Seven Lions

Tomorrow morning I’ll be giving a presentation on digital history as part of the big commencement celebration coinciding with the visit by first lady Michelle Obama. Along with giving me an opportunity to talk about the importance of using digital tools in the study of the humanities and integrating environmental systems into historical systems, it gives me the chance to show off some majestic cattle.

UC Merced students often complain about the cows, which is a shame, given the respect our ancestors gave to the animals.

Just finished reading Immanuel Wallerstein’s article in the excellent Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change.  Wallerstein is the founder of World Systems Theory, which focuses on the processual links between societies as an explanation of historical events, though the theory has grown far beyond Wallerstein’s capitalism-oriented, modernity-constrained initial description.  Without getting too arcane, there’s a movement in the academy toward integrating environmental systems into the study of history, and to do so you need to systemitize history to make it feasible.  But Wallerstein’s essay–the final one in the book–doesn’t focus on understanding extractivist culture or divining proxies for deforestation, but rather on the collapse of the modern world.

Pretty heady stuff.  According to Wallerstein, the systemic failure of the current system is already a given, and it’s only a question of whether the enlightened aristocracy of Davos ends up controlling the next great system or the Wikipedia-like, distributed (and chaotic) peers typified by the World Social Forum.  For those of you, like me, who are unfamiliar with the WSF, their meetings sound like the equivalent of a real-world Wikipedia:

Other people that were not coming from Latin America were unconsciously excluded from the forum, as there were no interpreters at the forum at all, and it was very difficult for people who were coming from outside Latin America to follow speeches or activities that were taking place in the forum from day one of the forum. It was made clear that it was not the responsibility of the organizers to organize interpreters for people, it was people’s responsibility to organize their own interpreters and it was very difficult for us to get that as there was no prior arrangements made. This was a pity. In our struggles in South Africa we have many different languages but our movements always take responsibility for organizing translation – especially for visitors. Of course the NGOs in South Africa want to do everything in English but not the movements.

Of note is the growing importance of academics and Non-Governmental Organizations in the ranks of the WSF, which runs afoul of an anti-expert bias like that typically associated with Wikipedia (And philosophical Daoism, but that’s way off topic).  Contrast this with the expert-driven and much swankier World Economic Forum and you start to see an almost uncanny resemblance between the state of these two groups and the state of the university and the growing connected-world knowledge bases.  The World Economic Forum is about to be underway, and it’ll even include celebrity Twitter interviews as well as a host of externally accredited experts, thereby limiting the number of participants to a modest two and half thousand, versus the tens of thousands who show up for the WSF.

Wallerstein posits these two organizations as emblematic of the two paths toward the “Next System” (Some kind of post-capitalist/post-Marxist future means of economic organization) and wonders, as I did in my last post, how the current instability will play out.  It is interesting to note that there is some kind of dichotomous self-organization occuring across various realms, with a peer-collaboration expression on the one side (WSF is criticized, like Wikipedia, as being Communist at its core) and an expert-oriented version acting like a Zoroastrian neccessary-opposite.  Strangely enough, these various evil dopplegangers seem to be unaware of their placement within a putative Pantheon of Global Social Conflict:

Wikipedia, Open Source Software, World Social Forum

vs.

Academia, Proprietary Software, World Economic Forum

Since I can’t think of a simple dichotomous relationship to posit Local Community / Global Multinational without expanding on whether I’m talking about services, products or agriculture, I’ll leave it out.  I realize there’s no strict alignment between these forces, and that you have academics supporting Wikipedia and Apache being used by major corporations, but there’s already a growing sense that the local organic farmer (or bookshop owner) should be using Linux and supporting Wikipedia and taking part in the WSF.  Not sure how the social networking sites figure into this, they don’t seem to skew or splinter along ideological lines, but that could just be a sign of my own unfamiliarity (and extreme disdain) for them.  What’s extremely strange, at least to me, is that there is a definite dualistic nature to our modern world ideological system, and yet it seems that we’ve fractured into more ideological bantustans than ever before–due in part to the remarkable ability of the Web to break down communication and organization costs and therefore allow for Mao’s thousand-flower continuum.  The bantustans are natural conflict-absorbers, because they make disagreements, like modern art, seem so subjective.  To paraphrase a quote that may or may not have come from Kissinger, you can express vicious disagreement precisely because of the very low stakes.  But this masks a very real, distinct dichotomy of ideology that permeates global culture and which seems to be expressing itself in every new endeavor.

