Call for Papers

Call for Papers: ’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines‘

Symposium, 29 January 2010, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom.

****** Deadline for submission: 25 November 2009 ******

Sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s “Beyond Text” programme, http://www.beyondtext.ac.uk/SLI.shtml

’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines‘ is a free, interdisciplinary one-day symposium hosted by the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. It aims to bring together postgraduate students, academics and practitioners whose work relates to the mediation of memory. The symposium will be held Friday 29th January 2010.

Current postgraduate students are invited to submit abstracts of papers and presentations for one of three panel discussions, each based on an element of the title: Monuments, Machines and Madeleines. The symposium hopes to examine these interconnected aspects of the mediation of memory through a variety of academic approaches, including – but not limited to – anthropology, archaeology, archival studies, art history, cultural studies and cultural theory, geography, history, linguistics, literary studies and criticism, psychology, the sciences, sociology and theology. See below for more detail about the purpose of each panel and suggested themes for submission.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be emailed to m5symposium@googlemail.com by 25th November 2009. Applicants should include their names, details of their institution and phase of study, and indicate for which panel they consider their paper most relevant.

Panel 1: Monuments
We purposefully memorialise ourselves and others, our achievements and cataclysms, through the production and archiving of material structures and objects, including architecture, artworks, music, text, museums and archives. What roles do these objects and institutions fulfil within our personal, familial, social and cultural lives? What is their significance in narratives of the past—for example in memoirs, oral history interviews, or in traditional cultures and societies? This panel investigates both the relationship between the construction of memorial objects and modes of remembrance, and also the processes of creating, transmitting, storing and memorialising narratives through objects of memory.

Suggested themes:
- The postmodern memory institution
- Processes of commissioning
- Public and personal narratives of remembrance
- Monuments as sites of identity
- The archive as a site of power
- Remembering and forgetting

Panel 2: Machines
Plato’s accusation in The Phaedrus that the technology of writing, “will create forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, because they will not use their memories,” acknowledges that mediating technologies alter processes of remembering. Plato, of course, overlooks the benefits of such supplements to memory—the irony of such a statement is that we are only aware Plato said this because he wrote it down. Similar controversies abound regarding newer technologies such as photography, video, phonography and the Web. In a highly technologised society, where gadgetry is fetishised and innovation relentless, such memory devices will continue to proliferate. This section of the symposium investigates the effects of the delegation of memory to machines —technologies in a larger sense — upon human experience and its consequences for our personal and public past.

Suggested themes:
- Duplication and distribution: the ephemerality of the digital
- Machines as metaphors for memory
- Capture and loss: the future limits of memory machines
- The status of oral testimony
- Authenticity: media as witness

Panel 3: Madeleines
Proust’s madeleine cake famously triggers his narrator’s memory, involuntarily inducing a sudden and intense recollection of a specific time and place through associations with sensory experience. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, all can transport us instantly. The vivid, uncanny memories connected with such sensory triggers are produced entirely through chance associations and as such differ from intended memorial objects. This element of the symposium explores how such sensory encounters and chance remembrances inter-relate as well as the wider ways in which unintentional sites of memory participate in the constitution of our lifeworld.

Suggested themes:
- Psychology, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, Sensory and synaesthetic experience
- Revelation and epiphany
- Film, music, literature as memory trigger
- Memories of place: architecture and landscape
- Unintended and accidental sites of memory
- Introspective recollection
- The capture of sensory experience

Stephen Fry: The internet and Me

Stephen Fry was talking technology on Radio 4 yesterday, and some of the highlights have been transcribed here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7926509.stm

Since Fry's probably more responsible than anyone else for taking Twitter over the tipping point and into the popular consciousness (in the UK at least), his views are worth having. Among his more piercing points, he talks of web snobbery, and in particular the platform migration of early adopters as the great unwashed swarm in (FB, is for example, now "low rent").

Interestingly, he defends txt spk, pointing out that when paper and ink were expensive in the 17/18C, words were at a premium: "letters were, as they say, crossed. You'd look at them writing horizontally and then there'd be vertical lines all the way down and round the margins. And 'your' is 'YR', you know just as it is in a text. It's exactly the same point - you're compressing." I might also say that compressed language allows quicker expression; literally less time for the word to get from the brain to the page, which helps keep the flow of thought. See also, Pepys' diaries written in shorthand - when the pen was the primary mode of inscription it was the cheapest and easiest way to get words out.

