AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Digital Genres Six

Greg Costikyan is talking to us about games and business. Development budgets are increasing rapidly; he thinks this is driven by Moore’s Law (pumping polygons). A Doom level took about a man-day to build; a Doom III level takes more than 2 man-weeks. Tools aren’t advancing as quickly as the hardware.

Manufacturers feel they have no choice. They feear that consumers demand the highest-level, coolest graphics. Games are sold on the basis of demos and looks. Marketing departments run on the basis of feature lists. The sales channel is narrow. “The Industry” believes that technology sells.

Sales have increased, but not as fast as costs. Sales growth is a linear curve; the average game loses more and more money. And all this will only get worse.

The field is more and more hit-driven. Publishers will consolidate and publish more and more titles. Publishers will try to standardize (“like sports games”) with statistical, minor tech updates.

They’re trying to cut costs; they’re trying to alleviate risks; all games must be eligible to be a hit (“AAA titles”).

Developers won’t sell a game unless a marketers already knows how to sell it. Innovation thus can grow only a the margins.

Margins are squeezed, advances don’t recoup, you live from contract to contract, and developers have a hard time. . . . Greg fears the comic-ization of game design. The plasticity of game design oughtn’t be stifled.

Next up is Edward Castronova, who’s already otorious as the man who figured out the GNP of Everquest. He refers to online worlds as “synthetic”; he doesn’t like calling them “virtual” worlds (the term “virtual” is passé, and problematic).

What conclusions does Edward draw from this situation? This raises all sorts of political questions. The amount of financial assets at stake implies significant political energy. He’s presently analyzing whether two completely similar avatars — but who differ only in gender —differ also in eBay price. He tracks commodity prices in Norrath on his website. He makes the provocative comparison between physical-world governments and the administrators of online games.

Jesper Juul is getting his laptop connected for his dpresentation, “On the affinity between computer and games.” He takes as his point of departure four big questions: Why play computer games? What is a game? Games as rules vs. games as worlds? What is relation between computer games and other contemporary media/other things?

Why play computer games? Well, we play games all the time; why not do it with computers? Different games, different reasons. Why do games fit computers so well?

Jesper goes over a classic game model. It involves rules, variable outcomes, values assigned to outcomes, player effort, outcome associated with player, and optional consequences. He’s now parsing modes of play into “games,” “not games,” and “borderline cases.”

He thinks that the classic game model was broken by 1970’s (perhaps by pen and paper role-playing); quanitfiable outcome doesn’ apply to Doom; value assigned to outcome changed with SimCity, and its siblings; player effort may not have changed; but MMRPG changes the effects of consequences.

Digital Genres Five

First paper, afternoon session: Robert Moore is presenting a paper on brands, the use of language in corporate culture, and semiotics. Brands are composite entities, an unstable proprietary composite of a material product and an abstract symbol.

Brandedness (in the contemporary market) interpellates people to act as consumers (Anyone who uses the word “interpellates” has already won me over). Brand is the way producers extend themselves into the world of consumers.

In the beginningwas the Name; without a protected brand name, a brand does not exist. If the brand name devolves into a signifier for a category (rather than one particular version of products), the brand no longer exists; Moore calls this “genericide.” The name separted from the product. “Ingredient branding” names a component, which component is not itself perceptible in consuming the product (NutraSweet, Dolby, “Intel Inside”). You drink the cola, you use the computer — but you “consume” the host product without observing the component branded part. In these cases, the component frequently derives its initial cachet from the whole product, then lends its brand status back to the host. Third example: “viral marketing” produces its product in the act of branding; and in the act of consuming the product, the consumer both consumes and produces the product.

Moore proposes that online, we are dependent on our names. Machines recognize us by our names, we recognize one another by our names. . . .

Now the Happy Tutor is transmitting twenty-two aphorisms on branding — a version of this posting from April. This performance suffers lack only in the of The Tutor — whose presence perhaps would make the performance impossible. More’s the pity; but his delegate himself offers a surfeit of significance.

Laura Trippi is here (we were afraid she couldn’t make it). Two digital genres, or metapgenres: Defense Transformation (a Pentagon program that aims to take control of technological innovation and outrun private invention), and the other doesn’t have a name (P2P? Social Software? Smart Mobs?). Both are driven by disruptive technologies, using complex systems theory (emergence).

Why talk about them as genres? It calls attention to their relational nature. Defense Transformation responds to terrorist networks. They are internally stratified. Like the notion of brand, it forms a bridge that connects to the chronotope, linking to its conditions of possibility. It conveys the axiological horizons of each utterance. They’re always evolving,unfolding themselves across cultures, remixing, operating under other names. They provide narratives that explain their trajectory, but the narrative isn’t inherent in the genre itself.

Common values and beliefs: free markets, innovation (in and of itself). . . .

Defense transformation is the Pentagon’s effort to reinvent itself to prioritize informational technology (information up to parity with economic, political resources), toward the end of a Revolution in Military Affairs. Shift from doctrine of overwhelming force, to primary dominance. It’s not about destroying, but controlling knowledge and information to disorient and destabilize the adversary.

Net War: the combat shifts to non-state actors.

How does this connect with branding and the role of narrative? Brands deny a perceived good about one product or service, and persuade the consumer of another good.

Micah Jackson is talking about selves, identity, and online personality. He suggests thinking of our first year of college (Edward Castronova moans); we move away from our families of origin, make new friends —do we become new people?

He explains “self psychology” which Kohut developed in understanding and treating narcissistic personality disorders (I’ wishing Chris Locke were here to join in). Micah’s paper is good, but I’m not summarizing it because it’s so entwined with self psychology that I feel as though I’d have to reproduce the psychological background information in order to convey the points he’s making about the [self] psychology of online interactions.

Digital Genres Four

Biella is talking to us about IRC. (Her paper is online here, but she says she’ll take it down as soon as the conference is over). She’s drawing cultural criticism — specifically Paul Gilroy’s critical depiction of Black/Caribbean culture — into the study of social interactions on IRC channels.

She’s arguing against the premise that “authenticity” constitutes an essential components of community. She also argues against the homogenization of online interaction; if we invoke “technology” as a blanket characterization of what’s going on, we miss the diversity of online interactions and communities.

IRC and Caribbean street talk “are public spaces in which clever word play, performance, and stream of consciousness conversation predominate.” Whereas the Caribbean Diaspora derives from a distinct geographic and cultural dislocation, IRC brings together persons whose physical locations remain dispersed. The forms of speech in both communities converge — but the dramatic divergence of cultural circumstances of Caribbean diaspora identity (on one hand) and hacker channels remains vitally important.

Now Anne Galloway will tell us about “What Is the Augmented City?”: ubiquitous/pervasive computing. Amplified reality assembles, layers, virtual spaces onto physical spaces.

Anne proposes that “We have never been modern” (following Latour). Four facets of ontology: the real, the possible, the ideal, and the actual. The virtual is the ideally real; the abstract is the possibly ideal; the concrete is the actually real; and the probable is actual possibility.

The virtual is a real idealization, as a dream, a memory (as past-ness). The concrete is the present, the taken-for-granted event, the now. The abstract doesn’t exist in se. The probable exists (to the extent that it does) in the future.

Molly Wright Steenson picks up by talking through “imaginary architecture.” Bruno Taut, expressionist architect, wrote in November 1919, “There is almost nothing to build, and if we can really build somewhere, we do it to live. Or maybe you're lucky enough to be carrying out a good contract? I’m finding the practice to be cloying, and in principle, you all seem to be feeling the same way. Honestly: it is completely good that today nothing's being ‘built.’ Things can thus mature, we can collect our strength, and when it begins again, then we'll know our goals and be strong enough to protect our residents from dangerous adhesion or degeneracy. Let us consciously be imaginary architects.” So doing, he founded “the Crystal Chain.” Molly submits that this makes as timely a claim now as it did then. As she narrates the history of the Crystal Chain correspondence, she notes her disappointment that so little design thought today is utopian: “If you silence the discourse of vision too early, you cut it off and get nothing.” “The Web grows community without even trying.” (Trevor leans over and points out that the Disseminary is utopian information architecture.”

Digital Genres Three

Holly Swyers takes up the topic of slash fanfic in the context of Putnam’s investigation of a distinction between the “real” and “virtual” communities in Bowling Alone. She’s drawing on the Batslash list in particular.

She fell into exploring Batslash in the course of research on the popularity of Batman in the political atmosphere of the 90’s. She’s spending much of her time explaining the premises and structure of fanfic, and the testimonies of its practitioners. She unfolds the implications of the practitioners’ convention of labelling slash fanfic (for example), as a sign of acknowledging participants’ particular interests — and their interests’ differences from the likely interests of a casual browser.

Evelyn Browne is following through the discussion on fanfic, especially as fanfic traffic has relocated from mailing lists to LiveJournal. LiveJournal has catalyzed participation in fanfic by interconnecting “Friends Lists” with fan communication. (She’s talking fairly rapidly and quietly, and I’m sitting at the back of the room, near the electrical outlet, so I’m not catching all that she says. Please excuse the thinness of my blogging here.) She has quantified the posts on a number of lists over the past couple of years, and she thinks that the number of postings have remained pretty constant over that period. She thinks it’s easier to carve out an idiot-free space by using Liveournal than by using a mailing list. Marginal fandom emerges more prominently in LiveJournal.

Now it’s Steve Himmer, talking about the nature of blogging and whether there is such a thing. He cites the Meg Hourihan defnition and describes the flap that ensued. He’s questioning the technically-oriented definition, and seeks a more literary definition.

He approaches this by asking how we read weblogs. The blog lies in a blurred zone of story and reportage, factuality and interpretation, truth and fiction. A weblog focuses attention on trustworthiness rather than factuality. He here cites Jonathon Delacour’s posting on Ikuko’s name, a posting that generated a flurry of responses [finishing sentence] that reflected shock, disbelief, appreciation, strictly linguistic interest, strictly human interest, and ruminations on the relation of fact and fiction.

He’s discussing “ergotic literature” as a genre for blogs. Unlike print publications or even highly-complex computer games, blogs remain fundamentally open — the author can be expected to continue adding to the blog, to add links to a blog, and possibly to permit readers themselves to comment within the blog. All these differentiate the work of a blog from journalism or novel-writing. He doesn’t suppose that blogs are better or worse, a replacement or an alternative to other modes. His point is that the issue of whether any particular author is “really” blogging misses the value of actually reading blogs (rather than discussing the relative merits of technical tools).

Digital Genres Two

(I’m going to note-take more lightly this afternoon; I just can’t keep up and pay attention while going easy on my right thumb.)

David Rosenberg is now talking about the promiscuous comparisons between the Talmud and the internet. He’s beginning with an introduction to the Talmud. He’s usefully spelling out many, many distinctions that can differentiate Talmud from hypertext or hyperlinked weblogs.

He sums up by noting that although some comparative points can be made, the Talmud isn’t just like the internet. By eliding the real differences, we neither honor the Talmud nor elevate the ’net.

Now, Theo van den Hout of the Oriental Institute is discussing knowledge management in the really ancient (1325 BCE) world. Evidently, the Hittites had a very efficient form of recording and filing information; unfortunately, they didn’t record their system, so we don’t know how the (information) architecture worked. Although they worked with a conventional tablet size (roughly 8.5 x 11 or 14), they also kept small post-it size tablets (tablettes?) and medium-sized pillow-shaped tablets. We have about 35,000 tablets and fragments of tablets from the hittite Empire, reflecting a storage capacity of about 7,000 tablets, by van den Hout’s estimate.

Most were stored on in stacks of shelves, sometimes with labels indicating the title; some were kept in niches, chests, and jars. Van den Hout points out that light for reading was a problem. Sunlight from the left-hand side is ideal for reading cuneiform, but the tablets were stored in dark rooms; either one tried to read cuneiform by flickering torchllight (a hassle) or one carted a tablet outdoors to read (another hassle).

