Category: Uncategorized

As readers in the Bay Area may know, Caltrain is facing short-term financial crisis. Service cuts have been proposed that would severely gut the usefulness of Caltrain as a transit service. Last week I attended a meeting with a couple of elected officials and local transit advocates to identify opportunities to prevent these drastic cuts.

What I found at the meeting was shocking. Sue Lempert, former mayor of San Mateo, member of the MTC board, said that Caltrain riders very rarely come to meetings, even though the current situation is a serious crisis. I believe that this isn’t because riders don’t care about the situation, because people feel helpless and do not know what they can do.

I found out yesterday that there is a key VTA board meeting Thursday May 6 at 5:30pm with an agenda item about financial support for Caltrain. In the immediate term, VTA’s support is critical to mitigate the Caltrain cuts, according to Sue Lempert, who is one of our most experienced local leaders on the issue and has the all the budget details at her fingertips. (Support is needed in all 3 counties that Caltrain serves: San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, and VTA’s support needs the most bolstering).

If you live in Santa Clara County and can attend the VTA meeting and speak in support of Caltrain – this is a key moment to do so. If you happen to know someone on the VTA board, now is a good time to give them a call.

Details:
* Board of Supervisors’ Chambers, County Government Center 70 West Hedding Street, San Jose
* The issue is item 7 on the agenda: http://www.vta.org/inside/boards/packets/2010/05_may/bod_050610_agendapacket.pdf

Messages to communicate include:
** A functioning Caltrain is key to viable public transit on the Peninsula.
** VTA’s support is important to keep Caltrain running until more stable funding is found.
** Encourage that the VTA board to engage in working meetings with MTC, SamTrans and San Francisco to develop strategies to save Caltrain

If you are able to attend, please leave a comment that you could go. If you can’t go but know someone who can, forward this post to them. This is important to keep viable public transit on the Peninsula.

In yesterday’s post on the problem with Facebook Like, I wrote that Facebook is trying to be the sole provider of social context. This got me thinking about the various places that social context may be represented in a networked software system:

1. in the object or message (which ActivityStreams helps enable)
2. in the context where it is created
3. in the contexts where it is seen and used
4. in each node of the social graph
5. in sets of social graph elements
6. in decentralized elements of the social graph (e.g. aggregated/syndicated profile elements)
7. shared understanding in participants minds
8. unshared understandings in participants minds

Facebook’s model is seeking consolidation in two places. By replacing a metadata-rich, standardized, ActivityStream based representation of the message with a proprietary API call, Facebook is foreclosing opportunities for the adding of context in creation and in viewing and utilization (items 1-3 in the list).

By acting as the sole provider of social graph and profile services, Facebook is seeking to own those aspects of context (item 4, 5, and 6 in the list). Is Facebook doing anything to enable the exchange of subsets? (item 5 in the list)

But the even the proposed more open models social graph models don’t yet support context well enough, if I understand them right. The portable social graph initiative was based on a simple model that the user wants to bring his or her friends from service to service en masse, and this just isn’t true. It would be great to see an OPML-like standard for friend lists. I don’t think this exists yet. I’m told by standards geek friends that there are standards for 6, but I haven’t seen implementations. Pointers to resources are welcome.

Decentralization, experimentation, and diversity

The future that I am rooting for uses a decentralized model that supports experimentation with many different ways of creating and supporting social contexts. I’d love to hear for people steeped in the standards world to explain which elements actually support this vision, and I’d love to see more development that uses it. Even in a world with a big Facebook, locally specialized needs can be the seeds of disruptive change.

Last, but not at all least, are the aspects of social context that aren’t represented in the nodes and lines in the graph, or the messages and objects that traverse the graph, but among the people. It is always the case that the communication and social understanding, and social misunderstandings and conflicts among people are richer than the bits transmitted by electrons. Social context is in the cultural structures and discourses that people live in, and are largely outside the scope of the communication tools we use, although the tools and use of tools are shaped by culture. Part of the reason for humility and experimentation in design is the knowledge that models and tools are never going fully represent what is happening socially, they can only augment social experience to some degree.

