I struggled through Alan Liu piece From Reading to Social Computing. His technological analysis on how we got to today’s social computing and his explanation of social reading is beyond my paygrade, so ill have to take his word for it. There is something he says in the introduction that doesn’t sit well with me, however –“Social computing encourages literary scholars to remember and repurpose the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting.” Is social computing, just a continuation of people sharing literature socially or is it something completely different and incomparable with the way we did things in the past? I feel that, for all its benefits, we could be massively underestimating the negative effect social computing can have on literature.

In a social computing manor, I searched Wikipedia for insights into the history of social writing. There wasn’t much to be found there, so I turned my query over to Google. The top result is a book by Tom Standage called – Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years. The description informs us that “Social media is anything but a new phenomenon” and goes on to give examples of how people in the past sharing information mirrors today’s social networks. Maybe so, but there is one fundamental difference between the past and now. In the past, we didn’t have much information about an author beyond his or her work. The work was what mattered first and foremost. Status and reputation came later.
Mysterious or unknown people often wrote words that led to revolutions or made us think differently. Nowadays there is anonymous social computing, but for the most part, we can easily find out way too much about who is writing, publishing, reading and interpreting literature. We now judge authors work increasingly with other aspects of their life and not just what they wrote.

Regardless, social computing is here to stay, and Liu thinks we should embrace/dissect/research it academically. For instance, he addresses why contemporary literary scholarship should take an interest in contemporary social computing: “If one loves literature, I think, one now has to be willing to go speculatively where the language of passionate life goes, especially among the young, who will carry on the cool literary adventure.” Being cool is great in all, but not if it’s for cool’s sake. Could it be that trying to be cool is our first real intention when engaging in some social computing? I fear that superior or lasting artistic merit is lost in the quick gratification social computing gives or worse encourages.

I agree with Liu in that “social computing and literary activity are both aspects of a single communicational phenomenon: the contemporary form of the human need to say something well (memorably, persuasively, movingly, beautifully, wittily, and so on) to someone else.” However, he then goes on to say that “Conceiving of such a unified field of literary and social communicational study will require significant methodological work.” Why does our need to say something well to someone else have to be such hard work? If what we are reading fits this criterion, then it’s just good writing – no matter who said it or how it comes to us.

The article concludes that social computing allows us to “seek knowledge and experience wherever it is vested and most easily accessed.” This is undeniably true- we can access knowledge like never before with computers. The danger with social computing is it gives us access to unknown worlds around literature too that maybe should remain unknown. Often this only shows us the messiness of human life and removes us from the work itself.

My favorite quote from this week’s readings comes from Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing”:

In essence, Facebook became a platform for character role-playing. It allowed students to study the play as if they were directors staging it in alternative medium. All the world, as it were, is not a wooden “O” but a digital Friend Wheel.

This metaphor contains multitudes. Dating from 2013, it inevitably dates the project and makes it impossible to replicate on the same terms: Liu refers to a Facebook feature that came and went like so many others it has offered over the years (I don’t remember the Friend Wheel; I hardly remember the social graph it once debuted, and never made use of it). Nevertheless, this one-off aspect captures something of the nature of a “great work” of art or literature.  In addition, Facebook is no longer the social network of choice for the student age group he was working with; and he describes his class’s use of the platform in a way that, according to Facebook’s guidelines, would surely be considered abuse of the platform.  In many ways, this makes Facebook perfect for such an experiment. Unlike Instagram – which was just getting started – Snapchat, the now-defunct Vine, or even Twitter, Facebook requires a primarily narrative-based creation and performance of personae (I have two accounts myself) for reasons surely examined by many other studies in social science, rhetorical theory, and psychology. The suspicion with which many users view it only encourages a less-than-absolutely-faithful reflection (as if this were possible) of who its users “are” in “meatspace.”

