Digital Context

Shifting our culture into a digital, "ubicomp" format profoundly changes the way we live. We are beyond the point where we are able to pretend that technology is a tool we use to perform certain tasks. Our relationship with the technological environment is much deeper and more reciprocal. We are created by the technology we have created. The allowances and limitations we find in being able to instantly find information, access almost any text, or communicate with people across the world, change the very shape of who we are in the world.

Both of the articles we read this week discuss an aspect of this shift. In "Reading behavior in the digital environment: changes in reading behavior over the past ten years," Ziming Liu studies the ways the proliferation of digital text impacts the quantity and quality of our reading behavior. Ziming finds that although people in today's text rich environment spend more time reading than they did in the print-only past, the depth and concentration applied to reading has declined. Reading online includes more scanning, keyword searching and following links and less careful, focused reading with annotation.

Ziming includes discussion of the "printing to read" phenomenon we've discussed in class. I found her mention of the Strassman statement "the human nervous system has a special control mechanism for the coordination of the hand with the focusing muscles of the eye..." (Ziming, 709) to be especially interesting. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, will this control mechanism begin to change if we habitually subject our eyes to screen based print? In the more immediate future, what will happen to scholarship, writing and "the academy" as our future scholars, writers and professor are raised on a diet increasingly high in web-based print?

In "The public library as a meeting-place in a multicultural and digital context: The necessity of low-intensive meeting-places," Ragnar Audunson advocates public libraries as an ideal "low-context" public space for members of an increasingly diverse and fragmented public. Audunson describes "high-context" places as arenas of primary engagement, where people form their unique, exclusive identities. "Low-context" public spaces, by contrast, are neutral places where people can meet, observe, and co-exist with people outside of their primary identity subgroups.

Two phenomenon contribute to our current need for low-context public spaces: 1) migration and the "globalization" of society and 2) the Internet, and it's ironic consequence of cutting people off from their neighbors just as they are being connected with people who share their interests around the world. Audunson argues that the public library is perfectly primed as an answer to this need for a "third space" or low-context place, to increase understanding between cultures and interest groups. According to Audunson, democracy "presupposes a degree of cultural community." To perpetuate democracy in a diversified society, we must find a way to celebrate diversity, while simultaneously building bridges to create "cultural community."

One really interesting thing about this article is that it was written by Norwegian, whose experiences with migration reflect the reality of the European Union at a time when the United States is intensely involved in it's own negotiation of integrating immigrant culture. There are amazing parallels between the role public libraries play in European democracies, and the role the public library is establishing in the United States.

I am also really interested in Audunson's idea of the public library as a "bridge between the virtual and the physical." The Internet has broadened our affiliations to identifications that vastly transcend geographical boundaries. Local government can seem irrelevant when all the news in the world is at your fingertips instantly. Audunson says using a public library is a local act of community involvement. Public libraries are also access points for the digital world, making them a balance of these two ways of belonging.

This reminds me of the Walter Benjamin essay "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html which though written when newspapers were considered "technology," is deeply applicable to the issues the Internet raises in our lives. Benjamin discusses the difference between "knowledge" and "information." He argues that "knowledge" is local, gained through interaction with other people, and tells us how to do things we need to be able to do to live in our immediate environments. "Information" is global, and disconnected from our immediate survival needs. Being a Marxist critic, Benjamin went on to assign value to these distinct terms, for reasons that still seem to apply.