One of my concerns about rise of the one-true-network graph is the potential loss of diverse experiences. By displaying one’s Facebook own friends in a third party site, is this locking one into one’s existing friend network and foreclosing opportunities to meet new people in new contexts? Surely, we sometimes want to share with close friends, but also to use different contexts as opportunities to make new acquaintances.

A recent academic study at Insead video link here shows that people are more creative when they get the chance to live abroad. Cities with diverse populations tend to be more creative, interesting places. Social network concentration is comforting and not a bad thing in itself, but social network lockin is stifling.

I think that the representation of social context is hard, and diversity is healthy, and that’s why I’d like to see standardized elements that can support a lot of decentralized, competitive experimentation.

What do you get when you cross Derrida and Kabbalah? Something like “The Burnt Book”, a postmodern interpretation of Talmud and other traditional Jewish texts by Marc-Alain Ouaknin, a French rabbi and philosopher from a Sephardi rabbinic family and the French postmodern tradition. Ouaknin is a disciple of Levinas; he brings Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Blanchot, and other European thinkers to his reading of traditional Jewish texts; and he brings the Rabbinic tradition, including Kabbalistic and Hassidic mystical traditions to his understanding of postmodern philosophy; the combination is a distinctive and wild fusion.

This post is part of a series exploring the work of thinkers who explore the resemblances of traditional Jewish thought and post-modern theory. Like David Kraemer, in “Mind of the Talmud” Ouaknin reads the Talmud’s rhetoric as the expression of a philosophical approach that explores truth in multiple voices and un-resolved arguments. Like David Frank, in Arguing with God, Ouaknin shows have this approach is different from the tradition of Western philosophical dialog, contrasting the multi-voiced argument in the Talmud with Platonic dialogues, where one of the characters is present as a foil for the other.

Engaged interpretation

Unlike Kraemer, who uses a historical approach to trace the origins of Talmudic rhetoric, Ouaknin rejects the historical perspective, and prefers an immersed and interpretive style of reading (Chapter 6). Ouaknin’s ahistoricism appears to draw from a common orthodox perspective; from this perspective, a historical reading is alienated and impersonal. “To whom are the texts of the Tradition addressed? For the historian the answer is simple: to everyone except himself”. By contrast, the ahistorical view allows for living, personal engagement. “The existential approach is based on the personal involvement of the interpreter in the event of understanding.” In contrast to traditionalists, though, Ouaknin wants to use the ahistorical approach to generate innovative interpretations.

The first five short chapters provide an accessible summary of traditional Jewish literature and its interpretive methods, from the perspective with which the tradition sees itself. “We will not be giving a description of the history of the Tradition, but the tradition of the history of the tradition.” In the tradition of the tradition, Moses hears revelation from God, writes it down, and conveys in oral teachings more context than is written in the bible. The point of view of traditional self-perception yields sentences like this: “since Hebrew is a consonantal language, no vowel that would provide for a more precise reading should appear”. From this traditionalist perspective, Hebrew is a consonantal language in order to deliberately enable ambiguity of interpretation; rather than as an accident of the evolution of writing scripts. As someone infected by modern notions of history, the unbracketed perspective seems a bit jarring. The historicist and charitable way to say the same thing is that the Rabbis took advantage of the consonantal language of the script to create fruitful interpretations.

If you are familiar with the tradition of the tradition, you can skim this section; though it has some tasty snippets of midrash and interpretation. If you are less familiar, it’s a nice intro, if you prefer or can tolerate the traditional self-perception.

Post-modern talmud

Drawing the traditional interpretive framework, Ouaknin highlights a variety of aspects of Talmudic rhetoric that exemplify post-modern traits. Ouaknin draws on Blanchot and R. Nachman to highlight the importance of the open-ended question in the Talmudic genre; Talmudic discussions start with questions (rather than definitions), as is common in Greek philosophy and its descendants. Ouaknin elaborates on “Makhloket” – the classic form of Talmudic dispute between pairs of sages in each generation who are continual opponents – Hillel and Shammai, Rav and Samuel, Abbaye and Rava, etc. In Makhloket, reconciliation is not sought… we would have to talk of an open dialectic, since no synthesis, no third term, cancels out the contradiction.”

