Unglamorous Glorifying of Big Data

The recent article in Popular Science magazine by Juan Enriquez titled “The Glory of Big Data” boasts a tagline that should scream at us to wake up instead of making us drool over the possibilities of data crunching that the article highlights. The tagline reads, “Suddenly, we can know the world completely. Next, we reprogram it.” It’s become very apparent to me that we’re losing perspective on the difference between knowledge and experience.


I attended a conference at Rutgers University in June of 2010 where a speaker on the use of technology in the classroom told us that the future student will have more knowledge at their fingertips due to technology than the specialized knowledge in which a professor will have personally acquired. At first blush this seems absolutely incredible and progressive. The skills the student then needs is not retaining information but learning how to access it.

So where’s the problem? This seems like a giant leap forward in the ever quickening race to acquire information. That’s a good thing right?

What we’re failing to separate is the distinction between what we gain in the human condition through experience and what’s classifiable as attainable knowledge. To make an analogy, I can tell someone that heroin use is harmful to one’s body and that it can damage one’s relationships, like any other substance abuse, because of the intensity of addiction. I know that; that’s knowledge. However, I’m lucky enough to have never experienced it, either first or second hand. Someone who has experienced the awful issues revolving around heroin abuse will access that pool of wisdom they’ve accumulated about its devastating impact. This is a resource that I can’t replicate or duplicate, not with Google or any other powerful information search engine.

Moreover, the human condition is defined as the sum total possibilities of human experience. Notice it doesn’t concern itself with knowledge, because knowledge is not as useful to us without the accompanying experience to turn that knowledge into wisdom. It’s our experiences that define us, not necessarily just what we know.

As a case in point, the perennial stumbling block of all English teachers is Spark Notes or a plethora of the other sites that summarize and analyze literature. This, in and of itself, is harmless, and not the issue. The issue is how this knowledge is used to supplant the experience of reading the art, for art it is. This is the equivalent of someone telling you that Raphael’s “The School of Athens” is a painting that depicts some of the greatest philosophical minds of antiquity, including Aristotle, Plato, and, interestingly and anachronistically, even Raphael himself. Ok, so now I know who’s in the painting. I’ve gained some knowledge. However, in the summer of 2008 I had the pleasure of seeing this famous painting in person at the Vatican Museum. It’s an incredible experience to behold this colossal work. In the few moments I had with the painting I experienced a kinship of understanding with the artist; a connection with Raphael. Although the Vatican commissioned the work, Raphael had the freedom to depict these philosophers as he wished, and one can experience the reverence and awe that Raphael imbibes in the painting by being present with it. It was in the moment of experiencing the art that I began to fully understand how important these Greek philosophers were to our modern world. These thinkers set the stage for others to build upon their thoughts. I didn’t read this sensation; I didn’t have it described to me; it wasn’t analyzed by some third party. I experienced it.

The experience of art is different in a museum than on a computer screen—anyone who has ever visited a museum or has been in an art studio can tell you this. Spark Notes and its ilk mar the ability for a student to experience the art—to allow the student to formulate their own constructions of meaning and experience around the act of experience itself. The Spark Notes method of disseminating knowledge from the art is not referential nor does it allow for the indelible personal connection. Take a look at some of the incredible things that genetic engineers are now close to accomplishing—like bringing back the wooly mammoth—which could potentially go horribly and irreversibly wrong. Tell someone that science is potentially the greatest force the human species has ever wielded, and they’ll know it. Talk to a scientist that has ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or watched Jurassic Park and they’ll have the wisdom of it.

Determining what humans stand to lose if knowledge supersedes experience is a difficult conclusion to pin down. However, the loss of experience must impact the depth of the human condition. Take away experiences and one makes human existence meaningless. In a sense, pure knowledge is embodied by the Internet itself. It’s important to remember that the Internet—data-- is not who we are. However, if education and our daily lives are now defined by how we access our information and not what types of experiences we have, we should expect a great shift in what it means to be human. The degree of that shift, and in what direction, bodes ill.

