Filed under: Uncategorized — identityvacuum @ 1:05 am
Yesterday we toyed around with the idea of online identity/ies – one or many? consistent or fractured? Dayna invoked YouTubers’ spiralesque discourse and the way some participants in quote unquote online communities seem eager to slip into the crowd, slip out of responsibility for one’s words. Mitch commented that he has frequently been impressed by how online communities are often very diligent self-policers, and the way rational vigilantes almost rise up, sphinx-like. And Rose pointed out that there is a sort of movement under way in which people who want to be taken seriously on the internet, often people whose professional identities are in some way connected to the internet-specific work they do, endeavor to build consistent identities across different kinds of spaces, in the quote unquote real world and on the internet. I’ve seen this, or what I think maybe she was referring to, and Rose correct me if you read this and you meant something else, but you did mention you were building a wiki. This one teacher-lady Vicky Davis aka coolcatteacher is a wikilover (http://coolcatteacher.wikispaces.com/) is an example of someone with a pretty unified identity, and if you go to the about page there is even a black and white posed studio picture of her from like 1990. Anyway, we moved on to a discussion of the internet as a space for communication and interaction versus the internet as a medium that discourages sociality.
This afternoon I was looking through some of the materials from earlier in the semester, more specifically the chapter on panoramic travel in The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. I found the last five pages or so especially fascinating, when he discusses how reading while traveling became a thing to do. It turns out that among a certain class of people – those who before would have traveled by stage coach with a small group of close friends before in “intense conversation and interaction” (p. 67), it became very a la mode to remark on the insufferable banality of modern travel. But what they really missed was the easy conviviality of their past selves. So they mopped up their disappointment with highbrow travelogues while annihilating space and time. Meanwhile the working folks who traveled third and fourth class with no compartments as in first and second class had nothing to compare rail travel to, and so they loved it and all piled in and had a great time and didn’t read.
Schivelbusch cites a contribution to the so-called medical congress of 1866 that declared “a new form of locomotion has so profoundly altered the traveler’s relations to each other” (p. 69). If you replaced locomotion with communication that sentence could have been written today. In this rich rich country we are made complacent by our objects, devices, and my – as I call it – my “little machine,” and so we all, all classes, absorb the excess capital.
I’ve listened several times to David Harvey’s lecture podcasts, one on globalization and the other on the neoliberal city. I find his talks and the articles posted on his website somewhat easier to parse than the superdense Condition of Postmodernity. That my sense of him is as a substative thinker, not unnecessarily obtuse, fairly profound, etc, I am pretty sure I need to read the book over a few times to offer any worthwhile critique. Also I’m getting sick…
But I’m interested in his use of a Robert Park quote. “The city is man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.”
I’ll try to keep this brief, so I can move along to the much more interesting task of responding to what all of you wrote in response to this week’s readings.
As I alluded to in class and in my first post, I began morphing into a proselytizer for Haraway as soon as I read the Cyborg Manifesto, so imagine my pleasure to stumble upon Rosenzweig’s reference to her student Paul Edward’s treatise on cyborg discourse in the Cold War era. And what’s more, we all have access to the full text through good old Mina Rees and ACLS. Very exciting. When I am able to read it (or some of it) I’ll report back.
In other news, I thought this week might be a good time to share a YouTube video I came across some time ago and used with my students last year.
Aside from the catchy tune, I think it is also a really useful tool to explain to students how web 2.0 is so different from the internet that preceded it. Michael Wesch does some other really interesting work with his Digital Ethnography students at Kansas State University.
I got this nifty new iPhone application that would, it said, allow me to blog from my phone. Fabulous! If it worked. Only I just composed my whole post and it neither saved nor posted. I have been defeated by my machine. Maybe I need to develop a closer relationship with it. Sigh. It will have to wait until the morning. Sorry folks.
E.P. Thompson, “Time Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” Past and Present 38 (1967), 56-97
Thompson’s the guy who articulated the notion of “time discipline.” Basically, what this amounts to is a reorganization of people’s observance of time as measured, quantified. He maps out for the reader the evolutions in social conceptions of this former *wild card,* so to speak -a process that roughly parallels the onset and acceleration of industrial capitalism. The outward manifestations of people’s (especially workers) labor habits underwent a veritable transformation, and in all likelihood people’s internal life also changed qualitatively.
There is no need to review familiar aspects of the transition to industrial capitalism that occurred in Western Europe, nor to reiterate familiar structuralist critiques (as in Marx) with the various social, psychological and physiological damages they wrought in rather dramatic fashion. Let is suffice to say that timepieces, once adopted by capitalists in the owner class to regulate the schedule and pace of human laborers at the machines that crowded *blasted* factories, became status symbols – like ugly designer handbags, the newest communication device, or wall-mounted HD televisions. This ugly nugget of information highlights the pathetic tendencies hidden (or not-so hidden) in each of us.
Hence Bourdieu’s assertion that in measuring the passage of time – that abstract entity that governs my actions with such vigor – is not only a useless pursuit but also an indication of my flawed character, what Bourdieu calls “diabolical ambition.”
The inescapability (first imposed from without, then from within) of the fetishized consumer item is depressing. It leads to a rather paradoxical (or just ironic?) state of affairs in which the instrument upon which the factory owners rely to antagonize their workers into pursuing maximum efficiency (read: PROFIT) also becomes a desirable consumer object. A nightmare vision indeed…
The well-known aphorism (a cliche? let’s have an up or down vote…) attributed to Ben Franklin is as true from the vantage point of the workers as from that of the management/ownership. <<Time is Money.>>
A transcript accompanies the audio file. I’ve not yet mastered the software so please excuse whatever glitches surely remain despite my best efforts.
I’ve read one of her books, entitled The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies (1999, 2004). Slated for publication in September 08 (this month!) is Teacher TV: Sixty Years of Teachers on Television, which Dalton co-authored with Laura Linder.In a brief promotional interview with Wake Forest University (where Dalton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications), she suggested that the newer book would examine some sensitive and nuanced portrayals of classroom work – as opposed to happy ending, ideologically neoliberal, reductivist Hollywood films – in particular the unequivocably fantastic fourth season of the HBO series The Wire.
I generally take my notes using Zoho Notebook, the amazingly prescient way to gather up notes and resources of all types. This is what I jotted while reading the excerpt from Marx. This one comes highly recommended. The program not the notes – they’re pretty mediocre!
I just read Steve’s response to Pablo’s post and found it instructive. Will report here for my own benefit and perhaps yours.
As for Marx (which you are all hopefully working your way through as I write this), he writes within a very different tradition than Hayles (though not so different from Haraway) and he’s confronting a very different world. But all three are struggling with the impact of technological change and transformation, which is turning upside down the older world and forms of human organization into which each was born. Each is trying to get at the root cause of these transformations and, in Marx’s and Haraway’s cases at least, trying to figure out ultimately how to transform it. One clue to reading Marx: pay attention to the footnotes and try to determine what is his attitude to the world he is writing about and why he uses the tone that he does.
With just one close reading under my belt, I’m counting myself a Haraway convert. Utterly charmed – by her assertion that the feminism of now must reject the discourse of dialectics (that polluted relic) in its quest for new relevance – and by her refusal to abide genre conventions (feeble contraint – a.k.a. the ethic of divide and conquer). Her language is poetry – she has banished impotent academicspeak – yes conceptual complexity is reified, not stifled. I have been preoccupied for long enough with the ways and means of style and clarity in scholarly writing – and this text is a revelation. Rereads are in order…
Attachments include a clean pdf, related resources.
