I got sucked into a conversation last night over at Unfogged that started out with ogged’s annoyance over what he refers to as the “bitchy whine” at the Washington Post about how Harry Potter basically demonstrates the end of literacy as we know it. Ogged wisely noted that the general claim that no one reads anymore always masks a more specific claim that no one reads anything good anymore, but that because that “anything good” goes unspoken, we’re never required to have the conversation about what “good” means, and where those values come from, and why they should be supported, or undermined, as the case may be.

Wisely, I say, as this argument is at the heart both of my last project and the new one as well. But also wisely because ogged provoked the conversation, comment after comment about the value of literary reading, as compared with the value presented by other forms of reading (including that form of interpretation that one brings to bear on non-textual media such as television). It’s a fascinating conversation, and one that seems to me to demonstrate by example the utter wrongness of the sense that only texts written according to a particular set of conventions, printed on sheets of paper which are collected into signatures and then bound between covers, have cultural merit. The article I’ve just finished writing, which I’ll be posting for comment soon, claims at one point that the deep purpose of all publishing is conversation, of some variety or another, whether the casual discussion among a book group, the formal discussion of a class, or the slow and painstaking discussion (stretched out over decades) of scholars, though the institutional structures that have risen up around reading over the last five centuries have gradually attenuated that social purpose. Here’s a conversation, however, and a great one at that, provoked by a one-paragraph blog entry. So under what definitions would this not qualify as “good”?

One of the speakers at the “New Structures, New Texts” summit in early June was Michael Jensen, the director of web communication for the National Academies, as well as the director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press. His talk was the one that most captured my attention of the course of the day, intersecting as it did with MediaCommons’s key interest in redefining the processes and purposes of peer review.

The talk was based in part on two articles of his, one in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and one that was published shortly after the summit in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s this latter piece that I’m most interested in, at the moment, as Jensen here lays side by side the authority models of traditional scholarship (which are based, as he points out, on an assumption of information scarcity) and of “web 2.0″ (which are based on information abundance), and attempts to project what the values of “authority 3.0″ might be, how it might be computed, and, most crucially, what scholars and institutions need to start thinking about in order to be ready to participate — as authors, as researchers, as evaluators — in such a model.

As Jensen points out, most people talking about things “3.0″ today are focused on creating modes of algorithmic filtration and other forms of artificial intelligence in order to cope with increasing information abundance; these technologies will no doubt have powerful effects on the ways that authority — whether scholarly or otherwise — is measured. Included amongst the factors that “authority 3.0″ algorithms will likely take into consideration, Jensen indicates, are:

- Prestige of the publisher (if any).
- Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
- Prestige of commenters and other participants.
- Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
- Raw links to the document.
- Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
- Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
- Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
- Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what’s its authority status?
- Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
- Quality of author’s institutional affiliation(s).
- Significance of author’s other work.
- Amount of author’s participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
- Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
- Length of time a document has existed.
- Inclusion of a document in lists of “best of,” in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
- Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

I’m particularly interested in the inclusion of “peer prereviewers” — and in particular the specification of “pre” in that designation — as only one in a long list of other metrics, and a caveated one (”if any”), at that. MediaCommons is, as we discussed at some length at this spring’s editorial board meeting, interested in the development of a mode of “peer-to-peer review” that would take into account both a qualitative assessment of the comments made on a scholarly text and more web-native metrics such as links, downloads, tagging, and so forth. Implicit in this model, however, is a sense that the most important thing we’ll be working on, in developing peer-to-peer review, is a schema for “reviewing the reviewers,” for determining not just the authority of a text but the authority of the commentary on that text.

As MediaCommons moves forward, we’re hoping to provide the tools for scholars to have a hand in developing such systems. Right now, we’ve got a number of “sociable” bookmarking buttons that appear beneath both blog posts and In Media Res entries, and we’re working on ensuring that various forms of metadata (including COinS) that will be important to tracking the life of electronic documents will be embedded in everything we publish. As with everything, however, we need significant user input, to ensure that the technological network we’re building develops in concert with the human network that it will serve. So: what are the metrics we need to include both in the review of texts and in the review of the reviewers? How should those metrics themselves be evaluated? What is at stake for members of the network (whether authors, researchers, or more casual readers) in the inclusion and contextualization of those metrics? And what do we need to do, now, to communicate to our institutions that this is, in fact, the future of scholarly authority, and is thus a model of assessment that must be taken seriously by hiring, retention, and promotion committees?

I’m currently reading Empire of Signs (one of the few books that actually went in the suitcase, which I’m trying to spread out enough to tide me over), which just presented me with the following:

The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner (provided the country is not hostile to him) in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the alienations of the mother tongue: the regional and social origins of whoever is speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize. Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality. The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me: I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning. (Barthes 9)

I am fascinated, on the one hand, by the degree to which this captures my experiences abroad: caught in the swirl of chatter in another language, which I hear only as raw communication, without any sense whatsoever of what’s being communicated. All such overheard conversations give the sense of being about matters most serious, when no doubt some percentage of them are just as idiotic as those overheard in your local Starbucks.

On the other hand, I’m also fascinated by the transition out of this mode of existence in the midst of another, unknown language. I had a moment the other day of overhearing a conversation that I wasn’t paying attention to — just that level of background chatter to which one is not party, and not really meant to understand — when I suddenly recognized that I’d followed the entire thing without being aware of it. I think that’s the first time that’s happened to me — that I’ve understood something said in French without my having consciously decided to do so. It’s a different kind of vertigo than that to which Barthes refers, and perhaps more literally disorienting, as the “foreignness” of the language seems to evaporate, like the morning fog.

One of the greatest joys of summer, for me, is getting a brief glimpse of that seemingly long-ago period of my life when I used to Read for Fun. Which is something different from having fun while reading; it’s reading utterly divorced from utility, reading something that one intends neither to teach nor to write about (nor, for that matter, to use as a means of distracting the brain from work long enough to allow you to fall asleep), reading just for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s the kind of reading that I used to do as a kid, in which I’d immerse myself so deeply in the diegetic universe of the book that I’d be lightly dizzy when I looked up from it.

The good news is that I got to do a bit of that kind of reading week before last. I’d been stalling on reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, in large part because I wanted to enjoy it, to allow myself to experience it as a novel rather than as a piece of work. And I did; the nested dolls of the novel’s various narratives not only had me curled up on the bed reading during hours when I ought to have been doing other stuff, but also occupied my thoughts during those odd hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep. There are points, particularly in the last third, at which I found its narration to be a bit too on the nose, making darned sure that the reader wasn’t going to miss the point, but on the other hand, many of the connections among its narratives and characters are quite subtle. And the novel’s structure raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative diegesis itself, forcing the reader to think about what kinds of stories can fit into other kinds of stories, and what kinds can’t, and why.

The bad news is that I tore through the novel with something of the speed with which I used to read as a kid, and so the novel ended much too quickly. And, alas, that was the only novel I had with me; two others were in That Box. So I’m trying to read a little French fiction, but there’s no way I’m making that diegetic escape in another language. At least not yet.

I don’t think I know anyone at Virginia Tech.  But if any of you are there, I hope you and your colleagues and loved ones are okay.

We actually had a psycho-on-campus drill earlier this semester, and though we all went along, no one I know here took it terribly seriously.  That we live in a world that’s always happy to provide us evidence of why we should take such things seriously just breaks my heart.

Timothy Burke has posted one of the most sensible assessments I’ve seen of the problems with “effects” research, spurred on by the vastly over-reported study recently released suggesting a correlation between time spent in day care and “disruptiveness” in school.  Burke extrapolates outward to think about the persistent problem of “media effects” research, which has for decades attempted to create causal links between a series of social problems and the consumption of media texts (i.e., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cause schoolchildren to kick one another, Marilyn Manson causes teenage suicide, violent videogames cause school shootings, and so forth).  For whatever reason, I keep expecting us all to have moved beyond such simple causalities, and am always taken by surprise when any study suggesting that mode of cultural consumption x causes social problem y seems to achieve such wide purchase in the public imagination.

But then, by and large, we all want something to blame for such social problems other than ourselves, something external to our family structures and our under-supported schools, something that we can demonize without having to ask more difficult questions about our culture and its values and inequities.  Burke concludes with a pledge that we could all bear to take:

Do not endorse research about social behavior or social psychology without first looking very carefully at the methodology and the effect size. If you would disregard the study on those grounds when it contradicts your own social views, disregard it when it endorses your views.

I’d add to this, though, that we might all bear growing a bit more skeptical about causality in general, resisting the suggestion that a correlation between phenomena can tell us anything more than that there’s a correlation between phenomena, particularly when the putative “effects” of the phenomena under study are, as Burke points out, “teeny-tiny.”

Good grief, do I love these women.

Ben has opened a discussion over at if:book about Gore Vidal’s recent BookForum interview, in which, among other things, he laments the death of American readership.  I’ve taken this as an opportunity to rant a bit about the presuppositions of this kind of death-discourse, which I’ve gone on at length about in The Anxiety of Obsolescence.  I feel strongly enough about this comment to republish it here:

Oh, boy. Don’t get me started. I’ve got an entire book’s worth of arguments about this. These sorts of declinist arguments (no one reads anymore, and reading used to be so important; there are no famous novelists anymore, and novelists used to be stars!) nearly always seem to me led by two incorrect premises: a nostalgic over-estimation of the past importance of reading/the novel/the novelist to mainstream US culture, and a pessimistic, overly narrow underestimation of what’s happening in contemporary culture. Yes, reading was very important, and the novel was a key cultural form, and novelists used to hit the talk-show circuit, but all of that was a far more limited phenomenon than it seems. Reading, particularly of fiction, has generally been the province of an educated segment of the population with an adequate supply of leisure time and the desire to fill that leisure time with an imaginative, edifying experience. It’s arguable that in the 1950s economic and social forces combined to make that segment of the population seem both extremely large and central, but it was far from universal. (In a similar vein, one might revisit who the audience for talk shows such as Jack Paar and Johnny Carson was, and how that audience—and thus the nature of the talk show—has shifted in the last fifty years.)

But, on the present: anyone who suggests that there are no famous authors today has a very narrow definition of fame. Making such a statement requires never having shown up at a David Foster Wallace reading, or a similar appearance by any number of other writers. And even writers who don’t appear are famous: Pynchon has been on The Simpsons! Can you imagine the mob scene if he ever decided to show up in public? It’s of course arguable, as I think Vidal is suggesting, that this kind of fame isn’t mainstream, that these audiences are somehow on the fringe of contemporary culture; I’d argue that such readerships have always been more removed from the mainstream than they might have seemed, and that, in fact, the construction of this audience as “marginal” within US culture has been part of a conscious attempt to protect the novel’s audience by creating a sort of cultural wildlife preserve, away from the depredations of more contemporary media forms.

And on those contemporary media forms: it’s my sense that people aren’t doing less reading than they used to, but rather that they’re doing far more; it’s just that the scene of reading no longer involves a retreat from the general flow of life into a quiet space with a discrete, printed object. Now the scene of reading is everywhere: public, communal, wired. And the form of reading looks quite different: sometimes it involves the interpretation of visual images and embodied performances rather than simply the processing of text. The book is not alone, and won’t ever be alone again; authors have got to start thinking about the ways that new forms of reading might be used to their advantage, rather than retreating into nostalgia.

After publishing which, I realized what I’d left out:

(I failed to mention the first time out that all of this has echoes of Norma Desmond reverberating in my head: ‘Reading is big. It’s print that got small.’)

From “Agony”:

Even critical theory, which once took its distance from damaged life, becomes another game. Apply to top ranked schools. Find a good coach. Pick a rising subfield. Prove your abilities. Get yourself published. Get some grants. Get a job. Get another job offer to establish your level and bargain with your current employer. Keep your nose clean and get tenure. You won! Now you can play! Now you can do what you wanted, secretly, all those years ago. Only now you can’t remember. You became a win-win Situationist. Your critical theory became hypocritical theory. It is against everything in the whole wide world except the gamespace that made it possible. But gamespace is now the very form of the world, and this world eluded your thought even as it brought home the glittering prizes. It’s gamespace that won. The hypocritical theorist, while dreaming, meets the ghost of Guy Debord, and proudly cites a list of achievements: Ivy League job, book deals, grants, promotion, tenure, recognition within the highest ranks of the disciplinary guild. The ghost of Debord sighs: “So little ambition in one so young.”

In his new memoir, “The Discomfort Zone,” Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed…. While some readers will want to give Mr. Franzen points for being so revealing about himself, there is something oddly preening about his self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable. And while it doubtless takes a degree of self-absorption for anyone to write a memoir, in the case of this book the author’s self-involvement not only makes for an incredibly annoying portrait, but also funnels the narrative into a dismayingly narrow channel.

Yikes.