Posts
What’s the score
here? Why is a page of news a problem in orchestration?
How does the jazzy, ragtime
discontinuity of press items link up with other modern art forms?
To achieve coverage from China to
Peru, and also simultaneity of focus, can you imagine anything more effective
than this front page cubism?
You never thought of a page of news
as a symbolist landscape?
Front Page (probes) –
p.3
Why does the Hearst press attempt to
organize the news of each day into a Victorian melodrama?
Anything queer in a big urban press
going flat out for the small town, the small guy and cracker-barrel sentiments?
Is it a some screen or just the fog
from a confoosed brain?
Nose for News (probes) – p.5
Marshall McLuhan – The Mechanical
Bride. 1951. Ginko Press
I had intended on looking at the circulation of debt as an
embodiment of social fabric in this post – but a couple of recent experiences
and readings have inspired me to extend my line of thinking about the emerging
narrative of the social self. I think pursuing this line of thinking will
contribute to understanding how the constraints of a post-scarcity condition in
the political-economies of the digital economy will emphasize the narratives of
our social selves.
In my last post I talked about the interesting paradox
inherent in the emerging narrative of an enacted, ententional, social self. It
is that the process of individuation at the heart of a modern notion of individuality
arises in the context of an ever growing network of encounters with others and
increasingly with things – connected things.
It is the richness of our encounters with the world that
enables a truly individuated individuality (a uniquely self-aware,
social-psychological-embodied knowing self as opposed to an idiosyncratic psycho-bio-genetic,
being deeply constrained by small-group structures). Our encounters include
those with people we don’t know (moments where it is possible to explore new
behavior – and have our mirror-neurons respond to an embodied incorporation of
mysteries presented by new people) or new types of interaction with people we
already know, or engaging in liminal situations.
What the paradox is – is that the
more connected one becomes – the more unique experiences with ‘other’ arise and
the more possibilities to individuate there are. The social self is the self
that can radically evolve – unlike the isolated, atomistic and permanent
self-identity. This paradox of individuation also develops a new disposition - that
despite the fact that social interaction can also be filled with uncertainly –
even scary – it also requires that people be ready to face those many
uncertainties including engaging in liminal conditions that encounters with ‘other’
involve.
I began with quotes
from the two first essays in Marshall McLuhan’s first book (derived from his PhD
Dissertation) ‘The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man’. This was
written throughout the 1940s and published in 1951. The first article talks
about the front page of the New York Times (the first one above). The second
article refers to another front page – but I couldn’t find it so I’ve just
picked something that seemed similar.
Why are McLuhan’s probes-as-insights
significant? I think they highlight (so graphically) many recent critiques of
what the Internet is doing to our brains – that is radically transforming our
capability to pay attention – not only ever shorter attention but also inducing
a perpetual ‘partial attention syndrome’ – a consequence of ‘multi-tasking’.
These critiques include that our increasing dependence on search is eroding our
memory and making us dumber.
But
when one looks at the front page crammed to the limit with short bits of news
from all over the nation and the world – we see that traditional broadcast
media has been priming us for at least a century to shorten our attention span
and to ‘float like a butterfly’ from topic to topic. As for partial attention –
one only has to recall the iconic image of the father or parent screened behind
the wall-o-print while mumbling ‘yes dear’.
However,
McLuhan saw much more deeply into the effect of media. He noted that the
traditional broadcast print media was a ‘collective work of art’ created on a
daily basis for ‘industrial man’ – an assemblage of 1001 tales of
‘entertainment’ told by an anonymous narrator to an anonymous audience.
The discontinuity of juxtaposed info-snacks linked the
technical-mechanical dimension of the newspaper to the techniques of emerging art
and concepts of science such as the physics of quantum reality and relativity.
McLuhan
was adamant that this discontinuity did not warrant ‘wails that chaos and
irrationalism were descending upon us’. But that rather the complexity of the
discontinuous, of new science was enabling a new perception of the world, a new
intelligibility providing new insights.
In essence, what was arising was a
planet that was in fact a single city. This is an amazing insight by McLuhan
considering that he was writing these thoughts in the 40s and published them in
1951. For McLuhan – the new sciences, the new techno-social conditions meant
that irrationalism was actually more intolerable and instead demanded from
people more intelligent effort and more social integrity than ever before. For
McLuhan the 20th Century techniques of world news coverage had
created a ‘new state of mind’ increasingly beyond parochial rootedness in local
or national political opinion.