Following Levinas, Ouaknin reads the Talmud’s classic interpretive method, “gezerah shavah”, “analogy by common term” as a process of interpretation that opens up a vast amount of creative space by bringing the context of each quote to inform the other.

Like Kraemer, Ouaknin uses the familiar story of the Oven of Aknai to make the point about dialectic. In homiletic style, though, Ouaknin creates his own interpretation. The Talmud says of Talmudic discussion “The words of one and the words of the other are the words of the living God. Ouaknin’s own take” “The sentence should be understood as conditional” “*If* there are words of one *and* words of the other, *then* they are words of the living God. This is nice, and an example of Ouaknin acting as a participant not an observing analyst.

Opening up, incompleteness, instability

Ouaknin’s style melds the serious play of Jewish mystical tradition, and the wordplay of Derrida and other French school postmoderns; words, letters and meanings are combinatorially re-assembled, exploring themes of presence and absence, intertexuality, multiplicity, incompleteness. In the section on “Openings”, Ouaknin reads and interprets midrash on idiosyncrasies in the passed down scribal tradition of the writing of torah scrolls. Various dots and symbols in the text are interpreted like pre-GUI typesetting codes, erasing, transposing, cutting, pasting, and otherwise transforming the meaning of the coded text.

Ouaknin describes the paradoxical effect of these erasures: “Once effaced, these two verses no longer exist, but, as a result, their effacing and the meaning of this effacing are themselves effaced, forgotten. Therefore the effacing should be done without effacing, and we should perhaps write indicating the effacing, leaving a trace of the existence of this intention of an impossible effacing” This echoes Derrida, in its style and content illustrating a shimmering indeterminacy of meaning. Trace is a Derridian technical term, referring to ways that the meaning of language always depends on things that are not said.

When I read Derrida back in the day, I wondered whether he was at all familiar with the play of Midrash; his family was assimilated, his education was Western, and his life was secular. Regardless of Derrida’s intention (!), Ouaknin reads the Midrash back into Derrida. There are similarities and differences that are more complex than they may appear – deconstruction works to destabilize authority and gives the critic the last word; Ouaknin’s midrash insists that there is no such thing as the last word; and gives creative power to each reader who can innovate. Ouaknin’s radical theology insists that the presence that animates the play of meaning is only visible in its absence (the burnt book theme); but his normative orientation and reading of postmodernist themes back into sacred texts creates a gravitational pull that adds back reverence where Derrida would not find it.

The Mystical Tradition

Ouaknin approaches postmodern rabbinics with distinctive background in Kabbalah and Hassidism. Ouaknin uses the mystical sources and techniques to generate meanings; he plays them off of postmodern sources to create a unique take on these ideas. I can’t count the number of times in undergrad when the teacher said that text comes from the latin Tissus, to weave (this was Yale in the 80s.). Ouaknin brings a section of the Zohar, in which a phrase is broken into horizontal and vertical columns, and read both vertically and horizontally. “Here we are really confronted with a “text” that must be understood in its etymological meaning: fabric, texture, built by interweaving of vertical threads (warp) and horizontal threads (woof). The Gaon of Vilna, speaking of this diagram, explicitly uses the term “woven.” Ouaknin then segues to Julia Kristeva.

Mysticism isn’t my primary disposition, I confess. Whereas text interpretation sets up interplay between the reader and the text, mystical readings strike me as arbitrary and unmoored; pretending to being interpretation but being fully self-expression. I like abstraction in art, but I’m puzzled to the pretension at coded messages. The same techniques that can be used to compute hidden messages from the text of the Torah can derive messages from the text of Tolstoy, or the phone book. It’s not a matter of belief in one text or other – getting messages from an source of alphabet material is a matter of algorithm not source text. It’s a matter of esthetics, I suppose. When the readings are insightful (as Ouaknin is), and the emphasis is more on interpretation than on literalism and “proof” (as Ouaknin does) I can enjoy mystical interpretations as tours de force.

