Electronic academia
Another extended review of a book of/on academia in the information age. The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change, ed. Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills, available free here. This is a collection of Marxist-type essays about electronic culture, with special emphasis on how new technologies affect pedagogy. It's a mix of the surpassingly bad and the somewhat provocative, so it's a good thing I downloaded it for free, I guess.
Charles Bernstein contributes a provocative list of statements about new media and dissent, many of which are obvious but worth reminding yourself of, e.g., "Electronic space is neither free nor unlimited because our lives are neither free nor unlimited." I also liked his insistence that promoting unpopular viewpoints isn't an end in itself, even if you don't like the people currently in power. And I really responded to, "If the discussion is always starting from scratch, the participants with greater experience may drop away," as part of my fannish experience. People who contribute more than I do to fandom's upkeep would also recognize his claim that the online world's illusion of greater ease in communication is just that - the hard work of editing remains, and technological expertise and effort on someone's part is always required. Tiziana Terranova raises interesting questions about what it means for people like us to provide free labor/free content that generates revenue for AOL, or Amazon, or LJ for that matter. Open source gets more attention in the literature compared to other kinds of content freely shared - and her suggestion that this reflects a masculinist bias made me think, and made me glad I put in some reading on fan fiction when we did open source in my advanced copyright class - but plain old mailing lists et al. probably generate at least as much value, albeit distributed differently. Many of the other contributions are far less worthy, like the person who either insists on writing Mexico and America as mMexico and aAmerica or had a very bad editor; the latter might well be the case, given the typos in some of the other contributions - it looks as if each author was responsible for his or her own editing, and some were more careful than others. There's also a lot of theory goo; you'd better be comfortable with Gayatri Spivak and the "Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari axis" to read many of these pieces, and frankly I don't think it's worth the effort in most cases.
Donna Haraway gives an interview in which she asks, "Does that make sense?" after a typically dense response, and the interviewer says, "Yes, it does," which I have to admit I found hilarious, especially in light of Haraway's "deliberate choice" to "write complexity," which means talking about cyborgs as "real conditions of existence" instead of using "pseudo-universal categories of human and machine" and insufficiently complex adjectives like race, gender or class. "My writing," she says, "really is layered and evocative and figurative and regularly full of sometimes deliberate and sometimes gratuitious contraditions." Sure, fine, whatever. Or, perhaps a better reference: Nice work if you can get it.
There is a fairly likeable essay about intellectual property, with an interesting theory about how, when we lacked outside-of-brain storage space, we had popular culture (people telling each other stories), then went through a middle period of fixed media and got mass culture, then got even more storage space, which has allowed us to return to popular, individualized culture. Kembrew Macleod's essay, though, is his usual crap, the kind of catastrophist nattering about intellectual property that I think does more harm than good to the free-culture cause. Macleod's claim to fame is that he successfully trademarked "Freedom of Expression" for a class of goods including books and magazines (by, as he admits, fraudulently claiming to have operated a magazine with that name), and he thinks this proves that trademark law has gone too far. That's just dumb. "American" is trademarked too, for example for airlines, yet that doesn't operate as any constraint on anyone who wants to use the term American in conversation or even as a name for something other than an airline. The point of a trademark is that you can stop other people from using your mark in a confusing manner in business, and a lot of things aren't confusing. There are bad things about intellectual property law, but Macleod's little parlor trick isn't one of them. Then there are essays about VRML (don't ask) and a comparison of the Internet to a defunct steel town, both of which seem like they ought to have a point but don't.
Harvey Molloy writes about taking fan sites as models for student writing instead of essays which, though supposedly universal, are written for teachers' eyes only. Thus, essays confront most students with an unfamiliar format, one that won't be important to them outside school, and ask them to pretend that it matters; fan sites offer the alternative model of telling people about something you love. (The "teachers' eyes only" thing reminded me of a middle school assignment I had. We were supposed to keep private journals about our lives, only we had to show them to the teacher. The sense of violation I felt was profound, and I didn't write a damn thing that was really on my mind; when the teacher praised my insights, I felt contempt that she couldn't see that I was doing a trained seal act for her. If I wanted to keep a journal, I'd - well, I guess I'd post it on the Internet. But at least it's my choice, which may be the real sticking point for Molloy's model - how do you get students to be mandatory fans?)
Marc Bousquet contributes a thought-provoking essay on technology and academia, dissecting the fantasy of "downloadable education" that will rid universities of the annoyances of dealing with professors and students once and for all. As he points out, they may fantasize about getting rid of professors, but students increasingly demand more elaborate facilities in every other respect. Also, the deskilling of education actually requires different skills, often split between new classes of people: graduate students teaching undergraduates, so that the acquisition of a Ph.D. often marks the end of full-time teaching instead of the beginning; IT people; and managerial types. He argues that we now tend to see material objects only in terms of the information that they can provide, and that this is transferring to people too, so that we want them to be totally available (on our desktops, as it were) when we want them but otherwise invisible. Like manufactured objects, labor is now being treated as if "just in time" production were optimal, so we get lots of adjuncts who don't have tenure and who absorb the costs of maintenance - like driving 60 miles a day to get between campuses - off the university's books. Bousquet ties this to employers' desire to locate operations not where labor is cheapest but where it is most easily controlled. There was a lot of food for thought in his essay, though not much hope.