Fiction for Dummies – Why fiction is important in our culture

I just finished reading Stephen King’s “1922” and was thoroughly wowed. King’s prose contains such a gritty truth that one is compelled to not only be horrified by the gore and the terror, but to understand it, mainly through the identification of the protagonists as the everyday sort. There are no Odysseuses , Beowulfs, or tragic hero in King’s story, simply the mundane who learn their lives aren’t mundane after all, but filled with as much depredation and loathing as any a hero might face. This is, in essence, King’s poetics, his literary aesthetic. That aesthetic is so gut-wrenching in its insistence on everyday characters that King felt compelled to reveal some of his thoughts on the creative process—and the role of fiction in our society in general—in an afterword:

            “I have little patience with writers who don’t take the job seriously, and none at all with those who see the art of story-fiction as essentially worn out. It’s not worn out, and it’s not a literary game. It’s one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives. And the often terrible world we see around us. It’s the way we answer the questions, How can such things be? Stories suggest that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—there’s a reason.”

King’s brilliance truly lies in his commitment to the art of prose. Sure, he’s made a ton of money writing his entire life, but he declares that money is tangential, that it’s the art itself that’s important.

            What King is diving at is the unshakeable desire for art in our lives. All true art, sometimes referred to as high art, is “one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives.” Fiction is a social requirement. King goes on to express his idea that commonplace characters placed in uncommon situations are the most riveting and emotionally appealing—hence the derivation of his poetics above. However, as an artist—specifically a writer—King is mentioning something that I’ve taken a large interest in in the past 12 months or so; the idea that art is essential, or even vital, as King mentions, to our very understanding of why we’re here and what we’re doing with the time we have. Intellectualism, understood as the single characteristic that separates humans from all other species on the planet, fiends for art. Those without much education have difficulty connecting to high art because of a lack of understanding of how the media work, and so most people become lovers of pop culture. One has simply to turn on a radio and a TV to hear and see pop culture hard at work, offering itself up for easy and unsophisticated consumption.

            As King points out however, it’s high art like fiction—true fiction, the kind of fiction that is produced by writers who take their jobs seriously—that is absolutely essential to understanding our world. True fiction invites us in to ask the question, How can such things be?, on a more complicated and sophisticated level. What’s interesting about King’s poetics as he explains in the afterword is that he is looking for a devouring emotional response from the narrative first, and then the intellectual response second once the book is put down. King discusses voraciously reading Orwell’s 1984 as a teenager due to his emotional connection to the book while reading it. It appears King feels that emotion is the first way in which we should respond to true art. But why feel through something before one allows the intellect a crack at it? I think the answer lies in the fact that one’s mind doesn’t shut off when reading fiction, but rather is turned down to a dull roar while the emotional side is often stoked and tended like a desperate fire on damp wood in the dead of winter. We crave for emotion for our very survival, for our most immediate connection to what makes us human. Sometimes we need to pull ourselves off of the Information Super Highway and enter the dirt track that leads into the Forest of Feeling.

            We’re saturated by information in the form of facts and statistics on a daily basis—the supreme comfortable realm of non-fiction. King’s compulsion to defend fiction is firmly grounded in our contemporary social context. His desire to defend what he does as an artist resides solely on the observation that our society seems to be turning away from fiction to keep our head out of the clouds, yet it’s the exploration of the clouds that makes our journey on the ground so rewarding.

On the Title "Prometheus Repurposed"

It is now 2010 C.E. The age before us marvels the will as well as the mind, when one thinks of the technological wonders and human horrors that are potentially within our reach. Our technology-- and our relationship with it—can produce a future with divine possibilities or destructive consequences. The human race stands at a very interesting, yet trying point in its history. The evidence of an unsustainable population growth, coupled with social and economic issues that have never before been of such a magnitude, will either catapult humans into a new stream of consciousness concerning our relationship with the earth and with each other or, pessimistically, will kill us. On a centurial timescale the tipping point has been reached. How we navigate through the social, cultural, and scientific waters of our age will be the pivot point of humanity’s next greatest epoch.


There are visionaries we should be listening to—scientists, mathematicians, economists, ecologists, teachers, professors, theorists, theologians, philosophers, and writers. These visionaries are of our present age and of ages past, for the act of envisioning is to see an aspect of life more clearly than others. It’s this power, this imagination coupled with cognition, that can transform a society’s world view and alter the course of human behavior.

