Algorithmic Culture, Redux

Back in June I blogged about "Algorithmic Culture," or the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing of people, places, objects, and ideas using computational processes. (Think Google search, Amazon's product recommendations, who gets featured in your Facebook news feed, etc.) Well, for the past several months I've been developing an essay on the theme, and it's finally done. I'll be debuting it at Vanderbilt University's "American Cultures in the Digital Age" conference on Friday, March 18th, which I'm keynoting along with Kelly Joyce (College of William & Mary), Cara Finnegan (University of Illinois), and Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University). Needless to say, I'm thrilled to be joining such distinguished company at what promises to be, well, an event.


The piece I posted originally on algorithmic culture generated a surprising -- and exciting -- amount of response. In fact, nine months later, it's still receiving pingbacks, I'm pretty sure as a result of its having found its way onto one or more college syllabuses. So between that and the good results I'm seeing in the essay, I'm seriously considering developing the material on algorithmic culture into my next book. Originally after Late Age I'd planned on focusing on contemporary religious publishing, but increasingly I feel as if that will have to wait.

Drop by the conference if you're in or around the Nashville area on Friday, March 18th. I'm kicking things off starting at 9:30 a.m. And for those of you who can't make it there, here's the title slide from the PowerPoint presentation, along with a little taste of the talk's conclusion:

This latter definition—culture as authoritative principle—is, I believe, the definition that’s chiefly operative in and around algorithmic culture. Today, however, it isn’t culture per se that is a “principle of authority” but increasingly the algorithms to which are delegated the task of driving out entropy, or in Matthew Arnold’s language, “anarchy.” You might even say that culture is fast becoming—in domains ranging from retail to rental, search to social networking, and well beyond—the positive remainder of specific information processing tasks, especially as they relate to the informatics of crowds. And in this sense algorithms have significantly taken on what, at least since Arnold, has been one of culture’s chief responsibilities, namely, the task of “reassembling the social,” as Bruno Latour puts it—here, though, by discovering statistical correlations that would appear to unite an otherwise disparate and dispersed crowd of people.

I expect to post a complete draft of the piece on "Algorithmic Culture" to my project site once I've tightened it up a bit. Hopefully it will generate even more comments, questions, and provocations than the blog post that inspired the work initially.

In the meantime, I'd welcome any feedback you may have about the short excerpt appearing above, or on the talk if you're going to be in Nashville this week.

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

My mentor and dear friend Lawrence Grossberg recently published a great new book with Duke University Press, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. I'll be reviewing it here in the next few weeks or months, but for now I wanted to link to a podcast from The Critical Lede.  The hosts Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe interview Larry about the book and how through intellectual work we might begin re-imagining political life in the United States and abroad.



Having listened to the interview, I should mention that it's not only compelling for what Larry has to say about his new book, but also as a succinct introduction to cultural studies.  He says, in a nutshell, that we should imagine taking ten jigsaw puzzles, dumping all the pieces out into a bucket, mixing the up, and then throwing out the pictures.  Then figure out how to reassemble them.  That's how hard it is -- or should be -- to do cultural studies.

Amen.  Enjoy the interview.

Now in Paperback

Whew!  Since launching D&R more than five years ago, not a month has gone by in which I've not blogged here.  Well, it almost happened this month.  Apologies for all the quiet around here as I've settled back into teaching and even deeper into fatherhood.  I'm glad I made it in under the wire.

I have some good news to share with all of you.  My book, The Late Age of Print, is now available in paperback! Yes folks, that's right. If you've been holding off buying the book because it was available only in hardback (and, ahem, free digital download), now's your chance to pick up a copy all your own.


I'd be remiss not to mention that the paperback contains a new preface, written by me. It offers something like a theory of the relationship of printed and electronic books, constructed around a distinction the Canadian media historian Harold Innis once drew between "time binding" and "space binding" technologies. It also tries to walk the fine line between simply celebrating or bemoaning these different types of books, which is one of the recurrent themes you'll find in Late Age. Here's a little taste from the preface:

For Sven Birkerts, printed words possess “weight, grandeur,” while their electronic counterparts suffer because of their supposed “weightlessness.” Could it be, though, that the turgidity of printed words, and hence the paper vessels containing them, quietly persuade us to settle for less authoritative, definitive, and elegant books than we deserve? Grandeur, perhaps. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that complacency follows all too easily in the wake of humankind’s most majestic accomplishments.

