Regarding Jeff's recent discussion of Bugeja's rant against technologies newer than the library, I noted in passing my use of the term technostalgia to describe that sort of rhetorical oddity. I use the term in a piece on Heidegger and radio, and for the sake of offering a bit more of an explanation, since I didn't offer that much in my comment, here's a few paragraphs from the end of the paper that attempt to explain the use of the term.
"The problem here is not that media and technology are objectively distinct but rather that engaging technological objects — “the things themselves” — as evidence merely of the technological blinds critique to the spiritual in-between made possible by the mutual translation between objects and their subjects; subjects and their objects. Media must be understood as more than technologies, not because of a particular heuristic truism, but because otherwise this regressive approach to the technological advances of any era will continue to generate incommensurate drives, founded in a sort of technostalgia, in which thinkers bemoan the present technological moment precisely because its presence cannot measure up to the tortured univocality their theorizing demands of it and look to a technological predecessor as a means of reestablishing their selves, their world, and their politics.i I use the term technostalgia here not to describe something as simple as a yearning for the past, but rather a particular formation in which a comfort with already established media ecologies becomes wedded to certain ways of thinking subjectivity and spirituality in such a way that newer and shifting media ecologies come to constitute the “outside” of that comfort zone...
[T]he theme of technostalgia finds its analogs in a number of media scholars who continue to align themselves with particular ontological precepts. Simply by way of a hypothetical, and knowing full well that a more sustained and critical reading would be required before being able to conclude anything, let me very briefly offer two potential examples: Harold Innis and Neil Postman. Innis famously remarked that his “bias is with the oral tradition, particularly as reflected in Greek civilization, and with the necessity of recapturing something of its spirit.” He spoke of balancing particular media environments, but he was pretty explicit about where the spiritual center of culture found its historical grounding. Like Heidegger, Greek orality was idealized as a community and an ecology in which everything had its place. It might be worth charting how significant the spiritualist rhetoric was in Innis' explication of Greek society. A similar trajectory can be traced in Neil Postman, prominent media ecologist and thinker of technology, who has argued for returning to the thoughts of those unafflicted by nearly every modern medium: the political philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like Heidegger, Postman exhibits similar fascination in the near-prophetic power of the era’s poetry and appreciation for our “place” in the world, and while happier about the airplane, Postman nevertheless reverts to spiritual dicta, fearing that the modern age has lost its ability to dream, and yearning for a quasi-religious transcendence through which to ground human existence. Echoing Heidegger’s hope and terminology, Postman elsewhere contends that unlike the calculative reason of the twentieth century sociologist, the novelist of preceding centuries “proceeds by showing.” As I noted earlier, the epideictic potential of showing offers us hope, but it will require significant theoretical and practical articulation. A less charitable reading of Postman finds a scholar who believes we will simply, through sheer dint of will, return to the age of showing, and all might yet be made aright, if – and this is a big if – we can just hold onto that past strongly enough.vii This avid humanism (and we could group Innis in with Postman here) no doubt has laudable qualities, but it also flies in the face of humanities research and thinking since the 60s, and requires a belief in a subject somehow unique and ontologically distinct from the media ecologies that form it. The critical task of this essay offers a different way of responding to and thinking about how our media continue, in McLuhan's words, to work us over completely.
Ultimately, the problem lies not in a longing for a simpler technological past, but rather with the injection of the politics of spirit into that longing, banishing from media the uncertainty of the in-between and the haunting spirit of its attendant ghosts. The allure of the lost spirit is always already a particular political allure, full of political consequences in how we theorize technology, the subject, and ideology. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, with new media continuing to redefine itself in the digital and virtual frontiers, the challenge posed is the same, if more urgent challenge posed by all media once marked as new: to discover ways of interrogating their contingent benefits and dangers without replicating the same technostalgiac drives that have plagued the critique of technology since Plato’s condemnation of writing."
Comments (5)
I ike how you called the author of the rant by simply his last name. As if anyone knows or cares who this guy is.
Posted by HooHaa Spoilsport | January 26, 2006 6:15 PM
Posted on January 26, 2006 18:15
Thank you for your well-thought essay on the term technostalgia. There have been a lot of assumptions in "Ghost in the Wire" about me and my research. I am responding now only because of the scholarship in the above piece, "Technostalgia."
