Norm Friesen

Preparing an abstract for a presentation at SFU’s Ed. Summer Institute, and have been inspired by Diskurse des Lernens(Discourses of Learning) by Käte Mayer-Drawe. Here’s my translation of a page from the introduction:

Learning begins… where and when that which is familiar loses its utility and that which is new is not yet useful: “when the old world is, so to say, abandoned, and a new one does not yet exist” (Mead). Its path leads not from shadows to the light; instead it brings one into the twilight, at a threshold between no longer and not yet. From a pedagogical perspective and in the strictest sense, learning is an experience. This is the central thesis of this book. As simple as this may sound, its implications are both subversive and anachronistic. Disruptions, difficulties and other inadequacies are unpopular, because frictionless, high-speed accommodation within a stress-free atmosphere is the ideal of our time; and in this context, a pedagogical theory of learning that focuses on inefficient uncertainties can have particular meaning. In a time where [instructional] technologies are used for the production of members of a globalized society, there is no room for any lack or absence. Accumulation is the decisive keyword; accommodation is the successful action.

It is the dictatorship of the machine which also determines our view of learning. Machines generally have nothing to gain when they enter into difficulties. Difficulties in this sense are only interruptions which must be eliminated. Maturana and Varela speak of perturbations, which bring about or resolve change, and which are themselves “determined by the structure of the perturbating system.” The structure of the organism determines what happens. Indeed, we are not absolutely different from machines, but we diverge decisively from them in that we profit from indeterminacy and that difficulty and loss actually makes us more knowledgeable. We know of the pain of thinking. “The unthought hurts because we’re comfortable in what’s already thought” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 20). (Mayer-Drawe, 2008, p. 15).

Just published a paper on CTheory.net titled:

Doing with Icons makes Symbols; or, Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface

Here’s a sample: “Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts of human development and activity. They are not simply metaphors enabling, say, a particular conception of memory, perception or language — as is the case for Plato’s wax tablet, Descartes’ camera obscura or Chomsky’s computational “language organ.” Instead, media form the organizing principles for the psyche and its functions overall; they provide the pivotal moment for maturation and humanization — the point where human development allegedly diverges decisively from the animal to the human. But in these contexts, media are not simply the basis, cause or source of psychological phenomena; they are inextricable from and in a sense even constitutive of them.”

Robert Rosenberger (Georgia Tech) has put together a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology based on my article on Dissection & Simulation: Transparency or Encumbrance? (draft).

This special issue contains articles or responses by Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Estrid Sørensen, Darin Barney, and Rosenberger himself, as well as my own response to them.

Available here are Rosenberger’s introduction and my own reply to the various responses:

• Introduction by Robert Rosenberger
• Less is More: A Response to Ihde, Rosenberger, Borgmann, Barney and Sørensen by Norm Friesen

I’ve tracked down a copy of an early paper by Kittler, titled “Forgetting” (1979). The translation appears to be quite good, except for the unfortunate rendering of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn as in the title, above. But this actually proves Kittler’s point: Despite the insistence of hermeneutics on the integrity of the work and of the author’s communication through it, the hermeneutic “work” was in Kittler’s time (and much more clearly today) overshadowed by the database, catalogue, archive, and algorithms of translation and organization. Increasingly, these are the only means of access, persistence, organization and retrieval for these works –via online catalogues, full text databases and the ubiquity of Google queries:

The person who draws up catalogues does not understand them any more than the person who uses them. A book list, a representation of the keys on a typewriter, or a telephone book do not constitute sentences, but statements. Catalogues are statements which make statements manipulable. And if the most frequently printed and the most frequently used books today are tables, inventories, circuit charts which only schizo[phrenic]s write or read from front to back, then [how can] hermeneutics, without question, takes as its point of departure that subclass of books that some people still write or read from front to back.

Kittler further argues that these books and instruments are imperfect, providing flawed representations of the information they organize –pointing the user to missing files or records, deleted Web pages and dead domain names. Forgetting, in other words, is one of their key functions –and it appears as similarly indispensable in the methodology outlined by Kittler in this remarkable piece.

From: Discourse. Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Nr. 3, 1981, 88-121

(Hint: It’s NOT the same thing as the Toronto School of Communications.)

I’ve been working with Darryl Cressman on an article on “Die kanadische Schule” for a German Handbook of Media Studies. The piece will be translated and then published by Metzler (the Metzler Dictionary of Media Studies and Media Theory, already in print, is to the right).

Here’s how we explain the difference between the two “schools:”

To speak of a general Canadian school of media theory is to use a specifically German label, one that can be traced to Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, where he inaccurately attributes the term to Arthur Kroker’s Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. …A Canadian school of media theory and Toronto school of communication both refer to the same general intellectual output, but differences in each name” and frames this output is significant. To speak of the “Toronto school” is to see this work as a local approach to communication, suggesting that it was a faction within the larger, contemporaneous and mainly empirical study of communication. To speak of a “Canadian school” suggests something much more substantial, namely the founding, as Dieter Mersch describes, of a “general theory of media” or of the original introduction of “the term ‘media’ as it is used in cultural theory today.”

See the entire article on the Canadian School (pdf).

An excellent article has just appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement: “Cap and Gown Learning on a Shoestring Budget.”

It focuses on low- and no-cost educational options that are starting to emerge as Open Educational Resources are not only accumulate, but are organized into groups and programs, and are (only very gradually) associated with credentials.