Another interesting point raised at Akahele (The cautious site with the beautiful name) highlights the problem of crowds: the concern for peer-produced data in an environment where some of those peers want to insert malicious, propagandistic or otherwise known-flawed results into a system.  But the problem isn’t limited to peer-produced knowledge, and it seems that El Sevier, the publisher everyone loves to hate, is just as happy to game the system in an entirely expert-driven manner.  The cynical part of me has always argued that the criticisms of Wikipedia result from a naive vision of knowledge production in traditional spheres, and this seems to back it up, but I think it’s more problematic than that.  We seem to be moving into a post-post-modern period where it’s not just the critics who think that meaning and truth are malleable but also the consumers and creators of knowledge.  It’s like 1984 but instead of just Big Brother manipulating the facts, imagine if Winston Smith was also manipulating the facts in his own personal life and on common peer resources.  The journal industry in academia has been oft-criticized as of late, concurrent with the criticism of academia itself, and I think if we’re not careful we’re going to see the El Seviers and Wikipedias of the world meet in the middle, where only the most mundane of facts are agreed upon and, like modern news agencies, anyone will be able to point to their favored experts (or non-expert encyclopedias) to support whatever malicious intention they have.  Doubly worrisome is the effect this must be having on the traditional citizen, who according to Enlightenment theory requires their proper understanding of the world (known as education) to make informed choices in directing the course of their political system.

Nowadays, with ready access to expert and non-expert knowledge that supports every side of every debate, we’re faced with an extremely public social surgery, and all indications are that amputation or leeching will come back in vogue.  Whatever your stance on creationism or globalization or climate change or Islam or Tibetan nationalism, you can now find experts, news outlets, journal articles, &c &c to support you.  This does not seem to be a sustainable system.  But what’s the solution?  Will the backlash be a clamoring for a restoration of aristocratic control or a pulsing anarchy of rival ideologies?  History tends to describe the latter as too unstable to last for long.  I don’t know.

UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project just released the winners of their Social Computing in 2020 competition.  I’d put together an entry for this, based on the rise of animation as a medium for non-lingual knowledge formation and transmission, but apparently the folks at Santa Barbara have a rather constrained vision of social computing (read Facebook), as well as too much exposure to science fiction and not enough exposure to dystopian literature.  To wit, their winners consist of:

First Place – A hypothetical tool to manage the privacy settings of your on-life.
Now, this is the most technologically feasible of the winning entries, which isn’t saying much once you find out what took second place, but the idea that you can one day prevent your boss from seeing your drunken MySpace pics isn’t exactly groundbreaking, earth-shattering or radical.  It is, however, highly unlikely, given that the growth of social computing and the Web in general have eroded the concept of private life both from a technological perspective (It’s hard to hide who you are once you begin to take part in the connected world) and from a social perspective (More and more people think once incredibly private details are not such a big deal in the connected world).  People already manage the privacy settings in their on-life (Their on-line life, I’m coining that term right now, you all owe me $.05 every time you use it) by using multiple email accounts, signing up with monikers on their various social web sites, &c, &c.  If I was a judge, I’d give this entry a B for feasibility, a D for novelty and a C- for need.

Second Place – Recording Sensations for Fun and Profit!
Okay, so we’re going to assume that someone will create a “sensation suit” in the next ten-twenty years, that will record “experience” and allow you to replay it.  If you’re thinking of a particularly crumby movie starring Ralph Fiennes, you’re not alone.  Let’s just imagine that such a technology is within our reach–wait, no, feasibility was one of the hallmarks of this competition, you can’t just assume that somebody will perform alchemical sorcery and create a magic SensoSuit.  How the heck do you expect this technology to work?  The entry includes erotic activity on its list of experiences, so apparently the suit can transmit sensations particular to men and women.  How’s that work?  Is it a unisex suit?  At least the sci-fi that’s dealt with this kind of thing acknowledges you’ll need to tap into the brain to do it, in which case even the Johnny Mnemonic possibility is still out of reach, but at least it’s hypothetically feasible.  Alright, alright, let’s say somebody makes these suits (dry-clean only, I hope) then what?  Is it just a pressure point and pin-prick system (The Full Body Acupuncture Experience, now at Disney World!) and if so, is that really what an “experience” is?  I hate technological optimism, that’s why I think The Truth Machine is an amazing work of fascist fandom, but the amount of technical mastery necessary to create a dubiously structured version of experiential knowledge is, in my mind, a bad mix.  F for feasibility, C for novelty (Again, I feel the need to point out crappy movies and literature from the depths of science fiction) and, I don’t know, a B- for need, just because I acknowledge that porn still rules the Internet (A sad shame and a case for the ultimate failure of a major tenet of the Enlightenment) and that doesn’t show any signs of letting up.

