Another Dr. B: Blog #13

First, a word about my sponsors. The library’s hosting of weblogs remains a contested issue on campus, and the discussion seems to be moving in a direction I’m not interested in going, so I will continue my blogging on TenADay (that’s for your information, John and Andy, the only two people who have linked into this blog). I also can’t seem to figure out how to disable comments on WordPress to prevent spamming. I noticed that the real Dr. B was having the same problem, and set her comments to “members only,” a move I also made, but that didn’t stop the spam. I generally like the WordPress interface, but am annoyed by the spam, a problem I haven’t had on Blogger.

If you are interested in reading about secondary mnemonics, and more thoughts on Ulmer and MEmorials, please visit TenADay.

Over on my old blog, I wrote about my interest in constructing a “Virtual Peace Garden” as MEmorial to civilian harm and loss in global conflict. My site would be a “peripheral” MEmorial, attached to the physical International Peace Gardens located on the Manitoba-North Dakota border. I decided I had better do a bit more research on the IPG first, however. Here are some things I found out.

1. The garden just celebrated its 75 anniversary, July 14, 2007.
2. The IPG has been under-funded for a number of years now, but during the last legislative session in ND, the state decided to increase its commitment to the gardens–5 million for this year, $32 million total (although the Canadians are going to chip in half, as I understand the agreement).
3. A 9/11 memoiral was erected in 2001, with beams from the WTC transported to the IPG by Canadians, erected on the US side.

I found out a variety of other facts, but in general, I was impressed with the vision the Director and the governments have for the IPG. My own plans for the Virtual Peace Garden seem, in fact, parallel to their vision of increasing the traffic and function of the site. A new interpretive center and conflict resolution center (Camp David style) are in the plans for the IPG. The park is currently open only 3 months of the year, but the goal is 12 months. The IPG plan probably isn’t quite as ambitious as my own vision: turning both the physical and virtual IPG into a kind of mecca, a pilgrimage site for peace activists from around the world.

Greg Ulmer, primary theorist of Electronic Monuments / MEmorials, talks about the work of virtual memorialists as the work of “consultants without portfolio” and “unsolicited consultations.” I do wonder how the IPG board of directors would respond to my “unsolicited consultation” and I wonder what compromises I would need to make if I functioned as a consultant with portfolio? Seems like I need to keep pushing my project further, define it more clearly, and then see about contacting the Director.

I opened up my computer thinking about a blog entry and found out that my new NDSU blog account had just been set up. This won’t be the typical test blog, but part of my ongoing blog work at TenADay. Of course one of the goals is to just test out the Word Press interface, which, I have to admit, is very elegant from the backside. Also plays well with Safari!

So, I’m reading Manovich and thinking about McLuhan, which is how I read everything. I’ve been thinking for a while that Manovich’s new media forms, film and database, map onto McLuhan’s hot and cool in potentially interesting ways, but I haven’t known what to do with the 5 principles of new media Manovich lays out. But here is how Manovich makes sense of his relationship to McLuhan. He says, “New media calls for a new stage in media theory whose beginnings can be traced back to the revolutionary works of Harold Innis in the 1950s and Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. To understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science” (48). So Manovich sees his work as part of a new stages of media studies, which is fair enough. McLuhan definitely represents first-wave media studies, with lots of flaws and limitations. I have seen others refer to the more sociological and fine-grained analyses that followed McLuhan as being a second wave of media studies (the work done in the ’70s and ’80s, maybe even 90s, culminating in Remediation?), leaving Manovich, perhaps, as a third-wave, concerned with code, software, and computing capabilities.

Manovich also makes a distinction between what he calls the “cultural interface” or “cultural layer” of new media and “the computer layer” of new media (46). This is another way of describing his third wave, but what this phrasing helps me understanding is that I am primarily interested in (and qualified to analyze), the cultural layer, the interface layer. I have even adopted “working at the interface” as the title of my video blog, and I plan to use it as a subtitle in almost already started book, McLuhan for Compositionists: Working at the Interface.

I also understand more clearly that my work (published and in my head) never advances new theories, but instead tries to synthesize and use existing theories or concepts or practices in new ways. My book project would not advance a “new rhetoric for new media” but instead would try to synthesize the diverse scholarship that already exists, and most specifically, locate the various terms (hot and cool, immediacy and hypermediacy, film and database) on a functional map of cultural interfaces: Scott McCloud’s big triangle. My reasons for wanting to do this kind of synthesis project (beside the obvious fact that I don’t have a new theory to contribute) is that I think the field of composition studies could benefit from a more solid and interconnected base of concepts we could teach and research from. It might also be useful it we all spoke more similar languages, or at least understood more clearly how the “interface language” spelled out by Kress and Van Leeuwen relates to the inteface language of McLuhan, McCloud, and Manovick.