Colophons give the state of completion, the series, title, scribe, and supervisor for each tablet. Likewise, we sometimes find lists of the contents of a given shelf, with the state of completeness.

Now Seth Sanders is going, and his target is where the “newness” of digital genres comes from, and what a “digital genre” might be. He’s beginning with Frank Moore Cross’s history of the emergence of alphabetic writing from logosyllabic writing. Logosyllabic writing seems to have been general; alphabetic writing seems to have originated from a single source. He suggests that the elitist societies of the ancient world were logosyllabic, but that alphabetic writing engendered a more open, democratic culture.

Seth attacks the reasoning that underwrote this supposition. Empirical research points out a conclusion entirely opposite to Cross’s position.

He takes autographs as an index of linguistic function. Logosyllabic texts cite witness lists, which were authenticated with seals (for those who had them) or fingernail-imprints. In Greece (supposedly the site of higher rationality indigenous to alphabetic culture) one might mortgage a plot of land by planting a huge rock on it — not by filing a document with a signature (for instance).

The first signed alphabetic document dates from November 17 in 446 BCE, in Palestine: a deed of ownership for land. The ancestors of the autographically-signed deed were stamp-sealed Aramaic texts, mediating the Egyptian logosyllabic deeds and the Aramaic autographically-signed deed. The function of a signature doesn’t have to do with an ideology intrinsic to semiotic systems like logosyllabic or alphabetic writing, but the medium: clay or papyrus.

Daniel Headrick is now talking about alphabetical order, but I’m to type. It’s a shame, because this is a fascinating record of the history of alphabetical order.

Digital Genres One

The conference is just beginning. . . I’m up first, so I won’t blog my presentation, but I’ll try to cover the rest.

OK, I finally stopped talking. Now Trevor is up, talking about performing identity in a tripartite way: we perform with attention to text, we select what we’re performing, and we embed that selection in a particular genre. But we don’t just reflect on texts; we also engage in praxis, in specific places or spaces, when we act out these texts, we understand them. At that point, we get feedback and take risks, strengthening or damaging relationships. Performances are embodiments of certain texts.

Trevor quotes from Ezekiel, when God appears to the prophet and commands him to eat the scroll that includes the divine word.

Does performance situate itself in virtual bodies? Trevor acknowledges that he was skeptical at first, but that his doubts may have been influenced too much by television. TV detracts from our capacity to pay attention, because we have no feedback; he cites the Matrix Reloaded, but he’s giving spoilers so I’m not listening.

Can we then instantiate individual or social bodies online? Not in familiar ways, nor in a novel on-substantial (not-instantiated-in-physical-worlds) religious phenomenon. He argues that touch can’t be simulated; there’s an ontological difference between a physical touch and an electronically-mediated touch. That doesn’t mean that Trevor is theologically negative and nervous about online theology; he wants to give a positive account of online interaction, and he focuses on blogs. They’re more oral and aural than other online modes in a healthy online parasitism that forms a web of social connections like the web of connections that we enact in sacraments (that one I doubt).

Trevor characterizes blogs as stories, whether in pictures (he cites Burningbird and Rageboy, an unnerving combination) or words. Now he’s misguidedly defending the idea of spatial metaphors for online activity, but that’s not necessary to the point that he’s making about blogs as fulfilling his characterization of online activity and performance.

He wants to push the performative dimension of blogging by drawing in a connection to virtue (not Bill Bennett), citing the Epistle of James 3:17f: “the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity. And the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.” All of this, Trevor says, can be done online, and with that he rests his case.

Now Lacey Graves is starting up; she’s the youth desk coordinator for the Bahai’i faith. The online version of her paper is here. Since she’s got the text of the paper online, I’m going to use this interval to take a break from typing (and thus rest my right thumb)

Now Naomi Chana is up, talking about naming and identity. She refers to the DIDW website, and notes that most discussions of DigID emphasize security, technical, legal, and economic issues and ignore questions about the constitution of identity. DIDW suggests that digID should restore the ease and security that once subsisted in human transactions. Naomi questions the reality of that narrative of a golden age of human interaction; was it ever that way? She points to DigID discourses as a myth of salvation from the ambiguities and fears of digital interaction. Moreover, the language of DIDW collapses theology into anthropology where “the human” is unquestionably good, and the “impersonal” unquestionably bad.

She talks about naming, pseudonymity, polynymity, and the issues of trust that that raises. If names are metonyms for reality, we need to limit the play of polynymity. She invokes the category of mysticism to escape the binary opposition of nominalism and essentialism. Perhaps by considering the question of names for God, she can help clarify the relation of name and identity online.

She picks Abulafia as a representative figure — not because he’s a representative figure, but because he opens a useful window into matters of naming. He broke down the Tetragrammaton into components, recombining (recombinant onomastic DNA?) the letters in different representations. He thought he could attain enlightenment by spoken and written versions of the Divine Name. She passed out several lines from “The Battle of Blood and Ink,” blood and ink symbolizing intellect and imagination. There are also numerical resonances with various features of the created order.

My fingers are burning out. Naomi talks really quickly, and I need a break — sorry.

Proud

I’m proud for two reasons tonight. First, Michael received his offical Disseminary Hoopoe cap, and he attests that it looks good (I’d love to see a picture, Michael).

And second, even more important, Margaret got Seabury’s W. Stevenson Taylor Award for best theology essay this year. And that essay isn’t even a patch on her thesis.

I’m not really proud that Steve and Sage arrived safely tonight, but I’m very pleased they did. They’re gracious guests (they didn’t, for instance, say, “Well, you certainly have more than enough books around here,” or “Did you have to set us up in the basement, with the sump pump, the refrigerator, and the mysterious boxes of who-knows what heaped up around us”). I do hope it doesn’t rain — that sump pump gets noisy. And just our luck, it’ll flood the basement with all their stuff in it. Now I won’t be able to sleep tonight. Oh, well, more time to fine-tune my Digital Genres paper.

They Call Me a Good Preacher, Too

Margaret sent a link to this story on the relation of the author to the text.

Well, What About It?

How about Steve Himmer for President on the Green Party Ticket? I hear it pays better than TA-ing, Steve, and you obviously aren’t underqualified.

Found in Augusta

By popular demand — or at least, by suggestion from a couple of people — I tracked down my copy of the photo of Si as an apprentice in Old Fort Western. I had remembered his hair as being blonder than it shows up here, but the lighting is obviously tricky. He’s slenderer now than he was then; no baby fat on this year’s model. Still the radiance and the joyous outlook remain unchanged. The photo’s pretty dusty. My apologies to those of you who were planning to print it out and pin it on your bedroom wall.

Not only was he a good-looking, angelic kid, but he’s grown into a powerful (if somewhat grisly) writer. . . .

By the Way. . .

The review for promotion has been postponed indefinitely.

Does the Cluetrain Stop at Vatican City?

As I’m burnishing the deathless prose with which I expect to revolutionize the intellectual and spiritual lives of conference-goers, I’m culling quotations from pertinent sources, and found myself going over the Pontifical Council for Social Communications’ “The Church and the Internet,” which showed intriguing signs of cluetrainical insight.

Consider: “ The Church also needs to understand and use the Internet as a tool of internal communications. This requires keeping clearly in view its special character as a direct, immediate, interactive, and participatory medium.

“Already, the two-way interactivity of the Internet is blurring the old distinction between those who communicate and those who receive what is communicated,24 and creating a situation in which, potentially at least, everyone can do both. This is not the one-way, top-down communication of the past.”

Did Msgr. John P. Foley write that, or did Doc Searls script it for him?

There are predictable manifestations of the Magisterium’s nervousness about free dialogue — “it is confusing, to say the least, not to distinguish eccentric doctrinal interpretations, idiosyncratic devotional practices, and ideological advocacy bearing a ‘Catholic’ label from the authentic positions of the Church,” and “ The ‘tendency on the part of some Catholics to be selective in their adherence’ to the Church's teaching is a recognized problem in other contexts; more information is needed about whether and to what extent the problem is exacerbated by the Internet” — but the clues are there in the foreground.

Getting the Drop on DigID

Eric picks up the right stick, and perhaps even the right end of it, when he begins puzzling through DigID by way of credit cards. They don’t compare perfectly, but I do think that credit cards, perhaps in conjunction with cell phones, represent the point d’appui, the site where leverage toward DigID can most readily bear fruit without arm-twisting or hand-wringing. (Thus I’m not surprised to see Nokia, American Express, Vodaphone, VISA, and MasterCard among the Liberty Alliance members.)

I’m not a Passport expert, and I’m suspicious of Microsoft (not an MSFT-hater; that’s wasted energy) — so I’m not the one to predict whether Passport will be the lever. Liberty Alliance, though I suspect the trustworthiness of some if its partners, seems like a better bet; a collaborative approach runs less risk of misbehavior by a monopolistic proprietor, and their support of PingID and the open Jabber protocol make an impressive show of good faith.

Hey, Eric — why not seed this enterprise with something really attractive, such as an intriguing online game? Offer anyone who wants an ID to play Norlin-Land, and then say, “You know, if you’d like to buy a book from Amazon, just enter your credit card number in your preferences dialogue box.” The game doesn’t have to be as intricate as Unreal Tournament or Ultima or Sims Online; in a certain sense, the simpler the better. (Although just imagine what would happen if the game were itself fascinating; think of the possibilities if Liberty Alliance were to make a partnership with Ludicorp for the Game NeverEnding. The mind reels . . . .)

Aw, Shucks

Those of you who collect travel brochures will want to stake an early claim on this year’s Kennebec Valley tourism guide. Of course, this is always a hot item, but this year’s edition includes an advertisement for Old Fort Western, a stockade in Augusta, Maine.

And in that advertisement, on page 14, you might see an angelic blonde-haired rascal in eighteenth-century garb, brandishing an authentic quill pen over an authentic ledger book. And you would realize that you were holding a photograph of Josiah Adam, aged 8, at the Fort Western summer camp; a radiant young sprout, delighted at this opportunity to immerse himself in antique customs, and to be photographed so admirably by his grandfather. . . .

(It’s not in any of the online documents — not that I could see. More’s the pity.)

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Over the weekend I remembered how much I love Another Green World.

RSS, and Cheers for the Home Team

I didn’t notice that Pem (to whom a hearty Welcome back! from her week at a spiritual direction workshop) has an RSS feed — that’ll help me keep up with her, so that I don’t miss posts such as “Alternatives to PowerPoint” I have different reservations to PP, but Pem makes a great point (which resonates with one of Jeff’s points about all-in-one curriculum management megalith systems): we teachers would have fits if we were obliged to use classroom time in as regimented and formulaic a way as Courseware systems typically expect us to use online instruction. Yes, many teachers don’t want to learn to use online resources (and that’s okay, a point I tried to emphasize in Nashville before somebody’s gleeful trolling provoked the “experts” controversy), and others want to work with online resources in ways that an all-encompassing system will only hamper. There’ so much yet to be discovered about how we can learn online. . . .

More Thanks

On Friday, I omitted to mention one of the great gifts for which I give thanks this year: the birth (and continued thriving, despite some edgy surprises) of Cameron, Ruairi, and Sawyer. They and their parents have been through a lot with us, and we marvel again at the ways that a child can transform the lives not only of beginners, but even of grizzled veteran parents. Bless you, all!

iTunes Libraries Query

I have more MP3 files than I want to keep on my TiBook. I recently conceded the file-management war to my iTunes, letting it put files wherever it jolly well wants to, since that’s more convenient for my iPod. So, does anyone out there have advice that would let me use my external hard drive as the main library for my files? I’d like to be able to keep the main library on my external drive, and just pick up files from it when I want them; but iTunes seems to want to deal only with a single library, and that on my CPU.

This is why I (and plenty of other users) object to file systems telling us where we ought to want to keep our files. We may have reasons and ideas that the file hierarchy doesn’t know about. Grrrr.