And another:

The challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways to ensure that we continue living in an expanding culture, which is to say, one that strikes a suitable balance between time- and space-binding technologies. This would be a culture in which neither printed nor electronic books exclusively ruled the day. Instead, it would be one in which the “p” and the “e” mingled promiscuously

The paperback is available from my publisher, Columbia University Press, as well as most major booksellers including IndieBound, Powells, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

If I get some time in the coming months I may try to redesign the book's companion blog. The look seems a little stale to me after two years, plus it would be nice to reboot The Late Age of Print website on or near the occasion on the paperback's release. If there are things you like or dislike about that site or would like to see added, shoot me an email or leave a comment. Since my goal isn't just to make The Late Age of Print blog look better but to make it more reader-friendly, I'd appreciate your input.

Speaking of input, I'd also love to hear from those of you who've read the new preface to the paperback edition or, for that mater, from any of you who've read and want to discuss Late Age.

More anon...

We Are All Salespeople Now

On December 9th, the website Patently Apple, which monitor's the computer maker's patent applications, came across a filing for an intriguing new application sharing feature.  In a nutshell, it would allow iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac apps (coming in 2011) to be downloaded not only from Apple's proprietary servers, but also directly from devices belonging to one's peers.  Here's a graphic from Patently Apple outlining how the proposed feature would work:

The idea behind the peer-to-peer sharing function goes something like this.  Someone you know shows you an app.  You decide you like it, so you establish a wireless connection to your friend's device and presto! The app is yours, without ever having to log on to Apple.  At some point down the line, one or the other of the mobile devices would report the transaction back to Apple, which would in turn arrange for the appropriate billing.

It's difficult to draw meaningful comparisons between the analog and digital realms, but let me take a crack at it anyway.  Imagine for a moment that a friend of yours is reading a book.  You give it a quick inspection and determine that it looks interesting to you.  Instead of trudging to the library or bookstore, or ordering it online, your friend just happens to have another copy she'd be happy to sell to you directly.  And so on and so on, for every friend of hers who is also interested in the book.  (Somehow, the proceeds from each sale find their way back to the distributor.)

If Apple follows through on this patent application -- and there's no guaranteeing that it will -- then it could fundamentally alter how we understand and go about transacting for digital goods.  In addition to a fixed, centralized point of point-of-sale, there would now be millions of decentralized, mobile points-of-sale.  Buttressed by a sufficiently robust incentive system (say, a free 99¢ app after 10 paid shares, or something to that effect), you can only imagine how many apps would end up getting sold between friends.  We are all salespeople now.

In some ways, Apple's proposed peer-to-peer app selling system isn't anything new.  People have long discovered new products through interactions with friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances.  It's not a coincidence that these types of communications are the basis upon which viral marketing is built.  What is different, however, is the way in which Apple could conceivably close the gap between word of mouth advertising and a completed, commercial transaction.  Ideally, the two moments would become virtually indistinguishable from one another.

The other odd bit here, which no one seems to be commenting on, is this: under the proposed system, people would be paying Apple hundreds, even thousands of dollars for its hardware, which would in turn allow them to buy into the company's mobile app sales force.  That's right -- you get to pay for the privilege of working for Apple Computer! This is assuming that the meager incentives you receive for selling are, on balance, incommensurate with the high cost of the hardware.  If it wasn't abundantly clear by now, Apple truly has a bullpen full of evil geniuses in its employ.

Get ready to go to work.

Debate on the Future of Higher Ed

Culture Machine, probably the most innovative open access cultural studies journal around, is hosting a debate on the future of higher education.  It's very Important stuff.  Check it out!

