Recently in old media Category

Lindsay Waters has a piece in yesterday's IHE about how we evaluate what we do in the academy, "A Call for Slow Writing." Now, you might recall that my own feelings about Waters are, shall we say, less than glowingly positive. But I will say that my feelings about this essay are mixed, and not in the worst way.

First, it's a well-wrought piece, showing off Waters' own skills at prose, and it is replete with erudition. I don't usually write like that, but there you have it. And second, I'm actually in complete agreement with the major point of the essay:

I have claimed elsewhere that the book-for-tenure system is coming to an end, that it is unsustainable, that its growth has been an obscenity, because it was mindless, because it sought to make something automatic and machine-like play the role that should only be played by the soul....There is no good reason why the essay should not replace the book, and a lot of good reasons why it should. I am tempted to say -- in order to be maximally provocative -- that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure. The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely.

Waters' argument is that we need to start unlearning the system that prompts us to push out writing as quickly as we do, in the interests of bumping up our pre-tenure numbers. I don't know that he'll have many takers for denying tenure to those who do publish books, but I will say that I very consciously reset my tenure clock when I moved from ODU to SU. And my book was better for it, I believe.

So far, so good. It's a little curmudgeonly of me, but I am willing to grant that most of our writing would be improved by shaking it free of the shadow of tenure. But then...

What I'm saying is that the first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes -- and here I'm going global -- a good curry. It really sets you back. Or maybe forward. Style, maniera, modo is what we readers demand.

It's hard for me not to react negatively--and here I'm going local--to the modo for modo's sake here. But the larger point is where I'm set back. To imagine that an entire profession sits around thinking, "hmmm, how can I write a really crappy sentence here?" is beyond laughable to me. Is there writing in the humanities that is largely indefensible from a stylistic point of view? Almost certainly. Are there writers in the humanities who consciously set out to produce inelegant prose? I seriously doubt it. So the notion that an entire tenure system is going to be changed by our conviction about the quality of our prose just sounds cranky to me, to be honest, and not serious at all.

Now, Waters goes on to talk about the editorial changes going on at boundary 2, and they sound great. I'm even willing to grant as part of a thought experiment that other journals follow suit. Not all, I'd imagine, but some. Let's even suppose that some of the essays written in this renaissance of clarity trickle upwards into book form. How long will that take? And where does the system tip?

Most importantly, though, what will any of this have to do with the demands placed upon us by our institutions? Who will be the first top-flight university to say that their tenure expectations are aberrant, and should be scaled back to allow more quality work? Which administrator, content with a system that translates qualitative work into quantities, is going to admit the "obscenity" when most university and college budgets already build into their calculations the retirements and tenure denials, and the budget line resets that they bring?

Seriously.

I've never been all that adept at the kind of nominal-dense, code-wordy prose that Waters and others decry, so I don't really take this stuff that personally. What I do take personally is the transfer of value judgments from the work (this work is difficult, obscure, and personally offensive) to the folk who write such works, in some kind of weird moral algebra. Honestly, I find that a little sloppy.

There are things that we can do. That much I agree with. We can strive to write as well as we can, certainly, and we can try to hold each other accountable as we read manuscripts, offer advice, direct projects, etc. But to imagine that we are the ones who have driven this system within which we toil is a little facile.

And this is from someone who's been fortunate enough to receive tenure. I'm not one of those who believes that the current system was good enough for me, so it's good enough for anyone else. But I don't see this essay offering anything like a solution for the problem it poses.

That is all, except to note that I'm not the CB who left a comment on the original post...

Another head shaker from the land of old media:

If you're on Facebook, there's a good chance that you've come across Scrabulous, which is a Facebook module that allows you effectively to play Scrabble with other Facebook users. According to the Motley Fool, Scrabulous has upwards of 600,000 users a day. This popularity has unfortunately attracted the attention of Mattel and Hasbro, who own the rights to Scrabble. Their response? Cease and desist, of course.

What should happen? The two guys (count em: one...two) who created this insanely popular version of the game should be rewarded, licensed, franchised, and lauded for doing what the dinosaurs who own Scrabble haven't: produce a high-quality, online version.

