tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post7846310527982165632..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Blogging the Middle Ages: Future FrontiersCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21924729641221599262009-12-10T08:22:55.407-05:002009-12-10T08:22:55.407-05:00I am a newbie to Google Wave and need to spend som...I am a newbie to Google Wave and need to spend some time with it to figure it out. My son Alex and I are reviewing a medieval historical fiction together and we are planning on using Wave as the collaborative space to compose the review. I'll let you know how it turns out.<br /><br />Fluidimaginings, thanks for your thoughts. It's funny, as "plugged in" as I am I always carry a small notebook with me. Sometimes I'll use the voice memo function of my phone instead, but most of the time I like having the clarity of pen and paper in front of me.<br /><br />Eileen, I am with you on the attention span thing. Wait, On the what? Bridge spans are interesting yes. Wait, lost track, YES, attention spans are short. I know I am not reading less these days (I will always be a textavore), but I am reading many more, much briefer things. For example even though I am loving reading Howard Jacobson's novel Kalooki Nights, it is taking me forever to get through it because other reading keeps coming my way. I long to sit with a novel ... but I haven't been sitting with books enough lately.<br /><br />Matt, the problem is that FB can be too personal, so I definitely limit what I want people who are not friends to see, leading to a closed but somewhat intimate circle. I am well aware though that this means certain discussions that probably should be public (eg the one on Patty Ingham's essay) get locked behind an electronic door.<br /><br />Jonathan, you may be right about Twitter, though for me my tweets are my FB updates so I think of those as integrated technologies, and don't believe that FB is going to go the way of Geocities etc.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-3288062914912328562009-12-09T18:05:37.282-05:002009-12-09T18:05:37.282-05:00One prediction, which is not an engagement with th...One prediction, which is not an engagement with the serious point of your post, Jeffrey, but may be worth considering anyway. At the moment, as I understand, the owners of Twitter have yet to make it make money. At some point, unless they solve this, it will therefore cease, or be swallowed like Geocities into Yahoo, or become part of a new MSN or something like that. Facebook is, I believe, in not dissimilar straits. So I personally will be slightly surprised if this conversation still makes sense in five years. On the other hand whatever the blog provider <i>de jour</i> may by then be, we will all probably have local copies of our content, will be using systems like Wordpress that in order to attract trade from other systems provide tools to import content from them, and so on. So I think that though they may move, blogs as specific gatherings of writing will endure, for all the reasons you suggest but also because the rivals will change and shift and never entirely take over before being replaced themselves.<br /><br />At least, they'll endure as long as any other digital medium, I should say for caution's sake. That may of course not be very long, on book or parchment scale. Probably time I backed up Tenthmedieval again...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-60029546068311461462009-12-09T12:52:14.093-05:002009-12-09T12:52:14.093-05:00The thing about Facebook is that it doesn't HA...The thing about Facebook is that it doesn't HAVE to be a closed circle. Just by doing something <a href="http://www.rc.vt.edu/medieval" rel="nofollow">like this</a>, you can open that circle up to anyone and everyone, while still maintaining a closer circle of more engaged participants. <br /><br />Also, sort-of related, I tried to integrate <a href="http://twitter.com/prof_gabriele" rel="nofollow">Twitter</a> into my teaching this semester. I don't think it really worked but I'll keep trying.Matthew Gabrielehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11971159578332078338noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-62727532566544543332009-12-09T12:49:13.452-05:002009-12-09T12:49:13.452-05:00When Jeffrey wrote that no one gets the future rig...When Jeffrey wrote that no one gets the future right, I was thinking how hard it is to get the present and past right, even when its artifacts are all around you. Taking a stab a one's present moment, especially now, with information overload all around us, is perhaps the most difficult [and futile] of all; yet the worse alternative might be in just allowing everything to wash over you without enough attention to anything that might help us to discern meaning & value [of information, social networks, relationships, communication, etc.]. I worry a little bit about closed social networks, such as Facebook, as Jeffrey does, but I think for different reasons. It's not the *closed* nature of these sites so much as their breezy brevity that I worry about. It seems to me that many of us have the attention span of gnats in our current moment. Don't get me wrong, though, because I think sites like Facebook and Twitter, at the very least, enable conversations [albeit, quick and only-so-deep conversations] that otherwise could not be squeezed into one's day, and across wide geographical tracts that otherwise could not be traversed, so quickly, or at all. Any portal, digital or otherwise, that exists for the trafficking of "talk" and information, is okay by me; I mainly just worry about our attention span in the cases where we really need to practice what might be called an undivided attention to particular persons, texts, issues, matters, "cases," events, questions, etc. or any combination thereof. Increasingly, in my own life [and this has been written about exhaustively, anyway], I sometimes feel as if what used to be called "free time" barely exists any more because so much of my time is taken up communicating with persons via digital and other mediums--cell phones, email, Facebook, etc.