The discontinuity
evident in the front page of newspapers and magazines became an invisible
ground – with an entailing effect that McLuhan suggested inevitably enforces ‘a
deep sense of human solidarity’. Although the traditional broadcast media
seemed to condition people to accept the authority of the media opinions and
attitudes, what McLuhan noted was a ‘new art form’ that was universal in scope
and presented in the technical layouts of print. ‘To the alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper is a superficial
chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high
order.’
However, McLuhan also suggested that people would rather
immerse themselves in the content than have a deep grasp of the meaning of the esthetic
and/or intellectual character of the medium.
What McLuhan pointed out over half a century ago was that
literate minds were already being deeply changed by the message of popular
broadcast media – a message of irrational-seeming-hyper-juxtaposition of
radically divergent and global content. The 20th Century literate
mind was challenged with having to wayfind between the worlds of mass broadcast
media (newspapers, magazines, radio, and later TV) and the experiences of an
educational system who’s focus was ‘disciplining’ the mind.
Any listen to a Sugata Mitra or Ken Robinson TED talk provides
a concise overview of an industrial education system that focused not only on
disciplining behavior to prepare students to function is a highly
regimented/scheduled world of industrial work – but also to discipline a mind
to occupy specialized professional-occupational niches within a finite
knowledge structure.
I began my real academic enculturation in the 80s, with all
my university knowledge derived from very limited face-to-face encounters with
professors, more with cohort students, books, journals and magazines and
finally TV & radio. Having grown up in a working class home with no books
to speak of, I remember the feeling when I entered the university library for
the first time.
Whole worlds of knowledge – ready to combine and recombine in
unfathomable ways to create new knowledge. But the rub was the impossibility of
unleashing the full range of my curiosity given the pressures of time and resources
available to fulfil the requirement of my chosen ‘discipline’. Disciplining my
learning and thus my mind meant that whole swathes of the Dewey Decimal system
became simply outside of my personal capacity to explore. There was too much to
know and too little time. The pressures and constraints of the academic
structures of learning continually demanded a channeling of my curiosity into
an ever narrow path.
Academic disciplines
can easily become journaled guilds based on communities of intellectual peers
who can confer credibility on one’s work. When it works well this community of
peers confers credibility based on rigorous and critical review that enables
sound continual progress. However, when it works less well, this sort of
community of peers can shape a sort of crony-careerism where the
publish-or-perish incentive structure is fulfilled through a form of collusive
hyper-specialized focus on a minutia that is formed into a ‘field’ inevitably
becomes exclusively contained in a related journal. These sorts of academic
structures have provided the channels that most of our pre-Internet generation
of university/college students, have had to accept in order to receive a
disciplined post-secondary educational journey.
Whatever our particular
experience to the disciplining of our minds has been, the inevitable outcome is
productive of a relatively narrow and coherent educational experience. Even
those who fought to be as eclectic as their interests, tended to have to accept
to remain within the constraints of a disciplined focus that enabled an occupational-professional
pursuit – and ‘job’.
The Classic Tree of Science depicted above is from The
Golden Encyclopedia, 1959, and is essentially how universities continue to
shape disciplines and faculties. Of course things have changed. For example,
the production of knowledge increasingly entails more open evolving contexts where
many more actors participate, and where resources are no longer fixed,
predictable or under direct control
and research priorities must adapt to a constantly shifting landscape and the
research enterprise must embrace more uncertainty. Lip service is often paid to
the importance of ‘multidisciplinary’ approaches.
However, in the 21st Century, generating
knowledge is increasingly about: practical usefulness within a context of the
application of knowledge; it is transdisciplinary (new disciplines arise in the
efforts to apply and implement knowledge); it is more heterarchical and transient;
it is required to be more socially accountable and reflexive (a context of
implication) and therefore tends to require a larger, more diverse and
temporary ecology of epistemic communities, practitioners, actors, stakeholders
and participants involving a continuous negotiation[1]
in order to collaborate on problems defined in specific and localized contexts[2].
The
emergence of capabilities inherent in the digital environment such as ‘big
data’ and ‘social computing’ has accelerated the transformation of knowledge
generation beyond the traditional occupational and professional frameworks[3].
The
complex, multiway interactions the Net enables means that networks of experts
can be smarter than the sum of their participants. (p.62)
David Weinber.2012. “Too Big Too Know”
Paradox of Science
and Mass Media
What I find so interesting is the paradox of the front page
that McLuhan illuminates as such an apparently random assemblage of
discontinuous content with the industrial emphasis of an educational system of
disciplining minds. It is as if they as shadows of each other. Yet on the other
hand the nature of mass media involves significant control over content by
professional editorial oversight, in which case the message of
irrational-seeming-hyper-juxtaposition of radically divergent and global
content may be better seen as another form of centrally directed attention –
aimed to discipline minds. If this is a reasonable assumption – than there is
no paradox.