It’s easy to speak in generalities such as these. To say outright that the world has issues does nothing to solve them. This blog will focus on those writers and thinkers who have a unique outlook on the human condition. That’s everyone who has ever written, you may be thinking. True, but even ancient writers were writing for ancient audiences, who suffered through their own problems and produced various forms of culture to understand the world and their time as it pertained to them. How does that help us today? How do those texts speak to us in 2010?

Prometheus was a god in the Greek mythology who stole the fire from Hephaestus’ forge and gave it to us mortals. Fire—or more specifically the act of creating it—was top technology in the time of the Olympians. Punished for eternity by being chained to a high rock, Prometheus was fettered for having taken knowledge of the universe that changed human history. We’re duplicating this scenario now. Humans have successfully melded man and machine into bionic symbiotes. Gene splicing and genetic engineering pave the way for a wholly novel way of treating previously fatal disease. The Internet and the gadgets that access it are becoming faster and more functional, allowing us to share data with each other at unprecedented levels. We are harnessing the powers of nature itself—science is our fire.

But Prometheus suffered for it. Well, in a sense so are we. Let’s imagine that Prometheus conferred with Zeus and made a diplomatic arrangement. Instead of stealing the powers of the universe, Prometheus taught mortals the consequences of such power before it was exploited. Such a parable seems laughable until one considers the capacity humans have for learning. It is this capacity that I will explore on this blog. How do we implement the technology we’ve obtained in a manner that is productive and not destructive? Lastly, we need to continually apply the lessons given by writers and thinkers of the past to our issues, to our needs. Our future will be bright only as long as we confer and begin a discourse with the past. Prometheus must be recast and repurposed. The use of technology should not result in punishment, but rather, should result in a clear recognition of our role as a leading species among many on this planet.

Obama the Dramatist – is it enough?

There have been few people in my life that inspired me. I’ve had three great English teachers in high school and three fantastic professors in college. My wife helps me to do good work—having a family is an amazing feeling and a good hunk of motivation. Last night I watched Barak Obama give a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. I actually had shivers run down my spine and through my legs when he spoke. In all seriousness, the last time I’ve had that happen was while watching the rousing speech William Wallace gives to the Scots before the battle of Sterling in Braveheart. So, Obama is one hell of a public speaker. We all know this, but what does it mean?

For one, I think it’s pretty clear that Obama is well educated. Now, granted, some people are well educated and can’t speak well, others are smooth talkers yet can’t figure out how to put a square peg into a square hole, but Obama is different. I’ve heard Obama compared to JFK too often to accept that he’s all charisma. No, there’s more there.

He’s put together one heck of a primary campaign. Battling through irate ministers and a demographic age deficit has given Obama validity in his claim that he has the experience to run the country. I’m not saying that that’s all a President is going to face, I’m saying that Obama has the skills to cope, recoup, and come out on top. He has the smarts, the drive, and the perseverance to see things through. This is what our leadership has been lacking for the past eight years. This is the type of person we need at this crucial moment in our history.

Tech-ing Ourselves to Death

My students use their cell phones in their purses, in the front pocket of their hooded sweat-shirt, under their arms, or even down under their seats. Some are even good enough to text while they stare me in the eye. Just last evening I opened my cell phone and took a picture of my wife’s grocery list and then sent that picture to her phone—she had forgotten the list at home. Again last evening I uploaded three pictures of my old car onto Craigslist. By this morning seven people were asking about the car. In order to make a sales pitch to some colleagues I slid my 2.0GB thumb drive into my computer, downloaded the pictures of the car and brought them to work.

The phenomenon of Craigslist, the cell phone (which serves so many functions it’s a misnomer), or the thumb drive are just a few of the tech innovations that will change the way we look and think of our relationship with media and the printed/displayed word. Social web sites are quickly becoming a form of communication, and, so much so, that students are resisting writing a five paragraph essay more than I’ve noticed in the past. Their writing is quick, and to the point. (Some are already screaming, “How is that bad!”) Writing is changing, and I’m noticing the change in my own writing as well. Written expression is being redefined by the media itself—my Craigslist post consisted of a single sentence with a bulleted list.

What interests me is to question whether or not writing in this sense will have a negative impact on what we consider literature and, by extension, the significance on our cultural well- being. I notice all too often that students can’t stand writing that isn’t as flashy in description or tone the way a television or movie now is—authors used to expect imagination to complement the language; it’s not working that way anymore.

