Last week I was interviewed on probably the best talk radio program about culture and technology, the CBC’s Spark. The interview grew out of my recent series of blog posts on the topic of algorithmic culture.  You can listen to the complete interview, which lasts about fifteen minutes, by following the link on the Spark website.  If you want to cut right to the chase and download an mp3 file of the complete interview, just click here.

The hallmark of a good interviewer is the ability to draw something out of an interviewee that she or he didn’t quite realize was there.  That’s exactly what the host of Spark, Nora Young, did for me.  She posed a question that got me thinking about the process of feedback as it relates to algorithmic culture — something I’ve been faulted on, rightly, in the conversations I’ve been having about my blog posts and scholarly research on the subject.  She asked something to the effect of, “Hasn’t culture always been a black box?”  The implication was: hasn’t the process of determining what’s culturally worthwhile always been mysterious, and if so, then what’s so new about algorithmic culture?

The answer, I believe, has everything to do with the way in which search engine algorithms, product and friend recommendation systems, personalized news feeds, and so forth incorporate our voices into their determinations of what we’ll be exposed to online.

They rely, first of all, on signals, or what you might call latent feedback.  This idea refers to the information about our online activities that’s recorded in the background, as it were, in a manner akin to eavesdropping.  Take Facebook, for example.  Assuming you’re logged in, Facebook registers not only your activities on its own site but also every movement you make across websites with an embedded “like” button.

Then there’s something you might call direct feedback, which refers to the information we voluntarily give up about ourselves and our preferences.  When Amazon.com asks if a product it’s recommended appeals to you, and you click “no,” you’ve explicitly told the company it got that one wrong.

So where’s the problem in that?  Isn’t it the case that these systems are inherently democratic, in that they actively seek and incorporate our feedback?  Well, yes…and no.  The issue here has to do with the way in which they model a conversation about the cultural goods that surround us, and indeed about culture more generally.

The work of culture has long happened inside of a black box, to be sure.  For generations it was chiefly the responsibility of a small circle of white guys who made it their business to determine, in Matthew Arnold’s famous words, “the best that has been thought and said.”

Only the black box wasn’t totally opaque.  The arguments and judgments of these individuals were never beyond question.  They debated fiercely among themselves, often quite publicly; people outside of their circles debated them equally fiercely, if not more so.  That’s why, today, we teach Toni Morrison’s work in our English classes in addition to that of William Shakespeare.

The question I raised near the end of the Spark interview is the one I want to raise here: how do you argue with Google?  Or, to take a related example, what does clicking “not interested” on an Amazon product recommendation actually communicate, beyond the vaguest sense of distaste?  There’s no subtlety or justification there.  You just don’t like it.  Period.  End of story.  This isn’t communication as much as the conveyance of decontextualized information, and it reduces culture from a series of arguments to a series of statements.

Then again, that may not be entirely accurate.  There’s still an argument going on where the algorithmic processing of culture is concerned — it just takes place somewhere deep in the bowels of a server farm, where all of our movements and preferences are aggregated and then filtered.  You can’t argue with Google, Amazon, or Facebook, but it’s not because they’re incapable of argument.  It’s because their systems perform the argument for us, algorithmically.  They obviate the need to justify our preferences to one another, and indeed, before one another.

This is a conversation about culture, yes, but minus its moral obligations.

Just after Christmas I promised there’d be a big announcement coming in the new year.  Well, a month in and here it is: The Late Age of Print is now available in paperback!  Yes folks, that’s right.  If you’ve been holding off buying the book because it was available only in hardback (and, ahem, free digital download), now’s your chance to pick up a copy all your own.

I’d be remiss not to mention that the paperback contains a new preface, written by me.  It offers something like a theory of the relationship of printed and electronic books, constructed around a distinction the Canadian media historian Harold Innis once drew between “time binding” and “space binding” technologies.  It also tries to walk the fine line between simply celebrating or bemoaning these different types of books, which is one of the recurrent themes you’ll find in Late Age. Here’s a little taste from the preface:

For Sven Birkerts, printed words possess “weight, grandeur,” while their electronic counterparts suffer because of their supposed “weightlessness.”  Could it be, though, that the turgidity of printed words, and hence the paper vessels containing them, quietly persuade us to settle for less authoritative, definitive, and elegant books than we deserve? Grandeur, perhaps. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that complacency follows all too easily in the wake of humankind’s most majestic accomplishments.

And more:

The challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways to ensure that we continue living in an expanding culture, which is to say, one that strikes a suitable balance between time- and space-binding technologies. This would be a culture in which neither printed nor electronic books exclusively ruled the day. Instead, it would be one in which the “p” and the “e” mingled promiscuously

The paperback is available from my publisher, Columbia University Press, as well as most major booksellers including IndieBound, Powells, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

If I get some time in the coming months I may try to redesign this site.  The look seems a little stale to me after two years, plus it would be nice to reboot The Late Age of Print blog on or near the occasion on the paperback’s release.  If there are things you like or dislike about the site or would like to see added, shoot me an email or leave a comment.  Since my goal isn’t just to make the site look better but to make it more reader-friendly, I’d appreciate your input.

Speaking of input, I’d also love to hear from those of you who’ve read the new preface to the paperback edition or, for that mater, from any of you who’ve read and want to discuss Late Age.

More anon…

I’ve been away on vacation for the last couple of weeks; hence the quiet around here. I’m busy now catching up on emails, writing projects (one of which is already late!), page proofs, and other assorted business. I’ll be back here blogging in full force once I get through my weighty to-do pile.

