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Empathy, books and convenience: why the more a Kindle is like a book, the better I will like it.

The last three books I bought, I bought electronically, and read them on a number of computers using various among the 'Kindle for X' programs available. They were a convenient and portable way of consulting some non-fiction material, and I'll do it again. I particularly liked the aspect of being able to keep well-ordered notes and bookmarks as part of my reading history. Some of my non-fiction paper books have their margins crammed with rather difficult-to-read notes, and bits of paper pasted in at the back with my index entries for various pet subjects not identified in the supplied indices. The electronic versions of these are an improvement.

But the reading experience itself wasn't always as good. I was never very far from distraction on my netbook or on my iPod, and that's the point Johann Hari also makes in his recent post "In the age of distraction, we will need books more than ever", quoting David Ulin:

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.

The point Hari makes is that "in the age of super-speed broadband we need dead trees to have living minds", staking out the point that concentrating on what others have to say  takes time and concentration: the empathy that narrative offers needs us to engage strongly with it, and Hari makes a case for books as a suitable technology for this: they help us withdraw from the present; they are an aid to the kind of reflective concentration that helps us turn a subject, an idea, more carefully in our minds to find a better relationship to us. He points out that the more a Kindle does -- the larger the number of bells and whistles it has, the less useful it is as a medium for reading itself.

Being connected can have more than one meaning, it would seem. It's valuable and exciting to have instantaneous access to whatever we want, and it's useful to have an ever expanding set of tools to do that with; but there is another kind of contact - written up in works like Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice,  or Wayne Booth's The Company we Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. This is the contact of empathy, carried through in the narrative form. I cannot say for sure whether my empathy is engaged as fully with a Twitter stream or a Facebook update. My reading history, as it were, in those areas, is very poor. There are no great works, no great events I can share wholeheartedly in (perhaps I am doing it wrong). At any rate the kinds of interaction and sympathy I feel in conversational forms is far better mediated as a conversation.

But it does seem to me that there is something valuable in the longer form, in the lack of distraction, and in the deeper human contact I feel from books.

For me it is not a matter of technologies, or of convenience; it is one of attention and empathy. If electronic devices can approach this level of concentration and engagement, by simply allowing themselves to serve a simpler function, I think they will maximise their effectiveness, rather than leaving something unfulfilled: we can build other tools for other kinds of contact. In other words, the closer the Kindle comes to being a book, the better I will like it.

Where would you go if you wanted to learn how to research?

Would you do it on the web? Would you get stuck in a rut and find that you were looking at the same things in the same ways?

What techniques would you use? Google scholar's pretty good. And of course you would have bibliographic references within those. Maybe you have paid access to a subscription database so that you can actually get to see more of those papers, not just their abstracts.

How do you find out, though, those authors who come sliding in out of left field into your subject? How do you get access to other people's ideas of what might be relevant? How do you break out of your own personal viewpoint on what relevance is?

Google wants to help you, heck, everything on the web wants to give you nicely-personalized, relevant results.

But what counts as relevant isn't just those things that most closely chime with the resources or the theories you're getting comfortable with. It's those things that challenge you, those things that are uncomfortable, and those things that take you off across into other disciplines and areas where analogous research or insights are waiting to be brought into contact with the ideas you brought with you.

I still think that libraries are good places to get this to happen. They can be good places to be surprised and challenged by information that supplements and disrupts the material you can easily gather online.

This isn't an argument for books, per se - though I do think that there are cognitive and critical reasons to access a range of media that includes them - as much as it is an argument for the importance of knowledge structures that cover a range of subjects as a public commons, rather than as a personalised niche.

Serendipty, self and search

Reading from Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble just now, I came across the following:

Maintaining seperate identity zones is a ritual that helps us deal with the demands of different roles and communities.

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubbble, Loc. 1610

This is in the context of web personalisation and the competing strands that moticvate different measures of our preferences and marketable interests. Pariser mounts the Facebook 'one identity' notion as having problems when we want to consider how people actually behave. Having different facets to one's identity isn't necessarily a mark of a lack of integrity (except in a very limiting and literal sense) - and, as Pariser points out, most of us find ways to behave differently in different contexts.

This reminded me strongly of my findings when I was working on my Ph.D. in artists' books. There was a strong indication among the artists I worked with, that as well as the technical aspects artists' books made it possible to combine, there was a strong 'affect effect' : it made it possible for them to think of themselves in different ways, of altering the modes of practice they used and thought with. (I.e. as well as the tools of, for example, poet versus printmaker, they get to think like a poet versus a printmaker, and combine both in one medium.) The artists' book becomes a place in the imagination where different aspects of the creative self can come together and exchange ideas and points of view. It helps that it is also well-adapted as a multimedia form so that aspects of the technical and material mingling are a germane part of this. But here the similarity to the filter bubble discussion is in the sense of the book forming a ritual place for exchanges between different roles and communities. (There are also Trickster resonances here, in that the mingling of these streams will often  produce unexpected effects).