But the 21st Century experience of the Internet
is one where access to content which is increasingly not conditioned by
‘professional’ editing and ordering. Where consumers of content are often also
producers – the pro-sumer – but also where search empowers the pro-sumers’
curiosity in ways that are unprecedented. We are now asking questions with the
expectations of finding an answer almost immediately. If we just look at Google
– it now answers 40,000 questions every second, translating to 3.5 million
searches per day[4].
Before the Internet, how many of these questions were never asked? It is a safe
assumption that as the 21st Century continues to advance everyone in
the world be empowered to ask what ever question that arises with an
expectation that some relevant answer can be found – ultimately meaning that
curiosity will become the major driver of learning.
And this is the really interesting aspect the enabling of
curiosity – imagining what the generation currently emerging for whom their
whole life experience is one where access to the web has been a ubiquitous part
of their life. We are already inundated with data and information – as David
Weinberger has aptly said – It’s Too Big To Know.
Today’s kids have access to
more information and know-how outside of school than is fed to them inside of
school. They will grow up not with ‘Big Data’ but with ‘Celestial Data’ – that
will be ready at hand, in increasingly diverse media. This is the vanguard of
real digital natives who are habituated to getting information related to any
passing curiosity that happens to arise in their mind or in their conversations
– a way of living where curiosity driven knowledge acquisition is an
unquestioned habit – like breathing.
Let’s take an
example, YouTube is current the most popular search engine for anyone who wants
to learn ‘how to do something’. But it is also an inexhaustible source of video
presentations-lectures-discussions on any topic one is curious about. The
user-interface of YouTube also presents a list of further enticements to
curiosity which operate a little like the library shelf (but instead it is organized
according to a recommendation algorithm of knowledge) and a little like the
front page’s assemblages of discontinuities. Each YouTube video has a list of
‘recommended’ or related videos determined by algorithms tuned to content
and/or previous searches. These lists presents seductive, ever bifurcating
trail of curiosities – delectable crumbs of thinking to follow as time permits.
In my own experience it takes an act of will not to get lost in this seduction
to follow the ever branching mycelial trail of interesting curiosities.
However, unlike a newspaper’s or a magazine’s assemblage of
discontinuities – the Internet has no master editor choosing the content and
crafting it in support of any particular narrative. Instead there are a
proliferation of voices, points of view and competing narratives. There is no Dewey
Decimal Classification system organizing the streams of our inquiries within
rigorously bounded knowledge domains. Internet searches, news feeds, and social
media assembled recommendations provide a hyper-discontinuity.
Some have argued that the Internet has actually reduced the
diversity of the content we encounter by enabling people to more easily create
an information echo-chamber or bubble around themselves. The cheap counter
argument to this is simply to point to the increasing convergence in the
ownership of broadcast media, to Chomsky’s manufacturing consent, to the FOX
media empire. The media bubble was actually pierced with the advance of the
Internet and the rise of social media. For someone to create and sustain a
personal echo-chamber via the Internet (and especially social media) requires
an effort and vigilance that is near impossible. No matter how careful we are
in only following people we believe are of like mind and thus closely tied, the
fact remain every person has their own proliferation of other networks of
interests – linking them to other people
and sources. In this way new information inevitably leaks into very insular
circles. Of course that doesn’t mean that people can’t continue to live within
their own beliefs – transforming whatever territory they engage with into the
personal maps they believe are true.
Given that people engage with Internet media – through their
searches, social media networks, and other types of platforms – they will
inevitably encounter hyper-diversities of content. What does this foresee?
I think what the Internet enables in the young and maybe
awakens even in those of us who are less native is an inevitable pre-eminence
of a curiosity-driven mind – a more rhizomatic approach to learning, engaging
with content, and any sort of creative activity. This might not seem so alien
as we all laud curiosity – but this is enabling an order of magnitude more of access
to new breadths of discontinuities – beyond the confines of the traditional disciplining
of entrainments involved of our education-occupation and even of traditional
‘hobby/leisure’ channels.
However, the curiosity-driven mind is not just shaped by the
expectation of searching for and finding answers and/or information to any question
that may arise. It also includes new approaches for formal education – for example
the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) – which invites unprecedented masses of
people to enroll in an ever increasing range of formal courses – simply out of
curiosity – to get a taste of what a subject is about.
