Writing for Interactive Media

I have been invited to adjunct teach a course at Emerson College called “Writing for Interactive Media.”  I have begun the process of researching possible text books and creating a syllabus.  I’m excited about the prospect of employing the concept of electracy as a way of organizing this class, as well as the chance to research narrative as a form of information storage and retrieval that might provide ways to maximize the communicative potential of new technologies.  There will be more to say about all of this once the course gets started.  For now, though, I’ll be busy with a lot of good ole-fashioned book-reading!

Liquid Theory

Just after posting my extended comments on “how concepts function,” which mentions a desire to explore fluid-flow principles and de Bono’s concept of “water logic,” among other things, I came across this post on liquid theory, inviting us to contribute to a liquid book, a call-for-collaboration in a wiki-book of philosophy: Liquid Books. Here we go!

How Concepts Function

I started reading the IEP (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) entry on “Concepts,” which starts by laying out “tasks for an overall theory of concepts,” one of which is to determine what the metaphysical status of a concept is. As I thought about Deleuze and Guattari’s theories, it occurred to me that they are not so much concerned about what a concept is so much as what a concept does: how it functions in a particular context or assemblage, what it accomplishes in solving a particular problem.

In fact, the way that this line of thinking started was by thinking, “If you stop to think about it…” But stopping is artificial: there is no stopping: the mind is going going going, a model of Bergsonian duration, and it’s when we “stop” to think about thinking that we develop a metaphysics of thinking, a model of the “being” vs. “becoming” of thinking. Deleuze is about thinking on the go, thinking as going, and going implies a direction, possibly even a destination (unless you’re a nomad, that is) and/or an agenda: are you stratifying or destratifying? Are you becoming more complex as an organization or is there a kind of chaos-ification occurring?

Thought, that is (to repeat myself), requires a context (what are you thinking about? what problem are you trying to solve?). I see this in their concept of the machinic assemblage: things themselves have fluid ontological categories depending on the role they play in a temporary assemblage of parts/wholes that come together to fulfill a particular purpose or desire. A bicycle tire on a bike, for example, serves as a mode of transportation; in a work of art, however, it serves as a mode of self-expression. In a different context, faced with a different problem to solve, it could be/come something else (in the way that car tires are used as the soles of shoes in third-world countries).

For D&G;, it seems that the problem they want to solve is the question of how to think differently, how (ultimately) to think creatively. Beyond this (and with them there always seems to be a beyond), they want to capture the boiling roiling moment of a phase transition, whether the moment when water freezes or when water boils… In the words of Jeffrey Bell, in his Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference,

A dynamic system. . . presupposes both the stable, structured strata that are in some sense *complete*, and it entails the unstable, unstructured, deterritorializing flows. As Deleuze and Guattari proceed to develop the implications of this thinking, or as they develop a philosophy ‘at the edge of chaos,’ they neither create concepts which solve, once and for all, philosophical problems, nor do they slip into a state of anarchical relativism. Rather, philosophy, as with a living organism ‘at the edge of chaos,’ must maintain both its stable strata and its unstable deterritorializing flows. Without the former, a living organism dies (or a philosophy slips into disordered nonsense and says nothing), and without the latter, an organism is unable to adapt and will also die (or a philosophy falls into a mindless repetition of cliches and platitudes). (4)

So there should be a give and take to thinking, one that allows for this kind of freezing (stratification, striation) then flowing (destratification, smoothening). Philosophical concepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari, function to facilitate such vacillations.

With all of this in mind, I declare once again my intention to investigate fluid/flow principles. An initial peek at the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology points to Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, “rigid body dynamics,” viscosity vs. “viscoelasticity,” and the like.

And before closing this entry, I need to mention Edward de Bono’s Water Logic, in which he opposes the “rock logic” of the “Greek gang of three” (i.e. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, “who hijacked Western thinking”) with his concept of “water logic”: “Traditional rock logic is based on ‘is’ [identity: What is this?]. The logic of perception is water logic and this is based on ‘to’ [flow]. . . “What does this lead to?” De Bono concludes in a passage that might have been penned by Deleuze: “I write about the huge importance of concepts for water logic. It is concepts that give movement and flexibility in thinking. Such concepts do not always need to be precise because we are using water logic rather than rock logic, which depends on precision” (189).

