Introduction

For some, the very notion of “pre-Splash Knowledge Studies” (PSKS) is an oxymoron. The academic institutions of the time were notorious for being wasteful where they should have been stingy, and stingy where there was need. Worse, restrictive copyright laws and archaic credentialing rituals sealed off important participation vectors and created an atmosphere of distrust and resentment.

Significantly, one doesn’t require the remove of time and circumstance to make this bleak assessment of the period. Thought leaders clearly understood that crucial components of the academic ideal, such as the free and universal access to knowledge, were “compromised by the current intellectual property regime,” and that the so-called ‘new media’ initiatives put forth by most institutions were “about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it” (link) And yet while this frustration was shared by many within the Humanities, few seemed to know what to do.

Part of the reason for this desperate state of affairs was a lack of examples of alternative knowledge production systems that could point the way. As one scholar noted:

[Reimagining the Academy will] involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and [require] students to build on each other’s work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goal since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like. (Confessions of an Aca/Fan, October 2008)

Indeed, despite the incredible advances in network technology and ubiquitous computing that had taken place during the early 2000s, the inherently conservative nature of degree-granting academic institutions meant that official scholarship continued to treat “digitally (re)produced research…as if it were more or less a prosthetic extension and enhancement of print.” Worse, in many cases, knowledge produced in online spaces – particularly collaboratively-produced knowledge – was often rejected altogether. So high was the anxiety about the future that many turned to denial, attempting to wish the unfolding changes out of existence by clinging to the past; in so doing, these actors did their part to set the stage for the cataclysms that accompanied the Splash. Such was the tenor of the time.

On the other hand, it has become something of a Crosbyism to simply equate all pre-Splash knowledge production practices with corporatism, neofeudalism, and rampant careerism. As broadly accurate as these clichés might be, the reality is, of course, much more nuanced. Our research has revealed numerous progressive models for the production of knowledge that were actively explored in various sectors during the decade leading up to the Splash. One such practice, namely that of “Alternate Reality Gaming”, a cross-platform recreational knowledge production activity whose popularity exploded in underground “alpha geek” culture in the years immediately preceding the Splash, has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of our node to such an extent that we have decided to dedicate our centennial activity almost exclusively to its study. By exposing this little-known genre of story and play to a wider audience, we hope to spark fresh discussion about popular conceptions of life and learning in the first decade of the 21^st century. Further, by revealing how the ARG community (among others) enacted many of the very practices that would have enabled the Humanities Academy of the time to break free of its self-imposed chains, we intend to make a larger point about the all-too-human tendency to miss the solutions to one’s problems even when they’re sitting right in front of one’s nose.

Full paper: watson-hypothetical-worlds.pdf

What’s less obvious is understanding how ubiquitous computing and social media affect the ways new readers interact with novels and other long-form texts. Does the shifting vernacular of online discourse degrade general literacy? Is the Web somehow to blame for shortening attention spans? Does social media threaten to eliminate common cultural touchstones by fragmenting readers into ultra-personalized affinity groups?

The debate is passionate and charged. Articulate advocates abound, from technologists who cite social justice and political engagement as urgent reasons for integrating new media literacies into school curricula, to traditionalists who argue that instantaneous access to information and the casual, fragmented and unfocused nature of online writing present mortal threats to book culture. There are rejoinders to every argument, and there isn’t anywhere near enough room in this space to begin to cover it all. Nevertheless, like a lot of arguments, much of what is interesting here has less to do with particular advocacy positions than it does with coming to an understanding as to the origin, meaning and trajectory of the debate itself.

Using Motoko Rich’s concise 2008 NYT article, Online, R U Really Reading? as a launching point, I would like to suggest that what’s really going on here is in fact less a matter of ideological dispute than a linguistic discord brought about by category confusion — a semantic landslide shaken into being by instabilities in the definitions of the words online and reading. Furthermore, I argue that as the dust settles, the definitions for these words will expand and overlap one another as they stretch to take into account the dynamism and reach of the erupting technoculture; as a result, the distinction between so-called “media literacy” and traditional capital-L Literacy will all but disappear.

Communications technology and culture produce and consume one another in a strange co-evolutionary symbiosis. Chicken-and-egg problems confront analysis at every turn. Did the Web create Web culture, or did Web culture create the Web? While these kinds of questions might have had more ready answers in the early days of the web, the relationship between tech development and online culture has become increasingly tangled and recursive. The era of pervasive social media is upon us, and this is changing the way we must think about online communications, shifting away from a purely instrumental static linked documents view to the new and radically-unfamiliar-to-print-culture Web 2.0 perspective of dynamically linked concepts and actors. Cyberspace turned out to be much broader and deeper than even its most prescient early advocates had predicted — broad, because the Web is more than just an information space to be navigated through, but is also (most crucially) a multipurpose, multi-faceted hyperspace of conversation, socialization and collaboration; and deep because the Web’s tangle of dendrites now extend well beyond computer screens and into our embodied existences via the mobile devices and other near-ubiquitous network portals that proliferate in our lives.