Rabbi Nahman and atheism

Ouaknin draws the image of the Burnt Book most strongly from the work of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav. This Chassidic master is best known for his stories; Ouaknin reads him in his more neglected role as a philosopher.

Rabbi Nachman wrote several esoteric works, and then had their copies destroyed, believing that their existence endangered his life and the life of his family. Ouaknin connects the burning of R. Nachman’s own books with the Chassidic Master’s take on the classic myth of Lurianic Kabbalah. In order to create the world, God needed to constrain Godself to leave enough room for the world to be created. The world as it is, is devoid of God, other than little divine sparks scattered in toxic container fragments, as a result of a sort of explosives accident during the creation. The burnt books are analogues of this self-constrained divinity, they are present only in their absence.

The Kabbalistic myth, and the tale of the burn book both serve as powerful illustrations of the Derridian trace. The picture of assembling truth out of a million scattered sparks of Godstuff is a different image of the postmodern fragmentary alternative to systematic truth. WIth these ideas of presence-in-absence, Ouaknin gets to be engaged with the atheism and decenteredness of modern/postmodern thought, while maintaining the gravitational pull of God and meaning. He can be an atheist in thought, while keeping God on the other side of the screen.

What’s hidden behind the screen?

The image of the screen that hides the divine from sight is a core image in the central section of the book on eroticism and transcendence. In an upcoming post on the Burnt Book (part 2 of 3) I’ll talk about this section. Things will get strange. To be continued…

There are different versions of basic ethical principles that are common across cultures, and may have roots in the evolutionary advantage of cooperation.

The famous New Testament version is “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” A Talmudic version has a subtle, but notable difference, “what is hateful to you, do not do unto others.” The difference may relate to differing attitudes toward proselytizing. Someone who would want to have been converted to Christianity would offer the same benefit to others. By contrast, someone who would prefer not to be proselytized would recommend against inflicting others with one’s beliefs.

In many situations, I like the Wiccan version of the golden rule, “do as ye will an ye harm none.” The cautionary clarification is that “harm none” includes the self – so practices that are pleasurable but self-destructive would be discouraged.

There’s another variant that I wish existed but haven’t seen anywhere. “Do unto others as they would have done unto them.” This assumes that what the other person wants may be different from what you want, and encourages you to treat them as they would wish to be treated. The other ones are easier, the roots of empathy and avoiding harm are found in one’s own feelings – this one requires reflecting on how another’s wants are different.

Wikipedia has a whole catalog of cross-cultural variants, here. What do you think?

In The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well, anthropologist Lynn Isbell makes the case that humans evolved distinctive capabilities to see and to communicate, in response to snakes, the most dangerous predator of our primate ancestors. The book marshalls evidence across a range of disciplines: neuroscience, primate behavior, paleogeography, molecular biology, and genetics to make the argument.

Isbell’s argument sounds like “Eve’s revenge” against the argument in Terrence Deacon’s Symbolic Species. While Isbell argues that “the snake did it”, the Deacon argues that “Adam did it” – humans’s understanding of symbols evolved to express the sexual ownership of women by men. In his book, Harvard neurologist and anthropologist argues that the understanding of symbols is the main differentiator of human intelligence. Humans invented an abstract symbol and group ritual – such as wedding rings and marriage cermonies – to mark the fact that a woman is the exclusive sexual property of a man. This allowed humans to live co-operatively in groups (which enables more efficient hunting and gathering).

Both stories are fascinating assemblages of scientific evidence making arguments about the origins of distinctively human capabilities. But, as I said in a blog post about the Symbolic Species, Deacon’s argument skips over alternative explanations of the same evidence. The ability to see beyond immediate evidence to consequences remote in time and space can be explained with Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis of gossip, or storytelling in general. Deacon himself argues that language is overdetermined; there are so many advantages that it’s hard to tell what came first.

