Just start calling me Rip Van Meridian

Your correspondent's arrival to last Tuesday's department meeting? Naah--it's really Tompkins H. Matteson's Rip Van Winkle's Return (1860). Image found here.

Apparently, part of turning 50 (which for me will occur next week) is that one feels the uncontrollable impulse to begin lots of sentences with "In my day . . ." or "I remember when"--not to mention, in my particular instance, a certain rueful recollection of earlier times when I'd hear someone older begin talking like that and think, "C'mon, old man--stop living in the past."

(There's a strange poetry of confluence between that impulse and the upcoming annual colo-rectal exams I'll soon begin undergoing, but I'll leave that for another time.)

During Tuesday's meeting, at which we walked through the process by which we are to build not a single, department-wide e-text but our own, individual customized e-texts for use as anthologies in our rhetoric/research classes beginning this fall, I felt a lot like that hunched-over old guy in the painting above. I found myself wandering back in time to my undergrad days (almost 30 years ago now) when I first seriously used an IBM Selectric typewriter and wondering how producing a text would get any cooler than that and, later, when working on my master's, trying to compose a short paper on an Apple IIe--in those days, you just about had to program the thing to produce text (by this time, Macs existed, but we didn't have one in the tutoring office)--and thinking, Man, screw this: I'll just keep using a typewriter for my work once I get to a doctoral program. In short, I of course clearly remember how things got done back when I first entered college, but in comparing that time to this one, we might as well have been monks in medieval monasteries.

(Mind you, I don't feel nostalgia for those days, enjoyable as they were--after all, I wrote a fair number of terms papers and my dissertation using WordPerfect 5.1 . . . for which, every time nowadays that I wrassle with Word's presets, I admit to feeling more than a little nostalgia.)

But then again, maybe I'm still dreaming . . . As I played around with the software for my own e-text, I ran across an article titled "Could Written Language Be Rendered Obsolete, and What Should We Demand in Return?." It speculates that as researchers perfect mind-to-machine interfaces, we can someday (perhaps by 2050) essentially do away with that clunky old technology known as written language and convey what we want to communicate via just thinking it. I will have more to say about that piece later on in another context. For now, though, I'll just say that, that day, as I played around with the interface and read this article, I found myself wondering, "Just what kind of place are we preparing our students for? I am having trouble imagining it."

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Of Dogs, Intelligence, and the Internet

[This needs a bit of smoothing and fleshing out in places . . .]


Yesterday, my college's Philosophy Club made a short road trip to Newman University to meet up with students and faculty in their fledgling Philosophy program (they're just getting a major off the ground there--something of a surprise to me, given the deep historical connections between Catholic thinkers and Western philosophy).

The topic was artificial intelligence and its myriad implications for human beings. IBM's Watson was our starting point: we noted that Watson is a big storehouse of information and some algorithms for sorting that information, but it shows no capacity for learning from its own mistakes or the mistakes of the Jeopardy! contestants it played against. Chris Fox, of Newman's faculty, mentioned that the capacities for reflection and self-awareness have to figure into questions of intelligence. "Computers don't laugh at themselves," he said. His example was dogs: They seem to have a kind of intelligence in that they seem immediately to recognize other dogs as dogs, no matter their size or appearance, but (so far as we know) they don't reflect on their (or their own) dog-ness.

Along these lines, Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine (via Andrew Sullivan this morning) has a recent post called "In a dog's net." Apropos of a "CBC Ideas series about how (we think) dogs think," Jarvis takes the idea that dogs "think in maps informed with their smell" and that they thus "have a different sense of 'now'” and muses,

It strikes me that the net — particularly the mobile net — is building a dog’s map of the world. Through Foursquare, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Maps, Layar, Goggles, and on and on, we can look at a place and see who and what was here before, what happened here, what people think of this place. Every place will tell a story it could not before, without a nose to find the data about it and a data base to store it and a mind to process it.

On the same show, canine Boswell Jon Katz argues that dogs respond to changes in their map: “hmmm, those sheep aren’t usually there and don’t usually do that and so I’d better check it out to (a) fix it or (b) update my map.” Dogs deal in anomalies. So do data-based views of the world: we know what happened in the past and so we know what to expect in the future until we don’t. Exceptions and changes prove rules.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I frequently try to talk about how the Internet, and technology more broadly, mediate between us and knowledge of the world, simplifying and distorting our experience of it if we use it uncritically. Jarvis' comments, it seems to me, bear this out. The phrase "a mind to process it" is the small but crucial one here: maps are, or should be, something like a modelling of the mind that produces it--and, indeed, directs our thinking along the lines of that modelled mind. I've not yet seen the program that serves as Jarvis' jumping-off point, but the impression I get from his remarks is that dogs make no judgment about the scents they collect and sort--a scent is a scent is a scent. There's the association of a specific scent with the specific location where the dog encounters it, but (apparently) no linkage made between, say, the locations where s/he also locates it. There's no sense of spatial relations between/among these places. (GPS devices, it occurs to me, are more sophisticated than this only in that dogs, because they have better noses, don't require satellites and disembodied voices to guide us through space.)

Humans long ago created a technology that models the world as the (human) mind apprehends it: maps. Maps show their reader at a glance where things are located in space; moreover, by choosing what to show and not show, their makers have made judgments about what is significant for their reader to know and not know. We are free to argue the values of those judgments, of course, but the implicit message of maps is clear: some things are more worth knowing than others. Indeed, once upon a time, maps quite literally oriented their readers in accordance not with a physical direction, but a worldview. Surely that is a more-or-less basic description of the human mind, too: we experience, we forget, we remember, we interpret and re-interpret, we decide what matters.

