Rituals, Texts and Databases

Com­par­a­tive ontol­ogy asserts that humans already have ontolo­gies, and that machine ontolo­gies are both pro­jec­tions of human ontolo­gies (those of the numerati) and mate­r­ial agents that inter­vene in the ongo­ing repro­duc­tion of ontolo­gies (every­one else’s).  Devel­op­ers of ontolo­gies for the web of linked data would do well to under­stand the nature of human ontolo­gies, as well as they way machine ontolo­gies inter­vene in the ongo­ing con­struc­tion of social life.

Human ontolo­gies are not like ROM pro­grams, hard-wired into our brains and exe­cuted with­out mod­i­fi­ca­tion; they are designed to be repro­grammed through engage­ment with the world. They are one of our most effec­tive adap­tive traits.

Ontolo­gies are adaptive

Anthro­pol­o­gists have stud­ied ontolo­gies in the wild for a long time, under the var­i­ous cat­e­gories of “struc­ture,” “sym­bol­ism,” “cul­ture” and “col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions.”  One of the most impor­tant con­trib­u­tors to the study of ontol­ogy is the Amer­i­can cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist Mar­shall Sahlins.

Sahlins’ prin­ci­pal the­o­ret­i­cal con­ti­bu­tion to cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy has been to retrieve the con­cept of cul­tural struc­ture of the ahis­tor­i­cal, for­mal­ist, and mech­a­nis­tic con­cep­tion devel­oped by Lévi-Strauss, whose own work on mythol­ogy belies his more the­o­ret­i­cal pro­nounce­ments.  Rather than sep­a­rat­ing struc­ture from event (and his­tory), and locat­ing the for­mer deeply within a uni­ver­sal mind–like a camshaft respon­si­ble for the jig­saw puz­zle of culture–Sahlins focuses on what he calls the “struc­ture of the con­junc­ture” of struc­ture and event.  His­tory emerges as a cul­tur­ally dis­tinc­tive second-order struc­ture that results from the ongo­ing work of cat­e­gories in praxis. So cat­e­gories have a struc­ture, but that struc­ture under­goes reeval­u­a­tion and change as it is applied to the world.

In Islands of His­tory Sahlins describes the process of cul­tural (onto­log­i­cal) change in terms of the “risk of ref­er­ence”: as cul­tures clas­sify things in the world–as they deploy ontologies–they also put these ontolo­gies at risk.  For things in the world do not always behave as clas­si­fied, or planned.  Even the sun  has an occa­sional eclipse.  Although the keep­ers of culture–from priests to grandmothers–try to enforce adher­ence to the cat­e­gories, the behav­ior of things will inevitably con­tra­dict the cat­e­gories and call for their revi­sion.  Sahlins reads the Hawai’ian’s clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Cap­tain Cook as Lono as just such a world chang­ing event.

Rit­ual is one mech­a­nism humans use to syn­chro­nize the world with world view.  As peo­ple grow, for exam­ple, and change sta­tuses, rites of pas­sage are used to medi­ate this “con­tra­dic­tion” and reclas­sify peo­ple so that they can fit into the sys­tem.  Another mech­a­nism is prophecy, where  the reverse is true–world views are aligned with a world that has changed.  Mil­lenar­ian move­ments are the clas­sic exam­ple of this: a prophet emerges who can make sense of the new in terms of the old, but changes the old in the process.

Rit­u­als and prophetic move­ments are the orig­i­nal forms of change management.

This is the ongo­ing work of cul­ture.  Cul­tural repro­duc­tion is never mechan­i­cal.  That is one rea­son we humans have his­tory.  There is always a dis­pro­por­tion between words and things, plans and situations.

Data­bases (and the point of this post)

Now, a data model, such as a set of tables and fields in a rela­tional data­base, an XML schema of ele­ments and attrib­utes, or an RDF vocab­u­lary of classes and prop­er­ties, is a plan, a schema of clas­si­fi­ca­tion.   And data­base appli­ca­tions, like rit­u­als and texts, have their own forms of ref­er­en­tial risk to con­tend with. They clas­sify the world and, in the process, both effect the world they clas­sify and open them­selves up for revi­sion by that world as it changes.

