Author Archives: Steve

Hypertext and the Economy

The economy is in a bad way. People are suffering and there’s lots of fear:

Job losses are accelerating at a terrifying pace, with more than 1.25 million lost in the U.S. in the last three months, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report Friday. Unemployment jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest since 1993. Almost two million jobs have vanished since last December, with daily warnings of dire conditions ahead that could make this the worst recession since World War II. November’s job losses are the most in any month since 1974.

It seems to me that one of the ideas in germination since FDR and the explosion of road building with Eisenhower is the significance of the metaphor of distance. This metaphor saw new illumination in the 80s and 90s with the ecological spread of networks. Social networks now reformulate time and space with simple links. “What’s so ‘n so up to” meant something different when I was a kid. Now I visit a weblog and read.

I once lived in a house with mahogany deck railing. Such a house requires great distances passable by fuel and tarmac to exist. This kind of existential reality was once new and significant. I would imagine that a thinker could trace the change of perception of spatial economy by way of an ecological framework. A new energy infrastructure could provoke another round of change. Solar power, therefore, would imply another kind of railing for decks, just as swift rail would imply a different sort of decision making.

Distances matter in networks. Go to page 20 is much different than a note made available by a link. In relating ideas, hypertext is an epistemology of distance. In Graphs, Maps, and Trees, Moretti makes available demonstrations of relations between texts, which, in a way, shortens their distance between one another. What kind of relations, for example, exist between Beowulf and the Book of Songs?

It’s not that short a distance between relating Los Angeles and Hartford if a father could leap across that distance more quickly than by using a plane or re-conceiving the amount of energy expended to visit Boston from Bridgeport with the use of solar trains. Underlying any new technology is an ecology and an infrastructure and a new set of metaphors made tangible, like replanting beans where we once planted tobacco.

At the moment, the goods exist to create new markets for which people could make contributions. This is how literary ideas link to roads. New literary forms, new forms of travel, new forms of work. What’s the plan: we need this much new track, these many trains, this kind of energy, and this kind of skill to make it all work. And don’t forget the nano-solar paint to make cars look pretty and run well–and thus a new economy emerges. What hypertexts would follow from that?

Ecology

Hartford’s Watkinson’s Center for Science and Global Citizenship will be moving into a modular Project Frog building. Should be interesting. Here’s the Courant piece.

Then there’s weird reporting on a Mark Olfson study which went after the extent of disorders in young adults:

Olfson said it took time to analzye the data, including weighting the results to extrapolate national numbers. But the authors said the results would probably hold true today.

Interest and Effort

This NYT article on a test for athletic ability caught my interest:

In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child’s natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child’s cheek and along the gums to collect DNA and return it to a lab for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome.

The test’s goal is to determine whether a person would be best at speed and power sports like sprinting or football, or endurance sports like distance running, or a combination of the two. A 2003 study discovered the link between ACTN3 and those athletic abilities.

I’m close to completing Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which is a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of certain types of success, athletic, intellectual, and professional. Why is it thought provoking? Because I work knee deep in a world where success, ability, and knowledge are systematized by human decisions and traditional frameworks. Gladwell’s conclusions basically come down to a few key success factors: hard work, an ecology of opportunity, interest, and attention. I might have the speed gene, in other words. But I wasn’t really sized right for wide receiver. A yellow front tooth is proof that the playing field wasn’t for me. But I did have parents who could see beyond the neighborhood and they had lots of interesting books on the shelves.

Netbooks

Michael Arrington doesn’t have many nice things to say about netbooks. Here’s his claim plus arguments in classic thesis style writing:

I find Netbooks unusable for three reasons: they’re underpowered as PCs, the screen is too small for web surfing, and the keyboard is so small that effective typing is impossible.

I know three people who have them. These three people love them as mobile computers.

Amardeep Singh on the Good Stuff

Amardeep Sing at the Valve writes:

I, on the other hand, couldn’t get away from it. Huh—Is he really picking his nose? It was the first time I had ever seen an acknowledgment to this “shameful” bodily act in print. Can’t we read Stephen’s picking his nose as a kind of satirical counterpoint to the weighty literary and theological allusions that surround this event? My professor’s answer: no. No nose-picking, not in this class.

Fifteen years later, here I am: students, what do you make of the fact that Stephen Dedalus, near the end of this dense cerebral episode on the nature of sensory perception, Aristotle and Aquinas, urinates into the ocean, and picks his nose? What do you make of the fact that Leopold Bloom wakes up with the thought of the “inner organs of beasts and fowls,” cooks a pork kidney for his wife, and then goes to the privy to defecate?

Love it. Of course, if we’re talking about a novel that must by the nature of its telling admit much of human experience, the experience of the body is a logical detail. The fact that Stephen picks his nose: forget students, what would Tennyson say?

Hypertext and Weblogs

Will Richardson reacts positively to a statement by Kathleen Blake Yancey of NCTE:

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds.

(links in original)
By following a few links, I was led to NCTE’s list of abilities for the 21 Century

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

* Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

* Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally

* Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

* Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information

* Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

* Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Someone at NCTE should propose a paper or workshop at Hypertext 09. In any event, this could get interesting as hypertext becomes a part of writing curriculum.

Thanks Will.

Science and Technology

I just wrote a long note at change.gov concerning the technology area in the agenda section. The emphases on the transition website express priorities and thinking I’ve been hungering for from a government run by responsible adults. Here’s partly what I responded to, under the preparation section:

Make Math and Science Education a National Priority: Recruit math and science degree graduates to the teaching profession and support efforts to help these teachers learn from professionals in the field. Work to ensure that all children have access to a strong science curriculum at all grade levels.

This is laudable but as a priority it limits the scope of realistic initiative in “technology” which is and has always been more that the sum of science and mathematics. Smart users of technology may not be mathematicians and scientists; nor will good science and math teachers touch every area where technology is important for designers, writers, and coders. In new media, science works with art or should to innovate and change systems.

We need rounded priorities, don’t we? On the change.gov website technology needs greater diversity. Some mention of hypertext would be nice.