Technologies of Text (S12)

Looking back on the class period were we looked at the Nicholas Carr interview, I could not agree more with his Theory. Although the class completely turned his arguments against him, I believe he has more ground to stand on than most people give him credit for. Nicholas Carr says, ” the Internet short-circuits our mental processes by constantly bombarding us with information.” I find this to be true and believe that it is harming the nations youth, year after year. Even though I use the internet just as much as the next guy or gal, I see where Mr. Carr is getting his train of thought. Just like anything else in the world that sticks around for a while, trends start to take place and so does  change. The way i think of it, is survival of the fittest. If one is unable to stick with the times and customize their lifestyle to new big trends, then in a sense they will become no longer needed. I am not talking about small trends either, I am talking about things such as the computer and the internet. If people do not jump on the technology band wagon they will simply be left in the the past. As a human race we are constantly evolving and the internet happens to be a gigantic part of our evolution.

With that being said, I believe that the way the internet is making us and how it facilitates the easy way of doing things is having a dramatic affect on the human mind. For example if you told a student in todays world if they owned a map or even knew how to use a map and/or compass they would most likely say, no. This is in part because of the invention of the GPS and now the simple use of Google maps. Another example would be, if you asked a student when was the last time they picked up a dictionary and manually looked up a word they did not know, the answer would most likely be, I do not know, its been that long. This is also because of the internet and the use of on-line dictionaries. So like Carr is saying, the internet is defiantly changing the way the mind thinks and acts, and I am not so sure that this is a good thing. I admit it I am just as guilty as the next that I am the same way, so I am not exempting myself, but it also does not mean that I agree with it.

I can completely see the future of the human race heading toward one of those ridiculous movie scenes with flying cars and anything and everything provided with a virtual experience. I do not see it being to far fetched at all. In a way this kind of takes me back to my last blog post about Walden. If the world would just take a step back and look at what is really important in life, we might be able to see that where the human race is heading could be a place that we do not like. Maybe, just because the internet makes things easier, should we really take advantage of it? I find value in being able to complete tasks manually, the old fashion way. It might be harder, but when things get hard thats when I seem to learn the most not only about myself, but the people around me as well. I also find value in seeing the hardships that previous generations had to endure to get to the place we sit today.

Back to my main point, I see Mr. Carr’s points as valid and completely within reason. If we like it or not the internet is changing the way we think and I see it doing so in a bad way. It may seem like I am way out in left field because of the way we are adapting to the technologies of today, but just because something works and is the easy way of completing a task, does not mean it is good for our brain. Take the movie Click for example, Adam Sandler in the movie finds an easier way of doing things and thought it was of benefit to him and his family, but in reality it killed him. I know this is an exaggerated example, but it fits the mold of what Mr. Carr is referring to.

While checking twitter and searching through blogs, I ran across a post by Miriam Posner that made me think of our class discussion.  In her post, The wind in the trees: Regimes of attention, she talks about silent films and brings up a good point about our attention skills.

“The problem is that early silent film counts on a kind of attention that we didn’t have: an open-eyed fascination with the appearance of moving photographic images, and the ability to grasp allusions to any number of turn-of-the-century pop-culture references.”

In our discussion, many people seemed to disagree with Carr.  Even thought there is a bog debate on whether newer technologies are detrimental or not to our attention and our learning process, there is something that I think both sides can agree with.  The way we concentrate has changed, whether it be a good change or a bad one.  Back in the day when silent films were new, they were extremely exciting and entertaining.  Now, there are so many new devices that stimulate us on a daily basis, that something as simple as a silent film would have us bored silly. So is it a bad thing that we have the TV on while we are on the computer trying to read an article?  Is Google making us stupid? The answer depends on your opinion.  Personally, I know that I retain more information and understanding of a reading when I have full concentration designated to the reading.  I can definitely do more than one thing at once, but it depends on what those things are.  I would not be able to read Walden with the TV on and fully understand all of the information I’m coming in contact with.  I am not a researcher, nor have I read many studies on how the brain works, but I know there is a lot of research material on attention and concentration.  In my opinion, many people think they are multitasking when they are just switching their attention from one thing to another very quickly.  I do think that understanding a lot of information from different sources is a learned skill we have developed over time.  When it comes to something important, like reading Walden or writing a term paper, I know that I want to stay as far away from distractions as possible.  I feel less productive when there are so many different things trying to divert my attention from what is really important.

Whether you agree with Carr or disagree, it is easy to see that the way we live and experience information is vastly influenced by our technologies of today.  I find it interesting to see how much our lives have changed from the past.  Something as amazing as the first moving picture, even though it’s silent, is now a thing of the past and may even be boring to some of us. What is it going to be like when televisions and computers are out-dated? I think it is an interesting thing to think about.

Here is the link to Miriam Posner’s blog:

http://miriamposner.com/blog/?p=1116

 For this week’s post I found my inspiration from the same person as my last week’s post, Adeline Koh Ph.D., on twitter. Let me state before I compose this post that I am very happy I am following Adeline Koh because I feel as though her tweets are relative to our course material, recent, and above all interesting!

The project of digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’ is where scholars are making the 19th century magazine, Straits Chinese Magazine, digitally available  while also including academic commentary upon it. Perhaps a better understanding of the projects focus can be deduced from a quote from the article,  “Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’ is an attempt to give voice and representation to formerly colonized subjects, and to attempt to work against the “imperial meaning-making” of the archive by implementing new types of reading and commenting technologies that disrupt the idea of dominant and subjugated knowledges.” After reading this article, I learned that “Asian Victorians” or a diasporic Chinese group who became best know as “Straits Chinese” in Southeast Asia were established by the British Empire to help rule and mediate with the British Southeast Asian colony including Singapore. This was interesting to me because I never knew that the group “Straits Chinese” every existed and that they played such an influential/important role of British colonial  rule in Southeast Asia. More importantly, this grabbed mt attenion because I would have never known or learned about the “Straits Chinese” if it were not for its recent push to digitize this 19th century Southeast Asian.  This project is providing a great service to people by making the Straits Chinese Magazine accessible to more scholars and people than ever before.

Also on this page, http://chineseenglishmen.adelinekoh.org/, there is a section where Adeline Koh Ph.D., leader of the project as well as site director, inserted a link/spot with information about how to contribute and “help with digitization, annotation, commentary and editing in this project.” This is where collaboration with community, defined earlier in the year as a priority of digital humanities comes into play.

I believe Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’ is a perfect example for of how digital humanities is providing access to of historical documents to a wide range of people as well as  showing how digital humanities is a communal or networking effort.  It is also an example of the following pre-defined priorities of digital humanities earlier in the year:

• collaboration with community
• helps accomplish time consuming tasks quickly
• public scholarship
• open access—makes scholarship available to all
• wider availability of resources
• Helping student relate to humanities materials

The problem with writing a blog for this class is that there are so many different things I could write about and I have such a hard time choosing! I think what strikes me as most interesting at this point in the class is Thoreau, of course. Not him as a person so much, rather his use of language in Walden. His writing possesses an eloquence that is lacking in modern writing. Thoreau’s writing flows seamlessly using elegant words to weave together these incredibly complex and ornate sentences. It is so artful it is almost like poetry. Yes, I know what poetry is and clearly this is not, but it possesses a similar lilt, a sort of rhythm that is uninterrupted by these long and drawn out phrases. He even includes small poems:
What’s the railroad to me ? •
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallowS|
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods.
And then there are his descriptions of things which are a veritable treasure trove of experiences.
“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in are very, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.” Page(s): 87
It is like I’m sitting there with him in the afternoon sun smelling all the trees, listening to the birds, and losing myself in those afternoon hours where naps often capture our attention only to be awoken by the traveler’s wagon.
Few people write like that anymore. No one writes for the sheer pleasure of writing or conveying the sensual (5 senses) aspect of an experience. Thoreau has such an extensive way of expressing himself through words and that’s one of the reasons I love reading Walden. Sure, it is dense, but the vocabulary is beautiful and something that is rarely seen today.

I first encountered the following video clip in my intercultural communication course a few years ago, it helps bring to light how much information and observation the human brain can take in at once.  Watch the clip and then decide for yourself if you are really multitasking or simply focusing your attention in different places at once.  Then post what you observed from the clip as a comment if you feel so inclined.

here’s the link to the video

I bring this clip to your attention because I think as a young generation exposed to so much external stimuli from a young age, we have convinced ourselves that we’re not missing significant amounts of information.  I agree with Carr’s viewpoint not only because I’m not the greatest multi-tasker, but because of the scientific evidence that backs up his argument.  I think we can all agree that there is a limit to how much external stimuli the brain can process, so maybe we all have different capabilities or strategies for digesting information.

So did you see the Gorilla or the changing color of the curtain?

As we saw on Friday, with the discussion of Carr’s articles, there are ways in which technology has possibly affected our lives in negative ways. I follow IDEA.org on twitter and they recently posted an article discussing the affect technology has had on human sleep patterns. Since the late 17th Century, the sleep cycle for humans has appeared to change due to technological advancements.

It appears that it may be unnatural for humans to be sleeping their “regular” eight hours. Various research has been conducted by Thomas Wehr and Roger Ekirch, who presented his work in his book, “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past”.

Through studying old diaries, court records, medical books, and literature, Ekirch concluded that prior to the late 17th century, humans more often broke their night into two parts. A typical night of sleep began two hours after dusk, sleeping for about four hours, then a period of being awake for one or two hours, and then a second period of sleep. But during his research, Ekirch found the references to this two part night disappearing in the 17th century. It was a slow progression for 200 years, beginning in northern Europe, spreading downwards.

The first period of movement away from this sleep cycle, Ekirch attributed to three factors. They include street and domestic light improvement, and growth in coffee houses. By the end of the 17th century, 50 major European towns had their streets light. An overall theme between these three factors is that they created some legitimacy of doing things late at night, which allowed for less time to sleep. Medically, the in 19th, doctors stopped recording this two part sleep cycle.

Ekirch’s conclusion is that he believes that the human body has a “natural preference” for sleeping in various periods. He believes this is what could be causing “sleep maintenance insomnia” .This is where people wake up at night and cannot get back to sleep. There have been increased cases of this ever since the two periods of sleeping disappeared.

You can see some of the sources Ekirch used in the book’s preview at Google. If you are interested and want to hear more from the author, here is his webcast on the book from the Library of Congress:

Besides being an interesting discussion of technologies impact on human life, I think this article also represents something else important. It helps to show the impact the digital humanities have made on research. With the digitalization of things such as old diaries, court records, medical books, and literature, research like Ekrich’s becomes easier. Drawing themes and finding accurate data is essential for Ekrich’s work and is made easier by the digital humanities.

Thoreau argues that philosophizing is different than doing, and I can’t agree more. One of my good friends is a Philosophy major.  He and I would often get in a debate about how useful philosophy is when applying it to a job or the real world. Well, he would usually win the actual debate because he could construct an argument on the spot better than I could, but I still believe that you really need to intertwine experiencing with philosophizing. It goes back to the idea that in the midst of our busy lives, it’s critical to sit back and think about what we’re doing. We need to take breaks to maintain our focus and reset our goals.

The idea of balancing experience and learning also applies in this class! Just like with this Social Media paper we’ve been working on–we would be clueless if we just learned about what “tweets” were, or read about certain professors that study and teach digital humanities. Instead, we get to dive in on our own! Both in class, with professors beaming in, and independently surfing the web and twitter with what specifically interests us. Now for the philosophizing or learning part…applying what we’ve learned and writing that darn paper.

I was attempting to write the upcoming social media engagement paper when I decided to take a quick break and browse twitter. While browsing twitter for relevant examples of what influenced me the most I came upon a link to a blog post entitled, “On Blogging in the Digital Humanities” by Micheal Ullyot. That reminded me that I need to blog! So here we are and yes… this rambling does have a point.

Regarding Monday’s discussion, I disagree with most of the class and find myself at least mildly agreeing with the skeptics. You may be able to “multi-task” but there is no way that you can accomplish things that require deep processing simultaneously. Attention is like a pool of resources and it is not never-ending. For example, I can drive and sing a song at the same time. I cannot do calculus while someone reads Walden and retain that information. So if you take the middle ground and say that you can do moderate academic exercises such as blogging about digital humanities while watching television and talking to a friend, I would have to agree. Yes, you can do all of that at once but you will perform much poorer than if you could attenuate your resources to a single thing. Your blog may not be as coherent, your conversation will be devoid of active listening and you will have holes in your memory about the TV. See… there goes my faulty attention span, back to the article about blogging.

Michael Ullyot gives a couple reasons why blogging is important. One is that blogging circulates ideas in progress. While I agree with Ullyot on this it left me thinking, aren’t ALL ideas ALWAYS in progress? A couple other reasons are because this field moves quickly and academic publishing is slow followed by the collaborative nature of DH projects. I can understand the aforementioned reasons as to why blogging may be preferable but there were a few others that I tend to disagree with. One in particular is that before blogging one would have to develop a project in isolation, present it at conferences with a few experts then possibly publish a year or two later. With blogging and other technologies Ullyot points out that, “Now a DH scholar can publish her questions, ideas, and methodology the moment she conjures them up, and distribute the audio file of her talk to a conference or small audience the moment she delivers it”. Now this seems like a negative thing to me in some aspects because well thought out research takes time. Quality takes time. There is no reason to rush these things unless Carr is right and our attention spans have started to degrade.

Michael Ullyot ”On Blogging in the Digital Humanities”  http://ullyot.ucalgaryblogs.ca/2012/02/24/on-blogging-in-the-digital-humanities/

It’s been awhile since I have been on here, so I have some catching up to do. My first thoughts go to our discussion in today’s class. When I was reading Walden on my own I did find him to be contradictory, and it actually irritated me a lot. After discussing this point in class today I still find it a round-about way that makes him seem pretentious to me. I felt like he was not quite making his point, because he was so busy being “clever.” Not being able to read something direct from him, I can only speculate as to how I would feel about that approach. That being said, discussing some of HDT’s contradictions in class did help to make the reading clear for me. His contradictions–now making sense–did seem appropriate, and has me thinking that maybe his intention was to be thought provoking to society. To hold the mirror up for us to look into. To questions the decisions that we have made, and to lead us away from generalizations and group-think mentality.

Now that that rant is out of the way, I have to comment on a blog post that I am subscribed to. The blog post, Digital Humanities and the Archives: Economics and Sustainability, was interesting to me and grabbed my attention for a few reasons. 1. Being a business major, the topic was interesting to me, and 2. I wanted to know what digital humanities had to do with economics and sustainability. The author, Eleanor Shevlin, lists the economic issues as: funds and time to travel to archives. “While travel expenses remain legitimate needs today, access to commercial subscription databases, funds to support one’s own digital projects, and the feasibility of embarking on such a project for pre-tenured scholars have emerged as pressing economic concerns.”  I don’t know why, but this is not what I expected this blog post to be about. I expected a lot more technical economic terms being thrown around, and more about how digital humanities will sustain economics. I don’t know why, but after reading the post I have to say it was actually interesting.  It had a lot more to do with the consequences of not sustaining digital archives and the economic consequences of not sustaining them.

(I’m starting to think that I’m not getting the point of the things I have been reading lately . . . hmmmm . . . maybe there’s something to the merit of the readings and the video from our discussion last Friday.)