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The Culture Machine debate on the future of higher education in the UK and internationally, and on the position of the arts, humanities and social sciences within the university, continues.

Six new contributions have just been added to the Culture Machine InterZone section:

• ‘The Death of the University, English Style’ by Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie, both at Goldsmiths, University of London

• ‘Cut the Shock Doctrine: Radicalize Common Sense’ by Paul Bowman, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

• ‘Amidst the Culture of Efficiency’ by Sunil Manghani, Critical and Cultural Theory , York St John University

• ‘On the “Death” of the University’ by Jason Rovito, Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

• 'Education, Education, Education' by Ewa Sidorenko, Education, University of Greenwich

• ‘Diversity and Choice’ by Leon Wainwright, History of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University

To read the pieces, visit the Culture Machine InterZone: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/12

More contributions to follow.

If you still want to join the debate, email your all contribution to Gary Hall at <gary@garyhall.info>, remembering to include your full name and academic affiliation (if any). If, for institutional or other reasons, you would prefer to have your piece published anonymously, we would be happy to accommodate this.

All contributions will be reviewed by the Editorial Board on a rolling basis, with those accepted for publication being made immediately available on the Culture Machine site.

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Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at:
http://www.culturemachine.net

"Harry Potter Grows Up": The Meaning Behind a Cliché

For those of you who aren't familiar with The Late Age of Print, the final chapter of the book focuses on the extraordinary literary sensation that is Harry Potter. So, needless to say, Harry Potter has been on my mind quite a bit lately, especially with today's release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I don't have much to say about the latest film, honestly, not having yet seen it -- although I intend to, as I've seen the previous six movies and have read/enjoyed all seven books. Instead, what I've been thinking about lately is the age of Harry Potter, or rather that of his fans.

I teach an undergraduate course at the 300 or Junior level called "The Cultures of Books and Reading"; during one week, we focus on the many-headed Harry Potter phenomenon. When I first launched the book class, back in 2006, I was excited to realize that my students were basically Harry's contemporaries. Those among them who were eleven years old -- Harry's age -- when the series launched in 1997 were twenty in 2006, which is the typical age of most college Juniors.

But now it's four years later, and those twenty year-olds are turning twenty-four. Yes, that's right, twenty-four -- practically a quarter century. Graduate school age. Marrying age. Getting established in one's career age. Even baby-having age. I'm feeling old just writing about them! Indeed, it's not just that Harry Potter and the actors who portray him and his friends on screen have grown up. The whole fan culture surrounding Harry Potter has grown up, too, to the point where, as with Star Wars fans, we might even start thinking about a whole new generation of Potter enthusiasts.

This is what the release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows really means. It marks the beginning of the end of the film adaptations, yet it also marks the beginning of the beginning of the next generation of Potter fandom. What role, if any, will the books, films, toys, games, candy, costumes, etc. play in their lives? And what new meanings will the Harry Potter franchise take on once the torch gets passed, or rather shared?

The Future of the Humanities

This video made the rounds last week on Facebook.  I'm sharing it here for those of you who may have missed it (or who want to watch it again).  It offers a tragicomic glimpse into the cynicism that pervades the academic humanities these days -- a result of poor job prospects for many, limited funding, and diminishing respect within and beyond higher education.  It's biting, but for exactly the reasons I wish it were not.

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Critical Lede on "The Abuses of Literacy"

My favorite podcast, The Critical Lede, just reviewed my recent piece appearing in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, "The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read." Check out the broadcast here -- and thanks to the show's great hosts, Benjamin Myers and Desiree Rowe of the University of South Carolina Upstate.

E-Books: No Friends of Free Expression

I've just published a short essay called "E-books -- No Friends of Free Expression" in the National Communication Association's online magazine, Communication Currents. It was commissioned in anticipation of National Freedom of Speech Week, which will be recognized from October 18th to 24th, 2010. Here's a short excerpt from the piece, in case you're interested:

It may seem odd to suggest that reading has something to do with freedom of expression. It’s one thing to read a book, after all, but a different matter to write one. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that reading is an expressive activity in its own right, resulting in notes, dog-eared pages, highlights, and other forms of communicative fallout. Even more to the point, as Georgetown Law Professor Julie E. Cohen observes, “Freedom of speech is an empty guarantee unless one has something—anything—to say…[T]he content of one’s speech is shaped by one’s response to all prior speech, both oral and written, to which one has been exposed.” Reading is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression, because it forms a basis upon which our future communications are built. Anything that impinges upon our ability to read freely is liable to short-circuit this connection.

