Information Overload vs. Facts and Truth

So, back on April 14th, I was the main guest on Connecticut's public radio program, Where We Live, for an installment entitled Information Overload: Finding The Facts And Knowing The Truth In The Digital Age, hosted by David Desroches and produced by Jeff Tyson. 

I've been on the program several times in the past, courtesy of producer Catie Talarski and former host John Dankowsky, but this was the first time in a while, with David Desroches filling in as host, and with producer Jeff Tyson as my primary contact. It was also the first time that I did my part from the WFDU studio at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Teaneck, NJ campus (where I used to teach courses for their MA program in Media and Professional Communication). 

Here's the write-up on the program from their website:

Ever since the Presidential election we’ve heard the buzzwords—“echo-chamber,” “facts,” “alternative facts.” More than ever our country is divided by how we get our information and what we see as the “truth.” Even reality itself has become debatable.

What’s the difference between a fact and the truth? And if people can’t agree on what a fact is, what does that mean for a democratic society?

This hour, we tackle big questions with big thinkers in the age of digital news.

We try to understand just how the complex world of information we live in today has evolved. And we explore how critical thinking and news literacy can help us wade through information overload.

Has the internet and social media shaped the way you understand truth? Or, how about your understanding of what’s real or fake?

Unfortunately, I can't embed the sound file here on Blog Time Passing, but you can go on over to their site to listen to the 49 minute program. Some of the content may be familiar to folks who know me, and/or general semantics and media ecology, but this is more of an interactive format, and there's always something new that emerges out of these events.

The Lifelong Learning Community

Back when I started this blog in 2007, one of my earliest post was entitled The Fragile Community, which was about a book co-authored by my friend, the distinguished communication scholar, Larry Frey. Subtitled, Living Together with AIDS, the book is based on ethnographic research Larry and co-author Mara Adelman conducted on a residential community for people with AIDS.

..........................

The reason this came to mind is that one of my former MA students from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Margaret Roidi, recently published an article in Synergy: The Online Journal for the Association for the Tutoring Profession. According to the website, Synergy "is the national peer-reviewed online journal for ATP; the mission is to provide an avenue for scholarship and discussion to further the knowledge of learning processes, tutoring practice and the administration of tutoring services." As for the article she published, its title is: "Tutor Training Procedures in Higher Education: Creating a Community of Lifelong Learners" (and yes, it's available online, I've conveniently linked the title to it, so just feel free to click away).

Now, aside from congratulating a former student on a significant achievement, I do want to acknowledge the important role that tutors play in the university setting, a role that often goes unremarked. Sometimes students need something more than class sessions can offer, some degree of individualized help, and this is where tutoring comes in. It can make the difference between student success and failure. As a faculty member, I do want to note that we try to give personal attention to students who need it. But much depends on class size, and even at an institution like Fordham University, where there are almost no large lecture classes and a tradition of cura personalis, there is only so much that a faculty member can do.

So, tutors are an essential component of any institution of higher education. That much is clear. But when you think about what tutoring entails, generally working with students on a one-on-one basis, it seems almost the antithesis of community. And yet, more and more, there is an emphasis in higher education on building communities of learning. As Roidi discusses, tutors are, or ought to be, an important part of these learning communities, to improve their teaching skills, and outcomes with students, and the university as a whole. As she puts it in her conclusion, "a community of tutors can benefit tutees, institution of higher learning, academic support programs, and the community at large" (p. 12)

Educational technology is an important component of this kind of initiative, as she also notes: "Tutors as well as instructional designers must possess a highly adaptive leadership mindset that can be influenced heavily by the rapidly evolving technological environment (McLuhan & Gordon, 2003)" (p. 3). Certainly, a media ecological observation!

And I think that the basic statement that Adelman and Frey make in The Fragile Community is worth repeating here: "Communication is... the essential, defining feature⎯the medium⎯of community" (p. 5). This is as true for learning communities as it is for residential communities, if not more so.

