Bored in the Library, Luxury of the Mind

Stop Trying to Fill Every Hour of Your Day: Ever wonder why you get most of your ideas in the shower? It’s because the shower is among the last sacred spaces where we aren’t distracted by colleagues or technology. Our ideas need time to ferment and connect with other ideas, and being bored allows our minds to accomplish this naturally. -Sean Blanda, Five “Good Habits” You Need to Unlearn

This is not about quiet, but the idea of quiet. Libraries have always been leaders in third space, as Montgomery and Miller argue that in times of fiscal constraint, the academic library fills that niche, and further, the library is a place of individual productivity during finals. Most importantly, the library:

(O)ffers a comfortable welcoming environment for informal gathering where people come and go at their leisure and “nobody plays host” (Oldenburg 1999). The relaxed atmosphere of the third place provides users with the chance to be around others where they are not restricted by time, nor are they compelled to be there. -Montgomery and Miller, The “Third Place”: The Libary as Collaborativeand Community Space in a Time of Fiscal Contraint

The place we are trying to get away from is a noisy one. Stuart Sim puts forth the idea that the noise we are trying to get away from is integral to the business culture of the United States, where it functions as a way to get our increasingly divided attention (Manifesto for Silence). Pushing this one step further, John Stewart connects the noise of the consumer society to an even deeper place: our identities:

It seems the attitudes toward noise are being shaped and changed by consumer society…..It also means that many people do not know life without noise; if it were not there, a void would open up in their lives. They would notice the silence. They have become oblivious to the noise. Why Noise Matters, p.9-10

The “fear of silence” is so unsettling because without the noise, our attentions have no easy external focus, no desire drive spurned on, no object or idea with which to attach. The stuff brings the noise and brings our identity additives with it. This is the place where libraries get their power, both in terms of physical space, but also the space that an instruction librarian  can bring into the classroom. Shutting down the noise and unsettling that drive allows students to really connect ideas with other ideas. Blanda may think that is because they are bored, but perhaps that is exactly the point. He equates not having to deal with the hassles of life to boredom and specifically, a lack of noise. Being able to avoid the invasion of noise (corporate or otherwise) has always been the purview of the well-to-do, and is a key factor in defining a luxury product:

Luxury vehicles make a statement — but too often, you can’t hear it over the roar of their engines. So the makers of top-line craft are dummying up the decibels, with a technological silence that’s 24-karat golden. Indeed, keeping quiet has become a science of its own. -Alexander George, The Silence of Luxury

Libraries provide that sacred third space of silence, both from sound and from other mental distraction, much the same as what Blanda finds in the shower, and what your average 1%-er finds in the comfort of the newest Learjet. What libraries excel at is keeping down the cost. Best of all, unlike the cluttered and loud identities that can be forged through the consumption of consumer goods, the library provides a quiet place, sometimes literally, but often figuratively.

Quote That:

To summarize: the answer to underfunded, lower effectiveness primary and secondary education requires subsidizing a private, VC-funded bet made on a roulette wheel fashioned from the already precarious prospects of a disadvantaged population.

As TechCrunch’s gleefully apocalyptic article demonstrates, Silicon Valley culture loves to celebrate the end of institutions merely to bask in the spectacle of falling rubble. That works for summer popcorn flicks, but in the real world, eventually we have to live among that rubble. Or, I suppose, we have to be able to afford the cost of the private rubble-clearing services that would allow us to persist in their wake. -Ian Bogost, Inequality in American Education Will not be Solved Online

Library Branding and the Innovation Culture

Tying your library to something like a 3D printer moves you in the wrong direction. It moves you towards manufacturing physical products. It leads you to the tangible – that’s not your job. It is the concept of the intangible that connects all the objects librarians have traditionally dealt with- books, records, photographs, magnetic tape and compact discs. It is this tradition of dealing with the intangible that makes librarianship such an exciting profession right now. -Hugh Rundle, Misson Creep: A 3D Printer Will Not Save Your Library

I really liked Hugh Rundle’s post on the “intangibles” which make up our professional bread and butter, where the tangible and intangible meet, but the heart of the thing is that libraries primarily provide access to the information, the creation of physical objects, however, is of very little import to Rundle. The proposition seems sensible, but David Lankes took issue with it:

Some librarian brought in the first game, and the first scroll, and the first illuminated manuscript. They did this to enhance access, yes, but also to expand the capabilities of the communities they served. They did so not because it was text and therefore OK, but because they were tools that could help. Help, not document the world, but to change it. -David Lankes, Beyond the Bullet Points: Missing the Point and 3D Printing

The question I put to Lankes (and he graciously answered) was that at what point are those intangible things not tools? Ideas are some of the most powerful tools we have for Librarians change the world, as do many people, with texts and other tools. And yes, they loan and provide access to tools, but more importantly, they provide access to tools that not only help people participate in their communities, but also to escape or change their community and their circumstances, by evasion or critique. Language is one of the most powerful means we have of shaping and re-shaping our world, and libraries excel at helping people navigate language and its tools.

What struck me as the main issue is an underlying ethos of a “innovation” culture. I think it is central to Lankes’ mission, but as I’ve argued before, it also runs against the conservative grain of librarianship and community. While admirable, in the post-2008 world, I harbor a deep skepticism towards “innovation.” To that end:

“I think it’s great that some libraries are able to lend out items other than books, because it shows that they are responding to the needs of their particular community. But again, I do not see it as a desperate move to stay relevant…. We’ve got relevancy coming out of our ears.” -Jen Doll, Ask a Librarian About the Odd Things Happening at Libraries

There is a tension between “things” and “non-things” and how it affects our relevancy to our communities, but it really sidesteps a larger issue.  The “thingness” part is also tied up with “maker culture,” which to a large extent has been adopted by the culture at large, and has frankly commodified. The 3D printer, is arguably a different beast,  but the same culture promotes their use: without extensive software and hardware, there is no way to make anything with them, thus continuing to reify a digitally driven “innovation” culture, which may or may not have anything to do with one’s community. Lankes acknowledges the point about 3D printers not being the best fit, but his overall program of innovation comes from the 21st century mindset of constant innovation.

There are a lot of parallels to an ongoing discussion in the Digital Humanities community, where the creation of digital tools is see as an artisanal and constructivist practice:

No matter the type, our tools had one thing in common: overwhelmingly, their own users had made ’em, and understood the continual and collective re-making of them, in response to various resistances encountered and discovered, as a natural part of the process of their use. In fact, this constructivist and responsive maker’s circle was so easily and unavoidably experienced as the new, collaborative hermeneutic of humanities computing, as the work itself that—within or beyond our small community—we too rarely bothered to say so.

“In the Middle Ages,” he tells us, in Art and Labor, “everything that man made was beautiful, just as everything that nature makes is always beautiful; and I must again impress upon you the fact that this was because they were made mainly for use, instead of mainly to be bought and sold… The beauty of the handicrafts of the Middle Ages came from this, that the workman had control over his material, tools, and time.” -Bethany Nowviskie, Resistance in the Materials

Nowviskie tries to separate the hand-coded tools of the digital humanist from their mundane  context of personal-computer drudgery and place them in the rarified air of the middle ages, ringing of individual craftsmanship that has little to do with the gross commodification of the 21st century. But the middle ages also were a place of tight guild control of production, a rigorous exclusivity of creation. In reality, there is a part of the digitally-fueled discursive regimes of code/space which still takes hold. In some ways, it feels like the digitally-driven innovation culture nudging its way into the branding of craftsmanship, much like the innovation culture is finding its way into community discourse. Neither of these are bad in-and-of themselves, but they are, effectively, branding operations to make one thing seem more like another.

