“Poe,” the mascot of the Baltimore Ravens.

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

My football-obesessed son is researching the history of the Baltimore Ravens for a school project, and in a dinner-time conversation last night, I pressed him about what the ultimate goal of the project was to be–a question which was met with the usual reticence of a 9-year-old boy who’s asked anything about “what happened at school that day.”

When pressed further, however, he finally mumbled something he’d learned about the Raven’s mascot, “Poe.” My English-major ears perked up not just a little.

Ask any Baltimore fan who actually helped the Ravens franchise select its mascot, and you’ll quickly learn that “The Raven” was chosen in honor of the eponymous poem penned by one of that city’s most famous ex-residents, Edgar Allan Poe. What a wonderful connection for avid football fans AND literature enthusiasts! Like, all 10 of us. While I can’t find direct mention of it, I wonder whether the Ravens’s choice of uniform color had anything to do with that “velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er”?

Poe’s darkly themed “The Raven” seems to be one of the earliest poems you get to read as high schooler. My first reading turned into a fascination with Poe’s other works, including the equally well-known short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Grisly, dark, and wonderfully Gothic: Perfect material for the adolescent mind!

Nothing could have propelled me back into the blogosphere more quickly than the idea of coming up with my own shortlist of favorite “apocalyptic” songs, inspired by Bob Darden’s post on the same topic. Taking Bob’s lead, the idea here is to choose

… songs with an almost manic, barely controlled intensity, in the lyric or the music or the vocals – or, in a perfect world – all three. I’m looking for songs where the performer is either losing control or has just lost control. I’m drawn to songs where there is a hint of hysteria and … sometimes … a hint of insanity.

In no particular order, I’d suggest adding the following to the list:

“O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s cantata, “Carmina Burana.” Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other piece of music that captures the essence of the “hysteria” Darden refers to:

Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” I confess I’ve never read the lyrics to this song, so I have no idea what it’s actually about; but musically, this is another great example of aural hysteria with Robert Plant’s banshee-like vocals (I can almost hear the galloping of the Four Horsemen!):

Lyrically, this song speaks to modern-day societal dysfunction, anger, and madness, while pointing to life’s larger mysteries, symbolized by that thing in the Scottish loch. Musically, it possesses all the hysteria and intensity of our apocalyptic genre, particularly with the insanity of Sting’s vocal delivery and Andy Summer’s haunting guitar effects around 2:42. The Police’s “Synchronicity II”:

Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” while a more restrained and contemplative piece of acoustic blues, is incredibly powerful with Johnson’s mournful humming and a slide guitar that “gently weeps” a transcendent lament:

I was a huge Van Halen fan back in the day, and I remember how their instrumental “Intruder” from  Diver Down used to freak me out, so I’ll include that. Eddie’s maddening guitar licks on this track are an homage to insanity:

I think Rush’s “Tom Saywer” competes in intensity with any of the aforementioned:

Pearl Jam’s “Once” fits the bill, methinks. Eddie Vedder’s vocal style is unparalleled in its anger and intensity:

You have to give 80′s hair-band Iron Maiden it’s due for producing some of the most intense music in the metal genre (I flat wore out my copy of the “Somewhere in Time” cassette tape as a young teenager). “Wasted Years” was a pretty good one. This band was highly underrated in terms of musicianship:

… and the “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” was among my favorites:

I don’t know about where this tune fits in on the apocalyptic scale, but you cannot deny the insanity of Screamin’ Jay Hawkin’s “I Put a Spell on You.” Nothing else like it:

Finally, I don’t think you can leave out Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” for its morose beauty, dynamics, and lyrical content, which do seem to speak to some kind of apocalypse:

Screenshot of Nota for iPad

While I had heard about a few music-related iPad apps from the aforementioned duo of fine arts librarians in Baylor’s CFAL, I learned about quite a few more yesterday. Let’s look at some of them:

