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I'm referencing Neal Stephenson's fantastic science fiction work Snow Crash in my title, but what I'm really talking about is this: Photosynth demonstration. Looks like a fantastic resource.

Thank you to Jenny Davidson of Light Reading for the link.

Now go forth and read Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. Odd combination, n'est-ce pas?

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The Future (of Communications) ain't what it used to be...

Like a grand and miraculous spaceship, our planet has sailed through the universe of time, and for a brief moment, we have been among its many passengers.

(quotes transcribed from this youtube posting )

I’m one of those kids whose parents took them to Disney World. Not once. Not twice. Nearly every summer for the entirety of my life. My mom and dad, it seems, really bought into the idea that Disney World is a place where children and adults can laugh and learn and play together – words that should sound familiar, as I’m clipping them from Walt Disney’s opening day address at Disneyland. I think what was most interesting about my young life as a Disney World devotee was that I wasn’t quite the Princess-waiting-for-her-Prince type of girl the Magic Kingdom always catered to (but never more so than now, it seems). I wasn’t so much into the “Dreams” camp. It just didn't cater to what some might call my tomboy nature. What I really loved was Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow – EPCOT Center. Yes, I was a science geek at Disney World.


What I loved about EPCOT was the promise of the future it seemed to portray. Dispensing with the character based rides of the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT center was a place to play but more importantly a place to learn. I learned about energy and non-renewable resources at the Universe of Energy long before it was home to Ellen’s Energy Adventure – and I wasn’t only in it for the all-too-short dinosaur portion of the ride, in which travelers through the Universe of Energy came face to face with those creatures whose deaths currently fuel our global energy economy. I learned about the formation of the Earth’s oceans and the endless variety of life that inhabits them at the Living Seas, long before it became “The Seas with Nemo and Friends”, back when the focus was still on the operations of SeaBase Alpha, and the care of the many aquatic inhabitants who live there, from sharks and rays to manatees. But what captured my imagination the most was Spaceship Earth – the attraction housed in the gigantic geosphere that is EPCOT Center’s trademark symbol.

On this visit to EPCOT Center, however, I felt conflicted about the possibilities for the future represented by this guided tour of the development of communications. For the first time, it didn’t ring true to me. Rather, the whole enterprise seemed profoundly sad. An excerpt from the end of Spaceship Earth pinpoints the moment where, dulcet tones of Jeremy Irons aside, I lost my faith in the narrator’s vision, for the first time in the 20 or so years I’ve been visiting EPCOT:

Today, we possess the ability to connect with one another instantly, anywhere on the planet. A new communications super network is being built before our eyes. Spaceship Earth glows with billions of interactions, carrying news and information at the very speed of light. But will these seemingly infinite communications become a flood of electronic babble, or will we use this power to usher in a new age of understanding and co-operation on this, our Spaceship Earth? Physical distance is no longer a barrier to communication: today the entire world is our next door neighbor. Our news is their news, their news ours. We share our hopes and concerns with the whole planet. We truly live in a global neighborhood.

For nearly 20 years now, Spaceship Earth has proclaimed this very message: Communications – and more broadly communication – is not simply a tool used to build our future. Rather, it’s the only real future we have, and our increasing technology entails both “the ability and the responsibility to build new bridges of acceptance and co-operation between us.” The outlook of this very Disney-fied vision of the future is interested in a causal relationship between human communications and human connections, averring that “by using our new communications tools to build better bridges between us, we will discover we all share the common bonds of hope and sorrow, dreams and joys.”

Put bluntly, I felt as though I’d been betrayed, experiencing this ride again at nearly 25. We live in a world of instant communication, and being “in touch” is, as I like to call it, the nervous tic of our society. And yet, it seems like the entire world is collapsing all around us – wars, terrorism, hunger, homelessness, natural disasters – everywhere I look are people and a planet in pain. The assuredness of a Disney ride – telling me since I was 5 years old that, as “Tomorrow’s Child” (the former theme song to the ride), I’d be part of a better future, a future in which humanity would finally have the tools to communicate with one another. In so doing, we would find a way to connect that would allow for both the acceptance of our differences (cultural, religious, linguistic) and the acknowledgement of the things that we share (and the order of those two is important).

