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In my undergraduate days, I always felt
constrained by the traditions and expectations of the
curriculum. So much so, in fact, that I opted for the
marvellous Independent Studies department at Lancaster
University, which is rather like undergraduate research:
you choose your subject area, what you want to say about
it, and how you wish to be assessed. Most people choose
dissertations rather than examinations. I am good at examinations
- or at least, I used to be - but I always knew they were
an inadequate form of assessment. I chose dissertations.
The bulk of my studies were literary
but I wanted to respond to the texts as I wished, and
not according to literary tradition. I enjoyed browsing
the Critical Studies shelves, and found books debating
these kind of questions: what actually is a literary text,
and what can we say about it? I regarded it as a pre-eminently
psychological object, amenable to psychological criticism.
What does a play or novel say about the writer's internal
life, and what kind of psychological life do the characters
demonstrate? I had the freedom to pursue these ideas within
I.S.
'Convergence' is a fashionable
concept, mostly related to technology and the media. Alongside
this phenomenon, I suggest there are new kinds of intellectual
convergence taking place. However before I discuss that,
I want to refer to academia. Convergence occurs as you
progress through the academic system - at postgraduate
level, subject demarcations tend to disappear. A project
may well have content that fits the discrete categories
of English, History and Sociology…and you might conduct
your work within Visual Arts. I knew this was possible
many years ago, but with the exception of I.S., I was
not allowed to pursue it. Intellectual convergence also
features widely in the relatively new areas of Media Studies,
Film Studies and undergraduate Critical and Cultural Studies.
I don't know about university level English these days;
I suspect it has been influenced by these developments,
but that part of it also remains rather more traditional.
Life does not fit into discrete
categories, so narrow specialisation does not reflect
or prepare you for it. I'm a fan of intellectual convergence;
innovative research begins with personal creative thinking,
unconstrained by artificial parameters. And yet…
I'm beginning to think there are
three categories of people involved in digital media:
the artist/designers, the programmers, and the theorists.
And this is a major area for intellectual convergence
" Any professional
trendspotter will tell you that the worlds of technology
and culture are colliding" (Interface Culture 1997,
Steven Johnson: 2). The
artist/designers pursue their work and don't always know
how to justify it conceptually. The programmers crunch
code and get upset with clumsy JavaScript that a content
developer will accept, because their energies are directed
elsewhere. And the theorists - that's me, I suppose -
think about these things in a wider critical and cultural
context.
These categories do merge and
while this can be a creative situation, it also presents
certain problems. A programmer does not have an appropriate
background to develop or apply the theory. They understand
code, interaction, protocols, and project management.
A designer/artist doesn't really care about theory; they
just want to create things. Both of these general types
will be exposed to cultural and theoretical considerations,
but only in a peripheral way. With the proliferation of
digital media and the Internet in particular, you have
a situation where theory does not necessarily derive from
a theorist. This concerns me because the ensuing work
is likely to lack intellectual rigour. Suddenly, we are
all cultural theorists…but what kind of theory is being
presented?
Note: here's an example. It's
actually quite an interesting idea, that the Internet
expands and augments human intelligence. It's not
original; Marshall McLuhan said this many years ago, but
the writer updates it by referencing the Internet. However
my point is this: the writer is an electronics engineer,
not a social theorist. I like this site, incidentally
- I'm not criticising it. What I'm doing is pointing out
how digital artists and technical geeks have recently
become cultural theorists. Sometimes what they say is
OK; sometimes it isn't.
More: the
Geeks are coming...
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