PhD Blog (dot) Net

I hated English Literature at school, and duly responded by failing my O-level. From what I can remember, the syllabus consisted of an obligatory Shakespeare (in my case, Twelfth Night), something by one of the Brontës, and shitloads of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. This may have been partly determined by me being in a ‘grammar school’ stream (which had continued to operate under the comprehensive system recently ushered in by the Labour Party), as I also recall being envious of a ‘secondary school’ stream who were reading Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, with its brilliant and iconic 70’s cover.

The announcement of a shift towards a more Anglicised and pre-20th century GCSE syllabus seems to be taking us back to the seventies and eighties, when incidentally – in choosing not to continue studying it for O-level – my History education also stopped somewhere around the Middle Ages. It also appears to be directly influenced by Michael Gove and an educational policy seemingly hellbent on a ‘back to basics’ rhetoric to appease the Tory right and massage his future leadership ambitions. As such, the announcement was received by typically mixed responses of incredulity, anger and bemusement from the educational community.

But it reminded me that when I left school, and started reading books of my own choice, it sparked a new and voracious appetite for literature that was initially fuelled by American mid-20th century classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye. These may have become clichéd teenage cult novels, but they helped form the basis for a self-directed literary education (of sorts), which rapidly expanded to include the works of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner and many more.

It’s interesting to recall the cultural landscape in which this occurred: a period of self-discovery which corresponded with a growing exploration and awareness of not only books, but of music and film, primarily mediated by the NME, fanzines and several like-minded individuals in my peer group. These days, such resources are massively multiplied, distributed and (to an extent) democratised through the participatory culture of social media, through online networks and reading groups, often manifest in lists, recommendations and other explicit and sometimes vacuous expressions of shared cultural capital.

Perhaps it is partly the role of formal schooling to create a stale and repressive environment that might initiate informal, self-motivated and alternative learning cultures and trajectories, but I’m mindful that there are too many young adults who stop reading books entirely when they leave school. So it’s hard to justify an increasingly restrictive and archaic syllabus at the expense of geographically inclusive and culturally diverse literature that might just help cultivate a lifelong passion for reading.

Reading the introduction to Ben Fine’s Theories of Social Capital, I was struck by how much it resonated with my own emerging suspicion of how original concepts of social capital have been transformed by reductionist (and predominantly neoliberal) interpretations, that seem to disregard the complexities and nuances of formative work on the subject. As Fine suggests, they expand on Bourdieu’s relatively narrow definition with a fraction of his depth of understanding. The ‘peculiar relationship’ with neoliberalism and rational choice in particular, represents a ‘generalised commodity fetishism’ of social capital.

The literature on social capital thrived in the 1990’s, representing a radical increase in the scope, definition and application of social capital across the disciplines. According to Fine, these largely exploitational interpretations have degraded, rather than contributed to, the literature. As such, social capital has become an attractive motif for ‘hacademics’ and policy makers at the expense of rigorous academic arguments. In response, social scientists offer limited critique or choose to ignore social capital altogether.

It is right that ideas, concepts and theories are open to development and reinterpretation in interdisciplinary contexts, and Fine’s arguments may seem elitist. But he believes social capital has become a parasite that has ‘reduced and distorted’ the rich traditions of the social sciences. This has resulted in the adoption of social capital as a leading explanatory factor of social, cultural and economic factors at the expense of other (and more convincing) determinants.

In the new conceptual chaos of social capital, the nature of its relationship with other forms of capital is rarely defined. There is often a presumed transference between components and effects of different forms of capital; “rounding up the symbolic and the cultural into the social” (p.4). In addition, the relationship between social capital and capitalism itself is frequently ‘glossed over’.

Most pertinent to the studying of the social web – and the apparent readiness of researchers to invoke the work of Robert D Putnam in particular – is the necessity to question the idea of social capital as:

“self-help raised to the level of the collective. However good or bad things might be, they could be better if people interacted more, trusted one another, and cooperated. Social capital offers the golden opportunity of improving the status quo without challenging it. Everything from educational outcomes through crime prevention to better psychological health can be improved if neighbours and communities would only pull together and trust and interact with one another.” (p.4)

Such convenient and consensual interpretations of collective empowerment through participation and collaboration often fail to acknowledge the corrupting forces of what Fine describes as the ‘dark side’ of social capital.

It appears that Fine’s book represents an important critical reading of the social capital literature, which I hope to have a chance to explore beyond the Introduction in the near future.

Reference

Fine, B. (2010). Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly. London: Pluto Press.

Over the last week or so I’ve had a chance to catch up with Martin Weller’s new book, The Digital Scholar. Those who follow The Ed Techie blog will be familiar with his enthusiastic support of open scholarship, and it’s great to see that an open access version of the book is now available to read online.

Drawing largely on Ernest Boyer’s four components of scholarship as a framework, The Digital Scholar provides an excellent overview of the role of digital technologies in the current academic landscape. It is clearly written and accessible to a wider academic audience, so I hope it gets the recognition and readership it deserves.

As a complementary work, I would highly recommend Christine Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age, which provides a more in-depth look into the socio-economics of information that underpin academic discourse and publishing. It’s a great book, but one that felt conspicuously out of date when it was first published. A second edition, incorporating the influence of web 2.0, would be most welcome.