I imagine that this experiment not only enlivened Romeo and Juliet and brought it to life, but also must have enlivened the social networking experience altogether and brought these other issues to light for the participants. And, although it was probably a closed group, I love thinking of the potential “lurkers” watching the goings on and wondering, but unable to participate. Facebook, in Barthes’s terms, provides a fundamentally “writerly” experience of self, others, and social connections in which authority is decentralized; through posts, likes, and responses, readers and writers (users and friends) mutually build and interpret each other’s online selves (often through misreading). Like Liu’s other experiment with The Canterbury Tales and blogging, the social world of R&J has a remarkable affinity to today’s social networking platforms “even to the point that the rudeness, “flames,” baitings from “trolls,” and other apparent debasements and provocations of language typifying the extremes” of social networking have a performative, dramatic ethos. In ways seeming to build on Hayles’s use of Facebook as a pedagogical tool (“Hyper and Deep Attention, ”196), Liu’s use of Facebook also highlighted the reader’s role in (recon)constructing a literary text’s own voice and meaning: it “allowed the students to study the play as if they were directors staging it in an alternative medium.”  As Liu posits elsewhere in his essay, a “successful online reading environment would integrate social networking tools in a way that extends readers’ existing strategies.” Moreover, Liu reminds us that this approach is fundamentally orthodox: knowledge and experience are, as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested in How We Became Posthuman (1999), distributed phenomena . In the case of texts, Liu explains that these are accessed “through combinations of authors, documents, readers, and scholar-critics—that is, in the social networks of all of the above.”

Because I am no longer in the loop when it comes to typical classroom pedagogy in a literature course (as opposed to somewhat still-nascent interactive, technology-based pedagogy) I don’t know if Liu’s experiments with Facebook have been widely adopted. They would have to be adapted to the platform’s changing features and its stricter guidelines for the creation of accounts. I hope it has been adopted more widely, or—sooner rather than later—will be. Like the MLA Commons and other developments in crowd-sources peer review, which have not quite yet transformed—but promise to—the stale rigmarole of academic publishing, and with it the institutions of academic authority and tenure and promotion procedures, “it may be that social computing will change the whole paradigm of literary reading and research to make central the social environment of literature…scholarship, equipped with Web 2.0, becomes a fully social act.”  I wonder what will happen when “Web 3.0” arrives.

In “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” N. Katherine Hayles urges professors to anticipate a shift in the way rising, media-steeped students think and to evolve accordingly. She presents her argument in unambiguous, binary structures, with two types of attention, two generational sides, and ultimately, two inevitable solutions: “change the students to fit the educational environment or change the environment to fit the students” (195). Perhaps out of rhetorical necessity—she is, after all, writing in 2007 to the largely deep-attention readers of the MLA’s Profession magazine—she oversimplifies both the “divide” and the research that evinces it, obscuring some of her keenest observations and their pedagogical import.

She defines deep attention with a direct connection to the discipline of her peers and an example likely to be beloved by many: “Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times” (187). By contrast, she defines hyper attention more clinically, as “characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (187). Her audience, both by generation and occupational predilection, might place greater value (even ascribe superiority to) deep attention. But she argues that there is merit and weakness in both. Deep attention, she notes, while essential for solving complex problems, lacks awareness and the ability to adapt quickly to change—skills her audience may need to recognize this generational shift and accommodate it. Inversely, hyper attention is great for navigating quickly evolving environments but struggles to sustain energies when the task demands it—energies a student might need to read an article like this one.

Again perhaps to placate her audience, she presents the modes as seemingly mutually exclusive, and springing from history and evolution. Where deep attention is the product of luxury, of a society (or a sliver of society) that needn’t battle constant threats to survive, hyper attention was (and perhaps may be becoming again) a survival strategy when humans responded to persistent and unpredictable threats. In conjuring an image to clearly depict the modes, she segregates them almost pejoratively but certainly stereotypically: “picture a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother sitting in front of a console, jamming on a joystick while he plays Grand Theft Auto” (187-88). Of course, life requires both: from the hyper attention needed to drive in traffic to the deep attention that solves moral dilemmas. And the college sophomore is as likely to be glued to her phone later that night as the ten-year-old is to enjoy a bedtime book.

Further, the root of the generational shift lies in kids’ unfettered, unchaperoned access to a wide variety of media that gives rise to a hunger for multi-channel stimulation which, at its extreme, presents as AD/HD—a term likely to instill fear in deep-attention readers.

But within her pared-down and somewhat alarmist model are exciting revelations that present real opportunity. Analyzing a study of the effects video games have on executive function in kids, she concludes, “The results suggest…that media simulation, if structured appropriately, may contribute to a synergistic combination of hyper and deep attention—a suggestion that has implications for pedagogy” (193). This seems huge. To wed the two types of valuable and desired attention is not only a goal for the rising generation, but educators themselves and serves as a true call to investigate ways to scaffold the use of media in the classroom.

She also references a study of older gamers who “found the opportunities offered by the games for achievement, freedom, and in some instances connections to other players even more satisfying than the fun of playing. Stimulation works best, in other words, when it is associated with feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness—a conclusion with significant implications for pedagogy” (195). The study reveals that these games require “active critical learning” (195) to progress, motivating players to learn new things incrementally. Designing curriculum with these natural incentives seems less modern age than just plain effective.

