Bluegoose on the Brazos - January 25th, 2006

One crucial act of nerdism is to obsess over cool stuff. On the technological side, cool stuff is usually gadgets. A new program, a new game, a new tool. If it's cool, it demands your attention and nothing can get in the way.

For educators who think they can appeal to nerdism by making college courses into computer games, several problems arise. First, school is always decidedly uncool. Second, the educators themselves fall into a kind of nerdism and tend to get excited about their tools and then neglect what they wanted to teach in the first place.

I'm updating today because my DSL at home has been down and I've only been able to do internet stuff at work.

I didn't realize how integrated the new media was in my academic writing till this week. The DSL connection is down at my house so I have no home internet access, not even email. Big deal, I think, I can still write. The power is on, the unlinked computer still works like a fine typewriter. Only when I started writing could I realize, every time I reached for the browser button, how much I had been flowing back and forth between books, word processor, and internet, how often I check a title or a reference in some online archive or the library online catalog or even Amazon.com—none of which were any longer at my finger tips. The virtual library has gone back to artificial and I have to use my natural legs to get me there.

I was flying into Dallas at sunset from the east. Over a thin layer of clouds the sinking sun cast a hazy orange glow. Through the faint orange filter of clouds-light-air, I see the expanse of Lake Texoma (maybe) surrounded by a landscape of farm and ranch country, sketched out by roads and fence lines like a living map. Is the phenomenon natural, artificial, or virtual?

It is natural. The clouds-sunlight-air-water-and-land would be there whether I watched them from the airplane or not. I happen upon them just as surely as I would happen upon yellow sunlight breaking through the pine boughs in an opening in a forest on a long walk.

But it is artificial. I could never see the water and land through the orange filter from this height without the boost I get from the mechanical means of travel. I look from a height twice as high as the peak of the tallest mountain on earth. It's just possible that orange light never looks this way down below.

And it is virtual. I arrive in time to take the view thanks to heavy mediation. The forces that bring me here—the schedules, the linked computers, the human and mechanical networks that keep the plane in the air from colliding with other planes and arriving at this juncture of light and air and evening—have all the qualities of the New Media. They are digitized, networked, and converging.

The categories have meaning only in analysis or as occasionally dominant trends within a world in which they regularly combine to produce effects like the fleetingly sketched map of north Texas through a gauzy orange filter.

Last night I bought one of those plastic boxes of raw "baby" spinach washed and table-ready for the busy consumer. As I was eating a salad of it tonight—January 24, the middle of winter in Texas—a live ladybug crawled up on the lid of my bowl and over onto the table. I watched it crawl away and then checked the place name on the plastic box. The spinach was washed and packed in Salinas, California.

Natural, artificial, or virtual?