5: The number of semesters I’ve been enrolled as a Ph.D student.

26,065: The number assigned pages of reading I’ve completed. I didn’t keep track of any extra reading done for writing papers, etc.

11,529: The number of those pages I’ve read in the past 17 weeks.

51: The average number of pages I’ve read every day, including the weekends, during the semester. You can see samples of those pages below.

800: A rough estimate of the number of pages that I have written for papers, book chapters, books, notes, and practice writing for my exams.

99: The number of books and articles on my exam readings lists.

12: The number of hours dedicated to the written exams, spread out over three days.

60: The typical number of pages written in those hours.

1.9: The number of babies I’ve had as Ph.D student (#2 is due in 3 weeks, yay!).

Here we go!

Gregory Chaitin’s The Unknowable is billed as the companion volume to his Limits of Mathematics, though it also, in many ways stands on its own. In this work, Chaitin sets out to explain the way that his work follows from Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s Halting Problem.

The story begins with the mathematician David Hilbert pioneering the field of metamathematics as a way to eliminate all doubts about the efficacy and power of mathematics. However, this process ultimately failed, instead revealing the fundamental uncertainty that underlies mathematics. However, the result of this failure was a large role in the development of the modern computer and other resulting technologies! Chaitin characterizes this as a most spectacular failure.

Bertrand Russell’s set theory paradoxes  led to the development of symbolic logic, which via Godel and Turing, showed that it is impossible to formalize mathematics and further that “essentially any formal axiomatic system is either inconsistent or incomplete,” (p. 11). Chaitin, from an early age, became intrigued in these problems and wanted to determine if these problems were unusual or if they impacted all of math:

I began to suspect that perhaps sometimes the reason that mathematics can’t figure out what’s going on is because nothing is going on, because there is no structure, there is no mathematical pattern to be discovered. Randomness is where reason stops, it’s a statement that things are accidental, meaningless, unpredictable, and happen for no reason (p. 22).

And ultimately, through his work on randomness, is what Chaitin has come to assert, in a way that neatly parallels contemporary quantum physics.

Chaitin then uses the programming language LISP to create proofs for both the Incompleteness Theorem and the Halting Problem, before developing his own proof related to algorithmic information theory: “Roughly speaking, a random string is incompressible, there is no simple theory for it, its program-size complexity is as large as possible for bit strings have that length,” (p. 86). This, Chaitin argues, is even stronger than Turing’s proof because it goes beyond saying something cannot be computed, and shows that it cannot be proven. The book features the LISP code that can be used to construct these proofs for those who are interested:

Finally, somewhat surprisingly in the conclusion of the book, but perhaps most interestingly for my own work, is the argument that we might better understand information as primary – is the “software” that can be run on a variety of different hardware. Examples include the same information that can be represented in materially different ways through DNA, DVDs, videotapes, nerve impulses, and hormones, to name a few. The material becomes irrelevant and what matters primarily is information.

This summer I put together my committee and, with them, collaboratively constructed my exam reading list. This process was made somewhat challenging because my program is both interdisciplinary and usually focused on contemporary issues, which means it is difficult to base any list on past lists created by other scholars. However, the other thing that became clear to me is that there are very few people who have shared their reading lists.

For those reasons, I’ve decided to share my own lists, with a shortened description that omits the actual work I will likely be doing for my dissertation.

Exam 1: Deleuze and Guattari: Data, Information, and Signs

This list represents a focused reading on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari related to the concepts of data, information, and signs. In addition to primary sources from each author, the list contains the work of those who influenced the authors (Simondon) and later work influenced by the authors (Faucher, Iliadis, Lazzarato).

Primary Texts:
1. Chaitin, Gregory (2001). Exploring Randomness.
2. Chaitin, Gregory (1999). The Unknowable.
3. Deleuze, Gilles (1994 [1968]). Difference and Repetition.
4. Deleuze, Gilles (1988 [1970]), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
5. Deleuze, Gilles (1990 [1968], Expressionism in Philosophy
6. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1987 [1980]), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
7. Deleuze, Gilles. (1995). “Postscript on control societies”, In Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans., pp. 169-176). Columbia University Press.
8. Guattari, Felix (2009). Schizoanalytic Cartographies.
9. Guattari, Felix. (1996). “Ritornellos as Existential Affects”. In G. Genosko (ed.), The Guattari Reader.
10. Guattari, Felix. (1996) “Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement”. In G. Genosko (ed.), The Guattari Reader.
11. Guattari, Felix. (1996) “The Place of the Signifier in the Institution”. In G. Genosko (ed.), The Guattari Reader.