Google Earth and Autocartography

I had lunch with John Craig Freeman, one of the organizers of the Invent-L Imaging Place conference I attended back in February 2007, my work for which has become the focus of this blog. He showed me his recent experiments with Google Earth, and I was intrigued by the possibilities for autocartography. The ability to embed youtube videos and other files in layers points to the map becoming an organizational interface for a kind of rhizographic, multi-genre autography. Here’s the slideshare file for my presentation on Autocartography:

Autocartography: Mapping the Selfhttp://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=autocartography-mapping-the-self-18306&stripped_title=autocartography-mapping-the-self

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: electracy education)

Further Dialogue and New Directions

My response to the essay rejection prompted a dialogue about possible directions the essay could take in the future and possible venues. I am indebted to Craig Saper for his encouragement, his tending to expression of my “genius.” After giving it thought, I concluded that I could develop the autocartography as a genre and use a map interface for my presentation. I’ve also ordered the book Lacan: Topologically Speaking, edited by my former professor Ellie Ragland. I had a course with her while at UF called “Madness and Literature,” in which I applied Lacan’s theory of psychosis to a breakdown I had while an undergraduate. Getting back in to Lacanian theory will be a challenge of course! But this could tie into my references to topology as a spatial metaphor for “imaging place”: in this case, the place of the mind. Lacan’s use of topology to “map” the mind might yield clues to how it could be used to image place as I presented it at the conference (now almost two years past!). In my presentation (you can find the slideshow at slideshare.net: http://www.slideshare.net/rsmyth/second-life-imaging-virtual-place-part2), I mention the conceptual metaphor “thinking is moving through space” and consider what would happen to thinking if the space through which thinking moved was a topological space, or a multi-dimensional space.

There is much to think about here!

Essay Rejection and Response

I received word that my essay didn’t fit the pattern of other work delivered at the Invent-L Imaging Place conference and that it needed major revisions. Here’s the email I received in full:

We’ve consulted with our readers and the general consensus is that your contribution is not yet ready for publication in this particular journal issue. The readers enjoyed your essay as did I, but they want a better sense of how it fits with the rest of the collection. The journal volume focuses on specific imaging place projects. The readers felt that you talked in general terms about fascinating aspects of imaging, and offered a wonderful experiment. They also thought it was two or three essays smashed together: one on Ulmer and Deleuze; one on The Quick Brown Fox; and, one on SL. Finally, they want you to make the essay more of a journal article and less a paper presentation by removing the references to the conference in the body of the text, and citing it, if you’d like, and putting those citations in notes and in a bibliography. It reads like a paper rather than an article at this time.

They saw your essay as a wonderful experiment about topology that would certainly fit in another issue, or something that might fit here if you were to provide a more elaborate answer of how your work led to new insights in imaging place specifically.

The specific changes requested would be to revise the essay with a discussion of how it fits with the imaging place focus. Then, the article would need to explain how the experiment with the Quick Brown Fox or the Ulmering of Deleuze led to new theoretical insights about imaging place.

All that said, I personally liked the essay, loved your performance, and think the work it considers worth publishing.

As you can appreciate, our timelines are very short: we’d need to have the revised contribution in hand no later than the end of the month (August 31) to facilitate one final editorial review. Please let me know if you think this is feasible and whether you’d like to proceed with such a revision. The editorial group would like to include your work, but only if the revision successfully addresses the issues raised above.

I responded as follows:

Sorry for not responding sooner. I have to admit to being very frustrated about receiving this one week before major revisions were due, at the end of a summer vacation during which I could have worked on such revisions. It was especially frustrating after having submitted the draft a whole year earlier–one of the few submitted on time, I think.

I was also surprised that there wasn’t any room for something a bit on the edge in terms of form and content. While it certainly didn’t fit the pattern of other projects, I thought that it addressed questions that the conference topic raised and suggested future avenues for research and consideration. The references to the conference within the text were meant to ground it in the event of the conference, a grounding I thought necessary given the great abstraction of some of the content.