Third Place – RFID in Your Colon
Okay, so one of the other reasons I hate technological optimism is because it completely ignores the misuse of technology.  I call it the Nazi Substitution Hypothetical.  Nazis plus microwave ovens?  Not much difference.  Nazis plus nuclear weapons?  Big Mistake.  If the Nazis had your miracle technology, would they be geometrically worse or exponentially worse.  Again I have to point to the Truth Machine, a novel based on the premise of the invention of a machine that could unerringly determine if the subject was lying.  Oh, that’s great if we live in a happy world of unicorns, but think of how much easier it’d be to run a fascist state if you had that?  So this entry proposes putting RFID chips in EVERY ORGAN IN YOUR BODY so that some, assumably benevolent, controlling power could track the function of your body.  The write-up on the Social Computing site doesn’t include a specific social computing aspect, and seems to assume a classic governmental agency approach, and really, why would all your twitter fans want to know about your gall bladder efficiency?  And who’s going to willingly subject themselves to three hundred and twenty-eight RFID insertions?  We bristle about the possibilities of an authoritarian state looking into our backyard, much less our prostate. D for feasibility (I have to average the feasibility of creating the technology with the feasibility of a free society subjecting themselves to it), F/A for need (F if you think The State will ever turn bad, A if you live in a hippie utopia where your spleen is everybody’s spleen) and a B- for novelty (Tracking the physiological function of the polity is another staple of sci-fi–heck, even Aliens did it).

Knowing my luck, this will all come to pass, so at least my boss won’t know the function of my kidneys while I record my ride on the most dangerous rollercoaster in the world.

The last time I was writing about qausi-amateurs in knowledge production, I primarily focused on the phenomenon of scientists writing history, particularly environmental history, because historians trained in the current university system are unfamiliar with environmental science and uncomfortable making sweeping claims about environmental systems, whereas scientists feel that philosophy and history are easy enough to jump into based, I assume, in a perceived “Rigor Gap” between the sciences and the humanities.

But that’s not the only way in which academics change course from their initial field of study to produce scholarship outside their discipline.  Laura Mandell wrote an excellent article about the growth of the Digital Humanities, wherein she highlights the attempts by scholars of literature and history to assimilate digital tools and theory into their scholarship.  Mandell echoes Mark Taylor’s call to dismantle the disciplines that define modern scholarship but with more pressing concern based on the currency of university education:

But these efforts to dismantle the disciplines may resemble a wrestling match between Thor and the Evil Demon more than it does any revolution, velvet or otherwise.  There will be no disciplines if there is no one to discipline.  It’s not simply a matter of Phoenix University or universities-without-walls or distance learning.  It’s really that so much learning is taking place online, without us.  Oh sure, kids in the U.S.: they’ll come to college, they’ll do their time, get their credentials: but their thinking will happen elsewhere.

A couple years back I claimed that the university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the university, and I think it’s time I amend that statement.  It’s really not the university–which is simply a construct arising out of the interaction between scholars and students, society and academy–or Wikipedia–which is much the same.  Rather, it is that the humanities need the digital more than the digital needs to be humanistic.  We already wander an Internet where humanities knowledge is readily available, produced and collated by non-scholars in more innovating ways than even well-funded scholarly digital humanities projects.  The Victoria Improvement Project, a user-created mod of Paradox Interactive’s colonial conquest game, has done a better job of creating a vibrant, historically accurate world than History Game Canada, which just won a large Digital Media and Learning Prize.  Another prize-winner was Hypercities, which is little more than a Google Maps mashup that seems to be inspired by the amazing work of David Rumsey.