The internet-as-map doesn't do any of those things. By implicitly presenting all data as equivalent in value, it can lead to reductive, uncritical thinking in its users. It shapes our thinking in accordance to its modelling of the world and not the other way around, and most of us are at best dimly aware that this is so.

Put another way: some of my students think their smartphones are, in fact, smart.

A dog's way of mapping the world is perfectly fine--if you're a dog! If the 'Nets map the human world in the way that dogs map their world, I'm not too sure that that's entirely a good thing for people.

UPDATE: Somewhat apropos of the above is this post about a couple of programmers teaching a computer how to recognize double-entendres (specifically, otherwise innocent sentences and phrases that one can follow, "heh heh"-like, with "That's what she said"). Unless I'm missing something, this seems to raise the question raised by John Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment: does the computer really understand that it's making these jokes? Is it "in" on them as it makes them?

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The electronic lever and fulcrum

Archimedes rocks your world.

My colleague Larry the movie guy has noted odd things in the answers on tests he gives in his physics class, in which students are allowed to use calculators (Larry keeps a slide-rule around to show his students how things used to be done): students who get the more complicated math right but who end up getting the wrong answers because of mistakes in simple arithmetic; people whose calculations of a bullet's muzzle velocity yield answers which would be the result of the physical laws of a world in which you or I walking briskly would out-walk that bullet (Cool! We could go back to swinging jawbones of asses, then!); etc. "What are they thinking??" he sometimes exclaims.

My version of Larry's problem is similar by analogy: During the course of the semester, as has been the case throughout the Microsoft Word years, I will have occasion--several, in fact--to say things like "Spell checks only check spelling--not usage" and I will see my students nod sagely and smile at the inanity of someone's thinking otherwise and yet, come the succeeding sets of papers, I will see yet more raft-loads of there/their/they're and two/to/too and weather/whether and accept/except confusions. I'd list yet more, but you get the idea. And don't get me started on apostrophe usage.

It's tempting to blame students and/or the impoverished state of their grade-school education for these problems, but I don't think that's entirely fair. I may be falling prey to "in my day"-type thinking, but it does seem to me that such errors have become more common as computers have supplanted typewriters or, more precisely, as spell-checks have become a feature of word-processing softwares. I would lay some of the blame, therefore, at the straw-man feet of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Their softwares have so reduced the mental work involved in producing a text that it can easily create the illusion that once the words appear on the screen, what else is there to do?

Randall of Musings from the Hinterland posts on a different version of this here: some of us have become so accustomed to thinking of computers as labor-saving devices that, as you'll see when you read his post, our insistence on using them as such can lead some of us to become inefficient--the Old Ways of Doing Things would have actually saved us considerably more time than we expended while looking for a way to perform the same task via nifty widgets to save time. A different version of destroying the village in order to save it.

Larry and I once talked about all this last semester, and Archimedes came to mind. Or, more precisely, tools and how we think about them.

At a fundamental level, a computer is a tool, just like Archimedes' lever and fulcrum are. Both are instruments that perform work. But this particular comparison breaks down rather quickly. With the lever and fulcrum, the end results of the labor expended are immediately evident: you've pried the rock up and moved it, or you haven't and have to do it some more or reposition the fulcrum or what have you. Despite the obvious labor required, not much in the way of intellectual engagement is required to use this particular tool--nor, for that matter, emotional investment. Did you succeed in prying up the rock? Good. Next! At a certain level, then, the working of the lever and fulcrum is a passive activity. Physics doesn't care what you think.

Neither does a computer, come to think of it--all the more reason to keep in mind the old programmers' credo, "Garbage in, garbage out." The great strength and weakness of contemporary word-processing programs are that they make very easy the task of producing documents very fast. While the mechanics of producing a text become easier, the desire of most people to be finished with a writing task as quickly as possible, I suspect, becomes enabled by that same ease, thus leading to the problems mentioned above. Somewhere along the line, how we perceive writing has changed: it has always been work, but as the technologies used to produce it have changed, so also has our felt connectedness to its output. Which is to say, that as it has become easier to produce a physical text, we have become more intellectually and emotionally detached from the actual results of that production. Maybe part of the problem also is the language we use for these instruments and their softwares: computer. word processing. As though texts are akin to mathematical calculation, language as lunch meat.

There's also with it the fact that more of us have to write as part of our work, which not only makes practical its further technologizing but also leads to its devaluing as a skill worth doing well (again, because of the emotional detachment most of us tend to feel from the labors our employment require of us). It does not help that the ultimate disinterestedness of the machine to what it produces is actually antithetical to those attributes of Good Writing: clear, effective thinking and what the French would call le bon mot--which, unless we're especially gifted, take time.

By way of contrast to all this, consider Shelby Foote's use of a crow-quill pen to write his massive three-volume narrative of the Civil War. Without worrying here about the quality of Foote's writing, consider for a moment the mechanics of producing that text: a couple of short words, perhaps one word or a part of a word, written per dip of the quill in the ink; and always, always, the frequent few-seconds' pauses when the quill is raised from the page and toward the well and them back again, during which there is time to try out and retry and try again the next few words and phrases--in the inner ear rather than on the screen. There is no way to do this sort of writing fast.

This isn't an argument that we go back to quill pens or Royal manuals when we need to write anything worth writing (it is interesting, though, that Darren Wershler-Henry, author of The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, noted in this NPR interview that a soundless typewriter marketed in the '40s failed because, apparently, people liked the sound conventional typewriters produced). It's only an observation, and not a very profound one. But it's one that, as a teacher of writing, bears some consideration on my part, seeing as good writing more often than not gets produced by in some way(s) going against the grain of the very technology most of us use to produce writing nowadays.

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