For exam­ple, the cat­e­gories pro­duced by a require­ments elic­i­ta­tion process for an appli­ca­tion designed to improve some work­flow, and encoded in a data­base that sits at the bot­tom of an appli­ca­tion stack, may not accu­rately rep­re­sent the work­flow as it is actu­ally prac­ticed, and as it will inevitably change as new devel­op­ments take place–changing per­son­nel, clients, strate­gic plans, etc. The data­base, then, is put into a situation–the sit­u­a­tion of the conjuncture–into which its cat­e­gories are at risk.

In this sit­u­a­tion, data­bases are like texts–they are built on the arma­ture of a hard-coded ontol­ogy, and they can move beyond their orig­i­nal domain of applicatibility.

But unlike most texts, and very much like sacred texts, data­base appli­ca­tions (and their admin­is­tra­tors) are usu­ally given a cen­tral posi­tion within an orga­ni­za­tion.  They are often deployed as key ele­ments of an enter­prise archi­tec­ture that calls the insti­tu­tional shots.  Thus they can insu­late them­selves from ref­er­en­tial risk.  They can force con­for­mity to their logic–as Michael Wesch’s New Guinea vil­lagers redesigned their set­tle­ment pat­tern to con­form to the gov­ern­ment census–or they can pro­duce a black mar­ket of behav­iors in an orga­ni­za­tion that bypasses the data­base gov­erned work­flow.  This is what fac­ulty do who are forced to use an LMS but would rather use Google Docs.

Com­par­a­tive ontol­ogy can help here.  If we view ontolo­gies as always sit­u­ated, then we should (1) design sys­tems for max­i­mum flex­i­bil­ity and adapt­abilty, and (2) learn a les­son from the rit­ual life of peo­ples around the world and through­out his­tory: engage our ontolo­gies in con­stant reeval­u­a­tion and mod­i­fi­ca­tion, mak­ing the world (of our orga­ni­za­tions) fit where appro­pri­ate, and also refin­ing the cat­e­gories to fit the world.

To meet the first chal­lenge, we shouldn’t cre­ate over­wrought ontolo­gies, but rather focus on just enough clas­si­fi­ca­tion to achieve the effects we need. Usu­ally, the effects we are most con­cerned with are con­nect­ing peo­ple to peo­ple, peo­ple to infor­ma­tion, and infor­ma­tion to infor­ma­tion, in as few links as possible.

To meet the sec­ond chal­lenge, we may want to refine what we mean by “social oper­at­ing system”–for that is pre­cisely what a rit­ual sys­tem is.  Maybe it’s time to fol­low McLuhan’s advice and exploit the rit­ual effects of the elec­tric, in order to mit­i­gate and shape the more dan­ger­ous effects of the elec­tronic.   When we build ontolo­gies, maybe we should also be think­ing of the phys­i­cal and vir­tual spaces in which they will be deployed, and the mate­r­ial and dig­i­tal arti­facts that will be their vehi­cles of expression.

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Theory Driven Design

I am all for user-driven design method­olo­gies. My instinct is to dis­trust the Cen­tral IT ethos of “we know bet­ter” because “we think more ratio­nally about things” and all that.  That per­spec­tive is based on a simul­ta­ne­ous over-valuing of a lin­ear, ratio­nal notion of process (“plan­ning”) and a grudg­ing accep­tance of user behav­ior as “cul­tural” and there­fore out­side the scope a require­ments gath­er­ing process.

The term “non-functional require­ments” speaks vol­umes and cap­tures the Cen­tral IT atti­tude very well.  Under that cat­e­gory, the whole point of effec­tive soft­ware design is swept under the rug.  We know that soft­ware will be most effec­tive when it adapts to user behav­ior and vice versa, but we often side­step that issue, hop­ing for incre­men­tal, evo­lu­tion­ary changes to pro­duce the desired effects over the long run.  We miss the oppor­tu­nity to inno­vate, leav­ing that to the less timid.