• GarageBand – Less robust than its desktop counterpart, but at $4.99, it’s hard to beat as a solution for making multi-track recordings on the fly. With the iPad’s camera connection kit–accepts audio input via USB–and a decent USB mic or USB audio interface for instrument connections, you can actually turn the iPad into a mobile mini-recording studio that will export your songs in web-friendly formats. Output quality is not all that bad IMHO. This app also deserves a look since it’s full desktop version exists in the META lab *and* because Student Technology Services is slated to pilot an iPad check-out program this fall–those loaners will have GarageBand, too.
• Nota – For $2.99, you can use this app to make instant notations of notes, chords, and scales.
• forScore – $4.99 sheet music app that will let you import and annotate music in PDF format (see also MusicReader and unrealBook).
• Karajan Pro – $9.99 ear-training/theory development app.
• Symphony Pro – Pricey at $14.99, but it will allow you to write, edit, and play back original notations. For inquiring minds, I don’t think there’s an iPad version of Finale yet.
• Scorch – Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is Avid’s Sibelius for iPad. At $4.99, this is billed as a “interactive music stand, score library, and sheet music store.”
• iReal b – $7.99 equivalent of a Real Book that displays/plays charts of popular songs.
• PageFlip Cicada Bluetooth Pedal – A $79 Bluetooth pedal for flipping digital sheet music. As advertised, PageFlip “works with the Apple iPad on apps that accept keyboard commands, such as MusicReader, ForScore, and unrealBook.”
• Kindle for iPad – If you’ve got any kind of musical notation on an eReader like the Kindle, this could be very handy.
• Finally, since we aren’t limiting the discussion to just music apps, either, it’s worth mentioning Kathryn’s plug for Noteshelf, a note-taking app. I use Evernote myself. For those folks who may be wondering what an iPad can do that and iPhone can’t: iPad far exceeds the iPhone for productivity tasks like note taking since it’s got a bigger display and keyboard (and you can get an external keyboard and dock like this one, too).

Some questions that warrant further exploration:

• How to get our favorite, often-used sheet music in digital form to keep it from falling apart?
• How to print said sheet music wirelessly once it reaches the iPad.
• Is there a process for having the institution pay for work-related iPad apps for use on a personal device?
• Not iPad related, but cool: Using smart pens like the Livescribe in conjunction with students’ instrumental/vocal assessments. This would allow the faculty member to associate their notes to a specific audio clip that occurred during a performance or recital.

Lastly, a final thought concerns the iPad’s potential as a presentation tool in the classroom. As it stands, iPad 2 can be “mirrored”–i.e., extended to an external display where even motion swipes gets projected–in our classrooms with AMX control panels via VGA (the connection where a laptop could be connected). You’ll need the Apple VGA Adapter to make this happen, though. Exciting developments are on the horizon, however, with regard to projecting the iPad display wirelessly via AirPlay through Apple TV, which, for the uninitiated, is not an actual TV but a small device that retails for just $99.

OK, all for now. Auspicious beginnings! On to planning meetings with the rest of you …

I’d like to intentionally ping two people who have introduced me to the concept of the “courseblog,” Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell, both of whom have been doing this for quite a while at their own respective universities, and both of whom have advocated the use of the aforementioned plugins (guys, chime in as necessary). In doing my own research to more fully understand the mechanics behind this approach to aggregation, however, I’m realizing that WordPress is falling short in a very fundamental way. I’m wondering: If native support for RSS is built into sidebars, why not also for pages and posts? (A recent Google search on the subject tells part of the story, but more on that later). At first glance, the native behavior of the RSS widget performs comparably to what BDP RSS could do–but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it does more than just simple sidebar aggregation …

This conversation needs a little context, first. I’m coming at this from the perspective of a multisite admin. Since my early days of WordPressing in a multisite environment when “MU” was its own product, I learned very early on to observe certain cardinal rules to make my life easier:

1. Eschew any and all plugins that duplicate a native functionality. Many good reasons to do this. For one, it keeps your installation more bug-free since plugins are often the culprit behind many WSOD (white screens of death). In the end, fewer plugins is better, IMHO.
2. Always upgrade. Always. Always. This keeps you from getting hacked, but it’s way more problematic when you’re stuck using a plugin with deprecated code.
3. If you must install a plugin, use those that have a loyal following, a committed developer, and provide something truly unique for the end user. Much easier said than done, but in this category, BuddyPress comes to mind.
4. Don’t hack ANYTHING if you don’t have to. I’m very thrilled to see WP provide a good solution for hacking themes via the new child them approach, and so I wish there was something similar for plugins (is there?) or for the entire core of WordPress. But while it’s now easier to hack themes, the usual caveats apply for hacking anything else. You’ll lose it all anytime an update is pushed out, and besides: Most of us got into the WordPress business because we either weren’t programmers or didn’t have the time to program, so why hack if you don’t have to?

Of course, I wish it were that simple all the time. However, things occasionally arise to challenge this “one-size-fits-all” approach, and this concept of aggregation is one of those. As widespread as RSS technology is, and as popular as WordPress has become for its ability to be an aggregator, there is no native support for aggregating content into the body of a WordPress site or republishing remote content into WP pages or posts. Why not? Sure, there’s old ways to hack that behavior into a theme, but those approaches don’t necessarily work in a multisite scenario where, let’s say, I have many people who want their own unique theme AND a courseblog to go with it (sure, I could hack all my themes, but getting back to #4 above … ). I’m also finding that the most popular plugins for this are either going away or are broken in WP 3.x, so what’s a super admin to do?

This is really frustrating because I’ve seen what a really fleshed-out courseblog looks like. This kind of aggregation is really valuable, and it’s one thing that–at least, not without the use of a limited amount of robust plugins up to the task–WordPress can do well. But I’d like to challenge the WordPress folks to consider making that behavior native so folks can aggregate content 1). ANYWHERE on a WordPress site, not a just in a sidebar and 2). within the context of multisite environment without the admin having to do any hacking.

Looking at WordPress.com to learn how they handle this kind of aggregation, I learned that they don’t. This thread may help explain why. While it’s true that aggregating content requires a blog admin to be more vigilant against incoming spam, it shouldn’t be a reason to keep that technology from being implemented into core WordPress.

As our seminar draws to a conclusion, I’d first like to say it’s been a pleasure getting to know everyone and reading their work. A special thanks to Gardner for spearheading this experiment (and kudos to Sandy for requiring me to take the seminar in the first place. Also, thanks for the loaner text book). Wonderful conversation and vicious blogging by all have given me fodder and inspiration for my own writing, which has been a real pleasure to do. Paige is forcing me to continue this post-seminar: I’ll do my best! Makes me realize all that I loved about my days of English-majoring and writing for newspapers. Finally, all of this has given me an opportunity to do something I should have been doing all along: blogging. This has been really fun.

What have I learned? Honestly, at the beginning of the seminar, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I made that clear in my very awkward introduction to everyone. But man, what a learning experience this turned out to be, and a very inspiring experience at that!

OK, so here’s a few things I think I learned over the past semester:

1. Collaboration = Augmentation. The assigned readings are much less inspiring and cogent without the full participation of the class in the blogosphere (no worries there). Some of my more significant learning experiences came after reading other blog posts–and, likewise, hearing you all reflect out loud in class. Many of those observations, written and otherwise, helped me hash out the real significance of the readings or ponder things I hadn’t thought of. It just goes to show that we’re much smarter together than apart. This is a hackneyed observation, perhaps, in the Web 2.0 world, but I think it’s really true. And NOT to say there isn’t a place for one’s own learning space … Which is what our own blogs are anyway.
2. The importance of paying attention to the sensual experience of media. McLuhan was the most important author for me in this class. Seemed his ideas just kept cropping up all over the place, including in McLoud’s essay. Ashley’s post “McLuhan said this” is an important reminder about how we shouldn’t take certain academic pronouncements too seriously, but something in his message keeps resonating with me. In terms of education, I think the idea of “The Medium is the Message” is an invitation to explore how various use of technology in education either reinforces or inhibits the learning experience based on the senses with which we engage it.
3. Mastery of technology is less about a prerequisite “competence” than about a sense of playfullness and wonder. After reading the essays on gaming–and in conversations where the subject seemed to always come back to children–I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least on some level, there’s an important lesson to be learned from how children engage technology (and more broadly, the world). I think the same is required of us to learn new things, especially technology. At the beginning of every technological adventure, we must care less about mastery than about forging ahead Crusoe-style and being OK with being a stranger in a stranger cyberland. I’m not advocating irresponsibility, either; just saying that we should always remember to engage technology with a sense of play (not fear) and experimentation before we attempt to master and control it, if that’s even possible. We adults spend a lot of time pointing out how our youth are so adept at technology, but who’s more concerned about being the “experts,” us or them?
4. Our stories, and our need to tell them, matter more than technology… which is why we keep inventing new ways of telling them. Strange, isn’t it? After this seminar, my take is that modern developments in computing (and our reaction to those developments) are only really important in terms of what they say about us as humans, and how they augment human nature, not what they represent in themselves. Ashley was ahead of the game in this observation when she wrote about Social Media as an Issue of Trust.
5. Living and learning is an artistic endeavor, and technology–when used effectively–can help us more fully express that. I’m at a loss, so I’ll just stop there .

Now for the cheesy part! I leave this seminar being really excited about the future–what it holds for us as educators and parents, the possibilities for our children to live richer lives as a result of New Media (again, thank you everyone, especially Gardner, for such a wonderful experience). As I think about all this, my minds goes back to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” the part that says,

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And then I think about my own children, and realize that this is what the New Media will make possible. Now, time for another dose of that Tylenol …

My high school football coach, a real salty old fellow, was a wellspring of quirky aphorisms. Of all the things he ever said, there was one phrase which still rings in my head to this day. Like most of his other pithy colloquialisms, you’d likely hear this one just before the team took the field for a game: He’d gather the team in a huddle, his eyes fixed in a steely gaze, and declare with a raspy twang, “Mens [sic], you know what you know.”

You know what you know.

Had the year been 2010 and not 1991, me and my fellow teammates might have wondered silently “wtf?” in our heads after hearing this strange, awkward phrase. Mens, you know what you know. Part of the amusement of it was hearing coach re-pluralize “men” into “mens,” as he often did, but the rest of it just left you wondering: “You know what you know?” Incidentally, it’s somewhat strange to be told you do, in fact, “know what you know,” which we did (and we knew it). And so that quirky saying became a kind of a team mantra, a reminder that we could take the field with confidence remembering all we had done during the previous week of practice, and simply let our bodies and minds react on the field reflexively like musicians playing music without thinking of the mechanics of their instruments.

You know what you know.

You probably see where I’m headed with this … So as I’m pondering Illich’s “Learning Webs,” I hear it again: You know what you know. Taken in another context, this could be a very bold statement about learning, the self-directed kind (and bear with me as I attempt to make a leap from my old football coach to Plato). I think what my coach said in five words was perhaps more eloquently summarized (or not?) by the dialogue that took place between Socrates and Glaucon in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

[Socrates] But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.
[Glaucon] They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
[Socrates] Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
[Glaucon] Very true.

… the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already … You know what you know. Or, put another way, as John Lee Hooker (one of my favorite bluesmen) did in “Boogie Chillen“:

[youtube eM3PuXDpKiA]

One night I was layin’ down
and I heard mama and papa talkin’
I heard papa tell mama,
“Let that boy boogie woogie,
It’s in him, and it got to come out.”
And I felt so good,
Went on boogien’ just the same.

