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.

Just a quick note to welcome you to the course. You can browse the site, but note:

• I’ve left some old posts below. I’ll occasionally resurface them, but they’re from an old run of the course
• We’ll communicate and share documents via a CUNY Academic Commons group, to which you should have received an invitation.
• The syllabus is the most relevant thing for now, so check it out.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve just finished evaluating your final projects (and everything else). It was a real pleasure to see the amazing, creative work many of you did at the end of the course. I hope everyone has a great summer and look forward to seeing you around campus in the fall (and perhaps even in English 390, “ABC of Modernism”?).

A couple of notes:

1. You’ll get a link via Google from me to the same doc I’ve been using to share evaluations with you. There you’ll see comments on the final project and on other aspects of the course. In some cases, you’ll get links to essays with marginal comments or comments via hypothes.is. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. There’s a final grade at the end (or there will be by about 2pm).

2. I’d love the liberty to post or link to your projects on our course site. If you want to OPT OUT of this, feel free to do so via email. Otherwise, if I can get organized, I’ll put together a little showcase of your work for future students to see.

3. Speaking of opting out, remember that our course site and our hypothes.is feed are open to public view. If you like, you are welcome to delete any or all materials from those platforms. If not do not do so, that’s great, and I might even share your brilliance with future students now and then.

That’s all for now. Good luck with the end of the term!

[posted for James]

[reflection on audiobook]

Audiobook Reflection

The idea of a do-it-yourself audiobook struck me as very much within the scope of an English class seeking to both honor its roots in a certain literary tradition but to extrapolate vastly forward into the technological age we live in. I have perused LibriVox only a handful of times, once having downloaded a few dry works of Continental philosophy like some kind of self-help serum that goes down easier through the ears. However, my time with the works was fairly short lived, and I recall their quickly serving me more as a sleep aid than anything else. In my younger years, though, I once had a very positive experience with an audiobook in the car of an English teacher who took me on a summer camping trip—this one, as I recall, had a single narrator who very deftly took on voices of various characters, considerably unlike the tone of the narrator in the LibriVox work I encountered. Anchored in this positive memory, and also recalling the juvenile eagerness with which I always volunteered to read out loud in elementary school, I was pretty enthused at the idea of working on an audiobook.

Like many others in the class, I felt considerable alarm at the prospect of a group project. I scratch my head, but fail to recall the last instance in which it was necessary to collaborate with others on schoolwork. Like many others noted as well, I quickly became aghast with the sound of my voice—it is probably good that I waited till all my takes were done to listen back to any single one, because I fear that the anxiety induced by a single listen would have tainted the quality of the work moving forward. Surely, this feeling is not unique. However, upon listening to the work of my group mates, I felt greater pleasure at the quality of their narration than of my own, and hoped perhaps someone in the group might have a parallel sentiment as a way of soothing myself.

The editing work was probably the most fun part of the entire process. I enjoyed the multitude of bodily sounds—gurgles, slurps, throat noises, phlegm—that had been afforded by the very sensitive iPhone microphones we opted to use. Luckily, cleaning these kinds of things up was fairly simple—in a digital rendering of the sound files, little bumps in the wavelength corresponded to these minor disturbances and a quick scan made it easy to locate and eradicate the unwanted byproducts. I contemplated amplifying them and embracing the absurd humor of such an act, but I figured the rest of the class might not find it as funny as I do. After several rounds of cleaning, I proceeded to check that each portion of audio ran comfortably (meaning, no awkward pauses within a single file, or uncomfortable gaps between portions of text, and smoothly running transitions between narrators), and lined everything up. Finally, I added a track by Nils Frahm to augment the emotional weight of Ezra’s reading of the book’s conclusion.

All in all, a fun attempt at a forward thinking exercise that hit mark in remediating a traditional text that benefited from its sonic treatment.

[post on Benjamin]

“This patient process of Nature… was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are played one on top of the other—all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.”

In his discussion of oratory tradition, Benjamin makes this note about a fundamental way in which temporality and artistic process has changed. I can only take guesses as to what has contracted modern man’s patience, but my best guess will be something about a shift in the mode of production, and one’s relationship to land.

Benjamin’s notion of the storyteller is bimodal, being the combination of the land-bound artisan who stays permanently in place (on the land: fixed spatially but thus hyperaware temporally) and the sea-farer who brings with him stories of far-away (here, the temporal dimension is somewhat suspended but the spatial changes are what engender the storytelling). But the scale of time they are working with seems to be pre-modern, or of antiquity. Just as a craftsman prior to industrial-mechanized-automated labor worked as a lifelong process of improvement, the oratorical traditional was like, as Benjamin figuratively describes, many thin transparent layers of lacquer culminating in an organic enrichment of the story. Works handed down over generations (religious texts strikes me as a good example) seem to engage a passing of time that feels supernatural in scope—in the Biblical voice, the feeling of time is somewhat timeless, a procession of events that cannot be pinned to any temporal marker comfortable to our modern minds. The works handed down over the years exist in relationship to their setting, where the craftsman has been fixed, subsisting from the Land to whom these stories belong.

When Benjamin notes that “modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated”, it feels like a jibe, and disingenuous dismissal of modernity (even he, later in this essay, seems to concede that literary time enables, like a Futurist or Cubist artwork, the colliding of multiple time-perspectives). The relationship to the land (or at least the immediacy of that feeling) seems to be lost; humans no longer think or feel out in the world—perhaps labor alienation has caused them to withdraw deeper into their own psyche, where I feel the realm of the novel is situated. And a more inner, psychological assessment of time feels timeless (not in that monumental Biblical sense mentioned earlier), all senses and scales of time compounded and folded into a single point of access within one’s mind, from which one can travel back, forth, and dilate at will. I would argue that perhaps it is not that modern man fails to have patience at anything that can’t be truncated (though I would argue that perhaps over time, our attention spans have narrowed—and this discussion is more than pertinent to Digital Humanities if it seeks to grapple more with our relationship to technology), but rather that modern man no longer sees the need to conceive themselves in sweeping arches of time that emanate from Earthly posterity. In conceding to the thought of Lukacs and his idea of “transcendental homelessness”, it feels that Benjamin does certainly grasp this symptom of modern man and thus the novel, in which “the meaning of life”, and its unity, can be “compressed in memory”.