Category: Uncategorized

A quick Q & A with Jay Rosen from his Tumblr site:

akakensmith asked: Your clearly show journalism disrupted by a changing world and journalists inventing very new versions of their work for a new time. Just as clearly, you and others show active citizenship changing, too, driving other changes and responding to change. But the university seems to be getting off without much disruption to its familiar ways. Aren’t the social disruptions you study going to demand something of the university sometime soon? Can it make knowledge within its walled garden forever?

Jay Rosen: Yes, I think it’s coming. It’s happening at the lower end already. This is one reason I do so much of my “teaching” in public and for free, as with my Twitter feed and blogging, which I think of as a kind of journalism education. That’s not enough, but it is preparation for what’s ahead. Here’s someone whose experiments I am following closely.

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Addendum: An interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education a day or two later predicts that technology and economies of scale create opportunities for certain kinds of excellence that will sweep around universities unwilling to innovate and leave them to die. That’s still the university operating in its walled garden, I suspect, just now the garden is virtual.

In a brief book excerpt, the late and much lamented NYROB writer Tony Judt describes the role of the intellectual in times of concrete turmoil like our own:

All this is hard for intellectuals, most of whom imagine themselves defending and advancing large abstractions. But I think the way to defend and advance large abstractions in the generations to come will be to defend and protect institutions and laws and rules and practices that incarnate our best attempt at those large abstractions. And intellectuals who care about these will be the people who matter most. (March 22, 2012 — NYROB subscription required to view full article)

I have greatly admired Tony Judt’s writing for several years, but I wonder if this formulation overlooks any hope that we might find in the movements that use social media to inform and inquire and affiliate and widen the range of voices that come to matter in society? Elsewhere in the excerpt he speaks of the role of intellectuals being “to fill the space between … the governed and the governors,” not a very exact formulation but one that doesn’t imply any particular role for the governed. The university, as well as any one of its professors, would not seem to have to work out a relationship with “the governed” or be challenged by their knowledge and experience or collaborate with them. Is the public intellectual here someone who speaks well and knows better? I can’t quite tell, but that’s my hunch.

If the university considers its role primarily to be “the production of sanctioned professionals,” as Dave Hickey has written, then its faculty need not learn the new inquiry and affiliation skills of, say, the Arab Spring. Sadly, if the university has no need to adapt, neither must the professor working there, I presume. If so, then the fuzziness of the intellectual’s relationship to “the governed” in this NYROB excerpt looks backward to established norms rather than forward to mysterious new circumstances unfolding now around us.

Tony Judt’s book was written under excruciating difficulties in the final months of his life that did not leave room for him to explore those unfolding circumstances, but like his other writing it has many other virtues. Dave Hickey’s playful “Romancing the Looky-Loos” essay shows at least one intellectual who has had a chance to think more about social practices that foster “a mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile, social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities”–something more specific that “the governed” and more interesting, too. See also “If you build it they will come,” Tim Dunlop’s foundational essay claiming that our new media allow us to concentrate on public intellectual practice rather than the credentials often associated with the work in the past.

Happily retired, as far as I can tell, colleague Ellen Maher recently noted this: “I look back at some of my sociology syllabi and wonder whether some of the disciplinary sacred cows might not have been better left slaughtered in grad school.”

We were chatting on Facebook at the time. My reply: “Ellen, I think you are onto something. Do we tend to teach undergraduates as if they were going to get MA degrees and MA students as if they were going to get doctoral degrees, when there might be very interesting versions of our majors that are for people not headed down that particular path? This has to be true for English, my field, where we are entrusted with two of the great wonders of human society, language and literature, both of which enrich and ennoble and enable much in our lives besides that narrow path to the doctorate. Surely there must be a dazzlingly interesting BA degree in English that is not a warm-up for the MA and then the Ph.D. I suspect that with all their interest in creative writing majors and minors our students are trying to tell us the very same thing.

At an event at the Natatorium today, four community leaders were honored as Trailblazers–individuals who broke ground for South Bend in areas such as desegregated employment and education. Mayor PeteButtigieg talked about how these individuals had helped change what had been unthinkable to something the absence of which would be unthinkable a single generation later. He went on to remind us that trails, having been blazed, need to be kept open–for the future of our community, worthy accomplishments need to be maintained and developed.

The setting for the celebration was itself a great symbol of transformation, South Bend’s former public natatorium, a swimming pool where segregation long reigned, a building which is now a community center and home of the Civil Rights Heritage Center and a marker of a public university’s commitment to all the people of its region. I am proud to be on the faculty of IU South Bend in part because of its commitment to the Natatorium.

I am still thinking about Dave Winer’s book, even though it’s none of my business. I wonder if there are models that suit a serious blogger’s writing methods and style to be discovered in the field of natural history. Chapters with small sub-chapters in a loose progression and grouped somewhat informally, each one focusing on one or two examples or anecdotes and a concept. In other words, not so different from blog posts but accumulating in a way that adds focus and energy. A little different energy from the blog because it does strive to be a book with a single focus and many related subtopics.

Why natural history? Because that field* works in part by accumulation of observations, I believe, as does blogging.

Some parts of DW’s written work fit natural history very well. Imagine 15 short entries about the life cycle of a tech project, say. A few entries about the early stages, a few about the relationship of the tech innovation to the marketplace and to users, a few about the maturation and old age of a tech innovation, a few about the natural enemies of tech innovation, one or two about the wider ecology that supports this innovation, one or two about what the innovation does to the wider social and economic ecology, etc. I know that DW has written about most of these things already or spoken about them in podcasts. Pull those already existing pieces out, arrange them in a progression, and see what examples and what parts of the life cycle of a tech innovation still need to be added to the story. You have a chapter or more underway.