References

Borgman, C. L. (2007). Scholarship in the digital age: Information, infrastructure, and the internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

These days, as I become increasingly submerged by journal articles and text books, I don’t have the time, nor often the inclination, to read much fiction. However, walks into University and bus rides can be usefully spent snatching brief opportunities to listen to audio recordings of books.

I’ve long been a supporter of LibriVox, an outstanding non-profit organisation that campaigns to “acoustically liberate” books in the public domain, by releasing volunteer recordings free of charge on the web. The book readings are broken up into sizeable mp3 audio files available through downloads, weekly podcasts, and iTunes subscription. Not surprisingly perhaps, most of the books in the extensive catalogue feature multiple readers sharing chapter duties. However, root around and you’ll find plenty of single-author readings. Personally, I prefer these, they allow you to build trust with the reader as the narrative develops to create a sense of shared experience. A particular favourite is John Greenman’s lyrical reading of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Librivox reminds us how a relatively old technology, the global distribution of the web, and people’s willingness to share their time, can combine to provide some of mankind’s finest thoughts free of charge.

The death of J D Salinger this week gave me an excuse for digging out my old copy of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a few years since I last looked at it but, along with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s probably the novel I’ve re-read the most. Indeed for several years it became a bit of a ritual to read it on my way home for Christmas, in homage to Holden Caulfield’s narrative.

As I’ve got older, I’ve increasingly warmed to Mr. Antolini – Holden’s highball-swigging ex-English teacher. Debate over his homosexuality often overshadows his empathetic relationship with Holden, epitomised by his eloquent words on the painful transition to adulthood and the values of scholarship and learning:

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

Howard Gardner – well-known for his multiple intelligences theory – discusses his new book, 5 Minds for the Future, in a lecture at the RSA. Shifting from the purely cognitive, towards a social policy response to globalisation and technological innovation. he argues today’s learners need to adopt to flexible, inter-disciplinary ‘outside-the-box’ thinking by cultivating five key mental capacities:

• The Disciplinary Mind
• The Synthesizing Mind
• The Creating Mind
• The Respectful Mind
• The Ethical Mind

The Disciplinary Mind

Here, Gardner refers primarily to the academic disciplines. Whilst acknowledging the necessity to achieve mastery in one discipline (which usually takes a minimum of 10 years), he stresses the need to recognise the distinctive (and essentially unnatural) ways of thinking in other major schools of thought.

The Synthesizing Mind

Quoting physicist Murray Gell-Man – who proposed the synthesizing mind will be the most important in the 21st century – Gardner suggests this is the most urgently required of the five minds, yet remains the least supported in formal education. Synthesis requires the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines into a coherent whole that is communicable to others. Gardner argues the best synthesizers are those who can cultivate and master synthesizing methods or strategies using a range of formats – maps, taxonomies, narrative etc., – which are best developed through goal-driven and feedback processes.

The Creating Mind

The capacity to identify new problems, questions and phenomena. Creativity is not just a cognitive process, but is reliant on personality traits of temperament and attitude, and on feedback from others in the field.

The Respectful Mind

The ability to empathize; to acknowledge, understand and eventually contest the views of others.

The Ethical Mind

The fulfillment of one’s professional responsibilities and moral obligations as a citizen.

Gardner acknowledges integration of the five minds is prone to tensions, and that most individuals will have a tendency towards some over others, He concludes by emphasizing the need to expose students to communities and societies in which the qualities derived from these minds are both encouraged and prevalent.

I had assumed there was only one model of distributed cognition; that which is largely associated with the work of Edward Hutchins and which describes how individual human knowledge can be distributed across a group or network of people, tools or environments. So I was somewhat taken aback when Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University introduced four more in her lecture “How We Think” at the University of Nottingham earlier this evening. She outlined the embodied, extended, autonomous, and appropriated perspectives alongside the embedded model to which I am familiar. She then went on to explain how these are used to varying degrees by writers, artists and designers working in the digital domain; highlighting the print-based work of authors Mark Z Danielewski (‘House of Leaves’), and Steven Hall (‘Raw Shark Texts’), the electronic and interactive texts of Deena Larsen and Steve Tomasula, and an algorithmic engine from multimedia artist Talan Memmott. She discussed the roles of narrrative and spaciality (of texts / images etc.), and the temporality of embodied reading, and concluded by referring to Lev Manovich’s notion that narrative is in direct conflict with what he terms ‘database’ (i.e. that which is relational, spatial or conceptual).

The open access imprint Bloomsbury Academic have released Lawrence Lessig‘s new book, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy through Creative Commons. The book is available as a free pdf download along with a NPR audio interview with the author. Lessig explores emergent cultural activities on the web, arguing outmoded forms of copyright need to be radically updated as the copying, remixing and redistribution of creative and informational content become increasingly criminalised. It seems like they are doing just that in New Zealand.

I’ve just started reading Yochai Benkler’s acclaimed The Wealth of Networks – a book I’ve been meaning to catch up with for some time. The full text is available through the Books Unbound site; a free digital initiative from Yale University Press. You can also download a PDF version from the wiki site.