As those on my Facebook friends list know, my high school friend Holly White has gone public about being kidnapped and sexually assaulted at the age of 14 to combat the attempt to whitewash the event by mother of the serial rapist who attacked her. The other courageous act I want to highlight is Lisa Schamess‘ recent musings on writing a book about coping with her husband’s death of cancer ten years after the event, and to link to the set off essays co-written by the two as he was dying and a set of essays written in the first year after his death when Lisa found herself a young widow with a young child.

Central to both these issues is the question of how personal is too personal, how much one wants to reveal about oneself in the electronic age where the anonymity of print gives way to the interconnectedness of McLuhan’s electronic global village. In Holly’s case, while her act of revealing the personal was a choice, it was a choice forced upon her by someone else. Here we find her using social media as well as the traditional press to combat a whitewash of events in a small town. For her act to work, she must make public her very private role as a victim of a serial rapist, something unknown to most of us who lived with her daily in a small town, a traditional village, if you will. Friends, acquaintances, and even strangers with no direct connection to Holly or our small community now know of some of the most private details of Holly’s life because she has used social media such as Facebook and the press to combat the distribution of this self-published book.

While Holly’s choice was thrust upon her by the self serving acts of another, Lisa’s choice to go public, to first use an online forum, her blogs, and now her book-in-progress is a choice that comes from within, although the event(s) that serve as the genesis of these choices are no less wanted than Holly’s.²

While both contexts are quite different, in their motives, in the results, and in what they are revealing, both Holly and Lisa have chosen to make the very personal public in ways that I can only call acts of courage. My own struggles with the walking the line between the personal and public pale in comparison to theirs, and I am in awe of these two women.³

1. The medieval studies group blog In The Middle, Jeff Rice’s Yellow Dog, Bonnie Kyburz kind of…, Mike Edward’s Vita, Brendan Riely’s Digital Sextant, and Lance Strate’s Blog Time Passing are all  excellent examples of academic blogs that effectively and engagingly slide into the personal.
2. Just so it’s clear, Lisa is published writer and novelist, which for me means that when she says she’s writing a book, this isn’t the same thing as your cousin or neighbor or person you meet in a bar telling you that they’re writing a book. Unlike the average person who says they’re writing a book, Lisa has a track record of making it happen.
3. As a footnote to this post, I feel compelled to comment on the mnemonic function of these acts of courage. Making the personal public brings personal experience into the shared experience of the social, into the realm of communal experience. In this way personal memory becomes social memory. Their public acts of personal remembering transfer those personal experiences to us through acts of Burkean identification through consubstantiation. To paraphrase Maurice Halbwachs, the father of social memory studies, all memory is social, which means that all remembering is rhetorical in nature. And in realizing this, the lines between the private and the public, the question of how much personal might belong in an academic blog, becomes more muddled. Or maybe it becomes more clear. I’m still trying to figure that bit out.

I do indeed say that writing is artificial, and maybe one of our divergences is due to my not having explained that I do not consider being artificial necessarily bad at all, but rather of itself good. Nothing is more human than artifice. Only human beings can make products that are truly artificial–extensions into the outside world of the interiority of human consciousness or, if you wish, appropriations of the outside world into the interiority of consciousness. — Walter J. Ong, from a letter in the “Literacy and Orality in Our Times” publication files, dated Dec. 14, 1978.¹

I first posted this back in March 2007 at Notes from the Walter J. Ong Colletion, where I blogged while processing the Ong Collection. As I wrote in that post, I love the sentiment and world view Ong expresses here. As McLuhan would say—has said repeatedly, actually—we shape our tools and then they shape us. We fashion out of the interiority of our consciousness new environments which in turn become the environments in which we live. One of the most profound insights brought to us by the pioneers of media ecology is the understanding that media beings and cyborgs aren’t limited to our present and future but our always past.²

As the semester looms, I’m working through the revision I’m making to the “Media and their Effects” themed first-year composition course that is based around McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. In the past, I’ve focused the course around the idea that “the medium is the massage,” that is the idea that the forms our communications take (i.e, face-to-face talking, printed books, radio broadcasts, text messages) have a larger affect on society—how we think, work, interact, communicate, organize, construct, and participate—than the ideas expressed in those communications.

This time around, I’m centering our attention on the A.N. Whitehead quote at the end of the book: “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”³ The purpose of The Medium is the Massage is to help instill in us the awareness, the consciousness, necessary to navigating the dangerous future. As McLuhan tells us much earlier in the book, a statement I always return us to when we reach the A.N. Whitehead quote, “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as their is a willingness to contemplate what is happening” (25).

The critical lens of media ecology gives us an awareness of how we create the environments in which we live and how those environments then exert their influence upon us. It is through this awareness, this ability to understand what is happening, that we have the ability to shape our future.

1. The letter can be found in the The Walter J. Ong, SJ Manuscript Collection, housed in the St. Louis Room of Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University.
2. McLuhan defines media as “extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical” (The Medium is the Massage, 26).
3. In fact, I almost renamed the course from “Rhetoric and Composition: Media and their Effects” to “Rhetoric and Composition: The Business of the Future is to Be Dangerous.”