It’s not that these projects aren’t the cutting edge of digital innovation, they shouldn’t be, but the current production of scholarly digital media is sadly lacking in real depth and is reflected by the concurrent monographs and journal articles written about it.  More and more, scholars are realizing that there is something to be gained from the development and use of digital tools, but their years developing expertise in literature, history or art have left them unable to write or understand code.  As such, though they may be experts in the colonial history of Kenya, they cannot translate their knowledge into a systems theoretical expression suitable for presentation in digital media, and so we miss out on truly innovative humanities digital media.  The work done in the Digital Humanities is done by quasi-amateurs, whose vision needs to be translated by technical experts unschooled in historical, artistic or literary dynamics.  It is as if we had brilliant but illiterate scholars of philosophy whose arguments were being written down by scribes unschooled in the philosophical arguments they record.  Heidegger wrote of the damage done by this process when he bemoaned the translation of Greek philosophy by translators not as brilliant as the original writers.  Plotinus argued that philosophers shouldn’t write books, and there are still many humanities scholars who see digital media in the same light, but if we’re going to accept that digital media is the new book, then that requires the academics to be software literate.  Lev Manovich makes the same claim in Software Takes Command, pointing out rightly that you don’t need to produce all the code, or even understand it all, but you must understand how software functions if you want to create software.  As Daniel Cohen points out in The Promise of Digital History:

But those who would like to do advanced work in digital history will ultimately have to acquire significant technical skills, not only to execute complex digital projects successfully (or to guide those doing the design and programming in a technically literate way), but also to have a more far-reaching vision of what is possible for historians in this new medium.

This focus on software literacy has to begin in undergraduate humanities education and must be stressed in graduate school.  Already we claim that a quality humanities scholar must be able to write, hence the required writing courses in every university, and that they must have a grasp of foreign languages, hence the similar requirements in graduate programs, now it’s time to place software literacy on that list.  You cannot be an expert if you are illiterate in the subject you claim expertise.

Updated to improve my street cred, apparently Nick Montfort at MIT is willing to acknowledge the reality on the ground:

I certainly don’t want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing about computing systems, but I also think it would be a disservice to give out game studies or digital media degrees at this point and not have this sort of essential technical background be part of the curriculum.

Wouldn’t you find it strange if a literature professor said that they didn’t “want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing how to read and write”?

A recent op-ed by Mark Taylor in the New York Times rightly points out that graduate school isn’t just broken, but has been broken for decades now.  Anyone familiar with University, Inc. will know this has something to do with Vannevar Bush‘s creation of the military-education complex coupled with the change in university funding implemented back in the early 80s.  Nowadays, it’s mostly symbolized by the underpaid graduate teaching assistants and the commuting lecturers that missed their chance at tenure on the business side and the ever-more specialized professors in ever more insular departments who think that interdisciplinary means getting a soil scientist to talk to a hydrologist.  In my own experience, I’ve been told that groundbreaking research and multidisciplinary synthesis is exciting and wonderful, but it isn’t a dissertation.  It’s particularly hard to develop digital media, as there’s no peer review system in place to give credit to humanities scholars who produce something other than text.  Real innovation in the university isn’t just frowned on, it’s downright grimaced at.

One result of this is a trend toward the production of humanities knowledge by quasi-amateurs.  Jared Diamond started this, writing a Pullitzer-winning study of history without ever studying history in academia, having received his PhD in Membrane Biophysics and a career in physiology.  David Montgomery did the same thing with Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which highlights the importance of soil in socio-political reproduction (Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology which, if my undergraduate experience was any indication, would have included a couple sorely lacking World History courses, if that).  Don’t get me wrong, Diamond’s books are valuable pieces of scholarship and Dirt highlights several major, important issues that have been underrepresented by traditional historical scholarship, but these works lack the kind of historiographical complexity that matches their environmental complexity.  As a result, academic historians hate Jared Diamond as much as they hate Wikipedia, though for superficially dissimilar reasons.  It’s only natural that we’d see the frontiers of environmental history scholarship advanced by academics outside of history, because they actually took classes on environmental systems and understand their importance and their comprehensibility.  There are signs that the daunting nature of Nature is finally being addressed by history departments in the academy, but it’s been made very difficult for historians, who are trained to study languages and political ideologies, to make a late-in-life leap to understanding monsoonal shifts, pedogenesis and desertification.  This is a direct result of the specialization that Mark Taylor criticizes, and it’s most visible in academics who transition into the humanities (Richard Dawkins, for instance, thinks himself a philosopher) because the humanities is considered to be less rigorous than the sciences.

And so we sit here, complaining about the anti-expert bias at Wikipedia while scholars bemoan the creation of feckless experts in academia, and what do you know, one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia gets to co-edit a peer-reviewed academic journal despite not being an academic philosopher for years.  It’s about time we reexamine the creation of experts, the weakness of their specialization, and its relation to our modern, over-connected society.  I feel lucky that I went to graduate school at a place that didn’t even have classrooms the first year, much less a robust Chinese History program, so I was forced to supplement my study of history with courses on environmental science and digital tools, but if we don’t change the university system soon, then choosing to build your PhD outside what Taylor calls “the Detroit of higher learning ” will continue to go unrewarded and prove to be more foolish than focusing on the role of early 19th century French medallions in social history and hoping that you luck out with a tenure job at Wissiapa U.

