Sabbath and technology

The Atlantic is, along with Wired, one of my favorite places to get good reading. There is a consistent surge of good articles from both sources. Today is no exception. Rebecca J. Rosen's article/post We Don't Need a Digital Sabbath, We Need More Time provides much needed food for thought in regards to our [perceived] relationship to our technology. While I rail, have railed, and will continue rail against the idea of "media fasts" as fasting is strictly applied to eating/not-eating, this idea of a media sabbath is apt. Rosen suggests
"The reason is that if we allow ourselves to blame the technology for distracting us from our children or connecting with our communities, then the solution is simply to put away the technology. We absolve ourselves of the need to create social, political, and, sure, technological structures that allow us to have the kinds of relationships we want with the people around us."
Not dissimilar from fasting, the void that is created by ripping technology from its placeholder in the day-to-day process needs something to fill it. What is needed, as Sertillanges suggests, zones of silences or Rosen's "forts of time". Each of these requires active setup and maintenance. This is antithetical to Rosen's example of being "on the clock" which carries with it a vehicular metaphor that is transporting individuals and implies certain obligations and constraints. 
Walter Benjamin has suggested that "...we are bored when we do not know what we are waiting for." Often when we find ourselves waiting for anything, even a break in the conversation the habit is to grab for the device not just because of compulsion to check one's status/place but from, I think, not wanting to know-however implicit this desire is. Rosen's call for time deepening rejects the use of devices as mere time fillers.
Where we need to start in renewing our thinking about our use of technology is not, perhaps only, in terms of amounts of distraction or impact on our ability to think but in its relationship to our time. Not only should device use be calculated in terms of what we are paying attention to, but also in terms of pushing back on perceived needs on our time by our devices. Devices take less work and investment to get or achieve meaningful or at least noticeable results. People take a lot of time, work and investment of energy. It is easier to mediate relationships through devices that are easy to work and manipulate; perhaps thus keeping the relationship at a level that is easy to work/manipulate. (This is guessing-I don't have good data for this other than my own anecdotal experience. When my wife and I were first dating in college we spent a decent chunk of time on IM. Looking back most of those conversations were largely nonsense and I found that when we were together physically I had to work harder at being as silly as I was online. The relationship didn't grow online but to me it felt like connecting.)
A Sabbath approach to technology, as Rosen posits, requires us to give "...time to one activity or one person, without interruption from gadgets, work, or other people, [to]/will help us slow down and connect."
This takes work, it takes waiting and it takes knowing.

Location and ownership, writing and reading

   
Location is a big deal for human beings. Location defines the weight or importance where we live, where we eat, where we buy our stuff. Location also defines how we relate to each other, politically, socio-economically, religiously, nationally, etc.  We situate ourselves in terms of our relationship to politics using locational metaphors; Left vs. center vs. right. The phrase "we don't eye to eye on this issue" "we're on opposite sides" "he's on the fence" "she taken a strong stance on _________" all seem to indicate that for most human beings locational awareness is pretty important. 
Location and ownership also have an important relationship. Explorers coming to new places (Everest, Antarctica, the moon) plant flags to state that the flag-planters were here first. Also that the found place which flies a particular flag has the implied allegiance to or ownership by the country who planted that flag. No one else has planted, for better or worse, a flag on the moon. You get there first (location) and plant your flag-the thing upon which you planted your flag is, at least theoretically, yours. Even if someone else owns, or claims to own, that thing upon which the flag is planted, large chunks of history bear out what happens when possession seems like nine-tenths of the law until force is leveraged.
Historically the repeated use of a particular location moves an innocuous place through continued use to transform that place into a landmark. If that landmark is disrupted or destroyed, it tends to be fairly disruptive to the collective psyche; i.e. New Hampshire's Old Man on the Mountain which was/is featured on NH's money, highway signs and was generally a state icon until it gave up being a mountainside and became a heap of rubble.
There is a similar type of shift happening in education and it is rather deeply messing with perceived expectations of location and ownership. A good example of this shift is Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent bloggish article My View: Are electronic media making us less (or more) literate?. Read the article and then glance through the comments. The 325 comments that take up two quote unquote pages. Two tropes that run through the comments, housing varying degrees of snark, is a sense of ownership (writing means this and not that) and location (real writing happens like a research paper and not a blog). Reading happens in a book; writing happens on a physical page, with a pen-preferably a quill if you would believe some of these comments. However, Fitzpatrick captures the ethos that others, such as Andrea Lunsford and Cathy Davidson, whom I'll discuss more in a second, have championed, namely;

"Part of the problem is that "writing" is still seen by many as "producing words on paper," just as               "reading" may still be associated primarily with "books." Such equations run the risk of blinding us to what's   actually happening in contemporary culture. Students today may read fewer printed books, but that doesn't mean "no one reads anymore." In fact, there are many more opportunities for reading today than there have ever been, more platforms and devices and formats and spaces in which we are all constantly engaged in the process of consuming and interpreting text."