But I also find that user-centric method­olo­gies are based on naive assump­tions about what users want, or who The User is, or what the point of the user research is in the first place.  Unless you have a very restricted audi­ence for your software–and admit­tedly one often does–it is very dif­fi­cult to trans­late the views of a few peo­ple, whether cap­tured by focus group, sur­vey, or even participant-observation, into gen­er­al­ized prin­ci­ples for an appli­ca­tion.  Ulti­mately, good design is what works, and we ret­ro­spec­tively attribute suc­cess to our process.  But we really have no clue.

What is it that one is cap­tur­ing by user-centric research, any­way?  The atti­tudes and dis­po­si­tions within a class of indi­vid­u­als?  This can’t be it.  User atti­tudes and men­tal mod­els are highly vari­able, and they are muta­ble because humans are adap­tive, more than we think.  If you build soft­ware based on some sta­tic notion of what users want, what they say they want, you will miss the effect soft­ware has on redefin­ing what they really want.  This is because users inhabit cul­tural envi­ron­ments, and soft­ware inevitably has effects on those envi­ron­ments.  If you focus too much on the abstract user–what’s “in” the user–you will often have the feel­ing of the goal posts mov­ing.  Or you may end up dis­miss­ing the user alto­gether as fickle and irre­spon­si­ble, and go on with your own design ideas.   If you design soft­ware for a liv­ing, I am sure you know what I am talk­ing about.

I think the proper focus of user-centric soft­ware design has to be the user-in-context.  That is, not the user but the Sit­u­a­tion.  But sutu­a­tion defined in a spe­cific, rig­or­ous way.  Sit­u­a­tion as the objec­tive, insti­tu­tional frame­work of power and infra­struc­ture in which peo­ple work.  This is dif­fi­cult ter­rain to study, hedged in as it is by all sort of taboos and mis­recog­ni­tions that keep the social gears mov­ing.  Let me give you an example.

One of the areas where the Cen­tral IT soft­ware design ethos dom­i­nates is in the area of doc­u­ment man­age­ment.  Two fac­tors drive the design of solu­tions: (1) devel­op­ers assume (know) that paper­less­ness is a Good Thing, and (2) the paper-based work­flows that users are enmeshed in are so crufty, com­plex, and idio­syn­cratic that it is impos­si­ble for users to describe them in enough detail to re-engineer them.  The result is that the dig­i­tal doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tion will almost always build around people’s behav­ior, or else it will break work­flows where it has to.  So, instead of step­ping back and rethink­ing what the data flows entailed by a paper form entail, or tak­ing advan­tage of the metaso­cial moment and ask­ing Why are We Doing This in the First Place, document-logic is repro­duced in the soft­ware.  The eff­fect is not to repro­duce the old way, and make it more effi­cient.  It is some­thing unpre­dictable and bound to have hid­den con­se­quences, not all of which can be good.  Most likely, we’ve pre­served the noto­ri­ous stu­pid­ity of bureau­cra­cies and have ensured its con­tin­ued sur­vival in a mutant  and more pow­er­ful form.  Because once cat­e­gories get encoded in insti­tu­tional data­bases, the tail wags the dog.  Think health insurance.

So, what to do?  I sug­gest that we pur­sue theory-driven design.  We actu­ally try to make sense of the soci­ol­ogy and anthro­pol­ogy of bureau­cra­cies and oper­a­tional­ize the best ideas in these dis­courses as design prin­ci­ples.  We think of how soft­ware behaves as an assem­blage of arti­facts in a liv­ing cul­tural envi­ron­ment.  This is not social engi­neer­ing, nor is it to tread the tired path of “orga­ni­za­tional behav­ior,” a field that is too closely tied to the exec­u­tive per­spec­tive.  It is to pur­sue a rich, empir­i­cal under­stand­ing of soft­ware in the wild, or at least, the office.

Theory-driven design is not anti-empirical.  It is the oppo­site: for a good the­ory gen­er­ates testable hypothe­ses.  It gives a frame­work to user-centric research beyond the unan­swer­able quest for what users really want.  As they say, there is noth­ing so prac­ti­cal as a good theory.