What will happen? Scrabulous will probably get retired, and there will be tens of thousands of new, brand-hostile customers.

But it's less about avoiding hostility and more about understanding that "in an edgeconomy, people sharing/hacking/using/etc your goods can actually create massive amounts of value for you." That's from Umair Haque, writing about something else entirely and yet the exact same thing. Company after company walks down this path, and it seems like, to a person, all of the stiffs in charge make the wrong decision. Maybe this will go down differently, given that all the public clamor, from individuals to techonomics blogs, weighs in on the side of "opportunity." But somehow, I doubt it.

That's all.

I've got some college hoops on in the background while I work and play Scrabulous, and it's occurred to me that visitors from another planet would honestly believe that Christmas is the holiday where we meat popsicles buy each other Lexuses (or is that Lexi?). Seriously. I've seen 5 or 6 commercials reference the holidays in the past hour or so, and 4 of them were for Lexus.

If I had that much disposable income for gifts, I could think of only about 8 gajillion better things to spend it on. So, just so we're clear, if you're expecting a gift from me this year, chances are it won't have an oversized, four-foot bow on it.

That's all.

Matthew Kirschenbaum blogged about it when his CHE piece ("How Reading is Being Reimagined") came out online, but given the choice between plunking down money or relying upon the "free" copy in the department, well, I'll take the two week delay.

But I got around to reading his piece today, and I did want to express appreciation for a couple of points in particular. It's an essay that balances nicely the critique of the NEA report with the promise of new media. A couple of things jumped out at me:

First, I think this point is easy to overlook:

The structure of To Read or Not to Read presents itself as tacit acknowledgment that not all of its own text will likely be read by any one reader, since it is clearly designed to be "not read" in at least some of the ways that accord with Bayard's observations. The report is accompanied by an Executive Summary, a condensed version of the major findings. Its internal organization is carefully laid out, with summary points at the head of each chapter, topic sentences, extensive notes, sidebars, and sections labeled as conclusions.

I mention this passage not for its critique, but because it connects with some of the stuff that Derek is working on with respect to abstraction, and it points to something I'm increasingly conscious of: the range of scales through we approach texts. It's rapidly becoming one of the key ideas that I'm working through in my own writing. And at CCC Online, for that matter. It's not an issue of reading/not-reading for me, but of negotiated distances.

A second quote that poked at me:

Reading your friend's blog is not likely a replacement for reading Proust, but some blogs have been a venue for extraordinary writing, and we are not going to talk responsibly or well about what it means to read online until we stop conflating genre with value.

Again, my point is a little less obvious. I'd add that we need to stop misunderstanding genre itself, in terms of a set of language-objects like books, blogs, magazines, etc. Which is not to say that MK is wrong here. The problem is that thinking about reading in terms of consuming objects (a book, a blog, a newspaper) is always going to lead to the substitution he's arguing against. And this is something I hope my book gets at a bit. The problem isn't the range of acceptable objects so much as it is our acceptance of "objects" themselves as the measure of the practice, if that makes sense.

(I've arrived at that position in large part as I've been converted by the work of genre studies folk in our field, btw. When I taught a course on genre a couple of summers ago, I entered the course highly skeptical of the material we were reading--it's the only time I've taught a course whose subject I was "against" to start with...)

Anywho, one last observation, which itself has nothing to do with MK's article. It's title is "How Reading is Being Reimagined," but on the cover of the Chronic Review, it's listed as "The New Metrics of Reading," which strikes me as somewhat different. On the front page of the Chronic site, it's called "Literacy.net," and includes the tease

All you need to do is skim the NEA reading report online and you'll have some questions. And that's the point, writes Matthew Kirschenbaum.

I've never really noticed how fast and loose they seem to play with their descriptions of content. I know that Becky has run afoul of the CHE headline writers before, but I guess I haven't paid much attention otherwise...

Anyways, it's a good article. Go read it. That's all.

There's a nice entry up over at if:book by Nancy Kaplan, on the topic of the recent NEA report about reading. I can't say much about it (the report, that is), as I have many better things to read with my own time. Kaplan does a nice job of taking on the NEA's graphic "representations" of their findings, which don't support their conclusions. For example, the decline in reading? It's actually at the same level it was in 1971. The NEA report starts from a later date, so as to make it look like more of a decline than it actually is. And so on.

