Sustainable Converse-action

The New Media is the Message,
not the message.

Dear College,

In the library the other day, Ben Feinberg showed
me his newly installed Social Sciences Blog with
the same enthusiasm as Graham when he established
FAH! at the beginning of summer, for Fine Arts and
Humanities exchange.

Possibilities for collegial conversation across &
within intra-disciplines! Talk-going-on that is not
limited to 4:00 meetings, lunchroom & hallway
occasionals, professional conferences & refereed
publications, slam poetry events, after-performance
round-tables, book-club meetings, team-teaching
debates, graduation addresses, deans conferences
and self-evaluation reports, staff forums and
faculty body conventions:

But rather: the possibilities of The New Media—
Post Literate and Neo Oral, kin to cell-phone and
text messaging and of course e-mail: reviving the
the earlier tradition of Bell Letters where information
and knowledge and questions and interests and
concerns were communicated in non-thesis driven
digressive, genial conversational exchanges—back
& forth like talk but with distance & remove:
detachment & yet connection..

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced
in so small a house, the difficulty of getting
to a sufficient distance from my guest when
we began to utter the big thoughts in
big words.

You want room for your thoughts to get into
sailing trim, and run a course or two before
they make their port. The bullet of your
thought must have overcome its lateral and
ricochet motion, and fallen into its last and
steady course, before it reaches the ear of
the hearer, else it may plough out again
through the side of his head.

Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and
form their columns in the interval. Individuals,
like nations, must have broad and natural boundaries,
even a neutral ground, between them. I have found
it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a
companion on the opposite side.

In my house we were so near that we could
not begin to hear—we could not speak low enough
to be heard, as when you throw two stones into
calm water so near that they break each other's
undulations...As the conversation began to assume
a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved
our chairs further apart till they touched the wall
in opposite corners, and then commonly there was
not room enough... (H.D. Thoreau)

Social Science is a closed blog like FAH! (invitation only:
takes some fooling around with google & gmail and
passwords to participate). "We'll see how it goes, closed,"
said Ben. Keep it in the family for now. Graham, too: same.

Like us (fine artists & humanitarians): there was an initial
flurry, Ben said, and then not so much; and he & I talked
low in the library about what IT meant and what IT took to
get into IT and how-IT-is that the MEDIA we swim in now is
radically different than what-IT-was and how IT might
ultimately impact school & schooling and study and scholarship
and research and publications and academic probation and
footnoting, plagiarism of course (intellectual property) and
retention and attendance policies and whether we as colleagues
were shy or lazy or indifferent or not rewarded for IT or not
tuned-in to IT’s possibilities (the media IS the instant messaging
of thought and insight and query and quip and quest and
edification--emergence of local food-for-thought and
foundation for our own intellective and affective sparking.

Anthropologically speaking, I bet IT takes a collective Mind-Set
(shared attitude, atmosphere) for this kind of collaborative and
conversational genius to grow as a local garden of delight, say.

Or it has to be "cool," maybe. Like some new sport. OR else
like old-time back porch jamming: plink plank & everyone's an
instrument in the band & we all get better and good by playing.
Or it'll come into fashion--like hair cuts or tattoos, small cars.
The Chronicle of Hire Education will begin plugging this kind of
home-groan activity and then IT'll be ok to participate.

Something like that. I need help, as usual, to make sense of this.
IT's not a matter of reason and logic. More of an
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE: what IT takes to
put us in play together: our 3 divisions,
within and without.

I’m sure anyone can improve these terms and maybe help
sustain this conversation—either in our inter-disciplinary
blogs or (better) across the curriculum on FacultyL.
What prevents? & Why? I’m just asking. Or
what’s a college for these days?

xxxooo, Sam