While it is true that an
overwhelming number of people who enroll in MOOCs don’t complete them, the
minority that do still represent unprecedentedly large numbers. And for those
who are seriously engaged the education they seek through MOOCs they have
access to unprecedented variety of courses beyond the traditional disciplinary
domains – a variety that no single university can offer. Furthermore,
individuals can take courses that traditional university educational programs
would not allow because they fall outside of traditional
disciplinary/occupational streams.
What does this mean for the digital native imbued with the
expectation of ‘free range curiosity’? Perhaps a habit of unbounded curiosity
driving unique education-career pathways – hyper-specializations in dynamically
emerging niches of expertise. An education that may look (to the traditionally
disciplined mind) more like dilettantish-sampling than serious study. An
appearance of continual wayfinding through weird assemblages of learning
experiences.
There is something both wonderful and scary in this change
in conditions of change. Our children developing as natives in the digital
environment are living in a vastly different informational world – one that
enables many more unique forms of creative synthesis of knowledge – unleashing
vast diversities of types of thinking based on unique assemblages of knowledge
streams. The scary part is that this is also like a new Babel - making
languaging and efforts to develop a common body of knowledge more difficult.
The apparent shadow of the mycelial-curiosity-driven mind will be a sense of
breadth that lacks depth as well as an anxiety that without the constraints of
a discipline-occupation to provide a ‘common language’ for a coherent body of
knowledge (hence the intellectual Babel where no-one can understand what other
are really saying).
However, the paradox of hyper-specialization is an
increasing dependence on hyper-exchange – which means a conditions that drives
a new form of generalist knowledge (remember the breadth and variety of
encountered content) – and a likely emergence and expectation of better forms
of conversation suited to a social-self enabled to participate in knowledge
generation. An emerging, new constraint shaping the social-self will likely
involve the shaping of an intrinsic curiosity as a foundation of scaling
learning and creative exploration in an ever accelerating world of innovation,
learning-while-doing and hyper-specialization. In addition to intrinsic curiosity
is a deeply embodied social engagement – conversational diplomacies enabling
the establishment of Context – that can establish common Language – that establishes
engagement – toward agreements that in turn enable coordinated
(self-organizing) action and social computing[5].
Does this sound
farfetched? It certainly doesn’t seem to align with the image of the ‘Tree of
Science’ shown above. But the image of the Map of Relationships of Scientific
Paradigms[6]
shows a very different knowledge environment and evolving trajectory.
The curiosity driven mind is nourished by a diet of ever
more abundant knowledge and the fundamental economic property of knowledge is
that it is non-rival – sharing knowledge doesn’t diminish the original
possessor of knowledge even as it enriches the recipient. Despite the age-old
adage that knowledge is power – the emerging truism is that knowledge shared is
power-squared. An economy of abundance is a fundamentally different economic condition,
than an economy focused on the allocation of scarce, rival resources and goods.
Attempts to induce a paradigm of scarcity and rivalness around information and
knowledge through forms of absolute intellectual property can only result in
the underutilization of information and knowledge. The traditional business
models and the incumbents who are dependent on them seek to design systems that
would prevent knowledge/information abundance and the zero marginal costs
inherent in replication of digital information.
The curiosity-driven mind – one that wants to do more than
absorb what is ‘given’ but to also build upon and create new knowledge/products/
value, is already developing new economic models that not based on the monopoly
of knowledge – but rather establish that knowledge is a commons of social goods
– knowledge that is free at the point of use yet able to be accounted for in
its use and in this way enables the recognition and revealing of all the
pathways of the inevitably social roots of value creation.
There is another aspect of the digital environment that is
significant in enabling the curiosity-driven mind. This is the world of the
video game and the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). There has been a lot
written on benefits of the video game and I don’t want to summarize these
discussions. But among the many key features of the video game I’d like to
highlight two.
The virtual environment of a video game tends to be an open one
which is full of secrets and prizes – and thus a central feature of every video
game is of course the continual and iterative exploration and testing of the
game environment. Another key feature of every video game is the degree of
continual failure that players must acclimatize themselves to, if they wish to
‘beat the game’. Habitual commitment to exploration and the need to accept an
experience of overwhelming failure until success – these are both powerful
habits and forms of literacy supporting a curiosity-driven mind for life-long
learning.
The MMOG also generates these habitual commitments but adds
a powerful new literacy involved with developing social fabric. Many challenges
involved in achieving success in an MMOG require substantive effort to
coordinate group actions to succeed in the game. Such group efforts to
accomplish even a single quest in the game, can sometimes take regular repeated
trials over months before success is achieved.
Mark Chen (2012:4)[7],
summarizes the literacies integral to video gaming and also (one could argue) to
all literacies necessary for citizens of the digital environment (e.g. see Jenkins
et al., 2006; National Research Council’s 21st century skills for student
success, 2010) and primal in shaping, what I’ve been proposing as a
curiosity-driven mind.