It's a nice, contemporary example of the kind of analysis that Edward Tufte has been doing for years with respect to information design--too bad that kind of reading proficiency is neither advocated nor practiced by the report.

Anyhow, her conclusion:

Because of changes in the nature and conditions of work, declining proficiency in reading among American adults might cause some concern if not alarm. It is surely also the case that educational institutions at every level can and should do a better job. Yet there is little evidence of an actual decline in literacy rates or proficiency. As a result, the NEA's core argument breaks down.

That is all. Go take a look.

Lately, for some odd reason, I've been watching BBC America, and in particular, among other shows, I've been watching episodes of Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares." It's a lot more palatable than his FOX show, Hell's Kitchen, which is a show that seems designed to determine just how much foul-mouthed abuse aspiring cooks are willing to endure to make their dreams come true.

Nightmares, on the other hand, involves Ramsay visiting various restaurants all over the UK, and attempting to help them reverse their bad fortunes. There's still plenty of swearing, but Ramsay shows a softer side as well, as he really goes out of his way to encourage young chefs even as he's chewing out the idiots.

Anyhow, one of the changes he inevitably suggests to almost every restaurant owner is to lower prices. Lower prices gets people in the door and sets up traffic flow, customer loyalty, repeat customers, and a chance to sell them luxury items like appetizers, desserts, and drinks. Makes sense, but it is sometimes surprising how many restauranteurs fear the lower prices.

I was thinking about this when I saw the announcement that NBC is no longer going to be selling on iTunes, and that includes some of my current fetishes like Heroes and BSG. Or rather, I should phrase it differently: iTunes is no longer selling NBC content, because NBC wanted to more than double their per episode price, bumping it from $1.99 to $4.99, and this despite the fact that everyone else has stuck with the $2/episode price.

As unfortunate as it'll be not to be able to download the occasional episode when I miss them, I'm actually happy to see Apple take a stand in this instance. It seems like every time I hear about a network missing the point of digital downloading, that network is NBC. Maybe the loss of revenue will prompt them to spend a little money on hiring someone with a clue.

Heck, I'd even pitch in $4.99 to see that happen.

Although I still use them from time to time, as their affordances are useful for a particular context, I don't spend much time anymore on listservs. And today, I unsubbed from my last holdout, a disciplinary listserv ostensibly devoted to my specialty. As with the blog, I go through phases of listserv fatigue, but over the last few years, the fatigue periods seem to grow longer and longer, punctuated more by silence than by activity.

My unsubscription was prompted by a message today which, under the auspices of continuing a discussion from earlier this week, launched into what, as best as I can tell, was a largely unprompted invective against blogging. I won't repeat it here, both because I'm not sure the list is public and because I'm not interested in dignifying it. Long and short, though: blogging, the message suggests, "atomizes, isolates, and individualizes knowledge." A few more sweeping generalizations, and a strange fascination with the idea that blogs are assholes, or like assholes, or bloggers are assholes. I don't know.

And honestly, I don't really care. My experience with blogging is so different--of course, it could matter that I actually maintain a blog--that the message could have been in another language for all the sense that it made to me. I was sitting in Panera today, reading Amanda Anderson's The Way We Argue Now (Amazon), and in it, she has a chapter on ethos in the Foucault/Habermas debate. Anderson is accounting for a comment from Foucault that he is "a little more in agreement" with Habermas than Habermas is with him. By saying this, Anderson explains:

Foucault implies that there is no external perspective from which one might adjudicate their differences or agreements, precisely because one essential element of agreement stems from the attitude of the thinker towards the other's work.

This stuck with me, because it fits nicely into the network-y/visualization thinking I've been doing, particularly when it comes to thinking about ways to map conversations and/or disciplines, and to chart changes. One of the things that Anderson's doing in that chapter is shifting the relationship between Foucault and Habermas, undoing the knee-jerk binary through which that relationship is frequently viewed. The link between the two is still there, but its character is altered, assuming that Anderson's various interpretations are persuasive.

