That question has been a long-term puzzlement for me.
Although the last thing that the world needs is another definition for literacy, mine is fairly simple: Literacy is the manipulation of symbols. If we want to talk about mathematical literacy, computer literacy, or a traditional alphabetic literacy, I think that my definition holds up. “Manipulation” is a broad enough word to cover reception (reading) and invention (writing), as well as rearrangement (remixing, if you’d like).
But “manipulation” in my simple definition also implies artful, studied symbolic action (hat-tip to Kenneth Burke). The New Oxford American Dictionary on my Mac here adds the qualifier “typically in a skillful manner” in its definition of manipulate.
This semester I’m teaching a course called Humanizing Technology. One of my opening remarks to the class at its first meeting last Tuesday night was that the course’s title is kind of a lie: Technology, specifically the digital/computer technology that is the focus of the class, isn’t waiting for us to humanize it; it’s already a bit too humanized, in so far as technology reflects human imperfection, as all symbol systems do, as well as a human desire to control and perfect—or what Burke describes in his “Definition of Man” (which students are reading this week) as both being “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy” and “rotten with perfection.”
Symbolicity rules the terms of engagement with digital technologies. And digital technologies, no matter how magical, are both the product and the enabling force of specific symbol systems: computer languages.
Of all the challenges that I will be putting in front of students this semester, working through Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages (7L7W for short) is the one that already has students most on edge (judging by the number of emails I’ve received this first week of class alone).
As I’ve reassured a number of students this week, 7L7W is not on the reading list because I think it will (or even can) make anyone a programmer; it’s there because I want to achieve two goals.
The first is to demystify programming languages, and the learning of them, by simple (over)exposure. Seven languages is a lot by any measure, especially spread out over seven weeks (more like ten because of how the class is structured). Especially in a course offered in the humanities department. (For some students in the course, particularly my undergraduates coming in from the Information Technology and Management program, that demystification may not be so profound. Though I’m hoping the learning that Tate encourages in the book will.)
The second and, to my mind, more important goal is to help students come to see programming languages (as well as other symbol systems, from number systems like hex and octal right down to binary and ASCII and its modern day Unicode supersets) as designed things. Just as its tempting to think that spoken and written languages came down directly from the gods, so too is it tempting to think that computer languages themselves have their own origins in divinity, or something outside of human invention and cooperation.
One of the features that sold me on the 7L7W book (I’d also considered Chris Pine’s excellent Learn to Program) was the interviews that Tate arranged with the creators or lead developers of the languages in the book. It’s one thing to slog through the syntax and application of, say, Ruby; it’s another to do so alongside the words of Ruby’s creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, who recalled:
Right after I started playing with computers, I got interested in programming languages. They are the means of programming but also enhancers for your mind…
The idea of moving from play to an interest in programming languages, I believe, is unusual. Matz further observed that “the primary motivation” to designing Ruby was “to amuse myself.”
And this is where I return to my original question: Why don’t writers gravitate toward code? Writers, and not necessarily even good ones, all share a certain love for how amusing written language is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have puns, double entendre, and other forms of word play. We likewise wouldn’t have style, or at least a sense of it. And less obviously, we probably wouldn’t have writing period unless it were well funded (Boswell’s Life of Johnson is quotable here: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”)
There are few writers I can think of, though, who would find much amusing about HTML5 or Ruby. And that is unfortunate, especially when there is so little to lose in being exposed (as my students will be) to computer languages. I’m not crazy enough to believe that all writers will become programmers and developers. But some might. And quite possibly to good effect. Although at first glance a computer language like Ruby is lacking in the flexibility and ambiguity of a natural human language, it is nevertheless full of subtlety and elegance—and has a self-consciousness and even humor about itself that is absent in natural human language (minus maybe a fake one like Pig Latin).
Put another way, the distance between writing and the digital-material conditions and technologies that support writing should be of far more concern than past distances between, say, writers and typists, or scribes and makers of parchment or stone tablets.
