Synthesis

Dehlia — As a tangent from your tangent about the material turn, here’s Jonathan Sterne’s essay, “What Do We Want?” “Materiality!” “When Do We Want It?” “Now!”  ( http://sterneworks.org/Sterne--Materiality.pdf )

Maybe we could use it as a survey in a course on technology someday...

Ed and David — in the same essay as an aside Jonathan makes some comments about forms of writing (e.g. book, journal article), and event (e.g the seminar, or music lesson) :

"Geoff Bowker’s materialist and somewhat scary analysis of our own situation in the production of knowledge is quite telling. As he surveys the every-grow- ing glut of journal articles, each of which has a smaller and smaller audi- ence, he sees: “We are clearly not creating a species of knowledge-power appropriate to the issues that we face. We are producing knowledge that is predicated on and replicates mass production and mass consumption. Our information infrastructure, willy-nilly, is the fold in the Moebius strip that permits the world to seem as society writ large” (chapter 5, this book). The declining relevance of the journal article as the materialization of schol- arly knowledge, and the uncertain struggle to find alternatives, demands a certain patience, since if there is a new form of knowledge coming, it hasn’t yet arrived. Bowker finds some hope in massive collaborations and new database logics. For my part, I retain some confidence in the resiliency of both the essay form and the codex, which have thrived for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the journal article seems to undergo transformations every two or three decades.

Boczkowski and Siles turn more hopefully to pedagogy as a solution, get- ting students to work across disciplinary categories. If I still believe in the book and the essay, I still believe in the seminar even more. I am experi- menting with disallowing rehearsals of “technological vs. cultural deter- minism” arguments in my classes and exams. It’s harder than it sounds, especially when the rhetoric of techno-utopianism is alive and well in the commercial world and still operates in the truth spaces of journalism and online discussion. It’s also difficult given how much this comes up in cultural analyses of technology of whatever stripe. But if we want to get beyond the argument, our students stand a better chance of succeeding than we do, so it’s up to us to stop trying to reproduce it, even as a historical curiosity. At the graduate level, my seminar on the historiography of new media in winter 2013 takes Boczkowski’s approach to the extreme, though my model is less the social scientific diagram (with its quadrants) than the record collection with its eclecticism. Students will select the topic of their semester’s research at the beginning of the term and each week retrieve a primary source relevant to it. Each week, they will also read a distinc- tive work of media historiography (mostly books, since that is still the core traffic in the field). They will then write about their artifact in the style of the author, which requires them to determine what the important stylistic aspects of the work really are. At the end of the term, the students can then revise these short papers into something longer, synthesized into some- thing approaching their own authorial style. The approach is meant to encourage openness to other ways of writing and thinking, to free students of the pressure to take positions as their own against the positions of oth- ers, and to challenge them to reverse-engineer the work of other scholars so that they get a better sense of what’s actually involved in the interface between writing and thought. The pedagogy imposes some strict limits and demands for imitation (at first) to encourage creativity by freeing students of the demand for creativity in the places we usually look for it (choice of object, originality of voice, etc). It is drawn from how musicians learn their instruments: when I wanted to learn to play a good bass line, my teachers had me learn to imitate what the best bassists did. I either succeeded and incorporated their techniques with my own, or failed and came up with something original-sounding in the process.”