Tag: Johnson

Good Ideas

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

I like much of Steven Johnson’s stuff, and undoubtedly I will pick up a copy of his latest book project, Where Good Ideas Come From, though probably not until next summer. As I watched this TEDtalk, though, I’m dissatisfied with how little work on rhetorical invention surfaces here. Johnson’s “liquid network” is an intriguing metaphor, indeed: drink together, think together…eureka! Or, sometimes, “I’ve got nothing. May I have another?” But I wonder whether this “natural history of innovation” will do much more to advance thinking about how good ideas happen than did Karen Burke LeFevre’s Invention as a Social Act (1987), a book whose premises have by now become a given for contemporary rhetorical thinking. This “noodling around” and “hacking” is fascinating stuff, especially when such innovative acts are paired with vivid, thoughtful anecdotes, a storytelling strategy Johnson deploys with distinction. Since Johnson is great at making theoretical concepts accessible, maybe this new project will be a good fit with existing work on invention. On the other hand, absent some acknowledgment of a larger family of ideas related to invention, e.g., “systematic serendipity” (via Merton via Halavais, a concept we discussed yesterday in ENGL326) or contingency (an alternative to managerial rhetoric Muckelbauer develops smartly in The Future of Invention), the originary “where” from which good ideas come will remain partial, incomplete, problematically runny.

Allowing that I haven’t picked up the book (!), I look forward to reading it with these few provisional concerns in mind. In that sense, I guess this amounts to some sort of TED-motivated pre-review. Furthermore, I wrote it while sitting all alone in my campus dorm-office, which probably means good ideas here are few, far between.

Unplanned Meanderings

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Steven Johnson’s “The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book” renews questions about what happens when e-readers unexpectedly suffocate text behind no-copy/no-paste barriers. Safe-guarding text against circulation is not new, of course, but Johnson offers a timely reminder of the ways this glass box logic is noxious, lying dormant, going unnoticed until it is revived in this or that text-walling application. There’s much to think through in his entry (which is a transcript of a talk Johnson offered at Columbia University), much in the way of commonplace books, motivated filtering, and how it is homophily bias takes hold differently online than in “real-world civic space.”

§ § §

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings. (para. 5)

“But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.” Here is a line that succinctly captures for me how blogging has always functioned a little bit differently than the kind of “being digital” I experience in Facebook or Twitter. Long-forgotten hunches and emerging obsessions are not so much a function of friendship, sociality, or phatic affirmation as they are a distributed, often faint, read-write memory–a recollection of being (or having been) on the verge of something mind-changing.

Everything Inventive Is Good For You

/ Derek Mueller

Earlier this week I wrapped up Steven Johnson’s latest, The Invention of
Air, a pop-sci biography of Joseph Priestley. The book was typical, enjoyable
Johnson: cleverly woven anecdotes, theoretical hints concerning networks and
ecologies of influence, and iterative trigger-phrases that pop just enough to
keep the narrative lively and fast-moving. I soared through the first 160
pages in-flight last Friday and then got back into the final chapters a couple
of days ago. And I liked the book very much, except that it slowed ever
so slightly near the end: the young, experimental Priestley was more provocative
than the aging, dislocated Priestley. The latter, it turns out, suffered late in
the religious and political aspects of his life because of the the same
"congenital openness" (190) (or "chronic intellectual openness" (142)) that
helped him become so influential on enlightenment scientific inquiry, and this
section of the book worked at a noticeably different pace than the one dealing
with Priestley’s tinkering with plants.

Johnson characterizes his own ecological approach to Priestley’s life with
the phrase "long zoom":

Ecosystem theory has changed our view of the planet in countless ways,
but as an intellectual model it has one defining characteristic: it is a
"long zoom" science, one that jumps from scale to scale, and from discipline
to discipline, to explain its object of study: from the microbiology of
bacteria, to the cross-species flux of nutrient cycling, to the global
patterns of weather systems, all the way out to the physics that explains
how solar energy collides with the Earth’s atmosphere. (45)

