Saturday, June 18th, 11:00-12:30 (6020 HSSB)
Moderator: Bruce Bimber. Discussants: Kevin Almeroth, John Seely Brown, Judith Green, Cynthia Lewis, Peter Lyman, John Mohr, Christopher Newfield, Schoenerwissen (Marcus Hauer & Anne Pascual), Brigitte Steinheider
- “Who reads online? Do different people read online than offline? Is this good?”
- “How do reading practices create or define community? Does this work better or worse online than off?”
- “Is reading becoming more (or less) social, collective, or collaborative than in the past?”
- “What do transitions from traditional computers to wireless technology mean for reading as a community or society?”
- “Do teams read? Do CEO’s read? What is the current state of reading in the workplace?”
- “’Is there a text in this classroom?’: How can a group in a single location read online together?”
- “How can reading online be improved? And what do we have to do to get there?”
Online Audience Experiment: During this Roundtable, conference participants and members of the audience who have wireless-enabled laptops with them are invited to participate in an experiment in the social practice of conference-going by using the “comments” section of this page to post reflections, questions, or reactions in real time during the roundtable conversation. While these comments will not be displayed on the screen simultaneously with the roundtable conversation (because it would be distracting), they will be shown during the question-and-answer period. They will also remain on the conference site as a record of the audience’s engagement with the roundtable. If you wish to participate in this experiment, please ask the conference organizers during the conference for instructions on logging on to the conference wireless network and add your comments during Roundtable 3 to the current page.
June 17th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
Welcome to the Online Audience Experiment for Panel 3.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:09 am
Thank you for providing the opportunity for this experiment. In 2001, I observed a Board Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which featured a simultaneous projection of the minutes as recorded by the ICANN rapporteur on large screens in the auditorium.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:17 am
Welcome
June 18th, 2005 at 10:19 am
So as a panel member, my question, for myself and others, is whether I can “keep up”, i.e. follow the discussion and keep track of the message board.
Of course, a major goal of this message board is to allow communication and learning beyond what a single speaker track can offer.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:20 am
You have to continually refresh the screen.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:22 am
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (www.ietf.org) uses a “jabber system” (www.jabber.org) as a way of keeping minutes. It was a system we wanted to try and use here!
June 18th, 2005 at 10:23 am
How does it work Kevin?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:25 am
Courses in the Interactive Media Division at USC use this system as “heckle screens”....where students are allowed, and in fact, encouraged to post, google, surf during classes, including during lecture time. the “behind-the-back” heckling is projected onto screens on every wall in the room.
its very disconcerting to be the instructor in this scene…but the students love it.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:26 am
Jabber (www.jabber.org) is more of a “real-time” system… using Java, jabber gives you a “chat window” that all comments appear in.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:26 am
i’m dyslexic. online “reading” sounds like online “dearing” to me.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:26 am
I just tuned in here a few minutes into the panel, and am amazed at the number of posts already. It would be interesting to see whether the audience or the participants are more prolific in generating words during the same time frame.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:27 am
“Is reading becoming more (or less) social, collective, or collaborative than in the past??
depends on the definition of “reading”, but overall I would say internet based reading is conversational, in other words consisting of reception and then response, so collaborative.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:28 am
yes, in fact I believe it is more oral than literary
June 18th, 2005 at 10:29 am
What is the code: insight, one-upsmanship, appreciation, ...?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:30 am
Listening to Cynthia Lewis speak, it occurs to me that it would be wonderful sometime to organize a conference on new media in which we include children on a panel—or, if not in a panel, then in some other format (skit? song? playing an online game?).
June 18th, 2005 at 10:30 am
it would actually be interesting to have this projected ‘live’ during the panel
June 18th, 2005 at 10:31 am
I like George’s comment about the conversational nature of online discussion. For me, this seems to point toward investigating something like ephemeral aesthetics, a short-lived, mediated experience grounded not in an airy abstract rhetoric of virtuality, but in terms of the materiality of the media (object-centered, as Lisa Parks mentioned yesterday).
June 18th, 2005 at 10:31 am
I like George’s comment about the conversational nature of online discussion. For me, this seems to point toward investigating something like ephemeral aesthetics, a short-lived, mediated experience grounded not in an airy abstract rhetoric of virtuality, but in terms of the materiality of the media (object-centered, as Lisa Parks mentioned yesterday).
June 18th, 2005 at 10:31 am
Ahhh, I love the “it depends” answers… it is what I say to my students all of the time.
Two points (since Cynthia is speaking): I’d like to recognize the importance that technology plays. Technology creates MANY opportunities for different kinds of reading.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:31 am
i’d love to have the high school students i’m working w/ show their new media work at a conference; we did that at the race in digital space conference in 2002 to great success. the students stole the show (w/ their great game, tropical america.)
June 18th, 2005 at 10:32 am
i wish this page had an auto refresh!
