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The Knack … and How to Forget It: An Inquiry into Consumption Deskilling « Generation Bubble

Ersatz engagement IS numbing — from sports on television (except, perhaps, with a crowd of fans who share your passion) to pre-cooked meals.

The entire purpose of a true liberal arts education is to awaken us to the pleasures of understanding and appreciating that which takes time to accustom one’s self to: fine art; good writing; critical thinking. In a democracy, the encouragement of laziness by the purveyors of goods and slickly-phrased buzz concepts for the public’s consumption and regurgitation (witness the health care mobs) threatens not only personal satisfaction, but the vitality of our government itself.

via The Knack … and How to Forget It: An Inquiry into Consumption Deskilling « Generation Bubble.

A comment by a reader on a post about consumption and deskilling.  An interesting argument in the context of impending liberal arts curriculum upending at my school.

More interesting to me though, in terms of moving liberal arts forward, is this argument of the blog post’s author, about craft:

Resisting the deskilling process means giving up pleasure that we experience as real — the pleasure of eating Doritos is no less real than the pleasure of making enchiladas from scratch. There are many reasons to prefer the latter form of pleasure, but those reasons are not necessary hedonic — it may not be more intensely pleasurable to exhibit our skills than to passively engorge ourselves on consumer goods. Personal pleasure, the invocation of quality, cannot be the basis for ethics here; in fact it’s in the interests of a consumer system to make it appear that it is. Individualist ideology finds such rich and compelling expression throughout the various discourses of American society, from advertising to taste-based criticism to democratic politics, in part because it echoes the consumerist premise that life is mainly a matter of detecting quality in the marketplace. Reskilling consumption cannot be about teaching people to strive for the “good things” in life. Rather, it will probably have to champion a different form of identity altogether that supplants connoisseurship and the curatorial identity with that of the craftsperson, wholly engrossed in their work and more or less indifferent to the world.

Craft, the joy of making and using, is what, for me, techne and new media are all about.

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2009 08 30 blips
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draft management

Gina Trapani’s post on Flashbake led me to Cory Doctorow’s discussion:

Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog’s RSS feed (I’ve been characterizing this as “Where am I, what’s it like there, and what am I thinking about?”). It also records your computer’s uptime. For a future version, I think it’d be fun to have the most recent three songs played by your music player.

The effect of this is to thoroughly — exhaustively — annotate the entire creative process, almost down to the keystroke level. Want to know what day you wrote a particular passage? Flashbake can tell you. Want to know what passage you wrote on a given day? That too. Plus, keeping track of my todo.txt file means that I get a searchable database of all the todo items I’ve ever used, with timestamps for their appearance and erasure.

Wow.  Won’t say much about syncing the weather and all that to one’s drafts (this seems interesting on one level, on another level seems like stuff only interesting to literary scholars a hundred years in the future who are desparately searching for a dissertation topic not already covered) I’ve been using subversion for a little over a year to do something similar.  While Cory doesn’t like having to manually commit changes to the repository, I love this feature and is exactly why I use subversion.  Every time I make some progress on  a draft, I commit it, and write a little note about what I’ve done.  I can then view the log and see all the progress I’ve made on a manuscript.  I can also review where I made big decisions (the other day I made a note on my CCCCs proposal draft about how I swapped some paragraphs around).  If I decide to reverse that decision, I know exactly what version to return to.  Pretty sweet.  Easy on macs and Windows.  If you have dreamhost or another web hosting service with subversion, you can even sync these to the web and have your stuff available on any computer.

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2009 05 01 blips Comments (0) Permalink

Mol Redux

Mol, Annemarie, & Law, John. (2004). Embodied action, enacted bodies: The example of Hypoglycaemia. Body & Society, 10(2-3), 43-62.

This article draws on the same study as Mol’s Logic of Care, but makes a somewhat more straightforward argument regarding the way our culture conceives of bodies. Instead of seeking objective knowledge (like what we know of cadavers) or subjective knowledge (how we feel inside), they argue we should seek to know how bodies “do.”

For example, they discuss people who play sports and have diabetes, and the increased level of complexity that gives their blood sugar management. One person interviewed said they had to give up a part of themselves since they couldn’t do sports as before.

What this suggests is that the assumption that we have a coherent body or are a whole hides a lot of work. This is work someone has to do. You do not have, you are not, a body-that-hangs-together, naturally, all by itself. Keeping yourself whole is one of the tasks of life. It is not given but must be achieved, both beneath the skin and beyond, in practice. (p. 57)

In other words, keeping yourself alive and healthy is an achievement, one accomplished through often invisible and un-reflective practices.  Mol & Law direct our focus squarely on these practices in discussing Mol’s study of diabetes.  This makes a good focus for my own upcoming presentation on typing injuries and pain.  Instead of focusing on the pain as something objective (what parts of the body are hurt) or subjective (how does it feel inside when typing), the focus needs to be on practicalities–the practices of typing itself, the design of keyboards, discourses of efficiency and work habits, design of office furniture, use of office furniture, laptop design and use, etc.