In an unsurprising coincidence, Eileen Joy wrote a post on the same day I visited EPCOT, which addressed, among other things, the problem of modern communications and the human subject. I was particularly struck by her final lines, which speak to the problem of “electronic babble” from the excerpt above:

Just after listening to the On Point program I arrived home to find my new issue of Vanity Fair in my mailbox [the special Africa issue guest edited by Bono], in which issue there were excerpts from Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason, where, interestingly, he descries television as the main culprit in the so-called "death" or "decline" of authentic and reflective life and heralds the Internet as perhaps the last place where democracy might still be possible

So, all of this got me thinking and wondering: does too much blogging, life-logging, live-caming, and live-journaling really threaten the cultivation of the authentic and private self? Is "being alone" a necessary precondition for authentic self-actualization? Was it really more difficult in the premodern era to "hide" one's behavior, thoughts, and emotions? Why does a "private self" matter so much to what we think of as "being human"? Could the Internet really be the last safe haven of rational thought, strong critique, and freedom?

So which is it? Is the Internet electronic babble? or place where we might, finally, find a way to connect (...only connect)? Are we not getting enough “alone time”? or is it possible – just maybe – that we’re getting too much alone time? I don’t have any answers in this musing (do I ever?)...but I can’t stop wondering if our exteriorization of our interiority push us closer to babble and further from communication. I also wonder, partially as a result of my currently under-indulged obsession with Levinas, if part of the problem is that modern communications has been reduced to information without a face. Or more precisely: without a face we recognize as not simply (and so not dismissibly) Other – a face which, returning our gaze, sees in us, in what we think of as our collective self, an Other. It echoes something that was said or implied at Kalamazoo (I forget which) – the importance of allowing oneself – or one’s Self – to be displaced.

Update upon further reflection: maybe it also has to do with how we use the technology we have -- i.e., we have to choose to engage in conversation and bridge-building communication.

Partial thoughts, to be expanded upon later, with the introduction of another side of this story – translation. And, surprisingly enough, Augustine. Since I’m happy to announce – I’m done reading City of God, affectionately known in these quarters as the book that never ends...

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Looking Forward to Old English (and its Study)

It’s one of those times I’ve learned to really enjoy in the medieval blogosphere – we all seem to be thinking about the same things lately. Eileen Joy over at In the Middle has sparked a wide ranging discussion of futurity and the work of medieval studies. Dr. Virago added her thoughts with her moving post on Speaking for the Dead, and Heo Cwaeth, a while back, also had some important thoughts.

I’ve been off-blog for a bit – room mates moving out, moving in, and setting up house pretty much consumed my life – but I’m aiming for something a little less “cooked” here, assuming I understand the terminology that’s being used over at In the Middle (I’ve a penchant for stealing terms that I like. I like how I understand this). So some not-too-worked-over thoughts that have been ruminated on while moving heavy objects, falling asleep on the IKEA bus, and assembling IKEA furniture.

In a comment to my last post (was it really nearly two weeks ago now? Wow.), JJC made the following comment:

The project of translating that which does not yet exist (and yet the existence of which is, it seems, indisputable) is a more difficult version of the the medievalist's plight: to translate the languages that did exist, but because they were alive and because they endured for a long time and because they exist now only in deceptive fragments, to be forced into translations that are always out of time, always stories about petrified remains and not living, changing things. Or even more frustrating, to attempt to translate languages and learn in that process that our knowledge is doomed to recede, not grow.

Meanwhile, in my email inbox, I received a note from LJS, a poet and infrequent commenter on various blogs. He’d been catching up on his blog reading and saw the link to the letter JJC wrote to Capitol One via the Tiny Shriner Review. He’d seen a comment I’d made, about my orals, and it led to a moment of real wonder, for him and subsequently for me:

But I also noticed this comment from you: “Makes the prospect of starting reading for orals a little daunting -- a whole year to rework what I thought I'd learned about the Middle Ages. Then again, that's kind of why I'm looking forward to it.”

And I misread it the first time (skipping ahead) as referring to the Middle Ages. And there seems something so possible and inevitable in the fact that one might -- indeed, might have to -- look forward to the Middle Ages.

(And I realize this operates in two senses: an Anglo-Saxonist looking forward as her texts' writers and readers might have done; and a modern commentator rethinking her relationship to the past and looking forward to the Anglo-Saxon era rather than looking back, from the Castle of Teleological Supremacy and Capitol One cards)

LJS is hitting on something that I think is all tied up in the quote from LeGuin I mentioned in my last post, and moreover, in Eileen’s reaction to it, which I quote here:

regardless of the past-ness of the historical artifact, whether the "Beowulf" manuscript or Hadrian's Wall--it is primarily here with us right now, and is therefore also modern in some way [much like human beings, with their biological genealogy, are both historically-shaped and moving along in the present]. While it might be important to know how and for what reasons "Beowulf" was written down in the tenth or early eleventh century, a more urgent question for me is: why would anyone want to read it, or write it [again] now?

