CONVENING VIRTUALLY FOR CONVENIENCE: THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN ACADEMIC CONFERENCING

Adam Garcia

argarcia76@hotmail.com

http://adamgarcia.blogspot.com/

VIRTUAL ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION PLATFORM AND PAPER PROPOSAL FOR

Strategies of Critique XXIV: The Future (TBD) CONFERENCE

Instructions for virtual convening: Please read the following text and engage with those you are in contact with in regards to the topics covered and issues raised. If you choose, you may email the author and/or participate in an online discussion of the issues. As an additional exercise, please be mindful of your visceral and communicative experience of attending the conference physically.

Reflect on what meanings and effects physical attendance and participation has on you and your engagements with others.

Consider how these engagements would be the same or different by engaging/convening virtually instead of physically.

Consider a future in which virtual convening becomes more commonplace and physical convening more costly or more occasional and select.

Consider a future in which individuals are more independent, both from academic standards and economic structure, and how critical intellectual discourse can and will be transformed in fostering democratic life.

CONVENING IN COPENHAGEN: VIRTUALITY IN THE SHADOW OF ELITE PHYSICALITY

The spectatorship of the recent Copenhagen summit on environment and climate was a success insofar as it achieved a sense of global presence while pervading global-local consciousness. Ironically, while the summit's focus was billed as CO2 emission-reduction, it was taken for granted that participants should expend fuel and CO2 to convene physically in Copenhagen rather than engage in online discourse that would have saved fuel and CO2 emissions. While recognition of this irony could serve as an easy prompt to reject physical travel in favor of online networking, a more critical gaze might question whether a virtual summit could have achieved the same status and pervasiveness without the expenditure of fuel/CO2 and convening of physical bodies. This presents a tension between the continuing development of electronic media for facilitating interactive discourse and the premium it generates for translocal physicalities through scarcification of translocalism and desire for materialization of translocal sociality.

While this topic is generally and pervasively relevant, I would like to localize my treatment of it here by, first, situating my submission to this conference as a virtual one where I must decline to travel and attend as much as a consequence of personal economic-institutional constraints as a will to democratize the future of intellectual discourse by achieving indifferent status for virtuality as for physicality of participation/attendance. Second, I would like to explore one potential future (form) of intellectual discourse in which formal communicative institutional constraints of academic discourse, such as refereed publishing, heavy emphasis on review and citation of academic literature, and so forth are supplanted or at least supplemented by more open and less authoritarian forms of writing and communication, which while apparently lacking in formalism may still be rigorous in their application of critical thought, intellectual richness, scientific value-control reflexivity, and be authored with a general interest and intent of exchanging data, thought, and experiential-wisdom among the globally literate.

While addressing the general themes of fluidity global digital communications and its tension with the elitism of scarcified materiality in physical translocalism, this contribution will shift to address the decentralization (rhizomatics) of alocal online dialogue and consider how online discussions may grow to greater centrality as a medium for democratic exchange and how intellectual writing may develop greater flexibility with the relaxation of high-authoritarian standards of citation and formalism. In support of this paper's theme, it will not contain academic formalities or citations.

THE DIGITAL ECONOMIC PARADOX

Digital media have the ability to reproduce data infinitely while distributing copies to any receiver connected to the internet at any point. The economic consequence of digital abundance, like any other form of abundance, is that the exchange value of a digital text of unrestricted access becomes very low, since its consumers have no reason to sacrifice other consumption opportunities to gain access to something they can already get for free. While the use-value of any text or other good is what it is regardless of exchange-value, it is the exchange value that is measured in monetary units - and therefore it is the exchange-value that is often responsible for catching public interest for a text. One has only to consider the widespread interest in works of art traded for millions to recognize this relationship between exchange value and public attention.

The countereffect to abundance-driven exchange-value depletion is scarcity-driven appreciation. Not all scarce goods appreciate in value as a result of their scarcity, but reduced availability makes it impossible to find an adequate substitute for a lower price, and this prompts some to pay the asking price. Digital media therefore have often been feared for their ability to create unlimited access and therefore unlimited abundance of media texts. The question, however, is whether they may also promote scarcification of non-digital (i.e. analog) media.

