newspeak

Kate Middleton\’s wedding gown and Wikipedia\’s gender gap..

I was surprised, in a way, to learn of the extent of the bias. After all, Wikipedia is the place where one can find all sorts of only slightly diluted corporate and personal marketing about more or less culturally recognizable objects and people. But I ought not to have been surprised, for of course Wikipedia only follows the cultural corrugations that have been so deeply grooved into systems of thought and judgement as to be invisible. They become evident, or more evident, and probably not for long, after disputes like this.

I guess that I and many others in my fields are more aware of the grooves (ruts) that trip us up and channel our valuations because of my academic (and in my case personal predilection). But that training produced critical thinking almost by accident. It used to be, say around 30 years ago, before New Historicism gained its name and when New Criticism still held sway (incredible to think that), that the study of literature and culture was really all about the study of cultural inevitability and the certification of value. With the philosophical, anthropological, political, and economic revolutions of the late 60s (particularly in France, where Anglo-British satisfaction didn’t go far), all the smugness of what literature is, what it does, what its value is (in some abstract way, as if it were a kind of arithmetic of the soul, comprised of Platonic forms rendered into words of unbearable significance), all this was put into question. Even the idea of “literature,” which is fairly hard to define, was questioned. (Sadly, this level of scrutiny has not been applied universally, and move outside of the key universities and into other areas and you’ll find not the fades of the New Criticism but vigorous existants; and not the absence of Leavis types and others proclaiming the virtue and essential need of literature for culture en civilization–as in Kulchur, that is–but its very real presence. Literature, outside of these institutions remains the shibboleth by which power enjoins its identity and separates out.)

So I was lucky–I went to UC Berkeley as an undergrad and studied with Walter Michaels; and as a grad student, I was able to continue working with those who would regard the interesting things about culture being not its timeless and perfect forms but the ways in which power, as a cultural modality, works. And this made me then think: Why on earth do we study the supposedly “great” works, many of which were utterly ignored (and for good reason: boring) and not the popular ones? Sure, the latter category may be utterly artificial, but that’s not my judgement and doesn’t really affect the ways in which people receive the commodity.

Kate Middleton’s dress, that is, merits a Wikipedia entry if only because there are probably tens of thousands, if not millions, of people actually quite interested in it. And it *does not matter* what the provenance of their interest is, nor the supposed “value” of the dress in some putative cultural idea or plausible future. It matters now.

The same can be said of her shoes, her every article: these are of interest because there is interest. If there are people who can write the entry and do so according to the stylistic and factual standards of Wikipedia, then yes, let’s have that.

And so it goes down the line. That this discussion is essentially an American one, is not surprising. I’d venture that it’s actually classic: a discussion about the value of a cultural artefact could really only take place in a milieu contoured by deep anxieties over its own cultural operations, and thus concerned over nuancing what counts as literature vs junk fiction (literature vs science fiction, say), films vs movies, vs TV; high-brow vs lowbrow. I tend to think this kind of cultural anxiety–that what “we” are is never quite enough to sustain the next generation–is particularly powerful in post-colonial environments. But, obviously, it’s not by any means special to them.

FRED WILSON: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is – Business Insider.

Is it just me or is this not obvious? And has been so for years. Or do these coming in from older generations still see computer technology (even the term stinks of fustian age) as something “new,” the way that, say, the NYTimes continues to place “Technology” in a separate section.

It’s not just that “technology,” that “computers” that ICT in general are now ubiquitous and even definitive of the New Modernity. It’s that all this fascination with what the aged would call gizmos and so on obfuscates the reality of work, use, distribution characterizing modern ICT economies. Actually, outside of ProPublica’s periodic articles on the issue, it’s probably only the NYT’s iEconomy articles that take the needed steps to comprehend the economic logistics of this present world. And that’s just a start. For instance: The role of ICT in, say, Africa or Brazil or India is not about cool gizmos but about necessary communications and the shift from traditional economic practice (read: farming built during an epoch of climate benevolence–the not now world of Global Climate Change or Hell on Earth, HoE) to economic modalities that are slowly being established to accommodate the displaced, displacing workforce. Not about gizmos and not really about survival but all about sustainability: Living today so that we can live tomorrow.