A good start­ing point might be to take Ted Nelson’s ideas about doc­u­ments and hyper­text and com­bine them with, say, David Graeber’s crit­i­cal anthro­pol­ogy of bureau­cracy.    Not to con­done the anar­chism of Grae­ber, but to lever the authen­tic­ity of per­spec­tive he brings to a dis­cus­sion about the role of doc­u­ments in the orga­ni­za­tion.  Read­ing his essay, “Beyond Power/Knowledge an explo­ration of the rela­tion of power, igno­rance and stu­pid­ity,” it is hard not to believe that a rad­i­cal rethink­ing of the doc­u­ment, and document-logic, would not ben­e­fit from his perspective.

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What Edupunk has become

Look­ing at this bit of the SXSW panel on Edupunk, I have this to say:

It seems that Edupunk really has become about anar­chy, just as Gard­ner feared, at least in the minds of many.  Downes’ social club the­ory of edu­ca­tion is just the sort of point­less pop­ulist angst that punk exploited, and which dif­fers, I would argue, from the more authen­tic (in quotes) Clash-like music, where one gets a sense of hope.  I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s there, and it’s also not call­ing for destruc­tion.  I think it’s this: the Clash knew the lim­its of the medium — rouse but do not pre­scribe, but also do not pro­scribe.   After all, we’re just a band. Leave social change for others.

I am afraid that Downes comes off as a typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a now com­mon­place mil­lenar­i­an­ism among instruc­tional tech­nol­o­gists, at least at con­fer­ences — where the Las Vegas prin­ci­ple seems to apply (“What hap­pens at ELI stays at ELI”).  It’s a cargo cult.

Jim Groom is no mil­lenar­ian.  For him, the essence of Edupunk is not in its anar­chism, but in its com­mu­ni­tarin­ism, if I may impose that word upon him — the relo­ca­tion of decision-making and cre­ativ­ity in the hands of fac­ulty, stu­dents, and tech­nol­o­gists, and not in the hands of cor­po­rate busi­ness mod­els that may appear to be log­i­cal and nec­es­sary from an admin­is­tra­tive point of view, but which are in fact nei­ther.   This does not at all mean Kill the Uni­ver­sity, as Downes very clearly argues.  It means, Let’s not go down this slip­pery slope that cer­tain kinds of soft­ware seem to be push­ing us.  That’s pretty much it (which is a lot).

Iron­i­cally, Downes’ approach puts edu­ca­tion much more in the hands of anony­mous cen­tral­iza­tion, for with­out the res­i­den­tial cam­pus, there is no medi­at­ing insti­tu­tion between Google or the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment and the indi­vid­ual. Downes com­mits the clas­sic fal­lacy of rad­i­cally indi­vid­u­al­is­tic polit­i­cal thought — the destruc­tion of sup­pos­edly oppres­sive insti­tu­tions like col­leges, fam­i­lies, etc. only cre­ates the social con­di­tions of anomie and total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Good luck with that.

Edupunk, for me, is really all about what Gard­ner and Jim,  like McCart­ney and Lennon, had going at the very begin­ning.  A dis­cus­sion about what sort of lead­er­ship is appro­pri­ate to aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy, given this new mil­lieux of tech­nol­ogy.  What do we teach our stu­dents and fac­ulty, both crit­i­cally and prac­ti­cally?  We need to recover this thread; from what I can see, the SXSW panel did not achieve this.

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Edupunk, Technology, and Leadership

I want to give my two cents on Edupunk,  a wildy suc­cess­ful term coined by Jim Groom (Mary Wash­ing­ton)  to describe a style of aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy sup­port that (1) eschews Cen­tral IT and its depen­dency on scal­able but clunky and ulti­mately bor­ing and pos­si­bly evil appli­ca­tions, such as Black­board, and (2) instead favors help­ing fac­ulty use more open, flex­i­ble, ele­gant, inter­est­ing, and avail­able tech­nolo­gies from the open source and Web 2.0 spaces, such as Word­Press.  In coin­ing the term, Jim gave mean­ing and focus to a real trend and ten­sion that has been with us for some time, but which remained uncat­alyzed for being unnamed.  Nam­ing is pow­er­ful magic and we would do well to pay atten­tion to it when it suc­ceeds as well as it has in this case.