June 18th, 2005 at 10:32 am
My 12 y.o. daughter instant messages all the time—I’m just glad it’s logged…much preferable to me, than unmonitorable phone calls.
Reading the logs helps me keep in touch with her world, in ways that I would otherwise be shut out
June 18th, 2005 at 10:32 am
What we’re doing right now is known as “backchannel” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel.
There are other programs that manage it better.. can really handle it in real time, without having to constantly refresh..
June 18th, 2005 at 10:32 am
what the “lit boy” is saying is not true. Reading is to fantasize being connected to the world.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:33 am
i concur with Tara’s suggestion….make this space a dynamic element of the panel presentation….would it energize a tepid communication form (i.e., the panel discussion in front of a mute audience), or devolve into cacaphony?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:33 am
My last comment was not posted; so this is a test
June 18th, 2005 at 10:33 am
http://www.jabber.org doesn’t require refresh…
and it is a “back channel” that is being created, not with the right software, but with the system we had in place
(oops, there goes my capitalization, grammar is next!)
June 18th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Reading as social practice seems to be more like communicating in style and purpose.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:34 am
what would be the best physical organisation for a room using live blog/chat and a panel at the same time?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Wouldn’t the literature folks be worried that what happened to traditional journalism’s going into the tabloid rabbit hole will also be the time-compressed victim of online reading?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:35 am
The dialogue between Chris Newfield (on reading as a fundamentally anti-social act) and John Mohr (on new media allowing us to tune into all the world’s thoughts) connects up in an interesting way with the dialogue on Friday (in Roundtable 2) between Nicholas Dames (on lurking) and Walter Bender (on ways to allow active reading).
June 18th, 2005 at 10:35 am
i like the term ‘proliferating consciousness’
June 18th, 2005 at 10:35 am
I agree with Tara and Anne—the backchannel should be projected on the screen. It’s an interesting experiment in attention. Will it happen Alan? Can you project it if there is a consensus among us to do so? Then the backchannel would have an impact on and possibly change the dynamics taking shape in the room.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:36 am
It’s funny how the lecturer/panelist now looks out upon a sea of downturned faces, all absorbed in their laptops. Not sure this is a good thing.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Following Yunte following Chris, reading – developing what we have historically understood as literary subjectivity – is to situate oneself in an imaginary world. So it is not ‘real’ but virtual sociality.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Alan, I hope your comment #31 could be hyper-linked later with a video file of “the dialogue”. How cool would that be!
June 18th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Following Yunte following Chris, reading – developing what we have historically understood as literary subjectivity – is to situate oneself in an imaginary world. So it is not ‘real’ but virtual sociality.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:37 am
backchanneling still freaks me out when i’m the presenter: but i’m trying to learn. i don’t often ‘allow’ it yet in my classes
June 18th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Lisa, it would be interesting to have the backchannel dialogue projected on the screen in real time during the panel. But we have a technical problem. Putting on the screen blues out the faces of the panel for the TV cameras.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Ben—THis is what happens in my living room every night—we each have laptops and the TV on at the same time—it’s just the changing nature of being
June 18th, 2005 at 10:38 am
Yes, it would be interesting to compare the laptop bloggers’ retention of the panel’s discussion with the retention of the non-laptoppers.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:39 am
what’s interesting to me is not just what i’ve heard and absorbed, but also the apparent gaps in my listening and engagement. do these gaps occur in other kinds of reading? viewing?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:39 am
In terms of the downturned faces problem: I’ve often thought that for classrooms and other situations like that we really need laptops with screens on both sides and a camera—so that the face of the user is displayed on the other side of the screen (visible to the panel or teacher)
June 18th, 2005 at 10:40 am
Here are the notes for “my turn”
1. I have no idea what reading is.
I need a definition to do research.
2. I hear what John is saying (“there are dangers”)
3. But the challenge that softens some of the dangers
is they dynamic nature of this system: time and
generations change everything!
4. My mantra when i take off my engineering hat
is to pay attention to generations and how society
and culture changes with age.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:40 am
I like the chuckle that spread across the room as people read #43,
June 18th, 2005 at 10:40 am
is there a tension here between the pleasure of listening (to the panel) and the pleasure of reading/writing (the blog)? I am experiencing that as a difficulty, to be honest.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:40 am
the imd classes anne mentions come w/ the caveat that whatever is on your screen could end up projected to the whole room, so there’s a kind of implicit policing going on
June 18th, 2005 at 10:40 am
On looking out on a sea of laptops: what “paying attention” looks like is notoriously slippery; as we all know, trying hard to look like one is paying attention often leads to mental drift. Our speakers may not be able to trust that their audience (faces all downturned into their laptops) is paying attention, but is this not just the dramatization of the usual human problem: the inaccessibility of someone else’s attention?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:41 am
Are we interested in differentiating reading from writing, or not? We say we are talking about writing, but the social / network effects that we most frequently site are directly related to writeability – e.g. blogs, journaling – del.icio.us and “social bookmarking” might be one example of social reading models, ditto rating compilation systems (e.g. Amazon ratings, minus capsule reviews) ....
