What’s the fuss about?

I was at the International Women’s Day Lunch here at the University, where Catherine Deveny, a popular columnist with The Age, was the guest speaker. She was hilarious. Apart from the many things she said (digs at Abbott’s missionary positions he needs to fill in his stationery cabinet, etc!), she said something so relevant to our course that I thought I must share with you. To paraphrase her, she said it’s the internet that will ultimately liberate most people from most of their problems. The context to this was of course, repression of women by religion and a patriarchal society. Having a website should be the ultimate goal. “Have a website. Tell the world who you are, what you do, how you can be contacted! Everyone will and should have a website!” And she talked about how pure academic circles have a prejudice about online referencing, research and people who have “blogs” and have a “website”. It’s almost like it is tabooed in the pure academic world.

Ok, so assuming we’ve all happily arrived at the conclusion that we need to have a website to be heard and noticed, the next impediment is how do we go about doing that? It’s not as simple as having a lot of ideas and thoughts and being armed with fluency in English (or whatever the lingua franca is), writing or inscribing equipment -- pen, pencil, paper, for the more quaint, a typewriter, and for the more technically contemporary, a laptop or a personal computer with an easy to use interface of a word processing software application -- and voila, you are ready to disseminate your pearly words of wisdom and wit to the whole world (or the readership you intend!). To publish your ideas online, to host your own website involves a whole gamut of other skills that are traditionally outside the scope of “pure aesthetic” preoccupations!

For most of us who pride ourselves in being practitioners of the high aesthetic, the arts -- the writers, artists and creators -- up until now have been purely devoted to the seemingly isolated, “elevated” area of the creation of the aesthetic and not entirely too concerned with the more “crass” aspects of its real-time “process of production”. We never did have to concern ourselves with say printing, page layout, pixels, typesetting, kerning, leading, alignment, folios, indexing, navigation, binding, distribution, etc. Just take care of the ideas and writing and there will be others to take care of the rest of everything that falls under the broad heading of “production”.

But now, with this whole merger of form and content, we, the writers and creators of content and ideas, have to delve into the realm of the current technology of “online production”. We have to now dabble with “HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, URL, CSS, JavaScript, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, Hosts, Clients, Servers, Databases and finally Dreamweaver”. Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University (US), has this very interesting YouTube video that describes all this, called “The Machine is Us/ing Us”.


After watching the amazing film Julie and Julia, it would seem that it’s really not that hard. All you need is a blog host and you can start firing away and publishing online, just like Julie Powell does “365 days, 524 recipes”. But going by all the heavy, technical sessions we’ve had so far, our task seems more daunting than that!

I find myself seeking comfort in Robert M. Pirsig’s priceless words from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about people like me who are living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, having something to do with it, but being outside of it, detached, removed: Involved in it but not in such a way, as to care.

I just think that flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.

This is something some of you may have come across already. But it just seemed very relevant against Pirsig’s views. It is a little audience survey, “What is a Web Browser”, that google conducted prior to the launch of their own web browser, Chrome. It really reiterates the fact that the users of a product, technology in this case, really don’t know exactly what it is or how to define it. The point is do we need to know? And if so, how much do we need to know?