Below is my five minute stream of consciousness on where I see technology being in grad school years from now, or perhaps not a new distance future?

What Would Graduate School Look like in a Technology-Rich Future?

 People are going to expect more and more from your time, because everything is can be done so much faster. The only problem I have is, I don’t have a good enough imagination to conceive of specific examples of making the writing and reading process quicker. I supposed that some sort of voice-to-text or thought process-text technology could make the writing process even faster than manually typing. For reading, would be too distant to think that we could just download material to our brain. Perhaps I just don’t’ know enough about the conjectures of technology to know whether or not that is actually a possible thing. But since grade school I remember people talking about, “wouldn’t’ be great if we could just learn by osmosis” and they definitely have that scene in the matrix. But then what is learning? What is it to “know” something if everybody can do it. Of course some people have those same thoughts now about the internet. People 20 years ago, if they wanted to learn something about the a random subject, like Buddhist colonies in Tibet, they would have to go to the “stacks” and hope that the library had a book on that subject. That person would then have to read that book, and to really know it he/she would probably have to find even more books, or perhaps even travel to that place. Now knowledge is available to everyone, well anyone that chooses to find it and put it up there, instead of looking at cat videos. And let’s be honest those cat videos are freaking awesome, and entertaining. What are we using technology for? I recently started to playing some dragon game. Who am I? But then I think that individuals understand knowledge, everyone can have it, but what we do with it will even further be reliant on a unique, creative aspect of it.

My current research project is looking at how feminism is visually construed on Instagram. What kind of images are being posted that reflect how feminism is thought of today? I believe this is a way to look at how 3rd Wave Feminism is thought of today. I am using Instagram because I believe looking within a digital medium is also part of this contemporary engagement. And this medium is also very visually based, which is what I’m interested in. What images are connected to today’s feminism?

However, even though I am interested in a digital medium, I also working within a frame that sees the digital and the nondigital as a fluid state, particularly in today’s age. Because of this I am using critical theory and visual studies that traditionally may look at photographs, although a few look at new media forms.

Many times when the digital and feminism are connected that it is with a cyborgfeminism lens, which is not exactly what I wish to do. In my literature review I want to go through an understand of cyborgfeminism, and what it does bring to 3rd Wave feminism, but also state that this is not how I will be interpreting the Instagram photo posts.

My question is that many cyborgfeminists include Donna Harway’s Cyborg Manifesto, however, for what I am using cyborgfeminism for I don’t believe Donna Haraway says anything specifically for my project. But can I even mention cyborgfeminism without Donna Haraway?

The other day, a friend of mine here at Virginia Tech (a fellow student, though a fiction writer in the MFA program) asked me what my thesis was about. I began talking in earnest about how cultural productions are continually evolving sites rich with interaction between subjects, objects, and the ideologies and structures of social power that inform and are informed by the relationships between them and how an updated understanding of the critical paradigms which may be used to understand these interactions must be continually refined and updated, which is why I’m hoping to proffer (or at the very least, review) an updated interpretative framework that can function productively for reading the modern texts of cultural life and identifying the themes, symbols, and language that determine how culture disseminates ideologies of class, race, gender, sexuality, politics, and other crucial concerns with respect to the globalized, post-postmodern world and vis a vis modern feminist theory as it pertains to subject-object construction, identity formation, and consciousness/reflexivity as a means of developing agency, identity, and mobility within and as actions of transgression against such cultural ideological systems…

And I think it was about at “continually evolving sites” when here eyes started to glaze over, somewhere around “updated understanding of the critical paradigms” when she whipped out her phone and started texting, and near “globalized, post-postmodern world” when she literally turned away from me and started talking with the person sitting next to her.

And really I don’t blame her. At the time, mid-sentence, I was actually starting to wonder how loaded I really was.

This isn’t to say that I was talking nonsense. I happen to believe that I might be on to something really interesting here. But her lack of interest was proof enough that sometimes (or often, depending on who you are and what you’re doing) the language and even topics that we engage with in the scholarly world are not welcome in places like restaurants and bars where the interaction is casual and the answer to any question is expected to be tweetable. The sting that I felt at her lack of tact notwithstanding, I appreciated her refusal to engage with the topic because it manifested a fear of mine that’s grown larger for me the further I climb towards my PhD: the fear that as my work grows more interesting and relevant to intellectuals and scholars, it grows less so to everyone else.