And here, on the metaphysics of presence, he talks of being able to have a proper conversation by email because all the bodily interaction is absent: "As I talk to you now, and as one talks, especially to strangers, all the terrible problems of class, differences in education, race and gender all have their part to play in the embarrassment of real life conversation, but the moment one's let loose with a keyboard or a pen you can express yourself properly." The writer A.S. Byatt made a similar point at the Digital Lives conference I attended last month. There she said that she preferred to give interviews via email, because there “you can have a real conversation.” All of which perhaps flies in the face of Dreyfus' worries about telepresence and the absence of bodies; maybe I need to read Derrida after all, which is something I'd been trying to avoid.

Later, a riposte to the dystopians: "I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn't congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel - about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead."

Good stuff.

Links, links, links

1. Another from AlertBox, this time tips on Blog Usability:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

2. An article from the NY Times, 2002 "TECHNOLOGY; A Rift Among Bloggers" about the reaction of the "veteran" bloggers (Kottke et al) to the insurgence of "war bloggers". Kottke compares it to hating seeing your favourite band go overground (''It's like being the punk-rock fan who was into punk rock before everyone else") - a tone which certainly comes through in Blood's book (which I'm rereading - a posting on that to follow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10BLOG.html?ex=1024286400&en=e399bdc149d15532&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

3. An online article by psychologist John M. Grohol, entitled "Psychology of Blogs (Weblogs): Everything Old is New Again" - talks a little about the analogue, but not as useful as title suggests as he talks more about the similarities between blogs and online mailinglists than anything else. Also has links to other early articles about the psychology of blogging by the same author - not the most heavyweight of insights, useful though ...

http://psychcentral.com/blogs/blog_new.htm

4. An article by Travers, Uni. Washington, entitled "Blog Invasion! What Are They? Where Did They Come From?". A good source of references.

http://homepage.mac.com/dtraversscott/Academics/BlogHistory/index.html

5. Nielman Reports is a (student?) journal hosted at Harvard, looks like lots of articles about blogging as it relates to journalism:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports.aspx

6. Article from Wired announcing the demise of the blog in the face of Twitter, FB, etc. So soon?!

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay

7. Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" 2008, figures and analysis:

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

More links

Another few links from Jakob Nielsen at Alertbox:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Summary: "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."

Which, given the supposedly participatory, inclusive power of these sorts of tools, is pretty damning - seems to be a new hierarchy, just a little more distributed. Includes some good stuff about improving usability and incentivizing the process to get more people involved.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Summary: How people read websites: "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html

Summary: "Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned." Talks about user studies involving the reading of blogs.

"Primates on Facebook" (Economist article, 26 Feb 09)

Just to archive this link: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13176775

It's to an Economist article which quotes findings that although the average number of friends on FB is 120, the intimate circles of friends people are regularly, actively, in contact (Men=7, Women=10) is no bigger than pre-social-networking:

Quote: "people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

Social networking as social broadcasting...

Initial thoughts on Langdon Winner’s “constitution” of sociotechnical order

Winner’s neo-luddite approaches to technology are quite refreshing as an antidote to the cyberbole of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, etc. I don’t think I agree with him, but his point of view is certainly worth airing. In the “Whale and the Reactor,” he proclaims: “Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation of a free society” (20). On pp. 95-6, he elaborates:

“Dreams of instant liberation from centralized social control have accompanied virtually every important new technological system introduced during the past century and a half. The emancipation proposed by decentralist philosophers as a deliberate goal requiring long, arduous social struggle has been upheld by technological optimists as a condition to be realized simply by adopting a new gadget. This strange mania ... is alive and well among those who celebrate the advent of the computer revolution.”

