One can find connections between Bush’s As We May Think, Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect and portions of McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in many ways, but I’d like to note some seemingly random “convergences,” if you will.

It is highly interesting that — as we spoke about in class last night — each author notes that “new media” are always an extension of both humans and the technologies of the past.

Bush “predicts” something we can all relish today:

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important (emphasis mine).

The above sounds slightly familiar to what Engelbart writes two decades later:

Man’s population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found comes steadily greater in response to the increased rates of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man’s intellect . . . would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there can be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.

McLuhan, coming after the prognostications of Bush and Engelbart, does sound a warning about new technologies and those of the past:  “Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users” (34).

Today’s extensions of the human and past technologies can be as psychically (and physically, in some ways) dangerous to humans as heavy industrial machinery was in Bush’s day. Now, instead of losing an arm in a textile factory, we face cyberstalking and identity theft. Thus, it is important to remember that with these advances also come new dangers and vulnerabilities that build upon the past.

My name is William Pate, if you’re new to the blog. The newer posts will be for my graduate Issues in New Media class (they will be tagged as such).

I’ve lived in Austin for a little over ten years after growing up an Air Force brat. I graduated from St. Edward’s University in 2006 after taking a number of years off. I’ve worked for the Texas Freedom Network, the Legislative Study Group and Representative Garnet Coleman, most recently. All of which required extensive Web work. (I still do content curation and production for TFN’s Daily News Clips.)

My wife is an experience designer at frog design. She’s pretty awesome. Or pretty and awesome. However you want to look at it.

We have three dogs and two birds.

What’s new media? Ya got me.  Especially when it comes to my own field, rhetoric and composition. Apparently, when used in rhetoric and composition studies, phrases such as “new media” and “Web 2.0″ and “social media” and so many others fall under the Justice Potter Stewart rubric of: “I know it when I see it.”

For over a decade, scholars in rhetoric and composition have been discussing, variously, computers in classrooms; hypertext; the existence of Web blogs, social networking platforms, video-sharing and their pedagogical uses; visual rhetoric; Web 2.0; and a host of other advances in technology that impact our field of study. What we have failed to do, however, is to fully define exactly what it is we’re talking about. The phrase “new media” abounds in our classrooms and academic journals, but what does that phrase mean? Can you define it? Is it only the digital? Does scanning and digitalizing a copy of Plato’s Dialogues suddenly make it new media? Can you define Web 2.0? What comes after Web 2.0? 2.1? 3.0?

Unfortunately, our focus on “new media” (which I have so far found to be a less-than-useful phrase in rhetoric and composition studies) remains on those media that have existed for quite some time – media that are already old-hat to our students (e.g., blogs). We can continue to write about hypertext and be laughed out of the digitally literate room, or we can expand our focus to truly new and emerging technologies. (When did you last hear someone use the phrase “information superhighway?”) Manovich notes this obliquely when he calls daguerreotypes “new media.”

While there are a lot of people talking about the practical use of whatever “new media” we decide new media is but a dearth of theorists on the subject. (Which may be a relief to some in our class, but, as they say, “Theory without practice is meaningless, but practice without theory is blind.”)

The best definition I’ve found thus far is by Peter Lunenfeld: “In the end, the phrase ‘new media’ turns out to be yet another placeholder, this time for whatever we eventually agree to name these cultural productions.”

I’ve decided.

The Apple insignia is the Mark of the Beast.

See all you Mac-elites in hell.

From: William Pate
To: John William Felps
Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:13 PM

Was just reading back over something you wrote to me last year:

They acted like they thought I was one of them, but they damn well knew I was not.
Largely unconscious folks.
Completely boring folks.
And they are boring simply because of the willful unconsciousness.
Maybe I’m being too hard on them.
Nothing compared to what they were on me.

Man, I totally know where you’re coming from. I tell ya, some of the people I’ve been having to deal with lately — not even deal with, just be around — fit the mold you laid out so very, very well. It’s unfortunate. I almost feel sorry for them. But, as you wrote in another e-mail, I’m mainly just impatient that the world let’s ‘em get away with it, and let’s them think they got away with it.

Not a good lesson.

—

From: john william
To: William Pate
Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 2:37 PM

No, it sucks ever-loving ass, Brother.
And we’re not allowed to hurt them for it. That’s what gets me. Some cosmic consciousness thing, I don’t know…
Suck it up, suck it up, then get away from it soon as it’s too much, ‘cuz it won’t change.
Love and peace.

But we’re not allowed to hurt them.

—

From: john william
To: William Pate
Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 2:38 PM

Syntax ain’t my strong suit.
Or typing.
Or thinking.
This could go on for a while…

Okay, so I stole this idea was CoverSpy, but I’m going to start posting (along with my usual other stuff) the covers of books I see random people reading, along with descriptions of those individuals.

(5 Mar 2010, 1732, Epoch Coffee: Male, 20s, White Polo with Navy Slacks. Glasses. Short Blond Hair. Sitting Alone at Table, Later Accompanied by Two Girls.)

(5 Mar 2010, 1745, Epoch Coffee: Male, 20s, Shaggy brown hair, Red and white flannel shirt with brown jeans or cords.)

—

Today is two months sober for me.

Hooray!

That is all. For now.

– William

This is the song we’ve been listening to, singing, humming and whistling in our office for the past four days.

Dan Reeder – Work Song animation