This is why the idea of a blog/YouTube channel as an offshoot of my academic self seems absolutely critical. Especially if my end goal is to offer people (my students, my peers, my readers, my instructors, my future kids) new ways to understand the world around them, then above all else my ideas not only have to be complex and nuanced, they have to be tweetable; they have to be bar-room ready; they have to be grounded not only in a bedrock of previous research and a coherent network of scholarly discussion, but also in the the real experiences, real language, and real world of real people.

This is why I like to keep my blog somewhat irreverant. Why I write fragmented sentences like this one. Why I let the (sometimes not-so-) occasional obscenity stand proud on the page. Why I rant and joke (hopefully) just as much as I muse and ponder. Why I want a YouTube channel that subscribes to the VlogBrothers and PBSIdeachannel and Feminist Frequency and puts out videos that reference Bronies just as much as Judith Butler.

Not only do I want to be out there in academia, I want to be out there in the world. I want my work to be grounded in the conversations I have sitting on barstools with fiction-writing friends. Grounded in the knowledge that relevance has not been sacrificed for complexity and depth. Grounded in the real life of real people.

My greatest fear is not that my work will be irrelevant to the academic community, but that it will be irrelevant to everyone else.

I have to begin this post with the unabashed statement that I am a blatant narcissist. And to that end, I don’t usually like writing blogs online because I’m convinced that the effort is only so much more noise in a vast sea of cacophonous drivel. The feeling runs parallel to the very idea of a Facebook page or a Twitter account… the idea that anybody really cares about what I’m currently having for dinner, how pissed off I am about Futurama being cancelled, or how awesome I think a hand-carved Stormtrooper coffee mug is.

The confession to narcissism might seem to counteract this. After all, aren’t Facebook and Twitter the ideal answer to every narcissist’s most fervent prayers? The ultimate digital tools to draw attention to the self?

True… so perhaps I’ll modify the term: I’m a realistic/pessimistic narcissist (the “slashed” term giving a nod to those who would argue it only natural for the two words to be conflated). Sure, I want everyone to be interested in my life and what I have to say. But I believe on some deeper level that nobody really much cares, because it doesn’t really much matter.

I wonder sometimes if others fool themselves as I do… thinking that perhaps some random internet surfer will ride a digital wave into my part of town and be snagged by the elegance of my prose, miraculously “discovering” my site. But really, how often have I just surfed around reading the random blog and finding something worth connecting with?

And at the end of the day, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, how many of us maintain a steady stream of mental production worth supporting a blog? At the end of the day, perhaps the dread centers not around how many people look at my blog postings, but the cold hard fact that I really do have nothing worthwhile to say.

All of this is counteracted by the comment. The glorious, miraculous comment that for a brief moment shatters the conceptualization of the blog as just more ignored noise in a vast sea of ignored noise. Suddenly, a user steps from the shadows, not only declaring their existence but simultaneously confirming that they have read my blog and, dare I believe it, have been stimulated enough to respond to it. Oh happiest of days! Such glorious payoff!

If you dear reader are not quite sure as to how much sarcasm that last paragraph contained, that makes two of us. On the one hand, the presence of comments does give me a kind of leap inside as a confirmation of my own self-affirmation. On the other hand, how much self-worth am I really locating in that faceless, nameless crowd of potential commentators, or worse yet, tick-marks that make up the pitiful number of page-views my plugin counts for me, as if assigning a number to the lack of readers would somehow make the fact easier to bear?

Is blogging a way to escape or nourish my narcissistic impulses? Does it and the so-called (and the actual) readers confirm the validity or necessity of the activity, or are they just the elements of a support system that continually decenters my self-worth and displaces it into the abstract concept of my supposed readers? And if not that, is it an exercise in futility? A tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it? If nobody hears me, am I really blogging at all?