Why? Because the digital-material conditions that make Facebook or Tumblr or even Microsoft Word possible are grounded in symbolicity that, like traditional alphabetic writing or even media-based writing (images, film), has a certain grounding in language itself. There is a continuity between communication through and programming of digital technologies, despite the assumption that writers/communicators and other lute-playing humanistic wood nymphs comprise one camp, and cold, calculating, logical (a- or anti-humanistic) programmers compromise another. It’s much more complicated than that. And I still don’t have an answer for my question.
Smaller Magnetic Materials Push Boundaries of Nanotechnology (NYTimes.com) -
Fascinating article that looks at the current outer limits of digital storage at the atomic level, including some of the implications for quantum computing.
“I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.” — Steve Jobs
One of the wickedly fun things about anonymous, academic peer review is what I have come to think of as the reviewer confessional. More than a few times I’ve submitted conference proposals or academic articles that somehow are taken very personally by the nameless reviewer on the other end, who then makes a sort of confessional digression from the actual review of my work.
Often this looks like someone taking something way too personally. For one of my articles, I remember something to the effect of, “Well, I would never personally want to learn how to write code…” Which is strange to me. When I review other’s research, I’d never write “Well, I would never personally want to…” followed by some component part of the research, or even some ancillary detail. What difference does it make? And yet still—that my work would be taken so personally, to the point that anonymous reviewers feel the need to defend themselves, or somehow say that my research is good for everyone else, but really just not applicable to the reviewer him/herself: that’s fascinating.
So I suppose I wasn’t surprised when this happened with a workshop I proposed for Computers and Writing 2012 that, like most of the things I propose for conferences, is a bit of a stretch. Titled “End-to-End Agile Web Application Development from Basically Nothing,” it’s a day-long workshop that hits both the front- and back-end of web application development in a whirlwind introduction to everything from version control to HTML5 to Node.js.
As I rhetorically (sort of) asked in the body of the proposal, “Is this a tall order for a day’s work(shop)? Absolutely. But the goal here is to provide participants with a full, end-to-end overview of the art of web application development, and make, by demonstration and example, the argument that we need to invite more of our computers and writing colleagues to work in these areas.”
Anyway, so as to the moment of confession from one of the reviewers. He/she remarked, “Personally, I would not be best served from this kind of workshop since I do not really have the freedom to use any CMS I want or house applications or programs on my office computer, but I also believe that many in the field can benefit from this type of workshop.”
I want to weep for this reviewer. First, because the reviewer has so little control over the computing resources that, presumably, surround his/her teaching and research. That’s just sad. But second, I weep because of the defeatism here. In that second clause, it’s other people in the field who can benefit. Not the reviewer, who (presumably) cannot possibly be served by (meaning, what? learn something?) this workshop because of a heavy-handed set of campus IT policies, or something.
Perhaps I’m reading way too much into this one-off confessional quote (the reviewer did recommend acceptance of the workshop, and indeed the workshop was officially accepted), but the implication here—I don’t control my own stuff, I can’t make my own choices and so therefore, I don’t have to learn this, but perhaps others do—is one that I find really troubling. And it’s also the kind of statement that perhaps only can be aired under the cloak of anonymity, particularly in an area like computers and writing.
“No design idea is ever so great that accessibility shouldn’t be a primary factor in the design itself.” — Me
My field is rhetoric and writing, and particularly the digital side of that field.
As I’m thinking about how to talk about digital craft, it occurs to me (obvious though it might be to others) that when it comes to making digital things, how and why you do them is quite different than that you do them.
There are, for example, no shortage of people who create websites within rhetoric and writing. Or who assign website creation to their students. Yet that those websites are being made is really no longer interesting. Or even important. Can those makers talk about the how and the why, in a way that gets at the materiality of what they’ve made? (E.g., specific choices made at the level of source code, versus a WYSIWYG…which is in a lot of ways a technology that lets you create rudimentary websites with a pre/overdetermined how realized through arbitrary menus and dialog boxes).
I really want to start blogging again. Truly. So, now I’m set up with Tumblr (still using someone else’s template, but that’ll change), which my blog.karlstolley.com subdomain now points to.
“When the tools are complex, when the artifacts produced are abstract, or when tools provide the only means of access to the medium (all conditions in high technology), it can be difficult to say where a tool ends and a medium begins.” — Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, p. 193