Does the level of “sociability” we ascribe to a system relate directly to the read-write (vs. read) nature of that system?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:41 am
Strangely, I have a yen to have the pnaelists on my screen simultaneously with this backchannel conversation. So we need a feed from the TV cameras onto the Web, so I can put the panel in one window on my screen, and put the backchannel in another window.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:42 am
i like to hear more about the “echo chamber” idea from JSB? Its long been suspected that the screen served as much as a mirror as it does a “window”
June 18th, 2005 at 10:42 am
I am hearing one of the panelists saying “blah blah reading…blah blah reading…reading—but I can’t hear what she is talking about because I am reading
June 18th, 2005 at 10:43 am
is listening to a book on tape the equivalent of reading the text of a book?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:43 am
yes, alan, i agree with the need for a feed into my screen
June 18th, 2005 at 10:43 am
what about “reading the landscape”, reading stained glass windows, reading cinematically, reading the “scene”????
need to either de-privilege the notion of text, or broaden its ontology
June 18th, 2005 at 10:44 am
it mey help to know that in Chinese, reading (“du”) means to punctuate. it makes sense with respect to “scriptura continua” (spelling?).
June 18th, 2005 at 10:44 am
i like nicholas dame’s comment—desire plays into what’s good or appropriate more than ethics
June 18th, 2005 at 10:44 am
i like jeremy’s linking of reading and writing in parsing the social: they are most certainly linked
June 18th, 2005 at 10:45 am
hmmm “reading”—can’t we read graffiti, clouds, seismic activity, hip hop songs, street life, bedrooms/closets, freeways—what is reading so tied to words? didn’t anyone read any work in cultural studies? i’m as interested in reading the world of betty, guy and dick (because of the game’s style, concept) as i am reading the copy of hardt and negri’s multitude sitting on my desk or the backlog of email i haven’t responded to or websites not yet discovered. finally the word utterance comes up as something to be read!
June 18th, 2005 at 10:46 am
“any utterance is a text” contains a deep literacy (vs. orality) bias.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:46 am
I notice long gaps where no one is typing—it would be interesting to see who is speaking and what they are talking about when these “gaps of submission” happen—or the opposite—when there are a flood of submissions
June 18th, 2005 at 10:46 am
what would be the best physical organisation for a room using live blog/chat and a panel at the same time?
Perhaps it wouldn’t be a room design at all – it would be an inset video pane so that a person didn’t constantly have to look up and down from the discussion board and the panelists.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:46 am
I think the question of whether we need a text to read is probably less crucial than whether we need to interact actively with a text to read. Whether information is coming at me from a book or from a Podcast, I need to be able (physically or mentally) to annotate, edit, organize, collect actively to be really reading.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:47 am
It would be interesting to synch the time of this blog comments with a parallel transcript (from the video) to see how the thread of the panelist’s discussion does or doesn’t intersect.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Lisa, you’re right, we need to share some definitions
June 18th, 2005 at 10:47 am
listening to the laughing in the audience makes me feel more connected
June 18th, 2005 at 10:47 am
The ripple of laughter on #43 was a nice moment.. a brief surfacing. Here we go!.. Kevin now surfaces with his acknowledgement of the back channel. This is a moment worth exploring.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Comic interlude: On the flexibility of the term reading: from Dickens, Our Mutual Friend:
“(By-the-by, that very word, Reading, in its critical use, always charms me. An actress’s Reading of a chambermaid, a dancer’s Reading of a hornpipe, a singer’s Reading of a song, a marine painter’s Reading of the sea, the kettle-drum’s Reading of an instrumental passage, are phrases ever youthful and delightful.)”
June 18th, 2005 at 10:48 am
Curtis (Re: #64)... we are collecting the data and will do the analysis!
June 18th, 2005 at 10:48 am
i’m with anne and lisa: let’s broaden reading: popular culture teaches us to ‘read’ each other, to read style, to read vibe: these are key social literacies at the interface of multiple systems of meaning
June 18th, 2005 at 10:48 am
Curtis, maybe that is a feature of the software to come out of this project?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:48 am
What Kevin just said is key: this has created two classes of panel participants – a type of laptop divide – amond this community of scholars. Online reading will exacerabate societal divisions between those mono-dimensional readers and the multi-dimensional readers.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:49 am
One thing that is becoming clear to all of us is that the simple comment structure WordPress uses out of the box is really designed for one-way – everyone comments on the primary post. In fact, we probably want at the minimum a threaded display – so that people can quickly and easily respond to each other and spin off parallel paths-untraveled by the linear audio experience of the turn-based panel….