This deep intermixing of social activity and technology requires us to re-examine what we mean when we speak of being “online.” What does it mean to say I am “online” when I am effectively always online? Where is the border between the Real and the Virtual when one exists in both places at once? Much of my own research involves exploring ways that mobile and ubiquitous computing can add layers of story, interaction and play to physical environments. Thinking of network technology/network culture in this manner — as a pervasive, spatially- and temporally-distributed non-platform-specific layer instead of a constrained single-platform activity — effectively expands the definition of the word online to include a vast array of mediated communicative acts.

Such an expansion problematizes critiques of new media culture that seek to cast online activities as being somehow in opposition to, or competition with, older modes of learning, play and communication. Rich cites Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, as an example of this kind of us-versus-the-machine characterization. And while Carr certainly makes some valid points about all the bad, bad things the Internet can do, he largely comes off as a finger-wagging grump. Carr’s confession that he “now [finds] it difficult to read long books” is particularly telling. Why does the author feel so down on himself for discovering that he is more interested and engaged by online conversation than he is by books? Maybe the reality is that Mr. Carr is in fact more fully in the world than ever before and simply doesn’t have the time or motivation to read books the way he once did, choosing instead to expend his imaginative capital meticulously researching and crafting angry, hyperbolic attacks on Web 2.0.

Mr. Carr’s argument is typical of critics who cleave to restrictive definitions of what it means to read and be online. Dana Gioia of the National Endowment for the Arts repeats a popular sentiment when he writes “electronic media…provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.” The basic argument here is that books engender crucial linear reading and thinking skills that simply are not called upon in ephemeral and fragmented online reading contexts. This, to me, is something of a tautology (e.g., wood-chopping skills can only be acquired with an axe in hand; but that doesn’t necessarily put the kindling pile in conflict with the Kindle). Assumptions in both directions seem unexamined: anyone who’s taken a decent undergraduate English course knows that novels aren’t actually linear; that they engage with the world around them; and that reading them depends on an active imaginative collaboration between the author and the reader. Similarly, reading online is, like everything else in our temporality, productive of fundamentally linear texts. Even the most random walk through the Web assembles ideas and data feeds into a linear sequence — chapter one, I click on this, I read that; chapter two, I write this, I click on that, I read this…

Despite these and other debates about the putative advantages and disadvantages of certain kinds of literacy, it’s pretty clear that the process of collapsing the boundaries between online and offline reading is well underway. Like Nicholas Carr, I too have experienced a decrease in the number of novels and long-form texts that I read, a decrease that has been inversely proportional to the amount and range of my online reading practices. One could take Mr. Carr’s bait and argue that, because of this change, I actually read much more widely, am exposed to an exponentially larger array of texts via recommendation engines and social networking applications, and that my ability to discover and discuss literature is much greater now than it ever was previously. But doing so would simply invite another salvo of replies — that I am an educated academic with critical skills that enable me to leverage technology better than “amateur” readers, that I am proselytizing for a set of practices that I have vested interest in justifying, or that the non-heirarchical setup of the Web puts Orwell’s 1984 on the same level as bttf4444′s Down With Big Brother!, a crossover fan fiction mixing Orwell’s original with characters and themes drawn from the Back to the Future series. I would, of course, disagree with all these contentions; the ball would bounce back into Carr’s court, and we’d continue ad infinitum.

Such PvP arguments typify much of public life in this country; I’d rather look for solutions and opportunities to be found in the notion that reading is an expanding category which now takes into account a multiplicity of practices. Conceived of in this light, literacy education becomes the site of overlap between many interrelated practices. Learning how to tell the difference between fact and speculation, good sources and suspect ones, poetry and drivel, bttf4444 and Orwell — and how to properly appreciate, contextualize and interact with them all — has always been the work of the active reader, and a part of this work has been to find ways to adapt to changes in the technological and social landscape. Dealing with the new layers of literacy demanded by network culture is just the latest stage in this ongoing evolution.

Let me put this plainly: Blackboard is an impediment to scholarship, and the sooner universities stop using it, the better. Let’s leave aside for the moment the clunky UI and bothersome content-framing that makes efficiently using Blackboard materials alongside other web content almost impossible. Let’s just pretend that it’s not a scandalous waste of university resources to pay for a substandard set of collaboration tools when better and more well-supported products exist in the free and open source community. And let’s not worry about the fact that the company behind the software has attempted to patent basic functions like posting course materials and grades online. Even if these issues didn’t exist, the system would still be deeply and fundamentally wrong-headed.