Building community⎯there once was a time when we could take it for granted as a basic function of communication, and the basis of all human life. Here and now, we find it more challenging than ever before, and therefore more essential.

Future Sh(er)(l)ock

So, ok, maybe I overdid it with the poststructuralist style title for this post, with all those parentheses and all, but hey, I did publish an article about two decades ago with the title, Post(modern)man, about Neil Postman, a revised version of which appears in my book, On the Binding Biases of Time—and speaking of time, it's time for another plug:




So, now that we got that over with, what I want to relate is that while I was working on Amazing Ourselves to Death—oops, I think I feel another plug coming on...





So, as I was saying, while I was writing the book, I naturally went back over many of Postman's publications, including the often overlooked collection entitled Conscientious Objections—uh oh, here we go again:





Originally published in 1988, Conscientious Objections included one of Postman's most pointed critiques of the social and behavioral sciences and scientism, coupled together with an eloquent statement on the importance of media ecology, in the lead essay, entitled "Social Science as Moral Theology" (which alone is worth the price of the book). The subtitle, Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education provides a sense of the range of subject matter covered, including several essays that exhibit a general semantics orientation, including one on Alfred Korzybski.

Conscientious Objections also includes two essays that sum up the argument he makes in his two best known works critiquing the impact of television, The Disappearance of Childhood and Amusing Ourselves to Death (wait for it, wait for it, ok, here it comes)...





The first of the two essays in Conscientious Objections is entitled "The Disappearance of Childhood" which appropriately enough summarizes the book of the same title. But the other essay, the one that provides the gist of Amusing Ourselves to Death, is entitled "Future Shlock" (which may come as a bit of a shock to you, I know).  And of course, it is a play on the title of Alvin Toffler's popular book of 1970, Future Shock. You know what's coming next here, now, don't you?





If you're not familiar with the book, it's a bit of popular media ecology, one that struck me as very profound when I was in high school and an undergraduate in college. The phrase future shock was itself a play on the established notion of culture shock, with the idea that the rate of change had accelerated so drastically in the postwar era that we easily fall victim to a form of culture shock without leaving home, a kind of temporal culture shock, as we are unprepared for the pace of progress we have been undergoing, and have no defenses or means of coping with all of the change that we are experiencing.

Of course, you no doubt recall my post here on Blog Time Passing back in 2009, entitled, Shockingly, The Future Ain't What It Used To Be, which included a bit more discussion of future shock than I am including here. The reason I wrote that post was that I had discovered that a documentary that was made back in 1972, based on Future Shock, and featuring Orson Welles, had been uploaded to YouTube. The film provides an interesting window on what we were experiencing at that time, and where we thought we might be headed. It's a bit of nostalgia for those of us of a certain age, and certainly a period piece, but not without its relevance for the present day.

So, in doing this post, I went back to YouTube, which has changed its policies since 2009 regarding the length of videos it allows (certainly a significant contribution to information overload), and I was not terribly shocked to find the movie now available in one piece, instead of chopped up into five segments as it was back in 2009, which is how it appears on my earlier blog post. So, let me take this opportunity to embed the full film here and now, for your viewing pleasure:





But all of this is a digression, so let me also explain that I sometimes teach a course entitled Writing for Online Media for Fordham University's School of Professional and Continuing Studies, a course that counts towards the Professional Studies in New Media major, offered by the Professional Studies in New Media program that I am director of. In fact I'm just finishing up a summer session section of the course, taught as an online class. And I also teach a graduate version of the class, Writing for the Internet, for Fairleigh Dickinson University's MA Program in Media and Professional Communication (being offered this Fall semester). And one of the assignments I give my students is to make an edit to a Wikipedia entry, and then blog about it.

So, after rereading Postman's essay "Future Shlock"which begins with him making the claim to have coined the phrase future shock prior to Toffler's use of it (without, I hasten to add, making any judgment as to whether Toffler took it from him or came up with it independently), I decided to take a look at the Wikipedia entry on Future Shock. It includes a section with the heading "Term" which read as follows:

Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He believed the accelerated rate of technological and social change left people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he popularized the term "information overload."

