I almost never listen to the radio. When I do, it's almost always NPR. I used to be a good NPR listener, back when I was a commuter; I drove at least an hour a day, just enough to keep up on what my local station thought I should know. Now I walk or bike almost everywhere I go, and as a result, the radio has almost completely left my life. When I do drive, I usually listen to cds.
Except when I go visit my parents.
The minute I get behind the wheel of my dad's truck, I'm all over the radio, and in a way that diverges completely from my usual habits. Everything I'd usually avoid becomes immediately desirable: the country station, the classic rock station, the "hot hits of the '80s, '90s, and today." I've attributed this before to the ridiculousness of my dad's truck, but yesterday I got a text message from a friend that's making me rethink the question. She's home visiting her parents, and she was driving around in her mom's car, listening to christian rock.
It's not a form of regression, because these aren't the stations we loved as teenagers, they're the ones we rejected. So what is it? And why is it so pleasurable?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
historiography of/on/around this internet
“my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” (5)
In describing her vision of the future relations between information, theory, and theorists in terms of fantasy, seduction, and dreams, N. Katherine Hayles taps into an undercurrent of aspirational idealism that is as palpable in many contemporary examinations of the twentieth century’s evolving theories of information as in the documents and practices of the time. Most obvious in the work of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who describes, in glowing terms, the possibility that “information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the … emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself” (8) this tendency to romanticize the disembodied flow of information is also apparent within more intellectual histories. An emphasis on diffuse yet interconnected systems of information and collaboration can lead to a sensitive history that avoids valorizing a few great men at the expense of those around them, but it can also lead to a masked enactment of that very mistake.
In histories of the information age, two kinds of information sharing systems are foregrounded: the newly-invented media themselves (e.g. radio, television, and the internet), and the structure of relationships that led to their invention and dissemination. As Thomas Streeter reminds us in his history of American radio broadcasting, “the electronic media did not fall from the sky or emerge fully formed from a test tube; they are the product of knowledgeable people doing things in a concerted, organized way, with certain purposes in mind” (7). His formulation carefully acknowledges both the people and their collaboration, avoiding the trap that Hayles cautions against in her description of the “posthuman.” She uses this term as a kind of shorthand for a point of view that “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” (2), one she locates both in theories of cybernetics and in the literary and historical documents that surround those theories. Within the historical documents, “informational pattern” may refer to the networks of theoreticians and inventors who create the media, and “material instantiation” to the individual actors within those networks.
Extrapolated into the future dystopian world of Craig Baldwin’s “Spectres of the Spectrum,” that network of innovators, experimenters, programmers, and who-knows-who-else becomes a shadowy, ill-defined enemy, a media conspiracy called the “New Electromagnetic Order” that threatens to destroy the possibility of memory. In Baldwin’s vision of the future, embodied individualism is literally destroyed by this emphasis on interconnection; information sharing leads not to productive diversity, but to assimilation. Kurzweil’s singularity is Baldwin’s nightmare. In his version of the past, eccentric inventors like Nikola Tesla are portrayed as the naïve victims of a military-industrial complex that sought to assimilate their insights and inventions while denying them either formal or financial recognition. Here, this particular kind of inter-institutional information sharing is understood as a problematic necessity, contributing to a dominant hegemony rather than preventing it.
In competing histories of that same past, the collaboration between academic institutions, businesses, and the government is figured in much more utopian terms, as a kind of open-source ideal. In Why The American Century?, Olivier Zunz writes about an “institutional matrix of sponsoring universities, professional associations, churches, corporations, state and local governments, foundations, labor unions, and others” (26), a “diffuse national research establishment,” and a “radio empire connecting science, business, and the military,” as democratizing, practical influences that “defined new possibilities” and “stood in the way of special agendas” (17-19). Even the loaded phrase “military-industrial complex,” though used only twice in the entire history, is given unusually positive connotations, described as an institution that “Americans naturally credited … for serving democracy” (166).The individuals that Baldwin celebrates disappear into the institutions that sponsored them, as in Zunz’s brief history of radio, which lauds the Navy’s influence in the development of the medium, and among private-sector innovators, names only David Sarnoff, the former head of RCA whose rapid rise up the industrial ladder can be perhaps attributed more to his people skills than his technical ones. Though the informational pattern is the focus of Zunz’s analysis, one charismatic man is still credited with having created and maintained each instance of that pattern.
