T&T buzz continues

Trials & Tribulations in Montreal a few weeks back was a fantastic two days with some awesome people doing very interesting work around digital spaces, particularly blogs and game worlds. While there wasn't quite as much emphasis on the "how" as on the "what", I think that actually reflects a big part of the trials and tribulations of digital research, and so was incredibly apt for this inaugural event. There is so much to think about, study, reflect on around digital life that the how can easily get lost.

Through some of the presentations, I've been challenged and reinvigorated and recommitted to the idea of studying digital life and digital culture. I've even come up with a few topics around game studies, so the whole thing was a smashing success. Have a few ideas now too as to maybe where to go for my PhD - England? Ohio? Oh yeah. Possibilities.

Seems the symposium caused a bit of a buzz for a whole bunch of people and was even written up in the Concordia University Journal, a campus newspaper that circulates rather widely and is also read by alumni around the world.

There was some talk on the closing day at the final dinner about continuing the amazing success and collegiality created in Montreal through to another few years. T&T 2.0 in Toronto next year maybe? Yes, maybe, but filling Kelly's and Shanly's shoes as a coordinator of such an event will definitely be a tall order!

Life outside numbers and religion

I speak disparagingly of positivist scientific ethos in the disciplines at universities, particularly in sociology, what I am truly speaking of is the narrow focus and emphasis on numbers. There is life outside numbers, in my view.

I am starting to see, though, that a more important area to place my interests and scorn isn't against something that is a question of mere research approach, but rather against an entire movement that is diverting scientific resources. That movement is the ensemble of thought, work, power and people that centre around the notion of intelligent design.

A friend of mine (who is somewhat of an independent and public academic and whose opinions about life and thought I respect greatly) has been bringing the issues in this to my attention recently, directing me to the cadre of thinkers who are being dubbed the new atheists. These are a group of influential scientists, including Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg.

An excellent overview of the issues can be found here for science and here for religion And what I grapple with when I read overviews like these and I contemplate them, and when I link it back to the philosophy I'm currently reading, is the incredible arrogance of the human animal, that must believe that humans are of paramount importance to the world and that the beauty and elegance of the universe must be the creation of a conscious omnipotent being who sees humans as "his" children. But I also seem some arrogance in some of the science positions, for simply rejecting outright the fact that humans have long seemed to need some sort of spirituality.

Weinberg makes an excellent point in this presentation though that the approach to truth in science is that science doesn't have heroes. He says that science stamps out wishful thinking and its role is to stamp out religious belief in order free the world from the taint of religion. I think these are a valid point, and an excellent place to place some of my own fundamental beliefs. And I believe that I don't have to believe in a deity in order to act in an ethical and moral fashion. So how do I fashion my own morality and ethics?

It came up in class this week too, while reading and discussing Bhabha, that I seem to leave no room for morality and was implicated as an amoral scholar. I argued that this wasn't true but was then flummoxed. In what do I base my own beliefs in right action? How do I conceive of the right way to act and live, when I feel the need and fundamental rightness of doing has to lay outside of both science and religion?

Heavy questions. So what I'm trying now to suss out, then, through reading more of these new atheists, watching some of the lectures around these debates between science and religion (such as these and these) and through books like Somerville's Ethical Imagination (points of which are presented here in the Massey lectures), is what is it that directs my own sense of "right" behaviour and belief in the absence of an omnipotent director deity.

I'm working on papers that try to see what it is about the human imagination and concepts of agency that requires us to believe in some sort of transcendent human purpose and design, some ineffable spiritual will. Don't know where I'll end up with all of this, but for me, at the moment, the journey is the thing.

Getting that I am not getting it

Do you ever sit down to read theory and start to totally get into it, though you are sure that you're not getting it?

Much of my readings in my TechnoPolitics course have been like that for me. With the exception (oddly) of Heidegger and Marx, I keep delving into to works, reading them and walking away after with the niggling notion that I've only glossed them. That I've missed their profoundness and their applicability to the academic becoming that is me.

Another of those happened today, not in a book this time but in an extract from a cultural studies reader for my Advanced Topics in Cultural Studies course. The chapter in question is by postcolonial theorist Homi Babha. His ideas on intersubjectivity, the subversive possibilities of agency through language, and his readings of Arendt, Bakhtin, Derrida, etc. all feel profoundly right to me. Yet I don't claim to be understanding more than 20% of this.

I wonder how common that feeling is for other becoming academics?

News from the road

There is so much going on right now, in my head and in my external life. I am in Montreal, visiting and meetingup with friends and colleagues, on the tail end of presenting and attending Trials & Tribulations. But I have to beg net time from friends so I'll leave it for now. I'm going to think of this while driving home today and try to sort out what to say about all the various bits I heard, people I met, drinks I had and laughs too.

Bar conversation for grad students

Actual snippets of conversation overheard tonight at the bar, while filling glasses with beer from the not-so-cheap pitchers of Alexander Keiths...

"Oh don't get all Foucauldian on me!"

"...but the hermeneutics of that get so complex when you bring sports into the mix..."

"My distaste for positivist science stems from the first principle..."

"That's the best Starbucks for reading Marx and Hegel in!"

"In the Derrridian sense..."

"Are you going to answer the ICA CFP using your SSHRC or your OGS?"

You know you're in a group of graduate students when this is Friday night bar conversation.

Cultural force of video games

The fact that video games have been economic forces in the last 5-7 years can't be denied -- much of the technical development of video/audio cards and mass capacity hard drives could be said to be driven by the economics of wanting to sell more games through versioning. But the fact that they are become a cultural force is a fairly recent development.

I see a partnership between Telefilm and the video game industry, as they position a video game competition as a "great Canadian" endeavour, as an example of the emerging cultural force of games.

The web as science?

Part of the reason I left sociology to come over to communications & cultural studies is that this latter discipline makes no noises about wanting to be a science. And it seems to me that the study of digital culture needs a nuanced, multi-layered exploration that escapes the rigid instrumental reason of positivist science.

I'm not so happy, then, about Tim Berners-Lee making the pronouncement recently that the study of the web needs to be scientized.

History has shown me that, to date, sociological phenomenon and scientific methodologies are not good ontological and epistemological partners.