Given that these comments were made in 1986, when the net was limited to universities and the Web was yet to come, and thus before the explosion of Web2.0 type stuff, they will now seem either utterly prescient or slightly misguided, dependent on your attitude as to how revolutionary blogs, etc. are (i.e. luddite or technophile?). The answer, of course will lie somewhere in between, but for the moment, I just wanted to get down a few initial thoughts on some solid claims Winner makes on pp. 47-8 of that book, about the nature of the “distinctive institutional patterns” he sees as having been created by modern industrial production over the last couple of centuries. This “de facto ... constitution of sorts,” (a “sociotechnical order”) and the way it relates to relationship to concepts of “membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice,” is presented by the identification of five primary traits, and I wanted to examine each of these briefly (and only as a first pass!) in relation to the modern Web environment. Basically, the thinking is, that these are five testable claims about an established order, which if the current “revolution” is really revolutionary, should be substantially effected or transformed by this new technology.

1. The first of Winner’s claims is that “technologies of transportation and communication ... facilitate control over events from a single center or small number of centers. Largely unchecked by effective countervailing influences, there has been an extraordinary centralization of social control in large business corporations, bureaucracies, and the military. It has seemed an expedient, rational way of doing things. Without anyone having explicitly chosen it, dependency upon highly centralized organizations has gradually become a dominant social form.”

RESPONSE: Certainly the Web has assisted in the the production of information/comment outwith those established centres, promoting self-publication and new modes of political discussion. Wikipedia, which I do think is a truly wonderful example of the potential of this technology, opens the knowledge-base of the encyclopedia to anyone with a laptop, web browser and web connection, self-regulated by its own community. Political blogs allow scrutiny of events like the Rather controversy which the mainstream media might have glossed over (the potential effect of which is easily – and often – overstated, of course). But hasn’t the Web also been a source of further growth in the means of control of those pre-exisiting centres (I’m thinking of new means of government snooping introduced by legislation like the Patriot Act in the US), also the fact that Google, by being so important to the functioning of these distributed centres, has itself become a fearfully large central organization. Maybe the positioning of the centres is changing, the organizations evolving, but when we look at the current battle over the T&Cs of ownership of content currently raging around Facebook, we might wonder whether we are becoming more or less centralized...

2. Secondly, Winner identifies “a tendency for new devices and techniques to increase the most efficient or effective size of organized human associations. Over the past century more and more people have found themselves living and working within technology-based institutions that previous generations would have called gigantic. Justified by impressive economies of scale and, economies or not, always an expression of the power that accrues to very large organizations, this gigantism has become an accustomed feature in the material and social settings of everyday life.”

RESPONSE: The Web definitely does not buck this trend. From home-working, distance-learning, etc. (and regardless of the efficacy of these), we can see that the need for physical proximity to the organization is lessened, hence the number of people who can be subsumed into the organization is increased (at least potentially). Indeed, this ability to increase the efficiency and effective size of associations, is often cited as one of the most powerful aspects of the Web...

3. “Third is the way in which the rational arrangement of sociotechnical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchical authority. Legitimized by the felt need to do things in what seems to be the most efficient, productive way, human roles and relationships are structured in rule-guided patterns that involve taking orders and giving orders along an elaborate chain of command.”

RESPONSE: Here, using the Wikipedia example, we might on the face of it see an organization without a hierarchy, in the traditional sense – but who is actually adding to it? Certainly not most of the people who use it, so is there hierarchy there? Again, using the example of the political blogs, are they challenging the traditional power structures in a substantially different form from the traditional letter to the MP or Newspaper? Is the hierarchy of the working environment being changed through the use of collaborative media? Hmmm ...

4. “Fourth is the tendency of large, centralized, hierarchically arranged sociotechnical entities to crowd out and eliminate other varieties of human activity. Hence, industrial techniques eclipsed craftwork; technologies of modern agribusiness made small-scale farming all but impossible; high-speed transportation crowded out slower means of getting about. It is not merely that useful devices and techniques of earlier periods have been rendered extinct, but also that patterns of social existence and individual experience that employed these tools have vanished as living realities.”

RESPONSE: Well, firstly, email/blogging/social-networking has perhaps impacted on traditional forms of communication like letter, phone, etc. As a nice example, a friend of mine, Catriona, recently (4th March) posted a FB status wondering, “if facebook is really that great. whatever happened to picking up the phone?", to which another friend, Chris (5th March), responds with humour:

“That's a bit unfair to the old F-book, methinks... I mean, when was the last time YOU just rang somebody out of the blue?? These days, as I've come to understand it, that's just poor etiquette. It's kind of like complaining: "Whatever happened to sending carrier pigeons?" Answer: "It's just not the done thing anymore." I mean, confronted with a carrier pigeon--or a telephone call for that matter--I'm just not sure I'd know what to do!” [NOTE: I’ll check that it’s ok to use this with both people involved – if not, I’ll remove it].