A single charismatic man also lies at the center of Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, a book that attempts to write equally about “[Stewart] Brand’s unique individual talents, the networking tactics he employed, and the increasing influence of the networks he helped build” (8). Though Turner argues that the “flourishing of nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary collaboration” he chronicles was first conceived within “a fabric of military-industrial-academic collaborations that has persisted to this day” (18), his primary focus is on the countercultural movements that spawned first the Whole Earth Catalog and then various online and business communities, culminating in Wired Magazine. These he describes as intentional communities, hand-picked groups of cultural figures that grew not out of an organic process of information exchange and cross-pollination, but out of the mind of one man: Stewart Brand. Though Turner nods to the fact that this emphasis on the network can function perversely as a hero-making rhetorical move, where “those who could most successfully depict themselves as aligned with the forces of information could also claim to be models of those forces” (260), this does not prevent him from being captivated both by Brand’s idealistic rhetoric and by the force of his singular personality.
Each of these histories struggles with the tension between historicizing the disembodied flow of information and recognizing the embodied persons who produce, transmit, engage, and utilize that information. Other writers, such as Lawrence Lessig, have focused on the material networks over which that information is transmitted, bringing physicality into their histories not by focusing on specific persons, but by focusing on the technical structures of information flow. Still, Lessig’s own cult of personality should not be ignored; within the community of those concerned with the future of the internet and copyright, he is undoubtedly more famous than most of the people he writes about. Like Stewart Brand, Lessig operates as a figurehead for a diffuse network of thinkers, capitalizing on his own personal charm and intelligence in an attempt to promote information systems that de-emphasize the individual. The paradox here is palpable, and potentially inescapable. Yet Hayles’s sense that we must attend to the complexity of embodiment is instructive here. Rather than understanding this as an imperative to isolate the individual from whom the rhetoric issues or who best embodies the ideals of a movement, we might take it as an enjoinder to attend to the multiplicity of ways in which the ideals are embodied, experiences ranging from active participants in these intellectual exchanges to the outliers who benefit from them.
In describing her vision of the future relations between information, theory, and theorists in terms of fantasy, seduction, and dreams, N. Katherine Hayles taps into an undercurrent of aspirational idealism that is as palpable in many contemporary examinations of the twentieth century’s evolving theories of information as in the documents and practices of the time. Most obvious in the work of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who describes, in glowing terms, the possibility that “information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the … emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself” (8) this tendency to romanticize the disembodied flow of information is also apparent within more intellectual histories. An emphasis on diffuse yet interconnected systems of information and collaboration can lead to a sensitive history that avoids valorizing a few great men at the expense of those around them, but it can also lead to a masked enactment of that very mistake.
In histories of the information age, two kinds of information sharing systems are foregrounded: the newly-invented media themselves (e.g. radio, television, and the internet), and the structure of relationships that led to their invention and dissemination. As Thomas Streeter reminds us in his history of American radio broadcasting, “the electronic media did not fall from the sky or emerge fully formed from a test tube; they are the product of knowledgeable people doing things in a concerted, organized way, with certain purposes in mind” (7). His formulation carefully acknowledges both the people and their collaboration, avoiding the trap that Hayles cautions against in her description of the “posthuman.” She uses this term as a kind of shorthand for a point of view that “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” (2), one she locates both in theories of cybernetics and in the literary and historical documents that surround those theories. Within the historical documents, “informational pattern” may refer to the networks of theoreticians and inventors who create the media, and “material instantiation” to the individual actors within those networks.
Extrapolated into the future dystopian world of Craig Baldwin’s “Spectres of the Spectrum,” that network of innovators, experimenters, programmers, and who-knows-who-else becomes a shadowy, ill-defined enemy, a media conspiracy called the “New Electromagnetic Order” that threatens to destroy the possibility of memory. In Baldwin’s vision of the future, embodied individualism is literally destroyed by this emphasis on interconnection; information sharing leads not to productive diversity, but to assimilation. Kurzweil’s singularity is Baldwin’s nightmare. In his version of the past, eccentric inventors like Nikola Tesla are portrayed as the naïve victims of a military-industrial complex that sought to assimilate their insights and inventions while denying them either formal or financial recognition. Here, this particular kind of inter-institutional information sharing is understood as a problematic necessity, contributing to a dominant hegemony rather than preventing it.
In competing histories of that same past, the collaboration between academic institutions, businesses, and the government is figured in much more utopian terms, as a kind of open-source ideal. In Why The American Century?, Olivier Zunz writes about an “institutional matrix of sponsoring universities, professional associations, churches, corporations, state and local governments, foundations, labor unions, and others” (26), a “diffuse national research establishment,” and a “radio empire connecting science, business, and the military,” as democratizing, practical influences that “defined new possibilities” and “stood in the way of special agendas” (17-19). Even the loaded phrase “military-industrial complex,” though used only twice in the entire history, is given unusually positive connotations, described as an institution that “Americans naturally credited … for serving democracy” (166).The individuals that Baldwin celebrates disappear into the institutions that sponsored them, as in Zunz’s brief history of radio, which lauds the Navy’s influence in the development of the medium, and among private-sector innovators, names only David Sarnoff, the former head of RCA whose rapid rise up the industrial ladder can be perhaps attributed more to his people skills than his technical ones. Though the informational pattern is the focus of Zunz’s analysis, one charismatic man is still credited with having created and maintained each instance of that pattern.