Isn’t the Web wonderful?  Students aren’t writing their own essays anymore (In fact, they’re looking for contract essay writers for the entire course of their college career).  Anthony DiPierro over at akahele makes the case that the optimism of participants in commons-based models (Open Source and Wikipedia) ignores the fact that “Almost all if not all of the great software projects, even in the open source world, were created by very small numbers of individuals.” Students would rather tweet or update Facebook than pay attention in class, with the result being a crisis of mixed input the likes of which would make Marcuse blanch.  The rise of mediocrity and the cult of the amateur seems to be the order of the day.

I, however, feel somehow unconvinced that all these easily accessible tools are causing the decline of civilization.  As I post my comments on an easily-accessible open-source blogging package, write my papers on a stable word processing/spreadheet/presentation package, check Wikipedia to see a list of Irish Famines, create little marines in Inkscape with some post-processing in GIMP, to be represented using PHP accessing an open-source database, I tend to agree that,  “Anyone who suggests that there is nothing to be learnt from making superior Free versions of proprietary systems, yet uses GNU/Linux, is simply thick.” But that doesn’t solve the niggling Wikipedia issue, where we all acknowledge that the vandalism, pernicious agendas and amateurish errors mean that Wikipedia really isn’t a perfect repository of knowledge.

But who’s being more foolish, the person who relies on an imperfect source of knowledge such as Wikipedia, or the person who clings to the belief that there were perfect sources of knowledge in some halcyon past?  Was there really a point when all newspapers were reliable sources of information or all historical texts accurately represented the root causes of progress and decline?  And more than that, even if we accept that for one day in 1977 all sources of knowledge were perfect in their unified, magisterial controls, does that make them better than the current imperfect sources of news, literature and knowledge that are actually accessible to, gasp, the unwashed masses both here and abroad?  Is it that everyone is growing mediocre or is it that we’re finally able to witness the actual level of understanding and engagement present among society (Both local and global) in a way that was kept under wraps during a less connected time?  Do you really think the Arabic Wikipedia caused the misunderstanding of socio-political processes in the Middle-East, or that it represents it?  Did the Chinese Wikipedia install the GMD in Taiwan or does it just reflect the current political divide?  On a more grounded level, have you noticed that the folks who claim that Wikipedia is junk because it’s not written by experts have a remarkable proclivity for ignoring experts (or deriding them) when they enter into the discussion in defense of the monolith?

Well, apparently Cadie didn’t take over the world, and all my INTERCAL studying went to waste.  To top it off, I just found out that the First Lady will give the commencement address at the first full graduating class at the first University of California campus located in the Central Valley (No, Davis doesn’t count, it’s right next to Sacramento, for those of you who are UC Davis graduates and never realized it).  As a member of the founding graduate class at UC Merced, I’m extremely heartened by the decision of Michelle Obama to come here, and hopefully it will bring with it some much-needed attention for our small, cow-tipping institution of higher-learning.  The real question on everyone’s lips, though, is whether Malia will like Son of the Great River…  I think so.  I mean, that’s why they’re coming, isn’t it?

That’s the problem with reading about hermeneutics, as soon as you start, everything in your life becomes a piece of some gargantuan puzzle. That must be why so few people study hermeneutics—admirable self-denial. Or maybe it’s because they’re too busy watching a cat in a Kleenex box on YouTube.

I just finished reading Michael Wesch’s essay on learning in new media environments and there was a part that really startled me, because I was just referring to the perlocutionary act.  While I was looking at different mediums, the “classroom medium” that Wesch so tellingly describes is also heavy with perlocutionary statement:

The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that’s why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that’s why the chairs don’t move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.”

In the classes I’ve taught, I’ve focused on systems-based explanations for history, as much out of necessity (It’s hard to integrate environmental systems into historical study unless you systematize the latter) as out of training (You can’t create digital historical media unless you reduce the historical data to systems-compatible units) or theoretical support. Testing this method of teaching is not so easy but I’ve found that by giving the students two points in a historical system and asking them to connect these points and give examples for their connections, they end up demonstrating a high level of theoretical understanding grounded in fact.