A lot has already been said about Edupunk and the range of ideas it con­notes.  In addi­tion to the press that fol­lowed the coin­ing of the term (includ­ing the New York Times), Jim has pro­duced a play­ful but seri­ous Bat­tle Royale video series in which Jim and his for­mer col­league Gard­ner Camp­bell (now at Bay­lor) debate the appro­pri­ate­ness and effec­tive­ness of the term to advance goals they both share.   (The topic was also the sub­ject of a recent panel at SXSW 2009, but I have not lis­tened to that yet.)  After lis­ten­ing to these clips, though, I can’t help but think that the core idea has been weighed down by the con­sid­er­able seman­tic load of the term “punk,” for bet­ter and for worse.  So I thought I would take a stab at res­cu­ing the idea from the word, if that’s at all pos­si­ble.  (I have no idea if this is cool with Jim.)  Not that the debate between Gard­ner and Jim is reducible to mere seman­tics; they do have impor­tant dif­fer­ences of opin­ion on edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy that go beyond the debate in question.

So, the core mean­ing of the term Edupunk derives from a rather straigh­for­ward anal­ogy Jim draws between this style of aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy and the late 1970s punk move­ment in music asso­ci­ated with groups like the Clash (his exam­ple).  Just as the Clash had a raw fresh­ness and energy in con­trast to the bloated, for­mu­laic, and empty music of Bill­board 100 bands at the time, apps like Word­Press and Dru­pal stand in con­trast to the bloated and mind-numbing soft­ware that we often (but not always) get from the cor­po­rate sec­tor, at least in the case of edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy.  The anal­ogy works at a lit­eral level since the suc­cess of bands like the Clash had a lot to do with their avoid­ance of Big Music pro­duc­tion stu­dios and pro­duc­ers in favor of cheaper tech­nolo­gies in avail­able spaces like garages and base­ments. [Update: garage music is an exam­ple of the long tail of pro­duc­tion being enabled by the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the means of music pro­duc­tion that took place in the 1970s.]

When you look at the anal­ogy in this way, the term garage band, or some vari­ant of it, turns out to be a bet­ter anal­ogy than punk proper for what Jim is get­ting at.  As a Clash song goes, they were a “garage band” from “garage land.”  The image of a garage band — and think of early Devo or the Mod­ern Lovers here — evokes the DIY ethos Jim refers to while avoid­ing analo­gies to bands like the Sex Pis­tols, who were cyn­i­cally man­u­fac­tured and mar­keted from the start. I have a hard time think­ing of Dru­pal, for exam­ple, in the same space as the Sex Pis­tols.  I have a less hard time com­par­ing the soft­ware to the sound of, say, Joy Divi­sion.  There is an ele­gant sim­plic­ity to both that, pre­sum­ably, derives from their being devel­oped with­out the encum­brances of a beau­racracy and Big Leadership.

The anal­ogy to the garage band music rather than punk per se avoids Gard­ner Campbell’s apt crit­i­cism about punk in the strict sense, that it was a divi­sive and cyn­cial move­ment with­out any real con­cern for change (one thinks of the Ramone’s I’m Against It or Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Gen­er­a­tion), and there­fore serves as a bad model for the hard work of craft­ing a trans­for­ma­tional aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy prac­tice.  But I sup­pose the nor­man “garage” does not lend itself to phrase coin­ing the way the saxon-sounding “punk” does.

And the word “punk” does have an impor­tant con­nec­tion to the open source soft­ware cul­ture that Jim val­orizes: there is a direct blood­line of descent that goes from punk (music) to cyber­punk (lit­er­a­ture) to the hack­er­dom (tech­nol­ogy) that pro­duced Perl, Linux, and PHP.  It’s a con­nec­tion that is evi­dent from the aes­thet­ics of open source soft­ware before it became suc­cess­ful and co-opted (not nec­es­sar­ily for worse) by the web-inflated soft­ware indus­try.  Just look at the cov­ers ot 2600 and The Perl Jour­nal from 1990s.

So, although I think Gard­ner is cor­rect about not want­ing to salute this par­tic­u­lar flag because of its guilt by asso­ci­a­tion with the Johnny Rot­ten school of anti-leadership, I think Jim was (is) onto some­thing very impor­tant that needs fur­ther unpack­ing, even after the hype curve sub­sides.  Iron­i­cally, I think the set of issues he cat­alyzed with the term have pre­cisely to do with lead­er­ship and its con­nec­tion to teach­ing and tech­nol­ogy, where Gard­ner rightly shifts the debate. But more on that later.