I enjoyed Deacon’s book for the evidence it brought about how the human brain processes language, and I look forward to reading Isbell’s book, which I read about in the Atlantic review, for the research she assembles about the evolution of vision and cognitive capabilities. But I strongly suspect that I’ll think about Isbell’s argument what I thought about Deacon’s – there is evidence for it, but there are also many other ways to explain the path of evolution, and no solid way to prove these explanations of the distant past. We’re humans, so we search for causes and tell origin myths, even when we’re using the tools of science.

to be Dunbarred (definition): to have so many people as friends/followers in a social network that one can no longer easily pay attention to new people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that there is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain social relationships, and that the limit is a function of relative neocortex size; humans can maintain larger relationship networks than other primates, for example. See Wikipedia Dunbar Number. There are various hypotheses about what the limits might be and what they mean – the core idea is that we’re limited in the number of people we can connect with.

Update: the Urban Dictionary had a definition of to dunbaras a transitive verb, posted by judiec on Feb 4, 2010, meaning to unfriend someone because you already have too many friends.

To intentionally remove someone from your circle of friends by avoiding contact, hiding or in extreme measures moving away. This will normally be necessary due to dull behaviour, fun sapping or heightened arrogance.

.

So I submitted the intransitive definition, to be overloaded. Thanks, Audrey for the Urban Dictioary reference.

When I read The Mind of the Talmud the first time around, not long after it was published in the 90s, it was mind-opening and shocking. This readthrough, I found it good and interesting but not shocking.

Professor David Kraemer argues that the literary form of the Babylonian Talmud communicates a philosophical approach. The Talmud presents extended arguments without resolution in order to convey the concept that truth is not determinable by people, and that truth can only be approached through a multi-voiced conversation. This rhetoric is a deliberate choice, and a significant contrast to other religious and intellectual traditions.

With detailed analysis from his doctoral dissertation, Kraemer shows how this style of extended and unresolved argument evolved over time, with later generations of Talmudic rabbis using features of the style with increasing frequency and intensity. Because of the evolution over time, the style was unlikely to have been invented by the last layer of editing, but the final layer of editing made some of the the most radical choices.

In a tradition that privileges earlier voices, Kraemer argues that creative interpretation by later authorities allows them to assert power over earlier layers. Kraemer takes this not uncommon modern reading even further with a more subtle point. The Talmud uses an interpretive approach whereby every small feature of scripture is intended to have one and only one teaching for halacha (Jewish law). To modern ears, this seems absurdly literalist and bizarre. Kraemer argues that this form of interpretation serves to increase the surface area of the text, allowing for more interpretive hooks. Not only that, the Bavli pioneers an interpretive method that draws interpretive conclusions by comparing not only to what the text says but to fanciful things that the Talmud imagines it might have said but doesn’t say.

Later layers of Rabbinic scholarship brought structure and system to the body of Jewish law, so it is striking to see Kraemer highlight the built-in contradictions and anti-conclusiveness of the style of the Bavli. The multi-voiced play of argument and interpretation fits nicely with the postmodern tradition, in which there is no single, stable, determinable meaning.

When I read The Mind of the Talmud for the first time, I’m not sure how much I noted the connection to the ideology of Conservative moment (the moderate traditionalist strand of Jewish thought and practice). Kraemer is a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the main Rabbinical school for Conservative Judaism.

For example, Kraemer uses the story of the Oven of Aknai, a well-known Talmudic story where a voice booms down from heaven to resolve a dispute among Rabbinic sages, and the sages dismiss the voice saying “it is not in heaven” meaning that the right to decide is in human hands. In response, G-d laughs in amused approval, saying “My children have defeated me.” This story is a classic in the homiletic canon of Conservative Judaism, which emphasizes the power of contemporary scholars to interpret the tradition for current circumstances.