One sentence in particular caught my attention:

“some businesses that reimburse employees’ tuition fees are also becoming interested in free- and low-cost online education providers. This could put more pressure on traditional universities to accept academic credits from outside sources…”

I would only qualify this compelling claim by saying that this would put more pressure on parts of the university that respond very directly to businesses that reimburse employees’ tuition fees. This would include a range of disciplines and programs, but only a part of what the university offers. Particularly affected would be professional graduate programs (e.g., business itself), but large parts would remain unaffected (e.g., the general BA).

It may be helpful to recall that Clark Kerr (Berkeley U’s president during the tumultuous ’60′s; pictured above trying to placate student protest) characterized the modern university as a “Multiversity.” This refers to a loose collection of communities or groups rather than a unity implied in the term university:

the community of the undergraduate and the community of the graduate; the community of the humanist, the community of the social scientist, and the community of the scientist; the communities of the professional schools; the community of all the nonacademic personnel; the community of the administrators.

The point is that the university is a conglomerate, not a monolith: some communities, some programs and functions cobbled together in an institution that has encompassed everything from agriculture to zymology are more vulnerable than others. The multiplicity of elements that the “Multiversity” implies is certain to continue to change, with some elements being more susceptible to alternative models of organization and accreditation than others.

In completing a research project looking into McLuhan, media theory and education, I’ve been reading about an early experiment on “certain media biases” and the pedagogical form of the lecture. Download a .pdf of the initial report, originally published in 1954 in Explorations. The New York Times (right) reported on it as well. Marchand’s McLuhan biography, provides a brief excellent overview:

One of the more interesting experiments the seminar group conducted was an attempt, orchestrated by Carpenter, to demonstrate that different media of communication did indeed have an effect quite apart from the content of information they conveyed. In the spring of 1954 more than one hundred students were divided into four groups. At the local studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one group watched a lecture delivered on television, a second attended the same lecture delivered in a television studio, a third listened to it over the radio, and a fourth read it in printed form. All groups then took an exam to test their comprehension and retention of the contents of the lecture. As Carpenter later wrote in Explorations, “About twenty of us in the seminar placed bets on the outcome. Academics all, we each seriously thought print would win and merely selected other media as sporting bet.” It was the group watching the lecture on television that scored highest in the test, however. The print group scored lower than even the radio listeners.

German Documentary: M. McLuhan: Visionary of the Media Age from Norm Friesen on Vimeo. (The entire broadcast can be viewed here.)

Interviewer: …but [he] wasn’t a systematizer

Martina Leeker (media studies, Cologne): …that makes it perhaps difficult to work with him in Germany. …but that is also part of the enormous wealth that he brings.

Interviewer: what surprises me about McLuhan, when one thinks about media theory and media philosophy, is that one has the feeling that since his time, not much has happened. Why is he still so great/important?

Lutz Hachmeister (media historian/filmaker): yes, well Tom Wolfe, the American author and journalist wrote that [McLuhan] is to be categorized with Einstein, Newton and Freud. Wolfe asked “what if he is right?” That was in 1965. And I think that today we can say that he is indeed in this league. He is a completely outstanding intellectual of the 20th century. …One of the few people who after reading three, four pages in the Medium is the Massage, which for us was the mao bible of communications studies (i.e. in the ’60s), who opens a fully new world of knowledge. And I know of no other author in this field of media theory / communications studies who has provided me with this –even now.

Frank Schirrmacher (editor-in-chief of the national daily FAZ): And what you are saying about there not being anyone else: we can be certain of that today. But there was a time of latency, a time in-between. I can say for myself: I read him differently than Hachmeister, somewhat later I believe (although we are the same age). He was an antidote, an antidote -–if one was interested in culture and media– against a force(?) that was at that time very strong, with great moral strength, in Germany. This was the critique of the consciousness and culture industry. We all know the names: Adorno of course, Enzensberger, the Frankfurt School…

Besides his rather un-German lack of systematicity, what stands out in the German reception of McLuhan is that he earlier presented and still presents an alternative (“antidote”) to Marxist critiques of culture and media. Instead of the Frankfurt school’s rejection of nearly all modern media (outside of established “bourgeois” culture) as expressions of industrialized manipulation, McLuhan’s media theory or philosophy is seen as offering something very different. This exchange is fairly consistent with other claims about McLuhan in the German context, and the assumptions behind and implications of these claims are interesting. Most importantly, McLuhan is considered to be a theorist and philosopher, equal or indeed superior to the likes of Adorno and others in the Frankfurt school. This gives McLuhan’s work a broader scope and significance than describing him (for example) as a pop prophet or patron saint. The latter kinds of labels give his authority a religious flavour, and suggest that it derives from his anticipation of recent technological developments. The German reception has granted him the stature of a philosopher, theorist and intellectual, and has also shown that his work can sustain a dialogue on this level.

(For a few further thoughts on these questions, see Friesen, N. (2011). Marshalling McLuhan for Media Theory. English Studies in Canada. 36(2-3) pp. 5-9. Draft available at:  http://learningspaces.org/papers/Marshalling_McLuhan.pdf).

A presentation by Wayne Mackintosh, hosted at a panel on Open Education held at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) on Oct. 20, 2011. Wayne Talks about openness in education, OERu, and points to some possibilities for TRU’s future role in it.

To view all the videos from this panel presentation (i.e. Lalita Rajasingham’s presentation and the discussion afterwards, see: http://ruopen.tru.ca/