Now You See It...

I ran into one of my favorite professors on the shuttle from Tenleytown to campus today, which is always a great way to start the day.  I get to chat with someone whose company I enjoy and get up to speed on what's going on right from the get go.  Since I work in the library and all, we got to talking about this article about how Harvard has declared academic journal subscriptions "financially untenable."  What a time it is indeed to be going into academia!  Publishing -- you know the saying "publish or perish" -- remains true today, and now publishing is getting harder and harder.   In fact, the biggest piece of advice I've received about using my time wisely in my PhD program (woot woot!!) is to focus on getting 2-3 articles published while I'm in the program before I enter the job market.

Then, said professor tells me that the best book on this topic and the impact of the digital age on academia is this book by Cathy Davidson called Now You See It.  I took a look at it and from the introduction, it looks pretty good.  She addresses an issue she calls attention blindness.   In the introduction she claims that "Because of attention blindness, we often arrive at a standstill when it comes to tackling important issues, not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are right in what they see but neither can see what the other does.  Each side becomes more and more urgent in one direction, oblivious to what is causing such consternation in another"...and she uses the reactions to the Deepwater Horizon spill as an example of this.  Nice example, thank you.

It also looks into how our brains need to evolve to adapt to the digital age, which requires our brains to multitask...but not multitasking in the sense of doing multiple different tasks at the same time, but instead adapting to seeing multiple viewpoints on any given issue at the same time.  This idea certainly maps well onto postmodern thinking that talks about how postmodernity is characterized as rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze and Guattari).

The good news is that this challenge seems to be a creative one rather than a deterministic one.  The book itself claims to be a "field guide and survival manual for the digital age."   I still have the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life on my bookshelf, which I never finished reading years ago...mostly I think because it focuses too much on psychology and not enough on science and because it is written by a journalist.  I guess it's still a topic that intrigues me.