Hayles’ Facebook example is wonderfully prescriptive, as students use an accessible, relevant example (societal forces at work that shape online personas) to tease out truths they can immediately apply to a more deep-attention piece, The Education of Henry Adams. Greater still, students can reinforce this insight every time they encounter a digital profile or read another novel. Harnessing that “active critical learning” also engages learners in their own assessment, giving them a stake in their education. While creating audio books, Allred’s “students also noted issues of readerly competence and affect: one student noted, ‘I came across a few words I had never seen in my life nor had I known how to pronounce them out loud’” (Allred, 121), something she may have dismissed in reading simply to write a paper.

Both approaches help students harness hyper attention in service of deep attention. Both harness digital relevance to bring students to more remote, but perhaps equally universal or resonant texts. The 2007 readers of Profession who missed this insight may be among the very faculty that Brian Croxall described as the “absent presence” (Kirschenbaum).

Regarding the remediative practices that constitute the digital humanities, I am drawn to the ebb and flow of the private and social that seems to pervade their discussion. In Berube et al.’s “Community Reading and Social Imagination” there is an insistence on an inherently social tradition that helped to establish the novel. Tracing the genre back to the “…coffeehouses, literary salons, reading clubs, reform associations, tea tables…where people read, and listened to others read, together,” (Berube et al. 422) they argue that the practice of reading has a far more public nature than that dictated by contemporary conceptions. Such an argument is happily seized upon by Liu and Allred to argue for the use of digital humanities in ‘recapturing’ the novel’s social nature and using remediation to realize modern instances of public reading and literary discussion.

While I agree with this championing of the novel’s social past (indeed, I was dismayed they did not go even farther and include instances like town readings of Pamela), the (to borrow Liu’s use of the term) “margins” of their argument suggested a resistance to the novel’s supposed public nature. Regardless of origins, the novel did eventually serve to construct the “…illusion {italics self-inserted} of participation in wide social networks…” (Ibid 421) and did not remain a traditional item of the ‘public sphere.’ That is, the novel may possess an aspect “…which does not lend itself…” (Benjamin 258) to the social. In a certain respect, this may simply be a consequence of the obvious necessity of individual reading even within a group setting. Though these events had individuals reading and reciting in solidarity, it does not seem as if they could not avoid the act of an initial private reading of some form. Indeed, in Allred’s comments on Rubery regarding public readings, we see that while the dominance of the original text was not so absolute a reading became a “passive reproduction,” the products of such social phenomenon were ultimately confined to the shadow of their origin in text and became “new editions” or “textual variants.” (Allred 123) Such classification would suggest that one would require a prior familiarity with the original text to fully appreciate the variations involved in this social occasion.

Ultimately, I suppose my critique can be paraphrased as remarking that books must simply be read prior to remediation and that the act of reading limits the remediative act. Albeit simple, I doubt the consequences to be of themselves simplistic. Consider Allred’s writings on audio recording in pedagogy. He recalls a student who, “…lamented that even her best-prepared peer ‘struggled with pronunciation of outdated words, and everyone managed to either switch words to constructions we were familiar with, or changed words to do the same.’” (Ibid 121). Note that the struggle occurs not from the act of reading itself but from the act of “pronunciation” required for a “compelling performance of the text.” The issue arises from the very act of realizing her private act of reading in a social environment. Whereas the antiquated lexicon of the text was of little issue in the interior world of “silent reading,” now it cannot help but clash with the individual idiolects and dialects that dictate societal needs for communication. As a result, we see a public choice for the “familiar;” portions of the text must be rejected because of their failure to realize themselves effectively socially.

This rejection is my rationale for my previous mention of Benjamin. This rejection of the text’s language due to its inability to “lend itself” to the social needs of the audio recording is reminiscent of the translator’s task. Just as the tools of digital humanities allow us to understand the text through what they successfully ‘translate’ the text into, so may they demonstrate what lies at the “nucleus” of the text by identifying that “…which does not lend itself…” Truly, the latter may lend greater significance due to its ability to identify aspects of the text unknowingly reinforced in remediation. (e.g. Candide 2.0’s required “scaffolding” to limit a completely free public reading, Allred’s admission that a better mastery of material would assist Looking Glass 2.0, Liu’s moderation of annotations on “From Reading to Social Computing” to assert some authorial control over his paper.) That is, the negative results of the digital humanities suggests as much literary insight as its successes.