Supplemental Texts:
1. Day, Ronald, and Andrew Lau. (2010). “Psychoanalysis as Critique in the Works of Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari”. In Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines, edited by Gloria Leckie, Lisa Given, and John Buschman. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited.
2. Debaise, Didier. (2012). “What is Relational Thinking?” INFLeXions No. 5.
3. Dyer-Witherford, Nick (2010). “Antonio Negri on Information, Empire, and Commonwealth”. In Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines, edited by Gloria Leckie, Lisa Given, and John Buschman. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited.
4. Faucher, Kane. (2013). Metastasis and Metastability: A Deleuzian Approach to Information. Rotterdamn/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers.
5. Genosko, Gary. (2014). Information and Asignification. Footprint.
6. Genosko, Gary. (2008). “A-signifying Semiotics”. The Public Journal of Semiotic, Vol 2: 1.
7. Guattari, Felix. (2008 [1986]). Molecular Revolution in Brazil.
8. Guattari, Felix (2008 [1989]). Three Ecologies.
9. Hansen, Mark. (2015). Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media.
10. Hayward, Mark and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. (2012). “Introduction: Catching Up with Simondon.” SubStance. 41(3): 3-15.
11. Iliadis, Andrew (2013). ‘A New Individuation: Deleuze’s Simondon Connection’. MediaTropes eJournal. http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/20385/16793
12. Iliadis, Andrew (2013). ‘Informational Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation’. Communication +1 2 (September).
13. Langlois, Ganaele (2011). Meaning, Semiotechnologies, and Participatory Media. In Culture Machine.
14. Lazzarato, Maurizio, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
15. Scott, David (2014). Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation.
16. Terranova, Tiziana (2006). The Concept of Information. In Theory, Culture & Society.

Exam 2: A Genealogy of Critical Apparatuses to Data & Networks

Equipped with a new conceptual understanding of information, I consider the ways that archeological and genealogical approaches to networks and data can be leveraged to create new opportunities for political intervention. In other words, how can a thorough understanding and analysis of the development of a particular medium help one better understand the ways in which it may be leveraged in the future? Such an approach necessitates a familiarity with current approaches to both media archeology and network politics.

I will begin by approaching networks from a media archeology perspective that investigates the ways that networks and other digital media are constructed. This emphasis on the material and visceral aspects of networks will serve to highlight the nature of and possibilities for the assemblages of machines and networks with the so-called human. This approach will be particularly useful for understanding the nature of such media and the affordances they offer for resistance.

Networks have created new opportunities for both control and resistance. While much of the academic work has focused exclusively on identifying and critiquing these methods of capture and control (Andrejevic 2002a, 2002b; Galloway and Thacker; Bratich; Thorburn; French), some scholars are beginning to imagine the ways that networks can be used for resistance and affirmation (Stiegler 2015). Increasingly surveillance scholarship is beginning to address the challenges of big data from the perspectives of both privacy and power (Andrejevic 2013; Andrejevic and Gates 2014; boyd and Crawford; Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier). A strong understanding of this surveillance scholarship, especially as it applies to big data, will be vital to the network politics portion of my project. In particular, I am interested in new opportunities afforded by the creation and analysis of big data.

Media Archeology:
Primary Texts:
1. Brunton, Finn. (2013). Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet.
2. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. (2012). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press.
3. Parikka, Jussi. (2012). What Is Media Archeology?
4. Starosielski, Nicole. (2015). The Undersea Network. Duke University Press.
5. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1. Stanford University Press.
6. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2. Stanford University Press.
7. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 3. Stanford University Press.

Supplemental Texts:
1. Chun, Wendy (2011). “On Sourcery and Source Codes” in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press.
2. Ernst, Wolfgang (2012). Digital Memory and the Archive. University of Minnesota Press.
3. Fuller, Matthew. (2007). Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. MIT Press.
4. Montfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. (2009). “Stella” in Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. MIT Press.
5. Gitelman, Lisa. (2008). “New Media Bodies” in Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. MIT Press.

