betajames

It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.

Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.

Right now, I'm reading A Better Pencil, by Dennis Baron. It's a fantastic, timely work about arguments against writing technologies from Plato onward. It also provides excellent counterpoints to Nick Carr and others about the influence of technology on our thinking processes.

Non-player characters are very important when creating this kind of world. BioWare can get away with having everyone stand around forever, but in an open world, the people must be moving and acting. It’s surprising how many games fail at this. Assassin’s Creed, The Saboteur, and Red Faction: Guerilla are all high-profile open worlds filled with people that do nothing but wander aimlessly. They feel like artificial obstacles in our path. Rockstar is great at creating emergent moments of NPC interaction, moments that occur regardless of our presence. From the spontaneous gang wars in GTA to another gang dragging some poor sap through a town in Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar uses these NPC interactions to make their worlds feel persistent.

I look for opportunities in games to forget my responsibilities to missions and NPCs. Accelerating along the San Fierro Highway with the radio blaring was one of the most memorable experiences for me in San Andreas. Wandering the Capital Wasteland was often more engaging than searching for Liam Neeson. Riding the rails in Empire City was a consistent exhilaration. For some reason, knowing I was the lone non-NPC in the gameworld was a comforting freedom, too.

One of the main motivations is being able to concentrate on gameplay. The programmers understand the age-old languages well. “I write games for the Commodore 64 because it's very simple and quick to learn,” admits a coder who calls himself, rather ironically, Richard of The New Dimension. “It also shows support for the retro gamers who still love this retro machine today.”

The guys who code retro games (they're invariably all men) also know the technology inside and out and it allows them to push the boundaries of what the machines can do.

“People are pushing the hardware to do things they never did back in the 80s and 90s,” says Jason Mackenzie, owner of retro label Psytronik. He explains that people are not just interested in creating the very best games and says some also want to hack the hardware too. A new graphics mode for the Commodore 64 has been created called NUFLI. It displays high resolution, full colour, bitmap images on a standard machine.

I admire and appreciate this kind of nostalgia much more than what Nintendo churns out on a regular basis.

Most authors, however, employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all. Charlaine Harris, queen of the vampire authors, in Dead as a Doornail: "The entire parking lot was empty, except for Jan's car. The glare of the security lights made the shadows deeper. I heard a dog bark way off in the distance." The chief of Scandinavian crime writers, Henning Mankell: "She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance" (The Eye of the Leopard). And "genre" books aren't the only guilty category. Take 2666, Robert Bolaño's magnum opus: "The window looked out over the garden, which was still lit. A scent of flowers and wet grass drifted into the room. In the distance he heard a dog bark." For all we know, these dogs are off-camera sound machines set to woof.

Is there a similar trope in academic scholarship and writing, one that is as concrete and noticeable? I can think of certain turns of phrase, transitions and the like, but nothing comparable to "somewhere a dog barked."

We should free the makers and small companies of the world to make devices without having to negotiate with carriers to get their approval.

Say you wanted to make a phone just for weekend nights, say one that included a lighter and a slot for holding whatever kind of cigarette you like. What carrier would offer that phone?

Or how about ones designed for kids, the elderly or the disabled?

A company could make a phone with guts that mesh with a number of networks, making the wireless companies have to compete for your business.

Google made a half-hearted effort to break the carrier’s grip with its Nexus One, which they wanted to sell directly to individuals who could then choose their carrier. Among the problems leading Google to close its online store was that the carriers soon decided that playing that game wasn’t in their long-term interest. Verizon and Sprint backed out of their commitment to support the device — leaving U.S. customers with only T-Mobile.

The carriers’s lobbying association likes to point to all the cool new phones and ask “Where’s the harm?” The problem is the harm comes from the devices and services that haven’t been invented yet, because wireless isn’t an open platform.

We literally don’t know what we are missing.

I worry that this piece, while I agree with it, is too idealistic in its suggestions. Perhaps my cynicism is showing too much in this regard, but given how the FCC and the Obama administration have (mis)handled net neutrality, I haven't much hope for this kind of revolution for wireless.

We conspire in an unspoken agreement that our carefully considered choices are more a measure of students' inadequacy than our hopes for them, so they increasingly stay home as the weeks, and the novels, fly by. Like a high-speed train through gorgeous countryside, a novel a week turns the lovely hinterland of literature into a meaningless blur. Slow down, and the landscape changes: tempting byways appear; curiosity is given a chance to supplant urgent strategy. Acoustic engineers like to leave "headroom" in a recording, fine wine must apparently be allowed to breathe, and great books deserve space to come into their own.

Slow reading, like slow food, is about savouring rather than gobbling. The alternative, as voluntary reading continues to decline, is the futile effort of policing: quizzes, exams and journals that, whatever their other merits, purchase reassurance about students' reading at the cost of deep engagement.

Thomas Newkirk isn't the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called "slow reading" movement, but he argues it's becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible.

"You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute," he said. "That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good."

Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly "taste" the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they've become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books.

"One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he'd come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing," Newkirk said. "I think they recognize they're missing out on something."

I fail to see how words acting as hyperlinks is a problem. If a particular idea, phrase or single word inspires a certain synapse to fire in my brain, I follow its trajectory and come back to the original reading when I'm ready. I make and see connections within and beyond the text in front of me.

I also have some measure of resistance to memorization and even to reading aloud. I can see some benefits to both, but memorization outside of an acting or poetry class appears as rather pointless to me. Is it possible to savor an essay, such as "Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace, without memorization? Absolutely. How can this happen? By engaging with it by way of discussion.

I’ve set up a second computer, devoid of internet, for my fiction-writing. That’s to say, I took an expensive Mac and turned it back into a typewriter. (You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the internet function out of the thing entirely. “I can just hide it from you,” he said. “No,” I told him, “I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.”) In fact, you ask me whether I feel there’s any difference between my fiction and essay—well, not (I ardently hope) either quality or commitment-wise (in that sense, yes, writing is writing), but lately, à la David Shields, process-wise I find I do want to Google while I essay, and while I’m always certain I need that other, internet-disabled computer for writing fiction.

An email correspondence between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates, touching on the influence of technology in all things writing. I have a growing interest in what we deprive ourselves of when we get down to writing, whether we perform better by way of sensory deprivation or overload (writing in silence vs. writing to music), whether we invest in programs like Anti-Social and Freedom and/or simpler word processors like OmmWriter and WriteRoom.

How many of us become cloistered when we write?

in the discursive circulation of hand wringing regarding the future of English Studies, what is seldom discussed is the networked makeup of the field’s identity and how it can be traced to the field’s advantage. Instead of doing such a tracing, English Studies argues that its ethos depends on shifts in perception regarding individualized moments such as labor (Marc Bousquet), textual reading (Franco Moretti), or digital computing (Cathy Davidson). These ethos-driven moments, however, are treated separately, as nodes without any network to belong within. When the recent 10th anniversary issue of the journal Pedagogy posed the question of “the most pressing pedagogical issues facing teachers and university citizens in 2010 and beyond,” the responses published reflect the fixed perspective I have been arguing here against.

Geosocial networking, as it's called (though it's surely destined to be savagely abbreviated) is now the big growth area for mobile internet applications. The number of startups fighting their way into the sector is staggering, and reminiscent of the dotcom boom; they all claim to be offering a unique and exciting service, but few seem to be financially viable propositions, and they appear to be waiting to be bought up by internet giants with huge user-bases and deep pockets. Brightkite, WhosHere, Zintin, Whrrl, Loopt and Dokiru are just some of the names that have, as yet, failed to resonate much with the general public; however, Gowalla and Foursquare have achieved a little more market penetration, and the latter's front-running has spawned yet more startups offering services that bolt on to Foursquare: Foodspotting, Hot Potato, FourWhere, SocialGreat, Layar and many others.

But despite the seemingly endless selection of methods by which we can locate our pals, we've shown some reluctance to do so. Too many services are chasing too few enthusiasts, and in the words of one observer, "it's like a big room without many people in it." And those of us who are in the room are curious, early-adopter geeks like myself who you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in any case.