His analysis of the phenomenon of information overload is continued in his later publications, especially The Third Wave and Powershift.

Nothing wrong with that. But I decided to add the following immediately after:

In the introduction to an essay entitled "Future Shlock" in his book, Conscientious Objections, Neil Postman wrote: "Sometime about the middle of 1963, my colleague Charles Weingartner and I delivered in tandem an address to the National Council of Teachers of English. In that address we used the phrase "future shock" as a way of describing the social paralysis induced by rapid technological change. To my knowledge, Weingartner and I were the first people ever to use it in a public forum. Of course, neither Weingartner nor I had the brains to write a book called Future Shock, and all due credit goes to Alvin Toffler for having recognized a good phrase when one came along" (p. 162).

 I actually made this change on March 13, 2013, and checking on the entry now, I am pleased to report to you that the addition remains unchanged, with the sole exception that the quote from Conscientious Objections was separated out and turned into a block quote, a reasonable enough modification.

So, that's my bit of detective work, which I hope justifies my inclusion of Sherlock in the title, along with shock and shlock, and maybe it is a bit of shlocky sleuthing on my part, but I don't think there's any issue here that might require the services of some Future Shylock, do you?

 

Orality and Online Writing

So, one of the many things that I've been up to lately is teaching an online course for the first time, and it's certainly been a learning experience.  Now, you may recall that this past summer I offered some opinions about online education here on Blog Time Passing, in posts entitled Reflective and Critical Thoughts on Online Education, and Further Thoughts on Online Education, and you might expect me  to continue on in that vein, but that's not what I'm going to do.  I'm going to reserve judgment until the semester is over, and hold off on any evaluation of the experience until then.


So why bring it up, you may ask?  And I'm glad you did.  Well, the course is Writing for Online Media, a course I first developed and taught in a regular classroom setting, well actually in the Walsh Media Lab over at Fordham University's Rose Hill campus, but what I mean is that it was taught as a real, live, face-to-face course. I also taught it under similar circumstances on the MA level over at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Metropolitan campus.  The emphasis in the course is blogging, I should mention.  


One of the things that I would do over the course of the course would be to give a lecture providing an overview of the history of writing, in order to put online writing into a larger historical, and media ecological context.


So, the question I had to deal with was, how to do the equivalent of an in-class lecture for an online class.  And as I explain below, I decided to write up my comments.  I tried to write them up in much the same way that I'd just talk about the subject in class, so this isn't an essay, it's more like lecture notes, although everything is all written out, so they're not really notes.  But they're written kind of the way I'd talk it, which is very much to the point of what's being said here (you'll know what I mean when you start reading).  And I emphasize kind of the way I'd talk, because some editing was inevitable.  And you don't have to put up with all my ums and ahs.


So, this is just a summary for an undergraduate class, but I figured that this was still worth sharing here, as someone somewhere might find this useful, perhaps in getting some ideas about the topic, or about how I teach it.


As I was writing this up, which is more difficult and time-consuming than if I had just give the lecture orally, I found myself breaking off quite naturally at several points, so these notes were produced in four parts, and in this post I'll share the first part, and provide the other three in subsequent posts.  Okay, ready now?  Class is now in sesssion!

Comments on the History of Writing 

Part I: The Spoken Word 

 I wanted to make some comments about the history of writing, and being new to teaching online, I had to think about how I would do that. If we were meeting in a classroom, I'd just talk for a bit. And for an online course, I could do a webcam video of me talking, that would be the easiest for me to do, but I don't think it would make for particularly good video watching. I could provide the audio and capture screen images, but this is mainly about my words, so it seems that the best thing for me to do is write it up. And I suppose that's fitting for a course on writing. 


 Our course is oriented towards professional practice, so I will just touch on some philosophical and historical points, and not go into depth in the way that I would say in a course I've taught at Fordham called Orality and Literacy. 