Let me give you a bit of background on my concerns about technology as being practiced at universities, especially journalism schools, which have invested heavily in convergence. My concerns about technology are not Luddite-based; they are there because of my work experience, which mandated intimate knowledge of technology, from those 25-pound "Gemini" portable computers in the 1970s to my feather-weight Apple laptop. I have dealt with technology budgets and vendors in one way or another for almost 30 years.
A bit of background might help you understand that my intent is to safeguard the investment in technology rather than use it unthinkingly through the frame of mega-conglomerates rather than pedagogy. We need to be concerned. Never before in the our history has technology been as powerful, global and mobile. Never before has our economy rested substantially on commercialization of technology. These devices represent a power that students have not earned, particularly in journalism schools, where we have spent too much time focusing on presentation and too little on fact-gathering. The blogoshpere has always assumed that there would be a record of fact (or the absence thereof) by which to hold media accountable. When media fail to provide fact, opinion prevails, and it is cheaper in corporate journalism to disseminate opinion rather than gather fact. Moreover, a news company can earn more revenue by targeting opinion to clusters of audience. As such, people hear only what they want to hear; they are affirmed rather than challenged or informed. Your essay above does both. I respect it; but I do not entirely agree with it. That is why it has sparked a research-based dialogue.
My own research is based on three types of experience: My career as a journalist for United Press International, my work in the President's Office at Ohio University, and my Ph.D. in English.
Without justifying my work, which is fact-based (even if those facts get trimmed unmercifully in print media so that copy can fit in space), let me briefly state that I saw a major wire service die because of investment in technology at the expense of reporters. Now we have AP and no competition (perhaps a bit from Reuters and Bloomberg). Now corporate journalism is investing in technology at the expense of reporters, just as UPI did. And now higher education is doing the same thing at the expense of teachers. The point is, my calling attention to this is not technostalgia; it is a wake-up call that revenue drives corporate America, especially with respect to technology. I would prefer that we use technology wisely, and that is the thrust of my work. Otherwise we are apt to see standards drop, politicized though they be, and legislators hold educators accountable, even as they cut budgets and even as fewer teachers work not only in physical space but in cyberspace at all hours from myriad locations.
This trend has been long in coming. I worked at Ohio University during the administration of Robert Glidden, one of the first university presidents to install computers in residence halls in the 1990s. We knew that those computers would result in more gaming and other uses apart from research. So we instituted a series of workshops and ethics presentations to help students balance their time in real and virtual habitats. That was a good approach. But education budgets were healthier in the 1990s. Now we simply install technology and hope for the best. That is in part why I am taking a risk in voicing my concerns in the popular print press.
Speaking of print, I have a Ph.D. in English. My major was associated with writing, but my literature specialties were in medieval through Restoration drama. The Englightenment is responsible for this very blog because print allowed professors like Martin Luther to assert that truth is greater than authority 218 years before we came to that conclusion in Colonial America in the John Peter Zenger case. In sum, my English doctorate taught me the value of the printing press in ensuring the scientific method, especially with respect to footnotes. My research partners and I are working overtime to stablize the Internet so that digital citations do not lapse. We have submitted National Science Foundation grant applications and have published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals. That is my biggest concern about Internet, a dynamic but unstable medium. Unfortunately, our research methods assume stability. It is a crime, literally, to manipulate books and journals in a library--to cut, mark up and paste. This is what the computer does best. Unless we stablize the Internet, it cannot reach its full research and educational potential.
Finally, I'll end with an anecdote associated with "technostalgia." It was cut from my recent piece during editing at the Chronicle. One of my journalism sources used the word "nostalgia" in a review session for an exam. Immediately his teaching assistant received emails asking what the term meant. “Students didn’t even think to look it up," he said. “I was tempted to reply, ‘Nostalgia’ is yearning for a time when students at a major university would not have to ask that question.”
The health of the blogosphere may or may not be in your hands. But you can help ensure more respect with the kind of writing and analysis that I see in your post on "technostalgia."
Posted by Michael Bugeja | January 28, 2006 8:38 AM
Posted on January 28, 2006 08:38
Michael, thank you for your comment, one both generous and interesting. I would be very interested in reading some of your stabilization pieces, and if you would be so kind as to email either cites or articles to me, I would be in your debt. Indeed, I'd love to even have some of them online for the purposes of discussion, if you're interested or could point me in the right direction.
