Question Technology

Revisiting Snow's Two Cultures

New Scientist asked several prominent people for an update on C.P. Snow's Two Cultures: Science and Art: Still Two Cultures Divided?  I finally got around to reading Two Cultures a few months ago. What I liked best was Stefan Collini's historical introduction (which takes up about half the book and is worth the price).

Collini is the first respondent in New Scientist's article:

C. P. Snow intended to call his lecture "The Rich and the Poor" - and regretted not doing so. This title points to what remains valuable about the essay now. Helping the world's impoverished majority meet their basic needs remains an obligation of richer societies, and applied science is a vital tool.

In other ways, though, Snow's lecture is superficial and misleading. Despite its subsequent reputation, it does not make useful distinctions between types of enquiry or discipline, making a thin contrast between "physicists" and "literary intellectuals" (mostly modernist poets and novelists, not scholars in the humanities). It also identified a rather outdated element of English cultural attitudes and snobbery, rather than a true divide between disciplines. It makes better sense to talk of "two-hundred-and-two cultures" than of "two cultures". [...]

The more damaging influence of Snow's lecture has been to encourage the prejudice that natural science is the only reliable source of "objective" knowledge, and to support the misguided belief that science and technology are undervalued in the UK and so should receive preferential treatment.

Update: Seed Magazine has a similar feature about Two Cultures, but theirs is video  because Seed is all hip and youthful: Are We Beyond The Two Cultures?

The Complexities of Dying in a High-Tech Era

I thought this recent Fresh Air interview with Robert Martensen was very good: End of Life Care in America, A Doctor's Diagnosis. Martensen discusses the problem of medical intervention in the very final stages of life.

He has written a book called A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era.

From the book description:

Critical illness is a fact of life. Even those of us who enjoy decades of good health are touched by it eventually, either in our own lives or in those of our loved ones. And when this happens, we grapple with serious and often confusing choices about how best to live with our afflictions.

 

A Life Worth Living is a book for people facing these difficult decisions. Robert Martensen, a physician, historian, and ethicist, draws on decades of experience with patients and friends to explore the life cycle of serious illness, from diagnosis to end of life. He connects personal stories with reflections upon mortality, human agency, and the value of “cutting-edge” technology in caring for the critically ill. Timely questions emerge: To what extent should efforts to extend human life be made? What is the value of nontraditional medical treatment? How has the American health-care system affected treatment of the critically ill? And finally, what are our doctors’ responsibilities to us as patients, and where do those responsibilities end? Using poignant case studies, Martensen demonstrates how we and our loved ones can maintain dignity and resilience in the face of life’s most daunting circumstances.

Novelist Jim Harrison's blurb gets to the heart of the matter:

“A Life Worth Living is a deeply engaging book. It can be read as a self-defense manual. In fact it should be read by, say, anyone over forty-five because we are all destined to do battle with the medical industrial complex which seems quite confused about helping us out of life. Martensen, who is both an M.D. and an historian of medicine, gracefully illumines the problems we all face.” – Jim Harrison, author of Returning to Earth

In Mortal Hands

This new book sounds very interesting: In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age by Stephanie Cooke. From the book description:

This provocative history of nuclear power is perfectly timed for today, when Americans are gravely concerned with nuclear terrorism, and a nuclear renaissance is seen as a possible solution to global warming. Few have truly come to terms with the complexities of an issue which may determine the future of the planet. Nuclear weapons, it was once hoped, would bring wars to an end; instead, they spurred a massive arms race that has recently expanded to include North Korea and I ran. Once seen as a source of unlimited electricity, nuclear reactors breed contamination and have been used as covers for secret weapons programs, from India and Pakistan to Iraq and Iran. 

The evolving story of nuclear power, as told by industry insider Stephanie Cooke, reveals the gradual deepening of our understanding of the pros and cons of this controversial energy source. Drawing on her unprecedented access, Cooke shows us how, time and again, the stewards of the nuclear age—the more-is-better military commanders and civilian nuclear boosters—have fallen into the traps of their own hubris and wishful thinking as they tried to manage the unmanageable. Their mistakes are on the verge of being repeated again, which is why this book deserves especially close attention now.

The author has a web site for the book at In Mortal Hands.

Twitter, Books and Reading

A few interesting items I spotted in the cyberstreams today related to twitter, books, and reading:

Seth Finkelstein has a nice post summing up what Twitter is all about (in short, ego): Twitter -- I'm not getting suckered again.