June 18th, 2005 at 10:49 am
is there a difference between sociality and humanism? what is it?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:49 am
Is it possible that our concept of reading (and reading practices) is in danger of being so pluralized that it is no longer a useful object of pragmatic research? c.f. Aristotle on the babel of different disciplines or arriving at truth.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:49 am
I get the impression that this whole conversation about the identity of reading is going in circles, partly because it is in the wrong register (or perhaps tense). I think it’s much more helpful to be finitist/empirical about this: reading is whatever readers assert or take it to be, and the research topic is to investigate how their definitions and distinctions are created and sustained. And it’s necessarily and radically historical: it changes not only from culture to culture but down through the years too, as successive generations are educated in changing ways amid a changing world. There is no thing that reading ‘is’.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:50 am
I’m finding that the visual trumps the audio input—I can keep track of the panel or the blog, but not both
June 18th, 2005 at 10:50 am
Kevin, great question! That was my query about the difference between listening to a book and reading the text of a book.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:50 am
reading definitely has become more of a catch-all that requires subcomponets definitions
June 18th, 2005 at 10:51 am
on the topic of “digital divide”....i think its not always defined as a gap between those who have access to the media/technologies and those who don’t….i think its soon becoming a divide between those who can WRITE/AUTHOR/COMMUNICATE using new technoloogies and those who cannot (for what ever purpose: including lack of access to technology, but also lack of media literacy, lack of social literacy, etc.)
June 18th, 2005 at 10:51 am
Re: Anne and Lisa on the broadening of our understanding of reading and text – so much of the scholarship in new media insists on the need for a critical vocabulary not tied to print or other ‘older’ media (e.g. Manovich, Aarseth), so I wonder if we will eventually speak of ‘decryption’ or ‘processing’ rather than ‘reading.’
Robert, if you could explain how to get to the Japanese garden, that would be much appreciated.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:51 am
isn’t it possible that a more pluralized, transmedial concept of reading and writing may help us to invent new ways of conducting research, publishing, even citizenship?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:52 am
Have you noticed that we can see who is speaking on the panel but there is no automatic visual connect with the bloggers?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:52 am
Re # 75, Is it possible that our concept of reading (and reading practices) is in danger of being so pluralized that it is no longer a useful object of pragmatic research?
Bill and Lisa are onto something. the idea of “reading” without grounding that idea examining in a material practice means little
June 18th, 2005 at 10:52 am
Summary: I’m able to keep up but just barely (not that both activities aren’t suffering a bit), but one thing that suffers is my ability to look, nod, and engage the other panel members and the audience.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:53 am
Sue (Re: #83)... yes I absolutely noticed… it makes me nervous, because I KNOW everyone is looking at me. :-)
June 18th, 2005 at 10:53 am
I think we are trying to make “reading” as a word try to pertain to too many activities—we are limited by our vocabulary. We need new words to more definitively parse the different types of reading that we all do—even ‘Online reading’ is not sufficient.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:54 am
Re: digital divide – yes! It is a cultural divide between a culture based on multiple literacies and a mono-literate, visual (i.e., minimally text-literate) culture.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:54 am
A little note on the digital divide. I think it’s interesting that when the notorious Bjorn Lomborg got a set of high-powered economists to rank all the world’s problems on a cost-benefit scale a couple of years ago (the book is called ‘global problems, global solutions’, cambridge 2004 or so), the one global problem that outside “lay people” had to add to their list was the digital divide – the economists had thought of Aids, war, free trade, etc., but in a list of some 30-40 problems the D.D. was the one none of them thought of.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:54 am
responding to jsb, can we foster new reading practies, particularly among humanities academics(esp. keeping in mind kevin’s notion of generational difference)? how do we do this? should we do it? i think we can teach new ways of reading: poststrucuturalism certainly did.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:54 am
I wonder if the panelists feel they are being attended to quite as well as the might have hoped, with so many people “speaking with their fingers” and “listening with their eyes” at the same time they could just be listening with their ears. Of course, people have always taken notes interspersed with personal commentary – but this thread is a bit heavier on declarative commentary, and takes more attention than transcription note-taking, I believe.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:55 am
JSB’s comment about reading for differenc in a browser struck off this thought in me: I’d like a browser or peer-to-peer system that allows me to read what someone else is reading—e.g., to “look over the shoulder” of guest reading DJ’s (fasmous people, for example, or famous scholars or people from other countries) as they read. I want see see how someone different from me is reading.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:55 am
I think it’s useful to remember that plural, multiply overlapping definitions and uses of the term “reading” have always been with us and are far from recent formations—are we in danger of simply rediscovering a semantic and cultural ambiguity that is inevitably part of any culture with a notion of literacy?
June 18th, 2005 at 10:55 am
A divide based on culture, age as well as many other traditional aspects (e.g. industrialization).
