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This device had previously spent much of the year collecting dust, as I had deemed it too much trouble to remember to recharge the contraption on a nightly basis in order to ensure I could actually listen to as the mood struck. Where having a souped up digital Walkman failed to engage my motivations, being able to audit college courses on the way to the laundromat seems to have sufficient salience to actually get me to plug the damned gadget into the USB port.
In any event, one of the things I've quickly come to realize about the experience of listening to a lecture previously recorded, rather than sitting in the front row of a classroom and interacting directly with the course presenter, is that I find myself in a 21st century circumstance equivalent to last century's pathology of "talking back to the TV". This is especially evident when the instructor will ask a question, and I am forced to listen to the answers of students present at the time of recording (or else, where recording logistics limited the ability to hear the students themselves, listening to the professorial feedback on those answers) without being able to toss my hat into the ring and deposit my two cents into the discussion.
But then I realized, hey, I have a[n OkCupid] journal now. I can expound there! Not quite the same thing as "being there", as it were, but in the very least it might be partially satisfying. So, for my first installment in commentary on podcast course Q&A, I respond to questions introduced in two courses I've begun following:
What is Emotion?
This question hails from the second lecture of Psych 156: Human Emotion, where the instructor sets the scene by advising his students that different researchers in the burgeoning field of "Affective Science" have different working definition of what exactly an "emotion", their subject of study, is, and asks the attendees of the lecture to offer their definitions.
Were I present, I would have most likely said something akin to the following:
Efficient heuristic adaptations for registering the salience of social-environmental stimuli, and optimizing the streamlined selection of accordingly appropriate responses from among available affective and/or deliberative behavioral repertoires.And yes, I really do talk like that.
"Information Wants to Be Free"
I found the commentary on this quote particularly striking. Attendees of the introductory lecture in Infosys C103: History of Information, when asked what this statement meant, offered such observations as: "should be free in the sense of accessible", "democratic in the sense that... anybody can contribute or presumably... receive", "not monopolized", and "not censored".
Huh? It's times like this that I wonder at the metaphoric attentiveness of my peers. Each of these responses derives from the quotation a commentary on what we do (or do not do) with or to information. Yet the power of this sentence is what is says about what its subject, information itself, actively does.
One way to understand this is by drawing a parallel to another maxim: "Water Seeks Its Level". Inherent in both propositions is an attribution of a propensity of behavior to the syntactical subject. We use the shorthand of intentionality ("wants" and "seeks") to succinctly encapsulate the physics of an inanimate or immaterial, in the cases of water and information respectively, stuff that predictably acts in relation to its environment.
Just as a gas evenly distributes itself to the volume that contains it, and a oceanic plate subducts beneath a converging continental plate, so information has motive tendency in relation to the constraints in its "environment". Such concepts as "access", "contribution", "receipt", "monopolization" and "censorship" invoke extrinsic forces that mediate and operate upon this intrinsic property of information, but that's not the pith of the matter.
It is in the sense of such active "stuff" that Manuel De Landa discusses information as a geological strata in his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. By comparison, the lecture participants, in their answers, seemed to me to have entirely missed this point. Like someone explaining the shape of a bubble by focusing on how people enjoy taking a bath with lots of suds, when the mechanics of spherical liquid films are not in any way contingent on the bather.
That the professor went along with this--using the answers given as a seque into a discussion of information as a resource "necessary to the political health of a nation"--and failed to examine the actual semantic content of the statement he had offered up, was disappointing, to say the least.
And so, not for the first time, and likely not for the last, I felt a deep desire to talk back to my iPod.