Toward the end of the article they connect their argument about studying bodies that “do” to the practice of medicine:

Sullivan suggested that medicine should add its patients’ self-awareness to the results of its own clinical (or, more specifically, pathological) gaze. Our suggestion is different. It is that instead of adding a further layer of knowledge, medicine should shift its self-understanding. Medicine should come to recognize that what it has to offer is not a knowledge of isolated bodies, but a range of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions into lived bodies, and thus into people’s daily lives.  . . . In articulating how it is doing, in considering the effects of its activities, medicine would be wise to confront its own tragic character: medical interventions hardly ever bring pure improvement, plus a few unfortunate ‘side-effects’; instead they introduce a shifting set of tensions. (pp. 57-8)

Aside from the obvious debt to Latour here (in the sense that almost all actions are translations that only approximate our imagined pure goals accomplished through direct means), I appreciate the recasting of medicine.  In other words, medicine should return to the sense of itself as a techne, as a cunning intervention, a set of imperfect practices and past solutions that may have relevance in existing situations.

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2009 04 06 research
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Steven Johnson updates Tool for Thought

I’ve long been quoting Johnson’s Tool for Thought essay on his use of DevonThink as a research database.  I’ve just come across a post he made to BoingBoing updating the approach he outlined earlier.  After collecting all his snippets of text and quotes, he drags relevant ones into chapter folders, creating a first round of organization.  Then:

And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that’s how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

via DIY: How to write a book – Boing Boing.

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2009 04 01 blips
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dan piepenbring on heidegger against the birkerts kindle argument

Read this post on if:book today re: using Heidegger to contest Birkerts’ arguments against the Kindle.  Not too interested in that argument, but Heidegger’s terms here resonate somewhat with me.  The idea of “readiness-to-hand” and the way all tools exist in a network/environment connects with Gibson’s idea of affordances.  Here’s Piepenbring’s gloss on Heidegger:

In his seminal Being and Time, Heidegger considers equipment and utility: how we relate to our tools, how the tools relate to one another, and how a network of tools mitigates our surroundings. “Equipment,” he avers, “can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure” (98).* Well-designed tools possess something he dubs “readiness-to-hand.” Roughly defined, the more something is suited to the use it is made for, the more ready-to-hand it becomes. Readiness-to-hand entails a kind of integration with the environment, an invisibility; the tool belongs so much in the world that we seldom realize we’re using it as we work. So that we may gape at his obscurity, here’s how Heidegger puts it:

The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work — that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered. (99)

Consider, for example, a computer keyboard. When I type on mine, I’m ordinarily unaware of it. Since it’s well-designed and fully functioning, I have no phenomenological reason to take notice of its existence — instead, I concentrate on what I’m typing. The keyboard is incorporated in my location, existing in tandem with my monitor, my lamp and, yes, the intimidating paperback edition of Being and Time resting on my desk.

via if:book: design and dasein: heidegger against the birkerts argument.

What might be useful here is the way tools organically become useful and visible when they are appropriate.  This is very much one of the keys to tinkering/DIY/techne.  I usually think of Pirsig’s beer can shim for the motorcycle handlebars here–the aluminum becomes a useful item (as opposed to garbage, or recycling) in an network of items that  includes of loose handlebars.  Of course, the narrator’s buddy isn’t about to put a beer can in his BMW bike, so for him, the can remains garbage.  Ready-to-hand is always situated in the moment and an environment, but also becomes visible (as a solution) to a specific person.

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2009 03 27 blips
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Boolify Project: An Educational Boolean Search Tool

Boolify Project: An Educational Boolean Search Tool.

An interesting tool for visualizing boolean searches.  Designed to help teach students about the AND, NOT, and OR.

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2009 03 26 blips Comments (0) Permalink

Keyboard review in NYT

Basics – Bending Your Computer’s Keyboard to Your Needs – NYTimes.com.

Article mentions even the weird Maltron, which typically doesn’t get mainstream attention.

maltron keyboard

maltron keyboard

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2009 03 26 blips
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Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007

Nota Bene: The OneNote Blog : Learn from a pro: Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007.

Video screencast of a writer discussing their use of OneNote for draft management.  This video underlines my growing dissatisfaction with this program–the writer is essentially overtaken by the binder metaphor, and ends up thinking of it explicitly like a file cabinet.  This is fine if this is useful for you (although SVN, I think, is more useful/easy to use), but I want more from my program.  Am exploring DevonThink and Tinderbox with the new Mac mini in my office, and thinking that I can shlep it back and forth pretty easily if these become mission critical apps.  Just worried about getting distracted by tinkering and not enough content creation.  But then again, tinkering is what I’m studying . . . .

My personal feelings aside, good video representing techne and writing process.

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2009 03 26 research
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Yoga For Facebook Addicts

Interesting way to frame the impetus behind moving in these ways.  Useful for upcoming C&W talk on ergonomics and typing pain.

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2009 03 20 blips
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Don Norman: Signifiers, not affordances

Last Norman quote of the day: here Norman argues that designers should focus more on adding signifiers to their objects, rather than affordances, which may or may not be easily perceived or used.  Signifiers, on the other hand, are obvious, and make use obvious.

People need some way of understanding the product or service, some sign of what it is for, what is happening, and what the alternative actions are. People search for clues, for any sign that might help them cope and understand. It is the sign that is importance, anything that might signify meaningful information. Designers need to provide these clues. Forget affordances: what people need, and what design must provide, are signifiers. Because most actions we do are social, the most important class of these are social signifiers.

via Don Norman’s jnd.org / Signifiers, not affordances.

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2009 03 15 blips
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