Archive for July 25th, 2009
“Instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones”
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on July 25, 2009
Proving once again why those handsome fellas at Snarkmarket are my new man-crushes, Tim has a great post up that thinks through recent changes to literacy that, rather than falling into the usual dichotomies – “kids can’t read no more!” vs. “down with printed words! long live video!” – instead thinks about the changing dynamic between the oral and the literate:
This is where most of the futurists got it wrong – the impact of radio, television, and the telephone weren’t going to be solely or even primarily on more and more speech, but, for technical or cultural or who-knows-exactly-what reasons, on writing! We didn’t give up writing – we put it in our pockets, took it outside, blended it with sound, pictures, and video, and sent it over radio waves so we could “talk” to our friends in real-time. And we used those same radio waves to download books and newspapers and everything else to our screens so we would have something to talk about.
But rather than asserting a fundamental primacy of writing, unchanging and universal, writing is now changed. It’s more than just our awareness of language’s constant slippages, the fact that when I say “Wow, this Lil Wayne album is sick”, I could mean one of at least two things. Instead:
This is the thing about literacy today, that needs above all not to be misunderstood. Both the people who say that reading/writing have declined and that reading/writing are stronger than ever are right, and wrong. It’s not a return to the word, unchanged. It’s a literacy transformed by the existence of the electronic media that it initially has nothing in common with. It’s also transformed by all the textual forms – mail, the newspaper, the book, the bulletin board, etc. It’s not purely one thing or another.
This seems key: that the experience of reading is not simply different on the screen and the page – it isn’t that paper is simply the linear antecedent of the web. Instead, writing remains forever changed by the web as it simultaneously alters the text that appears on screens as screens alter the text that exists on paper. And that isn’t good or bad necessarily. It just kinda’ is. As argued by Walter Ong – who Tim quotes at length in his post – once you make the transition from the oral to the literate, there isn’t any going back. This, I think, is sorta’ the same thing.
Anyway, I highly recommend you read the full post. It is, as always, smart and a pleasure.
Waxy’s Metaphor for the Web
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on July 25, 2009
By now, you’ve probably heard of the Associated Press’ highly controversial attempts to lock down its content. In classic style – and, it must be said, with classic style – Andy Baio has crafted a charming response. Rather than a clever blog-post outlining everything that’s wrong with AP’s desire to control the spread of information, Waxy has gone the other route and chosen to produce what I see as a metaphor for the situation: he’s made a Tumblr that aggregates the AP’s own RSS feeds.
What I love about this is how it works as a symbol. First, even though I have no programming skills, I know that it only took Andy 5 minutes to pull this together, which suggests the ease with which this kind of thing happens. While it’s true this particular site uses the AP’s feeds, it isn’t hard to imagine someone pulling a certain set of information from a more scattered, dispersed set of sources using custom feeds or crawlers. So on the one hand, the Tumblr works as a metaphor for the aggregative power of web technologies to sift and collect information and put it together in one place. To attempt to prevent this is to turn the web into a slow, electronic version of a printing machine, linear, structured and hierarchical.
On the other hand, having the site on Tumblr is also rather neat, as it works as symbol for what I’ll call the disseminative power of the web. Tumblr, perhaps more than most platforms, thrives on the idea and primacy of ‘the network’. In fact, when I try an envision Tumblr as a network, I often end up with visions of 3-D matrices in my head. It’s a bit like a machine – it’s the constant interaction of all the parts that makes it work, and Tumblr is much the same, as posts ricochet and replicate almost endlessly through the act of ‘reblogging’. To invoke Baudrillard, the network precedes the individual instance. To put something on Tumblr is to, symbolically at least, have it infinitely replicated, and infinitely reproducible. This is true for all the web, but I find Tumblr is a concentrated version of this idea, so… I likes.
Thus, Waxy’s delightful ‘middle-finger-in-the-form-of-a-Tumblr’ works as a lovely metaphor for the dual and always-present aggregative-disseminative power of the web. You can gather information from disparate sources and then scatter it in a profoundly non-linear, non-hierarchical fashion, at both ends of the equation. There is no starting point and no end point – only the circulation of bits of information. So, while Baio hardly needs any more kudos, good on him for both the literal and symbolic effects of his artistic, imaginative use of programming and its implementation on the ‘tubes.
