Category: Multimedia Theory

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Thanks to Peter O I came across Clay Shirky’s excellent analysis of what’s going on with newspapers and the web, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable . Some of the salient points:

  • Change has been so rapid that it has changed who is pragmatic and who is a fabulist. Newspapers are in denial about the realities of online content so those who describe what is happening (the pragmatists) are treated as fabulists.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.

  • The economics of publishing have changed. It used to be that there was a tremendous upfront cost to set up a newspaper or broadcasting facility. Now the infrastructure of distribution is paid for by all so publishing is cheap.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

  • It is easy to describe life before or after an epochal shift. It is hard to describe the chaos of experiments during the shift. Shirky looks to The Printing Press as an Agent of Change as an example of the hard type of history.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

  • Advertisers don’t want to pay for the costs of a full-featured newspaper (with international bureaus and investigative reporting.) They will move their money to where it connects with their (usually local) audience.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

  • Newspaper reporting provides a public service that will be missed, but knowing we will miss it doesn’t save it. We just don’t know how to fill the gap that will be left when daily papers dissappear in cities.

“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

Actually I think there are ideas floating around as to what might fill the gap:

  • Blogs may take up some of the slack with various advocacy groups and NGOs providing investigative reporting in the areas that concern them. I think it is wrong to assume that amateurs will necessarily do a worse job than professional reporters. In fact, as most know, professionals are too busy to usually go into depth and whenever they write about something you know they get it wrong in all sorts of ways. A blog like Buckets of Grewal probably does a more indepth job of examining the Grewal controversy than any newspaper story. The difference is rather that the professionals are committed to breadth and they write better.
  • Publicly funded broadcasters like the BBC and the CBC will provide tax funded news reporting with foreign bureaus and so on. They don’t have to have make a profit and can invest in things perceived as useful for society.
  • There will always be some big and international newspapers like the New York Times or Reuters because there will always be a demand for that sort of news. The internet reduces diversity – every city doesn’t need a newspaper with a foreign bureau. All we need is a couple of news services with foreign bureaus.
  • Some companies have already figured out how to package news as analysis and get other businesses to pay for it. This will accelerate as newspapers fail. Companies like Oxford Analytica will meet the demand of multinational businesses who need access to strategic information. The sooner the newspapers fail the sooner we will see these companies come out of the woodwork and start selling their products to us.

To conclude with another quote from the Shirky essay, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

Beatrice Warde: The Crystal Goblet

Reading the book on Canadian book design, The Surface of Meaning I came across a reference to Beatrice Warde’s The Crystal Goblet. This was given as a lecture in London in 1930 with the title “Printing Should be Invisible” and was printed in the 1950s. It is a clear and apparently influential statement of the modernist view of how a book design should be transparent letting the ideas shine through. It starts with a metaphor of the book as a goblet.

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. …

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. …

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist. …

It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization. …

the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. …

Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. ..

it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor. …

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. …

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline.

Perhaps the time comes when printing reluctantly hands off its usefulness to a digital successor like the Kindle which would explain the (re)discovery of pressing form into paper and other arts of the book. I am not making a prediction and especially not recommending this, just reflecting on how the book need not be so transparent as it was supposed to be. When the burden of usefulness is eased off the shoulders of books they can become post-modern chalices, opaque and shiny.

For another take see Book Design in Canada at Cardigan Industries.

Now for the wine within.

Gary Hall: Digitize this book

A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog entry about Gary Hall’s book Digitize This Book! I noted that I couldn’t find a digitized copy of the book and asked if others knew of one. To my surprise Gary wrote me back and pointed to the items listed below. Now that is the Internet at work! He is trying to get the publisher to allow a digital copy to be posted online, but in the meantime pointed out online versions of what became chapters in the book:

(2003) ‘Digitise This’, Mediactive, Vol. 1, No. 1 (pp. 76-90); republished in (2004), The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, January-March (pp. 23-46) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2006/03/0147/_.doc (MS Word Document)

(2007) ‘IT, Again: or, How to Build an Ethical Virtual Institution’, in Experimenting: Essays With Samuel Weber, edited by Gary Hall and Simon Morgan Wortham (Fordham University Press: New York) (pp.116-140) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2008/01/0740/_.doc (MS Word Document)

Gary Hall says that “Since the book came out I’ve also published a new piece on open access publishing and the humanities” at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current. A video of him presenting it as a talk is available at Pirate Philosophy – Steal This! .

I take back any irony in my previous post. (Can one take back irony? Perhaps I can only apologize for being ironic to early.)

Hall: Digitize This Book!

Cover of BookDigitize This Book! by Gary Hall is an interesting book at the intersection of cultural studies and humanities computing. The book seems to be addressed mostly to the cultural studies crowd arguing that “do cultural studies writers, thinkers, and practitioners not also need to experiment with ways of being ‘militant’ in a positive, innovative, creative, and constructive fashion in their own situations, institutions, and places of work?” (p. 206) The book is a sustained defense of the Cultural Studies e-Archive (CSeARCH) and other computing projects that Hall has initiated. He is trying to make space in cultural studies for projects we would recognize as humanities computing projects. To do this he argues against “transcendental politics” which assume a commitment to a particular political analysis in order to open room for actions, like starting an open archive, that cannot be demonstrated a-priori to be in support of capitalism or not. He ends the book with,

A fixed, pure and incorruptible institution could only be a violent, transcendental, totalizing, and totalitarian fantasy. One could even argue, after Derrida, that it is precisely the structurally open and undecidable nature of the situation – the fact that an institution or archive can be used to facilitate the forces of capitalism and globalization – that gives it ethical and political force. (p. 214)

Now I tend to shudder when I read phrases like “the forces of capitalism”, partly because I don’t understand the tradition of thought that takes such things as givens, but I don’t, as many colleagues do, believe we should therefore shun cultural studies or other forms of post-modern thought. Hall is interested in something important and that is the ethics and politics of digital work. To avoid discussing the ethics and politics of what we do in the university or as developers of digital works is to ascribe to a naive and unexamined ethic. Many avoid politics because the discourse has been politicized by second rate cultural studies folk who think shaming others for not being militant is a form of engagement. Hall is trying to open room for a form of politics beyond politics (or hyperpolitics) where we can act without knowing for sure what the consequences of our actions will be. That is the heart of ethics for me, acting (or not, which in turn is a form of acting) in the face of insufficient knowledge or ability. We always do things without being sure, ethics is knowing that and trying to deal thoughtfully with the ignorance.

Part of what I am saying here, then, is that certain forms, practices, and performances of new media – including many of those associated with open-access publishing and archiving – make us aware that we can no longer assume that we unproblematically know what the “political” is, or what sorts of interventions count as political. (p. 196)

Hall in his actions (like CSeARCH and the Open Humanities Press) and in his writing is trying to reach out to those in open access circles and in computing circles. We who are too buried in the techne should reach back.

You can find earlier versions of sections on CSeARCH like The Cultural Studies E-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy), but, ironically, I can’t, find a copy of Digitize This Book!. No one has bothered to digitize it, no doubt due to the copyright notice as the beginning (p. iv) that states,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. (p. iv)

Is there a contradiction between the injunction of the title (“Digitize This Book!”) and the copyright notice? What is the status of a title when it comes to rights? Should I digitize the book?

To be fair to Hall, the chapters of his previous book, Culture In Bits are available on CSeARCH and I assume he will make Digitize This Book! also available after a suitable interval. Perhaps someone knows him and can update me or point me to a digitized version already open.

Note: since writing this someone passed on a note to Gary Hall who kindly pointed me to online copies of other chapters. See my more recent blog entry with the links.

Hall makes an interesting move at the beginning of the book to position open access as a middle way for the university between the commercialization of the university and the (impossible elitist) return to whatever it is we think we were doing in the humanities in the good old days. I find it interesting that Hall believes “cultural studies has for some time now arguably been the means by which the university thinks about itself …” (p. 13). I’ve seen no evidence of this – cultural studies to me seems to want to position itself as outside the university critiquing it in the Socratic gadfly tradition rather than taking a role acknowledged by the university. It would probably come as a surprise to most university administrators that cultural studies is doing this for them and somehow represents the university’s institutionalized reflection. And therein lies the promise of Hall’s book – that there is type of creative activity we can all engage in, through which we can imagine the university by modeling it. We don’t need approval to set up open works. We can use the technology to become a way for the university to think about itself.

Globe and Mail: The big ideas of 2009

Saturday’s Globe and Mail had a full page on The Big Ideas of 2009. The listed five, three of which have to do with information technology and two with biology.

  1. Do-It-Yourself DNA
  2. The 3-D Revolution (as in 3-D movies and screens)
  3. The Age of Avatars (as in your avatars will become transportable across virtual worlds)
  4. Grow Your Own Tissue
  5. Reality Check for Social Networks (as in Social Networks aren’t getting the advertising and will lose momentum)

These ideas seem to be about the body and space with the possible exception of the 5th which is not really a big idea so much as a correction. I would like to suggest a different list around time:

  1. 3-D Social Year It’s Facebook
  2. Genome Online Networks Technology
  3. DNA Cells Web Tissue Users
  4. 000 Second Time World Human User Sites
  5. Life Canada said Ko using virtual advertising avatars

This list was generated scientifically. I took the text of the Globe story (edited it down to just the titles, text and authors), ran it through the TAPoRware List Words (with a stop word list), and then took the sequence of high frequency words in the order they appeared and broke it into phrases (without deleting any). This is a technique I learned from David Hoover who performed it at the Face of Text conference. It is surprising how often you can find suggestive phrases in a frequency sorted word list. I will let you interpret this oracle, but remember that you read “Second Time” here first. This list is what the Globe author’s really meant for 2009.

As an aside, I should say that the reason I am blogging this today (January 9th) is because Saturday’s paper (January 3rd) was delivered to our house today. I didn’t confuse things as we were travelling Saturday and the paper was cancelled until Monday. When we called the circulation desk they told us other people in Edmonton had had the wrong papers delivered. Here is the note I sent the editors this morning:

 I would like to thank the Globe and Mail for delivering Saturday’s (Jan. 3rd) paper to my house today (Jan. 9th.) As the Globe knows, we are behind in Edmonton and need the chance to catch up with all the timeless opinions gathered. It was particularly kind of the Globe since I hadn’t read Saturday’s edition as I was traveling. I managed to get half way through the paper before realizing that I was reading old news.

I do want to take issue with your list of 5 burgeoning ideas (A 10). Two of “the big ideas” have to do with the compression of space (“The 3-D Revolution” and “The Age of Avatars”) but you neglected the big ideas in the compression of time. I would suggest that the really big idea is the “New News” otherwise known as nNews or iNews. What matters in this day of personalization is what news is new to the individual avatar, and what time they are in (like the burgeoning age of avatars.) In Second Life my avatar wants second news, and today you delivered.

What I don’t understand is why we got Saturday’s paper while others apparently got Monday’s. (This is according to the kind and real human at the circulation desk who told us others got their New News too, but a different edition.) How did you know I was exactly 6 days behind?

UNESCO: Intangible Cultural Heritage

If one were to ask what cultural practices are incompatible with information technology you would come up with something like UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. ICH is the culture that isn’t material like books, paintings, sculpture and buildings. It is the folk practices and oral traditions. ICH is defined in Article 2 of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Paris, 17 October 2003),

For the purposes of this Convention,

1. The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. For the purposes of this Convention, consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with existing international human rights instruments, as well as with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development.

2. The “intangible cultural heritage”, as defined in paragraph 1 above, is manifested inter alia in the following domains:

(a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;

(b) performing arts;

(c) social practices, rituals and festive events;

(d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;

(e) traditional craftsmanship.

The history of this convention is rooted in finding ways to preserve heritage that, not being material, can’t be preserved through physical preservation or representation. It is therefore concerned with preserving that which resists technologies of information.

Picture of the Tenores di Bitti

I came across this on the site of Tenores di Bitti “Mialinu Pira”, a voice group signing in the pastoral oral tradition of Sardinia that has been added to the Intangible Heritage list (as of 2008). As the UNESCO site puts it,

Canto a tenore has developed within the pastoral culture of Sardinia. It represents a form of polyphonic singing performed by a group of four men using four different voices called bassu, contra, boche and mesu boche. One of its characteristics is the deep and guttural timbre of the bassu and contra voices. It is performed standing in a close circle. The solo singers chants a piece of prose or a poem while the other voices form an accompanying chorus.

What is interesting is that this group is named after an Italian anthropologist, Michelangelo “Mialinu” Pira whose best known book, La rivolta dell’oggetto: antropologia della Sardegna (The revolt of the object: an anthropology of Sardinia) is partly about the effects of technology on pastoral culture. (The book is online.)

We will know the digital culture partly by what it is not, and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage are a bureaucratic process for defining that which is oral, practices, and local.

Tupi or not Tupi: the Cannibal Manifesto

At a Global Dialogue meeting Clarissa introduced me us to Oswaldo de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto. This is one of those rare documents we should all read. The Manifesto Antropófago dates from 1928 and celebrates Brazilian remediation (such a stuffy word compared to “cannibalism”) of other literatures. The third line, which is in English in the orginal, captures the idea:

Tupi or not tupi that is the question.

The Tupi were an indigenous people of Brazil who were supposed to have ritually eaten their enemies. Not to belabor the point, but the joke eats Shakespeare and English into a modernist manifesto simultaneously rejects Western patterns. The manifesto starts with:

Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

It could be the law of blogging that eats the web or the law of social media that eat their versions. Remediation with teeth.

News Overview Inline Listing – MacArthur Foundation

Poking around the MacArthur Foundation site I found an interesting recent study on Teens, Video Games and Civics by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The full report has too much to summarize in a blog entry. Here is their list of “Summary Findings at a Glance”:

  • Almost all teens play games.
  • Gender and age are key factors in describing teens’ video gaming.
  • Youth play many different kinds of video games.
  • The most popular games played by teens today span a variety of genres and ratings.
  • Gaming is often a social experience for teens.
  • Close to half of teens who play online games do so with people they know in their offline lives.
  • Teens encounter both pro-social and anti-social behavior while gaming.
  • The most popular game genres include games with violent and nonviolent content.
  • Parental monitoring of game play varies.
  • There are civic dimensions to video game play.
  • The quantity of game play is not strongly related to teens’ interest or engagement in civic and political activity.
  • The characteristics of game play and the contexts in which teens play games are strongly related to teens’
    interest and engagement in civic and political activities.
  • Playing games with others in person was related to civic and political outcomes, but playing with others online
    was not.
  • Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing
    to discussion boards), re more engaged civically and politically.
  • Civic gaming experiences are more equally distributed than many other civic learning opportunities. (p. viii)

This study brought in the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) who have released a White Paper on The Civic Potential of Video Games (PDF) which discusses the social and civic aspects of gaming. One interesting result (also found in the Pew summary) is that it seems that teens who play games socially in person “are more likely to be civically and politically engaged than teens who play games primarily alone.” (p. 18) Online gaming seems to be “a weak form of social interaction” (p. 20) compared to in person social gaming. Another finding that contradicts the accepted (parental) wisdom that gaming is bad for youth is that,

The stereotype of the antisocial gamer is not reflected in our data. Youth who play games frequently are just as civically and politically active as those who play games infrequently. (p. 24)

Pew Study: Teens, Video Games, and Civics

The Globe and Mail had a story today on Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites by Patrick White (Nov. 25, 2008) that reports on a MacArthur Foundation funded study on, Living and Learning with New Media. This study looked at how youth participate in “the new media ecology.” (p. 1 of the PDF Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.) The report describes the “always on” connectivity of youth and their “friendshi-driven” practices. I was intrigued by the description of a subset who “geek out.”

Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. (p. 2 of the Two Page Summary)

The Digital Youth Project led by Mizuko Ito brought together researchers at USC and Berkeley. They have a book forthcoming from MIT Press called Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media that is online at the site.