But we are all still keeping in touch in some manner, aren't we?! And in McLuhan’s sense of “retrieval,” can’t we see the return of some features of communication that were lost in previous modes – for example, instant messaging and social networking is much more immediate than a letter, which retrieves some of the immediacy of face-to-face conversation which was lost while we were tethered to the letter as a primary means of written communication over distance. The Internet, in fact, remediates many media to retrieve some characteristics lost in their analogue modes (e.g., youtube is television but with the instant right to reply, broadcast becomes less one-directional). So I would probably assent that the Web does propagate this tendency in one sense, but in remediating so many other media, it perhaps retrieves more than it obsolesces. Further, I don’t think we’re led blindly into losing these “living realities,” I believe we accept losses and gains in a flux of negotiation based on costs and benefits to our primary concerns – to use the example of Paul Levinson in “Digital McLuhan,” the invention of the window to let light into buildings might have led to a loss of privacy, but we soon invented curtains!

5. Finally, in what has become a rather long posting, Winner advises as the fifth attribute of this de facto sociotechnical constitution: “the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations exercise power to control the social and political influences that ostensibly control them. Human needs, markets, and political institutions that might regulate technology-based systems are often subject to manipulation by those very systems.”

RESPONSE: Winner gives the example of advertising as one means by which organizations sway opinion to suit them, but we might also include lobby groups, etc. Here, the big corps of the Web and computing in general (Microsoft, Google, et al) certainly don’t seem any more averse to using these means to their own ends than traditional organizations. If we look at the content of the Web environment, though, does increased potential for public scrutinization of organizations and public-sphere conversation outside of traditional big mainstream media, increase the scope for us to recognize and react to these influences? Maybe ...

The Onion Review's Latest Sony Gadget

After yesterday's treatise (which on reflection probably overran the boundaries of what is comfortable to read in this electronic form), I thought I'd post something for fun - as a first attempt to expand the function of this blog. I found this video, created by the spot-on "The Onion" on Kevin Arthur's blog at Question Technology.

Truly magnificent, but WARNING, CONTAINS OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE!!!


Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Sh*t That Doesn't F**king Work

The Charlton Heston Question

Some ideas in my head, wanted to get them somewhere safer (more permanent?) than the flow and flux of my (unreliable) mental equipment, so here we go.

I’ve been thinking on the question of the neutrality of technology, which is a question I think needs to come near the top of my thesis argument. Can we ask questions as to the inherent morality of given technologies, disregarding particular instances of their use? Thus, the title of this posting comes in a fashion after McLuhan, who responds to the suggestion that individual modern technologies are neither good nor bad: “That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say ... “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11)

I’ve been thinking through this example, still used by the National Rifle Association in the US to counter those who seek to limit the availability of guns to civilians in the form of “guns don’t kill people, people do” (hence “the Charlton Heston Question, “ in honour/parody of the late president/spokesman of the NRA). I think it is nonsense to talk only of the particular uses of technologies and disregard the inherent ways in which they work on and shape the ways we relate to the world, our very psycho-social fabric. The very fact that we create guns at all, regardless of their eventual use, is, I think, instructive as to human nature.

For McLuhan, of course, mediating technologies are never neutral, they implicitly shape the messages they carry, in much the way a given metaphor transforms (and thus biases) our understanding of a concept – example: “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, which might tend to make us see ourselves as actors spouting words karaoke style from a predetermined script, but neglects to tell us, then, who the writer, the director, the audience, even the lighting-guy, is (presumably they’re all God, but then this means that this metaphor is implicitly shaping our view of the world as one created by a creator, who wants to watch over us, who approves or not, etc.) – thus we see the world in a novel way, a little differently, see common objects from new aspects, and hence we come to understand it a little better. Ok, so this is a good thing BUT we must heed the baggage and biases, and so iterate the ways in which that media (or metaphor) implicitly shapes the way in which we see the world.