 So let's start with the fact that writing is hard. I bet you knew that already. But why is writing hard? Because it is unnatural. It is so unnatural that we have to send children to school for years and years to learn how to write, and read, and that begins with getting them to behave in a way that goes counter to children's most basic instinct, that is, getting them to sit still. 


 Writing is unnatural because it is a human invention, one that was introduced about 5500 years ago. That may seem like a long time to you, but consider the fact that human beings have been speaking for tens of thousands of years, possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Compared to that, writing is a relatively recent development. 


 We don't know exactly when spoken language first appeared because speech has not bones, sound leaves no fossil or archeological evidence. Our species is almost 99% identical from chimpanzees, but one thing that set us apart is the well developed larynx we have, which allows us to make a wide variety of sounds. Another is a couple of special areas in the brain that serve as centers for language and symbolic communication. So maybe language appeared at the same time as our species, around 200,000 years ago, or maybe it evolved gradually, taking form only about 100,000 years ago. Richard Leaky estimated it at 70,000 years ago, and that works for me. 


 So for most of human history, we depended on word of mouth for communication, and oral tradition for the preservation of knowledge and culture. Without a means to store information outside of ourselves, we were dependent on collective memory, which always took the form of a performance. Speech is a performance, stories are told before an audience, and they are composed as they are performed, each time somewhat different, just as when you tell a story over and over again, the wording, pauses, etc., change from one time to a next. So repetition was important, speech was characterized by redundancy, to this day oratory typically uses a degree of redundancy that's much greater than literature, for example when Martin Luther King repeated the line "I have a dream" over and over again, or you get the parallel structure like John F. Kennedy's, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." 


 The main task in oral cultures, cultures without writing, is, as Walter Ong puts it, to think memorable thoughts. What helps is to tell stories, narrative structure, with agents performing actions, and especially with prominent agents (gods, heroes, and the like) performing dramatic actions (conflict, combat, quests). What also helps are the techniques associated with poetry and song, rhythm and meter especially, as can be found in sayings (a stitch in time saves nine, haste makes waste, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, slow and steady wins the race) all the way up to epic poetry. Note today how slogans and jingles are very effective mnemonically, and how songs can linger in memory, even against our will. Oral tradition also relied heavily on formulas and clichés. Rather than trying to compose entirely original compositions word by word, oral poets or singers of tales stitched together larger chunks of language, formulaic expressions (and the metaphor of stitching or weaving tales was a common one). 


 If you think about it, just about everything we're told to avoid in order to write well is what is valued in oral composition. And while electronic writing is not oral, not speech, media ecology scholars such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan have suggested that online writing brings back some elements of oral communication. So here are some suggestions: 

•   In thinking about blogging and online writing, you might consider using a bit more redundancy than you would in writing for print media. People have trouble listening in speech situations, so repetition is helpful, and attention is also less focused and sustained online, so some redundancy isn't a bad idea.

•   I also suggest it's useful to think about online writing as a performance. The singer of tales acts out the story, taking on the role of the hero, a form of mimesis, and it's useful to think about blogging in particular as creating a character and bringing him or her to life through your words. And the character is typically yourself, or an aspect of yourself, and what is often valued is a sense that the persona we encounter is genuine. But even if you believe it to be nothing more than your true self, that self needs to be presented to your audience, and that requires a form of performance. 

•   In traditional oral communication, there is always a person present, so there is always some sense of personality involved. In writing, the person is typically absent, and writing easily becomes impersonal. That's one of the complaints that Socrates voices about writing, according to Plato, in the Phaedrus. Online, and especially in blogging, it is easier for your personality to peek through, even if you're not trying to reveal it. Readers seem to look for it more so than when reading print media, and to appreciate a sense of person and personality. I'm not saying that it's best to turn a blog into a personal diary, but what work is a sense of personal connection. Writers talk about finding their voice, an interesting metaphor for a medium in which there is no voice, where words become silent. Voice is just a metaphor for personal style, and you don't have to have just one voice, but developing a voice in this sense goes hand in hand with putting on an effective performance through blogging. 