Wesch hits on another point that confronts the academy every day:

Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers. If we fail to address the crisis of significance, the technologies will only magnify the problem by allowing students to tune out more easily and completely. With total and constant access to their entire network of friends, we might as well be walking into the food court in the student union and trying to hold their attention. On the other hand, if we work with students to find and address problems that are real and significant to them, they can then leverage the networked information environment in ways that will help them achieve the “knowledge-ability” we hope for them.”

I think there’s a systemic bias whenever we create software or databases and its roots are in the object-oriented nature of the knowledge as it appears once we’ve transformed it into code or database entry. In a sense, there doesn’t need to be a Free Software Movement, because all data points are equal in the eyes of the machine. The Wikipedia page on episode 213 of the Simpsons is, from the created external standpoint of the software processing and presenting the data on-screen, fundamentally the same as the Wikipedia page on, say, Frederick Douglass, even though we would all agree (I hope) that the latter is actually more significant than the former. Likewise, in my own work using databases to track Medieval Chinese political geography, the entry for the capital of the empire is fundamentally the same as the entry for the smallest market-town. Without ever acknowledging this foundational aspect of digital information (And especially web-based digital information) we see it reflected on our browsers every day. Given that every website is the same in that one is not required to read it, it becomes evaluated in a consumerist manner, with an emphasis on interactivity and aesthetics.  It’s the true marketplace of ideas, and all of us are forced to admit that even the finest digital humanities projects don’t have the interactive or aesthetic value of the top sites on the Internet or, when they do, they have wrestled the most important parts of the genie back into the bottle (With expected results), so that students prefer to spend their time in university on Facebook rather than browsing the demographic records of Darbyshire.

So, because professors aren’t as comfortable with the digital medium as they are with the textual, they grapple with the distracting bane presented by the ubiquitous laptop (With expected results).  The real damage is when these same students enter post-graduate life and realize they need to scramble to learn a host of digital tools that only exist, when they do, as end products in their undergraduate existence.  The good news for scholars is that the dialectic continues and, assumably, once data literacy catches up with textual literacy among humanities scholars, there

I’ve been struggling lately trying to figure out what I mean by animation and how it relates to cartoons, games, diagrams and Edward Tufte.  There is, I think, a thread that links strategy gaming to the representation of people (or their bubble-enshrouded thoughts) as abstracted collections of lines and filled spaces that focus on process.  That’s the whole point of my theoretical Animated Clearinghouse of Verbs and Processes that you can see in all its Youtube glory at  Animated Ancient China II.  But if we’re just talking about filled spaces and lines, well there should be no difference between these two princesses:

Queen Kristie from Sveden

But we inherently know that the princess on the left is somehow different from the princess on the right.  We have all manner of details of the princess on the left, most notably that she was tricky from day one and that she had a proclivity for killing famous French philosophers, and know very little about the one on the right.  But beyond that intuitive sense of difference and to some scheme for describing how cartoons like Sleeping Beauty are media for the relaying of particular types of knowledge and somehow including within that media the video games that make up so much of modern life requires serious analysis.  I’m not a media studies kind of person, but I am a fan of MacLuhan and his concept of the tetrad, wherein one attempts to define the basic characteristics of a particular medium and its suitability for knowledge transmission.  To whit, I propose the Animation Tetrad:

So, Aurora, like a doughty space marine from Bughunter,  isn’t so interesting and valuable on its own, but as part of a non-lingual process for relaying knowledge.   Now, the knowledge being passed along in Bughunter isn’t as complex as the process for refining uranium for use in a nuclear reactor to create electricity, but it does share the same abstraction regarding details of individual objects with a focus on the system itself.  Ultimately, as we grow more comfortable with the creation of animations, we move away, according to this tetrad, from those pesky words, and move toward complex non-lingual communication of knowledge.  Imagine if Einstein had been exposed to that simple, 45-second Areva commercial (Probably a better scenario than exposure to Bughunter, we can all be sure) and I think the possibilities for complex theory and practice (known as praxis) relayed with little or no actual text becomes more and more possible.  As a historian, I recognize that this has happened before, especially in the use of art to relay religious truths to a laity illiterate in Latin.  Wikipedia boasts of articles in dozens of languages, but animation allows for an escape from the constraints of the vernacular (Possibly, with an institution of a new vernacular based on symbology that may one day become so complex that it constitutes a language that would need just as much training to understand as those that it replaces, hence the reversing characteristic in the tetrad).  So the next time you’re playing Rome: Total War, maybe you should think of it as Rossetta Stone for learning the animated language of knowledge transfer.  How’s that for ruining your gaming experience?