So what happens when you link? In the blogosphere, the party invitation is delivered. With a nod. With a wink. With a secret handshake. With just enough eye contact to be inviting, maybe even intriguing, but not at all off-putting or threatening or coercive. Or creepy. Not in the least.

It’s what Bakhtin calls “addressivity.” The “quality of turning to someone.” The thing that makes the party hearty.

The thing we need.

Two thinkers I’ve never dreamed of associating … but the Web’s recursive intertwingling reveals a deeply intriguing link.

I’m teaching Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines in my Introduction to New Media Studies class right now. My students are pretty well electrified (so to speak) by Nelson’s observations and arguments, and especially by his unusually direct and non-academic prose style. And although at some points Nelson can be too anti-curricular even for me (and that’s saying something), I find myself getting swept away all over again by the energy of his imagination and by the many home truths, at least in my experience, that he speaks. Nelson is very much the Walt Whitman of new media. He sings the learning community electric.

As I prepared for class a few days ago, finding more choice nuggets in an essay in which I’ve already underlined about 70% of the sentences, I was especially struck by these words:

But there is always something artificial–that is, some form of artifice–in presentation. So the problem is to devise techniques which have elucidating value but do not cut connections or ties or other relationships you want to save…. The design of things to be shown–whether writing, movie-making, or whatever–is nearly always a combination of some kind of explicit structure–an explanation or planned lesson, or plot of a novel–and a feeling that the author can control in varying degrees. The two are deeply intertwined, however. [Emphasis added.]

I was first struck by the connection (ah, there I am, mapping and exploring the very territory Nelson describes and inhabits) between Nelson’s words and an article on the role of emotion in learning that I read recently in a new journal called Mind, Brain, and Education. In that article, the authors describe emotion not as the unruly toddler in a shop full of the glass ornaments of reason, but as the very shelves upon which our fragile glass ornaments of reason are supported and made effective for our use. Nelson’s idea of “fantics” is especially resonant here.

But then I was truly brought up short when I read this quotation from Simone Weil over at “Blogging on the Brain,” ATL Graduate Fellow Hillary Blakeley’s blog:

Attention consists of suspending out thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired….

Poise, emptiness, readiness, holding without contact but within reach: Weil’s marvelously evocative language, like Nelson’s, like poetry’s, enacts the very thing it describes. Weil also reminds me that attention is more than hyperfocus, or can be. To paraphrase Milton, they also attend who only mull and wait. At the same time, both Weil and Nelson insist that one can combine analytical rigor (the activity they’re engaged in by writing these ideas down, for example) with puzzlement, suggestiveness, deeply felt experience.

And though to my knowledge Weil and Nelson never met or spoke to each other, and may not have read each other’s works, they too are books in Donne’s library, lying open to each other, reading and speaking to each other over the years, voiced and conversing by means of linkages mediated to me by the expressive capabilities of these new technologies. Books, face-to-face classes, blogging, institutional structures, traditional disciplines, cross-disciplinary conversation, youth and adulthood and middle age, history and the present, serendipity, impulse, intuition, rigor, beauty,courage, anxiety, energy, faith: all in the choir, singing a complex harmony I must both strain and relax to hear.

Physicians are notoriously self-sufficient, especially surgeons, but they’ve obviously discovered the benefits of linking in ways we’d do well to emulate. Nice quotation to that effect over at Rural Free Delivery. QED!

Trevor at The Prancing Walrus mines the history and variety of lolcats. New to me was “Confuse A Cat, Ltd.,” which Trevor tells me is an old Monty Python sketch. All I can conclude is that in fact Monty Python is the father of the Internet.

Which no doubt confirms many suspicions.

Here’s my podcast of the “New Horizons” column I wrote for the Sept./Oct. 2009 EDUCAUSE Review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (8.1MB)

Even if the specifics need changing, mild or moderate or drastic, I’m as confident as I can be that we should be educating our citizenry to be systems administrators of their own digital lives.

I wonder how this essay has been received by anthropologists. James Fernandez seems to me take extraordinary risks in the argument, or at least they would be in some intellectual circles. Perhaps not in anthropology? (Paging Dr. Wesch.) In any event, this essay is remarkable in my view for the way it analyzes non-schooled reasoning without reducing its sophistication or objectifying its practitioners.

Fernandez closes with two wonderful paragraphs that I’d like to share with you:

In a compartmentalized society like our own we are very able to compartmentalize our intellectual exercises. We are well schooled to heuristics–to looking for rules and applying them in limited and apparently self-contained contexts. That’s intelligence for you! But more traditional societies with pretensions to cosmogony, and most traditional societies have that pretension, are more totalistic. Intelligence is a matter of relating to the context, in developing it, revitalizing it. Hence, it is an intelligence that employs images to a high degree in actual or suggested analogic relation. It plays upon similarities in experience, and in that play it suggests or requires answers that suggest overarching contiguities–cosmologies, totalities which encompass, absorb, and defeat particularities. All this is rarely done in a direct and explicit manner. “By indirections find directions out.”

As well schooled as we all are in the modern specialized compartmentalized societies, we tend to misread in a schoolmasterish way the masters of iconic thought. We look for a limited set of applicable rules, or we are simply puzzled, and we fail to see how these masters edify by puzzlement. Our inclination is to deprive puzzles of their mystery–that’s science for you–and thus we fail to see how the masters mysteriously suggest an overarching order–how they give concrete identity to inchoate subjects, how they reconcile these subjects. It is hard for us to tolerate ambiguities of this kind, let alone understand their function.

As I read these words I think of Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and his advocacy of the “indirect approach” that itself must be complicated and dialectically reversed should the puzzlement ever become a mere parlor trick. I think also of the ways in which Michael Wesch has introduced a “grand narrative” into his anthropology classes as (I suppose) a kind of cosmogony or at least an overarching order. And I think of the way poetry plays with the most precise suggestiveness one can imagine. A far cry from schoolmasters, textbooks, and bon eleves, from which heaven save us.

James Fernandez, “Edification by Puzzlement,” in Explorations in African Systems of Thought, ed. Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. 44-59.