It’s in him, and it got to come out … You know what you know … the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already. Finishing up “Learning Webs,” I began to realize that Illich is not telling us something we don’t already know about our educational system (Gisele El Khoury’s post provides a good summary of Illich’s most salient points); and while I’m tempted to fixate on his condemnation of education and how we’ve gotten it wrong, I’m more distracted–and inspired–by the very optimistic assumptions that undergird that condemnation: That all of us have the potential to find our own way. We know what we know. It’s in us, and it got to come out. How meaningful and exciting self-directed learning can be.

If, like Plato, we accept that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already, then the job of the educator becomes strangely simple (and liberated, in my view): One moves from being a teacher, the “expert,” to facilitator. Educators can let go of that expectation to be sages on stages and simply turn “student’s minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves.” As Illich writes, this is the only way for educators to maintain credibility anyway:

As masters of their art abandon the claim to be superior informants or skill models, their claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true.

It’s hard not to agree with Illich’s concept of deschooling, but I will say that it misses a large point. Maybe I’m reading him wrong, but it seems the concept of deschooling assumes that the best learning should (or does) occur in schools to begin with. For the Christian, personal epiphanies are less likely to take place on Sunday morning than they are in, say, the produce section of H-E-B; likewise, our best learning epiphanies, those “a-ha” moments, are as likely to occur outside of school than inside, but maybe that’s precisely what Illich is getting at.

(Note: Just for the record, I never had a writing assignment in school that instructed me to find similarities between a football coach, Plato, John Lee Hooker, and Ivan Illich. That just happened on its own.)

While my interest in Xtranormal started out as something of a lark, I’m now trying to think about it more academically: Could this tool be useful in the classroom? Where might something like this fit into our discussion of New Media? One key to understanding the irresistible allure of Xtranormal, I think, is to realize that it affords us a way to do something we’ve already been doing for 30,000 years: Puppetry. In this case, though, digital puppetry. A Google search for “puppetry history” served up a link to a site that looked like it had been attacked by the Geocities-izer, but there was in fact a very telling observation on that site that brings me back to this week’s reading by Sherry Turkle:

It seems to me, man has always been interested in creating and controlling other worlds, as well as in trying to define his own. Puppetry, to me, is an extension of one’s self. It may be motivated by the need to explain, explore, embrace or critique the human condition. It is still, one of the safest ways to act out, act up, entertain, educate, commiserate, wonder out loud, unburden yourself or release your feelings. I have used it, along with my story telling to fulfill my need to see the good guys win and justice done. It has always been both a sword and a shield to me. It is my armor in a world of frustrations and disappointments, when indeed, the bad hats seem to be ahead in this game, we call Life. In short, I have found Puppet Theater to be a wonderful place to find peace of mind and spirit.

As I read this, I immediately called to mind the video game enthusiasts Turkle writes about in Video Games and Computer Holding Power (post forthcoming on that) and how they sought escape in video games in the same manner–and for the same reasons–as our anonymous puppeteer quoted above. Interesting.

Back to Xtranormal… Here’s a brainstorm of some possible scenarios where this service might be handy:

• Demonstrating effective interviewing techniques for job applicants or journalists
• Role play for would-be counselors and therapists (similar to above, what and what not to say)
• A story boarding tool, where dialogue for an original movie scene may be quickly roughed out

Granted, the potential for any video created in Xtranormal to be more humorous and distracting than educational may be a barrier to its adoption in the classroom, but still–it’s yet another resource in the digital storytelling toolbox.

How many hours I spent playing the arcade knock-off versions of Frogger, Pac-Man, and Joust, I’ll never know; furthermore, it’s a wonder I didn’t develop repetitive stress injuries in my hands for all the times I tried defeat the bomb-dropping burglar in Kaboom! (anybody remember that one?).

