Category: Philosophy of Computing

Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military? | Technology | The Guardian

The Guardian has a good story on Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military?. Despite the title, the story doesn’t really take sides. It documents the variety of ways that game companies and armies interact from companies like Kuma Games that make Kuma\War games out of current events. The article also links to an interesting grant award to Kuma from the Department of Defense for game-based second language training:

Utilizing our tools, experience, and huge library of existing 3D assets we can provide an effective, cost-efficient, rapidly-deployable and easily updatable language retention toolset for trainers and Soldiers deployed around the world. It is our intention to refresh languages skills in an intense and immersive 3D environment, which would be made available as part of an online/offline language exercise portal …

The article also documents games made from an Arab perspective by companies in Syria, developers tied to the Hezbollah and Irani organizations. These games (whether the Kuma\War games or those from other perspectives) can be seen as soft propaganda – making normal attitudes about who is good and bad. Such games don’t train people the way simulators might, but they can recruit people or legitimize a cause.

One could argue that just as in the Cold War the “soft power” of American movies played a key role, so in the percieved conflict with terrorism software is playing a similar propaganda role. The problem may be that the wrong people are being portrayed as the bad guys. The propaganda on both sides may be too crude and may make reconciliation harder.

In the meantime Iran has sentenced one of the Kuma designers to death accusing him of developing for the CIA. The game gets serious for this poor designer who was detained when he visited family in Iran.

 

In evaluating digital humanities, enthusiasm may outpace best practices – Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed has a story by Steve Kolowich about the essays we published in the MLA journal Profession on evaluating digital scholarship. The story, The Promotion That Matters (Jan. 4, 2012) quotes my essay On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship about how the problem is now how to practically review digital scholarship if you have no experience with it (and are on a tenure and promotion committee.)

It’s interesting how the article begins with what is becoming a trope – that the digital humanities is the new new thing. This time we have no lesser pundit than Stanley Fish proclaiming the arrival of new newness. Kolowich opens the essay (which is mostly about evaluation) by talking about how Fish, the “self-appointed humanities ambassador”, says the digital humanities has replaced postmodernism as the next thing. Its a nice way to open a story on the digital humanities and I suspect we will see more of this opening for a year or two. (What will it mean when people can’t start their stories this way?)

As for Fish, check out his blog post on the MLA, The Old Order Changeth (Dec. 26, 2011). The essay is based on reading the program (rather than attending) and he notices, among other things, all the digital humanities sessions. As he puts it, after reminding us what it was like when postmodernism was the rage,

So what exactly is that new insurgency? What rough beast has slouched into the neighborhood threatening to upset everyone’s applecart? The program’s statistics deliver a clear answer. Upward of 40 sessions are devoted to what is called the “digital humanities,” an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.

I’m intrigued by the possibility that the digital humanities might sweep through with the same arrogance that theory did. (Did it?) Is DH the same sort of new new thing? Fish lists some of the symptoms we might see if the digital humanities drives through like another revolution:

Those who proclaimed the good news in 20-minute talks at the convention welcomed the dawning of a brave new world; those who heard them with dismay felt that the world they knew and labored in quite happily was under assault, and they reacted, in counterpoint 20-minute talks, by making the arguments defenders of an embattled regime always make: it’s just a passing fad; everything heralded as new can be found in Plato and Aristotle; what is proclaimed as liberating is actually the abandonment of reason and rigor; a theory that preaches the social construction of everything collapses under its own claims; the stuff is unreadable; it has no content apart from its obfuscating jargon; maybe it will just go away.

I hope Fish is wrong. My hope is that colleagues not interested in the digital realize that we are not threatening to replace other forms of scholarship so much as to extend it. Digital practice does not deconstruct other practices/theories/methodologies, it supplements them and re-engages them. From the perspective of practice one of the things that exemplifies the digital humanities is that it is often experienced in projects that bring together “traditional” scholars and digital humanists rather than develop as a confrontation. Some of the more enthusiastic may think that the digital humanities can replace the practices of the last generation and in some cases the digital humanities does raise new questions, but the history of computing in the humanities has never been confrontational. (Instead, I would argue that the digital humanities has been a little too servile, pretending that all we wanted to do was bring new methods to old problems.) Our disciplinary history is that of a prosthesis or monster stitched from the old and the new. For that reason I doubt we will be the same sort of new new thing that postmodernism was. We don’t pretend to attack the foundations of the humanities so much as to extend them. We need our colleagues rather than despise them. We spend our time reaching outside of the humanities rather than gazing into its navel.