The "long zoom", thus, is both a description of Priestley’s intellectual
manner and also Johnson’s method of developing the biography. "Long zoom"
is an idea Johnson incubated in an NYU seminar he taught on Cultural Ecosystems
and through an invited talk he gave to the
Long Now Foundation in 2007 (according to footnotes in TIoA). I
doubt that The Invention of Air does full justice to the concept as
Johnson thinks of it, but the project does, on the other hand, seem to enact the
"long zoom." In the passage above, the reference to scale-jumping exposes one of
the rough edges of the concept. The "zoom" also comes off as predominantly
vertical, along the lines of the orders of magnitude, more than horizontal or
some combination of the two (viz. networked); it is not, in other words, a "long
pan" or "long track" (here I’m thinking of the extended camera metaphors–pan,
track, zoom–adopted smartly by Rosenwasser and Stephen when they talk about
inquiry, research, and modes of engaging with an object of study). I mean that
Johnson’s "long zoom," even though he does not say so explicitly in The
Invention of Air, seems to work both horizontally, vertically, and extra-dimensionally,
as suited to networked relations as to ordered magnitudes, and all the while
alert to the dangers in too recklessly skipping from one scale to another
(Latour).

Priestley comes to light as a "roving" intellectual (205), one whose "hot
hand" series of scientific breakthroughs culminated as consequence of a 30-year
"long hunch" he’d been following (70). The "long zoom"–a kind of
scale-shifting, one-thing-leads-to-another approach–allows Johnson to pin down
Priestley’s knowledge-making wanderluck. Yet, at another point,
Priestley’s success with hunches appears to be as much grounded in his "knack
for ‘socializing’ with his own ideas" (74) as a credit to his roving, generalist
sensibility. Where Johnson writes of Priestley’s affinity for socializing with
his own ideas, TIoA comes remarkably close to delivering a product
placement ad for DevonThink–almost to the point of making me thing I’d

read about it before (re: Johnson, not Priestley).

There is much more to say about The Invention of Air, but I’m out of
time, viz. paradigms and anomalies (44), coffee and coffeehouses (54), hack vs.
theoretician (62), ecosystems view of the world (82).

Syllabubble

/ Derek Mueller

Arrived home from MLA via Detroit on Thursday. Since I’ve surrendered almost three full days to gluttonous lazies: home-made fried chicken, NFL playoffs, afternoon naps, a nightly Wolavers’ oatmeal stout, a breeze through Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and darn near nothing else.

Today I can feel the low, resistant grind of changing gears–from no gear to anything-chug productive. Spring syllabus is due tomorrow–or Wednesday, depending on who you ask (this would be easier if I didn’t read *all* of my email). I’m penciled in for a section of WRT205: Critical Research and Writing, a course that more or less picks a topic (invention by topoi) and then gets on with research a la “critical inquiry”, which I take to mean “examined” or “deliberate” inquiry: self-reflective inquiring.

Did I mention that it’s an online class? I still thinking about whether to heave Blackboard into the weeds (where it belongs?): bypass it altogether and instead channel all of our encounters through a wiki-blog-delicious-youtube mash-up. The former is, if you can stand it, a cinch; the latter is far more interesting and also more work coming at a time when, well, there is already plenty enough work. Tonight, I can’t decide. Tomorrow I’ll flip a coin. But if the coin comes up “Blackboard,” that just might be enough to jolt me back over to the mash-ups.

The course itself–as planned–is a dance with pop culture and media valuation. We’ll read Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You, contemplate his handling of the good/bad reversal, and think/write/talk about his book–what he calls “an old-fashioned work of persuasion” in the first sentence–as a dissoi logoi, or strengthening of the (presumed to be) weaker position.

In keeping with program-level expectations for the course, the first unit will be something of a reading of Johnson and his work with sources and evidence. It’s a sort of parlor inventory with a hermeneutic slant, viz. who’s saying what, what it means, and so on. The second unit in the course usually involves some sort of annotated bibliography, but I’m thinking along the lines of a collection/annotation aspect (rel. Sirc’s “box-logic”) that might involve a playlist/compilation in YouTube or Seeqpod. Will put that alongside a more recognizable batch of article/chapter annotations and ask students to speculate about their complementarity. Unit Three is that well-run horse, the sustained research project, 10-12 pp. By that time, I’d like to have the dissoi logoi well-enough in hand that students will be developing arguments rel. to popular culture that complicate status quo views of brain-rotting media. And the fourth, final piece of the course will be some kind of semester-long foray into “serially immersive” new media writing: blogging, annotated social bookmarking, etc. The point here: to again insist on the generative, associative collusion between immersive new media writing and its (still) eventful counterparts in the academy. It’s an online course: this is the both-and set up to bridge the institutionally recognizable (and desired) and peppy, alt-logic digitality.