There is some serious psyche disruption happening with the ease of access to a wide potential audience that online writing offers. It is deeply, I think, wrong to not train/provide students with opportunities to develop in writing for various medium. But the growth of media for writing/reading affects some particular sense, for lack of a better word, that there is a way in which writing should be done and research papers are it.
For an excellent rebuttal/exploration of this idea would highly recommend Cathy Davidson's reasons posted in her post Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Reply to the NY Times. (One of the things that I really like about Cathy Davidson's approach is that she sets up contracts with her students for the grade they want to earn that semester.) There's a bunch of great quotes/ideas throughout but I would like to highlight this one: "The Internet needs more people committed to its improvement, to serious discourse."

This discourse is not people talking; it's people typing. These students already have a sense of location in regards to what they can do online and how they relate to their digital selves. But this sense of location, even ownership, contrasts strongly with the 325 commentators who are pretty sure that their sense of location and ownership of where writing should occur is correct. Unfortunately for those individuals, I'm pretty sure the weight, if not force, is largely on the digital side of things. While not discounting the digital divide and economic inequalities that prevent a decent-sized chunk of Americans, at the very least, from being able to interact digitally, it's time to shift locales and work to develop student writers who might be able to produce a good research paper but have more importantly demonstrated their abilities to critically, articulately and responsibly argue their points in whatever medium and length they happen to be writing in or at.  Perhaps even more important than staking a claim to online writing versus paper writing is to conduct writing classes in such a way, as evidenced throughout Davidson's article, that prepares the students for the type of writing they will need to do.
Framing the discussion in terms of where writing should or should not take place misses the point. Writing is already happening online. It is necessary for those in the place to instruct to help students recognize the full potential of leveraging those places can look like both for the success of the student and the enrichment of of the writing process.

Building for a better world: zombies and eugenics

From the very start I would like the fact to be noted that I think zombie studies, in general, are pretty dumb. However, the impact of zombies as a cultural movement that can be read in possible parallel to other historical or present happenings is intriguing. Mainly because the character and actions, so described by the big and small screens, of zombies provide, whether I like it or not, windows into how people think about other people.
With zombies there is often a problem of location. One group of people, now transformed through some event (sometimes stated (The Walking Dead, Night of the Living Dead), sometimes not (World War Z) is trying to overcome the other group in the location that the latter group believes to be, up until that point, secure. Typically in these scenarios the zombie group is much larger than the non-zombie group, hence the dramatic tension-will the smaller group outwit, destroy, and otherwise survive the larger devastating group. Because the larger group is indeed so devastating this is license, in the narrative renderings of the smaller group escaping, fighting for its life, is an excuse for a cinematic excess of blood, gore and general complete destruction.
The original Night  of the Living Dead stands in some conflict to the contemporary view of zombie relations. A cursory glance through the related Wikipedia article under the reception heading shows, even from this 30,000 foot view, that zombies aren't just to be read as brainless, flesh-desiring, un-humans but as specters or visions of conflict. They are the brain-eating elephant  wandering the room.
 I have just recently finished A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era edited by Paul Lombardo. This book is frankly chilling, especially the last two chapters dealing with the issue of bottom-line mentalities and HMO's and how close this brings us back to eugenic-type thinking. But let's return to the zombies. What enabled state governments in the United States to pass enforced sterilization laws that were in place up until 1979 was fear. Many of the individuals pushing for enforced sterilization argued that there was a rapidly growing section of the population that would, if not checked through eugenic methods-mainly sterilization, would threaten to fully overwhelm and presumably devour the rest of the population.This group of the population was referred to often as "feeble-minded" or "deviant" and almost always found in the poor and incarcerated. These individuals were undesirable on some particular level either through their perceived lack of contribution to society (deviance, "feeblemindedness") or their taking from it (prison, welfare, etc.) So politicians kicked in the hype machine. (Note that much of the eugenic/sterilization use in the US predates Nazi Germany by at least 30 years.)
Again, I don't think zombie studies are particularly legitimate. That being said, these particular myths offer unique parallels to how proponents of eugenics, managing individuals' ability to reproduce, saw these groups of people.
1. Drain of resources (Those sterilized were seen as a drain on state resources and, more dangerously, likely to produce offspring that were also a drain on resources.)
2. Curb appetite. (Zombies are known for appetite which a headshot/decapitation eliminates. The original proponent of enforced sterilization originally posited that the procedure was to eliminate excessive masturbation and general unpleasantness in the prison inmates. )
3. Proponents of enforced sterilization stated numerous times, in different states throughout this period, that there was the distinct possibility of being overrun by those and their offspring, if not controlled.
This is not to say that eugenics and zombies are anyway related or that the thousands of people who were forcibly sterilized are related to zombie-type punishment. Rather the fashion in which the policy-makers and medical personnel reacted to the individuals whom they perceived as lesser, deserved nothing more than complete annihilation as though these "lesser" individuals were only capable of destruction.
This is simplistic, granted but fear/suspense is one of the main narrative drivers of the zombie film genre. Will the individuals make it into the truck or won't they? Will the cut-off team survive the next onslaught? Can the small group of survivors make it against the vast unknown zombie horde?
It is much easier to be afraid of something when you don't know how big it is.So politicians/proponents pushed the fear up by creating a fake horde claiming if something wasn't done to prevent this their way of life would disappear.
It is important to remember that when any individual(s) call on fear/terror for immediate decision making the shuffle and groan of zombie voices also begin to rise up. Ungrounded fear cannot be the vehicle by which any individual or group makes or bases their decisions in dealing with another group of human beings. Otherwise we may well found ourselves slaying what we believe to be zombies but when the blinders are removed, are rather fellow sojourners on this swiftly tilting planet.