My college prep. courses are full of students who both read books and those who haven’t read a single book on their own. (These, by the way, students are very willing to confess.) How can these students co-exist in the same class? Easy. Tech. In a world where “copy and paste” has replaced “research and write,” students don’t have to read long passages in a novel to advance; they can simply use tools to get around that.

This isn’t intrinsically a bad thing. Why should students be forced to find a single solution to a problem when their world has presented them with twenty? Knowing there are different ways to solve a problem is a freeing experience, one that allows you to use methods that were never possible before simply because they didn’t exist. For example, on an assignment a student needs to explain how the protagonist in a story acquired a desire for power. They go to Google where they first enter the terms “power” and “literature,” and are instantly presented with the option to buy a term paper on power in literature (the site that pops up is called AcaDemon). Ok, so most students don’t have the bankroll to finance a continuing operation like that, so they skip to Wikipedia. Quickly zipping through this site, a student can peruse a plethora of subjects that deal with power. The point is, the student has so many resources at their fingertips, that they would sooner use these rather than their own noggin. That, therein, lies the problem.

What will happen to our society if the tech that provides us with the information becomes a vehicle for intellectual stagnation? Is it possible to still have innovative thoughts other than innovations in tech? My worries lie in the possibility that all of this tech will assist us so much that we’ll forget what it’s like to have to think through a problem, we’ll struggle to come up with original and meaningful discourse. In his 1980s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman unearthed the tip of a large boulder when he speculated that technology (tv specifically—it was the 1980s) and our insatiable desire for entertainment are leading to the decline of public discourse and literacy. Unfortunately, I’m noticing that his prophecy is coming all too true.

Once more America is a Shining Example of What Not To Do

Is it me, or does the rest of the world look at America and ask, "Why are Americans so hypocritical?" This is a major problem for a country that is trying its hardest to remain a world leader in the interests of maintaining national security. Its generally understood that we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to make America safer--at least, that's the rhetoric. Thomas Friedman recently wrote that cities around the globe are modernizing at such a pace that they are at risk of becoming American--in the sense that they consume vast quantities of energy without much thought to the way it affects the environment.

American foreign policy in the last decade must be written with the intention of making ourselves look foolish. How else can one look at it? We trapse all over the world stating that freedom and democracy must be promoted at any cost, when, at home, our democracy is in the process of strangling the world with greenhouse gases caused by consumer-driven policies. Yes, this country was founded on freedom, and that ideal is the well-deserved basis of American pride. However, should we be free to do anything? Literally anything? Do we have the freedom to ignore rationality and common sense? We as a country know of the impact our domestic policies are having on world ecology and, furthermore, human survivability; yet we do little to change it.

This is the most frustrating and unforgivable aspect of our democracy. Is the constituency being represented correctly? Is the problem that U.S. citizens all want a radical energy policy shift but are not being adequately represented in Congress? No, of course not. For some reason, we Americans enjoy leaving the wool over our eyes. This phenomena is as difficult to understand as it is to understand why, after major medical advancements in oncology and public health education, teenagers are still lighting up cigarettes. Common sense takes a back seat here and the most difficult question isn't "how do we change our energy policies?" it's "how do we change our attitude?"

As in most cases, there's no simple answer here. I'd like to believe that Americans simply need more education on the issues to realize the severity of the energy crisis in this country. However, it's hard to imagine that with the information coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change we still turn our backs on the evidence. Like Hamlet, we believe that there's a better time to act and, like Hamlet, it may lead to our ruin.

Flattening the World

One of the greatest things our technology allows us to do is communicate with a world-wide audience. My students are currently expressing their views on a blog that I run. However, due to the unknowns of the Web, the blog is private, which, admittedly, I feel is somewhat counter intuitive. I've been brainstorming a way to allow students to safely speak with the larger Web community. Even though our connectivity allows us to share our experiences and thoughts worldly, safety is a foremost concern. Ironically, safety has become the foremost concern outside of the Web too.

Blogs and other technomedia are the neopolitical forms of the Greek polis. Students, teachers, and world learners all need to embrace this technology but at the same time provide uniform and reliable security measures. Once we accomplish this, my hope is that our newfound technology will allow us to not only bridge the gap between geographic and political differences, but also bridge the gap between ideologic and philosophic differences as well.