Ironically, perhaps, while the Copenhagen summit was distinguished for its analog status as a non-virtual conference among 'real' political leaders and not just delegates from bureaucratic institutions, it was only known so widely because people were able to connect with it virtually. Granted the connection was read-only, at least it was for me, and the information partial and fragmented - but I was connected nonetheless. I was even able to use data about CO2 emissions to conduct a class discussion that could be construed as an analog satellite of the conference in Copenhagen, with internet media linking the two. Although it can be easy to lose sight of the virtualized connectivity of the Copenhagen conference in the shadow of its analog portion's status, in reality the virtual connectivity of the conference was probably far greater than the amount of analog discourse that took place physically at the convention center where it was held.

So despite the overwhelming virtuality of the conference, it was the physicality of it that worked to motivate so many to participate virtually at all. Had the conference been conducted as a textual online discussion among the same participants, the question is whether the same public interest would have been generated. In other words, was its virtual success due to its physicality? Clearly physicality offers a sensual richness that is lost with each level of reduction to pure text. One may wonder whether such sensual richness enhances or impedes the intellectual transparency of the message, but certainly it functions to draw attention and stimulate interest.

But the strange thing is that as pure text, and even relatively sensually rich digital data become more abundant and increasingly prevalent in daily media consumption, this may actually increase a sense of scarcity with regard to physical convening. Even while digital access provides the opportunity to connect with, contact, and consume so many texts and artifacts beyond reach through physical travel to all the places that would be required, increased virtuality may still have the effect of making physical access seem that much more exciting. Just as advertising tries to taunt consumers into temptation to buy the product, virtual access may work just as easily to sell physical access at a higher price.

I should not give the impression that this is a done-deal. It is no more difficult to resist seduction into valuing physical over virtual access as it is to recognize the convenience of navigating websites from home compared with the hasels and costs of travel. It should also not be assumed that an increased sense of scarcity in physical discourse derived from increased online discourse will necessarily make travel and physical convening more expensive. By the same logic of relative abundance, the more people forego physical travel in favor of virtual interactions, the less competition there is for transportation and accomodations. This presumes that people forego physical attendance out of emissions concerns and other preferences instead of being seduced into attending by the bargain of it.

Certainly, achieving parity between the value ascribed to virtual convening and that ascribed to the physical variant would be beneficial both in terms of emissions-reductions and social-economic equality. Yet, if such parity were actually achieved the question would become whether it would be desirable for no physical convening to take place at all. And if physical convening would occur, but as an increasingly small proportion of virtual convening, what factor(s) should guide the distributive logic of who should convene physically and why. Should it become a luxury for a class elite, a functional necessity claimed by certain professionals for certain purposes, or a broadly yet occasionally consumed delicacy or bitter medicine (depending on how it is socially-constructed)?

A FUTURE FOR DEMOCRATIC ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Democracy and authority are in a perpetual love-hate relationship. To the extent that we want to be free to express ourselves and engage contructively with others, democracy is an indestructible desire in our hearts and minds. Yet, on another level we are unnerved by the threat that freedom can spiral out of control, or that without control democratic discourse will produce nothing of value or substance. The fear of democratic discourse underpins the various authoritarian control-institutions of academic publishing. Without peer-review and other content filtering, scientific and academic rigor are expected to degenerate into unscrupulous propaganda. Worse yet, without any means of elevating the status of some writers and works and dismissing that of others, how would the value of any text or author be marketable at a level that would command the publishing sales/revenues, tuition payments, grants, subsidies, and other funding that are bestowed on prestigious academics? In a radically democratic discourse, where all voices are regarded as equal and all information must be equally critically filtered by the receiver, what justification would exist to pay anyone anything? The industry of academia would become bankrupt, not intellectually to be sure but financially.

But rather than discussing the economics, ethics, and other pros and cons of academic authoritarianism verses democracy, allow me to move directly to addressing the relationship of style and formatting to promoting more critical democratic discourse 'outside' of academia. I bracket the word, "outside," because it is highly debatable whether anyone who has ever come in contact with academia in any way can ever again become "outside" of it. The metaphor of outside-status vis-a-vis institutions and discourses always requires some boundary be defined, and once it is the question becomes what it means to be connected to a discourse through knowledge, a shared past, etc. while also being labeled as "outside" of it. Everyone who attends university classes or otherwise engages in academic study of one form or another has the capacity to critically re-produce, engage, and communicate with ideas and knowledge; arguable even if they learned to do so by some other means than academia. Yet few people are liberated in self-expression and discursive participation by constraining expectations of style, formatting, citation, and bibliographic reference that are constructed as normative among many if not most academics and academic publishers.

