Week 3: Guest Lecture from Neil Baldwin

Neil Baldwin. Image from the Creative Research Centre. 

Thanks so much to Neil Baldwin (Director of the Creative Research Center at Montclair State University) for sharing his thoughts and expertise with us here in the form of an open letter.

Students - please remember to respond in the comments.

January 23, 2011

Dear Jess: I congratulate you on the magnificence of your New Media Narratives course – all of it! -- the Syllabus, the probing and provocative questions, the required readings, the entire “culture” of the work you are doing, and the thoroughness and depth of scholarship.

I am honored to be asked to share my thoughts on transdisciplinarity and on publishing and thereby to make a simulus/contribution to the building-up and looking-forward phase of the course.

I hope you don’t mind that I am communicating as if I were writing a letter.

It’s a way for me to pretend that I am speaking to you and your students since I cannot be there in person, which would be wonderful.

You, Jess, way back when, were one of the first “appreciators” of the Creative Research Center www.montclair.edu/creativeresearch.

I won’t go into the mission and originating impetus behind the CRC, because all of that is well-spelled-out in our Mission Statement and other rhetoric pervading the site.

I would, however, like to direct you and your students to the Web-Bibliography and the Links pages of the CRC.

These have grown exponentially in the past six months, and are the two dimensions of the site of which I am proudest, even moreso than the blogs.

Let me explain why – by way of actually and yes, metaphorically addressing two of the core issues of your course.

The thoughts that follow herewith are actually the first time I have shared publicly a selection of segments of a long essay/book in progress that began gestating at the end of last year, when I finally came to terms with how much time I was spending on the Web.

For most anyone between the ages of 12-35, this is the norm.

For someone of my generation (born 1947), a “Baby Boomer,” this is a breakthrough.

That admitted, I spotlight the Web-Bibliography and the Links pages for many reasons, the primary one being pedagogical.

To me -- a lifelong teacher and learner (those two are inextricably linked), starting in the analog world and now deeply immersed in the digital -- links represent the cultivation of the ideal sensibility and habits of Mind that should be applied to the use of text on the Web. 

There is a remarkable degree of attention and sensory discrimination required to correctly, appropriately, & constructively embed a network of links into a born-digital text.

The CRC as intentionally link-laden/link-heavy.

This intention is an inherent aspect of our causal aesthetic.

If the medium is the message, then the efficacy of the medium will be judged by the degree to which the message is exploited.

I want to open up born-digital,Web-based writings and make them more permeable, reflective, and directive out into the world.

Linking breaks down the walls of the Web text that I am “on,” [as it were] – making the text into a permeable membrane.

Powerful decisions and choices are made with each link put into place: to whom, and for what reasons, are links chosen to be set into, and then to lead out of, a Key Word or term.

Links possess compositional importance.

They are not just mere elaborations, to “force” the piece wider. If the writer does that, the piece will come across as self-conscious and artificial.

Linking makes a structural statement about the way one curates and conceptualizes information and presents it - framed in a certain manner - to others.
Links open up the singular text being composed to a multiplicity of other influences and associations which make the work being written and posted become transdisciplinary on the most fundamental linguistic level. 

Flashback: Twelve years ago, at which time I was the founding Executive Director of The National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, I was invited by Microsoft Corporation to pay a visit to their Seattle headquarters.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement, however, nothing I am about to tell you and your students will violate that.

One of the reasons the Microsoft executives wanted me to talk with them was so they could show me the first prototype model of an e-book reader.

Remember, this was a dozen years ago.

The e-book was a glimmer in the eyes of the technology world.

The most vivid impression I retain from that visit was a mural I saw on the wall of a conference room. It was a kind of “evolutionary” chart with the Gutenberg press at one end, books as we knew them toward the middle, and electronic books at the right edge.

Someone waggled their index finger at me by way of a warning: “Books are dead. We have the wave of the future.”

They handed me a hand-made e-reader, cobbled together with screws. “This is where we are going,” they said. “The train has left the station.”

I have singled out the power of links because they are the most fundamental building-blocks of transdisciplinarity. Links are the most viable currency of digital communication because they permit texts to connect without disrupting original words. It was an extension of link-thinking that inspired me to make the CRC; because, in a higher education setting, where disciplines are hard-wired and immutable on an analog level, I believed the CRC would break new ground without threatening existing academic “units,” as we call them here in the USA. And now we are seeing the efflorescence of a hypertext boom in publishing allowing us to carry around thousands of books unencumbered.

I remember saying to myself a few short months ago that I enjoyed expressing my thoughts and observations on the exponential growth and expansion of media technology; but I also harbor no illusions that my opinions – well-considered and interesting though they may be – are going to in any way effect the pace of change.

All the best, & please keep in touch. Yrs., Neil Baldwin creative@mail.montclair.edu