Network Politics:
Primary Texts:
1. Andrejevic, Mark (2013). Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York and London: Routledge.
2. Genosko, Gary (2013). When Technocultures Collide: The Struggle for Autonomy
3. Clough, Patricia T. (2008). The Affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory Culture Society, Vol. 25(1): 1–22.
4. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. (1999). Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Struggles in High Technology Capitalism.
5. Galloway, A. and Thacker, E. (2007). The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. U. Minnesota Press.
6. Pasquinelli, Matteo. (2014). “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine,” Theory, Culture & Society.
7. Seigworth, Jeremy and Matthew Tiessen. (2012). “Mobile Affects, Open Secrets, and Global Illiquidity: Pockets, Pools, and Plasma,” Theory, Culture, Society.

Supplemental Texts:
1. Amoore, Louise (2014). “Security and the Incalculable.” Security Dialogue. 45(5): 423-439.
2. Andrejevic, Mark, and Kelly Gates. 2014. ‘Big Data Surveillance: Introduction.’ Surveillance & Society. 12(2): 185-196.
3. Boler, Megan (2008). Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times.
4. boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford (2012). ‘CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA’. Information, Communication & Society 15 (5): 662–79. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878.
5. Celis, Claudio. 2015. ‘The Machinic Temporality of Metadata.’ tripleC 13(1).
6. Dyer-Witheford, Nick (2002). Global Body, Global Brain/Global Factory, Global War: Revolt of the Value-Subjects. In The Commoner.
7. French, Martin. (2014). “Gaps in the gaze: Informatic practice and the work of public health surveillance.” In Surveillance and Society. Vol 12: No 2.
8. Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor and Cukier, Kenneth (2013). Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.
9. Packer, Jeremy and Joshua Reeves. (2013). “Romancing the Drone: Military Desire and Anthrophobia from SAGE to Swarm.” Canadian Journal of Communication. 38(3): 309-332.
10. Pasquinelli, Matteo (ed.) (2015). Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas. Meson Press.
11. Peters, Michael (2011). Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor.
12. Pugliese, Joseph. (2013). “Technologies of extraterritorialisation, statist visuality and irregular migrants and refugees,” Griffith Law Review 22(3): 571-597.
13. Stiegler, Bernard (2013). The Most precious good in the era of social technologies. In Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (Eds.), Unlike us: Social media monopolies and their alternatives. INC Reader #8. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
14. Stiegler, Bernard (2015). States of Shock.
15. Terranova, Tiziana (2004). Three Propositions on Informational Cultures. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press
16. Toscano, Alberto (2007). Vital Strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the Metaphysics of Contemporary Capitalism. Theory Culture Society 24(6): 71–91.

Exam 3: Poststructuralist/Posthuman Media Theory

The texts selected for this list represent approaches to media from a poststructuralist perspective. This perspective represents applied conversations in which I plan to participate as a scholar (Savat, Poster), as well as affirmative critical theory (Braidotti). These methods will inform the approach I take in discussing applied questions related to big data and help shape my specialization in this particular type of discussion surrounding media theory. For example, I hope to extend the work done by Savat and Poster using a Deleuzian framework for technology by incorporating a larger extent of Deleuze’s oeuvre into the discussion. Although Deleuzian notions such as assemblage and the body without organs are used frequently in media scholarship, there remains great potential for not only exploring media through additional Deleuzian concepts such as information, but also combining a Deleuzian and Foucauldian approach. A firm grounding in poststructuralist media theory allows me to understand the fundamentals of such an approach, become familiar with the types of work already being done, and finally, offers me the opportunity to expand such work.

In addition to the poststructuralist methodology, I have also included some of the related work on posthumanism that connects most closely with my own project (Braidotti, Hayles). Hayles’ posthumanist work in particular connects closely to my definitional work on information, because she argues that it is a dualistic understanding of the nature of information that drives the common understanding of posthumanism. Braidotti later extends Hayles’ call for a materialist and embodied version of posthumanism.