Like Nowviskie, Lankes, and Rundle, we all participate in the discursive regimes of code/space, in some form or fashion.  But Rundle puts the brakes on the innovation culture which calls for continually promoting making and participating in community, because it can no longer uncritically be accepted as “good” for a community. Here’s a solid list of reasons not to innovate post by Gijs Van Wulfen, who is LinkedIn’s innovation expert:

21 Situations when you should not innovate:

1. When you are sure your market is not changing in the coming five years.
2. When your clients are even more conservative than you are.
3. When your old formulas are still giving great risk-free results for the coming years.
4. When brand and line extensions bring you a lot of extra turnover and profits.
5. When the urgency to innovate is completely absent.
6. When you don’t receive enough money and manpower to do it.
7. When your company is in a short-term crisis.
8. When your organization is working at full capacity to meet the current huge demand.
9. When everybody says: “Innovate!”, but no one wants to be responsible.
10. When you´re clueless about what you´re looking for.
11. When there is no real business need and it’s only nice to have.
12. When you can’t form a capable harmonious team that really goes for it.
13. When there is no support at the top.
14. When the people in your organization are not (yet) prepared to break their habits.
15. When people in your company are lazy; content to copy from others.
16. When the organization doesn’t have any kind of vision about its future course.
17. When long term planning means looking three months ahead.
18. When everyone fears failure.
19. When everyone will attack and ridicule the newness of an idea.
20. When important stakeholders will block it at any time.
21. When your latest innovations are so successful and still need further exploitation.

-Gijs Van Wulfen, When Should you NOT innovate?

I think Rundle sees libraries in a number of these points, and calling it out in the midst of an “innovation” culture will certainly raise some eyebrows.

Quote That: WHY I READ THEORY

In other words, the theory and methods I discovered and then committed myself to offered ideas not to be applied to the work but rather inherent in it—or at least inherent to my understanding of it. In a sense, then, these ideas served to reaffirm, expand, and deepen my own hunches, legitimizing but also pressuring my burgeoning thinking, even as they offered a vast context to enter. -Johanna Burton, Outtakes from Another Conversation: Thoughts on Curating and Education.

NA: not an art movement, a fashion trend.

Originally published here: http://www.hellionmag.com/trends-gone-wild-the-new-aesthetic-takes-over-everything:

Day-glo and cat videos, scantily clad girls and 8-bit, surveillance video and artificial intelligence. When piled into a blender, the result is something called The New Aesthetic (NA). The tumblr of the same name describes it as a “research project” by the indefatigable and lovably nerdy James Bridle. At its heart is the idea that machines and the “network” have personalities, beings trying to reach us as the digital spills into the physical world. Infatuated with the way computers say “hi,” it is clear that Bridle really, really loves these new beings. As a result, his twitter feed is made up of spambots. Beyond this earnest feeling that made us feel good while watching “Flight of the Navigator” are the same feelings that gave the pre-digital world the heebie-jeebies when they witnessed the bloodless brutality of “Tron.”

In  both cases, NA has armed many artists with a new vocabulary of images to draw on and use to comment on the world. Azealia Banks brought a lot of those elements together in her “Atlantis” video, drawing on backgrounds that look stolen from a ‘94 pirate videogame and a handful of “Jaws” references, set over stuttering beats. Brought to this level, NA seems like a rehashing stuff from the 80’s and 90’s in interesting ways.

Carla Gannis, a digital artist in her own right, wrote that “A movement cannot merely catalogue what currently exists, it is defined by the future(s) it envisions,” and maybe that is where she and many others start to miss the point. Just as those practitioners of the New Aesthetic understand the melding of life on- and off-line, they also don’t feel the need to respect the proper way to run an artistic movement. Ryan Trecartin’s artworks (video) and Code/Space (Academic Book) can sit comfortably beside Rihanna’s last SNL performance (music) and James Bridle’s “A Ship Adrift” (website) and all speak the same language. NA isn’t an art movement. More than anything, NA feels like a fashion trend that has taken over all parts of culture at the same time. The idea that the digital world is spilling over into the physical world is as old as computers, and it is now finding it’s way into everything.

What does this ad up to? We all have no idea. Gannis wants a coherent statement of purpose, and she’ll never get one. Here’s why: the thing is everywhere, and there is no reigning it in. Of the New Aesthetic, as Bruce Sterling points out in his watershed essay on NA, “We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things.” NA speaks to a lot of people because it is the reaction to a world intimately connected to the network. The whole thing can and never will be a “movement,” because it’s really a trend showing us how some people see the world we live in today.

For a generation of people raised on “Flight of the Navigator” all the way to those who grew up with “The Matrix,” the New Aesthetic Speaks their language. At it’s bit-driven heart, NA just wants to be liked, and it’ll keep popping up all over the place until it is.