Future forecast looks fearsome | Local | News | St. Thomas Times-Journal.

I tend to see the report cited here conservative, given the gross uncertainties regarding specific effects produced by the huge introduction of moisture into the atmosphere and the increased population densities….. And yet, no surprise, Canada joins the other wilfully blind polities in neglecting work on policy that would mitigate the inevitable damages.

John Dickie on the Italian Mafia | FiveBooks | The Browser.

A good account. The ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria are strong in Toronto, it seems. See, for instance, this article.

Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists – NYTimes.com.

Another interesting article on the perennially fascinating complexity that is privacy. Sometimes, I think that the idea of privacy, especially the American one, resembles the 19th century notion of nature, a notion that today can be thought of as cartoon simplicity that confuses more than it helps, and that perpetuates a belief in bounded objects when in fact there is little that is not always in flux. Even death, life, is better understood as an ecological process, not a state leading to being or nothingness. To articulate privacy, we need to start with the recognition that it’s a process, and not really a contract, though that can happen. But the step into this process is for most people happening with blinding speed, and only retrospectively, and with some horror, do so many realize that the private words and acts and pictures they posted to share with friend if anyone are now part of a very public–globally and perpetually public–narrative that haunts the once-private individual. Today, the confession spoken in privacy and otherworldly listening under the assurance of absolute boundedness more accurately resembles the shameful secret whispered far and wide by the reeds growing from the muddy hole Midas shouted into, falsely believing that his isolation actually meant invisibility and anonymity.

Just as with food: too much made for too few, too much consumed. Information obesity is about the glut of stuff that passes as information, that masquerades as good-for-you info, and that isn’t; that ends up bloating your day with distended periods of nothing doing but consuming the Tweets by twits, the blogs by bores, the stuff not that dreams are made of but killed by.

Once, poetry was the speech of the refined and adhered to strict rhetorical principle Qunitillian or Cicero would have recognized. The Wordsworth and Coleridge and the very greatest of then all, Blake, and the other Romantics rewrote the book of poetry out of the language of the common man. A crime, to the hidebound, this endeavour, for it graced the commons’ dross with nobles’ gold, giving the value of graceful form to gutter content: worse than a mismatch, a kind of counterfeit.

Do I think that the information obesity that elevates the most banal to the level demanding attention the same? That it should stay hidden under the rock of private discourse and not shown the public light of day? Neither information anorexia nor bulimia is the answer; starvation makes you not just weak but stupid. Perhaps a simpler answer, to address information obesity. Be selective.

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Assume ubiquitous clouds: claves. And users are in many, as we are with social media networks. So: What would be the best way to stake identity. Obviously there is no private/public, but access privilege.)? Write an answer on Quora

Assume ubiquitous clouds: claves. And users are in many, as we are with social media networks. So: What would be the best way to stake identity. Obviously there is no private/public, but access privilege.)?

A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London

via The Library at nothingness.org/Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

Georgetown students shed light on China’s tunnel system for nuclear weapons – The Washington Post.

Interesting. But more for what it, along with other omics studies (analysis of massive data–basically, examining indirect traces of activity), suggests a) new modalities of knowledge (thankfully, I was really getting bored by the old modalities), and that these may be liberating and certainly exciting, especially as b) they provoke the powers that continue to be to act as they’ve always (re-)acted. In this case, the reaction may be to foreclose avenues of inquiry, to amputate the limb before it can walk, let alone run.  Or, there may be the even more fun (irony alert) tactic of misinformation.

But these and so many other strategies of state power (or corporate: what difference is there, sometimes?) are hackneyed: we saw them in the Soviet Union, and they continue to be practised as necessary by more or less savoury polities. So, there may be more creative approaches to rendering not only the data problematical, but the analysis itself; and even the desire…. and then I think: didn’t we see a version of this clever obfuscation with, first, Enron, and then, more profoundly and dangerously, with the continuing, escalating, crash of 2008 and on? For wasn’t one of the big problems the very success of the obfuscation, so that what was being secured, or insured, and what was then being traded, and traded upon, was a there whose actual position (value) and momentum (price) could never be fully determined, at least at the same time? In this quantum universe of mortage foolery, it was all probability, until one encountered the stochastic element whose house was foreclosed, and whose job was cut.