First off, I’d say that media ecology is not an “offshoot” of cultural history because we can trace media ecology’s origins back to before there was such a thing as cultural history.  If we consider Plato’s Phaedrus to be the first media ecological treatise, then we’ve got over two millennia before there’s any cultural history.

Second, cultural history is a subset of the discipline of history, and as a method, a subset of historical methodology.  Media ecologists employ a variety of methods, and some of what we do is history, and some of the history we do is cultural history, and some of it is history of technology, which is somewhat different from cultural history; and we also do some history of ideas, and Mumford referred to his own method as “ecological history.”  [Read more.]

His whole response is well worth reading.

Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate’s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called “I Pee My Pants When I’m Drunk.” What is your first thought?

It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas — though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else — something that might be more relevant to the student’s qualifications.

“What it tells me,” Zvacek said, “is that the student is technologically illiterate.”

The piece then goes on to offer  Zvacek’s definition of technological literacy:

“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

On the one hand, I want to stand back and suggest that the issue raised in the anecdote isn’t about technological awareness but rhetorical awareness, about the construction of the self. And it is. At the same time, however, Zvacek is getting at something else. Zvacek is responding to the US Department of Education’s definition of technological literacy as knowing how to use a computer, and in doing so, she’s not alone.¹

I want to push this issue farther though, push it beyond the concepts of computer literacy or technological literacy. In fact, I want to push us beyond the use of the word literacy itself for a whole host of reasons, first and foremost because literacy is, technically, about letters, about the written word, and that positions the issue squarely in a particular techno-cultural-noetic milieu.²

I was fumbling with this very subject when I wrote about technological literacy in The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage, which I wrote earlier this year as an example for students working on their own technological literacy collages. I’m unhappy with what I wrote there, unhappy, in fact, as I was writing it. The problem, I’ve realized, is that I fell into the trap I try to push students away from. I let the imperiousness of literacy muddle my thinking³ The issue, I so fumblingly hinted at in my technological literacy collage is not literacy of any sort but awareness rooted in orality-literacy studies and media ecology. Its the kind of awareness that Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong spent their careers trying to teach us.

As long as we keep rooting this issue in particular techno-cultural-noetic contexts, we’re going to keep fumbling along, never to get it right. The awareness I’m talking about here, and the awareness I think Susan Zvacek is getting at without realizing it, is rooted in an awareness of McLuhan’s dictum/maxim “The medium is the massage,” that “[a]ll media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”⁴ That is,  McLuhan’s awareness of how media work as environments:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a working knowledge of the way media work as environments. (26)

It can be hard, at first, to convince students that you’re actually talking about something relevant to their lives when you jump around from such topics as the difference between alphabets, syllabaries, and logograms; renaissance perspectivism and railroads; Homeric myth and encyclopedias; Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Absurdest theater, and the Fluxus Movement; John Cage and Charlotte Moorman, the TV-bra wearing cellist and performance artist. As McLuhan knew, you’ve got to pull the rug out from under their (our) feet before we can get beneath the surface and understand the deep structures. As I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere from time to time, focusing on surface, making the mistake of being too rooted in a particular techno-cultural-noetic perspective, leads us to focus on the wrong things. My go-to example here is the belief that oral poets must be illiterate. Early scholars of oral tradition too quickly jumped to this conclusion that oral poets must be illiterate because the oral poets they studied were illiterate, even while there was evidence to the contrary, and it mistaken notion was perpetuated for far too long.⁵ As Ong argued, writing is imperious. It clouds our perspective. We are so rooted in literacy and in print culture that we far too often fail to realize it’s not our natural noetic state or that it’s not inherently better than other noetic states. This is the reason why we use literacy as the metaphor for everything, and in doing so, we fail to recognize that when we think we’re talking about literacy we are sometimes actually talking about awareness of media as environments.

Ultimately, this is why I keep teaching The Medium is the Massage, why I keep returning to it semester after semester even as I resist becoming one of those teachers who always teaches the same thing semester after semester. A year ago, a student told me our university president walked by, saw the student reading The Medium is the Massage, and said, “People still teach that?” Fortunately, this particular student had gotten McLuhan’s message by that time and she was grooving on it big time. She had come to understand McLuhan’s message and its relevance to her 21st-century life. I keep teaching McLuhan because it is relevant to all our 21st-century lives and it will be relevant to the lives of our 30th-century ancestors.

Hmmm…Timothy Leary came up with the dictum “turn on, tune in, drop out” at McLuhan’s urging. (( In Fashbacks, Leary laments that people misinterpreted this as meaning “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity” rather than asking them to alter their consciousness so to live better.) In that spirit, let me offer a new dictum, one to keep in mind when we think we’re talking about literacy: Peal back, delve deep, be aware.