Like so many of the other writings we’ve read, it’s hard to grasp the full significance of the essay on the first read, and so my understanding of The Six Elements is very awkward at this point; but I can at least glean the thumbnail sketch: The application of the Aristotelian model of drama, and our understanding of what makes it work, as it’s applied to our relationship with computers. Interestingly, in our seminar there’s this recurring concept of “agency” that is once again articulated by Laurel.

To my thinking, the agency Laurel’s talking about as it relates specifically to character and thought gets to the heart of our expectations about “the ways in which things should work or exactly how they have gone awry” in computer design (I’m thinking less about computer games than native functionality, though). By the way, Sherry brilliantly explains how we build these expectations into our gadgets, even beyond the point of practical use to fulfill our understanding–or need–for what Laurel might call the full “spectacle” or “performance” of the machine:

It seems that our tendencies towards presupposed existence of spaces which exist in their entirety extend to the outer representations of our machines, not just the inner workings of them.

This phrase alone makes Laurel’s essay come alive for me! Aptly titled “Anthropomorphism,” Sherry’s post once again moves us closer to considering the fine line between humans and computers and our desire to make them into our own image.

Speaking of, another thing in Laurel’s essay that really jumps out at me is the idea of consistency in character, and how–just as in stories–inconsistencies in the user experience violate something akin to dramatic order. Laurel’s example of the spell-check-gone-bad illustrates how even well-intended features in computing can, without our prior knowledge of them, upset this innate sense of order if “this behavior is not represented to you in some way … ” (Where this is concerned, Microsoft is king IMHO. Animated paper clips emerging unexpectedly to *help* you?! But to be fair, Apple’s auto-correct feature on the iPhone is just as disruptive). Laurel’s point is well taken: When agency, thought, and character all conspire against the viewer-user, the result is either a really bad B movie or a horribly designed computer application.

Finally, Laurel points out something that really resonates with me, and it reminds me why I’m the kind of person who never, ever starts watching a movie in the middle (and, I think, why I’m also not much of a gamer since I generally don’t have the time to understand the complexities of modern video and alternate reality games). I think what Laurel is saying is that, whether you’re watching Dr. Zhivago or playing World of Warcraft, full enjoyment of the interactive experience depends on one’s expectations of what that experience should be–via the Aristotlean model, if you like–and then how well the experience conforms to those expectations. To illustrate this concept as it applies to computing, Laurel uses her Macintosh as an example:

My favorite Macintosh example is an error message that I sometimes encounter while running Multifinder: “Excel (or some other application) has unexpectedly quit.” “Well,” I usually reply, “the capricious little bastard!” Providing graceful beginnings and ending for human-computer activities is most often a nontrivial problem …

Nontrivial, indeed.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Atari2600a.JPG/300px-Atari2600a.JPG

Anybody who read Gardner’s latest post and listened to his E-Learn 2010 podcast (you can play it inline at the end of selfsame post, and I encourage you to do so) knows that I’m having some fun here. The above image is the insignia of The Borg, a race of tyrannical cyborgs that terrorizes all the good guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you don’t know them by their insignia–OK, maybe you’re NOT an ubernerd–then surely you’ve seen a Borg or two on the Internet somewhere:

In his podcast, Gardner discusses the ongoing “Internet Backlash” and some of the folks associated with it, one of whom is Jaron Lanier, author of “You Are Not a Gadget.” At issue in the podcast is, among other things, whether Lanier’s critique of Wikipedia as an expression of the hive mind holds any water. For the record, Lanier is not some garden-variety luddite or even a technophobe. He is, in fact, a computer scientist and a very good writer, to boot. To learn more about his thoughts on the “foolish collectivism” of Wikipedia, have a look at Digital Moaism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. (Between this and Gardner’s podcast, you’ve got an excellent point-counterpoint debate about the concept of the read/write web.)

The spirit of Lanier’s own backlash against Wikipedia is fairly well captured by the very last passage in the essay, which contains the following warning:

The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

The last sentence there is the key to understanding where Lanier is coming from:

The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

The tension and often competing interests of the individual versus the collective: That I get. But where I think Gardner gets it right is in pointing out that Lanier’s take on things represents a certain myopia, a “failure of imagination,” as he says, or the inability to see the big picture. Take the concept of “The Collective.” What is “The Collective” anyway? Is it as Lanier would have it (the hive mind) or as Gardner would have it (the artisans of Paris)? The truth is that’s it’s probably both–depending on the context.

That’s just it: Context.  In my view, context counts for much more in this disagreement, perhaps, because never before in history has the idea of “The Collective” existed in such a unique context: The context of many individuals, each at her or his own computer terminal, who just happen to be participating in something collective. In other words, there’s surely more than one flavor of “collectivism,” and the kind we’re talking about here–millions of people editing a shared web space, usually anonymously, and in private–is something very new. As such, I don’t think the same rules apply when Lanier writes:

… the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

History is rife with examples of foolish collectivism gone bad, to be sure; and to be fair, it’s worth mentioning that Lanier cites several examples of ways in which collectivism succeeds in making us smarter. But I think we’re at apples and oranges at this point, so I return to Star Trek for an analogy…

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that The Borgs are subject to the usual personality dynamics that usually manifest themselves when humans (and humanoids) gather in concert to decide something important. The committee: That paragon of the dumb-down where nothing of import really happens. So, let’s say The Borgs are deciding on their next attack strategy in a committee meeting. What happens? The shyest and most quiet Borgs, whose opinions matter presumably not less than the more boisterous Borgs, hold back in usual fashion; and the more bellicose Borgs–some of whom are not particularly trenchant in the ways of attack strategies, let’s say–dominate the conversation, keeping the shy Borgs from having Borg-ese words edgewise. Arguably, this is a recipe for the Borgs getting their butts handed to them by Jean-Luc Picard (and I think Lanier would agree with me here).

While this scenario is a stereotype of the same kind of collectivism that Lanier is imposing on the digital world where, inevitably, the dumbest opinions hold sway, it does illustrate how context is important. In certain contexts–and I speak from my own experience–some people are empowered to be more insightful, more thoughtful, and in general, more interesting and creative when they don’t feel threatened by outside influence or conventional social dynamics. For example, when they’re at their own desks at home or in the office by themselves and have time to think and aren’t worried about folks looking askance at them for voicing strange opinions. This is what digital collectivism affords us: some might call it simply “anonymity,” but if thought of more imaginitively–as Gardner is encouraging us to do–we might also see it as a kind of unfettering of the collective influence. Dare I say, it allows us to have the courage to become more individual?

As for me, I’m a shy Borg and prefer to be left to my own devices behind the protective shield of a keyboard. You might find my writing interesting; but truthfully, if you asked me to speak up in a crowd about something I’m even knowledgeable about, the results will probably be dreadful, but not because what I have to say is less valid than someone who’s more eloquent. Thank goodness for a medium where even the most reticent of us can get our 2-cents in (comfortably). It begs questions: Can this digital collectivism be a bad thing for democracy and the advancement of knowledge? Is it harmful or beneficial to education?

At the same time that Lanier simplifies the notion of what “collectivism” is, so too does he over-simplify the meaning of Wikipedia. No thoughtful and responsible individual, even among futurists and techno-utopians, is going to proclaim Wikipedia as the de facto one-stop shop for knowledge. If thought of more imaginitively, though, one could view Wikipedia as a glorified card catalog or index where one just happens to end up first along the road to higher knowledge. Personally speaking, I use it as a map: Sure, it’s usually the first result on the SERP for any given topic you search for in Google, but so what? That means I have to believe that it’s an authoritative source? Of course not. But it’s not a bad place to start for further reading.

And at the end of the day, even when I take issue with something I read on Wikipedia, I have the freedom to change it. Somehow, that freedom seems more appealing to the individual in me than the Borg.