I then go on to explore the surveillance activities that are quite common among commercially available e-readers; I also question how the erosion of private reading may affect not only what we choose to read but also what we may then choose to say.

The Comm Currents piece is actually a precis of a much longer essay of mine just out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(3) (September 2010), pp. 297 - 317, as part of a special issue on rights. The title is "The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read." Here's the abstract:

This paper focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader's two-way communications capabilities on the one hand and on its parent company's recent forays into data services on the other. I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends. Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a “right to read,” which would complement the existing right to free expression.

Keywords: Kindle; Amazon.com; Digital Rights; Reading; Privacy

Feel free to email me if you'd like a copy of "The Abuses of Literacy." I'd be happy to share one with you.

The title of the journal article, incidentally, pays homage to Richard Hoggart's famous book The Uses of Literacy, which is widely recognized as one of the founding texts of the field of cultural studies. It's less well known that he also published a follow-up piece many years later called "The Abuses of Literacy," which, as it turns out, he'd intended to be the title of Uses before the publisher insisted on a change.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the work. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Ambivalently Scribd

Back in March I announced on my other blog that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I'd negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book's presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd's mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to feel less comfortable with the book's presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky -- things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there's one new feature I'm not feeling: ads by Google. Here's a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I'm not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it's what subsidizes the cost of my own and others' "free" experience.

Here's the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This PDF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 171 Second St., Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105 U.S.A.

“Noncommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I'm pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It's not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 "reads" of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I've always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others -- hopefully many others -- go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I'm more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a "commercial" or "non-commercial" use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it's built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered "non-commercial?" What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of "non-commercial" once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don't have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, "no." Then again, I'm pretty sure we're dealing with an issue that's never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I'll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

As I've said here before, though, I recently ported The Differences and Repetitions Wiki from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I'm not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

Digital & Social Media Job Posting

My department at Indiana University, Communication and Culture, is looking for a top-notch person to fill an opening in digital/social media, at the level of assistant professor.  Check out the job announcement, below, and please circulate it widely.

I'm not a member of the search committee, by the way, so if you have questions it's best to contact the committee chair--my colleague, Professor Barbara Klinger.

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Indiana University

Department of Communication and Culture

Digital and Social Media

The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Digital and Social Media to begin Fall 2011.

We seek a humanities-trained Ph.D. whose primary area of research expertise and training is in digital media studies focused specifically on the social dimensions and potentials of digital media. This applicant will be expected to interact productively with colleagues in one or more of the department’s three areas: Rhetoric and Public Culture; Film and Media Studies; and Performance and Ethnographic Studies. The applicant must have a well-developed research program and teaching experience in digital and social media. She or he will be responsible for developing an introductory lecture course and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as for actively shaping and teaching graduate offerings in this field of study.

We particularly encourage applicants whose research involves specialization in areas such as:

• Social networking


• New technologies of political advocacy


• Ethnographies of new media


• Convergence and participatory cultures


• Digital video


• Games and gaming

Candidates are expected to have a strong research agenda and a commitment to excellence in teaching. Preference will be given to those who have their Ph.D. in hand by the date of appointment. Applicants should send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to: Professor Barbara Klinger, Chair, Digital/Social Media Search, Department of Communication and Culture, 800 E. 3^rd Street, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405. Review of applications will begin December 1, 2010 and continue until the position is filled.

Indiana University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. The university actively encourages applications and nominations of women, minorities, applicants with disabilities, and members of other underrepresented groups.