Margaret Says

. . . that I have to put this link to yesterday’s photos of Bea and Pippa. She observes that I blogged so much today that people might miss the pictures otherwise. If that’s what Margaret wants, why, that’s okay with me.

Thumb Report

Since you asked — you know who you are — this is my report: After a week of not using my right thumb for trackpad-clicking (except in rare cases of reflexive gesture), not using it much for typing (using my left thumb or right index finger for the space bar), using a trackball set away from the TiBook, taking regular doses of Naproxen, and applying heat as much as convenient, my thumb feels a little different. That actually amounts to more than it suggests, since the times my thumb tended to hurt were specifically when I was using it, so if it feels better even when I’m not using it, something good may be presumed to be at work. (I think that makes sense.) The swelling in the tissue over the base of my thumb has gone down somewhat.

Taking Naproxen is tricky, since I’m not feeling a distinct ache that might remind me to take the pills. I’ve forgotten about them altogether once or twice, and several more times have taken them later than would be my plan.

The injury doesn’t feel like the descriptions of De Quervain’s tendonitis suggest; the Finkelstein test doesn’t feel bad at all. But if this makes my hand feel fine again, so be it. We’ll revisit the matter in another week.

Nashville Reprise

Okay, I left two topics hanging from my Nashville trip, and thinking about David and John reminded me to make good my IOU.

First, about expertise. I don’t think that the Web lays a finger on expertise in any sense that ought to worry people. People who really know a lot about (for example) astrophysics will still know a lot about astrophysics, and if I have a lot riding on an astrophysical question, I’ll ask my uncle or some other Official Astrophysicist.

It does complicate the social role of “ the expert.” People have traditionally looked to institutional structures for authenticating expertise: “She has a Ph.D. from Stanford,” or “He’s the D. Searls Professor of Astronomy at the University of Blogaria.” That reliance on institutions has always produced flawed results. We know that not everyone who gets a degree (even from a famous institution) has attained reliable mastery of her or his topic area at the time of graduation, and many neglect to keep up adequately after they graduate. Moreover, we know that not all brilliant, insightful people get academic degrees at all (plenty of sharp intellects never go to college, much less graduate schools). So the social-institutional definition of “experts” has been flawed all along.

Now that the web allows us to connect with so very many people, who converse so freely about so many topics, we’re loosely joined to innumerable people who may qualify as experts on social-institutional terms, and innumerable others who may not qualify on social terms, and they’re all answerable for the stuff they say in public. If the degree holder is a barely-made-it pontificator from Stanford, the web can call that expert to account; and if the autodidact knows her stuff and explains it lucidly, we’re better off listening to her than to Dr. Stanford.

It’ not as simple as that, of course — but it’s more simple to outflank unwarranted socially-instituted expertise now, online, than it was a few years ago, offline. And if that makes the possessors off socially-instituted expertise edgy, well, maybe it ought to.

The other topic I wanted to get back to was the question of blogging, education, and writing in public. I’ll keep this short ’cause I want to get on to preaching and the gospel of Matthew.

Some Vanderbilt faculty raised the question of whether student blogs should be accessible outside the campus, and David pressed me on this in the course of our drive to Seabury from O’Hare. I’m still thinking this over, but my present position amounts to this: there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with setting course expectations to include the capacity to speak in public on the course’s topic. John pointed out that this is one of the hallmarks of a liberal education, and Trevor has argued that part of the vocation for which we’re preparing Seabury students includes public proclamation of one’s assessment of the truth. All this seems quite compelling to me, and I’m fretful about the privatization of thought. One part (not the only part, not necessarily the decisive part, but one part) of education comprises learning how to formulate well-considered positions for public discourse. That tends often to get the least attention in a cultural setting that concentrates ferociously on the individual and privacy, and that soft-pedals public critical discourse at a depth greater than “Neener, neener, Republican,” and “Neener, neener, Democrat.” (This actually gets back to the “expertise” question, as the formal character of expertise has grown overvalued in the last few years to the extent that a [one-way] broadcast cultural world diminishes the pushback on public discourse. Lacking models of public intellectuals engaged in substantive debate, students [and some faculty] adopt a vigilant reluctance to think and speak in public.)

OK — it’s more complicated than that, as my students will especially be quick to say. But that’s the side I’m on for now. I owe people an account of the congruence between my firm support for public accountability for our lives with my firm resistance to government information-gathering, for example. But saying this, I can remove the “blog-in-prog” sign from two weeks ago’s post.

DRMA: "Bodies" by the Sex Pistols; "Heartbreaker" by the Rolling Stones; "What You Wanna Do" by the Reivers; "Sombre Reptiles" by Brian Eno; "Sweetheart Like You" by Bob Dylan —Happy birthday, Bob! (“Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you a king”); "Nugget" by Cake; "The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest" by Bob Dylan; "It's So Hard" by John Lennon; "Standing in for Joe" by XTC; "Pride (In The Name of Love)" by U2; "Collideascope" by the Dukes Of Stratosphear [XTC]; "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)" by Stevie Wonder; "The Great Escape" by Moby.

Danger

I’m feeling really productive this afternoon, which means that at any moment something will happen to knock me off track. But till then. . . .

Anointing

Say, I forgot (in the hustle and bustle, and in the rush of subsequent conversation) to mention this, but back in Nashville, I attained a milestone at the symposium with David Weinberger (since he’s working the Vienna scene this week, maybe we should call him pro tempore “David Wien-burger”?).

When the gracious John Rakestraw came to pick us up for dinner, he identified us both as “Web gurus.” I had a flashback to last September. David was there for the moment, but since he gets called a guru at the drop of a hat — and people are always dropping hats around him — he probably doesn’t remember the moment. I sure hope John does. John, if you’re reading this, would you authenticate that identification in the comments?

DRMA: "Mink Car" by They Might Be Giants; "I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down" by Graham Parker; "Someday" by the Strokes; "The Water is Wide" by Jewel & Sarah McLachlin & Indigo Girls (this, by the way, is supposedly the song to which Michelle Shocked’s friend alludes in the second verse of “Anchorage”); "H-A-T-R-E-D" by Tonio K; "Crosstown Traffic" by Jimi Hendrix; "Down On The Corner" by Johnny Marr & The Healers.

A Lover’s Plea

I love insight and brilliance, and I deplore tedium and lack of imagination. So when I turned to Morris Dickstein’s article about a resurgent interest in actual history (as opposed to that naughty theory), to which Tom Matrullo points, I winced to observe Dickstein casually ascribing qualitative characteristics to literary methods and approaches — as though a bright interpreter might not write well about Edna St. Vincent Millay from a feminist, or deconstructive, or old historicist, or New Historicist approach. (I do feel a little sorry that old historicists don’t get upper-case initials.)

News flash: Turgid critics abounded in the good ol’ pre-“theoretical” days. No news: Plenty of post-structuralist theoreticians write badly. Conclusion, so far as I can tell: in criticism as in any field of literary endeavor, gifted writers appear to us less often than do dull writers.

Moreover, brilliant writers often see so clearly the points to which they call our attention that they have a hard time tolerating other scholars’ perspectives — especially when those other scholars are dull, or are themselves brilliant.

May we please let go of the shopworn premise that “all feminists are ideologues and poor readers,” or “all historicists are tedious fuddy-duddies,” or “all queer theorists flagrantly defy both history and common sense,” or any generalization about critical approaches (especially when these sling the mud of the epigones onto the brilliance of pre-eminent practitioners)?

Now I must go finish the article, then read what the Tutor and Joseph say about it. They both point to Waggish.

This Space Reserved

All right, so our Bichon Frisé Beatrice isn’t as photogenic as everyone’s favorites Oliver and Hugo, but she’s a dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers sweetheart. Today she got her first haircut of the warm-weather season. I’m reserving a space below for before and after pictures.

Quite a contrast. . . .

Thanksgivings

The great Pippa’s table grace (we always assign the youngest of us to pray; Nate’s long-time prayer was “Thank you God, and you can be our friend”) is simply, “Thank you, God, for food.”

Well, I jst want to say “Thank you, God, for Fred Clark.” I wish I’d written that critical anatomy of Father Brown, if only for the brilliant lines, “The detective-priest accepts humanity's moral fallibility, but he cannot accept that our capacity for thinking and, especially, for knowing is similarly fallible and finite. (In this respect, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe may be a worse detective, but a better theologian and priest, than Father Brown.),” and “ certainty were really so available, after all, we would have no need for detectives. Or for priests.”

But I specially can’t wait to spring on Trevor the observation that “that [Bechtel] fellow rejects papal infallibility — such thoughts always lead to murder. . . ”

What Is Wrong With Seminaries?

My parents-in-law recently sent me a column from The Living Church, an Episcopal Church weekly. The columnist, the Very Rev. Gary Kriss, recently retired as Dean of an Episcopal seminary (a seminary strongly identified with certain partisan issues). The article in question was not published online, so I can’t link to it; you’ll just have to puzzle out Dean Kriss’s position as best you can, on the basis of my response to it.

The retired dean argued that Episcopal seminaries suffer the inevitable corruption of their faculties that derives from their improper allegiance to academic scholarship and their adherence to the practice of granting professors tenure. While I recognize problems with both the dimensions he cites — and other problems as well — I sensed some imbalance in a column written by one who had not toiled on the other side of the big oaken desk, so I wrote back to my in-laws about my thoughts in response to Dean Kriss, as follows (very lightly edited from what I originally sent off):

Thanks for the copy of Dean Kriss' article, which I would not have seen without your thoughtfulness.

My response is multi-faceted. To grant Dean Kriss all that I can, he certainly is right to suggest that our seminaries could do much, much better to prepare students for ministry; I could give a litany of reasons, but that might sound defensive, so I’ll refrain. Academic and practical-pastoral training do not yet easily converge, and some professors adopt the path of least resistance by pursuing either academic integrity or pastoral sensitivity to the exclusion of the other. Likewise, tenure systems always involve the risk that the tenured person (whether a rector or a professor) develops self-interested, destructive behavior. I don’t see the tenure system as an unalloyed good, although I still think it healthier than any alternative of which I'm aware. Perhaps Dean Kriss envisions a different system, for which he’s preparing the way with this article, but until he proposes it I’ll stay with my advocacy of tenure. Dean Kriss sensibly notes that institutional pathologies are probably aggravated by tenure — although making some members of an academic community vulnerable to the whims of others for their livelihood doesn’t sound like a panacea for dysfunction. Finally, power politics do indeed betray the calling to shared servant ministry. Thus far, Dean Kriss is making a strong case.

His argument misses some important elements, though.

Perhaps his experience as a seminary dean (who has not, so far as I recall, served as a full-time faculty member apart from his decanal responsibilities) focuses his attention on the problems with faculty, without recognizing some broader challenges in the endeavor of preparing students for ministry. Some problems in seminary education correlate with faculty tenure — but many do not, and tenure-associated problems might be greatly ameliorated if other the church tackled other problems directly.

To begin with, seminaries face the challenge of cultivating an ever-increasing amount of education in the same three years. Bishops and congregations now expect seminaries to do much of the apprenticeship training that formerly devolved on an ordinand’s first parish. It’s great that seminaries can step up and offer deliberate, expert guidance to practical matters, but the time for teaching such courses comes directly out of time for other courses that a seminary might teach. Moreover, seminarians arrive at seminary with less and less background in the traditions within which they will exercise leadership, so that seminaries must devote more attention to elementary instruction at the same time that they must devote more time also to teaching parish administration. In short, seminaries are asked to do more and more with the fixed time allotted them.

