Don Yer Blubber, Land Lubber!

Today, I want to talk about blubber. In class, we discussed the idea of varying degrees of symbolic and/or narrative usefulness within certain sections of Melville's Moby Dick. One particular topic that came up over the course of the discussion was blubber, and I think we were maybe too quick in asserting that there is nothing to be learned from whale fat.

Creative Commons License, by Jenny Spadafora

In Ch. 68, Melville, discussing blubber, writes:

[H]erein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.

This principle of maintaining a so-called "interior spaciousness"--a personal identity or "room of one's own"--proves particularly important within the context of the modern age. A study presented by Katie Davis in "Young People’s Digital Lives: The Impact of Interpersonal Relationships and Digital Media Use on Adolescents’ Sense of Identity" suggest that identity exploration and use of social media have both direct and indirect negative effects on adolescents' "self-concept clarity." The distillation of that is that as they use digital media exploratively, adolescents (and I would guess this could be extended at least marginally to adults as well) lose a sense of personal identity or rather lose clarity in their understanding of the concept of self.

Long Tails, and Machines, and Algorithms, Oh My!

Today’s discussion coupled with last week’s discussion about long tails got me thinking about the algorithms that are used in digital technology, particularly things like Google’s predictive search feature. The machine can anticipate what we want. Eerie.

(This was an awesome video I found about becoming an “Autocompleter” for Google. I think this was how they did it before they used algorithms. Haha!)

This was an interesting article from PC World about using the predictive algorithms. It touches on topics like Facebook friends, Pandora music, online dating, and Netflix movies.  The most fascinating thing to me, however, is that it points out that Google is changing the way we think because it is thinking for us. Because of this, we are not remembering as much as we used to because we rely on the internet to remember, in a way, for us.

So what do you think? Do you think we rely too much on these algorithms to tell us what we should think, or is it another nifty way to sort through all of the material that is online to find the information we are looking for?

Moby Addicted: Is it All Ahab's Fault?

Now that we've finished going through Moby Dick together in our Digital Culture class, I'd like to look at the end, and what specifically led to it and caused it. We talked in class a bit about how Ahab becomes a kind of anti-Christ in the final three chapters. In three days, he descends further and further into his madness, and ultimately causes the death of himself and his whole crew. Compare this to the story of Christ, who in three days died and reascended to save himself and everyone. In a similar vein, Greg wrote a post about Ahab representing Satan.

It's pretty clear that Ahab caused the tragic ending of his own life, his crew, and even the Pequod, but is it really all his fault? On the one hand, Melville certainly seems to think so, as Starbuck says to him in the final chapter, "See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" But as we were looking at this passage today in class, our group found and interesting correlation to another passage just a few pages before it at the end of chapter 132. Ahab remembers his wife and child and almost orders the crew to turn around and take them home, but as soon as Starbuck suggests they just go, Ahab looks away and refuses to give the order. Then he says the following in soliloquy:

"Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I." 

Notice the very similar construction between this passage and Starbuck's question later. Perhaps Starbuck heard Ahab's speech earlier and tried to mirror his construction as a rhetorical move in his final plea, or perhaps Melville wrote these two passages with similar construction to invite comparison of their quite opposite ideas (or, you know, perhaps it's a complete coincidence, but I doubt it).

As we looked at these two opposing passages, I tried to put myself in Ahab's shoes and see his logic. Then I realized what his lines actually sounded like to me: addiction. Read this definition of addiction from the American Society of Addiction Medicine and consider Ahab's behavior:

Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response.

Now, addiction as an idea has exploded into our cultural mindset over the past 50 years, and we're much more aware of it as a disorder than Melville would have been in his time. But even so, it's clear Melville meant for us to understand that Ahab was more than just obsessive.

If he is addicted, then, or suffers from some form of mental disorder, can we blame him for what happened? And if not, what is Melville saying about power structures? It's clear the rest of his crew didn't want to continue pursuing the white whale--Ahab has to remind them of oaths they took and ignores several pleas--but the tragedy still happens because Ahab is the sole commander and no one else has any control. Melville seems to be asking questions about power and leadership, and what happens when leaders go astray or prove themselves incapable. Ahab may not be to blame--but no one had the power to stop him, either.

This may be another reason why Moby Dick rose to prominence in the 20th century. The questions Melville asked here proved to be frighteningly relevant as the world headed to total war twice in one century thanks to leaders with more power than sense. It's almost scary how this book seemed to be most relevant nearly 100 years after it's publication.