That being said, I must express an initial reluctance as to whether or not I agree with the need or desirability of stabilization. It seems to me that one of the things the academy should do better is to adapt to changes in technology. To me, and I am a far younger and less varied in my experience, so I'm open to the possibility that this is me being naive (Ron Greene recently used the term "Kittler youth," which I thought appropriate and funny), it seems as if techniques that the academy has inherited - in the areas of research, pedagogy, general theorizing of knowledge and knowledge-creation - need to change; our media environments are different, the tools by which we learn have expanded, the external influences on how the brain operates are now varies in important and noted ways, and it seems that to me, rather than fighting to preserve the standards of a golden age, we might think about revising those standards. Case in point, reading your anecdote, what struck me is not that they emailed you but that they knew so little as to look it up at dictionary.com or wikipedia or any of the other myriad electronic devices, devices that shift and alter and that do not necessarily gain their strength from the smackdown of permanence.
That being said, there's certainly an archival problem here, in that historical movements online are, thanks to the nature of the beast, always a very violent Aufhebung, since whatever exists as the web's present often comes through the obliteration of that which came before. This is problematic, but there are already ways for researchers to work with this, including snapshot programs that will capture a webpage and the level or two of links from that page, as well as web-charting software that can show inter-relationships. And the obvious web caches, though I certainly agree that these are insufficient for meeting academic needs.
Anyway, I'll leave it there for now, and look forward to reading a bit more about the work. Disagreements notwithstanding, this is an interesting set of issues and one that definitely deservers some sustained discussion.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | January 28, 2006 4:46 PM
Posted on January 28, 2006 16:46
Thank you, Kenneth, for continuing the dialogue and your interest in my and Dr. Daniela Dimitrova's work on stabilizing the Internet so that it can reach its full research potential. By way of background, here are a few links:
http://www.halfnotes.org/Footnote_Study_2004.html
http://www.halfnotes.org/Footnote_Study_2005.htm
This link will open a PowerPoint:
http://www.halfnotes.org/Miscellaneous/half-life-ICA2005-f1_files/frame.htm
We have two other peer-review papers forthcoming in New Media and Society and in Portals (a library journal). We are revising a National Science Foundation grant application to set the framework and circuitry for a reliable, universal archive system in which footnote citation can be accessed reliably.
You're correct that the academy must adapt its research methods. Intercoder reliability is a case in point. Dr. Dimitrova, working with a student computer scientist, is developing an application that can analyze footnotes, determine if they have lapsed and (we hope in the future) provide more data as to how and why. In the future there may be less (or no) need for intercoder reliability.
We have other research plans that involve archiving and methodology, but it would be imprudent to share them on a public diary.
The Web is unlike any other medium to issue forth since the printing press. Television, which as you know enjoyed greater diffusion, still had a transcript. Web has a transcript, too; but it is manipulatable. That one facet changes everything with respect to original sources and replicability.
I am hopeful that our research will lead to new methodologies and funding for stable, comprehensive, universally accessible online archives. The problem we confront continually is the corporate rather than pedagogical paradigm on which the Web is based. Google's recent contract with China and its justification of censorship in the name of revenue is a case in point. There will be many who argue Google's side that lack of information is a worse scenario than censorship. That is corporate spin which, alas, I as a journalist, educator and technology researcher might take on as I did Facebook. The risk is misinterpretation of motive; but most visitors to blogs do not realize that editors in the print world make key decisions on how copy is presented in keeping with the publication's concept (aligned with its target audience [more marketing, alas]). But as a catalyst for dialogue, the mass audience of certain publications has utility.
Finally, consider this, Kenneth: I am part of the Watergate generation of reporters. We shared a common ethic concerning the First Amendment. We believed that if we did not protect it via fact and balance, the government would curtail its power. I have seen that happen. If we do not respect the Web via fact and balance--explaining to students that the on-demand culture does not exempt them from rigor (which includes online information gathering)--the Web as a serious medium for scholarship and learning will be undermined.
Once again, thank you for this dialogue. As a transcript, it shows what a blog can be, especially when one reads the stray comment preceding my first post, which references my name, a sensitive topic, as I am Maltese.
I read your bio, Kenneth, and wish you success in academe and happiness in life. I will look for your work here and in the journals.
Posted by Michael Bugeja | January 29, 2006 6:39 AM
Posted on January 29, 2006 06:39
Hi, I have mentioned this debate and posted my reaction at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=62
The gist of my argument is that Michael's approach, while valuable, is based on stabilizing the new information ecology with methods arising from an earlier phase, and that this can only be partially successfull. Rather, we must look at methods of stabilization from within the new sphere, that are congruent with its logic.
Michel Bauwens
Posted by Michel Bauwens | February 9, 2006 1:06 AM
Posted on February 9, 2006 01:06