A single charismatic man also lies at the center of Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, a book that attempts to write equally about “[Stewart] Brand’s unique individual talents, the networking tactics he employed, and the increasing influence of the networks he helped build” (8). Though Turner argues that the “flourishing of nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary collaboration” he chronicles was first conceived within “a fabric of military-industrial-academic collaborations that has persisted to this day” (18), his primary focus is on the countercultural movements that spawned first the Whole Earth Catalog and then various online and business communities, culminating in Wired Magazine. These he describes as intentional communities, hand-picked groups of cultural figures that grew not out of an organic process of information exchange and cross-pollination, but out of the mind of one man: Stewart Brand. Though Turner nods to the fact that this emphasis on the network can function perversely as a hero-making rhetorical move, where “those who could most successfully depict themselves as aligned with the forces of information could also claim to be models of those forces” (260), this does not prevent him from being captivated both by Brand’s idealistic rhetoric and by the force of his singular personality.
Each of these histories struggles with the tension between historicizing the disembodied flow of information and recognizing the embodied persons who produce, transmit, engage, and utilize that information. Other writers, such as Lawrence Lessig, have focused on the material networks over which that information is transmitted, bringing physicality into their histories not by focusing on specific persons, but by focusing on the technical structures of information flow. Still, Lessig’s own cult of personality should not be ignored; within the community of those concerned with the future of the internet and copyright, he is undoubtedly more famous than most of the people he writes about. Like Stewart Brand, Lessig operates as a figurehead for a diffuse network of thinkers, capitalizing on his own personal charm and intelligence in an attempt to promote information systems that de-emphasize the individual. The paradox here is palpable, and potentially inescapable. Yet Hayles’s sense that we must attend to the complexity of embodiment is instructive here. Rather than understanding this as an imperative to isolate the individual from whom the rhetoric issues or who best embodies the ideals of a movement, we might take it as an enjoinder to attend to the multiplicity of ways in which the ideals are embodied, experiences ranging from active participants in these intellectual exchanges to the outliers who benefit from them.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
dear readers
I started this blog sometime in early 2008 (or maybe 2007, i'm not sure), because I needed a space in which I could talk about books. Being in grad school has made it not only redundant but also impossible; I could post the things I write for school here, but I really don't have the time or mental energy to write anything else, and I doubt my three readers have any interest in those things anyway. So I'm moving on, at least for now.
This should be more fun for you to read anyway.
I may post a link or two here from time to time (although don't hold your breath), but primary blogging activity will all happen in letter form. At least until graduation, which happens sometime in June. We'll see what happens after that.
This should be more fun for you to read anyway.
I may post a link or two here from time to time (although don't hold your breath), but primary blogging activity will all happen in letter form. At least until graduation, which happens sometime in June. We'll see what happens after that.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
hell yes. of course we can.
Tuesday night, at Jimmy’s, it felt like this. It was all jumping and yelling and crying and hugging and then me getting really drunk and emphatic about things. The crazy thing is: it still feels like that.
This morning, a man I don’t know greeted me on the street. People are friendly in the midwest. This happens a lot. But this time, he didn’t say “Hi.” He didn’t mumble “How’s it going?” He just looked right at me and said “Yes we can.”
My feelings are complicated, to be sure, by the defeat of Prop 8 in California. It breaks my heart in a way that's made all the more personally crushing for its resonance with my first political experiences, working (just barely unsuccessfully) to attempt to add GLBTQ folks to Maine's nondiscrimination law. But all the same, it feels good around here. Really, really good.
(And now I'm going to go back to your regularly scheduled never updating my blog ever.)
This morning, a man I don’t know greeted me on the street. People are friendly in the midwest. This happens a lot. But this time, he didn’t say “Hi.” He didn’t mumble “How’s it going?” He just looked right at me and said “Yes we can.”
My feelings are complicated, to be sure, by the defeat of Prop 8 in California. It breaks my heart in a way that's made all the more personally crushing for its resonance with my first political experiences, working (just barely unsuccessfully) to attempt to add GLBTQ folks to Maine's nondiscrimination law. But all the same, it feels good around here. Really, really good.
(And now I'm going to go back to your regularly scheduled never updating my blog ever.)