Nicholas Carr wrote a very funny piece (Tim Writes a Book) about Tim O'Reilly's new simplified book for the twitter set called The Twitter Book. O'Reilly has said it "reinvents the book in the age of the web" by omitting such troubling things as "a sustained narrative." This book does sound silly and a bit pointless, but to his credit, O'Reilly has also published Steve Talbott's thoughtful critiques of technology (and they're nothing if not sustained narratives), so maybe it balances out.

Meanwhile, in that alternate reality where people still read complicated works of fiction, Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas puts out a call not just for more readers but for new, active "readers of talent":

"In the flames of this dream of mortgages and the golden calf of the gothic novel, the stupid legend of the passive reader was forged. This monster’s fall is giving way to the reappearance of the reader of talent, and the terms of the moral contract between author and the public are being reframed. Those writers breathe once more who are desperate for an active reader, for a reader open enough to permit into her mind the figure of a conscience radically different from her own."

Link: Vila-Matas Calls for Readers of Talent (Conversational Reading)

If you read Spanish (I don't) you can follow that link to the whole column. Two of Vila-Matas's books are available in English and I highly recommend them. I liked Bartleby & Co. so much I accidentally bought it twice.

Book Notes

Jim Knipfel's Unplugging Philco is a great little Vonnegut-esque scifi novel set in an America where surveillance technology and terrorism paranoia have reached extremes following an event referred to as "The Horribleness." The protagonist is Wally Philco who starts to rebel against the technology of the system and ends up working with a gang of "Unpluggers" who quote Ned Ludd and plan a revolution. The humor is a bit cheesy so don't expect high art, but it's still worth your time.

Novelist Mark Helprin wrote a provocative op-ed two years ago in the New York Times called A Great Idea Lives Forever, Shouldn't Its Copyright? (An inaccurate title, for which he blames the Times editors, as he says he never endorsed the idea of perpetual copyright.) That article provoked "three quarters of a million nasty comments" and he has now published a book called Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto that is sure to provoke plenty more. NPR featured a short interview with him today as well as a response by Lawrence Lessig: 'Digital Barbarism' wages Online Copyright Battle. I just picked the book up so I don't yet have an opinion on it... I'm sympathetic to the basic argument, I think (that copyright is important but it shouldn't be forever, and that "free culture" is problematic).

Lost in Cyburbia

This new book by James Harkin sounds interesting. From the cover blurb:

The early twentieth century saw the slow but steady exodus of the population from inner cities to the suburbs. We are currently witnessing a similar transformation as our new century establishes itself, but in an entirely different realm. As new technologies proliferate — personal computers, the communication gadgetry of mobile devices and access to the internet — our culture is participating in a mass electronic migration. James Harkin christens this destination to “Cyburbia” — the ether of “online,” where we spend so much of our lives.

Once upon a time there were no text messaging, no e-mail and no social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and MySpace. The introduction of these new forums for communication has radically transformed the way that we live — and we can only guess what will come next. Innovative and extremely timely, Lost in Cyburbia describes the architecture of our digital life, how it has developed over the past seventy years and how it will evolve in the future. The narrative recounts how the theories of Norbert Weiner (the inventor of cybernetics) and Marshall McLuhan inspired the counterculture radicals in the sixties and seventies, and traces how their pioneering idealistic and theoretical work laid the groundwork for a system whose central idea is bringing about direct communication between peers, outside the reach of authority.

Harkin explores what it means to be in the loop — and our obsession with instant access to information and how it is shared over networks — and considers what has been lost and what has been gained. Are we more connected than ever before or more isolated? Have our thinking processes been forever altered? Is the democratic nature of the net slowly being eroded by corporate interests? Or, as once hoped, will the net enable the awakening of a new kind of global consciousness?

Links:

• Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own (Canadian edition at Amazon)
• Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are (UK edition at The Book Depository)
• Cyburbia.tv -- a web site for the book with videos.

(via Core77)

Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

A syllabus by Robert Lanham in McSweeney's: go read the whole thing.

(via Nick Carr)

Welcome to the Future of Books (Great moments in OCR)

I was checking out Google's updated mobile site on my iPod Touch and noticed that it includes Google Books. The interface is actually not bad, but the OCR could use some work. Below is Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, looking a little like a ransom note or Riddley Walker. To be fair, the regular text is not as messed up as the TOC and list of "illustbations". I fear for a future, though, when all we might have left is crappy OCR'ed e-books of classics. Arga warga.