Which is a somewhat similar starting point (though they reach different conclusions) to Heidegger, whose “The Question Concerning Technology,” (In: "Basic Writings", London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, pp.287-317) seeks to address the essence of technology in relation to human existence. There, he posits the view of technology as neutral to be the instrumental/anthropological definition. Thus “According to ancient doctrine”, he advises, “the essence of a thing is considered to be what the things is” (288) and through this definition, we arrive at two statements: “One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity” (288). In these terms, technology is neutered, reduced to nothing more than a human activity pursuant to particular ends.

For Heidegger, this “uncannily correct” (288) definition does not, of course, tell the whole story. For him, in the terms of his earlier work, this would be the ontic explanation, correctly identifying states of affairs but not telling us what it is to be in this relationship. We have privileged ourselves, as the efficient cause of the coming to be of technology, at the neglect of Aristotle’s other three causes: material, formal, final. The material a technology is made of, the particular form it takes, and its telos, that which gives it its cultural bounds as a technology for a purpose, are all responsible for, all at play in the “bringing-forth” of, a given technology.  

Thus the potentialities of the stuff and structure of given materials, along with (and most importantly for Heidegger) the cultural context into which that technology is to be employed, are all necessary causes alongside that of the efficient cause. Given this, in the example of the coming to be of a sacrificial chalice, the silversmith is the efficient cause, “not at all because he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if it were the effect of a making ... The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted. To consider carefully is in Greek legein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to bring forward into appearance. The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacred vessel’s bringing-forth and subsistence take and retain their departure.” (291, author’s italics)

So technology is an occasion of “revealing” rather than creation, bring out of concealment into unconcealment, and this, if right has big implications for our understanding of what it is to be the cause of something, as inventor, creator or author. If we aren’t in full control of the coming to be of technology, then the instrumental/anthropological definition is deficient because it neglects the ways in which our technologies act on us, the way we are influenced to bring them to be. Heidegger goes on to argue that our true relation to technology is one of the enframing (Gestell) of nature, challenging it as a “standing-reserve” of resources to be plundered, and that this has a negative impact on our existence. I don’t want to tackle that can of worms just now though, rather just use the first part of his argument (can I just use the first part without being bound to accept the latter? – I think so, but maybe not) as an illustration of why the view of technologies as neutral is deficient, to demonstrate that human intention is not the sole author of technology, and to iterate the reasons why we must attend to the ways in which they are working on us as well as us on them.  

For Langdon Winner, in “The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,” technologies have political consequences:

“The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.” (28-9)

Thus, he proposes that the neutral view of technology blinds us to an essential matter of enquiry: “we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.... If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.” (25)

All of which (I think) I agree with, and leads back into my research, where the definition of materiality I gave in my last post (“materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content”) can be, perhaps, be sharpened into the research question:

“What are the material differences between analogue and digital forms, and in what logically and temporally prior ways do these differences hold the potential to effect and affect creation, consumption, and curation of content?”

As an example of the sorts of questions this is trying to pose: what does it mean that I can put a hyperlink here to something which may or may not be related to this piece, how does that effect my writing this, your (if you’re there) reading of it (did you immediately link through to it, or if you didn’t, will you ignore it now that I’ve made it questionable whether its even connected, will you even come back to read the rest of this if you do click on it?), and the effects on the archive (e.g. if this blog were being archived, would that page now be considered part of this work?). How does this sort of interlinking of information affect us? Is there anything in the truisms that concentration suffers, depth of thought sacrificed for a life of surfing/scratching the surface? Are we all living essentially post-modern lives on the net, lives of a random flow of unrelated shreds of information, a loss of traditional narrative form for one where any casual interconnection is taken to be symbolic of the larger web of meaning(lessness)? Etc, etc, etc. Wild speculation at the end, I know, but that’s where all this stuff is eventually heading ...