And unlike the belief that some of these divides can instantly be overcome with money, culture and age cannot.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:56 am
some one should tell a joke and see if it makes us all laugh and then the presence of the backchannel may become more physical/social in the room.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:57 am
definitions of reading for you:
•DECODING: The cognitive process of understanding a written linguistic message
•RETRIEVING/COMPREHENDING: Reading is the process of retrieving and comprehending some form of stored information or ideas. These ideas are usually some sort of representation of language, as symbols to be examined by sight, or by touch (for example Braille).
•ACQUIRING DATA: in computer science, reading is acquiring of data from some sort of computer storage.
•SYMBOLIC DECODING: Other types of reading may not be language-based, such as music notation or pictograms.
•INTERPRETATION: A social practice that draws on a repertoire of social, cultural and cognitive resources to construct and reconstruct meanings from various traditional and multimodal texts. Reading is therefore a cultural, economic, ideological, political and psychological act.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:58 am
THnak you Christopher—this is what I thought the conference was going to be about
June 18th, 2005 at 10:58 am
Thank you Christopher—this is what I thought the conference was going to be about
June 18th, 2005 at 10:59 am
the temporality of this exercise needs attention. substantive comments (like adrian johns’) seem the most rewarding upon reflection—but they also distract me the most from the panel and the here/now.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:00 am
what Chris Newfield is saying: “Looking without seeing; listening without hearing.”
June 18th, 2005 at 11:00 am
If we do a good job of making this avaiable after the fact, these important statements will be made available for further reflection.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:02 am
john makes a good point, computers can, in one sense, read much more efficiently and broadly than we can
June 18th, 2005 at 11:02 am
Did you hear about the resturant on on the moon?
Great food but no Atmosphere.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:02 am
Kate Hayles’ notion of ‘deep attention’ is becoming relevant here – can we give deep attention at all in this context? should we try?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:03 am
In the post conference analysis we should look at average the number of posts per panel speaker (when they are speaking)—is it me or does no one seem to type when John Mohr s speaking?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:04 am
We need some of the newspaper editors on the Media Ownership panel last May to sit on this panel who could articulate the quandry facing newspapers with declining paper readership and climbing online readership. How do you publish for both environments and make money at both?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:04 am
John Mohr’s voice demands attention
June 18th, 2005 at 11:04 am
Then again, do more posts per participant mean people are paying less attention? Or were the panelists comments so provacative as to inspire online discussion?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:05 am
often reading is discussed in terms of proximity and depth—a close or deep reading, for instance. are these metaphors appropriate given the different spatialities and temporalities of online environments? where do these metaphors come from?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:05 am
Ah – I just included a post with two links, pointing out that we aren’t linking out – and it was tabled by the blog system pending moderation. Because it has links in it.
Out of the box, blogs try to control linkspam – the flow of reading game… keep a writing sandbox, where inter-site reading is carefully circumscribed. The two old anxieties of web traffic control: don’t let them write (no wikis) and don’t let them read away (no out-linking)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:06 am
Ah…yet another reason people may stop typing—the tonalaity of the presenter—perhaps not even the content?!?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:06 am
along with new reading practices, the humanities also need to rethink the status of tools: they’re robust objects to think with, and the portable tools jsb describes are crucial for fomenting new reading/writing in scholarship. we need to push for an academy where a tool can get you tenure. in many spaces, that’s still a very radical thought.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:06 am
Re: “deep attention.” Charles Bernstein’s notion of anti-absorption is also useful. distraction, idleness, absent-mindedness, back-channeling should all be considered as part of reading.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:07 am
Or another factor to look at: does the intensity of comment decrease over the duration of the session?
The whole exercise is very tiring.
Also, if this is your first experience in this kind of environment, you behavior will evolve over time. Those with experience will be better able to handle the split attention.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:07 am
—- Bruce Changes the Question—-
What are the circumstances under which reading reconfigures or creates community?
[long silence follows] =)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:07 am
I think what John Seely Brown is saying about reading and believing is spot-on. This need to ‘triangulate’ is clearly a key one for the skill of online reading (think of the problem of phishing), and it used to exist in the world of books too: people used to “read” typography, paper quality, binding, location of publication, etc., and appraise a book in this light. The point about its being a practice, and not just cognitive, is also good: it is important partly because it involves precisely “shifting” out of media-engagement (if you want to refer to UC Press, then that involves dropping out of the page itself to consider its institutional identity). It’s a point when reading is constituted by engagement with the world.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:08 am
Funny Kevin, I find it stimulating
June 18th, 2005 at 11:08 am
anne thanks for the joke! i should have known that the timing of its reading might not be synchronous/collective! hence my weak isolated and belated giggle
June 18th, 2005 at 11:09 am
I’ve managed public chats before now, with a chat screen rolling and involving a physical interacting audience as well a a chat audience – we used an MC and a scribe to type on behalf of the physical audience- it worked pretty well
June 18th, 2005 at 11:09 am
I do wish the roundtable would open up to floor Q’s even if they won’t allow the chat bloggin up on the screen
June 18th, 2005 at 11:09 am
One of the reasons I suggested this exercise is because with such a large panel and such an important audience, having only one person speak at a time is the MOST inefficient way of exchanging ideas.
