Books the Bookaneers are reading (continued)

Thanks to Bookaneer Althea for initiating this post with the theme of summer reading.

I'm currently taking a full load of classes, so my summer reading has been tempered by school (ha!). Seriously though, reading stuff other than the assigned class readings is like my own personal pastime.

Let me briefly mention a book that I'm currently reading.

The book is entitled Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication by John Durham Peters. Peters is a communications scholar at Indiana University and his book is fascinating. And, let me add right off the bat, his prose is some of the best scholarly writing I've read (for example, he strategically uses short sentences that pack a punch. Whatever happened to short sentences in academe?) As the title suggests, his main thesis is to trace the idea of communication through history. Yes, how we (perhaps the western world) have thought about communication has changed quite radically over the years. Our conception of "communication" -- indeed, the usage of the word as it is commonly used today -- is a decidedly modern phenomenon. For example, Peters repeatedly highlights the erotic overtones to certain conceptions of communication; specifically, the word "intercourse" used to mean what we think of as "communication," and vice versa.

I'm only through a few chapters, but let me talk about one chapter to spark your interest. The first chapter, entitled "Dialogue and Dissemination," discusses two opposing ideas of communication through the important historical figures of Socrates and Jesus. A close reading of Plato's Phaedrus serves as the vehicle for discussing what Socrates believed made for true, transcendental communication: dialogue. Taking place during a period of transition from Greek orality to literacy, Socrates argues that forms of communication (i.e., writing) other than one-to-one dialogue are morally wrong, because (and here comes more eroticism for you) reading is like being penetrated and ventriloquized by the author. Dialogue, on the other hand, is the truest form of communication, because it allows each person to understand one another more fully (the written word doesn't respond to questions).

As opposed to Socrates' privileging of dialogue, Jesus's Parable of the Sower privileges quite the opposite. By scattering or broadcasting one's message everywhere, the speaker has more chances to "plant that one seed." In other words, for Jesus, miscommunication with most people is natural. He doesn't expect most people to understand his teachings, only a small minority. By broadcasting, one is able to more broadly distribute Truth.

I'm doing Peters a disservice in this description, because his readings of these texts are much more nuanced. Nevertheless, you get the gist of it. Later chapters discuss, for example, how the 19th century's craze of spiritual mediums (mostly women) was a historical continuation of a longer tradition of "angelology" - the study of angels - in Christianity. In addition, the spiritual mediums often described their practice in terms of the "new media" of the day - the telegraph. (New media are always accompanied by new ghosts.)

I hope I have sparked your interest. Check it out!

I look forward to hearing what other Bookaneers have been reading this summer, even in their far flung travels.

Books that the Bookaneers are reading

Before we split up fro the summer, we bookaneers discussed a reading list that we would all work on, so that we had something productive to talk about at our first meeting of the new school year. I can't remember what I agreed to read, but I brought a copy of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it to New York with me, and I'm cracking through it. I wanted to share some of my impressions so far.

In the Winter, fellow bookaneers Rachel, Freeda and I, along with our buddy Caroline, worked on a project to study the Amazon Kindle as an educational delivery tool. (The video of a presentation that we did at the iEdge conference, along with a brief description of the project can be found here) As part of our research, we read a handful of books and articles that Tarleton Gillespie, a professor of communication at Cornell, recommended to us. (As another of many asides, we read the whole of Gillespie's Wired Shut for our reading group and loved it.) The Future of the Internet was part of that list.

For the Kindle project, we mainly focused on the chapter entitled "Tethered Appliances, Software as Service, and Perfect Enforcement" in which Zittrain talks through a number of examples of devices like the Kindle, TiVo or OnStar that have been designed to resist tinkering or repurposing, and the consequences and dangers of those devices.

This time around, I've started reading from the beginning, and I'm grasping more of what Zittrain sees as being at stake in that later chapter. According to his narrative of development and innovation, generativity--which he defines as the quality of an object to be built upon, adapted, and put to many different purposes--has been the distinctive quality of modern computing that has allowed for an explosion of development over the last 25 years. Zittrain describes play, cooperation and good faith as characterizing the communities of coding behind the internet, and how productive those communities have been as a result.

Unfortunately, generativity--which requires that a device be left open to change and therefore, in some ways, incomplete--has also been the quality that has made the modern computer vulnerable to exploitation from the outside. During the years when the PC was mainly the purview of the hobbyist, this vulnerability wasn't exactly dire. But, now that we live our lives largely mediated by computers, viruses, malware, bad code and a host of other vulnerability make the generative PC increasingly worrisome and unattractive.

This is Zittrain's explanation for why appliancized devices--computerized gadgets like the Kindle or the iPod that are designed for only one purpose and that are difficult to repurpose--are gaining in popularity. Zittrain is concerned about this trend for a number of reasons, which I won't go into until I've finished the book.

So far, friends, the book comes highly recommended. But why take my words for it, eh?

If you're interested in what else the bookaneers are reading, stay tuned, I'll post a reading list soon. And maybe by fellow bloggers can say a few words about what paper or ebook is on their bedside table at the moment.

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