Being on the bottom of things

By Internet standards I have been around for quite a while, and while not a dinosaur on the scale of, you know, _David Weinberger_ or something ( :) )I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of a good many trends in the blogosphere and elsewhere. So while I don’t have a second brain located in my spike-studded tail, I do have a scar or two from being scraped by Internet faddism as its brushed past me and dug into my arm. I’m also in many ways a very traditional scholar who has a passion for paper. So while I am interested in the possibilities of cutting-edge technology I am not a bleeding-edge person or an unreserved enthusiast for change. So I think “Scott Palmer”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/15/palmer has more or less Got It when he writes:

Similarly, the emphasis that contributors to if:book seem to place on the “transparency” of scholarship and “immediacy” of publication made possible by digital delivery misses a very important point. There is much value to be found in not releasing one’s ideas to peers and public while those ideas are still half-baked. In many respects, the instantaneous delivery of “new media” writing is at odds with the solitude, meditation, and patience that are the hallmarks of traditional scholarship. Perhaps this is less true in if:book’s favored field (media studies), but it is manifestly not so for such disciplines as history, philosophy, and the like. Nor should it be. One can build a convincing case that, in the current age of instant analysis, self-absorbed “experts,” and ubiquitous 24/7 live blog feeds, the last thing that the academy needs is to embrace transparency and immediacy.

It reminds me of something Don Knuth once “said about email”:http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

Roberto Rodriguez advocates the way that digital technology allows us to “create at the speed of thought”:http://agile2006.stikipad.com/public/show/MakingMoviesAndSoftwareAtTheSpeedOfThought but of course the question someone with a background in theater rather than movies asks is: what’s wrong with rehearsal again?

All of which to say: digital genres provide increased velocity of information. This creates a continuum of speeds from top to bottom to work from. Since we’ve never had the ability to manipulate information at speed before we find it productive to do so and find lots of ways of doing so that are productive. But that doesn’t mean faster or more networked is automatically better. What is valuable is having the continuum to cherry-pluck from. I love to blog, but there is also work that I keep very close to my chest until it is done. The irony of a universally-readable ‘world of first drafts’ (as David calls the blogosphere) existing side by side with a smaller much higher quality and much more inaccessible world of revised material that, like Debian, is released ‘when its ready’ is hard to miss. But hey that’s life.

My point is just that there is a middle ground between enthusiasts of ‘networked books’ and people who find them anethma. Some of us occupy that middle ground, and we are fairly confident everyone will end up there as well — or at least find the configuration of speeds and modes they find most sympatico. But please recognize that not everyone who is into creative commons licenses also wants to eliminate the bottom of things and force everyone to live at the top.