This effort though may mean that there is too much information flowing to absorb all of it.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:09 am
ah…breaking the rules—YES!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:10 am
Pierre Levy talks about collective intelligence: Collective intelligence is an emergent property of collective social systems.
http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/archives/000288.html
June 18th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Re: #120: Raise your hand… Chuck just opened the floodgate!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:11 am
lisa: a meager attempt…just wanted to let you know that someone heard you!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Kevin—I think absorption rate depends on how well-adjusted one is to multitasking, and short attention span activities. I am used to surfing, talking to my wife & kids, and watching TV at the same time.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:12 am
RE: Sound of voices, competing attention
IDEA: A visualization “heat map” that could record the average number of keystrokes hit by the audience per second. How much tip-tapping are people typing?
The visualization could drawn down the side of the message thread in a timeline, or displayed in the bottom corner of the video like a timecode.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:12 am
It is almost impossible to listen and talk simultaneously in the 3-dimensional world. Not sure it is possible to write and listen at the same time—seems to be a processing of switching focus constantly, flittering like a butterfly’s wings
June 18th, 2005 at 11:12 am
I’m interested in the continuing use of the word “efficiency” in some posts—the history of reading-psychology is littered with fantastic, and often disastrous, attempts to produce more “efficient” readers. Anyone interested in the literary, or even knowledge-production more broadly, should think skeptically about efficient reading.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:13 am
ann, lisa, i laughed, but virtually ;)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:13 am
On reading practice and community: it is striking to me that this conference seems not to include people from the academic communities that already have shifted over into completely digital forms, which is to say, the life and physical sciences. These people don’t use paper any more for the creation and communication of knowledge, and some of them have had to deal with very much the kinds of issues that we are now talking about. I know we are focussing on humanities, and the humanities are different from the sciences, but still it might be nice to hear from them at some future stage. Otherwise we might risk reinventing some wheels.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Infosopher: you realize we have an asynchronous relationship… I don’t know who you are!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:14 am
In chorus with Chris Newfield’s comment about “deauthorizing”: one of the most interesting features of this online experiment is the amount of leakable between backchannel and frontchannel—in both directions (the panel taking note of the blog; the bloggers being joined by Kevin from the panel). It’s not so much deauthorizing that’s going on, perhaps, be reauthorizing—fluid, dynamic, shifting centers of “presence” in the conversation (with each of us becoming center/or niche, to use JSB’s vocalubary) by rota.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:14 am
I don’t just realize it, I am maximizing it
June 18th, 2005 at 11:14 am
re: attention. what about the importance of silence (even in the company of others)?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:15 am
Re #131: Even in computer science, we use little paper and take advantage of more online paradigms. However, we never get away from paper.
Paper becomes just another medium.
(And John is speaking…)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:15 am
Thanks you ajohns—the biological sciences and annotation of genomes with information creation of knowledge stores, etc. are good examples
June 18th, 2005 at 11:16 am
good point; silence seems to be necessary to make sense of the information we’ve received from whatever source
June 18th, 2005 at 11:16 am
adrian:
you’re exactly right. usc last year had two planning events for research goals, one on ‘visual culture’—with no scientists or engineers!—and one on mobile futures—with no humanities scholars or artists. these divides are notoriously hard to cross. that’s why george’s program here seems so fascinating (although they could use a humanist or two….)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:16 am
ya, who are you, infosopher?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:17 am
tara, it is so vital that we bring those groups together to brainstorm some vocabularies and define some terms before we can even begin to communicate
June 18th, 2005 at 11:18 am
re #129 I only used the word efficiency to address the fact that computers can ‘read’ ‘sort’ ‘filter’ through data faster than we can. I am certainly skeptical of the term, but I also think it’s important for us to recognize and imagine ways that computers might be able to do things in ways and at speeds that we cannot.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:18 am
“Last night in his speech, President Bush called for a complete overhaul of the tax code. He said he was shocked to find out that some millionaires in this country were still paying taxes.”—Jay Leno
June 18th, 2005 at 11:18 am
the creation of the expert/amateur division of labor and as the name for a set of identities that name those who are “authorized (or not)” is a consequence of institutions, political struggles, as well as tools. The blurring of this division is a return—in many sense—of an earlier mode of intellectual labor. The tools along (i.e., the wiki-pedia) don’t “cause” this blurring….its based on other important shifts. what are these shifts? i would look to the broader political context: “de-authorized” as citizens (vis-a-vis a particular political regime) may set the stage for people to gravitate to other realms where the sense of having a voice (where there is feedback of having a voice)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:19 am
we’re bringing a visualization expert into the vectors’ residency this summer to try to push beyond this particular divide. anne balsamo is a pro at this and is building a collaboratory to foster robust interactions
June 18th, 2005 at 11:20 am
To: ndames
Re: Beware Efficiency?