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Stories, Games, Databases and Film: The Aristotle-McLuhan Field

My pre­vi­ous mus­ings on the oppo­si­tion between McLuhan and Aris­to­tle imply a two-dimensional con­tin­uum for locat­ing var­i­ous forms of media.  If we let the term “nar­ra­tive” cover what Butcher trans­lates as “plot” in Aris­to­tle, and we clas­sify the four kinds of media dis­cussed by Manovich, then he have the fol­low­ing struc­tural table:

This table is an exam­ple of the clas­sic struc­tural­ist device, made famous by Lévi-Strauss, where all pos­si­ble vari­a­tions of an oppo­si­tion are laid out in a kind of truth table.  A plus sign (+) means that the cat­e­gory is present in the item, while a minus sign (–) indi­cates its absence. These tables are use­ful for gen­er­at­ing ideas about how ele­ments in a given field — in this case, media forms — are related to each other, gen­er­at­ing fur­ther ques­tions.  For exam­ple, it emerges that data­bases are the strong oppo­site of films, while sto­ries and games are weak opposites.

The table above can also be expressed as a two-dimensional field, where the named col­umn head­ers become the X and Y axes of a dis­crete Carte­sian plane, and the val­ues in the first col­umn become val­ues in the field.  This is the sort of device made famous by Bour­dieu (see Dis­tinc­tion).  The advan­tage of this device is that it allows us locate media forms with more pre­ci­sion.  Here’s what I have in mind:

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Aristotle and McLuhan (iii)

It came to me recently how com­pletely and dia­met­ri­cally opposed Aris­to­tle and McLuhan really are.  By which I mean the ancient aca­d­e­mic sen­si­bil­ity that still per­vades acad­e­mia and the (post)modern, new media one that wants to break free from the old forms asso­ci­ated with literacy.

In the Poet­ics Aris­to­tle spec­i­fies two dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures of tragic poetry: (1) the para­mount impor­tance of the plot, or sequenc­ing of events in the play, and (2) the down­grad­ing of the “spec­ta­cle” of the play — the scenery, spe­cial effects, etc.  Here’s how he puts it (emphases mine):

The plot, then, is the first prin­ci­ple, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Char­ac­ter holds the sec­ond place. A sim­i­lar fact is seen in paint­ing. The most beau­ti­ful col­ors, laid on con­fus­edly, will not give as much plea­sure as the chalk out­line of a por­trait. Thus Tragedy is the imi­ta­tion of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

The Spec­ta­cle has, indeed, an emo­tional attrac­tion of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artis­tic, and con­nected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from rep­re­sen­ta­tion and actors. Besides, the pro­duc­tion of spec­tac­u­lar effects depends more on the art of the stage machin­ist than on that of the poet.

So, the plot is the soul of tragedy while spec­ta­cle is the least artis­tic part of it.   Spec­ta­cle is so low in Aristotle’s reck­on­ing that he even sug­gests that drama doesn’t need actors and stages!   Appar­ently, the script by itself will do fine to achieve the sub­lime effects of the art.  (Here it is clear that what Aris­to­tle means by poetry is writ­ing, and that he strongly val­ues the stand-alone writ­ten work of art with this hier­ar­chy.  Although the form of the novel emerges much later, it is hard not to notice a genealog­i­cal con­nec­tion here.)

Notice how oppo­site this is of the new media.  On the one hand, as McLuhan states over and over, the medium is the mes­sage — i.e. that spec­ta­cle is the most impor­tant dimen­sion of art and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.   And, regard­ing plot, con­sider Lev Manovich’s idea that the data­base is the sym­bolic form of our time:  the sortable, selec­table, random-access, par­a­dig­matic, and non-linear form of the data­base, broadly defined, is the pre­cise oppo­site of writ­ing, although both involve text.  For writ­ing is, above all, the con­struc­tion of a spe­cific and unique sequence of sen­tences into a work that has, the more artis­tic it is, what Frank Ker­mode called the sense of an end­ing.   Writ­ing, in the sense of lit­er­ary or philo­soph­i­cal or his­tor­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, is dis­tin­guished by the pre­sense of an argu­ment, a nar­ra­tive, an unfold­ing of events and ideas in time, where the pro­gres­sion itself is as impor­tant as the con­tent.  Not so with data­bases, where con­tent is decom­posed into ele­men­tal units (records and fields) and then sub­ject to end­less growth and manipulation.