(Yeah, I know they save the full scans too and you can view the books as images in the non-mobile version.)

Chris Hedges on Atheism, Science, and Moral Progress

Chris Hedges's When Atheism Becomes Religion* might be of interest to readers of this blog for its critique of the scientistic thinking underlying recent books about atheism by the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.

The book is not a defense of religion (and Hedges wrote a previous book criticizing Christian fundamentalism) but a defense of moderation. He sees these new figures as scientific utopians who have an irrational belief in moral progress and are just as dangerous as religious fundamentalists.

A quote from the last chapter:

The contemporary atheists, while many are noted scientists, are deluded products of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about religion, human progress and meaning in the impoverished language of television slogans. They play to our fears, especially of what we do not understand. Their words are sensational, fragmented and devoid of content. They appeal to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and use them to dismiss historical, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are good. They proclaim the violence employed in our name a virtue. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They assure us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of being. Our way of life is the best. They indulge us in our delusional dream of human perfectibility. They tell us we will be saved by science and rationality. They tell us that humanity is moving inexorably forward. None of this is true. It defies human nature and human history. But it is what we want to believe.

*This is the title of the new paperback edition of a book published in hardcover with the too-clever title I Don't Believe in Atheists. He should have retitled his War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning while he was at it.

There's more info about Hedges at Truthdig, where he writes a column.

Bioethics in the Age of New Media (and Robo-Pets)

I love this cover (the book sounds interesting too). Bioethics in the Age of New Media by Joanna Zylinska, forthcoming in May:

Bioethical dilemmas—including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion—have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, among the public, and in professional and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media, Joanna Zylinska argues, is the transformation of the very notion of life. In this provocative book, Zylinska examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, she goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose a new "ethics of life" rooted in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop.

After a detailed discussion of the classical theoretical perspectives on bioethics, Zylinska describes three cases of "bioethics in action," through which the concepts of "the human," "animal," and "life" are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of "bioart" as Eduardo Kac's infamous fluorescent green bunny.

Zylinska addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, Zylinska makes the case for a new nonsystemic, nonhierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

The cover reminds me of this (Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner's Guide by Blay Whitby). I wonder how many other robo-pet book covers there are.

One more (yes, I'm a bit too obsessed with book design): Introducing Artificial Intelligence by Henry Brighton.

Polity's Digital Media and Society Series

I'd seen a couple of these books before but didn't realize they were part of a series. All 8 books sound excellent. Here is the blurb for the recently published Search Engine Society by Alexander Halavais:

Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet while much has been written about how to use search engines and how they can be improved, there has been comparatively little exploration of what the social and cultural effects might be. Like all technologies, search engines exist within a larger political, cultural, and economic environment. This volume aims to redress this balance and to address crucial questions such as:

• How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work?
• What are the 'search engine wars', what do they portend for the future of search, and who wins or loses?
• To what extent does political control of search engines, or the political influence of search engines, affect how they are used, misused, and regulated?
• Does the search engine help shape our identities and interactions with others, and what implications does this have for privacy?

Informed members of the information society must understand the social contexts in which search engines have been developed, what that development says about us as a society, and the role of the search engine in the global information environment. This book provides the perfect starting point.

Link: Digital Media and Society. The site also has a blog and some links to resources and course syllabi.

Sven Birkerts resists the Kindle

Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies, has an article in The Atlantic about the Kindle-izing of books. It is probably a disservice to snippet him, but here are some excerpts:

Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer—a skeptic if not a downright resister? Perhaps it is because I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon.

[...]

The Kindle is just a device and the Kindle experience is still mainly about text and reader (and convenience and cost-savings)—I know that. But we should not forget that the sum of reader-text encounters creates our cultural landscape. So if it happens that in a few decades—maybe less—we move wholesale into a world where information and texts are called onto the screen by the touch of a button, and libraries survive as information centers rather than as repositories of printed books, we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another. We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators. We may gain an extraordinary dots-per-square-inch level of access to detail, but in the process we will lose much of our sense of the woven narrative consistency of the story. That is the trade-off. Access versus context.

Link: Resisting the Kindle.

I think he has a point, and Birkerts is a valuable voice to have on this issue, but I feel like his arguments against e-books are getting more and more tenuous. He's not so much warning us of a negative effect now as warning us about change itself and the uncertainty it brings.

