On "This Is How We Dream"

Fascinating big picture spit-balling by Rutgers English professor Richard Miller, a self-described "person of the book" who now envisions technology as a means of articulating dreams, making the humanities visible and vital, and actively, immediately pushing ideas into culture where the may exist and evolve free from their creator and context. "As educators," he says, "we must be in the business of sharing ideas freely."

He freely admits that he doesn't know what shape the next evolution of composition will take, and acknowledges some fairly high hurdles to overcome before such composition is accessible by a wide audience, including an "extraordinary combination" of additional resources, the participation and initiative of inspiring and informed teachers, and pedagogy that has yet to be invented. Despite these... well, let's be generous and call the formidable challenges, he foresees a time when students will compose with "digital composing material" -- creating multimedia, multidimensional, aesthetically innovative pieces -- instead of word processors.

Of course, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, one challenge he does not address is that if you a critical mass of information growing exponentially in already (practically) infinite universe of data, your research is only as good as your research tools and the reliability of your sources. Ideas should exist in a free market, but the question of original authorship becomes important when false facts and bad data aggregate. He mentions, for example, following the 2008 election results in real-time; well, I did that too, and the "real time" data offered by a number of of sites was... well, let's be generous (I guess I'm in a giving mood) and call it "incongruous." (I recommend Nate Silver for all your accurate poll number needs, by the way.)

The evolution of methods and tools by which we access and organize this morass of information must keep pace with the web's expansion. And as there are bucks to be made from such services (Google's awesome, but they aren't exactly a non-profit), we have to assume that politics, economics, bias, agendas, and all sorts of other interference may create an illusory free market of ideas. Not that that's anything new.

I don't mean to pooh-pooh Mr. (Dr.?) Miller's presentation or high-minded ideals. As a book person who's deep in the thrall of new media, I'm fully behind his dream, instinctively and optimistically. But my instincts also scream out for somebody to play devil's advocate when we talk about a future that demands "extraordinary" resources, when extraordinary resources have been, historically and without fail, unfairly allotted.

Maybe that's not playing devil's advocate after all, but rather, just playing plain ol' advocate.