It sticks with me not because I can really disagree with the specific charges leveled against blogging in that message, because I'm sure that there are plenty of examples that anyone could trot out to validate them. What irked me most is the foreclosure of any sort of conversation; it was almost beside the point that it was initiated by someone with little to no direct experience of our community. Almost. Anderson explains that this comment from Foucault is consistent with his "dislike of polemic":

The polemicist...proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue.

There's something to this for me, not the least reason for which is my own general avoidance of confrontation. And it's also not to say that I don't fall back into polemic myself. I do. But I've got a lot more interest in figuring out how my ideas connect to, diverge from, and/or relate to someone else's than I do in waging a polemic/war. Even though, I suppose, it could be argued that my entry is doing just that.

Or it would be, were I to do two things, both of which are equally tempting. I'm tempted to refute those claims, drawing on my own experiences, talking about all of the collaboration, networking, and working-with that maintaining a blog has prompted in my academic life for the past three years. I'm also tempted to critique the listserv post, and perhaps even the list itself.

But I think I'll refrain. Which isn't to say that my entry here is snark-free--that'd be some sort of record, I think. It is to say, rather, that a community where someone feels comfortable (much less justified) in making those sorts of comments is not the kind of community I have any interest in being a part of.

That's all.

Speaking of commercials, as far too many people are this time of year, I present to you the four most shudderingly foul words I can imagine:

Maple Cheddar Breakfast Sandwich

I'm no fan of bad commercials, goodness knows, but at least most of them are bad commercials on behalf of pleasantly mediocre products. I'll be honest: the very notion of the MCBS makes me want to avoid the business in question. Not that I go there more than once or twice a year, but still. Yuck.

Go Bears!

A couple of the more attractive ensemble shows debuted this week, and I made time to catch them. Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and JJ Abrams's Six Degrees both started out pretty well. I'll withhold judgment until I'm a few shows in, but one difference stood out to me.

At the end of 60, NBC explains that if I missed any of tonight's episode, I can go over to the NBC site and catch a "two minute recap." Contrast that with ABC's approach, which also requires me to visit their site, but offers me the entire episode, and for free. Heck, just for kicks, I may go watch the episode again. The two minute recap? I've already seen next week's "two-minute recap"--it's called the tease for the next episode.

NBC already embarrassed themselves by taking on YouTube, so it doesn't surprise me too much that they would demonstrate again their utter unawareness of what the Web might do for them. What's unfortunate is that someone like Sorkin--whose episodes are probably among the least effectively reduced to a 2-minute tease--has to suffer for the network's shortsightedness. They're jumping on the "season arc" bandwagon with some of their shows, but they still don't get that making the first few episodes as available as possible will only pay off in the long run, a long run that the shows themselves require. Ah well.

That's all. I need to blog Scott McCloud's visit, and I'll try and do that tomorrow...

Update: Okay, clearly I need to just take all of this back, and pull my head out. Sorry about that. I was totally wrong. I'm not sure why they would just plug the 2-minute replay instead of the full episode, but both are available on NBC's site, even for the crappy shows.

I've already forwarded this to a couple of people, but I thought it worth linking more broadly. Timothy Burke has a new entry describing archival work: Historian as Snoop: Experiencing the Archive. It occurred to me that this would be a nice introduction to archival work for either a history course or a methodology course in our own field:

Archives often take you to a juncture like this. You’re rarely without tools that help you decide what to make of a set of documents, but you often still find yourself having to make some basic choices about what happened, what it meant, and whether anyone should care. But even before you get to those choices, there is a kind of secret pleasure that precedes them: a historian in the archives is often a kind of combination of Miss Marple and Mary Worth, a detective, judge and gossip, learning about the complicated art of being human from the traces and fragments of writing that accidentally trail behind individuals and find their way into boxes and files all around the world.

I'm no historian, that's for sure, but then, 5 years ago, I would have laughed at the idea that I might spend some of my time doing empirical/statistical work. And yet, here I am. The older I get, the harder it is for me to dismiss any method--not that I dismissed them per se. But whereas at one time, I would have been interested in applying one framework across many phenomena, now I'm more intrigued by bringing multiple frameworks to bear on the same thing.

Hmm. Writing that out feels right, but it also feels a little more absolute than I intended. Ah well. Go read Tim's piece. That is all.