SOPA Blackout

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USTREAM-ZUCOTTI PARK

Tim Pool (@theother99) has been live broadcasting the eviction from Zuccotti park from 1:30 this morning. The response to the injunction/eviction of the OWS group from the NYC park is supposedly coming down at 3:00 pm today (11/14/11). This is worth watching to both see what is happening and what will.

GPS Tracking or What is Privacy?

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday regarding the privacy of citizens, specifically regarding the ability to track vehicle movements via GPS without a warrant.  First read about this in Wired in this article  Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV  which has a good sum-up of the case, with full details and pictures of the GPS trackers including manufacturer details and specs.  The biggest issue in this that should really disturb us as citizens is the basis from which the government is arguing for warrant-less placement of GPS devices on vehicles, namely "...  that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices." (Wired) 
     If you're not familiar with the case the NYT has a quick summation Court Casts a Wary Eye on Tracking by GPS . "The case concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a valid warrant, tracked his travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison." (NYT)
 NPR has a slew of articles on this, though none on the front page. High Court Troubled By Warrantless GPS Tracking   This is  one of the better articles as it has some excerpts from the hearing transcripts. What The governemnt's attorny, Dreeben, is pretty well prepared, articulate and seems to recognize that this is not simply about the case which brought this to the Supreme Court. The defense attorny, Leckar, seems to lacking a full understanding of the greater implications of this hearing. Driving home and listening to this last night caused me to wonder if a lawyer more cognizant of the wider impact of this decision could have been chosen. Especially one who doesn't admit to the Supreme Court that he thinks London's CCTV surveillance is "scary". In context Justice Kagan is discussing Lodon's surveillance and Leckar replies: "It's pretty scary. I wouldn't want to live in London under those circumstances." Justice SCALIA: "Well, it must be unconstitutional if it's scary."
Reading through the transcript, Leckar gets beat up pretty good while Dreeben is much more persuasive. While the Supreme Court is a substantially intimidating group of people, Leckar really needed to be on his game and this transcript makes me nervous that he does not do an adequate job in defending privacy. To Leckar's credit privacy has become a difficult term to define but this decision is going to set precedent for the future and to fail to address this meaningfully, I think, is going to dramatically change the way we live.


 The full transcript of the  is available here. Towards the beginning of the transcript Judge Scalia asks the question, which I think is key to this debate, "...are you obtaining information that a person had a reasonable expectation to be kept private?" This is at the heart of  the current privacy debate. Dreeben goes on to argue that GPS offer a less time-consuming method of collecting this data to which Judge Alita responds "...in the pre-computer, pre-Internet age much of the privacy -- I would say most of the privacy -- that people enjoyed was not the result of legal protections or constitutional protections; it was the result simply of the difficulty of traveling around and gathering up information." This difficulty of gathering people's information
The two other questions raised here, I think, are 1) what is privacy and 2) is that privacy a right of the citizens of this country.

 Supreme Court Hears Arguments In GPS Case
Do Police Need Warrants For GPS Tracking Devices?
GPS Tracking: Supreme Court Debates Privacy Limits On Police (Huffington Post)