1. For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, let me suggest Cindy Selfe’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention; Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives from the United States, and Stewart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age as three good starting points.
2. See, for instance, Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Blinded By the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy for a Metaphor for Everything Else?” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies.
3. If you’re really curious as to what I mean by this, see Walter J. Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” (The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.).
4. The Medium is the Massage, 26.
5. Scholars of oral tradition, including such people as Albert Lord who was one of scholars who first promoted the error, have also worked to correct this perception. For a good, introductory text on this subject, see John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

As I’ve argued here before, while Lovecraft is most often classified as a horror, dark fantasy, or weird tale writer—he might classify himself as a writer of supernatural horror—much of his Mythos stories can classified as a science fiction as it is a response to contemporary scientific thought.

All this is simply to preface my favorite passage from Charles Stross’ The Fuller Memorandum:

Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, after all, and when you process information, you set up waves in the platonic ultrastructure of reality that can amplify and reinforce—

To put bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. THe more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality. The weirdness is already going macroscopic—has been, for decades, as any disciple of Forteana could tell you. Sometime really soon, we’re going to cross a critical threshold which, in combination with our solar system’s ongoing drift through a stellar neighborhood where space itself is stretched thin, is going to make it likely that certain sleeping agencies will stir in their aeons-long slumber, and notice us.

No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by smashing all our computers and going back to pencils and paper—if we did that, our amazingly efficient just-in-time food delivery logistics would go down the pan and we’d all starve. No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by holding a brisk nuclear war and frying the guys with the biggest dicks—induced megadeaths have consequences that can be exploited for much the same ends, as the Ahnenerbe-SS discovered to their cost.

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the demonological equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. Human minds equal plutonium nuclei. Put too many of them together in too small a place, and they begin to get a wee bit hot. Cross the threshold and suddenly and emphatically and they get a lot hot. And the elder gods wake up, smell the buffet, and prepare to tuck in. (61)

Just a bit of Stross’ science fictional thinking of which I think Lovecraft would have approved mightily.

As I’m trying to more regularly blog my reading, here are some thoughts/comments on The Fuller Memorandum and “Overtime” à la Brendan.

• While The Atrocity Archives consciously draws its spy thriller elements from Len Deighton and The Jennifer Morgue draws from Ian Fleming, The Fuller Memorandum doesn’t seem to be an homage to a particular spy thriller author. I’m not widely read in spy thriller fiction, so I’d be happy to be corrected on this one.
• The absurdest tedium of civil service bureaucracy upon which The Atrocity Archives draws so much of its humor is only hinted at in this novel, which is a good thing.
• The primary villains of this story are cultists seeking to awaken the sleeper in the pyramid aka the Eater of Souls aka CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN aka Cthulhu. With cultists at the center of this novel, I think it’s got a more Lovecraftian feel than the other two novels, but that’s a pretty subjective statement, especially as the other two are very much Lovecraftian in their own ways.
• As with Stross’s other two Laundry books, there is history to this novel, this time with roots in the Russian revolution and extrapolation based upon post-Soviet espionage. The arrest of an alleged Russian spy ring in the US the week before the novel’s publication and resulting spy swap a few days after the novel was released lends a sense of immediacy to the novel.
• In setting about writing this post, I came across a short post by John Brownlee of Wired, written after the publication of The Jennifer Morgue, in which he asks, “Which raises the question: exactly what genre of fiction wouldn’t benefit from the addition of the Cthulhu Mythos?” Good question.

“Overtime” is a fun story, set over the Christmas holiday with Bob serving as Night Duty Officer tasked with staffing the office while everyone else is off enjoying the holiday. (Mo, his wife, is off seeing her mother.)

While published before The Fuller Memorandum, it’s set after the book itself. Not only does Howard carry some technology he acquires in the FM, there’s a brief reference to climatic encounter in the novel. Very much worth reading, but I’d suggest reading it after FM.

TEI By Example offers a series of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Besides a general introduction to text encoding, step-by-step tutorial modules provide example-based introductions to eight different aspects of electronic text markup for the humanities. Each tutorial module is accompanied with a dedicated examples section, illustrating actual TEI encoding practise with real-life examples. The theory of the tutorial modules can be tested in interactive tests and exercises. The tutorial materials are contextualised with a tools section, providing both an annotated overview of state-of-the-art XML encoding technology, and a TBE validator application, allowing you to test your TEI encoding as you type! [Read more.]

A few favorite question/response exchanges from today’s session include:

@neilhimself I would love to read the version of AG in Dream’s library, how long a book do you think that would be?

@poodlemaster I think it would either fill a dozen shelves, or be twice as good and half as long.

and

@neilhimself Do you consider American Odin to be less powerful / derivative of Norse Odin, or just different but equal?

@meaganoff He’s more fun to write, because he’s more screwed up. He’d like to be as powerful as Norse Odin was in his glory days.

and

@neilhimself Are there any AG characters you plan to revisit in a different context as in Anansi Boys?

@T_Lawson I want to do more MONARCH OF THE GLEN stories about Shadow in the UK. Then send him home.

and, finally,

Do you ever see yourself in Mr. Wednesday?

@Asche_zu_Ash if you’re doing your job as a writer you had better see yourself in all the characters

American Gods was the first book chosen for the 1 Book, 1 Twitter discussion, which was the brainchild of Jeff Howe of Wired.