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
it's not what's in your pants that counts
Sure, Sarah Palin makes Edna St. Vincent Millay look like Mary Wollstonecraft, but (despite having a vagina) she’s not really the vice-presidential candidate who matters when it comes to feminism. Joe Biden didn’t just vote for the Violence Against Women Act, he wrote it.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
one of the boys
Edna St. Vincent Millay never described herself as a feminist, and the truth is that she said some pretty awful things about her sex. That said, she let her husband handle the housekeeping, and she never shied away from anything just because it was considered unwomanly. Thanks to her undeniable poetic talent, her strikingly expressive voice, and her unusual beauty, she was able to live a life that was impossible for most women at the time. The darling of not just the literary community but the whole country, she was celebrated as much for her girlish appeal as for her strong and individual writing, but in truth it was the contrast between the two that made her so irresistible.
A lush and a womanizer, living off money borrowed from her publisher and cuckolding husband with a wide assortment of lovers, even moving out of her home to live with a poet many years her junior, she spent the last years of her life in a state we’d decry in a man. But there’s something all too appealing about a woman who embraces her vices, who grasps wholeheartedly all the privilege her talent and circumstances afford her, who lives, and it’s hard to phrase this any other way, like a man. She was a pretty and brilliant bad girl, the kind of character you can’t take your eyes off, equal parts seductive and heartbreaking.
Heartbreaking not just because her story ends in tragedy, not just because she dies beloved but broke, addicted to opiates and drink, but also because of the first two things I mentioned. Despite being an inspiration to many young women and a hardworking advocate for young, gifted poets, she didn’t learn from her own example. Or perhaps she simply didn’t want to admit the fact that her clothes were discussed as much as her books, or that her libertine ways helped feed the national fascination that helped sell those books. It’s all conjecture, of course, but it’s hard not to imagine that being the subject of such constant examination must have been exhausting, must have made her realize the contrast between coverage of her life and work and that of her contemporaries. But she, so daring, so flirtatious, so ahead of her time, and so direct in so much of her correspondence, never told the world that more was required of her simply because she was a woman.
If it’s not obvious, I just finished reading her biography. The year it came out, everyone and their sister gave me a copy, because apparently it was the perfect gift for me. Despite the near-unanimity of the gift, it took me a while to get around to reading it. Instead, I dutifully thanked them, returned the extra copies, and shelved one copy to read later. Seven years later, I finally read it, and though I’m not generally into biographies, it actually was a pretty damn good gift. If you don’t know me (and if that’s the case, seriously, what are you doing reading my blog? You’re probably the first.), you may not be aware how easy it is for me to identify with a pretty, young, outspoken poet who grew up in Maine and likes to cause trouble. But it’s very easy, and that’s why I’ll treat her life as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. The moral: speak up. Even more.
A lush and a womanizer, living off money borrowed from her publisher and cuckolding husband with a wide assortment of lovers, even moving out of her home to live with a poet many years her junior, she spent the last years of her life in a state we’d decry in a man. But there’s something all too appealing about a woman who embraces her vices, who grasps wholeheartedly all the privilege her talent and circumstances afford her, who lives, and it’s hard to phrase this any other way, like a man. She was a pretty and brilliant bad girl, the kind of character you can’t take your eyes off, equal parts seductive and heartbreaking.
Heartbreaking not just because her story ends in tragedy, not just because she dies beloved but broke, addicted to opiates and drink, but also because of the first two things I mentioned. Despite being an inspiration to many young women and a hardworking advocate for young, gifted poets, she didn’t learn from her own example. Or perhaps she simply didn’t want to admit the fact that her clothes were discussed as much as her books, or that her libertine ways helped feed the national fascination that helped sell those books. It’s all conjecture, of course, but it’s hard not to imagine that being the subject of such constant examination must have been exhausting, must have made her realize the contrast between coverage of her life and work and that of her contemporaries. But she, so daring, so flirtatious, so ahead of her time, and so direct in so much of her correspondence, never told the world that more was required of her simply because she was a woman.
If it’s not obvious, I just finished reading her biography. The year it came out, everyone and their sister gave me a copy, because apparently it was the perfect gift for me. Despite the near-unanimity of the gift, it took me a while to get around to reading it. Instead, I dutifully thanked them, returned the extra copies, and shelved one copy to read later. Seven years later, I finally read it, and though I’m not generally into biographies, it actually was a pretty damn good gift. If you don’t know me (and if that’s the case, seriously, what are you doing reading my blog? You’re probably the first.), you may not be aware how easy it is for me to identify with a pretty, young, outspoken poet who grew up in Maine and likes to cause trouble. But it’s very easy, and that’s why I’ll treat her life as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. The moral: speak up. Even more.
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