Now I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeonly old goat who refuses to embrace any new-fangled fancy-schmansy technologimical whatsits because they’re leading to our inevitable destruction – a digital hand-basket in which we are all enthusiastically riding to hell…

but oh who am I kidding, I quite enjoy sounding like that. Doom-mongering is all sorts of entertaining because if you’re right you get to say “I told you so” and if you’re wrong it doesn’t matter because nobody took you seriously in the first place anyway.

But with that being said, I’ll state for the record here that I’m just not comfortable with the level of dependence that new advancements in digital technology are pushing me into.

Let’s take music for example. It used to be, in the good ol’ days, we had to go to the store to buy music. We got a nice shrink-wrapped package that held a disc with a cool design on it and colorful liner notes with the lyrics printed out and everything. And when you took that CD home is was YOURS because you could hold it in your hand, and you could take it anywhere and play it in anybody’s car or boombox or home stereo you wanted. You could give it to your friends and get pissed as hell when they put new scratches on it. At the end of the day, come hell or high water, you could hold that CD and know, without a doubt, that Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water was yours to treasure as long as you possessed that 30 grams of aluminum, lacquer, and plastic.

Now we buy our music from iTunes and hope to God that whatever new extension and format it comes in isn’t packed with DRM nonsense that only lets us play it on one computer, or not be able to burn to a disc, or is a really shitty sample rate, or will commit suicide and refuse to play after X many days, or, worst of all, requires a connection to the Internet. We stream our music now from YouTube channels, Spotify, and Pandora radio. The music we “own” exists somewhere in zeros and ones and we don’t even own those. We own the right to ASK for the music to play, not the music itself.

The newest SimCity title released by EA Games requires an Internet connection to play the game. This is known as “always online digital rights management” and was incorporated into the game ostensibly to facilitate some number of the game’s unique features, but in reality, it was merely an operation to crack down on piracy. This means that if my Internet connection goes down, or worse, the company servers go down, I can’t play the game. I could own the damn thing, own a computer that could run the program, AND have an Internet connection, but if for any reason the company servers are offline, then the game will refuse to play, even though my operating system is perfectly capable of running the code all on its own, even without an internet connection.

As long as I can find a wall socket and some kind of display (tinkering with the input method notwithstanding) I can play Super Mario Brothers to my heart’s content any damn time I please. Don’t have an internet connection? No problem! Nintento goes completely out of business? No problem! I bought that game with my own money (given to me for doing my chores and mowing my parent’s lawn) and I have the right to play it whenever I like regardless of what state the company or my internet connection is in.

But if EA for whatever reason were to go out of business, then no more servers, no more service. Suddenly, everyone who dropped that 60 bucks on SimCity gets a big middle finger as every copy of the game suddenly becomes forever after unplayable. This is exactly what happened on the day of the game’s launch. Hundreds of people who had paid full price to get the game on launch day couldn’t play the title they had just purchased because EA’s servers were having some sort of conniption.

That’s horseshit.

And I see it everywhere. Kindle asks you to forgo that bulky physical library. Your device can carry thousands of books! Yes, until your device breaks… then your thousand books vanish. Until you want to share one of those books with a friend. Until the power goes out and you didn’t charge your device up. Until (if your books are in some sort of “cloud”) a server error decides to delete your library, or until whoever is ACTUALLY owning and possessing that data is compromised.

If Armageddon comes tomorrow, I’ll be reading my copy of World War Z in the what I’m sure will be abundant firelight.

I pay money to POSSESS, not to BORROW.
Advancements in digital technology are quietly pushing us toward more dependency on the companies and servers and data that we do not in fact control. Data is now clouded, video games are played on external servers, programs are run remotely. Products are becoming inexplicably tied to the means by which they are purchased. What happens to your music library if iTunes or god forbid the great and powerful Apple is compromised? And the further we move into “virtual” ownership, the more power we place into the hands of those that ALLOW us to own. When ownership is empowered by that which is outside of my control, it is not real ownership at all. It is an illusion.

We are iTunes customers before and as a prerequisite to being music owners.

The more we move toward a virtual world, the more that money and time and products and relationships and media become a series of ones and zeros that exists simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, the more we must rely on the system that keeps those ones and zeroes moving. And because of the nature of the digital world, I think it is more volatile, unstable, and open to compromise than most people think.