These selections are homiletic choices. By contrast, Orthodox readings gravitate toward other stories in the tradition that focus on acceptance of the yoke of heaven without question, the value of obedience to authority, the ideology that each generation is further away from divine revelation and wisdom. Selecting homiletic choices out of a vast corpus of source text is itself a traditional thing to do regardless of ideology.

I noticed Kraemer’s homiletic defense of Conservative arguments even more strongly in Kraemer’s later book, Reading the Rabbis, where he does closer literary readings of specific texts in the Talmud and shows how the literary forms and techniques are used to undermine seemingly conventional ideas. In that book, though the technique is subtle, the familiar selections and conclusions uphold common tenets of Conservative Judaism.

In both books, Kraemer’s theology is radical, but he shows no radical leanings in categorization or practice. This stance is influenced by Kraemer’s reading of tradition, where one can hold wild and fantastic ideas as long as one remains within the ideological and ritual bounds of the community.

Kraemer’s ideas of undecidability and interpretive play are from the postmodern tradition. Still, his writing style is scholarly straight argument and linear prose. He doesn’t succumb to the postmodern temptation to engage in filligreed interpretation and self-consciously playful writing. For this, one can to turn to Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s “The Burnt Book”, which draws on Derrida, Blanchot, Jabès, Neher, and Levinas. For more pointed and less conventional theological readings, check out the work of Prof. Aryeh Cohen, who uses close readings and postmodern approach to draw interesting inferences about the theology of exile and other topics. Disclosure, Aryeh is also a friend.

In the last chapter of the book, Kraemer contrasts the Bavli’s multi-voiced and inconclusive approach to the pursuit of truth to other religious and intellectual traditions. But he does not get into in-depth analysis of the Talmud’s rhetoric compared to more well-known hellenistic/classical forms. For this analysis, is an excellent summary in a journal article by David Frank. (I first learned that argument from earlier sources in a course at Bar Ilan university in 1983. But I don’t have the notes or a syllabus for the class, and I am enjoying the process of tracing those missing sources.)

Kraemer’s argument sounded shockingly radical when it came out; now the dissonances are notable and pleasing. Yet the perspective and methods of postmodern Talmud scholarship are still fairly obscure in contemporary discourse. Conventional rhetoric is still classical – one build a logical case toward a single conclusion, using counter-arguments to bolster the case for one’s preferred approach. It is still strange to counterpose multiple voices, and to synthesize an approach composed of not-fully-resolved arguments among the approaches and positions.

in a networked world with public conversational practice, and where people are sometimes tempted to remember the conversations, the rhetorical choices of the Talmud’s editors have renewed salience. When we attempt to condense discussion in forums, Twitter threads and perhaps Google Buzz and Wave, how much of the individual voices and arguments will we preserve? I suspect there are lessons to learn from the modes of Talmudic rhetoric.

I strongly recommend The Mind of the Talmud to anyone interested in Jewish thought, postmodernism, and/or premodern sources of inspiration for contemporary hypertext. If I know you in person I may have already recommended it to you. This book is not an introduction to the Talmud – try The Essential Talmud by R. Adin Steinsaltz for a traditional-flavored good introductory text. The book presumes some knowledge of Jewish text and thought, though I suspect that it is readable by someone with interest and Wikipedia. Chapters 2 and 3, in which Kraemer uses statistical analysis to show that the rhetoric of the talmud isn’t merely an invention of its editors, is persuasive but quite dry; the interpretive and argumentative heart of the book is in Chapters 4-7. The book is also rather expensive, but one can get somewhat cheaper copies used, and there is inventory online. If you have read it (or if you go read it now), I’d love comments and discussion.

Steven Shaviro’s analysis of network culture, published in 2003, seems already behind the times. Kazys Vernelis writes a comprehensive analysis of what’s obsolete about old views of network culture, and what’s salient about network culture today.