Get Organized

About a month ago a friend and fellow academic contacted me to ask how I organize all of the material that we accumulate in the course of our careers.  With the school year starting for most of us here in the United States and elsewhere, I thought it might be worth sharing what I told her.  It never hurts to start the year off on the right foot, eh?

Confession: I'm a prodigious keeper of academic stuff.  I'm not of the caliber of the people featured on the TV show Hoarders (which, by the way, literally takes my breath away), but my collection still runs pretty deep. Heck, I even have a few of my old notebooks from my undergraduate days, and truth be told I do refer to them on occasion.  I'm able to keep this much stuff because I live in the Midwest where housing prices are relative affordable.  Folks living in urban setting ought to take what I'm about to say with a major grain of salt.

One of the main items I hold on to are photocopied journal articles and book chapters.  Each one has its own separate file folder, and on the tab I write the author's name and the selection title.  Where possible I note the full citation on the document itself. I file these alphabetically by the author's last name in a four-drawer file cabinet that I've just about outgrown. In the event that the article is more topically-focused or doesn't name the author, I place it in a colored file folder and file it alphabetically by topic.

I've also begun amassing a growing number of e-readings of late, which I save on my laptop in a folder called "articles."  I use the author's last name and a keyword from the title as the file name.  I'm not yet convinced this is the best system, but it seems to be working for now.  Regular backup is a must.

I keep my old notebooks from graduate school in a cardboard file box. They're filed chronologically by semester, with the oldest ones toward the back.  I've moved a few of the notebooks I refer to most frequently to the front, even though that violates the chronological system.

I organize my teaching files by class and semester. Every class gets its own hanging file every semester, and in each I place three manila file folders: one for lesson plans, one for handouts/tests/syllabi/etc., and one for any other course related documents (e.g., enrollment records, grade rosters, etc.)  I keep the most active files in my desk-drawer file cabinet at home, and the older ones (usually for classes I'm not teaching anymore) I have archived in one of the file cabinets in my campus office.

My research files vary, but for the most part I keep a hardcopy of every finished manuscript in its own separate file folder labeled with the title and publication/presentation date. These I keep in a cardboard file box organized chronologically. The accompanying research materials I contain in accordion files, which I label with the project title. I keep these in a file box separate from the finished papers, although I've gone back and forth on this. Any articles I've used on a project go back in the metal file cabinet once I'm confident the project really is done.

I've managed to collect electronic copies of all of my published research, which I keep on my laptop in a folder called, surprisingly enough, "Published Research."  Within it I maintain separate folders for journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews.  Again, backup is essential.

Books: if I haven't read or referred to one in a long time, or if I've never read it at all, then it becomes a candidate to sell to a used bookstore -- although the only problem here is that I end up just trading them in for more books.  Otherwise, I use foldable/stackable bookshelves (a carry-over from graduate school, when I used to move around a lot) to house the many volumes comprising my library, the bulk of which I keep at home since that's where I mainly do my writing.  The titles are organized loosely by topic (philosophy, media studies, communication theory, postcolonial studies, race, cultural studies, etc.) and then by author, but I don't maintain any type of formal alphabetical system here. I try my best to organize multiple works by the same author chronologically.  Most of the time textbooks and odd or duplicate volumes end up on the bookshelves in my campus office.

That's my system in a nutshell.  What are your best tips, fellow travelers?

Feedback, Please!

Earlier this summer Desiree Rowe and Ben Myers, whose podcast The Critical Lede I cannot say enough good things about, invited me to contribute to a journal forum they're editing on "The Performative Possibilities of New Media." Given my interest in the politics of scholarly communication, I immediately jumped at the chance to participate.

Composing the essay took a little longer than I'd expected, but I think I've got a respectable version of the piece now in hand. It's called "Performing Scholarly Communication," and it reflects on the origins and possible futures of academic periodical publishing.

This is where you come in. I've posted the draft essay to one of my project sites, The Differences & Repetitions Wiki (a.k.a., D&R^W), in the hopes those of you reading this might be kind enough to offer some feedback. You'll find "Performing Scholarly Communication" on the site, along with other essays I've worked on over the years.  Don't hesitate to comment anonymously -- I'm completely cool with that -- and definitely take some time to poke around a bit.  Oh, and by the way, the piece is pretty short, so it won't take you very long to read.