Perhaps some of you may know of a journal or venue that would consider it as is, given its strengths and faults as you have determined them. Or perhaps you plan a future issue of an IMAGING PLACE journal in which this would be a better fit.

Thank you for the time you took in considering the essay. And thank you for the great honor of including me in the conference–for squeezing me in as you did. I enjoyed the chance to move among the grammatologists once again and to lend my vision to the goals of the Larger Project–after climbing atop the shoulders of giants

I have to admit to wondering why they delayed so long in responding: was it to discourage me from working on a revision, since it was so different from the rest of the projects? But I have to assume that they were all just too busy to turn their attention to this work, and when the time came for them to do so, they left it to the last minute, as we all do–though I think that they had some idea of what they wanted to include based on the conference presentations.

Learning and Mnemonomics

While at work, I am slowly reading Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment, the report published by the National Academy Press. The chapter on “Advances in the Sciences of Thinking and Learning” speaks of the fundamental components of cognition as being working memory and long-term memory. The following quote caught my attention:

Unlike working memory, long-term memory is, for all practical purposes, an effectively limitless store of information. It therefore makes sense to try to move the burden of problem solving from working to long-term memory. What matters most in learning situations is not the capacity of working memory–although that is a factor in speed of processing–but how well one can evoke the knowledge stored in long-term memory and use it to reason efficiently about information and problems in the present.

Thinking in terms of how our memory is extended by technologies of communication–books, libraries, the internet, social networking–this quote suggests that learning is not just a matter of how we access our personal long-term memory but also a matter of how we access our culture’s memory, as stored in these various media. How can we tap the long-term memory of this vast, mnemonic prosthetic and use it to solve problems in the present?

This also invokes Ulmer’s concept of “emeragency” which puts problem-solving and policy issues at the center of a “humanities of pragmatics.” The technologically enhanced human brain is truly a “limitless store of information.” As such, our primary problem as individuals in the 21st century–and as educators of students who need the information literacy skills to navigate this limitless store of information–is to develop methods for managing this huge palace of memory: the birth of mnemonomics.

Mnemonomics: Social Networking as Collaborative Memory

Just posted a slideshow on a new concept of “memory management” I’m calling “mnemonomics.” This was for a presentation to a group of school librarians taking a course on Web2.0 and its potential applications in the classroom. I wanted to communicate my sense of profound amazement at the phenomenon of social bookmarking. It’s simple enough to use del.icio.us, for example, but in the context of the history of memory and the current major transition we are undergoing in communications technologies, it is literally “mind-blowing” (insofar as other people’s minds become part of our own: “collaborative memory”). I expand on an entry from my other blog on “Memory in the Age of Electracy“, and as I worked on the PowerPoint the subtitle changed from being “Social Bookmarking as Public Memory” to “Social Networking as Collaborative Memory.” I added references to Twitter (which I’ve just started to do: twitter.com/rsmyth) and slideshare as well as a plug for Pierre Levy’s book Collective Intelligence, which I think all of these technologies point to in a nascent form.

One quote I return to in my presentations of late, by Barbara Maria Stafford, invokes the sense of radical transition that occurred as a result of the printing press: “Pixels are the movable type of the future.”

The Slikipedia Project

We have posted the PowerPoint presentation that we delivered in the “Libraries as Immersive Learning Environments” class at Slideshare.net: The Slikipedia Project. Our hope is to realize this project in the coming months.

Libraries as Immersive Learning Environments

I have enrolled in a non-credit course from the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Libraries and Immersive Learning in 3D Virtual Worlds.” The course meets once a week in Second Life and carries on conversation throughout the week on an open-source course-management system called Moodle. For our final project, we are supposed to propose a project that incorporates some of the principles of “immersive learning” that we’ve been exploring in the course.

My partner and I plan to do a kind of “songline” or “memory palace” about the history and political science of just war theory. My hope is that this will be a model for an electrate form of information storage and retrieval. More to come as the project unfolds.