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.

#alt-academy: Alternative Academic Careers | a mediaCommons project

 

I’ve been meaning to blog about the MediaCommons collections edited by Bethany Nowviskie titled #alt-academy: Alternative Academic Careers. This collection of essays is long over due and corrects the view that the only way to do the digital humanities is to get a tenure-track job. This collection calls into question the relatively fixed boundaries between academic staff (faculty) and alternative academic staff (alt-ac). I would go so far as to say that humanities computing was a field primarily populated by alt-ac folk that is only recently getting colonized by academics. Anyway, I expect to assign essays from this collection to my students.

From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School | Digital Humanities Observatory

 

This week (July 4th, 2011) I’m instructing at the From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School at Trinity College, Dublin. I’m teaching a half-day hands-on workshop on Voyeur. You can see my workshop script here. I am trying a new version of our workshop script which will include worksheets.

I’m writing my notes at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/FromMetadataToLinkedData – these are not a conference report so much as reflections on stuff I’m learning.

Distractions in the Shallows

I’ve was slowly reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows when I came across this passage,

By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content an disrupts our concentration. (p. 91)

As often happens when reading, questions disrupted my concentration. I couldn’t help thinking that Carr’s gaze was limited by the screen. How many distractions are there beyond the book and screen. I grabbed my iPhone and took a panoramic shot of the visual space from where I sat on the living room couch. Rooms are the problem – they are filled with multimedia and interactive distractions starting with the couch (which invites me to put down the book and snooze.) Here is my annotated “multimedia” space (click to enlarge):

SPACEWAR – by Stewart Brand – Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

Reading I came across a reference to an influential early article in the Rolling Stone of 7 December, 1972, titled SPACEWAR – Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. The article is by Stewart Brand and it describes Spacewar and the culture around it:

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That’s the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)

The article goes on to describe the Hackers involved in playing and developing games as “A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor.” It talks about ARPA,  Xerox PARC, Alan Kay’s work and Pam Hart and Resource One. You can feel Brand inventing a compute counterculture by describing it as being. See Chapter 4 of Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture,

In “Spacewar,” Brand brought together two visions of personal computing and linked them in terms set by the New Communalist technological vision. The user-friendly, time-sharing vision of Xerox PARC and the politically empowering, information-community vision of Resource One were two sides of the same coin, Brand implied. Both groups, he suggested, were high-tech versions of the Merry Pranksters, and the computer itself was a new LSD. Drawing on the rhetorical tactics of cybernetics, Brand offered up Xerox PARC, Resource One, and the Merry Pranksters as prototypical elites for the techno-social future. He allowed each to claim some of the cultural legitimacy of the others: in his feature, Resource One appeared to be not a fringe group of ex-hippies but a central player in a new computer movement. Xerox PARC, while still a child of the military-industrial complex, took on the cool of the Pranksters. And the Pranksters and Brand himself, six years after the Trips Festival, demonstrated that they had survived the Summer of Love and should still be regarded as harbingers of social change.

…

Even before minicomputers had become widely available, Stewart Brand had helped both their designers and their future users imagine them as “personal” technologies.

The Leisure of Serious Games: A Dialogue

Game Studies, an online journal about computer games has just published the dialogue I wrote and performed with Kevin Kee, see The Leisure of Serious Games: A Dialogue. The dialogue started as a scripted performance for Immersive Worlds in 2009 and we then edited it into something to be submitted. The journal found it hard to review as it isn’t really an article, but then dialogue has always been at the edge of things.

Digital Humanities 2011: Big Tent Digital Humanities

I’m at Digital Humanities 2011: Big Tent Digital Humanities at Stanford University. I was involved in two workshops before the conference on Visualization for Literary History and Text Analysis with Voyeur. (You can see the script to the Voyeur one at DH2011 Voyeur Tools.) I’m also involved in a paper on “Computing in Canada: A History of the Incunabular Years” presented by Victoria Smith and a panel on The Interface to the Collection organized by the INKE Interface Design team. One gratifying thing to see is the visibility of the University of Alberta in the DH 2011 Visualizations set up by the conference organizers. If you zoom in to the different visualizations you will see the number of participants from U of A.

Academic Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

From Twitter I learned about James Smithies
Academic Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). These are images for setting up cloud services on Amazon. The two that he now provides are for Omeka and Open Journal Systems. They are not for the technically challenged, but they could be a way for a digital humanities center/project to be set up in the cloud for those who don’t have good university server support. The day may come when you don’t need university infrastructure, but can set up your own. For that matter, this blog is on my private site which gives me a bunch of tools (like WordPress and a wiki) for about $7 a month.

Humanities (dot) Net

As part of the CHCI annual conference at the Toronto Jackman Humanities Institute they scheduled a special day with centerNet titled “Humanities (dot) Net”. The program is on 2011 Annual Meeting « Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (scroll down). The event is a bringing together of these two associations of centres connected to the humanities, one digital and one “traditional.” Of course there is nothing traditional to the CHCI centers. Some of the things that link us include:

  • Interdisciplinarity. Of course, interdisciplinarity happens at all levels and in all sorts of organizations, including departments, but generally it is centers/institutes that develop structures for encouraging interdisciplinarity.
  • Collaboration. Both types of centres structure forms of collaboration. I think the CHCI centres tend to be more conservative, often also supporting “lone” scholars, but we both try to imagine ways of bringing the right people together for research and learning.
  • Legitimization and Leadership. Both types of centres can serve to legitimize activities that are not always recognized. They lead by recognizing new interdisciplinary configurations through fellowships, project support, workshops and so on.
  • Experimenting with Futures. Both types of centers can be sites of experimentation with new types of courses, new collaborations, and new research practices. Experiments emerge out of reflection which is why these centers are a site for thinking through where the humanities are going.

Humanities (dot) net as an event brings together leaders in both types of centres to learn about each other and to reflect together on the agenda of the humanities.