Or take a post from last week, when DW said this:

On the net, your feed is you.

The links you push through this tool will be rendered in many different contexts. That’s why the way you render it is not important. The point of the tool is to connect your linkflow with all the places you might want your links to flow. That’s the reality in 2011, and any blogging tool must take this into account.

Today there are: feeds, rivers and renderers.

This all but sets out the organization for a progression of sub-sections of a chapter, written not so differently than blog entries, based on observations of the nature of the three creatures: feeds, rivers, and renderers. Maybe some of the sub-sections might address these parts of the wider topic:

Things meant to be read by humans. Things meant to be read by machines. Feeds as a hybrid of the two.

Feeds you own. When somebody else owns your feed. When you own your feed. To what degree you can really own your feed. Political implications of feed ownership. Economic implications of feed ownership. Social implications.

How machines read feeds and render them for human eyes. The important differences between various renderers and where they reside. Who creates and who owns the renderers? Why it matters.

Rivers. How they differ from other websites. What they require. What they offer. Why they matter.

Implicit in so much of DW’s work and in these topics is a question: What is the real creative opportunity of the web? [Though he is a technologist, DW plainly sees this as a blend of technological and social creativity.] Where and how is it misunderstood? Where and how is it threatened? How can it be protected? How can we take part in its best opportunities? There should be a chapter that directly discusses these things, but DW would probably not be able to discuss feeds and rivers and other topics without revealing this wider philosophy along the way, too.

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*”Traditional natural history, deriving from Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides, had flourished in the late Renaissance. It involved the mapping of nature through the classification of plants and animals and the assembling of information about their uses and habits. This traditional natural history continued throughout the 17th century and reached its zenith in the 18th century in the work of the likes of Carl Linnaeus.” (Peter Anstey)

I think novelist Alexander McCall Smith has invented a mini-essay form suitable for Twitter, and he has been publishing these little essays for some time. He launches a topic over a course of 3-6 tweets, all posted in the space of perhaps a half hour. Presumably he’s been gathering thoughts for awhile in preparation, since the tweets tend to show the topic from a variety of perspectives, as a good personal essay will often do. And a reader is tempted to see the tweets as having been arranged in a thoughtful order, making a progression, leading from an announcement of topic through some examples toward some kind of closure or conclusion. Here is an example, which should be read, in Twitter fashion, from the bottom up:

Is this a strong tweet?

@maddow: Brilliant visualization of a hard-to-grasp, important thing: http://is.gd/hX6sQd

Well, as a reader I have no idea what the link offers, and I resist that in a blog posting or a tweet. But if this next tweet’s link is correct…

The promise you make and keep: a brief theory of web publishing. http://is.gd/iiTBa9

…then a writer who makes a strong promise to an audience and delivers on that promise over time may not need to say more than @maddow has said here because readers know what they can expect from a trusted writer:

@maddow: Brilliant visualization of a hard-to-grasp, important thing: http://is.gd/hX6sQd

But a writer who is still shaping an identity or purpose or project will not have established a clear promise that an audience has heard and accepted, and for that audience a tweet like @maddow’s would probably be too skimpy, too much of a tease.

Of the ethical circumstance of people who create and sell tools in our digital age, Dave Winer says:

I always go with the philosophy that if you produce a tool that is good at reading or listening or watching that you almost have an ethical obligation to make that tool also capable of creating. [DaveCast, 6/22/11, 2:59-3:12]

On Twitter, novelist Alexander McCall Smith (@McCallSmith) reports briefly on a conversation about curated spaces with someone from the art world. First this:

Spoke to curator. He made interesting distinction between paintings in gallery (zoo) and those “in the wild” (eg. in churches, houses, etc.). [June 16 2011]

That caught my eye as a useful division for those interested in the role of curation on the web–our shared work of helping others find worthy content by establishing a meaningful context and then linking to it ourselves. Some public spaces in the world, belonging to institutions and dependent on their authority, protect and organize their collections just as zoos and galleries do. On the bright side, good things are preserved and studied and presented, while on the grim side all the fabled limitations of the ivory tower apply: out of touch with the world, shrouded in secrecy, expressed in the language of insiders, etc. Remember, too, how lions used to pace in small enclosures, their feline power driven to the edge of mental illness by their terrible circumstance. Those who study sometimes stifle the thing they seek to know. So “the wild” sounds appealing at the end of that little message. Three minutes later the novelist followed up with this:

Same distinction with men. Some are in the zoo (tamed, quiescent); others in the wild (go to pub, football, think unacceptable thoughts). [June 16 2011]

Here he amplifies the hints of the first message—the gallery or zoo protects but also tames; in the wild there is danger and disorder. It is, perhaps, the tug of civilization at every moment, between that which orders and the energies which it seeks to channel and contain.

I wonder if schools ever talk about adulthood as an opportunity to negotiate between the two very central human impulses. It’s plain that there is a toolkit for acts of curation in various fields, but is there something comparable that helps us benefit from the wild energy? Is there a toolkit, or are the wilds by their very nature beyond the reach of those organizing powers? I wonder if young people would enjoy talking about these two parts of our nature. I don’t recall much along those lines in my upbringing.

David Brooks on the way adulthood works: “Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life…. Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.”