--who otherwise would have to have undertaken more physical and psychic labors to "reach" me, so to speak [and vice versa]. The end result sometimes feels as if, most of every day, I am just exchanging quips with too many persons across too many electronic media and spectrums and often for no real purpose at all. Sometimes for a real and meaningful purpose, though . . . sometimes.<br /><br />This brings me to weblogs, I guess, and what I see as their real value--they enable a more sustained and considered conversation, and where conversation does not always spring up, at the very least, they afford the space for the sort of meditative and critical writing and reading that, in print form, just could not materialize as quickly or as often. Within the academic realm, and even if we don't have all the time we need to read everything that is out there, weblogs at least democratize the discourse(s) and allow for a greater panoply of voices and opinions and ideas than our 19th-century, ideologically encrusted, patriarchal peer-review process allows for. Anyone who studies intellectual history [both within the humanities or the sciences] knows that really important, epochal paradigm shifts are inherently iconoclastic and done the old-fashioned way, can take decades and decades to effect real change because the new ideas have to battle traditional disciplinary super-structures that are extremely rigid, so, short of broadsheet pamphleteering [haha], I just see the Internet, and academic blogs in particular, as "open access" portals to counter-intellectualisms of all varieties, as well as extensions of the spaces available for the sort of work that *would* otherwise find its way, eventually, into old-fashioned print mediums, but now has a chance to "air" itself more often along that route in a more transparent fashion.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-74349107695697369942009-12-07T21:51:43.435-05:002009-12-07T21:51:43.435-05:00I have decided to come out of the shadows in which...I have decided to come out of the shadows in which we 'silent readers' dwell in order to add my opinion.<br /><br />In my personal opinion, there is room for any digital tool that facilitates communication. Thus, I agree that Facebook and the various blogging sites can co-exist and play nicely with newer tools such as Google Wave because they each facilitate a different form of communication.<br /><br />I confess that I have long dreamed of a day that internet communication would bring all of the people with whom you could ever wish to have a conversation, and to connect the world together. Yet this digital realm often troubles me, despite its obvious utility. I constantly use note taking software, bibliographical managers, word processors and all of the other trappings of the digital age, indeed I grew up with them as a scholar as they came into creation one by one.<br /><br />Despite this, I often find that I long for a simple notepad and pen, a musty smelling tome or a big pile of badly stapled journal articles on my desk. I think that as the 'future frontiers' expand, we will see an increased longing for the visceral pleasures to be found in the physical. I hope that for this reason, the academic community will continue to have meetings, go to conferences, print books and have coffee together, even if technology furnishes us with a virtual interface so perfect that there is really no reason to do so. <br /><br />I say that we should embrace the future, but retain the enthusiasm for the pre-computer past that we obviously all have for a more distant one. If we can love the Middle Ages, then why not a typewriter or a notepad?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55476784733357723522009-12-07T12:41:08.923-05:002009-12-07T12:41:08.923-05:00I think there is a lot of potential in google wave...I think there is a lot of potential in google wave if it becomes more widespread. It can be a great tech add-on for teaching, and could also be a wonderful way to add more e-components to symposia, conferences, etc.<br /><br />I haven't done more than tinkering with a wave just yet, but some of us ought to try it out.<br /><br />(I also have some extra invites...)Rick Goddenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04109263756022001400noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-3983085772797182502009-12-07T11:50:44.887-05:002009-12-07T11:50:44.887-05:00oh, i'd be open to that! i've got a few w...oh, i'd be open to that! i've got a few wave invites, too. wave intrigues me, but i've yet to figure out how to utilize it.holly dugannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-39159973907194547942009-12-07T11:02:57.927-05:002009-12-07T11:02:57.927-05:00Jeffrey...
Any thoughts on how Google Wave might ...Jeffrey...<br /><br />Any thoughts on how Google Wave might fit into all of this? It can be a blog and, sort of, can be FB. It can also be a powerful collaborative space (why aren't there more scholarly articles written by teams of young humanists? Or have I missed them?). It can also be a linked discussion.<br /><br />Some predict that it will be all of these plus much more but I am poor at imagining what.<br /><br />We need to get some folks here onto a Wave to see what might happen. I have a few extra invites if anyone wants to grasp the challenge.<br /><br />ken tompkinsken tompkinsnoreply@blogger.com