Putting all these ideas in conversation – and moreover, putting them in conversation with the idea Dr. V picks up in her post “Speaking for the Dead” – it seems like there is, in fact, a way of seeing the world differently – not from the Castle of Teleological Supremacy but from the basis that we do, in fact, have something in common with those people of the past we study. That we can, in fact, learn from the past. And I don’t mean that in the sense of “those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat their mistakes,” though that certainly matters deeply. Rather, I wonder if there’s a way of learning from the past that comes closer to what LJS suggests, closer to giving a reason for Eileen’s question of “why would anyone want to read [Beowulf], or write it (again) now?” Is there a way to think of looking forward to the Middle Ages as “an Anglo-Saxonist looking forward as her texts' writers and readers might have done; and a modern commentator rethinking her relationship to the past and looking forward to the Anglo-Saxon era”? Again, not to recreate the past, and not to live in it in any way, not even nostalgically. But isn’t there a way of seeing the continuity of the past and the present without a teleological fallacy coming into play? Isn’t there something instructive in the very grammar of the English language that, should we learn to read it, we might be able to see as part of what’s happening in the present? Or is that a teleological wolf in sheep’s clothing?

JJC’s comment, to return to where I began my endless quotation, suggested that the medievalist’s plight is this – “to translate the languages that did exist, but because they were alive and because they endured for a long time and because they exist now only in deceptive fragments, to be forced into translations that are always out of time, always stories about petrified remains and not living, changing things.” It’s true – our stories are always about the petrified remains of a past so long dead that it seems it has no bearing on the living. But I wonder if it isn’t also like the enta geweorc of the elegies. I don’t believe (ok, everyone who knows my work cover your ears now, I’m talking about it again!) that the pat ending of the Wanderer is the real story, if you will. He’s transported, teleported almost, into a Christian reality that doesn’t seem to follow on the existential musings of the poem as it progresses – as it was spoken, and as it was (perhaps) lived. Thus, although the walls of the poem are a site of mourning, and of loss, they don’t only stand for that. Rather, they could also be the past that persists in the present – and as Eileen said above (and in comments below), the past is always still present, with us – here and now. Walls can speak, in their own way – if we can learn to listen.

And now to student meetings, which shall prevent further musings on this subject until tomorrow, when I make my escape for the holiday!

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Translating the Future

So, to celebrate the victory of the Democratic party -- EVEN in the once staunchly Red State North Carolina! -- I thought I'd take a break from my work (endless, endless meetings with my students) to write a quick post on something I've been thinking about lately.

I wrote a really crazy paper for my linguistics class last night, that I wish I had called "The Time-Travelling King." The focus of the paper was on translation in the Alfredian context -- i.e., the ways in which translation and knowledge are figured in the translations of King Alfred, and how it works with ideas of English-ness. I feel like a group of Anglo-Saxonists would have been a bit more up in arms about it than the class was. Anyway, the most interesting thing I managed to say in the essay (if I do say so myself) was, characteristically, not mine. In fact, it wasn't even technically part of my essay. But I'd stumbled across this quote in the preface to the Ursula K. LeGuin book Always Coming Home, and it seemed to crystallize some ideas I've been having:

The difficulty of translating from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it. The past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future. The ancient Chinese book called the Tao teh ching has been translated into English dozens of times, and indeed the Chinese have to keep retranslating it into Chinese at every cycle of Cathay, but no translation can give us the book that Lao Tze (who may not have existed) wrote. All we have is the Tao teh ching that is here, now. And so with translations from a literature of the (or a) future. The fact that it hasn’t yet been written, the mere absence of a text to translate, doesn’t make all that much difference. What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now.

The way in which LeGuin thinks about her book -- a book of cultural artifacts (stories, songs, etc) from a civilization that is still far in the future -- reminded me of the translation topos of so many writers in the Middle Ages. They use the past, and the stories of other peoples, to think through their own time, but the movement is similar: they think about themselves, but they think about it in stories rather than in sociology. In some ways, I suppose, this ties in (albeit vaguely at this point) to the question of the future of medieval studies that's always in discussion over at JJC's site (check out particularly the posts from the symposium at George Washington last week). I guess we're always running up against the problem of not quite having the vocabulary yet to push beyond the questions we already know how to ask -- in that arena I think Eileen's comments on this post really hit the mark.

Once my computer returns from the shop I'll have more to say on that subject, after ruminating on it not unlike Caedmon. And, given that there will be no internet -- it will in fact be a lot like the dark ages.

In the meantime, however, I give you the arguably second best news of the day to close my post: as Dr. Virago reports yet another dark age has ended.

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