 

Apples

I've been reflecting this morning on the ways in which the materiality of blogs, as opposed to paper letters and diaries, effects and affects their use (for the writer, reader and archive). Investigation of this is going to be a major part of my thesis, and I've been trying to figure out how best to frame that question. I came up with the following:

materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content

I think that this distinction definitely has legs, and it'll then allow materiality to be the axis concept for discussion of how the way we write acts on what we write (and vice versa?). As is the way of things, though, I then began to think further into this content/carrier distinction, and think although its workable is problematic. I thought I'd jot down my reflections on the nature of these problems quickly, so as not to forget, viz:

If I go to the shops for a bag of apples and bring them home, I’ll likely do so in a carrier bag. What, then, is the carrier and what is the content? We would likely agree that the carrier bag, and the bag the apples were packaged in were the carriers and the apples the content. Hence, this packaging is the medium through which the apples were delivered back to my house – to say nothing for the moment of the time and space (pavement, bus, shop) I travelled through to retrieve them.

But what if I peel the apple before I eat it? Is the skin then just carrier, or is it still content? More, what if I didn’t want the apple per se, but was just collecting apple pips so I could plant a tree in my garden? I would argue that then the flesh of the apple becomes the carrier, and only the pips the content. To problematize further, what if, all along, I didn’t actually like apples at all, and only bought them so I could paint a bag of apples, then we would surely say that the bag itself becomes content.

Hence, the carrier/content distinction becomes blurred into a question of intentionality. My subjective desires in buying the apples become central to the question of what is content. The mediation (carrier) can itself become content, and the content become mediation. This, I believe, is similar to the distinction of Marshall McLuhan between figure and ground. It is not just that carrier works on content and vice versa; the two interact so inextricably that they become one another; hence the impossibility of objectification except in the dynamically constructed flow of the subjective life.

What all this means, I don't know. It maybe just muddies the water further ...

Gender differences

Today I’ve been happily ploughing through “Beyond Nostalgia: Aging and Life-Story Writing,” by Ruth Ray. It provides an excellent review of theories of life-writing, and I’ve harvested much grist for my mill. Among much other good stuff, there is an illuminating stretch of writing on gender difference in life-writing.

Ray notes that “men’s writing often takes the form of a continuous, public narrative or ‘autobiography proper,’ while women’s writing takes the form of private diaries, letters, notebooks, journals, and memoirs—discontinuous forms consistent with the fragmented, interrupted nature of women’s material lives.” (p24)

Ray quotes anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s reflections on gender differences in basic functioning in the world, where women, in contrast to men, are more “interested in the notion of reflexivity, of looking inward as well as outward.” She goes onto quote Margo Culley, who studied American diaries from 1764 to the present: “Those [diaries] kept by men, in particular, record a public life or are imbued with a sense of public purpose or audience.... Women diarists in particular wrote as family and community historians. They recorded in exquisite detail the births, the deaths, illnesses, visits, travel, marriages, work, and usual occurrences that made up the fabric of their lives.” Ray tallies the existence of such performative gender roles with the fact that women are more likely to keep personal journals than men. She quotes one study of 75 college students which found that only one male (of 35) kept a diary/journal of their own, while among the 40 women, the number was close to eighty percent, and that “young men were also much more likely to evaluate the genre of journals negatively than women.” (p13-4)

Given that the Herring, Scheidt, Wright and Bonus study, “Weblogs as a bridging genre,” found that most blogs (70.4%) were of the personal journal type, and that females were more likely to keep this more reflective, inward-looking type of blog, while the more outward looking filters and knowledge-logs were “created almost exclusively by adult males,” this is very significant for my investigation of blogging practices. Is would seem clear that gender (either through nature or nurture) largely influences the use of blogs as much as diaries/journals. Of course I’d known that gender differences would be an important point of investigation, but this perhaps makes clear how important ...

If I reflect on my own keeping this blog, I find that I’m using it mostly as a k-log, putting down thoughts, etc, related to my research. Even when writing reflectively (as now), my talk is confined very squarely to what I think about my research; I’ve not discussed myself yet, nor do I think I will. I think I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I’ve not even really reflected on the progress of the PhD per se, although it’s early days of course. This, I suppose, is down to purpose of use. This blog has one (i.e., to reflect on blogging) and thus to stray outside of that domain of discourse, to start talking about personal feelings or events, would maybe feel like a breach of the rules. I’ve set those rules of course, and no-one is really listening anyway, so you could say it doesn’t matter, but those boundaries are an essential part of my keeping this blog. I think that if this were a depository for just any old thought, nothing would ever go into it due to a lack of focus. The deal is that I write about blogging, not myself.

