The “dots” or “letters,” do move rather nicely through the lines or “communication channels,” and “principal investigator” is a pretty kick-ass title for Edelstein, I must say. 

Said the world, “wasn’t it content we crowned king?” Well, turning content into dots makes us focus on the really important thing, here: writers of the past had friends, apparently. And in some cases, they even had more than one. And hey, with Twitter rebranding their offering as Information Networking, perhaps we will stop caring about either the medium or the message, and start focusing on the network. At the very least, this Stanford venture has the kind of “enduring” appeal of such Facebook apps as Friend Wheel, billed as a “Wheely Good Friend Visualiser.”

Considering this got a green light, things are looking up for me to receive funding for my upcoming project, “Early Modern Marital Dynamics: It’s Complicated – The Tweeting of the Shrew” in which I plot the relationship statuses of major Jacobean and Elizabethan figures over time using a kind of Ur-Facebook made by carving out of the remains of Bebo.

Young Lady Interacting with Print

While at McGill recently, I walked by a poster still advertising a seminar long since passed entitled Reading and Writing: How Young French Women Interacted with Print in the Eighteenth Century. Now, the research and subject matter interest me greatly: as a media/communications junkie I can’t get enough of debates about the evolution in the way we work, think and live through paradigm shifts (orality < print culture < digital < ???)

But that seminar title really rubs me the wrong way and exemplifies some of the common criticisms of academic study that I hear all too often in the ordinary and business worlds.

Literal, much?

Yes, I can see by the write-up that the seminar itself delves deeper, but the title suggests a depressingly literal approach to the medium. Isn’t it one of the small marvels of the universe that what we’re doing (sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers staring at a screen) and what we’re experiencing (James Cameron’s feeble attempt to steal District 9‘s crown as most kick-ass allegorical film of 2009) can be so very different? So why the “Reading and Writing” prefix if your thesis is going to explore how the ideas these women exchanged in space were vastly more interesting than the rote physical activities society assumed were all they had on their agendas?

Passion, please!

Call me old-fashioned, by I like my academia with the kind of near-inhuman levels of obsession and personal investment that pose a serious threat to personal hygiene. Reading about Indonesian fire toads may be dull as dishwater, but all that can change when you hear someone talk about that topic as if it were their raison d’être. If there’s one thing I learned from an academic environment, it’s that being passionate about what you do is often as important as what you’re doing. Just as “Eating and Drinking: Consumption in Nineteenth Century France” does little to convey the wonder of fine French cuisine, so does that seminar title. You can go for dry without completely desiccating your subject…

St. John Interacting with Print

I’m actually really looking forward to following the Interacting with Print Research Group, even if they cut off their coverage at 1900 just when things start getting fun with the rise of newspapers and early film… But I do hope their future seminar topics, titles, descriptions and content are as media savvy as they should be, without such obvious bids for relevance.

For someone else, I can see how when looking over my bio my career path may seem more “road less traveled” than corporate ladder. And it is in contemplating a thorough answer to “Why not The Arts?” that I decided to start this blog. Because I know from personal and professional experience how much Arts grads in general, and theatre grads in particular, are capable of bringing to the web industry. I think we bring a unique perspective to the process, so I thought it was high time I should help to prove, discuss and document it.

So, Why not “The Arts”?

The Simple Answer:

My love of theatre always stemmed from a greater love of all media, so I never think about my journey as ‘changing course,’ per se. To me, it has always seemed a perfectly logical extension of my interests and skills. I get excited to read about updates to Google’s search algorithms, CMS trends or usability just as much as I enjoy reading Wired, AdAge or Direct Marketing. Partly because I genuinely enjoy my work, but also because an arts education prepares you to be passionate about you do. That’s what’s great about us arts types, we really dig research and when we get into something, there’s just no stopping us.

The Fun Answer:

I’ve worked for Arts institutions before. Some people really enjoy the environment, many of them are friends and former co-workers. But it wasn’t for me.

I realized that one of the reasons I started my own theatre company was because I enjoy making theatre like I enjoy scuba diving. A fun, expensive hobby that I love talking about, planning over the course of months and years, and executing at my own pace in my own time. But just as I wouldn’t want to put in a full workday under the sea (for a start, my dive computer would probably explode), it is a little known fact that working in Arts institution can also cause a wicked case of the bends…

Symptoms of high nitrogen levels in the arts careerist

For me, the only cure was a hyberbaric, high pressure web work environment, replete with bigger budgets and great accountability. For some, it’s law or medicine or other agency work.

As I mentioned earlier, I love all media, which is precisely why I’ve studied and worked in the fields that I have. But as I see it, much of the truly innovative, exciting things that are happening in media right this minute are in the digital space. And I want to be a part of that.

• Intermedia: An Art History course on performance/video art, experimental music, and the art scene throughout the 20th Century. I read Kurzweil for the first time and wondered what Socrates would think of mobile devices, given that Plato claimed in Phaedrus that he thought literacy alone would wreck our memories.

• The History of Early Film: If you’re thinking silent era, that’s what I thought too. But no, the era we covered looked at pre-silent era film (before 1915). As in “man gets hit over head by mongoose.” It’s a little like grainy YouTube before the evolution of shot-countershot. Reading about an infant medium spreading its wings (and taking down institutions in its wake: goodbye magic lanterns!) brings so many ideas to the fore on art in the age of digital reproduction…

• The History of Communications – Pre-Electronic & Post-Electronic: Why wouldn’t newspapers suffer in an age of web 2.0 community-building when part of their rise was in capitalizing on nationalistic “imagined communities”? The internet renders your audience if not “real” then, at the very least, not quite as imaginary. Also, learning Bell wanted “Ahoy hoy” to be the official telephonic greeting finally made me understand why Mr. Burns uses it to answer his calls (he is awfully old).

• CyberReligion – Technology, The Internet & Religion: Religious studies course for which we were told to “use the internet as [our] primary text” (well, that and our 400-page reader). More Kurzweil, Baudrillard, McLuhan, it was all about researching the experiential phenomenon of a new medium rising in our midst. From religious ideation similar to when people equated hearing a disembodied voice over the phone to a quasi-religious experience (almost like listening to God himself) to inevitable and gradual mundanification.