In the meantime, I’d love it if any of you reading this blog who’ve also read The Late Age of Print would be willing to post a review — even a short, considered one — on the book’s page on Amazon.com. There are two reviews there already, but I’d love to see more.  And don’t worry — I’m not averse to thoughtful criticism.  Praise is of course welcome, too.

Back soon.

My latest essay, “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing,” is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25.  In my opinion, it’s probably the single most important journal essay I’ve published to date.  Here’s the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies’ envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies’ capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field’s political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies’ alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field’s growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I’m fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on “Acknowledged Goods” by clicking here — and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you’re at it!

Since I’m on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I’d be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan’s amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer.  It’s called “The Googlization of Universities.”  I found Siva’s s discussion of bibliometrics — the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact — to be particularly intriguing.  I wasn’t aware that Google’s PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe.  The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of “algorithmic culture,” which I’ve blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you’d like a copy of “Acknowledged Goods.”  Of course, I’d be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.

It still may be one more day until THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, but what would Easter be (even if a day late) without an Easter egg? I’ve placed one somewhere on this blog.  If you find it, then you’ll get to learn the news a full day before rest of the world.

Happy hunting!

This one’s for all of my readers in the Northeast, especially those in and around the Philadelphia area.  I’ll be delivering a public lecture at Swarthmore College on Thursday, March 25th at 4:00 p.m.  The location is the Scheuer Room in Kohlberg Hall.  The event, which is part of the College’s Cooper Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.  Please come if you can.

The title of my presentation is “Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read: Privacy and Property in the Late Age of Print.”  Here’s an abstract for the talk, which is more up-to-date than the version you’ll find on the Swarthmore website:

This presentation focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader’s two-way communications capabilities on the one hand, and on its parent company’s recent forays into data services on the other.  I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends.  Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a “right to read,” which would complement the existing right of free expression.

The presentation is an opening gambit of sorts for a new book project I’m working on, called The Right to Read.

Anyway,  I’d be delighted to see you at Swarthmore on Thursday.  Please introduce yourself to me if you come.  And if you bring your copy of The Late Age of Print, I’d be happy to autograph it for you.

I’ve been fortunate to have received some really excellent reviews of The Late Age of Print in its first year of publication.  Maybe even more exciting than all of this positive response has been the book’s inclusion on several top-ten of 2009 lists.  A couple of weeks ago Michael Lieberman over at Book Patrol (hosted on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) included Late Age in his top-ten “books about books” of the year.  Last week Chapman/Chapman’s Ryan Chapman featured the book in his “Best Books of 2009″ post, calling it a “foundational text.”  And just yesterday Conversational Reading’s Scott Esposito gave the book a big shout by adding it to his “Favorite Reads of the Year” list.

So, with the end of 2009 almost in sight, I want to thank Michael, Ryan, Scott, and all of those who’ve supported the book this year, as well all of you readers out there who’ve been taking in, Tweeting about, and commenting on this blog.  I also want to acknowledge the hard work of José Afonso Furtado, a tremendous supporter of The Late Age of Print in all its forms, whose Twitter feed I piggy-back on.  Finally, I owe a heartfelt thanks to all the great folks at Columbia University Press and particularly my editor, Philip Leventhal, about whom I cannot say enough good things.

I realize that this post probably sounds as though I’m signing off for the year.  Don’t worry, I’m not.  I’ll be back again in 2009 with more dispatches from the late age of print.

After a series of delays (I hear this is how things go in Hollywood), I’m pleased to debut The Late Age of Print video at long last.  It’s no “Thriller,” admittedly, but hopefully you’ll get a kick out of it anyway.

Here’s a little back-story for those of you who may be interested.  Last fall my editor at Columbia informed me that the Press had begun promoting some of its books using short videos.  He then asked me if I’d be interested in shooting one for Late Age. Since I’m not someone who believes that electronic media are out to kill books — I’m quite confident in their ability to help books out, in fact — I decided I’d say yes.

I was a little daunted by the prospect of shooting the video, mostly because I’m a methodological writer who’s unaccustomed to speaking in sound bites.  I reflected on this a bit last December over on my other blog, Differences & Repetitions. In hindsight, that should have been the least of my worries.

In chapter 2 of Late Age I touch on how the campus bookstore at Indiana University (where I teach) was designed by Ken White, the architect who went on to create the big-box bookstore template.  What better location for the video shoot, I thought, than at ground-zero of the big-box bookstore phenomenon? 

Unfortunately, IU decided in 2007 that it would be a good idea to outsource campus bookstore operations to Barnes & Noble — about whom I write rather approvingly in Late Age. The long and the short of it is that Barnes & Noble denied my requests to shoot the video there.

I still find it difficult to fathom how a private sector company would — or even could — refuse the use of public property for a purpose such as this.  In any case, I’m sure I could have complained to the University, but by then so much time had elapsed that I just needed to get on with the shoot.

I settled on the IU Lilly Library, which houses rare books and manuscripts.  It’s a truly lovely location, though I fear that it may inadvertantly up the “book fetishist” quotient that I try so hard to mitigate in Late Age. The videographer also had me harp on the “books aren’t going away anytime soon” theme, which, though appropriate, doesn’t quite get at the substance of the book, which focuses on e-books, book superstores, online bookselling, Amazon.com, and Harry Potter.

Anyway, despite all the drama I’m still pretty pleased with the result.  I hope you like it, too.  Please share it, rate it, and comment on it.  I’d love to hear what you think!

Now that I’ve entered the video age, would it be asking too much for Colbert to call?