Burying Myself in My Word Processor

Okay, so some may think it may be hard to bury oneself into a laptop screen that's less than a centimeter thick, but that's what I'm seeking to do quite a bit over the next few weeks to get the rough draft of my MA thesis done. I will probably be buried in a few books from time to time as well, a process that's no less obscure and just as virtual in many ways. Words, after all, are virtual representations of thoughts, whether they're scrawled or printed in paper or appear on a computer screen.

I wonder how we came up with this metaphor, to bury oneself in something? Interesting how many of our metaphors for virtual activities are approached by way of flesh-and-blood-and-sweat ones. Not that finishing up the rough draft of a thesis is less work than actually burying something, it's just a different kind of work. Hopefully I'm burying treasure instead of something unsavory.

Okay, now I'm just procrastinating. Time to flip back to that other window and bury myself, once again, in T. S. Eliot and Thoreau.

Stretching out of Media Hibernation...

Even though it's 3 degrees Fahrenheit outside, I can feel spring a-coming (and see it on the weather forecast in the guise of more above-freezing weather to complement the melty stuff we had last week). Along with this feeling, I'm beginning to literally become more active and less media-dependent, as I do each spring. And so I wished to spend a bit of time reflecting on the seasonality of my media use, because every year this pattern seems to recur in some form.

Every year once spring comes (particularly here in Saskatchewan, where it's particularly welcome) I find myself stretching my legs, abandoning the need to watch my TV shows and my insistence on movies. Even when it's cold outside I find myself becoming more active inside the house: spending less time on my computer playing Triple Yahtzee or watching DVDs. More time turning on music and dancing to it. More time thinking about all those physical projects (like sorting through papers) that I've always intended to do but somehow haven't gotten around to yet.

I even find myself making a greater effort to keep in touch with friends and family, which interestingly, with many of those far away, increases my use of communications technology.

So yeah, it really does feel like waking out of a hibernation and rejoining the world of life and activity. It's not that I wasn't joined to it in many ways throughout the winter (including going to the gym), but the motivation to do it more is back, and once again is growing with the ice puddles outside.

I find a similar pattern to be the case with my creative writing--in the spring and summer, I often spend more time collecting new writing material, whereas in the winter, I'm more likely to spend time reflecting on how that material fits into the rest. This year, I find it a bit reversed--the winter seems to have been the simmering time, and now the creativity is starting to churn again (which is quite nice). But no matter which way things go, they always shift about this time.

My question is whether in the northern climes this is an average pattern. Is it just me, or do many of our individual patterns of use of media and communications technology follow a seasonal cycle? And does it affect everyone the same, or like SAD, does it affect some more than others?

It's NEVER Been Done Before?

I love listening to people talking about the web, but whenever I hear the words "this is done now on the web, and it's NEVER been done before" it sets my teeth on edge. And so when I was listening again to the speech David Weinberger, an expert on blogs, gave on the Library of Congress' excellent "Digital Future" series of talks (available to listen free here), and heard him say these words, my teeth gave an answering twitch.

Especially when I'm currently engaged to a very similar analog process to the one he was talking about.

What he was talking about was this: the web of what he calls subjective knowledge between bloggers--people responding to other bloggers, and readers learning from that knowledge. Voice in writing being important in whether people will believe the stuff or not. People pointing away from the current writing by "linking" to other writings.

I'm halfway through an academic thesis in the humanities, and I say "pshaw" to the idea that these things have never been done before. Has David Weinberger ever read through any significant body of academic writing, or tried to write a paper in response to it? What is good academic essay writing but a series of links provided in citations? What is a good research/response essay than a response directly stating an opinion (agreement/disagreement/partial agreement) about what another critic has been saying?

And anyone who's tried to read lots of critical essays is pretty aware that voice is a huge element of whether this genre is taken seriously.