Poststructuralist Methods and Examples:

Primary Texts:
1. Foucault, Michel. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2. Foucault, Michel. (1977). “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.
3. Foucault, Michel. (2014). On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the College de France, 1979-1980. Palgrave Macmillan.
4. Foucault, Michel. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1982. Palgrave Macmillan.
5. Foucault, Michel. (2011). The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the College de France 1983-1984. Palgrave Macmillan.
6. Foucault, Michel. (1997 [1982]). Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1. The New Press.
7. Kittler, Friedrich. (1990). Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Supplemental Texts:
1. Agamben, Giorgio (2009). “What Is an Apparatus?”
2. Bennett, Tony. (1998). “Cultural Studies: The Foucault Effect”. In Culture–A Reformer’s Science.
3. Bratich, Jack. (2006). “Nothing Is Left Alone for Too Long: Reality Programming and Control Society Subjects,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 2006; 30; 65
4. Bratich, Jack. (2005). “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies,” Communication Theory 15:3 pp. 242–265.
5. Daston, Lorraine and Gallison, Peter. (2007). “Mechanical Objectivity” and “Representation to Presentation” from Objectivity, Zone 2007.
6. Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). “What is a Dispositif?” in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, Routledge.
7. Deleuze, Gilles. (1986). Foucault. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
8. Foucault, Michel. (1988). History of Sexuality, Vol 3: The Care of the Self. Random House USA.
9. Foucault, Michel. (2010). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan.
10. Franklin, Seb (2012). Cloud control, or the network as medium. Cultural Politics 8(3): 443-464.
11. Galison, Peter. (1994). “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266.
12. Galison, Peter. “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004): pp. 229-243.
13. Kittler, Friedrich. (1996). “The History of Communication Media” CTheory. www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=45
14. Kittler, Friedrich (2009). Optical Media. Polity Press.
15. Kittler, Friedrich (1999 [1986]). Gramophone/ Film/Typewriter.
16. Packer, Jeremy (2012). The Conditions of media’s possibility: A Foucauldian approach to media history. The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies
17. Poster, Mark, and David Savat (Eds.) (2009). Deleuze and New Technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
18. Savat, David (2013). Uncoding the Digital: Technology, Subjectivity, and Action in the Control Society. Palgrave-Macmillan.

Posthumanism:
Primary Texts:
1. Braidotti, Rosi (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
2. Braidotti, Rosi (2012) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press.
3. Braidotti, Rosi (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press.
4. Hayles, Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Supplemental Texts:

1. Barad, Karen. (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801-31.
2. Braidotti, Rosi (2002). Metaporphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Blackwell Publishing.
3. De Boever, Arne, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woordward, eds. (2013). Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press.
4. Dyer-Witherford, Nick (2009). “Twenty-First Century Species-Being.” Presented at the Sixth Annual Marx and Philosophy Conference, 6, June. Institute of Education, University of London.
5. Haraway, Donna. (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: science, technology and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century.” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/
6. Hayles, Katherine (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
7. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments”. In Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, edited by Phillip Thurtle and Robert Mitchell, Kindle. London and New York: Routledge.
8. Hayles, N. Katherine (2013). “Radio-Frequency Identification: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments”. In Ulrik Ekman (Ed.), Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
9. Lenoir, Tim (2013). Contemplating singularity. In Ulrik Ekman (Ed.), Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
10. Oizumi, Masafumi, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi. (2014). “From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0.” PLOS Computational Biology. 10(5): 1-25.

I’m currently reading Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and am trying to work out how to understand the metaphysics that is discussed in it. I’ll try to share a working sketch of where I’m at, drawing heavily on Plato and Nietzsche.

First, Plato’s theory of Ideal Forms. If you’re looking for a more in-depth explanation of Plato and his Forms, check out my video here, otherwise, skip past it:

A short overview of Forms:

• Eternal and changeless
• Accessible to reason only (except beauty)
• Normal objects participate in them
• Forms have characteristics they give to particulars (self-predicated)

In other words, every thing that exists partakes in its Ideal Form. So each individual chair, like the one you’re sitting in, partakes in the Ideal Chair. Each chair, though, is in a sense a poor copy of the Ideal Chair. Epistemologically, this is where a Platonic critique of art/media is able to enter – a painting of a chair is one step further removed from an Ideal Chair. That means if we were trying to understand reality, the truth of the Ideal Chair, this is harder to do through an imitation (painting) of the chair that partakes in the Ideal Chair. Difference from the Ideal Form is thus negatively understood here. Plato, then, wants to find a way out this simulacra, out of the metaphorical cave.