The ordination process complicates seminary education as well. Diocesan discernment processes address earnest volunteers, who are offering to give up rewarding, remunerative careers and the authority that comes from hard work’s experience, for a vocation which may involve starting from scratch in both earning capacity and authority. The Process, though, presents a well-intentioned series of psychological and vocational obstacles for these volunteers to survive — and with ordination as well as reality TV, not every survivor is someone best equipped for ministry. Those who do survive have often learned to guard their thoughts and feelings, to protect themselves from possible betrayal by unpredictable authority figures, to present themselves in their best light under all circumstances, whether that truly reflects their capacities or not. (This tendency can be reinforced when clergy try to justify their parish authority by representing themselves as the local experts on every ecclesiastical topic.) An unpredictable, intrusive, adversarial ordination process — where such exists — produces seminarians who sense a higher obligation to get through the various impediments to attaining ordination than to imbibe deeply from such nourishing springs as they may find at their seminaries. Moreover, the canons vest faculties with some of the responsibility for evaluating fitness for ministry, tacitly signaling self-protective students that the faculty may not be on their side. Faculty exercise this responsibility on top of the already taxing demands of teaching, scholarship, leadership in community worship, and active participation in the broader church, and they feel torn between nourishing strong trust-based pedagogical relationships with students (on one hand) and passing judgment on those students' clerical vocation (on the other). Under such circumstances, the faculty’s task of helping seminarians grow to theologically-sound understanding of their vocation often conflicts with the appearance that they serve as gatekeepers (sometimes hatchet-men, and -women) obstructing the path to ordination.

Now, the church certainly has sound reasons to exercise discernment and deliberation in considering when to recognize a call to ordained ministry. That deliberation risks attaining hyperbolic importance, though, both to participants in discernment and to those being examined. When the prospect of enduring the ordination process itself deters candidates from pursuing their sense of a calling, then those responsible for devising and implementing the process should account carefully for its design and effects.

The intractable pathologies to which Dean Kriss points tend to be exacerbated by some of the conflicts that beset the broader church in more ways than the obvious. Of course such conflicts tempt students (and teachers, deans, and trustees) to enact these conflicts with a fervor amplified by a seminary’s essential function of formation and instruction, and especially because of the unique vulnerability of seminarians (who may at any moment, with little recourse, be removed from ordination track). They also tend to engender an atmosphere of contestation and rivalry, all the more so where an institution’s own identity integrates tightly with one or another party in a church conflict. While an embittered, recalcitrant tenured professor can greatly impede the work of a faculty, a healthy faculty can usually work around such isolated troublemakers. When collegial problems seem to implicate an entire faculty in dysfunction one may wish to reverse one’s gaze and consider another possibility: Sometimes the dysfunction subsists at more central administrative levels; even a dean or president can fall prey to pathology, and although these do not have tenure, they can be quite difficult to identify as problematic and to remove.

Academic tenure imperfectly addresses particular problems, problems that actually abide powerfully in precisely the seminaries fro which Dean Kriss would uproot this protection for faculty. Church-related institutions show a dangerous proclivity to assess their employees less by their gifts for teaching and study, and more by their adherence to partis pris. We do not advance the cause of a well-prepared ministry by invoking the hovering threat that a dedicated, capable professor should be dismissed because he or she believes that the wrong sort of person may (or may not) be ordained, blessed, tolerated, or healed. Moreover, if our seminaries were to abandon the practice of tenuring faculty, we could only expect that our best scholars and teachers would regularly leave Episcopal seminaries in favor of tenurable positions at secular college and universities, or at other denominations' institutions.

One last difficulty with which church and seminaries should come to terms can only be named as a persistent anti-intellectualism in the church. Dean Kriss surely did not mean to invoke such a base sentiment in assailing faculties, but in an ecclesial culture that shows relatively little respect for the deep work of theological reflection and critical study (tending to prefer self-promotion, bonhomie, partisan allegiance, and bluffing), his one-sided emphasis on the shortcomings of faculties might too easily be interpreted as a superficial appeal to the premise that those who lead church and congregations needn't really understand that much about the faith they presumably uphold and teach. (And since one impediment to effective seminary education is the chronic desperate financial circumstances that beset most seminaries, where neither professors nor students are by any means eating caviar for breakfast and nibbling bonbons through their leisurely day’s activities, Dean Kriss’s complaint ought at some point acknowledge the adverse financial circumstances that bear heavily upon both faculty and students.) A substrate of anti-intellectual self-congratulation strikes an especially discordant note for a church that boasts of its sophistication and openness to critical inquiry.

Everyone can point fingers, and by the same token everyone can cooperate in improving conditions. First, every congregation and every diocese must take seriously its dependence on the church’s seminaries — in part for clerical training, and not least for the sort of deliberation and critical thinking that enriches the faith by setting its roots deeper in truth and in understanding of the traditions we have inherited. Support for seminaries doesn’t mean only financial contributions, though that would make a good foundation; support should also involve active encouragement for the seminary’s teaching mission, interaction in seminary community life (where that’s practicable), and participation in governance.

Second, dioceses can step back from an exclusive emphasis on discernment of aspirants’ calling, and look to ways that the entire process can more effectively encourage aspirants and thank God for the gifts they bring to the community. Seminarians reasonably perceive a massive wall of hostile interest and discouraging consequences in their dealings with the process that leads to ordination, and they feel relatively little safety and support. (General Ordination Exams are only the bitter icing on this unpalatable cake — but I won’t go there.) If the church institutionalized as much support for those preparing for ministry as it does inquisition and rejection, the population of seminaries would take a marked turn for the healthier.

Third, bishops, deans, and faculties might consult one another for a clearer and more manageable sense of what is being asked of seminaries, and of what outcomes can be expected. Were dioceses to prepare students for seminary with a year's elementary instruction (not for credit, and preferably not for preventative costs) before they started formal study, the seminaries might be able more effectively to teach these better-prepared students. Similarly, if dioceses recognized that guided instruction in pastoral practice works especially well when students are actually in the midst of that practice, they might devise mentoring programs that alleviate the pressure on seminaries to teach students what they might do when circumstances arise that they've never experienced before.

Fourth, the church should devote concentrated energy to encouraging its scholars to explore ever more thoughtfully the relation of (on one hand) learning to use one’s full intellect in God's service, and (on the other hand) to learning how servants exercise sound care and leadership in congregations. We have paid fitful attention to the topic, but Dean Kriss appropriately pushes us to cultivate a more articulate, profound response to what are too often treated as antithetical interests. That can't be right — but we need better clues toward bearing fruit in what seems a barren no-one’s-land between the two options.

If after we make strides in these areas, we still find deleterious consequences to granting tenure to professors, then by all means let us take up a careful search for productive alternatives to tenure. But let us not begin an effort to strengthen the church’s mission by amputating its head for having a bad hair day; let’s hear from more voices than just Dean Kriss’s (and mine), and let’s work together dramatically to enhance the work of encouraging the educational ministry of the Episcopal Church.

Dull Day

Well, it wasn’t precisely a dull day; I went shopping with Pippa twice, once for groceries and once for acid-free paper on which to print the final version of Margaret’s thesis. I’ve been proclaiming the wonders of bhangra music to anyone who passes within earshot (Margaret says I have an unnatural attraction to music with lyrics in a language I don’t understand — her case in point is the refrain from “Iko Iko,” which goes “Jockamo feeno ai nané.”) (In fact, now whenever I sing along to some non-English language, Margaret arches an eyebrow and asks, “Jockamo feeno ai nané?”) So I’ve been listening to Asha Bhosle and Daler Mehndi and Mohd Rafi, and urging it on reluctant bypassers. The Apple Store should ramp up its supply of bhangra.

Eric points out that he’s very concerned about the three objections I raised to Microsoft’s Security-System-Formerly-Known-as-Palladium, En-Scub, especially objection number two.

But not a whole lot of thrills, such as there will be when Margaret hands in the acid-free utterly final copy of her thesis, “The Interpretation of Forgiveness and the Forgiveness of Interpretation,” probably tomorrow. (Ask her about it.)

En-Scub Is Not the Villain In A Cheap Monster Flick

Nor, says Eric, is it the cudgel by which Microsoft will bludgeon hapless users into submission, eliminating leeway and extirpating uncontrolled distribution. Eric provocatively asserts that En-Scub (it does sound Lovecraftian, doesn’t it? Plus, it’s not even a proper acronym. I’ll refrain from any further characterizations of Microsoft at this point) can ensure that piracy continues unchecked. He points out that the technology behind En-Scub is purpose-neutral (as nearly neutral as any technology can be).

Sound enough claims, up to a point. The aspects of En-Scub that most bother me aren’t the “intrinsic evil” aspects (or the dysacronymy or the monstrous sound of the thing). I have different grave objections. To wit:

(1) A structured system for securing trusted networks depends on my willingness to trust the system’s vendor. I won’t troll or flame, but simply observe that reasonable minds may find data in the public record to suggest that Microsoft might not constitute a perfectly reliable vendor for such a system.

(2) Does the idea of Microsoft designing a required hardware element to go along with their now-all-but-mandatory operating system strike anyone else as problematic? Will En-Scub be designed in the open, so that Linux and Mac users aren’t excluded from the outset?

(3) It looks as though this doesn’t amount to digital identity management so much as hardware authorization. That’s an important distinction. If I’m travelling and want to use my friend Melissa’s computer to do some digital errands, will Melissa’s computer automatically accommodate my authorizations? If so, what kind of protections and restrictions are we talking about? If not, it sounds as though I’ll only be able to interoperate with the En-Scub universe so long as I’m using my own personal machine. (What if my computer goes wonky? Assuming I have all my files backed up, I can edit them on a loaner machine — except that the loaner may not know what all my different authorizations are. What happens when I sell my old computer? There may be answers to all these — in fact I’m sure there are such answers, although they may not appease me — but the point of DigID should be that AKMA can do AKMA-stuff freely whatever computer he’s using, wherever he may be.

Plus, I wouldn’t trust Uncle Bill with my pocket lint. Whoops! Sorry.

Not a Joke

As I drove back and forth from Naperville for the recent series on Resurrection and Theology, I saw a billboard that featured a couple of guys (who looked college-age) with the prominent banner, “Aftermath, Inc.: Suicide - Homicide - Unattended Death.” I wrote it off as a stunt, a couple of Harvey Keitel-in-Pulp Fiction wannabes. But this morning, my curiosity getting the better of me, I went to the web address they cited. As it turns out, these guys do exactly what they say they do. I suppose I didn’t think of advertising such services on a billboard — what’s next? — but I suppose they need word-of-mouth.

They ought to remediate their website, though. (And I spared you the pointless Flash intro page that you get if you just go to their front page.)

Upgrade

Sprote Research granted my wish for Clutter, their cover-art retrieval application. Now, the main window that houses the album cover and information along with fast-forward, rewind, and pause buttons will permit a user to view the album cover up to full image size (instead of the reduced image that had been the case before. Note that a program such as Clutter doesn’t add the image file into the music file, the way iTunes allegedly does — so if you’re using the sound file in a context where you can’t see cover art anyway (an MP3 player, for instance, or just for storage purposes) you don’t carry the art overhead with you.

World [Class] Series

I have only one disappointment with this winter-spring series of technology lectures at Seabury: that more people couldn’t find time to come to more of the lectures. From beginning to end, the series offered nutritious food for thought. If the series’ insights were to seep into Seabury’s bloodstream, and hence to the Episcopal Church more broadly, we might begin getting a message across to a culture-generation conspicuously absent from many congregations (and under-represented where it’s not absent). Moreover, I suspect that that cultural group stands metonymically for a great deal more than seats in pews. If we were culturally in-touch enough to make appropriate use of technology (not just, “Hey, let’s have a ‘chat room’ for those teens!”) — and theologically clued enough to remember that our gospel’s heart beats with joy, integrity, sharing, and love — we’d be reaching not just technophilic Gen-Next-ers, but a wide swath of souls who see no particular to squander an exquisite Sunday morning being badgered and bored. I say this not to suggest that there’s no admonition or formality in church life; far from it! But I observe a great disproportion between scolding (on one hand) and articulating a coherent account of why one might live one way rather than another (on the other hand), between restrictive formality and joyous order.

I worry that Jordon Cooper came to us so long ago that people no longer remember the tremendous demonstration he gave. Jordon showed, on the basis of cases in which he’s been involved, the ways that a hyperlinked congregation grows in community, in effective congregational communication, and in outreach to an increasingly digitally-active world. Jordon’ talk connects beautifully back around to David Weinberger’ on the last night of the series; it’d be great if we could re-run him again, now.

Mena and Ben Trott demonstrated the tremendous capacities of their Moveable Type personal publishing system. Though most people associate MT just with weblogs — for obvious reasons — the Trotts showed that the back-end of the architecture makes possible a great deal more than blogs alone, and they sketched some of the ramifications of the whole idea of a content management/personal publishing system.

Jim McGee walked us through a discussion of how “thinking in public” in general, and weblogging in general, can enrich the shared work of organizations. Jim’s talk bore important implications for work in congregations, much of whose work gets done by people who spend little time in immediate proximity to one another, and who often rotate through particular responsibilities on a yearly basis. A congregation that took care to preserve its institutional memories from year to year would lose less time to revisiting preparations, planning, and organization, and would be free to devote more energy toward other ends.

And David Weinberger talked to us about the Web as a locus of meaning and connection, of communication and hope, and why that’s important.

I’ve been on the receiving end of thanks for this series from a number of directions, but they’re the ones who offered all this wonderful, deep, thinking for us to learn from. To David, Jim, Ben, Mena, and Jordon — heartfelt thanks for your participation in this series, and we’ll see if we can’t cultivate some fruit from the seeds you all planted.

Lift

Sometimes, some circumstances make you feel like you can levitate out of The Matrix of life’s arrant frustrating gloomy nonsense on the strength of other people’s kindness. David Weinberger is a prince, and gave an absolutely first-rate presentation; he drew out and encouraged an intense theological discussion (in which he demonstrated the difference between being disinterested and being uninterested). Accordion Guy, himself one of the coolest bloggers around (plus he’s Canadian, which Trevor assures me makes someone infinitely cooler than they ordinarily would be) took the What Blogger quiz, and drew a startling conclusion from his results. Then just minutes later, while I was doing some referrer hygiene, I followed a link to a neat student friend from long, long ago in a state far, far away — who remembered (bad permalink —scroll down to Friday, May 9) the Senior Seminar on Discourse/Knowledge/Discipline fondly. And this winter’s technology lecture series at Seabury, which series I want to sum up in a blog this weekend, elicited an encouraging email from one of our attendees.

Heartfelt thanks to you all, and to my faculty colleagues.

Advance Warning

I’ll be teaching a summer course on “Preaching Matthew” (as in, “The Gospel According To. . .”), and in an effort to clarify my thinking on the topic, I expect to blog a few entries on What I Think About Preaching over the weeks between now and then (late June). So if you (Dave) or y’all (seminary community) or any of you (tutors, allies, lectors, whomever) want to put your oar in on the discussion, be prepared.

Safe on Departure

Margaret and I woke up at 5:20 to drive David to the airport, where we entrusted him to the tender mercies of his airline at O’Hare. So far, so good.

Oh, and Tripp (“I’m not a doctor, nor do I even play one on TV”) thinks my thumb is hyperextended or dislocated or something like that. I will try to call for a doctor’s appointment today. [Later: Called the Primary Care Physician. Ha! Waiting for call back.] [Later still: Attending nurse called back; they think it’s tendonitis (bonus points for Wes), and I'm supposed to take two naproxen daily with food, treat the thumb with warmth, rest it to the extent possible, and call them back in ten days or two weeks if this regimen doesn’t help.]

Oh, and the review for promotion may be back on — my faculty colleagues are trying to insist on it —but don’t hold your breath, nothing’s been scheduled yet.

Why the Web Matters

David begins his talk about explaining the mistake of conflating “the Web” with the economic opportunities that the Web represented. First, he points out, he has many more friends since the Web exploded into our lives; he knows more people, and he knows people who can connect him to other people. Second, we now can safely assume that we can get more information about any topic. Whereas before, our access to information was heavily restricted and heavily mediated; now, there’s always another source, another site where we can learn more. Third, every day David receives suggestions about interesting and amazing things from others who passed word along. A global recommendation system has sprung up, making us interested in things we never knew we would be interested in. While there’s value to straining toward objectivity, the Web provides a massively interlinked intersubjective network, giving some of the weight that objectivity always used to have. Fourth, the Web has enriched cooperation (among David’s daughter and her friends, anyway) on homework and other such endeavors. The Web has effectively brought about social learning. Fifth, a generation of kids has grown up expecting that they can make their voices heard in public: in Amazon reviews, in weblogs, in chat rooms.

So the Web is a big deal. The Bubble was just money.

The Web is a weird place, but also really familiar. ItÕs a conundrum, since weird things usually donÕt succeed, they donÕt get adopted Ñ but the weird Web hasnÕt stopped increasing in adoption rate. ItÕs weird, because we relate to our 2-dimensional monitor screens as though they were genuine Òportals.Ó Likewise, the key metaphor for Web information is the page Ñ but these pages both invite you to go elsewhere, and try to hold your attention.

So the Web is so weird that categories that make real sense in the physical world donÕt work the same way with hyperlinked communication. This bizarre, weird place feels familiar to us.

Why is it familiar?

The Matrix: Reloaded opened today. (David thought The Matrix was anti-Heideggerian; our beliefs about our world are so out of whack with relation to the way we are in the real world, that our way of life now defines alienation.) The fact that we even understand the concept of The Matrix of how alienated we are. Something that used to be embedded in human experience has been ripped out, withered and dried, and thatÕs Òknowledge.Ó ÒKnowledgeÓ started out in genuine human needs in the Greek polis; over time, knowledge has been thinned down to the point that it amounts only to the least robust senses of our humanity. For example, Ray KurzweilÕs Age of Spiritual Machines waxes techno-philosophical on the timing of the trans-human transition, when weÕll be able to download a human brainÕs information into a silicon medium. David proposes that we think of a different binary medium: beer cans (up means 1, down means 0). If you think about a hundred million beer cans being flipped up and down in synchronous patterns, you can replicate the binary data on the silicon chip Ñ but if we look at a vast sea of flipping beer cans, weÕre a good deal more resistant to a romantic transhumanist vision. ThatÕs because weÕre more alienated from our knowledge.

One consequence of this alienation and confusion is the naive belief that we recreate in our heads a picture of the world the way it is, and if it corresponds to reality, weÕre sane, and if it doesnÕt correspond, weÕre deluded. Bad, bad, bad. Knowledge is not the same thing as information processing; when you kiss your beloved, you're not processing information about pressure on your lips and thermal changes, youÕre kissing someone.

[Here David embarks on a long story about buying a washing machine. Kenmore or Maytag? Why did David choose the machine he did? He chose the one he chose because of what he found out about the two models in question from the Web; he would never, ever, have found out the knowledge that influenced his decision from salespeople. The knowledge that influenced David was real, embedded, human knowledge Ñ not the dessicated information that passes as knowledge in our alienated culture.]

So David loves the way voice and knowledge are connected, which has always been the case until we got self-conscious about knowledge, so that knowledge had to be the same no matter who says it. On the Web, we can speak in our own voices in a new public setting. Our voices are passion-based, theyÕre experimental, theyÕre deeply social. Contrariwise, institutions strive to restrict voice and rhetoric.

So David wants to talk about books and authority. He asks about the Wikipedia (this is beginning to reiterate what we talked about in Nashville). The effect of wikis generates social interactions that actually build up information, knowledge, and productive educational material. Is this knowledge anarchy? Any Bozo on earth who wants to can vandalize this encyclopedia; this is the death of knowledge. But David argues, instead this is the emergence of multi-subjective, personal, knowledge unlike anything weÕve seen before. Wikis and weblogs replace the gatekeeper functions that restricted access to authorized knowledge with a filiated cacophony of passionate, vital opinion. Now heÕs on about books and experts again; IÕm glad that the Vanderbilt faculty isnÕt here to get edgy all over again.

The Web is a web of pages, but more important, itÕs a web of links. Tim Berners-Lee thought that scientists would use links for dynamic footnotes; he was right, except itÕs everyone using links for dynamic connections, not footnotes. ItÕs an economy of generosity. People are making pages for others because they care. The Kenmore page that tries to trap you on their site, that links only to other Kenmore pages, but everyone else provides links that attract you away from their sites. ThatÕs small Ñ but it means something; it shows humans demonstrating generosity to one another. This web of sociality makes the Web (Òworld wideÓ style) an exemplar of whatÕs best about humanity, and thatÕs what makes the Web look familiar: it shows us ourselves at our best.

Jim McGee asks David about voice and knowledge: he sees in himself (post-blogging) a greater willingness to let his voice back into other things he does. Does David? David sees mixed signals. Customers hate it when they talk to robots at customer care centers, but industries hate to let their customer service departments off script. But heÕs found more and more clients that are willing to let their customer care reps talk with human voices.

If the Web were interviewing for a job, where would it want to be in five years? Commercialism or idealism? David says, he doesnÕknow; if he had a clear idea, it wouldnÕt account for the wildly innovative texture of the internet. He cites the end-to-end argument: take all the stuff out of the communication part of the network, and put the stuff at the ends. The internet has shown the innovative power of the edges. The [built-in] openness of the internet will ensure that weÕll be surprised by what comes next. HeÕs excited about Open Spectrum.

Trevor picks up on DavidÕs characterization of knowledge as embodied. When he goes online, what kind of body does he leave behind, and what kind of body does he take with him? His experience on the Web is really embodied in a certain way; what kind of way? Does David see our notions of ÒbodyÓ changing? David agrees that this is one of the hard ones, harder than thinking about our selves on the Web. The flip side of our alienation from knowledge is an alienation from our bodies, which become an inessential substrate for information. So itÕs incredibly hard. He cites a weird line of thought that he cites in Small Pieces: if you go up a level of abstraction from physical bodies and try to explain what itÕs like to have a body, what we do online is a lot like what we do in the physical world. We have points of view, we care about what is proper to us, all represented in a non-bodily space. That idea misses the point that bodies refuse to be abstracted Ñ and David doesnÕt know what to do with that. Trevor mentioned that ÒtouchÓ is absent from these discourses; though we may devise haptic technologies, these are still alienated from whatÕs most important about touch.

Tripp suggests that the body is abstracted (in one mode) and communicated identity is embodied in ways that enrich one another. David responds hesitantly. Jane responds that embodied relationships canÕt be complete, full relationships without physical presence. It reveals and shares some stuff that physical presence doesnÕt, but it isnÕt sufficient in and of itself. Heather adds that her reading of friendsÕ blogs is enhanced by knowing people physically. David isnÕt sure. Ruth notes that as David pointed out, we have different voices in different settings; our online voices add another context for voice, not necessarily better or worse, complete or incomplete.

Intense theological wrassling ensues, about which IÕm too involved to keep typing.

Safe On Arrival

Well, Blogaria can stop holding its collective breath — David Weinberger arrived safely, and didn’t even evade the vulpine perception of my somewhat dazed sixteen-year-old son when I sent Si into O’Hare to escort David to the car. (AKMA to Pippa, while they waited in the car in the “Do Not Wait Here Under Any Circumstances” No Stopping Zone: “Wait a minute — I sent Si in there. He’ll get lost; he’ll never find David!”)

But everything turned out okay, and we’ve dropped David off in his suite to prepare for the intense technological grilling he’ll receive from Seabury’s students and faculty.

The ride into Evanston from O’Hare was delightful; David told us — well, I can’t repeat that, or David would have to kill me. And then — well, I shouldn’t say. Really, you had to be there.

Vita Non Brevis Est

In case it becomes relevant again, for whatever reason, I’m thinking of my vita. Specifically, I’m thinking about how to prepare an academic vita that stands out enough actually to communicate valuable information about a person, but not so much that it suggests that its subject is a showboat. My present vita is getting long; length itself communicates something valuable, but it tends to bury some information. And let’s not talk about page design in the context of academic vitas, as they tend to be ruled by the Times Roman Template-Driven school of layout.

I’m working on a tasteful, elegant, but not garish or pompous, way of displaying on the front page what a promotion committee or grant committee or search committee might expect from me, and organizing the details on subsequent pages. It’s probably a lost cause; academics may well adhere to the “don’t look too different” approach to self-identification. But then, those may not be the committees I want to connect with, anyway. Hmmmm.

Come to think of it, I’ve been struck by how absurdly inefficient academic hiring is. It seems as though there are two types of hires in academia: the star attraction (on one hand), and the cattle call (on the other; no offense to the cattle, among whom I am certainly numbered). There’s really little or no effective energy toward winnowing the field of interested job-seekers by people who know both the institution and the field of candidates. Some good brokers would make a fascinating difference, probably introducing some new problems but also making some wonderful positive connections.

I tease Margaret by suggesting that she would make a great agent for theologians, connecting interesting scholar-teachers with appropriate publishers and academic employers. It’s a cool idea that we won’t see implemented any time soon, more’s the pity.

Bunch of Ideas

I was earnestly hoping not to blog much today, in the interest of accomplishing non-digital tasks. But a variety of morning events and discussions have provoked me, so I’ll try to tackle them concisely, seriatim.

⊕ Re David Weinberger on copyright: As I was singing along with my computer this morning, I was reminded how deeply copyright has impoverished our culture. No, I don’t mean anything specifically to do with my own vocal artistry; but I do mean that the recorded-music industry has affected the sphere of homemade music just as the film and television have affected homemade theater (probably more so, though I don’t want to get into an argument on the point). But the notion that a single performance constitutes a definitive instance of a song (think of David Bowie singing “Changes,” I guess) throws our sense of culture all catty-wumpus. My habit of playing recorded music through every moment of the day that my surroundings permit (and that quantity just leaped with the purchase of a portable recorded-music reservoir) — a habit reflected perhaps less hyperbolically in the Typical American Family’s TV-viewing habits and some other folks’ radio and recorded-music habits — stifle the plausibility of indigenous performance. Regular folks now are much less likely to sing or play piano or guitar, now that they can easily choose to listen to Bowie or Britney Spears or Yanni or whatever. This, I know, is old hat, but it still riles me, and I want to highlight the connection to copyright, which ostensibly exists to enrich the cultural landscape.

⊕ I also have had occasion to see close-up the deleterious consequences of ressentiment, the malicious hostility of the weak and incompetent against the competent, and it’s stunning how effective the power of stunted weakness can be. Almost tempts one to turn Nietzschean — but I dare not do that, for my brother would chastise me, to keep me honest.

Really, though, the current of anti-competence that sometimes rears its head around us just beggars my imagination. That ressentiment can not only persist, but flaunt itself without fear of unmasking as the puerile envious malice that it is, turns my stomach. Maybe that’s what happened to Jenna and Naomi, in which case I hope they stay sensitive to this vile, destructive nonsense.

⊕ I still want to finish off what I was thinking about the Nashville gig, so I can take down the blog-in-prog sign.

⊕ I also owe the Tutor and his coterie of interlocutors some response about postmodernism, truth, Derrida, de Man, Swift, and the gospels. They’ve gone so deep, though, that it’ll take some concentrated thinking time to join argument. So I’ll pay bills instead, for now.

DRMA: "Finish Line" by Lou Reed;"The Train Kept A Rolling" by the Yardbirds; "A Room At The Heartbreak Hotel" by U2; "Tangled" by Folk You Harder (hi, Shannon!); "Wetback" by Los Mocosos; "Inconsolable" by Jonatha Brooke & The Story; "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" by the White Stripes; "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday; "Nkosi Sikelele Africa" by Paul Simon, Miriam Makeba, et al.; "The Truth" by Steve Earle; "At The Cross" by the Word; "Another Satellite" by XTC; "Chiaroscuro" by Paula Cole; "Happy" by the Rolling Stones; "Taxman" by the Beatles; "They'll Need a Crane" by They Might Be Giants;

Mixed Thanks

A tip of the hat to the redoubtable Mark Woods, who pointed me to a PDF of the article by Dan Hunter that I cite below. Now I can read the whole thing — except that as I read page four, I learn that Hunter’s “starting point is to challenge the previous wisdom that cyberspace is not a place for legal purposes” (my emphasis). What I make on the peanuts, I lose on the popcorn. Oh, well; maybe on page five, he says “Of course, AKMA is right and David Weinberger is wrong.”

By the way, the PDF stipulates that this is a draft only, so that we shouldn’t cite it. Remember that, everyone.

Elke’s Wish. . .

. . . is my command. Elke asked for a Disseminary t-shirt with the wood-type Disseminary design from below; I quickly added that to our Cafe Press store, emblazoned on t-shirts, a mug, a tote bag, and a messenger bag.

If you want that (or another design — I should add some Hoopoe goodies) on summat from Cafe Press, just let us know. Buy in quantity, to make us feel even better. We won’t make any money on these for the foreseeable future, but it’s cool anyway.

David W on DRM

David Weinberger offers his angle on why DRM is bad for humanity; that provokes me to add a few yelps of protest.

For instance, last week’s Sunday New York Times announced (link to abstract only, although the full text was posted for posterity here) that the Music Industry wants to develop a “software bullet” for shooting down illegal downloaders. Observe all that goes unstated here: evidently this software will be able to tell who’s downloading illegally. But let’s say I have a CD of Halley Suitt’s Greatest Hits, and I want an MP3 of Halley warbling “Tiny Dancer”; I could pop the CD into my TiBook and rip it with iTunes, but the word is out that iTunes’ encoder isn’t as good as the Unix-based LAME encoder. What if I don’t know how to work all those geeky Unix-based operations in OS X, but want to download a LAME-ripped copy of “Tiny Dancer”? How will the Magic Anti-Pirate Bullet know that I have already paid all the relevant parties from the ad agency to the payola-junkies to the executives even unto the artist herself? Obviously they can’t; the Magic Anti-Piracy Bullet must operate on the guilty-till-proven-innocent principle.

But that gets me going on another point. Let’s say I download a copy of John Lennon playing “Instant Karma” (among my first 45s — that’s the vinyl equivalent of a CD single, children). Now, I paid John, and I paid Apple for the vinyl and promotion and distribution costs way back in 1970. Does that make me a pirate if I download it now? It’s probably down in a box in the basement now, somewhere, but I can’t put my hand on it.

As a matter of fact, the Music Industry derives an increasing proportion of its revenues from turning over the media on which it publishes the music that it already knows you want. I have paid for some recordings on vinyl, tape, and CD (and soon the Industry will want me to pay again for Super Advanced CDs, which sound better and are, allegedly, hacker-proof). Note where the sanctimonious Industry rhetoric goes in this model: I paid the artist (the ostensible concern of pious RIAA officials) for the recorded performance when I bought the recording for the first time. From then on, nothing I do relative to that recorded performance cheats the artist out of an earned cent.

But the RIAA can’t see any of this, and their DRM enforecement mechanisms won’t see it either. They’re simply not interested in protecting musicians, whatever pious speechifying they do. To that end, they’re willing to presume guilt, to overcharge customers, to spend vast amounts of money on political campaigns (that they wouldn’t need to spend if they weren’t already their customers’ enemies). David has it right — DRM runs rough-shod over some of the most important characteristics of our humanity, and the world will be a worse place for that.

Ouch

Well, Margaret and I have pretty much decided that my thumb problems really are incipient repetitive-stress (from reversing my right thumb to click the trackpad on my Tibook), and I’m trying to take care of it. I bought a trackball, which gets my thumb away from the trackpad button. I have been trying to hit the space bar with my left thumb rather than the painful right thumb, which results in lots of keyboard disorientation. I omit spaces between words, thinking that my thumb must have hit the space bar when the signal from my brain was more like, “Whatever you do, don’t space with your right thumb.” Thanks heaven that NetNewsWire Pro has spell-checking.

Now that I’m not pushing my thumb to mouse-click, I find that even lesser tasks can give it a tweak. Holding something heavy between my fingers and my thumb hurts my thumb; the button on the trackball has a very low-pressure button, but even clicking that can cause a tiny jolt of pain. (I really do mean “tiny” — I wouldn’ even think about it if I weren’t being hyperaware of my thumb.) But reading of other people’s more serious repetitive-stress symptoms makes me cautious about soft-pedalling this one.

Now I’ll Have a Footnote

Constant reader may remember that the extraordinary David Weinberger and I have a running disagreement about spatial metaphors for online communication (loads of other people regularly join in — Tom, for instance, and dozens of other people linked from this hub). David argues that although the Web isn’t spatial, we appropriately conceptualize it as “place-ial.” I riposte that although we have become accustomed to spatial metaphors for online communication, these metaphors occlude some of the most exciting and unfamiliar aspects of the Web, so that we risk circumscribing our online interactions to those that most closely fit the familiar spatial/place-ial metaphors with which we characterize our activities (and defer, or perhaps lose, the opportunity to allow the Web to surprise us). Now, thanks to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, I’ll be able to cite an academic paper in support of my side.

As David Gold says, “We don't know yet what we can do in cyberspace,” especially (I Add) if we already know it’s “space.” (Link via wood s lot —thanks!)

Now I just have to get a copy of the article itself; I can’t read it online because the argument lies on the other side of an intellectual-property barricade. What this means, in effect, is that in order (ostensibly) to protect the author’s copyright, I will be made to pay a toll not to the author, but to Xerox or Toshiba or some other photocopier manufacturer.

It Was David’s

The mysterious roof hadn’t travelled as far as we had figured. It came only from next door, from a flat portion at the peak of the roof that one can’t see from ground level. I hope David’s family’s stuff stored in the attic, and Heather’s stuff in the bedroom (she’ house-sitting this year) wasn’t ruined.

Airport Delight

I had one of those traveller-déjà-vu moments in the Nashville Airport last week — “Have I been here before? When would that have been? (November, 2000, I think) ” and had the rare experience of actually enjoying one of those airport display galleries. This wasn’t “The History of Floor Wax,” or “Why Relocate to Boonville?”; it was a collection of designs from the Hatch Show Print collection. I was acquainted with some of their designs (most recently, the Bruce Springsteen “Live from NYC” album cover), but hadn’t known it was the work of a single house, and hadn’t known the extent of their work. Call me a design geek, but I just love this stuff! It was so exciting that I sat down and designed a wood-type Disseminary poster.

Whoa, Tom!

Tom Matrullo wields brilliance in thought and prose so casually you’d think anyone could do it. Yesterday and Thursday he unleashed two precision-guided vitamin pills of smartness, that raise by about 15 points the IQs of anyone who reads them carefully. Whoosh!

Blast From the Past

I promise not to do this very often, but yesterday Dave Winer said (a propos of Dartmouth):

So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course. And then realize that other bloggers (like me!) are consumers of expertise. We need experts to turn to just like the radio guys do. So there's lots of value in staking out the still largely virgin territory of expertise flowing through weblogs. This was one of the key epiphanies at the dinner we had last night.

Stormy Weather

Just when you thought life was settling down again — you returned home from an extended road-trip-ordination-preaching-tour — your neighborhood gets a tornado warning. Pippa went to sleep only when Margaret promised to watch the Weather Alert system vigilantly. (She subsequently construed “watch vigilantly” as “monitor actively or passively,” which Pippa might have construed as an evasion if she had been awake.)

The tornadoes seemed to have passed, so we drifted off to sleep.

Little did we know! No, we were not Dorothy-fied ourselves, but this morning we returned from church to find that a mini-twister had dropped a significant portion of somebody else’s roof in our backyard, nearly squashing a tree next to the Yamadas’ dining room.

I did a fast tour of the area (I didn’t care to risk receiving another roof on my head, in case any others were flying around), but none of the houses in the immediate area manifest roofing shortages. (The color of the tarpaper and the nice new flashing provide clues for matching to the house in question; that, and the big hole in where is patch of roof used to be.) So if you know somebody in the greater Evanston area whose house has a new irregular skylight, you may direct them to Seabury, where we have a roof to spare.

Back, and Done, and OK

It was a short night and a long day. Sermon number two still wasn’t what I wanted to be saying to Leigh and the congregation, so I got up early, fiddled around with the two sermons I had already written, decided that I’d try to write one more (if I didn’t like it, I had two to fall back on), and went to a coffee shop in downtown Eau Claire — the coffee shop in Eau Claire, as far as I can tell (potential Starbucks franchisees, line forms to the left) although I saw two prominent tattooing parlors — and working from a previous sermon, developed sermon number three.

That’s the one I finally preached, and it turned out all right. But I’m exhausted, and I have to help the good folks at St. John’s, Naperville, with their adult ed class tomorrow morning.

Here’s what I preached:

Sometimes the true words are the hardest ones to say.

“I’m the driver who dented your new car.”

“I love you, and I hope you’ll marry me.”

“Sorry, but I don’t want to go to the Homecoming Parade with you this year.”

The true words sometimes come out slowly, as porcupine quills from a dog’s nose. They stall and hesitate, unwilling to venture into a world where the truth is often unwelcome. True words may reveal our smallness and sin, or the truth may isolate us as lonely witnesses to righteousness when our fellow-citizens compromise with bigotry or violence. Or sometimes the true words rush out in confusion, falling over each other, making a hash of our thoughts; the truth is so hard to articulate, so hard to get right, that we blurt out whatever comes to us on the moment,

True words come out awkwardly, because truth burns.

Truth burns, and we speak in a world of straw and gasoline. Those who occupy the front pages of our newspapers, who spend all their waking hours in front of television cameras, usually find it easier to heap up the sawdust higher, to throw out more tinder, to dump more and more kindling. So it’s no wonder if people don’t want to hear the truth. Who needs the firestorm that the truth would start?

Which is where old Isaiah, or young Isaiah (to be precise) enters the picture. He showed up for his shift on temple duty one day, the Lord’s day, and without his expecting anything the Holy Spirit stripped away the comfortable insulation from his understanding, and showed Isaiah the stark majesty of God, clothed with the smoke of holy incense, surrounded with singing seraphim, sublime in the radiance of the truth. And Isaiah recognized right away the difference between God’s truth and the everyday blather that had filled his mouth up to then. “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.” God called Isaiah, and when we recognize a true calling from God, we look into a mystery so much deeper and more profound than our capacities, we can hardly avoid stammering our feelings of inadequacy. Our own resources do not measure up to the jobs for which God calls us; our hands are unclean, our hearts are unclean, our lips are unclean, and God calls us to the work of truth in purity. Well, where does that come from?

And the seraphim answer, “It comes from God. Now hold still – this might sting a little bit.”

Are you beginning to feel uneasy, Leigh? You ought to – because in a few minutes, Bishop Whitmore will ask you a series of questions. With each truthful answer that you give, you will draw a little bit nearer the fire. Your words weigh more heavily, syllable by syllable, as you assent to the teachings of the saints, as you bind your conscience to the church’s guidance. Answer these questions with the full gravity of the truth, and may the God who gives you the will to speak your answers give you also the grace and power to do them.

But that grace and that power will not always come to you as an exhilarating rush of joy and divine strength. When in the course of hospital visits you pray at the bedside of little children stricken with big diseases, of great women and men diminished by weakness and age, that grace will more often than not be manifest in patience and solicitude. When at convention and vestry-meeting you decline to play mathematical politics, but seek to discern the spirits, whether they be edifying for the Body of Christ, then God’s grace may be manifest in the pedestrian capacity simply to stay awake through endless speechifying and electoral maneuvering. When you look the people of God in the eyes, get out of the way, and make room for the Holy Spirit speak the truth, that grace will be manifest in fire.

Now Leigh, you’ve been doing your liturgical theology homework; you know that you have always already shared in that graced gift of fire; you have been baptized with the baptism of Christ, in the Holy Spirit. You have from your baptism shared with us in Jesus’ priesthood. All who are baptized into Christ share with him in an eternal royal priesthood, from my daughter Pippa to the Bob Hope (100 years old at last count). You have served faithfully in the order of deacons. We are not here to change your calling to the truth, nor your membership in the priestly Body of Christ. We are here to witness God’s action in calling you to give up the prerogative to claim your life as your own, and to ratify your voluntarily becoming a creature of God and the church. Beginning today, Leigh, you officially offer your friendship to the world without reserve; and beginning this afternoon, we commit ourselves to supporting you and learning from you in your consummate generosity. The sacramental ordination to the priesthood signifies and effects your renunciation of the claim to serve God out of your own powers; we receive your offer to get yourself out of the way of the Holy Spirit, seeking no credit for God’s work in you, but committing yourself only to amplify the glory of God by forgoing the glory of Leigh.

This afternoon we gather here at Christ Church Cathedral and we re-enlist with you in the service of God, joining in the declaration of our allegiance to the God who created us and who calls us to new life. We commit ourselves – all of us – to a way of life that points away from me, away from us, and toward our neighbors, toward recipients of Christ’s grace who have not yet made the same commitment we have, or who have lost the strength to live that way. We volunteer to take places in a choir without soloists, in which our personal privileges lose their importance in a tapestry of shared meaning. We are answering “Yes” to God, whispering, so that our voice not drown out any other soul’s “Yes,” and we are shouting “Yes” so that the sound of our affirmation shakes the world and crumble the walls that separate one lover from another, sister from sister, brother from brother, parent from child. And amid our harmonized chorus of “Yes” and “Yes,” Leigh kneels at our feet and prays in a voice that speaks with all our hundreds of voices, “Yes, I do, I will, Amen.”

Yes, Amen, to bind together broken lives, and Amen to heal wounded hearts. Yes, to a salvation that's not all about me or even about us, but about those whom we love without knowing or even necessarily liking them. Yes, from today on we become friends, friends to one another and friends to Christ. Leigh volunteers to show us what friendship means, and we promise to pay attention to her, to help her recognize how to be a friend, and to help her find the strength to live as a friend when her flesh’s inclination to befriend falters. Today we turn to Bob and praise God for his willingness to share, in a life joined with Leigh’s by holy marriage, to share the stress and frustration of priesthood without the explicit accolades that come with ordination, without even our full understanding of what his willingness costs him. Together we confess our reluctance to receive priesthood in our midst without exalting or vilifying that gift, and we pray that we not harm Leigh and Bob with praise or slander. Together we beg God that finally we begin to get things right, and that Leigh and Bob reveal to us God’s will for just people loving extravagantly, loving deeply, giving from their hearts and thus receiving from God the unquenchable grace that replenishes abundantly, that recompenses so richly that our spirits are humbled by God's generosity, and so that we give and give and give again, joyfully, from a treasure of grace and strength so vast that we cannot give away rapidly enough to exhaust it.

That capacity to dwell in God’s grace already resides within you, Leigh, as it resides in us all. Now, in the presence of God, we charge you to search your soul for anything that might impede the Holy Spirit, that might resist God’s grace in your ministry – because the angel with the fiery ember draws near. If you can honestly answer Bishop Whitmore’s questions, “Yes, Amen,” God will purify your heart and lips, that you may be a vessel for the Spirit.

Reach deeply into that grace, Leigh, and extend your hands to us. We call you to serve God as a healer, making real among us the promise of Christ’s healing power.

Reach into that grace, Leigh, and teach us the meaning of the gospel. We call you to be our guide through the tangled weeds that obstruct our growing to maturity, drawing us ever closer to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

Reach into that grace, Leigh, and find the strength to walk in integrity. We call you to bear witness to the truth, speaking the fiery words that will burn away tempting lies, and bring light to our path.

God’s grace burns with the fire of truth, Leigh, and we would understand if you flinched as the glowing coal draws near your lips. But even more, we pray that you trust the calling God, that you trust us, and say, “Yes, Amen.” And in a few minutes, when we kneel before you and ask your blessing, bless us with words of radiance from God, words set free from self-interested sin, free to make known the dazzling holiness of God. Be our priest, Leigh – and may the truth of God always burn on your lips and in your life, so that we and all who see you can recognize the Holy Spirit at work in you, to glory of God, through our only Lord, Jesus Christ.

Amen

A Long Night in the Making

I have most of a lesser sermon written, and a notion for a better sermon, but the notion isn’t taking shape. Can’t afford to go to sleep till the sermon takes shape in one direction or the other.

[Later: Nodded off; couldn’t keep my eyes open. But now, refreshed, have the hook that I needed, I think. We’ll see.]

[Phooey! It was a promising idea, but got what should be a festive and joyous sermon off to a decidedly grim note. Start over. Again.]

[Those waiting with bated breath by their RSS feeds may exhale. I think I have the hook, and the sermon’s resistance is broken. I’m writing it out, going over it to weave it more tightly with the Scripture readings, smooth out the theology and rhetoric. Thatnks for your support.]

Check-In

I’m still working on the report from Nashville, but my sermon for Leigh’s ordination on Saturday takes priority for now. I want to remind those who were planning to come to Evanston to see David Weinberger [on Thursday, the 15th] that he’ll be beginning his presentation on “Why the Web Matters” at 7:30, in the Seabury Lounge (same as Jordon Cooper, the Trotts and Jim McGee). Do come join us!

Nashville Report

Boy, typing sure gets slow when you’re doing it self-consciously to avoid using one thumb.

David is absolutely too kind, but we sure had a good time. He’s also absolutely right about irritating people by calling “expertise” into question. That was a (politely) heated exchange. He alludes to a discussion over whether the Web is an “information space” or a “conversation”; one interlocutor pressed him on the extent to which the distinction constructed a false [bad thumb! stop typing!] dichotomy. David pointed out that in discussions with some information-science types, especially some of the folks who invented the Web, it’s a useful distinction to emphasize the ways the Web isn’t just for technicians doing research, but also for teenagers musing about the vicissitudes of modern existence. Maybe everyone’s right on this one; maybe it’s just that information spaces are a lot more interesting, richer, wilder than we had ever imagined.

Things I want to add: reflections on “Open Source Education”; expertise, anti-intellectualism, and the nature of the Web; privacy and education.

Preventitive Typing

I’m typing without using my right thumb now, trying to fend off problems from space-barring and clicking so much with one digit. Very weird.

Back in Evanston

Arrived back safely, returning to the embrace of family and the frenzied gymnastics of family dog. David and I had excellent discussions with the Vanderbilt faculty both in the larger morning session and the smaller afternoon session. Tomorrow I’ll try to blog more about those sessions, and to take up David’s challenge about Sophism. I have to polish up the sermon for Leigh’s ordination, too.

David’s Comments

David begins with GoogleURLs, the unique search criteria that turn up our identity in a Google search. David’s is “David JOHO”; mine is “AKMA”; John Rakestraw’s is “John Rakestraw.” But that’s not what he really wants to talk about.

He presents the Web as a conversational medium, as opposed to a broadcast medium (such as television and radio, and especially — in this context — classroom lectures. Oh, phooey. I started out taking notes by hand, but then David challenged me to blog all this. the catch is that I fell behind, trying to transcribe my notesw from earlier, and then I missed something he said while I was typing, and it got really interesting for a moment there, and, well, you get the point. No notes.

By way of report, however, I can testify that we raised hackles among some present when David suggested that the Web constitutes an environment, a knowledge ecology, that calls “expertise” into question. (This seemed like a no-brainer to me; I’ve been interrogating the notion of expertise since the first chapter of my dissertation.) But some of the attendees were fearful that true expertise might be overshadowed by bogus, that we debase knowledge by compounding it with “personality” (where I doubted that they could ever truly have been separated). Hence, we engendered and intensified a small controversy, which kept everyone’s attention way from some of the brilliant insights I had been hoping to retail about pedagogy and technology.

This afternoon we talk with a smaller group about blogs (in particular) and teaching, in a more workshoppy environment. I’ll see whether I can live-blog that meeting; it’ll help if someone doesn’t distract me.

Live from Vanderbilt

David and I are about to begin a two-hour discussion of tech and ed at Vanderbilt, moderated by John Rakestraw. David is going to go first, stealing all the best parts of the notes I shared with him before we arrived.

FWIW, David’s computer is hooked up to the projection system, so I guess we'd have to call this an opportunity to mock David in real time. . . .

Live and Learn

Frank Paynter explains — in just a few paragraphs — why no one need be bothered to think hard about the body of theory that has informed my academic work so far.

[Later: Frank pulled his post on this topic, which is a shame. I’m sorry he felt obliged to; I hope he didn’t think I was fishing for that. The topic of postmodernism evokes strong responses across the board, and if a strong disagreement between Frank and me helps clarify what’s at stake in postmodern thought and the responses it engenders.]

Welcome to Nashville

My only experience of Nashville before today had been the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting held in Opryland, but I can report that Vanderbilt offers a much more attractive side of Nashville. Although the afternoon was sticky, and my cab dropped me off at the wrong hotel, it cascades with green, and everyone’s been friendly and helpful. David Weinberger seems inclined to steal all my best material tomorrow morning, so I may be left stammering and fumbling. At least I have an excuse, now.

Over dinner, John Rakestraw pumped David and me for feedback on a university-wide course management system. Vanderbilt’s evaluating options for a comprehensive package offering modules for class discussion, resource access, student records, and communication. Any suggestions? Ben and Mena? (There’a lot of business in the education market — it’s not defense contracting or anything, but there’s a living to be made by someone who can offer a coherent alternative to BlackBoard).

For the Record

This is the time at which the meeting of the committee called to review my promotion to full professor would have been deliberating, if that meeting had not been cancelled.

High Stakes

As a moralist by vocation — one who, as it turns out, works firmly on the terrain known as “virtue ethics” — I have a vested interest in Bill Bennett’s rhetoric and his practice. And (if you cut him slack for the cozy pipe-and-slippers nostalgia that suffuses much of his argument) I harbor some sympathy for some of his theoretical points. If we think through our ethics with less emphasis on “values” and “rights” and puzzling about quandries, and more emphasis on what sort of people we want to be and why, we will find that the sorts of ethical problems we confront take on different contours. That difference may help us figure out some of the frustrations we’ve had over the past half-century or so (and it may not; some will prefer the sorts of challenges about values and rights that come to the fore in ethical debates; chacun a son goût).

Gambling presents an interesting case for virtue ethics. It’s easy enough to defend gambling on the basis of a “personal rights” argument; Bennett wasn’t hurting anyone else directly, and he gambled voluntarily with money that was his to dispose of as he wished (we’ll come to the community-property question in a second). I suppose one could patch together a “values”-based defense of gambling too, though it gets trickier. “We value a society so constituted that people can kick up their heels in the way they choose,” or something like that. He evidently didn’t specifically condemn gambling in his self-presentation as a moral arbiter, so he hasn’t waffled on a practice that involved his own interests.

But if we want to talk about virtue and character — as Bennett clearly does, and does well enough at that he can drop eight million simoleans and consider it casual entertainment — Bennett’s gambling has to raise questions more serious than his demurrers suggest. What kind of person, in this complicated and impoverished global economy, blows sums of that quantity in preference to donations to education, medical charities, even Catholic Charities (an agency that’s been chronically short on funds to work toward its ambitious goals)? I’ll venture to answer that question by saying, “A selfish person.” What kind of person views a favored practice as ethically inconsequential without weighing its devastating effects on those whose pockets aren’t as deep as his own (and weighing the example he sets as a role model)? Again, such a person seems at the very least short-sighted. One could go on asking character-based and virtue-based questions of the ex-Drug Czar and Education Secretary (if virtue is the behavioral mean between two extremes, then dropping eight million dollars counts as as the moderate ground between not gambling at all, and what? losing a billion?), but the answers all seem to come out unfavorably. If Bennett wants to espouse virtue ethics, he owes his audiences an account of where his secretive, extravagant gambling habit fits into the picture. I’m betting on, “it doesn’t.”

Oh, and Joshua Micah Marshall asks, “What about lying?”

Perhaps most important, Elayne Bennett’s interest in the family’s shared financial well-being hasn’t been explored beyond Bill’s avowal that he hasn’t endangered the family milk money (“Whew! They’re down a few million, but they’ve got milk!”). Do we imagine that the couple sat down for a marital planning brainstorm, and Elayne said, “You’ve been working hard, honey — why don’t you take five to ten million and squander it at casinos to relieve that pent-up tension? I certainly can’t imagine what to do with all that money?” Perhaps I’m overinterpreting, but her terse report, “He's never going again,” doesn’t convey foreknowledge and approval to me. So, one more question: what kind of person blows millions of dollars of shared money without explicit and uncoerced approval in advance from those who hold a share in his financial well-being? (Are there higher mortal stakes?)

Bennett didn’t win himself any friends by playing Master Blifil during the Clinton years, which is too bad, because now a great proportion of the obloquy he’s enduring will derive more of its corrosive edge from vengefulness rather than disinterested reflection on Bennett’s own moral teaching and example. On the other hand, at a moment such as this, one wonders whether he can tell the difference.

Negative Capability

(a) Thank heaven for spiritual direction, wherein someone who knows you and hears you can share the work of figuring out what one earth is going on. Especially, thank heaven for my spiritual director, who is terrific.

(b) On the other hand, who ever thought there was anything good about a cockamamie operation where someone suggests that a possibility you’ve rejected a dozen times over, always for good reasons, might in fact be worth reconsidering, again? It would be a lot simpler if she had just said, “Forget it — that’s out of the question,” but she missed her cue.

Well, It Is, Sort Of

I do not usually read the Post, nor link to their pages, so this’ll probably rot after a week or so (just as well): but there, in black pixels on white, is the extent of my incisive analysis that Sarah Gilbert felt worth reporting to the multitudes:

"It's really a breakthrough," agreed A.K.M. Adam, a Chicago theology professor and tech-head.

The Old Bosses

Re-reading Dan Bricklin’s excellent, excellent analysis of the entertainment industries’ responses to digital reproduction and transmission — oh, he’s so right — put me in mind of a clarification. Whereas the Industry claims to speak on behalf of performers whose livelihoods hang in the balance, in fact the Industry is speaking on its own behalf as the broker that determines which performers get paid how much (and appropriates a sizable proportion, perhaps an unconscionable proportion) of the revenue stream for that brokerage fee.

Without the Industry, performers would still be paid, as Dan says. They’be paid differently. On the other hand, there would be a whole lot of high-living Industry executives who would be out of jobs. (thanks for the link, David.)

Amawifi

Margaret and I have established the pattern of spending alternating days at local coffee shops (rather than home or office, each of which presents distinct temptations and interruptions incompatible with productive brain work). She goes to Peets, where she loves their Lapsang Souchong and the electrical outlet by the unused sink, near the bathrooms. I tried Peets, and I like the coffee and the design sensibility, but Cafe Mozart down a half block has free wifi. Quoth the great philosopher David Weinberger, “Nuff sed.”

Social Software

Again, I’m late to the discursive party, but what I was thinking during the Social Software outburst a week or two ago closely resembles what Phil Windley and Mitch Ratcliffe have since said. A weighty portion of the rationale for identifying various applications and practices under the rubric of “social software” involves learning to think about what these have in common, what they make possible, how they might converge (and diverge) in their future functions. Some people involved in developing the category description will profit from what results, and to that extent we justifiably keep alert for [groundless] hype — but many other interested parties aren’t lining their pockets, they’re firing their neurons in ways that may engender innovative new tools and innovative uses for old tools, from which everyone benefits. If that’s “hype,” I can live with it. If Liz and Seb are involved, I’ll tend to doubt that they’re shilling for anyone (and I say this not to suggest that I have reason to doubt the integrity of Clay, Ross, and Jessica).

Parenthesis

May I just stipulate that my thumb seems to be slightly out of joint, or misaligned, or something, and it’s a nuisance (sometimes a painful one)? It’s not a big deal, not like a repetitive-stress injury or a suddenly-inexplicably-swollen leg or various afflictions that have beset Blogarian neighbors. Just a pain, so to speak, and I wanted to vent for a second.

Kindling in a Blaze

A couple of friends have prodded me about my from the Great Online Sapir-Whorf debate ongoing at Emptybottle and Chez Delacour and IMprOpRieTiEs and birdLand and Caveat and Wealth Bondage and, well, pretty much the whole of this nexus of Blogaria (and I have to go reacquaint myself with Language Hat to connect even more richly). I’m not up to substantive contribution, but I’ll toss some thought-shavings into the heat of the conversation, as a sign of whence I’coming in this discussion. One, I’m a broadly Wittgensteinian guy, so I’m inclined on one hand to doubt that “language” has intrinsic power as such (it’s people talking and writing and acting, not a reified semi-animate linguistic Force) and on the other hand to observe that the ways people use language in speech and writing and action tend powerfully to influence how they think, in ways that recede from conscious apprehension. So (in the context of this argument) I may be able to have both my cake and the satisfaction of having eaten it, though perhaps that amounts to nothing more than the weak version of Sapir-Whorf that Mick Underwood sketches. Language makes differences, but people make language.

Two, I wanted to remind everyone (in this grim political moment) of something George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”

Well, Shut my Mouth

This morning I accepted an invitation — mediated through Kevin — to talk to a reporter about Apple’s new music-downloading service. I wish I’d read Tom’s posting before I opened my mouth, and now I’m hoping that the reporter in question will lose her notes to our conversation.

Not that I’d materially change much of what I said; I really don’t mind paying for bits, if they’re the bits I want, at a fair price, and if I may then do what I want with them. I think Apple’s done a creditable job of making those bits attractively available. (One of the points I keep making in this context is that the mediators make customers pay for packaging and distribution, not product. Apple’ doing a very good job with packaging and distribution, with the reservations I’ve stipulated before: the price is too high, the selection too limited, and the DRM annoying — though I trust that some Slash-dot hero will circumvent it.)

Tom cuts loose at Steve Jobs for selling for a dollar what Napster made it possible to share without charge. I’m a firm theological advocate sharing in ’most every case, but I don’t mind paying for something if I’m satisfied with the deal. I borrow Frank’s lawn mower (or wait around, culpably, for him to mow the lawn) because I just can’t make sense of the expenditure for a mower. I share my books with people who don’t feel the urgency of owning a copy of some semi-obscure tome by a forgotten theologian. I buy those books in the first place because it’s worth the expense for me to have a copy at hand (or an extra to give away) — even books that are conveniently available in the seminary library. I don’t in the least mind paying $1.98 for the Firesign Theater’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, and the $10 Jimi Hendrix albums that Apple’s offering appeal to me.

At the same time, Tom’s outrage that file-sharing has been so effectively quashed strikes a sympathetic note with me. Perhaps I’m (half-full glasswise) appreciating the distance that the Apple Music Store brings us from the “Recording Industry as Fortress of Music” model, with the hope that once the bits start flowing, then they’ll erode the grotesquely, artificially high prices; once someone grasps the Janis Ian/Cory Doctorow principle that giving away one [digital] form of the music (or book) actually enhances the value of the physical form of the book (or music), The Industry may realize that they’ll make more money by selling everyone a copy of “Purple Haze” for a dime (and not fretting about the peer-to-peer file sharers) than by selling a thousand people copies for a dollar. . . .

Workers of the World, Unite

My best wishes this International Labo[u]r Day to all, to those whose toil furnishes my comfort, to those on whose behalf I have toiled, to those who stand with all for whom decent standards of common well-being matter more than the lottery ticket of individual wealth.