This is not to say that David Weinberger's talk isn't an excellent one, worth re-listening to even 3 years (so long in web time) after it was first given. And I'm actually quite fascinated by what he has to say about forgiveness and unselfishness as being key elements of blogging. (Forgiveness because the writing isn't as polished and many readers accept that before reading, unselfishness because of the linking.) Especially because bloggers are so often accused of egotism and sloppiness.

But as to the fact that a web of semi-subjective knowledge (complete with links to other bits of knowledge it's responding to) has NEVER been done before, I say "pshaw." I'm in the midst of reading sources and creating an 80-page paper that proves that's not the case.

This connection between what happens in blogging and academic writing does give me a fascinating idea/analogy for teaching university students what academic writing's all about, however. Those raised to be web- and My Space-literate, if they're taught how to harness those skills for academic writing, could bode well for the future of academic writing. What a fascinating thought.

A Beef about the (Mis)Use of the Phrase "Attention Span"

Those who talk about the deterioration of our attention spans from new technology tend to use that blanket term for many things that aren't actually attention-span-related.

For instance, I've heard people say that frequent email-checking shows that we can't focus on a single task at a time anymore and that our attention spans have become fractured and unstable.

I disagree.

For one thing, frequent checking of email shows we have an amazing attention span for keeping up with our email, and many people have so integrated it into their daily work that it really doesn't detract that much focus from other tasks, just becomes a matter of course.

Of course, there are times where an interesting email--or an urgent one--distracts from those other tasks. And there can be times when that normally-integrated task claims more attention than the other things.

That can be good or it can be bad.

I've noticed that those who complain about short attention spans of people usually have a stake in the other tasks, not in attention to the email. Those who would like to break through those other tasks using email are likely to complain that you don't check email frequently enough (or respond quickly enough) if you don't respond right away.

What really seems to be happening here is a kind of weird expectations upheaval. Because of the possibility of "instant" communication, it becomes more and more necessary for people to communicate what "ASAP" means (and what's possible), and manage the sort of anxiety that used to be present only at mailtime when one was expecting a particularly interesting or important letter. Whether you view that focus favorably or negatively depends on whether you would call focus to a single task over others great passion and attention or whether you would call it obsession.

This kind of anxiety isn't something that didn't happen in the past--there were many times people were worried about a single topic to the point where they at times ignored other things, and the question of what people prioritize certainly isn't a new one. But the technology today--and its attendant upheaval in expectations--seems to be exacerbating both the possibility of such passions, and the negative view of them by those whose tasks aren't part of them.

I find it particularly fascinating that these passions/obsessions continue in this new technology--a new technology that gets credited so often with shortening our attention spans.

Another related fascination I have is that our Western society is so used to the concept of multi-tasking by now that when a person chooses to uni-task a bit more, they find that difficult to deal with (sometimes rightly, sometimes not), even though I would argue that new media encourage that sort of passion/obsession (think of online poker players, for instance) almost as much as it encourages the culture of multi-tasking.

Being Witnessed

Since Lent starts again today, I've been thinking and talking about Lenten disciplines again recently. That has included talking about my Lenten experiment from last year, in which I gave up playing solitaire (on my computer) and Bejewelled (on my cell phone)--both games that I used to procrastinate from my graduate school homework. If you've forgotten, not playing these games resulted, in part, in my spending more of my procrastination time hanging out with people in person, and I felt more guilty about procrastinating in that way (for some reason) than I did playing games.

Anyway, I was talking to a new friend about this, and she used just the right word to describe why I felt guilty: it was because my procrastination was witnessed.

The more I've thought about this word, the more appropriate it seems to describe an effect the technological revolution has had on society. For years we've been aware that new technology, especially the Internet, has been amazing for introverts--one can look, read, and participate anonymously, without feeling like someone is watching you. It fosters a sense that you're not being witnessed--even though with our awareness of cookies and other techniques, we know that in another sense we are being watched. But it's hard to feel as though we are.

And this sense extends to our online and electronic communications. IM, email, blogging, even talking on cell phones in restaurants or listening to iPods--it's easy to forget that others can be watching (or listening) in. Even some people who are introverts in the non-technological world find it easy to lower their self-censor when communicating through (or around) some of these new media.