•   Narrative elements have always been memorable, and are often compelling. While blogging and other forms of topic-driven online writing will often take the form of exposition, a variation on the tradition of essay writing that can be traced back to Montaigne, putting on a performance means taking part in a drama (in the most general sense), and drama is closely akin to narrative. Performance requires taking on a character, so just consider the possibility of adding some element of a plot. Stories, anecdotes, always make for good reading. 

  The techniques of poetry and song are our oldest forms, rhythm comes naturally to us. After writing was introduced, it took over two thousand years before the idea of prose was developed, stripping out the poetic elements from discourse. And maybe we don't go in much for poetry these days, but consider poetic elements of rhythm, parallel structure, alliteration and assonances, saying and slogans. They work better online than in print. And while clichés are an anathema in writing, I personally do not believe that they are to be avoided at all costs. I think they are more acceptable online, and especially if used in a knowing, playful, or even ironic manner. 

•  Above all else, in whatever writing you do, online, for print publication, private correspondence, or to be read out loud, the best advice I can give you is to write for the ear. If it sounds good read out loud, it will read well when read silently. Reading out loud is the best test, and not a bad way to proofread either (but not sufficient for that purpose I hasten to add). If you write for the ear, you avoid long, convoluted sentences, sentences where the subject isn't clear or the point is confusing. A great example of writing that is for the eye rather than the ear is the use of the former and the latter. Those terms only work if you can go back and reread the previous sentence. They are terrible to use in public speaking. But even for a reader, they break the flow, the rhythm of the words. Writing was invented as a means to represent spoken language, and up until the last few centuries almost all writing was meant to be read out loud. St. Augustine in the Confessions relates how he met a man once with the remarkable ability to read silently. It was all but unknown until after the invention of printing in the 15th century. Carrels in libraries are desks with little walls surrounding them, and this goes back to the medieval monasteries where the intent was to contain and limit the sound of all of the monks reading aloud to themselves. One possible origin of the word carrel is that it is a variation on carol and choral. 

The bottom line is that writing that sounds good is good writing.

The Choral Village

It's been a while, I know, but there's a slight chance that you remember that my last post was Spirituality at the Speed of Light, and this new post is not entirely unrelated.  One of my graduate students in my FDU Understanding New Media Class this past spring semester brought this video to my attention, and in a musical sort of way, it demonstrates a new kind of electronic spirituality. 

The video is called Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - 'Lux Aurumque' and, well, why don't you see it for yourself:

This is a wonderful experiment in the use of digital media and online communications for innovative collaboration.  As I understand it, Eric Whitacre posted a video of himself conducting, and then invited anyone who cared to participate to record themselves on video following his conducting and singing one or more of the parts of this piece, Lux Aurumque, and then send him the file.  He combined the audio of all the files to create this performance, and as for the video, well, you can see for yourselves.

The effect is quite amazing, perhaps also disquieting, as in one sense it generates a kind of virtual heavenly choir (and even in their most benign sense, the hosts of heaven would be awe-inspiring, at least that's the reputation they have).  Just listening, we can appreciate a wonderful product of audio editing, in the same way that we might appreciate, for example, the last few Beatles albums.  

The video though, gives this a sense of the disembodied, the discarnate, to use a term that McLuhan favored (and I imagine he would have been fascinated by this demonstration of a new sense of mediated spirituality).  

In a more profane manner, however, it also reminds me of the depiction of the phantom zone in the Superman movies.  This certainly gives talking heads a new meaning, or should it be singing heads instead?  I do like the small glimpse into each person's local background that we get.  But overall, this comes too close to a bunch of floating heads to be anything but uncanny.