Regarding the loss of context, I'm tempted to recommend George W. S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context, but honestly I haven't retained a thing from reading that book besides the title... maybe it's relevant, maybe not. I'm clearly failing at literary-luddite comprehension today.

Update: Here's a smarter post by Scott Esposito on the same topic: Sven Birkerts Still Harping on Context.

The End of Books by Uzanne and Robida

Albert Robida was a 19th century French artist and writer of satirical science fiction. I first heard of him last year when I read about him in Maggie Jackson's Distracted. Jackson described some of Robida's surprisingly accurate predictions from his 1882 novel The Twentieth Century, which is the only work of his that's currently in print in English translation. Robida was a contemporary of Jules Verne but is much less known today, at least in the English-speaking world.

I was searching for more information on Robida and came across a short story from 1894 called The End of Books, written by Octave Uzanne and illustrated by Robida. It's a pretty amusing read in light of the ever-present fretting over the death of books, the threat of audio books (see Kindle), and the invention of things called "video books" (see Jeff Jarvis). Uzanne and Robida predict (and to my ears make fun of) this very same stuff. Below is one of Robida's illustrations of a future reader, enjoying a book the modern way -- by listening to and viewing it.

Links to the story and related material:

• The University of Adelaide has an English translation: The End of Books.
• An excellent summary of the story in English by Michael Ward, with links to the French text and illustrations: abstract.
• Gutenberg has the French text and illustrations: Robida. (They have a link to a supposed English version but it's actually the French.)
• An article by Edward Tenner about Robida: "World Greatest Futurist" (see the pdf).

Book Notes

It's been a while since I did a book post here. Here are a few newish books I think are worth your time.

My pick for best book of 2008 is Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Jackson's main topic is attention, but the book is about much more than that. She surveys the impact of technology on modern society from a wide variety of angles and sources, including science, literature, philosophy, and personal interviews. The style is more journalism than popular science, which seems to have disappointed some of the Amazon reviewers. If you liked the style of Bill McKibben's Enough then you'll probably like this one.

According to Jackson's website the book is coming out in paperback in September.

My pick for best book of 2009 (so far) is the second edition of Hubert Dreyfus's On The Internet. I wrote about the first edition (published in 2001) previously. A lot has changed since then and it shows in this heavy revision. Dreyfus's previous pessimism about whether search will ever work on the Internet is largely gone now, thanks to the success of Google. The book's second topic, distance learning, is less hyped these days so Dreyfus devotes less attention here to debunking it. In new material he describes his positive experiences with podcasting lectures via iTunesU and his not-so-positive experience lecturing in Second Life. For Dreyfus, embodiment is vital to experience, and his critique of Second Life and telepresence in general follows that argument, using ideas from Heidegger and existentialist philosophers.

On The Internet is part of Routledge's Thinking In Action series of books applying philosophy to contemporary topics. Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost philosophers of technology and also possibly the world's leading expert on Heidegger. If you ever decide to tackle Being and Time, as I am thinking of doing this year, then check out Dreyfus's Heidegger course on iTunes. It's probably my only hope of halfway understanding that book.

Finally, just in time for the silliness of switching to daylight savings time this weekend, you may want to check out Michael Downing's Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. This is a revised edition of a book that came out a few years ago at the same time as another book on the same topic by David Prerau called Seize the Daylight. I have not yet read either, but I picked up Downing's book based on the strength of a previous book of his I read (Shoes Outside The Door). There is an excerpt from Spring Forward at Downing's site.

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The Reality of Radical Life Extension

In case this blog is seeming a bit too frivolous lately, here's a short quote from Simon Critchley's brilliant Book of Dead Philosophers, from his entry on Lucretius. (Something for Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil and other modern techno-immortalists to think about.)

To run away from death is to run away from oneself, to succumb to the desire for immortality, against which Lucretius offers a mathematical argument: the amount of time one is alive is not going to reduce the eternity of one's death:

So an unquenchable thirst for life keeps us always on the gasp. By prolonging life, we cannot subtract or whittle away one jot from the duration of our death. However many generations you may add to your store by living, there waits for you nonetheless the same eternal death.

What is a year or a decade more or less in comparison to the length of time spent dead? Viewed from the standpoint of eternity, what Spinoza calls sub specie aeternitatis, life's brevity or longevity is nothing in comparison to the eternity of our death. Moreover, this eternity is nothing to fear, but is the basis for contentment and calm.

Critchley takes as his starting point in this book the saying from Cicero, echoed by others through the ages, that "to philosophize is to learn how to die."