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Aristotle and McLuhan (ii)

If elec­tric media cre­ates expe­ri­en­tial drama for McLuhan, does Aristotle’s the­ory of tragedy — peripeteia, etc. — help us under­stand that drama? (Does it mat­ter that I arrived at this idea in the form of an Aris­totelian syl­lo­gism?)  Can edu­ca­tion be under­stood as a dra­matic, or rit­ual, process?  If so, Vic­tor Turner’s the­ory of rit­ual process may be help­ful — he dis­cribes the lim­i­nal­ity that McLuhan val­ues, but he does so in Aris­totelian terms.

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Aristotle and McLuhan

Does McLuhan get us beyond Aristotle?

Just the other day I was re-reading my copy of Aristotle’s Poet­ics (tr. Butcher), and it struck me how inter­est­ing it might be to jux­ta­pose Aris­to­tle to McLuhan.  They inter­sect at a lot of points.  They are both media theorists–in fact, with the Poet­ics, Aris­to­tle invents the field–but Aris­to­tle is McLuhan’s oppo­site in that he is the first to the­o­rize (and embrace) writ­ing as a medium.  But Aris­to­tle also pro­vides a sup­ple­ment to McLuhan, since he unpacks the con­cept of drama that McLuhan draws on so heav­ily in his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the new media.  (For McLuhan, new media cre­ate an elec­tric envi­ron­ment which serves as a global mise en scène for a post­mod­ern drama of social life.)  In addi­tion, Aris­to­tle sets a bar for McLuhan — for until the lat­ter, or rather new media the­o­rists who fol­low him, can pro­vide an alter­na­tive to the con­cept of mime­sis — with some­thing more use­ful than Sonntag’s “erotics of art” (which admit­tedly sounds pretty fun) — then we will remain Aris­totelians, for bet­ter or for worse.  It is not enough to view mime­sis as an arti­fact of writ­ing, for that is a state­ment of faith and begs the ques­tion.  A truly rad­i­cal media the­ory would find the means to dis­place this con­cept, or else embrace it with abandon.

The art “with­out a name“

If there is any doubt that Aris­to­tle is the first to embrace writ­ing as a medium, and to dis­miss Socrates’ con­cerns about it in the Phae­drus, check out this pas­sage, which occurs at the end of Sec­tion I:

There is another art which imi­tates by means of lan­guage alone, and that either in prose or verse—which verse, again, may either com­bine dif­fer­ent meters or con­sist of but one kind—but this has hith­erto been with­out a name. For there is no com­mon term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenar­chus and the Socratic dia­logues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imi­ta­tions in iambic, ele­giac, or any sim­i­lar meter.  Peo­ple do, indeed, add the word ‘maker’ or ‘poet’ to the name of the meter, and speak of ele­giac poets, or epic (that is, hexa­m­e­ter) poets, as if it were not the imi­ta­tion that makes the poet, but the verse that enti­tles them all to the name. Even when a trea­tise on med­i­cine or nat­ural sci­ence is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by cus­tom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empe­do­cles have noth­ing in com­mon but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physi­cist rather than poet. On the same prin­ci­ple, even if a writer in his poetic imi­ta­tion were to com­bine all meters, as Chaer­e­mon did in his Cen­taur, which is a med­ley com­posed of meters of all kinds, we should bring him too under the gen­eral term poet [emphases mine].

Here Aris­to­tle carves out a space for this new craft, writ­ing, “under the gen­eral term poet.”  The Poet­ics is about this new form of mimetic prac­tice, this new medium,  with par­tic­u­lar empha­sis not on the spec­ta­cle – McLuhan’s focus — but on the action, the arrange­ment of scenes … the screenplay.