In other news, Pseudocipher = closest Depeche Mode knockoff I've heard in a while.
Charles Bernstein contributes a provocative list of statements about new media and dissent, many of which are obvious but worth reminding yourself of, e.g., "Electronic space is neither free nor unlimited because our lives are neither free nor unlimited." I also liked his insistence that promoting unpopular viewpoints isn't an end in itself, even if you don't like the people currently in power. And I really responded to, "If the discussion is always starting from scratch, the participants with greater experience may drop away," as part of my fannish experience. People who contribute more than I do to fandom's upkeep would also recognize his claim that the online world's illusion of greater ease in communication is just that - the hard work of editing remains, and technological expertise and effort on someone's part is always required. Tiziana Terranova raises interesting questions about what it means for people like us to provide free labor/free content that generates revenue for AOL, or Amazon, or LJ for that matter. Open source gets more attention in the literature compared to other kinds of content freely shared - and her suggestion that this reflects a masculinist bias made me think, and made me glad I put in some reading on fan fiction when we did open source in my advanced copyright class - but plain old mailing lists et al. probably generate at least as much value, albeit distributed differently. Many of the other contributions are far less worthy, like the person who either insists on writing Mexico and America as mMexico and aAmerica or had a very bad editor; the latter might well be the case, given the typos in some of the other contributions - it looks as if each author was responsible for his or her own editing, and some were more careful than others. There's also a lot of theory goo; you'd better be comfortable with Gayatri Spivak and the "Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari axis" to read many of these pieces, and frankly I don't think it's worth the effort in most cases.
Donna Haraway gives an interview in which she asks, "Does that make sense?" after a typically dense response, and the interviewer says, "Yes, it does," which I have to admit I found hilarious, especially in light of Haraway's "deliberate choice" to "write complexity," which means talking about cyborgs as "real conditions of existence" instead of using "pseudo-universal categories of human and machine" and insufficiently complex adjectives like race, gender or class. "My writing," she says, "really is layered and evocative and figurative and regularly full of sometimes deliberate and sometimes gratuitious contraditions." Sure, fine, whatever. Or, perhaps a better reference: Nice work if you can get it.
There is a fairly likeable essay about intellectual property, with an interesting theory about how, when we lacked outside-of-brain storage space, we had popular culture (people telling each other stories), then went through a middle period of fixed media and got mass culture, then got even more storage space, which has allowed us to return to popular, individualized culture. Kembrew Macleod's essay, though, is his usual crap, the kind of catastrophist nattering about intellectual property that I think does more harm than good to the free-culture cause. Macleod's claim to fame is that he successfully trademarked "Freedom of Expression" for a class of goods including books and magazines (by, as he admits, fraudulently claiming to have operated a magazine with that name), and he thinks this proves that trademark law has gone too far. That's just dumb. "American" is trademarked too, for example for airlines, yet that doesn't operate as any constraint on anyone who wants to use the term American in conversation or even as a name for something other than an airline. The point of a trademark is that you can stop other people from using your mark in a confusing manner in business, and a lot of things aren't confusing. There are bad things about intellectual property law, but Macleod's little parlor trick isn't one of them. Then there are essays about VRML (don't ask) and a comparison of the Internet to a defunct steel town, both of which seem like they ought to have a point but don't.
Harvey Molloy writes about taking fan sites as models for student writing instead of essays which, though supposedly universal, are written for teachers' eyes only. Thus, essays confront most students with an unfamiliar format, one that won't be important to them outside school, and ask them to pretend that it matters; fan sites offer the alternative model of telling people about something you love. (The "teachers' eyes only" thing reminded me of a middle school assignment I had. We were supposed to keep private journals about our lives, only we had to show them to the teacher. The sense of violation I felt was profound, and I didn't write a damn thing that was really on my mind; when the teacher praised my insights, I felt contempt that she couldn't see that I was doing a trained seal act for her. If I wanted to keep a journal, I'd - well, I guess I'd post it on the Internet. But at least it's my choice, which may be the real sticking point for Molloy's model - how do you get students to be mandatory fans?)
Marc Bousquet contributes a thought-provoking essay on technology and academia, dissecting the fantasy of "downloadable education" that will rid universities of the annoyances of dealing with professors and students once and for all. As he points out, they may fantasize about getting rid of professors, but students increasingly demand more elaborate facilities in every other respect. Also, the deskilling of education actually requires different skills, often split between new classes of people: graduate students teaching undergraduates, so that the acquisition of a Ph.D. often marks the end of full-time teaching instead of the beginning; IT people; and managerial types. He argues that we now tend to see material objects only in terms of the information that they can provide, and that this is transferring to people too, so that we want them to be totally available (on our desktops, as it were) when we want them but otherwise invisible. Like manufactured objects, labor is now being treated as if "just in time" production were optimal, so we get lots of adjuncts who don't have tenure and who absorb the costs of maintenance - like driving 60 miles a day to get between campuses - off the university's books. Bousquet ties this to employers' desire to locate operations not where labor is cheapest but where it is most easily controlled. There was a lot of food for thought in his essay, though not much hope.
In other news, Pseudocipher = closest Depeche Mode knockoff I've heard in a while.