I do wonder if I would want to make my own personal feelings a matter of public record. I think I would be most likely to do so only if anonymized, but then can’t see myself doing that if I can’t keep a diary anyway. Hmmm... Is all this down to gender? Hmmm ...

Typecasting

Having been reading a bit of Derrida and Kittler on the ways in which the technologies we use to inscribe our thoughts also shape them (i.e. "Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts" as Nietzsche had it), I was intrigued to come across the blogging phenomena called typecasting, where writers compose on typewriters before scanning their work and uploading it (example).

Is it the case that the mechanisation of the production of the word might also produce an experientially different relationship with language, both for author and reader, and thus change the way language is used? If so, this has obvious implications for blogging. As I compose this I find myself typing fluidly, I'm trying to get the words out and down (down where? the screen?) as quickly as possible, and to keep up a flow of thoughts. I can do this because I know I write in a revisionist medium, always above the safety-net of the delete key. Were I writing on a typewriter (assuming I didn't have any tip-ex), or by hand, would I be so cavalier in spitting the words out? Would it not be more deliberative, and how would this affect the content and the style of this writing?

Phenomenologically, each (handwritten/typewritten/digitally written) word affects us in different ways. The handwritten word, a self-evident testimony of effort, the proof of a body pressing the pen to the page. The handwritten word is taken to denote identity. It signifies at once authenticity (the autograph) and personality (graphology) and is presumed to represent (portray/betray) the person, link us intimately to them.

The typewriter, in comparison, bangs the words to into the paper with mechanistic anonymity. As Kittler would have it, a mid-point between creation and publication. Heidegger once questioned whether one would countenance writing a love-letter on a typewriter, and that underlying tension still seems valid. We privilege the personal.

Except that the typewriter itself is now a relic; in comparison to word processors, it demands an unnecessary expenditure of effort. The performative aspect, where revisions (crossing-out, or using tip-ex) will remain visible, stands in contrast to this digital writing, where a wrong key stroke is easily erased by a dab of the delete key, where revision is a central part of the act of writing (for me, at least). If forced to write in a performative manner, would my psychological processes be different? Would each word have to pass through the hands of some internal censor before being committed to the page? How would what I am now writing be different? More structured? More coherent? But then, this blog identifies itself as a notebook anyway, would I strive for coherence in a notebook? What if that notebook would be visible to others? Hmmm ...

The blog in time

Following a supervision meeting this afternoon, the question floating around my head at the moment is how to link the temporalised "self", with the intention to blog. In writing this blog, for example - and to ignore for the moment the possibility of communicating (to temporarily quarantine the "other") - I produce an inscription and thus exteriorise what was heretofore interior (thoughts, ideas). Insodoing I thus allow myself to reflect on those thoughts in a different way. I gain distance from those thoughts, can see them in the cold light of the exterior world, examine them more "objectively". This reflection, then, relates to the present self. The intention to blog allows the present self reflection on itself.

Clearly, though, the blog is a memory object also. As I create these strings of words, whether consciously or not, I also open the possibility of memorialisation. My future self then has access to these reflections; it'll be able to remember (parts of) what it was like to exist at an earlier time, and in the similarities and differences exposed be able to explore what it is to be that person identified as "me". So (and whether consciously or not), I serve both my present and future selves in writing this, through reflection and memorialisation. To what extent, though, am I also serving my past self?

Perhaps, in laying those words down, in reflecting on who I am, I'm also betraying where I've come from. Perhaps I'm intentionally laying down memories, eulogising, reconstructing the past - and perhaps insodoing I'm idealising, mitigating, explaining, mourning. Perhaps the past self, from whence we've been thrown (in Heidegger's parlance), is always the subject of this life-writing, of this reflection. Maybe it's the Proustian search of lost time which lies behind any such activity; at the very least, the mourning of that (now past) lost time which prompts me to exteriorise my thoughts now, so at least some of the "now" doesn't get lost.

There are lots of perhapses there, but then these words themselves form only initial ideas of course, a train of thought, an exteriorisation of some things that have been on my mind. And quite rambling they are too ... perhaps a little too close to comfort to other post-modern musings. Do I want them to be published (broadcast? - are these only metaphors anyway?)? Well, it’s too late now, here they go ...