The Spec­ta­cle of McLuhan

Here is what Aris­to­tle has to say about the spec­ta­cle (the mas­sage) of drama, one of the dis­tinc­tive fea­tures he dis­cerns in the art:

The Spec­ta­cle has, indeed, an emo­tional attrac­tion of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artis­tic, and con­nected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from rep­re­sen­ta­tion and actors. Besides, the pro­duc­tion of spec­tac­u­lar effects depends more on the art of the stage machin­ist than on that of the poet.

So we have a very thick line drawn in the sand. It’s not Guten­berg that cre­ated the old world that McLuhan wants to trans­form, it is Aristotle.

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Tech, People, Capital

Jim Groom writes another excel­lent piece in his blog, Bavat­ues­days.  In the post he makes the very impor­tant point that edutech poe­ple need to be aware, con­stantly aware, of the fact that tech­nol­ogy, espe­cially edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts like Black­board, are bound up with cor­po­rate inter­ests that are not our own.  That tech­nol­ogy does not always have the inter­est of teach­ing and learn­ing to heart.  I would add two things to this.

First, it’s not just cor­po­ra­tions and cap­i­tal­ism that we need to be wary of, it’s gov­ern­ments too.   Power is power, and edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy can be the hand­maiden of any insti­tu­tion will­ing to con­trol it.   What freaks me out about Black­board most — and Angel too for that mat­ter — is the way in which they push the assess­ment angle.  In these sys­tems the course becomes a con­duit of infor­ma­tion from the ped­a­gogic periph­ery to the admin­is­tra­tive core (and not between pro­fes­sor and stu­dent, the core rela­tion).  At some point, grade books — prof­fered as a con­ve­nience — will even­tu­ally frame how courses are taught and stu­dents graded, as they morph into devices for pro­ject­ing stan­dards and guide­lines for teach­ing.  The tail wags the dog.

Sec­ond, it’s not just Black­board, but Web 2.0 as well.   Face­book, for exam­ple, is about gen­er­at­ing con­sumer data.  It’s not, at root, about friends.  So is Google.  They’ve con­nected the web, but they’ve also helped trans­form the aca­d­e­mic inter­net into a cor­po­rate web.   The web is essen­tially a vast mar­ket mech­a­nism which is quickly trans­form­ing and replac­ing the old, currency-based “sys­tem of the world” (if it has not done so already.  The fact that banks and car mak­ers are col­laps­ing per­haps sig­ni­fies this shift.)  At least Black­board is a know­able enemy, and there­fore man­age­able to some extent.  With Web 2.0, we have entered a matrix of sur­veil­lance the likes of which no dystopian novel I have read antic­i­pated, since it is a matrix that we vol­un­tary par­tic­i­pate in.  The degree of trust that we have given over to the web is amazing.

This is why I think edutech needs to do two things. We need to acti­vate fac­ulty as crit­ics of tech­nol­ogy, not sim­ply users.  By critic I mean one who under­stands tech­nol­ogy for what it is, a cul­tural form with cog­ni­tive, ped­a­gog­i­cal and social con­se­quences, for good and for bad, and not merely a con­ve­nience.  This is an impor­tant dimen­sion of media flu­ency.  And we need to encour­age the devel­op­ment of what I call academia’s “indige­nous” tech­nolo­gies, the true source of open source.  Acad­e­mia cre­ated con­tributed heav­ily to the cre­ation of the inter­net and the web, and we have tra­di­tions of dig­i­tal schol­ar­ship and e-science that pro­vide alter­anate frame­works for doing edutech than the Web 2.0 world of tags, life stream­ing, and net­work effects. These things are great — I am for them — but they can’t be our refuge from Blackboard.

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What is Faraday doing in the text?

Why is Fara­day in McLuhan’s text (The Medium is the Mas­sage)? Because McLuhan finds a happy jux­ta­po­si­tion of form and con­tent in him: it is fit­ting that one of the dis­cov­er­ers of elec­tric­ity also embod­ies the val­ues of elec­tric cul­ture that McLuhan espouses–playful, par­tic­i­pa­tory, alit­er­ate.  Fara­day becomes an ances­tral prog­en­i­tor of the spon­ta­neous par­tic­i­pa­tion his medium pro­duces. Although never as fore­grounded as Guten­berg, he becomes the cul­tural foun­tain­head of the elec­tric in McLuhan’s mythology.

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