On Channel Two

/ Derek Mueller

Until I read
Andy Cline’s
entry at Rhetorica.net, I didn’t even know it was TV Turn-Off week. 
I’ve already soaked up a few minutes of TV today, so I guess I blew that one. 
Next year, next year.  Plus, with the NBA playoffs, forget it. 
Anyway, I’m much less inspired by a week for this and a week for that than I am
by the grad school mantra: "Get yourself right for next week."  Or
something like that.

I read Steve Johnson’s article–"Watching TV Makes You Smarter"–yesterday.  And I’ve read a few of the entries made
by folks (here
and

here and
here) from the blogroll who’ve written on the subject.  Should be clear
from the outset that I’m not sure I’ve got anything much to add.  But I’ll
try.

Johnson’s article suggests to me the importance of more complicated
understandings of cognition–of thought activity.  What happens in the
encounter with a particular interface–paper or screen?  What’s the
mentation?  The mind in action?  And how are mediating tools (Werstch,
Bruner, others) implicated in the complex neural patterns inside one’s head, the
firing of pulse-driven networks, the image vectors figuring some animated
correspondence to word, sound, intelligible object.  Sure, depending on
which examples of television programming we want to invoke as an example, we can
argue that the tube affords us activations more complex than we might’ve known
otherwise.  But loopy, fractured narrative structures?  Not unique to
television nor to any medium.

I agree with Jeff in his contention that
Johnson’s article is a solid articulation of the cultural shift instigated by
new media; a media mind–yup. And yet it’s not just the media part of the
phrase that seems to be misunderstood, obscured in the school-as-institution’s
cling to literacy.  Mind, too, has been shrugged aside either as a
mystical, speculative science or, in no more hopeful terms, as a universalizing
monolith misappropriated to the narrow path of biological determinism (I
oversimplify, but some version close to this one seems familiar).  Three
pounds of generic (c’mon, whose is it?) grey matter and a dissection pan. 
Since I’ve been reading some brain science books this semester, I’ve been
wondering–week in, week out–about how much bearing it has on the work we do in
composition, especially when we hinge pedagogies on new media.  How much do
we assume, for example, about how minds work, about how meaning is differently
apprehended, differently made?  The givens in comprehension? Whether
attendant to the teacher-penned comments at the margin of the page or in the
complexly spun plots of a television program. Recently and specifically, it’s
been Faucconier and Turner on conceptual blends and Antonio Damasio on mind and
affect in The Feeling of What Happens.

I expect this discussion will continue to stir throughout the week–as people
find time to read Johnson’s article at this frenzied moment late in the
semester (two weeks to go at SU).  Its coincidence with
TV Turn-Off
week sets up an interesting counterbalance, no doubt.  As just one last
thought, it also got me thinking about the

montage episodes ABC has so thoughtfully edited this week (endless efforts
to put H.Dumpty back together again).  Last night they aired a re-cycle of
Desperate Housewives; Wednesday the same thing’s going on with only
must-see show of the season in my world, Lost.  And so even as
Johnson makes the case that television programming potentially stimulates us to
more complex ways of thinking about story sequences and about inferential
dialogue-gaps that require us to fill in through projection and anticipation,
ABC has turned out full, hour-long episodes dedicated entirely to catch-up, as
if everyone wasn’t watching every episode.  Continues the questions, how
will we be conditioned?  What leaks into habits of mind?  And so on.

Added: Dana Stevens of Slate comments on Johnson’s article.

Forming with Small Hands

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to weave three disparate threads together, triple helix
style; they converged–blink!–for an instant while I was reading the other day, and it seemed like more than another drill. 
Who’s running this time?  Ann Berthoff, Steve Berlin Johnson, and one more
(Coach: I don’t care who goes, dammit.  Fill in the lines.) 
First, I’ve got to tell you a bit about the weave:

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