Why do I have such a hate-on for Blackboard? Because Blackboard is a walled garden. Or, put another way, it doesn’t play well with the Web. Which is a pretty serious problem for a product that is supposed to “intertwine easily with the other technologies” learners rely on. Take Blackboard’s RSS support, for example — or, rather, its lack thereof. Getting a feed to display in Blackboard takes a lot more work than it does in, say, a completely free blogging and collaboration system like WordPress. And getting feeds out of Blackboard? Forget about it.

Of course, closed-off, login-required systems like Blackboard are useful for restricting access to private information like grades, internal planning documents and direct email-like communications between professors and students (though why email itself isn’t good enough for this function, I don’t exactly understand). But Blackboard also seals off from public view useful materials like course syllabi, readings, web links and — most importantly — crucial knowledge-production activities like class discussion-board activity and blogs. Hiding this kind of content from public view is destructive and wasteful. I submit that if students and professors are engaging in scholarly discourse in online forums, sharing resources and collaborating on the development of new ideas, it is in the best interest of the students themselves, the Academy at large and — yes — human civilization for this information to be universally accessible, remixable and spreadable. Blackboard works directly against this imperative by locking down the productive activities of the classroom in the name of archaic intellectual property laws and nonsensical bugaboos about privacy, cutting students off from the massive intellectual cross-pollination potential of what James Paul Gee calls “affinity spaces.”

According to Gee, affinity spaces are discursive learning spaces defined not by membership in a particular community or group, but rather by a common endeavor or interest. Enabling these kinds of spaces is arguably the most significant and transformative affordance of the Web. Sure, it’s great that we can link documents together, send information to one another and cheaply produce one-to-many communications. Even walled gardens have their use. But the true power of a global information network is only realized when ideas are linked together and communication begins to occur on a many-to-many scale. This is precisely what happens in an affinity space, which functions as a kind of lens, focusing energy and enthusiasm from a dispersed array of sources onto a particular topic or semantic domain. Knowledge is generated, portals are opened and connections are established. Gee cites AoM Heaven, a player-community resource site for the (now somewhat long-in-the-tooth) RTS game, Age of Mythology, as an example of an affinity space, but it’s easy to think of dozens more. Yelp’s section on Pizza in Los Angeles, the Wikipedia page on micronations, the ThinkWiki Linux Thinkpad users site and the Delicious tag archive for ‘henryjenkins’ are all affinity spaces to a greater or lesser degree. Each is a portal to/generator of content co-created by a distributed group of individuals, expert and novice alike, assembled around a common endeavor.

Blackboard subtracts the efforts of students and professors alike from the pool of sources from which affinity spaces draw their power, interrupting rather than fostering the formation of productive educational bonds. By keeping online discussions, blogs and other discursive engagements under lock and key, Blackboard ensures that no one else on the Web will be able to look at, cite, aggregate, argue with, agree with, blog about or otherwise use any of the content generated or portals opened by the work of the class. This seems like a terrible waste to me — for the students, the professors, and the public at large.

Put another way, affinity spaces know few boundaries and take all comers, and that’s a big part of why they work and how they have become so ubiquitous in network learning practices (indeed, I would argue that affinity spaces are in fact synonymous with network learning practices); Blackboard, on the other hand, reifies an older order of property, unitary authority and isolated community — an order that makes little sense in the context of a broader learning environment governed by sharing, networking and openness.

By eliminating or limiting the role of affinity spaces in classwork, pedagogical approaches that lean heavily on Blackboard not only fail to educate students in crucial digital literacies, but also threaten to alienate them from “traditional” education itself. As administrators consider renewing their expensive contracts with Blackboard, Inc, they would be well-advised to consider the warning that concludes Gee’s paper:

. . . people today are confronted with and enter more and more affinity spaces. They see a different and arguably more powerful vision of learning, affiliation, and identity when they do so. Learning becomes both a personal and unique trajectory through a complex space of opportunities (Le., a person’s own unique movement through various affinity spaces over time) and a social journey as one shares aspects of that trajectory with others (who may be very different from oneself and inhabit otherwise quite different spaces) for a shorter or longer time before moving on. What . . . young people see in school may pale by comparison. It may seem to lack the imagination that infuses the non-school aspects of their lives (Gee 2003). At the very least, they may demand an argument for “Why school?” (103)

However one tries to justify the walled garden, be it proprietary protectionism, safety, careerism or institutional vanity, it’s difficult to claim that this cloistering of discussion, debate and ideation is better for scholarship than its alternative — that is, embracing digital literacy as a crucial pedagogical objective and developing a new praxis for education that brings affinity spaces into the center of the classroom. As for Blackboard itself, perhaps the best we can hope for is that students will find ways to hack it into something better…