Memo: I’m thinking of Alan’s “Laws of Cool” here – the idea that efficiency can actually mean figuring out how to do something in 2 hours so that you can play minesweeper and read webcomics for 6 – that is, it can be subversive repurposing. We tend to conceptualize about browsing as timewasting pleasure-reading, but I wonder if efficient, low-attention reading as a work practice could actually be considered liberatory (within that Office Space population).
June 18th, 2005 at 11:21 am
jeremy, you’re right, a great deal of learning takes place in low-attention reading
June 18th, 2005 at 11:22 am
Re: Adrian’s comment about the need to engage with communities that don’t use paper: There was a conference at UCSB in March called Calculating Images that brought humanities scholars together with medical practioners, astronomers, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists. It was great.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:23 am
To: Jeremy D.
Re: Beware Efficiency
Memo: I usally encourage my dissertation-writing students to sit stright for five hours during which they spend an hour to write dissertation chapters and four hours playing computer games.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:23 am
On efficiency as a form of low-attention liberation from various power structures: this seems provocative to me, if counterintuitive (military studies on attention-span seek the opposite: forms of high-attention “efficiency” that are wholly directed from without). The efficiency of distraction/half-attention deserves thought.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:24 am
I’m disappointed – I was looking forward to hearing everyone answer the last seed question.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:24 am
best online material i’ve found have been websites by collectors of pre-cinematic materials. since this material (scopes, oramas, etc.) is so diffuse and difficult to display in a museum, and international, it’s been very cool to see animations and photos of these objects
June 18th, 2005 at 11:24 am
Concept: Panel with Comment Thread, Mark II
What if we could somehow speech-to-text the audio stream and interweave it (marked) with this comment thread? This would become a very different document. Perhaps a two-column layout, indicating the synergy and competition of the two channels….
June 18th, 2005 at 11:25 am
best? most engaging? funny? Showing my low-brow sensibilities here: StrongBad
June 18th, 2005 at 11:25 am
To: cboggs,
re: #138
cae·su·ra also ce·su·ra Audio pronunciation of “cesura” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (s-zhr, -zr)
n. pl. cae·su·ras or cae·su·rae (-zhr, -zr)
1. A pause in a line of verse dictated by sense or natural speech rhythm rather than by metrics.
2. A pause or interruption, as in conversation: After another weighty caesura the senator resumed speaking.
3. In Latin and Greek prosody, a break in a line caused by the ending of a word within a foot, especially when this coincides with a sense division.
4. Music. A pause or breathing at a point of rhythmic division in a melody.
My note: used to allow time for meaning
June 18th, 2005 at 11:27 am
Sue (Re: #151): my answer is practice, practice, practice… and educating everyone how to read better.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:28 am
I wanted to mention a good website i came across recently called http://www.CiteULike.org which allows you to share your reading lists with others and it’s connected to journal databases and amazon. It relates to a comment Ron Rice made during the first roundtable about wanting to know what other people are reading.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:29 am
and second best thing I’ve read on-line
the first email my 78-year-old mom sent to me from her recently-acquired “web-tv” email:
Annie—-Guess what I THINK Igot this licked, I got your message,
Dad says HI111 HE would like some
Ireally like playing this game
info on trains to SAN, FRANCISCO// Would you like some company/// I
HOPE you have heard some goo d news, E-MAIL me OK MOM
love
third best thing: Her second email:
Do you think ill be able to master this machine, Im at my wits end,
Ill try again this evenning OKK E-MMMAIL ME1
love
June 18th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Q. ‘Best’ thing you’ve read online
A. Wikipedia is my best answer, and The Postmodernism Generator is my more interesting answer, and Google News is the real answer,
June 18th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Without a vocabulary, it is nearly impossible to communicate, without typing skills, it is hard to be involved in this interactive dialouge.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Re: #153. The speech-to-text conversion is far too inaccurate to do this well. However, we could give it a shot.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:33 am
Thanks, Infosopher.
If we are living in a mediated world, with constant input, where’s the space for reflection? What happens to children who grow up in this hypermediated world without space for personal reflection? It seems they would be more rather than less susceptible to manipulation by outside authority. If you don’t have time to process the information and you are being asked to respond to it, you are more likely to go along to get along than to challenge what you are asked to do, or to question the validity of the request.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:33 am
Keep in mind that if this dialogue had been on the screen the whole time, the behavior would have been MUCH different.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:35 am
re: 162. cboggs has a good point. has does reflection take place? did anyone reread these posts during the chat? or log out and log back in?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:36 am
cboggs,
I don’t disagree with the need for time to reflect—but developing short attention span skills will also be vital for “getting along” in the new online world—-much to the disconcernation (sp?) of anti-TV activists
June 18th, 2005 at 11:36 am
Re: 164, 162: as difficult as WE would find it… the younger generation is forced to do it… a question is whether they’ve got their act together enough to have time for reflection or whether they just don’t reflect. Of course, at that age, how much has any generation reflected?