As Gerry McGovern noted last week, sometimes that's a bad thing. But sometimes it's also a good thing, especially for those who have good things to say but have felt excessively shy about it before. All in all, it's a fascinating idea--one I'd like to explore more in-depth. How have people who would have felt witnessed (and self-conscious about it) in the world of twenty years ago been affected in their actions both on- and offline by this phenomenon? How has our culture changed as a result of this? I wonder...

And I wonder what those people who didn't like being witnessed were like before the printing press allowed for reading to become a general thing.

Some More Thoughts on Blogs

Don't Let Your Blog Come Back to Haunt You: In this article, Gerry McGovern provides an apt reminder that it's easy to get too comfortable in the informal atmosphere of the web, particularly when it comes to blogging. In the process he illuminates some common-sense--but also often overlooked--differences between the communities formed on blogs and other kinds of conversations.

That said, if you remember that problem I talked about last month with history and losing our records, blogging is possibly an antidote to some of that. That is, as McGovern points out, blogs are records--and although they take certain technology to read, because they're more public, there's a better chance that historians of the future will be able to read them than that they'll have access to our email records or our documents stored on our hard drives.

So although I would agree with Gerry McGovern's word of caution, as a person interested in historical writings and informal drafts indicating thoughts, I say: Blog on, bloggers. Think about first what you'd like to say to posterity, perhaps, as Thoreau may well have done when he wrote his journal (check out how Greg Perry re-packaged it as a daily blog). But blog on.

Are Books Losing Out or Not?

Are books doomed to ultimate extinction or are they still going strong? Two recent articles I've found highlight different sides of the ongoing debate:

Lament from a Librarian: Books are a Hard Sell: In this article, a high school librarian bemoans two things: (1) the change of focus for librarians (from book-centric to all-media-centric, from educating readers about critical thinking and content to education about how to sort through information); and (2) the increasing challenge of getting high-school level readers to be interested in reading literature that's helpful for training their minds, but more difficult to read.

Obama's books drive talk of '08 presidential run: This article highlights the idea that publishing recent, popular books has helped Barack Obama in his potential bid for the American presidency, and that sales numbers of the books by candidates might be one way to view which nominee might win the party nominations. The idea underlying this article is that books and their contents definitely have an influence on public opinion.

My thoughts: I'll try not to blather on too much about my opinion (I have a sense this post could go on forever), but my sense is that, although both sides have a point, I agree more with the points made by the latter article. We're quick these days to bemoan the passing of books, but yet sales of books continue strong, reading groups are a big trend across North America, and, as Pulitzer-Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson pointed out her talk at the Festival of Faith and Writing last spring, attendances at readings and lectures are up around the country.

It's true that we should watch carefully the effects of the information age on us: we should work hard to seek depth over breadth in a world that seeks to manage the overload by seeking to reduce things to soundbites. We should push against this pressure to do lots of things quickly, but none of them well. We should be aware of this tendency that's growing within ourselves and our culture to desire to have everything presented to us in a way that appeals to us. And we should be teaching the next generation about these trends.

But it encourages me that people are seeking to read the books of presidential nominees. It shows that many people aren't happy with the soundbites they get in the nauseating TV ads and other less-than-satisfactory ways of judging what the candidate actually thinks on a topic. They're seeking more depth, more transparency, and they're willing to put in the hours needed to discriminate among the candidates. And that gives me hope for the political process as well as for the culture of literacy as a whole. That hope may not continue until the next presidential election, but for now it's encouraging.

On a related note, I'll confess that I'm nearly as excited as everyone else that the new Harry Potter book is coming out this July, and just as nervous about what will happen to the characters in this last book in the series--a series that may not be high literature, but is fascinating, not least because it's effectively persuaded non-readers to make their way through thousands of pages to finish the saga...

(Thanks to Cindy for sending me the first link.)