Being literate means being able to take on an identity as someone who is part of a larger discourse, affinity group, or particular domain of practice (Gee, 2003; Heath, 1983; Street, 1984). A full or legitimate participant is someone who can produce, consume, remix, and critique the cultural goods and actions of their particular group. In other words, new literacy studies always looks at the social setting in which meaningful interactions and discourse occur.
Chen summarizes many of the literacies involved in the
mastery of new media (including those of the MMOG) into a concise list which I
have modified somewhat here:
- produce, consume, remix, and critique all sorts of media – Vital for an engaged citizen.
- communicate and coordinate on joint tasks – Vital for mobilizing collective resources to solve global problems.
- play and problem solve – the ability to act as a scientist and engineer.
- perform, identity shift, and metacognate – a vital ability to reflect on where one is in any particular situation in terms of overall mission, goals, task at hand – in order to assess what the situation and to imagine what could be in the future. This also involves the capacity to accept and play different roles as necessary.
- think in terms of systems and complex social networks to shape an awareness of how people and things are interconnected and dynamically changing – vital in order to leverage networks and conditions of change.
These literacies and their associated skills can only be
fully mastered through engagement and participation. Chen notes that an
interesting emergent experience arising from gaming (and I think also from any
curiosity-driven quests) is what James Paul Gee (2003:55) calls a ‘projective
identity’. This involves an imaginative capacity to view the constraints of their
current interconnections in a way that enables imagining what outcomes should
result in order to exercise more strategic choices in order to further imagine
a range of futures that could be enabled and relevant to all involved.
While Chen focuses on gaming in the quote below, I believe
that here again, he describes an essential emergent feature of the curiosity-driven
mind:
To play is to explore the rule / constraint systems in a game, motivated by an imagined reality. In many cases, to play expertly is to push at these rules / constraints, to exploit them and break them, to make the world the way it ought to be. This obviously turns the way learning happens in schools on its head. The very act of gaming is subversive and radical, the antithesis of top-down models of authoritative schooling. Yet seeing these benefits to gaming makes it clear that games represent sites of empowerment and agency.
The subversive nature of curiosity that is enabled through
the digital environment’s overwhelming abundance of information is at least an order
of magnitude different than the type of experience of the ‘authority’ shaped discontinuity
that constitutes broadcast-mass media. The emergence of the art of the ‘mashup’,
the ‘sample’, the rapid assemblages of curiosity-driven knowledges – of a mycelial
education rather than a linearly disciplined one –is producing a different
generation of minds – a change in the conditions of change and brings us back
to McLuhan’s prescient observation that is even more applicable to the persuasive
entailments of an open Internet – ‘To the
alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper [Open-Internet] is a superficial
chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high
order.’
The next post will build on this and previous posts to
explore entanglement between humans and humans, humans and things, things and
things. How engagement in the world creates dependences (mutual enablements)
and dependencies (sorts of entapments). This will be based on my reading of Ian
Hodder’s book ‘Entangled: An Archeology of the Relationships between Humans and
Things’. I hope that with this next post I will have established a ‘good enough’
foundation to begin the more substantial exploration of how debt is a necessary
constraint that enables the work necessary, to create and sustain social fabric
constituting life with and within a digital environment. Debt as favors, obligations,
responsibilities, form the fundamental nature of the social fabric through
which we enact ourselves-through-others.
Understanding the nature of debt-as-social-fabric
provides an interesting ground to imagine the possible constraints that the
digital environment enables and demands. Constraints that are necessary to
harness human efforts to do the work of sustaining social fabric by revealing
our ubiquitous and eternal debts, our enactions of value, our creative efforts,
and our moments of trust and risk. Constraints that enable the revealing of
value where ever it is created will also shape new constructions of social
identity and social self.
[1]
For example a recent Nature articles discusses the impact of blogging and
twitter on peer-review - http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110119/pdf/469286a.pdf
[2]
See Nowotny et al (2001) “Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an
Age of Uncertainty” and Gibbons et al
(1994) “The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research
in Contemporary Societies”.
[3]
See Neilsen (2011) and Weinberger (2012) for highly readable accounts of the
transformation of science being wrought by social media and social computing.
[5] See Paul Pangaro – An Economy of Insight – Conversations as Transactions in the Future of Commerce. http://pangaro.com/futurecom/ for a beautiful summary/presentation of conversation theory.
[6] See http://wbpaley.com/brad/mapOfScience/scienceMapFullColorPrint2_lowRes_b.jpg to expand this image for more readable details.