The Vernelis article describes a network culture that succeeds postmodernism. The dystopian worlds Shaviro analyzes are the projections of “late capitalist” postmodernism as described by Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. Those worlds were characterized by corporate dominance, image and simulation, fragmentation, hallucination, social isolation. The network, in Shaviro’s world, is a solvent dissolving bonds to any real experience or connection.

Vernelis sees the network reconnecting: “today connection is more important than division. In contrast to digital culture, in network culture information is less the product of discrete processing units than of the networked relations between them, of links between people, between machines, and between machines and people.” He envisions new economic, esthetic, and social patterns, driven by peer production, remixing, and networked micropublics.

I think his analysis of the changed nature of the identity and the public sphere is spot on. Varnelis writes “the contemporary subject is constituted within the network. Instead of whole individuals, we are made up of multiple micro-publics, inhabiting simultaneously overlapping telecocoons, sharing telepresence with intimates with whom we are in near-constant contact… today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.” This is very different from the isolated, hallucinating, insane individuals in Shaviro’s world.

I think Vernelis’ model of the characteristics of network culture is strong, and addresses the way the postmodernist dystopias feel out of date. But I and don’t completely agree with his view of the consequences, or in some cases he would be inconclusive where I have an opinion.

Vernelis writes that in the new network culture “privacy is unimportant. Self is undone in the network, vs. self is conceptualized in the network.” I don’t think this is quite true. I think that defaults and assumptions are shifting, and that new notions of “publicy”, as articulated by Stowe Boyd and others, will rise to the fore, in which people consider, act, and develop more tools that facilitate faceted sharing according to social context; only a small amount of which will be hidden to the point of invisibility, and a larger amount will be localized by context, new norms of urban ignoring, and the need for everyone to maintain signal to noise sanity.

And on that subject, Vernelis shares the lament that “A Blackberry or telephone constantly receiving text messages encourages its owner to submit to a constantly distracted state”. He does not yet take up the insight advocated articulately by Howard Rheingold, and as I just discovered Tikva Morawati in her NYU thesis, that attention is a cultural practice amenable to wisdom; that we can learn a range of strategies of attention literacy that allow us to become smarter by participating in flows, and preserve focus by learning to turn them off. Also Vernelis sees the networked self as “an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others, a switching machine.” I see additional opportunities; personal, business and art forums of curation to actively organize flows and their elements within publics over time.

Vernelis I think rightly observes a change in the public sphere. He cites Habermas on the 20th century decline in the public sphere, in the face of mass media and privatization. Vernelis sees that the 21st century is experiencing a revival of networked publics, in the form of interest communities, forums, newsgroups, blogs. There are also characteristic risks, as observed by Clay Shirky and others, of power laws that act naturally to concentrate power, and what Robert Putnam calls cyber-balkanization that breaks apart opinion into a million isolated ineffective microcommunities. There are also new opportunities posed for organization across the network, integrating the network, physical communities and the physical world, and opportunities for enhanced practices of deliberation and action. But we as a society may or may not take these opportunities and make effective use of them.

In the realm of esthetics, I don’t think Vernelis is quite right. He identifies a “new realism in which art becomes a background to life,” I think this trend is right on, with the maps like those of Stamen Design as a exemplars of the overlay mashups of this sort of art. But he’s also ambivalent about the nature of remixing and peer production in culture. Vernelis quotes Bourriad observing that, like DJs or programmers, these artists “don’t really ‘create’ anymore, they reorganize”. Just because I have Winterjazzfest still on the brain, there’s a generation of musicians whose work is quite different in style but aligned in sensibility, where historical and contemporary materials are not just reorganized but synthesized into work that I think is really interesting, emotionally affecting, good art.

Vernelis expresses a concern that fan media may simply merely represent the colonization of everyday life by capital. I doubt it this is true. There is plenty of content that is derivative (though I would argue that derivative folk culture still has merit over a culture with a few superstars and a large number of passive consumers), and there will also be some subcultures and works that will have genius, depth and lasting value.

So, I think Vernelis has identified many salient characteristics of the new network culture, and poses an interesting framework for thinking about the attributes of our current world.