I mentioned back in July that I'd be rebooting D&R^W, mainly as a result of the influx of advertising appearing on the original host site, Wikidot.  Well, this is it.  "Performing Scholarly Communication" marks the (dant-dant-daah!) GRAND OPENING of the new D&R^W, which links directly off of this blog.  Enjoy.

Thanks in advance, wise crowd, for reading and commenting on the draft of my piece. I hope you find something in there that intrigues you.

David Harvey in Words & Pictures

I bet that silly notion of the "ivory tower" would disappear if all academic talks had a real-time cartoon accompaniment, like this one starring the Marxist critic David Harvey. Heck, maybe we should lobby Fox for a Sunday night animated series based on his work. The show could even feature guest appearances by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Toni Negri.

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How to Have Culture in an Algorithmic Age

Note: this entry was posted originally to The Late Age of Print on June 14, 2010. I'm reposting it here due to the surprising amount of attention it's received and because of its relevance to my readers here on D&R.

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The subtitle of this post ought to be "apparently," since I have developing doubts about substituting digital surveillance systems and complex computer programs for the considered -- humane -- work of culture.

Case in point: about six weeks ago, Galley Cat reported on a new Kindle-related initiative called "popular highlights,"which Amazon.com had just rolled out onto the web for beta testing. In a nutshell, Amazon is now going public with information about which Kindle books are the most popular, as well as which passages within them have been the most consistently highlighted by readers.

How does Amazon determine this? Using the 3G connection built into your Kindle, the company automatically uploads your highlights, bookmarks, marginal notes, and more to its server array, or computing cloud. Amazon calls this service "back up," but the phrase is something of a misnomer. Sure, there's goodwill on Amazon's part in helping to ensure that your Kindle data never gets deleted or corrupted. By the same token, it's becoming abundantly clear that "back up" exists as much for the sake of your convenience as it does for Amazon itself, who mines all of your Kindle-related data. The Galley Cat story only confirms this.

This isn't really news. For months I've been writing here and elsewhere about the back up/surveillance issue, and I even have an academic journal article appearing on the topic this fall. Now, don't get me wrong -- this is an important issue. But the focus on surveillance has obscured another pressing matter: the way in which Amazon, and indeed other tech companies, are altering the idea of culture through these types of services. Hence my concern with what I'm calling, following Alex Galloway, "algorithmic culture."

In the old paradigm of culture -- you might call it "elite culture," although I find the term "elite" to be so overused these days as to be almost meaningless -- a small group of well-trained, trusted authorities determined not only what was worth reading, but also what within a given reading selection were the most important aspects to focus on. The basic principle is similar with algorithmic culture, which is also concerned with sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing cultural artifacts.

Here's the twist, however, which is apparent from the "About" page on the Amazon Popular Highlights site:

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people.

Using its computing cloud, Amazon aggregates all of the information it's gathered from its customers' Kindles to produce a statistical determination of what's culturally relevant. In other words, significance and meaningfulness are decided by a massive -- and massively distributed -- group of readers, whose responses to texts are measured, quantified, and processed by Amazon.

I realize that in raising doubts about this type of cultural work, I'm opening myself to charges of elitism. So be it. Anytime you question what used to be called "the popular," and what is now increasingly referred to as "the crowd," you open yourself to those types of accusations. Honestly, though, I'm not out to impugn the crowd.

To my mind, the whole elites-versus-crowd debate is little more than a red-herring, one that distracts from a much deeper issue: Amazon's algorithm and the mysterious ways in which it renders culture.

When people read, on a Kindle or elsewhere, there's context. For example, I may highlight a passage because I find it to be provocative or insightful. By the same token, I may find it to be objectionable, or boring, or grammatically troublesome, or confusing, or...you get the point. When Amazon uploads your passages and begins aggregating them with those of other readers, this sense of context is lost. What this means is that algorithmic culture, in its obsession with metrics and quantification, exists at least one level of abstraction beyond the acts of reading that first produced the data.