VERY important questions to ask and answer.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:37 am
#153, #162
To: Kevin
Re: Impracticality of speech-to-text
Oh yes, it is totally impractical – this kind of speech being quickly parsed by person into separate posts may not even be a tractable problem in the near future. How about we reframe the problem…
The panelists have to post like everyone else – but their text gets queued in the text-to-speech filter, and read in order… =D
June 18th, 2005 at 11:37 am
given allen’s comments, maybe the conference should have been focused on ‘online text’ or ‘online books’ : the slippage to reading seems, well, a slip
June 18th, 2005 at 11:39 am
The hardest time to continue this exercise was when I was trying to gather my thoughts to say something. I found it nearly impossible to type and keep the organization of my thoughts-to-be-spoken.
I notice that much of the audience discussion has died down now that everyone is gathering their thoughts to participate in the discussion.
Except for Alan, has anyone spoken who has also posted here.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:39 am
regarding John Brown’s point about the mighty pen as an annotatino tool—I would agree as it stands now…but I am disappointed that this conference didn’t touch at all on knowledge management and knowledge engineering.
One useful tool exists at cmap.ihmc.us (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) it is a free knowledge mapping tool that allows one to link sites, thoughts, documents, images, etc. into w personalised web of annotated knowledge
June 18th, 2005 at 11:40 am
Not yet :)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:41 am
it’s a shame the panel can’t see the screen – they are somehow excluded from the dialogue, which seems strange since they are meant to be leading it
June 18th, 2005 at 11:41 am
I didn’t have a problem with the definition of reading before this, but ignorance was bliss…
June 18th, 2005 at 11:42 am
Agreed Sue #172
June 18th, 2005 at 11:43 am
A great take-away of all of this is the blind spots we are all discovering in this activity.
Another important take-away is recognition of just how much this conference didn’t cover! Especially with panels that are hard to control, the whole content of this “system” is really ad hoc and on-demand!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:44 am
Everyone is talking about reading, no one is talking about knowledge—no one is talking about wisdom—isn’t this what we are trying to gain by reading?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Re: JSB’s comment on “future”
Like George Carlin would say, the future is no longer what it used to be.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:45 am
instead of using words like “text,” maybe “practice” would be a useful term. it sidesteps logocentrism and concentrates on how things are done by people, thereby localizing the instance in question.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:46 am
I think it would be important to historicize reading more as part of post 911 Bush regime culture. What are people reading? Are they learning Arabic? no! they’re reading the bible more than ever! Machine translation interfaces were used during the war in Yugoslavia, yet now the US military is hire foreign-born Arabic speakers as US soldiers and putting them on the frontlines in Iraq as sitting ducks. I am craving a more politicized discussion of reading that addresses the moment we are living in.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:46 am
“infocipher” is a word that results in 0 responses from google.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:48 am
it’s like we’re talking about driving without mentioning the destination
June 18th, 2005 at 11:48 am
Infosopher #176—excellent point. Of course, those terms now need definition as well, because they can’t be taken for granted any more than “reading” can
June 18th, 2005 at 11:48 am
I meant “Infosopher”... google says infocipher was the closest finding.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:49 am
to answer Lisa’s question regarding Arabic. after 9-11, i actually tried (but failed) to learn Arabic just so that i could “read” news from the other side.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:54 am
Kevin—
It’s my own creation (of course) “-soph” is the Greek root for wisdom
I is a reference to my consulting firm’s (Infosoph.com—but not currently online) main agenda which is to help people generate wisdom from their information and data.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:55 am
re: 179 and the political: i’m with you. perhaps a political discussion might be launched by talking about the network as a disciplinary space, in all the institutional and foucauldian senses of that word. the prevalence of dataveillance (corporations and parents using netnanny) seems an avenue to explore in counterbalancing the rhetoric of “possibility” so endemic to new media. what’s cut off by the internet?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:56 am
cboggs, #182—
these terms have been well defined by the knowledge management (KM) community already
June 18th, 2005 at 11:57 am
If everyone posts a “goodbye”, we’ll hit 200 messages!
(Interpret even the attempt as you will!)
June 18th, 2005 at 11:58 am
bye!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:58 am
goodbye!
June 18th, 2005 at 11:58 am
bye
June 18th, 2005 at 11:59 am
Infosurfer #187: that may be true for the knowledge management community. But what about other communities?
June 18th, 2005 at 11:59 am
salut
June 18th, 2005 at 12:00 pm
au revoir!
June 18th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
bye
June 18th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Here is a link to a visualization of the above discussion: http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/Agonistics/Transliteracies/Interface/agon1.html
-Warren (wsack@ucsc.edu)