Deleuze also consider’s Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return. A traditional reading of the eternal return suggests that there are two possible ways it was meant by Nietzsche:

1. As a normative guide: We can imagine that every action we choose to take must be eternally repeated (must eternally return). If this were true – which is different than claiming it is true – how would this impact the choices we make if we chose as if we were choosing for all of eternity?
2. As a metaphysical/ontological assertion: In this interpretation, Nietzsche would be claiming that everything actually does repeat, and in exactly the same way. Thus, we are either always already repeating choices we’ve made before, or choosing for all of eternity for the first time right now. In this case, everything actually does literally repeat.

To the best of my understanding, Deleuze offers a third non-standard interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return: everything returns but different – through difference, due to difference, and actually different.

This interpretation seems to only really make sense if one assumes an ontologically monist position that Deleuze draws from Spinoza. Everything is ultimately one substance, but is “expressed” differently through modes. In this way, substance comes together through habit (in a Deleuzian sense) to form a particular thing (a chair, or a person). Once those habits dissipate, the substance returns, but not as the same chair or the same person – rather as something different.

Plato is important here, because these modes of substance (individual things)  are now not partaking in any Ideal Form. They are not copies or a simulacra. They are different in themselves. This one monist substance returns eternally in different ways:

Overturning Platonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image…When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacra is the true character or form – the ‘being’ – of that which is. When the identity dissolves, being escapes to attain univocally, and begins to revolve around the different. pp. 66-67

This is the closet I’ve been able to come to making sense of Deleuze’s metaphysics in the context of any other philosophy. What do you think – am I on the right track? None of the summaries or lectures I’ve found have quite explained it in this way…

However, if this is right, what might this type of metaphysics mean for art and media? If Plato’s metaphysics rejected a painting because it was a simulacra that made it harder to attain knowledge, where are we if there is no distinction between reality and simulacra? How do we evaluate the painting in that context?

Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, Lanham attempts to highlight the two different ways of seeing once again, through an at or through form of attention. Focusing in one way tends to mean we don’t focus in the other way. For example, Lanham gives the research who specializes in a topic, and can even teach that topic well, but struggles to put it in context in a survey course of his or her field. Here he focuses on the joy available through play – of living life working at something rather than thinking about the success that comes through something. Interestingly, the example he gives of play is the geneticist Barbara McClintock, who was extremely dedicated to her research – “the pure ‘joy of the working'”. Yet, he highlights how alone she was, with no personal attachment: “‘There was not that strong necessity for a personal attachment to anybody. I just didn’t feel it. And I could never understand marriage.'” (p. 185). I have really struggled with Lanham’s selection for play here as solitary, and ultimately, lonely. Yes, if we enjoy our work, it can be a form of play, but is it necessary to do this at the expense of attachment to others? Is there not room enough in life for multiple forms of joy? Joy from work, joy from friends, joy from loved ones, joy from leisure? For me, this example side-tracked the entire discussion on play, and in some ways seemed to contradict his earlier explanation of what play even is.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 is a reworking of an article the author wrote for the Houston Law Review, regrading the debate of copyright and the Dead Sea Scrolls, featuring Barbie as a main character in the play-like format and serving as a metaphor for the digital. The main argument here is tension between the nature of the digital, which is easily reproducible, and the nature of capitalism which wants to capture value. Brands are valuable, and need to capture the value from all possible uses. But this is difficult to do in a digital world:

How can you separate idea from expression when the digital code, the idea, continually generates different expressions? Does the digital code’s owner own all the possible expressions that might be created from it? That would be “owning the conversation” indeed. (p. 205).

Chapter 7

This chapter was, for me, perhaps the most intriguing, as it deals with the future of academia.