Here is another video with a somewhat different shape to it, Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 2.0, 'Sleep':

Somehow, I find the spheres less disturbing than the flat screens.  Maybe this says something about the future of media?  The video also gives special emphasis to the international nature of this virtual collaboration.  If not quite a global village in McLuhan's sense, it is certainly a global choir, a networked choir as well, of course, and a celestial one for that matter, and to stick with the McLuhan allusion,  I guess you could call it a choral village.

If nothing else, these videos serve as a magnificent symbol of the promise of new media, digital media, participatory media, of the hope for what the human race might accomplish when we are all linked together and singing in chorus.  And if there is to be any hope for such a future, we need images like these to help us imagine it, and in doing so, try to bring it into being.  So bravo, Mr. Whitacre, bravo!!

A New Look for Blog Time Passing

So, did you notice?  The new look?  For this blog?  If you haven't been over to Blog Time Passing before, okay, that's understandable.  If you have, though, and you just don't remember, here's a screen capture to help job your memory:

Let's call it Blog Time Passing Classic.  And I do hope this new look does better than New Coke did.  If you're too young to remember how Coke changed its formula and then had to bring back Coca Cola Classic, or if you were otherwise disengaged from American culture, here's a link to the Wikipedia entry on New Coke.  It was quite the debacle.

Why the change?  Well, the main reason has to do with my students.  This semester, I set up blogs for two different classes at Fordham and Fairleigh Dickinson Universities, and had students in a third set up their own individual blogs (see my previous posts, Online Writers at Fordham University, Cold Class Communications, and One More On Social Media).  All that new blog-related activity got me thinking about the templates that blogger now offers.  

And I also had to admit that my students' blogs and the two class blogs, where I had the students decide on the template, all looked better than poor old Blog Time Passing, whose original look, well, let's say time has passed it by.  It goes without saying that when you teach, you learn a lot from your students, but there, I said it anyway.

I had also heard, previously, that the contemporary style in websites favors a light colored, wide open look, and while I am not exactly a slave to fashion, somehow it does look a lot better to me now, whereas the older styles did look great to me a couple of years ago.  I still don't understand how that works, maybe there's an explanation in evolutionary biology, I don't know.

But there was also a practical reason for making the change.  When I first started blogging, I was mostly sticking with text, and it didn't make much difference.  But as I became more experienced, and started to add pictures and videos more frequently, I started to run into the problem of items not fitting properly into that narrow band that the template reserved for blog posts.  Eventually, I learned how to change the size of images and videos, but it's still extra work, and I'd rather have those items be larger, not smaller.  I never could understand why posts had to be forced into those skinny tubes!  Why all that unused space on the sides?

I've also  been using a larger font in recent posts.  I'm still not sure about that, but as I get older and my vision gets worse, size and legibility become more of an issue for me.  It also has to due with the fact that I've been working from my laptop more often, and I find it harder to read off of the screen on that computer than on my desktops at home and at the office.

So, anyway, this new template gives me more room to spread out in my posts, and that means a great deal to me.  I've also taken the opportunity to change the color scheme to make it consistent with some of my social media profiles (as well as making it more to my liking than before).  And while I was at it, I dropped the advertising from the blog, as I wasn't making any money off of it, and prefer a commercial free environment anyway (although the "bookstore" on the side still links to Amazon).

In case you're not familiar with how this all works, none of the content from my previous posts has changed, everything is still there, it's just the style, the format, that has been altered by adopting a new template.  As my friend John McDaid explained to my Writing for Online Media class last night, websites used to be like documents, now they're like databases.  So the database remains the same, it's just the interface that's changed (did I get that right?).

So that's the story, and I thank my students for opening my eyes, and I thank you, dear blog reader, for sticking with me through thick and thin templates.

Of course, I can always change it back or change it to something else.  So tell me, what do you think of Blog Time Passing's new look?

Just a quick note about another of my class blogs, this one for a graduate class on Understanding New Media that I'm teaching as an adjunct at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  The computer lab we met in was very, very cold, hence the name of the blog:

Cold Class Communications 

 

People sometimes wonder if the computer and the internet is, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, a hot medium or a cool medium.  Well, now you know!