No … the danger is not that the digital humanities will try to deconstruct what came before, but that it introduces a new form of busy-ness to the humanities that distracts humanists from whatever is truly important. (And we all know what that is … don’t we?) The digital humanities is endlessly complicated, especially because it draws limbs from alien fields like the sciences and engineering. DH introduces new jargon, new languages (as in programming languages), new techniques, new practices, and new communal projects. All of this newness will keep us busy keeping up. All this newness will seem too much for many who haven’t the time to embrace something so time-consuming no matter how friendly. Many will keep quiet for fear that others think they are stupid because they don’t get computing when really they haven’t the time to do both the old, the new and the new new. Others will practice some cute put down just like all the cute ways we put down other movements we haven’t the time to master. Most will just feel the hug of the digital is a bit too friendly and a bit too tight. They will wait it out until one day something else will be announced as the new form of new new.

So what do I mean by busy-ness being the danger rather than replacement? Busy-ness is my word for the danger of constant activity Heidegger saw in “The Age of the World Picture” though there is something envious and cynical to his characterization of this technical turn. It is the danger of hyperpedantry when you perform the activities of wisdom faster and faster rather than thinking through wisdom. It really isn’t a new danger (Plato, of course, also warned us about this.) It is the danger that those tired of being left behind warn others about in the hopes they will slow down. It is a danger too often voiced by the grant envious which means we don’t listen too them. Here is Heidegger on it,

The decisive unfolding of the character of modern science as constant activity produces, therefore, a human being of another stamp. The scholar disappears and is replaced by the researcher engaged in research programs. These, and not the cultivation of scholarship, are what places his work at the cutting edge. The researcher no longer needs a library at home. He is, moreover, constantly on the move. He negotiates at conferences and collects information at congresses. He commits himself to publishers’ commissions. It is publishers who now determine which books need to be written.

From an inner compulsion,the researcher presses forward into the sphere occupied by the figure of, in the essential sense, the technologist. Only in this way can he remain capable of being effective, and only then, in the eyes of his age, is he real. Alongside him, an increasingly thinner and emptier romanticism of scholarship and the university will still be able to survive for some time at certain places. (p. 64, from the collection Off the Beaten Track, trans. by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes.)

Whatever Heidegger says, I believe it is impossible to distinguish between busy-ness and whatever is considered “real work” or real scholarship. The difference is ineffable, but that is not why busy-ness is a danger to the digital humanities. Busy-ness is the danger because it is the other of technical activity. Practical activity is what the humanities needs after theory, but also what it will tire of. At the very moment when we think the digital humanities has made a pragmatic difference we will worry that there is no meaning to all the technique. The digital humanities will not be critiqued as another replacement or another post post; it will exhaust itself and be found empty. The rhetoric will turn to wisdom and away from best practices.

Internet use and transactive memory – Contemplative Computing

From Humanist I was led to a good summary blog entry on Internet use and transactive memory. Transactive memory is a group or stored memory that we depend on instead of remember the information itself. We do this all the time (even before computers) when, for example, we depend on a cookbook for a recipe we have used before, but can’t be bothered to memorize. Given books like Carr’s The Shallows, there is debate about whether Google and the internet as transactive memory is making us stupider.

The real question is not whether offloading memory to other people or to things makes us stupid; humans do that all the time, and it shouldn’t be surprising that we do it with computers. The issues, I think, are 1) whether we do this consciously, as a matter of choice rather than as an accident; and 2) what we seek to gain by doing so.

This entry was sparked by recent news of research results on this subject by Dr. Sparrow and others (see YouTube interview). You can see Carr’s blog entry at Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Minds like sieves. Carr seems to think this reinforces his view that we are shifting to depending too much on technological transactive memory. Sparrow is more careful about drawing conclusions. We may have always depended on transactive memory, but are focusing now on one type – the internet. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates focused on writing as the technology tempting us to forget.