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Today scholars may believe they have explained everything. But our explanations and glosses, even in paperback,
are thick, stiff, and heavy; they do not bend.

-Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy,
the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination, p 135.

Ima Read, Ima Research

This song came from a twitter feed. Being a librarian, the words “IMA READ” act like a sign post for “please investigate.” It turned out to be a music video for a song which had blown up over Paris Fashion Week, specifically Rick Owen’s show. I won’t recount the shock this video first registers. The thing is pure unadulterated menace and cool.

With the slightest bit of internet digging, it comes to light that the song is not specifically a misogynist chant, but the work of a ballroom scene traveler and artist Ojay Morgan, who created the alter-ego of Zebra Katz for his musical projects. At least to Morgan, to read someone is  a high form of insult. Basically, making the other person a passive object to be taken in and dismissed in the face of one’s own place. Interestingly enough, the thing also came from a college experience:

 The song has always been my self-mantra—it’s just something I would always say to myself as a joke, because I took this class called  “How To Read A Play,” and I couldn’t stand the teacher, so I was always like “Ima read that bitch.” -Zebra Katz, Zebra Katz is Booking It

Namely, the song primarily seems to be in the voice of a teacher. Someone who from their own knowledge can quickly sum up and judge:

That really helped make it a song that you can pay reference to, even if you don’t know anything about ball culture—hopefully you went to school, then college, then at that point, hopefully you would write a dissertation so you can excuse your shit! -Zebra Katz, Zebra Katz is Booking It

The requirement of “reading” someone, and specifically “taking them to college” implies both violence and education, and the powers that it grants. Nothing so dire came of Morgan’s classroom experience, but the song highlights those fraught relationships anyone can feel in a classroom: when the students are bored and feel unchallenged, or feel that the teacher looks down on them, and the instructors saddled with curricula they dislike but have to deliver, or shoehorn previous work into, or feel that their students are in fact, facebooking, text-message spewing ignoramuses. Whatever the reasons, as a librarian, your heart goes out to both sides as they work out a difficult student-teacher relationship as the tensions escalate faster than we can breathe the words “critical literacy.”

I was glad to read that Morgan saw the value in education despite the violence it can unwittingly do, so he can write a dissertation and excuse his own shit. In any case, Morgan dropped the R-word and the C-word in another interview, and it goes a long way in making the song make sense, and even, to him, a funny self-mantra from his college days:

“When the song hit Paris, it completely skyrocketed,” Mr. Morgan said. “All these people in the fashion industry that I looked up to had to listen to that song, and I knew a lot of people weren’t going to get the context right away. You have to do the research to get what I’m saying.” -Eric Wilson, You Have to Know the Context

Libraries and librarians can always help create a context for education, and even if it’s not a pretty one, often knowing it goes a long way to help all of those participating in higher education. And the only way to get the context is to do the research, both for the class and about the class, to understand the content and the form of the classroom and the school. This is why we are the archive that can help critique a canon.  You can’t take someone to college until you give yourself some knowledge. Ima Read, Ima Read, Ima Read.

Mooc,deux: and the Feral

Many hackles are rightly raised by the ubiquity of this word “disruption”, and its implications for the business of higher education; but the best MOOCs do not deal in the bourgeois concept of disruption, they deal in a very real rupture that is confusing to us all. Something convulsive. A monstrous birth.If the best MOOCs show us that learning is networked, and that it has always been, then learning is more rampant than we’ve accounted for.

-Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, A MOOC is not a Thing: Emergence, Disruption, and Higher Education

Morris and Sommel rightly point out that learning has always been more ubiquitous than many in our industry have supposed, and admirably aim to break down the distinction between formal and informal learning. But I’m concerned that nothing so radical has been born, rather, the MOOC-as-technology is a bourgeois, technologically-enabled system designed to “capture” learning, and to try and contain it. Roger Whitson wrote that “There is no-outside MOOC, or there is nothing outside the MOOC,” which illuminates the point that, if not for the enclosure of learning by institutions of education (in most cases, higher education), then there’s no sense in going to such great lengths to define and theorize the MOOC. Instead, by supporting the idea that there is nothing outside of the thing, it grants domain of all learning to the MOOC, and more importantly, to the institution in control of it. The MOOC, both as a concept and as a technological product,seems to be a very big enclosure designed to broaden the perceived role of education in learning. Fundamentally, education is a discursive regime, and the MOOC will continue to contribute to it, rather than disrupt it. Still, harnessing the interest that many people have in learning new things is a very broad-minded ideal, and the people who have built these systems are equally high-minded and considerate of that social good:

The question we should ask ourselves isn’t whether we’re going to achieve equality between students at the University of Pennsylvania and students in the general public. Instead we should ask if, through the use of technology, we have improved the quality of the experience for each of these students separately. We want all students to be better off than they were before. -Daphne Koller, MOOCs on the Move: How Coursera Is Disrupting the Traditional Classroom

But the more concrete issue is that the MOOC-as-technology and the MOOC-as-concept are not easily separated, because one enables the other. The thinking here follows from thinkers like Foucault and Bourdieu, from whom already existing relationships will continue to define the structure of cultural (and therefore institutional) codes. MOOCs will continue to be designed to trace and map out previously “informal” modes of learning that will become a template to be enforced in the future, to capture the feral in the hope of making it more useful for educators, for better or worse.

I’m hoping it is for the better, although my chief reservation as a champion of the feral is this: the MOOC-as-concept still acts as an enclosure which educators can use for the “invention, metamorphosis, deformation, and reinvention” of learning, and the relationship between student and educator won’t be dialectically resolved. The power is still in the hands of the educator while the student is still acted upon, no mediated through the form of an ever-expanding enclosure. Many people take on a feral state in their interactions with formal education, as it constantly shifts its boundaries, its cities and deserts. MOOCS are only useful to the domesticated to promote their efficient and purposeful use of the educational system, which is the expectation placed on individuals as they enter into educational space as students. Already, it has been noted that the MOOC-as-technology is already in danger of failing to meet even the defined role of “student,” not even because it provides too much structure, but because through a lack of communication, it doesn’t provide enough:

The primary issue is the almost complete lack of personal interaction.  This dearth of connectivity applies to both troubleshooting and to the actually class experience. -Andrew Smyser, A Student’s Perspective on MOOCs

The truth is that most people do not experience the our institutions as a city, but rather as a wilderness on the edge of civilization. Complex systems intermingle, sometimes fluidly, and in this case, sometimes not. The main problem is that there needs to be much more unstructured ineraction, but instead, there’s very little interaction whatsoever. The theorizing and designing of technological and conceptual systems like MOOCs aim to provide more space for feral interaction, but given the structure of “one-teaching-to-many” and the control it requires, it still maintains the student/non-student structure of an educational institution while failing to meet that standard. My hope is that more than the educators, the students will (and should) do those things in any class setting, and the MOOC-as-technology and MOOC-as-concept will prove to be yet another enclosure for educators and students to be navigate in, and ultimately around.

Quote That:

Above all, the New Aesthetic is telling the truth. There truly are many forms of imagery nowadays that are modern, and unique to this period. We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things. -Bruce Sterling, An Essay on the New Aesthetic

Crafted for a heterogeneous audience with crisscrossing and even contradictory interests and needs, it is meant as a porous multiple construct: a guidebook for the perplexed, a report on the state of the field, a vision statement regarding the future, an encouragement to engage, and a tool for critically positioning new forms of scholarship with respect to contemporary society. -Peter Lunenfeld, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital Humanities, p.7

DH, NA, and the Messianic Streak.

As new media documentarian Jonathan Minard, among others, has pointed out, the New Aesthetic’s intrigue hinges on imagining that you’re seeing these images through the sentient eyes and mind of a robot, as though the webcam is looking back. When recalibrated as the human images which these are, we just end up with far more shitty photos and less privacy. -Whitney Kimball, Report from the New Aesthetic: The Movement Rolls on, Inward

DH is the square cousin of NA. The main critique of NA, like my critique of What Technology Wants, is that it is an act of imagining that machines are actually sentient, not that they actually are. Still, there’s a little bit of a messianic streak that comes out of a lot of DH and NA. From the same post, Kimball’s take on NA founder James Bridle:

New Aesthetic founder James Bridle then seized the stage: wildly gesticulating, he poured forth a double-time of storytelling and slides, interjecting things like “and yet, and yet, and yet!” I get now why Bruce Sterling described the New Aesthetic as being in its “evangelical, podium-pounding phase.” – Report from the New Aesthetic: The Movement Rolls on, Inward

So it goes. It also goes to show that whenever bright individuals cast an opinion on burgeoning scenes (both rightly and wrongly) they often use language designed to cast suspicion on any group: comparing it to religion. What greater linguistic guilt by association could there be other than implying that the interests of an entire group of people is somehow akin to the  great Satan of the unbelievers? Stanley Fish uses the same guilt by association technique that Kimball does, but instead of going after a slightly kooky but mostly harmless bunch of image-lovers, he takes a shot at some hyper-literate, theory-obsessed fellow humanists.

The anti-methodology that refuses closure and insists on fecundity facilitates — no, demands — sharing, and builds an ever-expanding community of digital fellowship, an almost theological community in which everyone explores in “the inexhaustible nature of divine meaning” (“Reading Machines”). -Stanley Fish, Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation

Not in response to Fish, but around him, Stephen Ramsay brings out the heart of Fish’s discomfort seemingly through another problem altogether:

A literary criticism that can only advance claims that are shown to be empirically valid is as deadening to the project of the humanities as a computational activity for which humanistic discourse lies permanently beyond its ambit. Risks need to be taken in both cases. In the former, the risk of saying something humanistically true but empirically false; in the latter case, of saying something empirically true that is humanistically false. -Stephen Ramsay, Stanley and Me

Depending on what frame of reference (humanities or science) you use, something can be true in one but not the other. The Foucaultian Librarian in me spots the easy binary that Ramsay drops. It is an issue that comes up with subjects and disciplines, when “(u)ltimately, we can easily end up believing in useful fictions as if they are true. In such cases we fail to recognize when the fictions take on a life of their own and we allow these fictions to separate from their own stories.” (James Elmborg, “Critical Information Literacy: Definitions and Challenges” p.84). Fish and Ramsay are locked into a real battle where the lines around academic disciplines have hardened into truth, with job descriptions, grants, fellowships, postdocs, careers, and the kinds of things we’ll teach our students on the line. To Ramsay’s point, when the dividing lines of discipline harden to such a point that two separate accounts of what is “true” are incompatible, it begs the questions of whether or not the project has the right outlook. Truth has and always be a slippery and frustrating beast, but the academic bifurcating of it will only continue to distort the usefulness of education writ large. One of the most exciting parts of DH is the ability to move between humanistic and empirical frames. Fish, it seems, is stuck on the dividing line in disciplines.

What seems to unsettle humanists is that religiosity, and it keeps things locked in the humanistic/empirical binary that holds to those “real world” factors surrounding higher education and research. The “messianic” streak found in NA and DH are both a result of both emphasizing scales and perspectives that go above or outside of the level of an individual human life (especially those which can be illuminated by empirical techniques), such are the forces that aggravate Fish, as described by Benjamin Schmidt:

Leaving individuals out of the story altogether, in other words, better acknowledges that there are other forces at work that operate orthogonally or antagonistically to human freedom. At times, that will be less dehumanizing than forcing histories that are properly about collectives to pretend that individual actors could or did make the difference. -Where are the Individuals in Data-Driven Narratives?

There are the rules and that’s fine, both the individual and large forces are part of the humanistic and empirical story of all of us. Finally, I’d like to thank Mr. Zizek for giving the whole of the United States (seems to include scholars) carte blanche to do as we like with ourselves, let alone our disciplinary frames of reference:

In Europe, the ground floor of a building is counted as zero, so the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is on street level. This trivial difference indicates a profound ideological gap: Europeans are aware that, before counting starts – before decisions or choices are made – there has to be a ground of tradition, a zero level that is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted. While the US, a land with no proper historical tradition, presumes that one can begin directly with self-legislated freedom – the past is erased. What the US has to learn to take into account is the foundation of the “freedom to choose”. -Slavoj Žižek, Why Obama is More Than Bush with a Human Face (Thanks to Mrs. Tsk*)