Oddly, after yesterday’s seminar–to date, the most poignant for me–I began to feel this same sense of being pleasantly (and movingly) hoodwinked. Something about Bill Viola’s essay and the wonderful commentary provided by my colleagues and presenters Jim Kendrick and Rob Rogers crystallized something in my brain. To their credit, I don’t think I could have teased out as much meaning from Viola without their presentation. Another read of “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is surely in order. To Gardner’s credit, sequencing the Viola essay after McLuhan was a stroke of genius.

In doing the required readings for NMFS and blogging haphazardly, and in listening to presentations and ideas being brought forth about the many topics we’ve investigated, my assumption has been that the proper focus of this class is the New Media itself. Like the typical student, I’ve progressed through readings and discussions with a lingering refrain in my head that goes, “Ok, so that’s interesting. But what’s the most important thing about this? What do I take away from all this?”

After yesterday’s seminar, something clicked. I had a mind splinter all evening and into this morning. Call it a moment of clarity, if you like, but I think I’m at the precipice of real understanding here. The most startling realization for me is that we have, in fact, been head-faked: This class is NOT about New Media at all. It’s about Us (with a capital ‘u’). It’s about our need for finding meaning in everything that we do and see and hear, and it’s about HOW we go about constructing that meaning for ourselves, cognitively speaking. It’s about the human brain–although, “mind” sounds better to me–and how it devours everything in the pursuit of truth and beauty “steadily and without any resistance.” It’s about how memory and the act of remembering IS like art: Every waking hour, we’re constantly editing, rearranging, and combining our memories all for the sake of telling stories and teasing out meaning from life. And it’s about how we instinctively and incessantly project those cognitive tendencies into the material world in the form of media, all again for the sake of making sense of it all.

But this is a class about New Media, after all. So what’s the point? The point is this: For the first time in human history, we have the most complete and elegant mechanism for extending our minds–THE most important part of ourselves–into the material world. Beholding the Internet with all of its attendant weirdness and beauty is like standing back from your own brain as you would admire it in some glass case in a museum: There we are, perfectly externalized in technological form, warts and all! (Only, you’re not looking at just your brain, but a billion others, too).

Marshall McLuhan writes that “We become what we behold,” but I’d wager the opposite is just as true: That what we behold becomes us. As Viola demonstrates with his water wall technology via video in “Ocean Without A Shore,” the better technology becomes, the more it enables us to convey ideas like the thin wall separating life and death, for example, exactly as that idea might have occured in a dream. That’s to say nothing of the fact that, not only can we now map our minds into our own data spaces; we can also connect to shared data spaces and take advantage of collective intelligence and creativity that exists there.

Again, my mind goes back to McLuhan. I can finally understand why modern computing as a medium (although, to be correct, it should be “media” because computers allow us to call on all media at once) is conceptually more important than all the bits and bytes that make it possible–or more important than all the individual tools and services that we as educators and technologists feel compelled to incorporate into the classroom. As for the message:

” … the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change
of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

The standard response of the technophobe is that computers are making us all into robots. But if like McLuhan we accept the notion that any medium’s message alters the scale of our sense ratios to the extent individual senses are emphasized over others, then the greatest promise of our digital age is that the Internet may in fact help to make us more fully human since it represents our collective brains “externalized in technological form.” It means that learning and creating with New Media means we are doing something more fundamentally innate and human than if we were locked away in our own rooms reading the printed page. And I think this is what everyone from Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay were getting at in their individual essays when they pointed to the power of computing and its ability to more fully replicate our thought patterns and the promise that it could make us smarter by allowing us to collaborate more richly.

Finally, I came away with another notion yesterday that’s harder to verbalize or pin down in a single blog post, but it has something to do with how life is really a lot like art. Every breath represents another opportunity to create, to remember, edit, and rearrange our own stories and ideas in our own data spaces to find meaning. What’s even better is that I can now share my data space with you, just as you can share yours with me.