I'm not against the crowd, and let me add that I'm not even against this type of cultural work per se. I don't fear the machine. What I do fear, though, is the black box of algorithmic culture. We have virtually no idea of how Amazon's Popular Highlights algorithm works, let alone who made it. All that information is proprietary, and given Amazon's penchant for secrecy, the company is unlikely to open up about it anytime soon.

In the old cultural paradigm, you could question authorities about their reasons for selecting particular cultural artifacts as worthy, while dismissing or neglecting others. Not so with algorithmic culture, which wraps abstraction inside of secrecy and sells it back to you as, "the people have spoken."

Higher Education: Let the Free Market Reign!

Great news for all of my readers who despise profligate government spending! My buddy Kembrew McLeod published a thought-provoking article in Tuesday's edition of the Huffington Post called, "A Modest Free Market Proposal for Higher Education Reform." In it, Kembrew outlines a compelling vision for ending the financial bloat that's endemic to today's public universities.

Among his proposals, he calls for corporate sponsorship of classes. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when the syllabus for my Introduction to Media class, which enrolls 250-plus students every fall, can finally say, "brought to you by the Walt Disney Company." Kembrew also suggests that undergraduates be given the green light to utilize paid-for research assistance companies, which makes a good deal of sense, really, for how else are we to grow the economy in tough financial times? My favorite idea of his, though, is to incentivize cheap graduate student teaching. Soon-to-be PhDs, Kembrew writes, ought to be able to outsource their doctoral dissertations:

By no longer having to conduct original research themselves, graduate students will have more hours to spend in the classroom as adjunct instructors. Let's do the math. PhD-Dissertations.com charges $17.00 per page, which adds up to $3,400 for a 200-page dissertation (plus, their website states that, "A discount of 10% applies to orders of 75+ pages!"). Although this might seem like a lot of money, consider the fact that most colleges pay adjuncts roughly the same, between $3,000 and $4,000, for each course taught per semester. Therefore, by just adding one extra course to his or her roster, a graduate student can pay for an entire dissertation in less than one academic year--while at the same time serving the university's undergraduate teaching needs. Once this new generation of scholar/project managers enters the profession, there will be no more need for traditional professors.

Since I'm an overpaid university professor who's contributing to all the bloat, I'll happily step aside to let someone with a bachelors or masters degree do my job for, say, seven or eight bucks an hour. But don't worry about me. I'll be lapping it up over at PhD-Dissertations.com, where at long last I can put my skills and experience to some real use.

Academic Publishing Roundup -- Communication Edition

Wow! I'm happy to report that my home discipline, communication, is finally making some strides in terms of bringing its book and journal publishing policies into the 21st century.

Last week, the International Communication Association (ICA), in Conjunction with American University's Center for Social Media, released its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies devised a similar statement of best practices way back in 1993 (it updated the document in 2009), so needless to say I'm pleased to see ICA catching up at long last.

These types of policy statements are vitally important for media and communication scholars, and indeed for scholars more generally. As more and more of our work engages words, sounds, images, and other artifacts drawn from the popular media, we need to be reasonably assured that we can criticize and, where necessary, reproduce content protected by copyright, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property law. That's exactly what these best practices statements do, in part by identifying a "community of practice" and carefully defining its -- in this case, scholarly -- customs. But it's not only about "show and tell." Reproducing copyrighted content in academic work is important to the scholarly process. How else would reviewers, other scholars, and anyone else who may happen to read our work assess the validity of our claims?

Academics routinely -- and often unnecessarily, I might add -- self-censor our work, for instance by opting to exclude images we're analyzing for fear we'll get sued by some deep-pocketed media giant. Heck, I've even done it myself. And that's why I'm such a champion of these best practices statements. They may not give us carte blanche to use intellectual properties in our work however we may see fit. They do give us a useful set of guidelines for making informed judgments about how best to proceed in these matters, though, plus they underscore how our own practices are in solidarity with others.