The first assumption that the author claims is challenged by the digital is that the ideal education is face-to-face, ala the Socratic Method. He debunks this by claiming – with not a single cited source – that early reports suggests students feel they learn more and are more at ease online than in person. Lots of issues here…

1. What sources? 2. Does students thinking that they learn more mean they actually learned more? 3. Is being at ease a good thing? In many ways I think education should be challenging and force students to exist in a zone of discomfort to truly be successful. I tend to want to say that if you’re completely at ease, you’re not learning very much. 4. Finally, my knowledge of research seems to suggest that online courses only work well for those who are already privileged and capable students who can study on their own. They do much less for students who actually need teachers.

Another assumption the digital challenges is that faculty should be employed full time by universities. Lanham sees the potential to move backward to the medieval model where professors were entrepreneurs and students paid them directly. The university provided the space. Of course, the problem with this is that the education that is popular is what survives. I can only imagine the plethora of creationism courses that would thrive in such a system in modern America.

Although these two assumptions stood out most to me because of the potential problems, the other assumptions are well worth the read.

Chapter 8

This chapter focuses on the way that the digital has allowed us to build a revisionist mentality directly into the creative process. For example, in constructing this blog entry, I can easily back up and change any sentence at any time. I don’t write an entire draft and then go back and revise. I revise as I go, which is a big shift.

As a society that’s used to facing scarcity, we’re now challenged with plentitude. Lanham argues that we must find ways to turn that back into scarcity. We do this by thinking as revisionists, rather than through stasis. We focus on continual readjustments and the relationships of things to one another.

This, then, is the economics of attention.

Back to Chapter 3. 

I know you’re wondering about the image. I’ll get there!

In this chapter, Lanham explains that ebooks have almost entirely attempted to simply reproduce print books. This is so much the case, that often the ebooks you find for sale are just PDF copies of the original book. Why would this be the case? Why wouldn’t ebooks instead try to leverage elements of their existence that make them unique? Why not draw more heavily on sounds and images, and movement, etc? He suggests a few possible reasons, including the early commercial failure of CD-ROMS that attempted such a move, and issues of compatibility with various devices.

The strongest barrier, in his opinion, has come from copyright issues. I found this section to be thought-provoking, especially from an academic standpoint. First, it’s almost always both acceptable, encouraged, and free to quote printed material. If I were writing a book, and wanted to include a particularly illuminating sentence from the Economics of Attention, I could do this for free, and it would actually increase the prestige of EoA. Authors almost always want to be quoted.

This is not the case with things like audio, video, or images. To include a short clip of a video means wading through a lot of copyright law and likely paying a hefty fee based on the number of viewers or sales. There’s no comparable prestige associated with having a clip of one’s work shared.

In a recent edition of The Philosopher’s Magazine, Richard Holton, in a discussion on the importance of open access in academic research, makes the point that universities – at least in theory – pay professors to publish written work. They don’t necessarily need to make any money from the book itself. Yet, this typically isn’t true for other media. In fact, multi-modal options for dissertations are just starting to enter into the discussion on many campuses. I wonder if, as the acceptance of multi-modal projects as serious academic work increases, so too will the willingness to accept usage of clips that material for free?

Lanham goes on to argue against some claims that multi-modality prevents us from reading and thinking and understanding deeply. I remain a bit on the fence in this issue. I definitely see the connections to traditionally oral cultures that digital media links back up to in a way printed books do not. Yet, I still have deep reservations about the amount of video most Americans tend to watch and how that impacts one’s ability to think clearly.

Finally, writing in 2006, Lanham argues that we had not at that time seen a truly digital book. Here’s where we return to the image of the map above. Having recently had a daughter, I’ve been digging into children’s books. One of the more interesting finds I made was actually characterized as an app rather than a digital book: The Trip Little Critter.

If this isn’t a digital book as Lanham imagines one, I have to believe it’s at least a major step in that direction. It mixes animation, text, voice, and games. And at least on the surface appears to have an element of choose-your-own adventure by selecting paths on the map above.

Is this the direction we’ll see digital books develop? Does this match Lanham’s vision of it? Why do we call it an app instead of a book?

Have you run across any other digital books that push boundaries like this one? If so, let me know if the comments or via Twitter. I’d love to see more examples.

To wrap up, here’s a shot of one of the games featured in the book/app: