October 2002 Archives
Chris Mooney pens an essay in the Washington Post in praise of Muggles - those people who aren't wizards a la Harry Potter.
Rowling's critique of people like the Dursleys owes a great deal to two other British writers of fantasy, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Both writers believed that fantasy and the imagination -- in stark contrast with technology and modernism -- can help us access a deeper, more magical and enchanted existence. As biographer Humphrey Carpenter described Tolkien's views: "Only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil." Or as Ron Weasley advised Harry in a letter: "Don't let the Muggles get you down!"
I think the choice between technology and fantasy is a false one. I enjoy fantasy and science/technology. At their root both have the same mythic quality Tolkien wanted to promote.
About 5 years ago I went through the process of moving my books from one home to another. At that time I filled a single box full of titles I planned to sell at the local used bookstore. (For comparison I probably had 25 boxes I planned to keep.) That box is still in the closet, never having been delivered to the used bookstore.
The New York Times has a short article on the perils of 'weeding' to all of those who patronize libraries or own one themselves.
Harold Bloom has a new book out, a massive tome called Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. I ran into the 800 page book as soon as I stepped into the Ann Arbor Borders 10 days ago. I was in Ann Arbor to visit the School of Information and stopped by Borders to get a sense of the school atmosphere.
Judith Shulevitz's review from the New York Times captures some of the brilliance of Bloom's analysis and method.
His style may be disheveled and his book shockingly attuned to the demands of the marketplace, but both have a virtue that trumps those flaws: authenticity. Bloom's focus on genius is not just commercial opportunism, the usual blather about the moral import of cultural literacy or part of the national obsession with success, though critics will find elements of all three if they go looking for them. Bloom has been writing about genius since at least ''The Anxiety of Influence'' (1973), if not before. His famous theory of poetic production as a struggle between strong older poets and aspiring younger poets is in essence a theory of genius -- of how geniuses defend themselves against the might of previous ones. Strength and genius overlap in the Bloomian cosmos, even if they're not exactly the same thing. Both are terms for power.Don't confuse Bloom's view of power with that of Michel Foucault, whose critique of power inspired the materialist and historicist approaches to literature that Bloom complains about so bitterly. For Foucault, power was everything and everywhere: all institutions, all discourses, all social relations could be -- must be -- reinterpreted as struggles for power. For Bloom, power is rare, mysterious, dangerous and inexplicable, although we never stop trying to explain it. Instances of this power, which has much to do with charisma and could also be called greatness, are to be cherished and studied, not deemed suspect and demystified. Efforts to explain literature as a function of the author's social milieu or historical context, according to Bloom, amount to little more than pathetic attempts to ward off the terrifying force of genius, to reduce it to something harmless.
I remember sitting in his class on twentieth-century poets and being awed by Bloom's erudition as though it were some kind of physical force in the room. At a reading I once saw him perform a poem by Robert Penn Warren and was so struck by the passion he showed that I read the same poem at my grandmother's funeral. He's as much of a presence in person as he is on the page.
Last night one of my classes began a cursory discussion of Foucault's theory of power - that it is discursive, diffuse, all-encompassing. It's nice to know that Bloom is fighting for the other side and forcing genius back into the world.
I stopped watching the news about the Washington D.C. sniper before the story had even really begun to bloom because I knew that the cable news channels were going to blow it with ridiculous speculation. Why not, I thought, devote every half hour to the sniper and the rest to the bombings in Bali or other world events? But no one listened to me.
So now the post-mortems of the media are starting to come out and the criticisms are focusing on the complete failure of the profilers to pick out the real culprits. The Washington Post summarizes it well:
Almost everything the sniper "profilers" and pundits told the media over the past three weeks turns out to have been off the mark, considering the very real profiles of the two people arrested early yesterday. The men and women who had been described on the air and in print as "forensic psychologists" and "former FBI investigators" took many swings at the who and why of the sniper case -- and mostly missed.
About their failure I completely agree, but later in the article they attribute the problem to a cause I have to question.
Criminal profilers may be the logical outgrowths of a society that believes that all of human reality can be quantified, a culture that has a touching faith in the truth-revealing ability of statistical analysis.It's part of the same belief system that has given us governance by polls, insurance by actuarial tables, newspapers by readership surveys and just about everything else by focus groups. It has also given us criminal investigation by number-crunching spreadsheets and computer-enhanced conjecture.
To me the belief in profilers is the opposite of a trend toward science or statistics. The profiler as portrayed by the media is the updated detective - a lone rational figure in a world gone mad who is capable of understanding the mind of the killer. In shows like Profiler or movies like The Silence of the Lambs the profiler never uses science or statistics to solve the case, he or she uses their intuition and their "understanding" of the killer. It's psychic powers clothed in the guise of rationality. There is no quantification in the pronouncements of the profilers I've seen on TV, it is all qualities and vagueness.
The real source of the problem is the media and it's unending appetite for blather. Of course this criticism may never see the day since MSNBC was congratulating itself last Friday.
Via Arts and Letters Daily I found this intriguing profile of David Lodge, author of a new set of essays Consciousness and the Novel and a recent novel Thinks, about the interesection between critical theory and consciousness studies.
Cognitive science and deconstructive theory may offer "a formidable challenge to the idea of human nature on which most literary fiction is based," writes Mr. Lodge in Consciousness and the Novel. The notion of "the autonomous human self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all time and all places. That doesn't, however, necessarily mean that it isn't a good idea, or that its time has passed. A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends upon it."
The Washington Post published this recent piece on the battles that were fought and lost over the USA Patriot Act last year when everyone was crying for more power for law enforcement.
Bruce Schneier had this to say in the June Cryptogram.
It's not about data collection; it's about data analysis. Again from the 30 September 2001 issue of Crypto-Gram: "Demands for even more surveillance miss the point. The problem is not obtaining data, it's deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. Everyone already leaves a wide audit trail as we go through life, and law enforcement can already access those records with search warrants [and subpoenas]. The FBI quickly pieced together the terrorists' identities and the last few months of their lives, once they knew where to look. If they had thrown up their hands and said that they couldn't figure out who did it or how, they might have a case for needing more surveillance data. But they didn't, and they don't."
First Monday recently published an essay on breaking the airline screening system. Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System by Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss
Kevin Werbach has an article at News.com describing the trend of computers toward decentralization. He indentifies 3 W's leading the effort.
What's the connection between Wi-Fi wireless networks, Weblogs and Web services? They are among the few technologies thriving amid the industrywide downturn. What's more, they are examples of the trend toward decentralization.
Arts and Letters Daily is back after being purchased by the Chronicle of Higher Education and one of their interesting links is to two articles about the appointment of Dana Gioia to head the NEA.
Open Democracy has a short essay on the power of association and the conversion of real capital into social capital.
Basically it tells the story of how the Bank of Sweden created the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economics in honor of Alfred Nobel in 1968 and used the power of Nobel's name and the history of all the earlier words to legitimize economics as a scientific endeavor. It's guilt by association in reverse and it worked incredibly well. Nowadays everyone just assumes that there is a Nobel prize for economics.
Here's an interesting question about the future of social networks posed on the Edge. What if we could use technology to scale our relationships up to many thousands or millions of people?
I've been thinking in my own mind recently about the power of hidden personal knowledge. I attended an open house for the School of Information at the University of Michigan last week and one of the presenters commented that we would all be surprised at the diversity of experience represented in the room. But I never felt like we had an opportunity to get to know others. I always castigate myself after one of these meetings, thinking how much better I could have been at networking or even introducing myself to other people. As it is I usually follow the shy path and listen to what others say, whether they are the presenters or the audience members. What if I could learn about the others in the group immediately? Or have a computer filter out and introduce me to people who share my interests?
In trying to find a metaphor for this idea I've been struck by the character of the Borg from Star Trek. What made the Borg so bad? Obviously they strike at a real fear of becoming something other than our individual selves. The idea is scattered throughout science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Puppet Masters, and almost every other alien invasion story that has ever been done. Pushing through this feeling I realize there is also a strange appeal to losing yourself in the collective. Computers and technology are, in part, so interesting because they push this question in both directions. The extremes continue to move apart and life just keeps getting more complicated and more interesting.
I
feel like the success of any one of my posts via MozBlog is balanced on a
fine edge of awesome coolness and continued frustration. At least the post
connection finally seems to be working, although there are pieces of the
editing of old entries that is still frustrating me. Needless to say the
whole process is still in its testing stage.
Luckily I found some
interesting stuff about Venkman, the built-in Mozilla JavaScript debugger.
The coolness of Mozilla continues to expand.
Test post.
Open Citation Linking.
D-Lib Magazine article on Open Citation Linking. found via Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog
More experiments with blog clients. This time I'm testing w.bloggar
So I'm testing out BlogBuddy to see how the xmlrpc connection works.
One of the things I've enjoyed most about the internet is the wealth of information available from professional societies I would never have heard of elsewhere and the conferences they host. Via Noise Between Stations I found this interesting article, "No More Conference," suggesting some improvements to conferences in general.
But, like it or not, we’re moving into a new model of leadership and interaction. It is one based on what I call a Wisdom Web. We’re currently living in an age of information overload. If I want to continue to be a hierarchical leader, I’m fooling myself to believe I can contain and control all the information and decision-making that is required to run a business today. I need to know when to lead and when to step back and encourage others to lead. And the only way for me to do this is to better know myself and where my strengths and passions lie, and then to ask the pertinent questions to better know and understand others. My knowledge is no longer contained in my head, but in the web of people I connect with as well. That’s true power.
Following through the article there are some suggestions on improving conferences that cite two intriguing sites. Open Space Technology ( www.openspaceworld.org ) and The World Café ( www.theworldcafe.com ). To this list I might add Socrate's Cafe and the Society for Philosophic Inquiry ( www.philosopher.org )
One of the things that really disgusts me about the Iraq debate and the Bush foreign policy is the complete lack of support for multilateralism. Lo and behold public radio latched onto a survey today that supports my beliefs. The Worldviews 2002 poll was conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs and found that Americans support multilateral actions in Iraq over unilateral by a 61% to 34% margin.
Where are the politicians who are trumpeting this fact?? Or the pundits citing this in their columns??
I've encountered a couple of articles about President Bush's new national security strategy and the war on Iraq and what I've seen makes me question the recent drumbeat for war even more.
Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker
Richard Rorty at The Nation
Michael Kinsley at Slate
Thanks to Electrolite - Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for the links.
It's always entertaining to read about how hackers envision themselves. In part because I find the rhetoric so personally appealing, and sometimes consider myself to be a hacker. A perfect example is from a recent essay at O'Reilly web, "Real Hacking Rules! Or, Before the Word is Totally Useless, What Is the Essence of Hacking?" Who wouldn't want to be a hacker after reading:
In essence, hacking is a way of thinking about complex systems. It includes the skills required to cobble together seemingly disparate pieces of a puzzle in order to understand the system; whether modules of code or pieces of a bigger societal puzzle, hackers intuitively grasp and look for the bigger picture that makes sense of the parts. So defined, hacking is a high calling. Hacking includes defining and defending identity, creating safe boundaries, and searching for the larger truth in a maze of confusion and intentional disinformation.In the national security state that has evolved since World War II, hacking is one means by which a free people can retain freedom. Hacking includes the means and methodologies by which we construct more comprehensive truths or images of the systems we hack.
So is any of this rhetoric actually true? I approach most of this rhetoric as an ideal to which we all can aspire as opposed to a description of the truth. Finding a single definition for a large group of people, such as hackers, is a fool's errand. To me the variation is where the real interest lies. But the essays of Thieme and others give us a yardstick by which to measure ourselves.
From Corante on Blogging Robert Corr has an interesting essay, "Bias in the Blogosphere", trying to analyze bias in the weblog world.
Some have suggested that blogging is an altogether new medium, free of editors and owners and therefore free of bias. They are clearly wrong. There is a significant systemic bias in favour of powerful interests that can be convincingly explained by a modified propaganda model. As we have seen, there is no opportunity for a peasant farmer in Peru to start a blog. This new medium is the domain of white, middle-class American men, and severe structural barriers restrict access by other groups. Those that adhere to the dominant ideology of the warbloggers are rewarded with larger audiences and higher rankings in search engines. Those that challenge the mainstream must face substantial flak, through hostility and abuse online, and legal and other threats offline. Because blogs rely heavily on the mainstream media as a source of information, the blogosphere effectively acts as a sixth mass-media filter.The significance of this analysis is that even in the absence of clear institutions that impart biased views and practices to the media, a system of filters can operate to reinforce powerful interests. This demonstrates that the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model is not conspiratorial, as its detractors have alleged. It also raises an important political issue. If the internet is not an inherently democratic technology, what can be done to rectify the situation? Clearly it is in the interests of society to ensure that all groups have a voice. The operation of the propaganda model in the blogosphere, where the influence of power and wealth is not immediately evident, shows that this will not naturally occur.
Two interesting pov's on automating dialogue in the weblog world.
Via library stuff comes a link to the National Technical Information Service - more information than you can shake a stick at.
Eldred v. Ashcroft is rapidly approaching its day before the Supreme Court. Here are some recent links on the case.
Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing has an interview with Howard Rheingold about his new book, Smart Mobs.
I looked at a number of phenomena that I am seeing today. Peer-to-peer sharing, for example, or peer-to-peer sharing of computing power as is done with SETI@home or Distributed.net. These are examples of groups of individuals voluntarily creating something collectively that’s much more powerful than what they could do individually. You see a kind of emergent property here. Napster had 70 million users. Intellectual property issues aside, the important thing about Napster was that people were able to create this kind of commons in which the act of sharing created more value for everyone. By the way in which all those millions of computer users shared their files, the act of finding something that you would find useful automatically made your resources available to others.