Does a Company's Presence Online (or Lack thereof) Affect their Credibility?

Jobs that are related to technology and the humanities have been on the rise. That’s not really news. But sometimes it surprises me just how important things like social media and programming skills have become to companies. Just today, I went to the LDS Publications meeting where they were recruiting interns, and two of those internships are heavily involved with digital media.

Here is a screen shot of the job description. (Sorry if it's a little small. There needs to be an option between large and extra-large sizes for photos on Blogger.)

There’s also a job board called mediabistro online that has an entire section dedicated to posting tech jobs that are related in some way to the media. Again, see the screenshot.

Devil in the Man: A 'Hell-Bent' Captain

Well here's a find if ever I saw one. Some of you know that I am currently in classes studying, respectively, Moby Dick and Paradise Lost, and I've been working at expanding my research base a little bit. Well, in searching for scholarly sources to go with some of the ideas that I presented in my last post, "God in the Whale," I came across a work that draws a really fascinating connection between Milton's Satan and Melville's Ahab. In Leslie Sheldon points draws on the research of other scholars to provide a stunning comparison of the two characters:

[I]n Guttmann's view [ . . . ] "Milton's fable is used to supplement Melville's own." (2) The drawing of Miltonic connections in the criticism is, furthermore, often associated with the contention that Melville interpreted the epic in a primarily "Romantic" and "Satanic School" way, attributing to Milton (as did Blake), (3) an unconscious "sympathy for the Devil," a view apparently given some support by the recently discovered marginalia in Melville's personal copy of Milton's poetry. (4) Fifty years ago, Henry A. Murray claimed that "Melville's Satan is the spitting image of Milton's hero ... the stricken, passionate, indignant, and often eloquent rebel angel of Paradise Lost, whose role is played by Ahab" (5) And as recently as 1998, Paul Giles similarly noted that Ahab's "desire for revenge on the white whale is as anguished as Satan's quest in Milton's poem for vengeance against God."

Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish 2: Digital Fish Edition

On Monday, I talked about Chapter 89 of Moby Dick and the concept of Fast-fish and Loose-fish and how it ultimately serves as a foundation for the creation of meaning within the novel. Today, I want to extend on ideas I started there by applying the concept of Fast-fish and Loose-fish to a wider view of our entire digital age.

To review, I basically argued that all meaning in life--both in art and outside of it--is the product of connection. (Indeed, the more I think about it, I can't really tell a difference between connection and meaning, and it seems the two are almost interchangeable.) If this is all true, then, ultimately, this idea is another key to how the digital age changes everything. New technologies give us different powers of connection, and thus the powers to alter the meaning of nearly everything in our lives.

As digital media gives fans more chances to connect with fictional universes,
it makes these universes more meaningful for them.

Digital communication changes the meaning of our lives because it changes the connections in our lives. That sounds big and daunting and somewhat terrible, but it's true in both superficial and profound ways, and isn't necessarily a bad thing. For one, the internet has given rise to millions of meaningful and valuable relationships that wouldn't have ever been possible before. Perhaps where this is most easily seen is the rise of fandoms, or more specifically what I'll just call "Comic Con culture." As Kylee pointed out in her post on the subject, Comic Con is a physical gathering of enormous numbers of fans of several similar but quite distinct fictional universes. Ironically, such conventions have grown as internet technology has become more ubiquitous and powerful. You'd think with more possible digital connection, you wouldn't need to physically gather in one place, but I would argue that Comic Con culture is on the rise because these people spend so much time reading/discussing/watching/playing online with each other that they create real relationships around these fictions, and those relationships climax in a confidence and understanding that can only come with community, leading to more and more people identifying with the community enough to physically attend a convention.

Accepting New Technology as Tradition

After today’s lecture from Dr. Wickman, I got thinking about how traditions are often reasons why some people are not as willing to be as explorative as others.

In chapter 69 on page 278, it describes what happens to the whale after its carcass is let go in the ocean: "When the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, never the less still shows the whit mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not ever hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy."

As Dr. Wickman pointed out in class, this relates to religion. But I would like to postulate that this idea of blind following that is being suggested is not only pertinent to religion but to technology as well.

People don’t like there to be a lot of changes in their lives. Throwing changes into a normal and structured life, at least for people like me, can give a “you-threw-off-my-groove” kind of vibe, and it takes time to accept the change. We are creatures of habit.

Courtesy of  Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, flickr.com