So while strict standards for academic writing and discourse may certainly have some positive effects on the quality of research and writing, they can be discouraging or even prohibitive for some who nevertheless have critical insights to share and a will to participate in rigorous intellectual discourse with others. In order to liberate such people, and really it's not just "some people" because even those quite comfortable with acquiescing to academic writing criteria have interests in subjects that we would never presume to claim expert authority yet still wish to learn more about through active participation in a critical developmental/learning process with others. So in order to liberate the spirit of free learning and critical discourse that is so conducive to democracy, it makes sense that many if not all the restrictions internalized regarding academic style, formatting, citation, and so forth must be bracketed, or ignored altogether, in order to substitute them with other means of rigour.

It often amazes me what I hear when I engage in discussion of academic writing conventions with those who revere them. Citation and bibliography are doggedly indoctrinated from the earliest moment possible. As a result, many people are trapped in dogmatic adherence to them as unreasoned necessities without which valid textuality is impossible. Who knows the purpose or function of source-citation and references well enough to replace them with an adequate substitute? I went through a period where I thought the purpose of bibliographic reference was to express professional recognition and solidarity with other scholars for purposes of professional networking. It was some time before it occurred to me that citing the source of a particular piece of information or claim allows a writer to avoid retracing all the steps necessary to explain or defend something they have derived from other knowledge. Ironically, since that realization, I have discovered that many people believe that simply citing a text with status imparts status onto their own work; as if academic discourse was a magic-factory where everything that touches gold turns to gold, where "gold" is truth, validity, and/or legitimacy.

Liberating critical discourse from dogmatic academic standards is hardly the utopia it may at first appear. With freedom comes responsibility, and where responsibility is absent or lacking, ethically or otherwise, the consequences are evident in the direct results of actions. There are no disciplinary actions to protect you from the consequences of things you say or do that can be abated to allow you a second-chance. My son watches a movie about Jonah the Prophet where the moral lesson is that God gives second-chances and so should people, but people are human and sometimes fail in their benevolence if they even bother to try at all. So, with total academic freedom also comes greater responsibility and awareness of the reasons for one's choices and the consequences of actions.

Less generally, it takes practice to replace citation with explicit reason. It is difficult to reason independently without consciously avoiding the compulsion to cite known scholars and texts and reproduce them in a constant advertising campaign of one's personal canon of influences. It takes patience to recognize when something you are attempting to communicate is lost on the person you are communicating with because they simply don't yet "get" or don't get the relevance of something you are expressing. Disciplinary foundationism affords people the luxury of communicating without having to negotiate vast amounts of pre-knowledge, and while this is wonderful in facilitating specialist discussions, it can actual impair an individual's ability to explain or engage the foundational knowledge and ideas they take for granted when confronted with the need because of either relative ignorance or critical challenge.

Although I could address more such specific issues, perhaps such issues can evolve in discursive exchanges. Academic authoritarianism is a shadow discourse in many ways. Rarely are the need or reasoning behind citation, refereed-publishing, style and format, discussed openly and critically. More often they are simply presented as conditions for survival in academia. If you want to get published - you just do it. "Jumping through hoops" is an expression I've often heard. "Publish or perish" is another. Consciously and ethically, probably few people actually have the intent or desire of symbolically threatening others with their life in demand of absolute submission to unnegotiable standards and conditions, yet that is what many people are doing under the spell of "that's just the way it works."

Democratic discussion and negotiation of valuable academic writing practices would be a refreshing alternative to the hoop-jumping negotiations, externalization of conditional imperatives, and so forth that make up the authoritarian discourse. The question that ensues is whether the growth of democratic discursive practices 'outside' academia could have a negative effect on academia. Sadly, while democratization of quality discourse multiplies exponentially the value and access to such discourse beyond academic elites, it also has the potential to threaten the funding of intellectual work insofar as intellectual work goes unfunded for the most part, outside of academic institutions.

This, however, leads to another economic paradox like the one faced with the infinite abundance of digital textuality. Does democratizing critical intellect and discourse actually work to promote subscription to academic publications, book sales, enrolment in colleges and universities, and so forth, In other words, are free public intellectuals actually becoming free marketing personelle for universities, publishing companies, and so forth? This futher evokes the issue of class formation and division among intelligentia, but this is a Marxist issue that I would rather leave to people who can stomach the prospect of class conflict and violent revolutions. I prefer to maintain the utopian dream that critical discourse, intelligence, and democracy can spread abundantly and only result in a better life among individuals of greater independence, respect, ethics, and insight into how to live well and promote better living among others. Such a dream can be a pleasurable fantasy, but it can also be a compass in working to move forward and coming up with how.