 

There are sites and opportunities for different roles and identities to come together - to bisociate their interests, as Pariser might put it when nhe discusses the roots of cretaivity. We find aspects of our other selves in serendipity, because we happen uppon something that interests us while we are looking for something else. That is, while our intention belongs to the 'self' we adopt in the moment, for a particular search or activity, our 'dormant selves' can be interested in things that come up along the way.

 

Libraries can offer a kind of world-representing panorama that keeps these waysides open, however partially (in both senses of 'partial', they may be.) Moreover, in surprising us and occasionally confounding us, they provoke not only serendipity, but an awareness of the 'otherness' of human-created information. Other people interpret the meanings you see in front of you. Others have catalogued, decided, inscribed their meanings. They are undoubtedly different from yours in subtle ways, and they may, in your opinion, just be plain wrong. We become more critically aware of other people's part in creating the media we consume when these alarm signals exist (some thing Pariser also mentions). These same alarms can offer a criticl distanciation from media, but they can also offer us material for critical reflection on our own knowledge structures and assumptions - it may, after all, be we who are wrong and not the speaker. When media can be consumed with none of these snags or alarms, when they represent back to us little more than an increasingly smooth mirror of our own opinions and preferences, they deny us the opportunity for both serendipity and critical awareness; further, they narrow the nourishment of the self to that single point of view that is calculated as the median center of our marketable likes and dislikes.

Games, reality, Trickster: finding ways to enhance imagination in a sustainable way

I've been reading from Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, and I've come across what I think is an interesting notion about how games enhance our collective imagination.

Here McGonigal quotes Will Wright:

...if theres one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, its the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool. I think of games as being an amplifier for the imagination of the players, in the same way that a car amplifies our legs or a house amplifies our skin.

The point being that by enlisting our willing involvement imaginitatively in game form, we can not only have an experience of flow, of fiero, of naches and the other positive emotions that McGonigal racks up as worthwhile aspects of games - we involve ourselves thereby in game activities that are by definition involving us in activities of collective intentionality. (The feeling is one of 'we-intend' as John R.Searle would put it.)And by gaming together, we build up massive amounts of collective intentionality. Games become a powerful force in, ironically, helping us work out our problems, together. But this notion collides with some of my other recent reading.

Games necessarily model an environment. There's a tension between imagination (which is often liminal, on the edges of breaking the rules or outright breaking them) and games, which exist because of their rules.

I've been reading Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, so my first thought is that Trickster, who is our embodiment of disruptive imagination, needs to be part of this process of amplifying the imagination. If we want to get the most out of human imagination, we need that force to be there. It will anyway, so we need to find ways of including it or at least anticipating the services we can provide for its positive side. (It'll still surprise, confound and delight us though).

My second thought links us to Douglas Rushkoff's Program or be Programmed. If anything digital has the role of the Trickster in it, it's programming, and certainly hacking. There are still boundaries on this though, but far more play to be transgressive and to go beyond the boundaries of a single system. But there are boundaries - at least ususally. The ur-hacker movie was War Games, and the thrill of that game was seeing how easy it was to unintentionally breach those supposed boundaries. That's a game, run amok. Yet its resolution was inventive and satisfying. Very Trickster, very Hacker. 

My third thought is that novels/ideas of the transhuman (eg Neuromancer, etc) pay with the idea of the Trickster in the net, subverting and corrupting/enhancing what he touches. This notion of the imagination in service of the beyond is important, and games designers need to be aware (I'm sure they are) of how they can serve the idea that imagination wants to go beyond. Maybe it can go in other directions too?

Games need to approach this tension between the complex modelling by rules, and whatever there is beyond the rules that imagination can work on. Even though, as McGonigal later notes, 'chess is infinite' (to show how complexity can be built up from very simple premises), chess is just chess, whatever it teaches us. I'm not sure that the real world games that come later are classically defined games at all. I'm not sure about the flexibility of their rules or their purview. They seem more like roles than games, scenarios rather than gameboards. That's not to denigratetheir effectiveness or to argue that they are anything else, really. But if a game is about its rules, these games exist to transgress them. To go beyond, to grow.

This begs a further thought. Isn't this characteristic of our species' relentless insistence on expansion being the only way to survive. Isn't ecology the art and science of living on limited means instead? Of living, imaginatively as possible, within the rules? This is much more gamelike. If trickster needs to work in the ecological sense, he needs to work inside the game board. Lessons from programming can teach us that. You can't program what cannot be programmed. (You can program a computer but not an ice-cream cone) Similarly, what we see instead of 'further' is deeper: more fine grained modelling that helps us make better decisions, that helps us, also, to disappear not over the threshold, but 'through the floorboards'.

 

Big Jobs!

"if we could convince every Internet user to volunteer just one single hour a week, we could accomplish a great deal. Collectively, we would be able to complete nearly twenty Wikipedia-size projects every single week."

Jane McGonigal Reality is Broken pt 3 How very big games can change the world

Blimey.

Finding the future

My login for the NYPL game Finding the Future finally works. Time for a little bit of clicky clicky.