The other bit of good news is that Boston College's Charles (Chuck) E. Morris III has drafted a resolution calling on the National Communication Association (NCA) to revise its fees for licensing NCA-copyrighted material. In a preamble to the document, Chuck writes:

The resolution seeks to regulate the prohibitively expense copyright fees charged by Taylor & Francis [publisher of NCA journals] in conjunction with NCA. Particularly alarming is that while for more than a decade NCA Executive Directors, who contractually have the prerogative to waive or reduce fees, intervened to make reprinted NCA journal materials affordable for high quality anthologies/readers of pedagogical and scholarly value, the current NCA Executive Director, Nancy Kidd, has prioritized profit and is allowing a dramatically higher fee.

Basically, NCA jacked up its licensing fees about a year ago, a move that will price smaller publishers out of the business of republishing top-quality communication research. The change not only promises to whittle down the competition (leaving only giants like Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, and Sage standing), but it's also inimical to the larger cause of scholarly communication. When Chuck writes that NCA is putting profits ahead of publishing, he's exactly right.

If you're an NCA member, you have until Tuesday, June 29th the add your name to the document. You can do so by contacting Chuck via email: morrisch@bc.edu. And hey -- if you're not an NCA member but you believe in the spirit of the resolution, why not go ahead drop Chuck a line anyway? I don't know if he can add your name to the formal list of signatories, but it can't hurt for him to be able to attest to support coming from beyond NCA.

Now, if only we could get NCA to adopt a best practices for fair use statement of its own. It's an embarrassment, frankly, for the oldest and largest professional association for communication scholars in the United States to lag so far behind its peer organizations.

World Cup...Fever?

Most of my friends seem to have developed World Cup fever, including those who, up until now, haven't shown any particular interest in soccer/football. I suppose that's how you end up with one in every two people on the planet watching at least some portion of the tournament.

But for those of you who, like me, are suffering from the opposite condition -- World Cup hypothermia -- I'm happy to share this most excellent clip from The Simpsons. Enjoy.

Social Media Hour Appearance

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I'll be a guest on Social Media Hour on Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 1:00 pm EDT. The topic is privacy, transparency, and social networking sites. You can listen live by clicking here; the archived recording will be available here. Here's a complete description of the program from the SMH website:

SOCIAL MEDIA HOUR #59: PRIVACY, TRANSPARENCY, & ONE MORE LESBIAN

This week the show will explore the topic of privacy and transparency specifically looking at how social networks and social technologies/platforms are changing the standards of privacy … or are they? With the amount of transparency in today’s world, are people reevaluating what they share? Is that a good thing? Ted Striphas from Indiana University joins the program to discuss. Also on this week’s show, Shirin Papillon, the Founder & CEO of OneMoreLesbian – a media site that aggregates the world’s lesbian film, television and online video content in one place. What does this have to do with the other topic? Simple. An array of sites and networks have arisen catering to myriad special interest groups. You can find site and networks for just about anything … that’s not new. But think about it, you choose to visit a site and participate in a social network … that behavior is tracked – whether by Google or brands that may appear there. If you choose to post links or comment on posts, others see your participation – so suddenly your personal affinity for a particular group is now public, which means in the case of LGBT oriented content, you are now more out than you were before. We’ll talk about OML as a business and about its growth and what it means when it comes to helping further expose a wider audience to the gay community.

Should be a blast! Please listen if you can.

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UPDATE -- Here's an embed from which you can stream the entire episode:

Scholarly Journal Publishing

My latest essay, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing," is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25. In my opinion, it's probably the single most important journal essay I've published to date. Here's the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies' envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies' capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field's political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies' alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field's growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I'm fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on "Acknowledged Goods" by clicking here -- and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you're at it!

Since I'm on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I'd be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan's amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer. It's called "The Googlization of Universities." I found Siva's s discussion of bibliometrics -- the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact -- to be particularly intriguing. I wasn't aware that Google's PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe. The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of "algorithmic culture," which I've blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you'd like a copy of "Acknowledged Goods." Of course, I'd be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.