Of course, forgetting costs so we may not have to worry if we don’t want to pay.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick

 

I just finished Jame Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. One of the best books I’ve read in some time. Despite its length (527 pages including index, bibliography and notes) it doesn’t exhaust the subject pedantically. Many of the chapters hint and more things to think about. It also takes an unexpected trajectory. I expected it to go from Babbage and the telegraph to computers and then Engelbart and information extensions. Instead he works his way through physics and math. He looks at ideas about how to measure information and the materiality of information explaining the startling conclusion that “Forgetting takes work.” (p. 362)

The second to last chapter “News News Every Day” is as good an exploration of the issue of information overload as I have read. He suggests that the perception of “overload” comes from the metaphoric application of our understanding of electrical circuits as in “overloading the circuits.” If one believes the nervous system is like an electrical network then it is possible to overload the network with too much input. That, after all, is what Carr argues in The Shallows (though he uses cognitive science.) None-the-less electrical and now computing metaphors for the mind and nervous system are haunting the discussion about information. Is one overloaded with information when you turn a corner in the woods and see a new vista of lakes and mountains? What Gleick does is connect information overload with the insight that it is forgetting that is expensive. We feel overloaded because it takes work not to find information, but to filter out information. To have peaceful moment thinking you need to forget and that is expensive.

Gleick ends, as he should, with meaning. Information theory ignores meaning, but information is not informative unless it means something to someone at some time. Where does the meaning come from? Is it interconnectedness? Does the hypertext network (and tools that measure connectedness like Google) give meaning to the data? No, for Gleick it is human choice.

As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. (p. 425)

More on the Shallows

In an earlier blog post I mentioned distraction and Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows. Here is a more complete reaction now that I’ve finished the book.

Carr argues that the web is an interruption technology that is changing the way we think. The multiple media, the hypertext links, and the constant flow of information distract us. He surveys research on reading and how the brain handles multimedia. He argues that the web is changing our brains. Sustained “deep” reading is what we aren’t doing.

His argument looks for a balance of rapid surfing (flitting) and slow contemplation, reading, and thinking. His argument is partly cognitive – around the way our memory formation works. He argues that our memory is organic and not at all like a computer. To form the long term memories that shape our mind we need to go slow, to reinforce and to think about things. The hyperdistraction of the web overloads short term memory and inhibits the development of long term memories. These long term memories are not information stored (that is the computer analogy) but our mind. The long term shaping shapes processing not just storage. A good example (which he doesn’t use) is language. As you learn a language you learn to think in that language, not just to store vocabulary and grammatical rules.

Carr also attacks the technoliterati, especially Page and Brin of Google. He attacks them for arguing that the web (and Google) are offloading memory to free up space in our brains. This, he argues, is just wrong from a cognitive perspective. We don’t have a limit to storage because memory is not storage. To offload it is not to think it and not to let it shape you.

I’m not sure he is right that books are that much better, though he quotes some studies (about how hypertext, the foundation of the web, doesn’t help much.) It is probably quiet reading that is more conducive to thinking than books. I also wonder if some computer games are an example of sustained thinking toys.

There is in the last chapter “A Think Like Me” an interesting philosophical discussion about how we shape and are shaped by technologies. He quotes McLuhan to the effect that extensions numb us. If you extend your arm with a tool, then you don’t feel with your hands. If you extend your mind with a tool like the web then you numb your mind.

At times Carr is realistic that we want a balance. We like to be numbed from some things like the cold. We use houses even if they isolate us. The trick is probably to be able to choose the level of engagement and to choose how you want to think. I don’t want to think about the outside weather so I have a thermostat and automatic heating. I do want to think about other things.

Kill Screen – Infinity Blade Review

Ivan sent me a link to a very smart review of the iPad game Infinity Blade. See Kill Screen – Infinity Blade Review. The review starts with:

Infinity Blade is a game about interation, about retreading old ground, about the small changes that surface across endless repetitions.

In the game, every time you die you come back as your son, but with slightly more experience and better powers. The review has a “Begin Bloodline X” at the bottom. Clicking on it replaces some of the words in the review with another review. Small changes are animated and the process then repeats. The review is a meditation on the game as life where you “live the same life a little bit better, a little bit smarter, a little bit longer than the time before.”

Very smart. Better than the game.

David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker

The other day I got into a fascinating discussion about cognitive science and whether the humanities might be replaced by neuroscience. (See my previous blog entry, Harpham: Science and the Theft of Humanity.) For example, the study of beauty (aesthetics) might be replaced by the study of how people think about beauty and what parts of their brain light up when they experience beauty. This conversation was with a neuropsychologist who was patient with my fumbling critique. Then Bethany sent us a link to a story in the New Yorker where the featured scientist says,

“There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

via David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker.