Rethinking AI

One of the problems of writing about technology is the speed at which it changes. Back in the early years of digital literacy it seemed as if there was a bit of a scramble to keep up with blogging, peer-to-peer music sharing, Friends Reunited, Flickr, the early stirrings of social media, gaming culture and virtual reality. But before Buzzfeed, Bitcoin and AI - and certainly a long time before platforms and algorithms began to dominate the scene, things seemed more straightforward, perhaps more app-specific. This broadening of concerns is a recurrent theme in Rethinking Digital Literacy. But one of the struggles involved in trying to get an overview is that details may get overlooked. Having touched on AI in Why Writing Still Matters, I worked hard to develop that theme in the new book, but the more I think about it the more I feel the need to develop those ideas a bit further. I think I'm successful in pointing out some of the big issues - the limitations of AI, the pitfalls in using it, the potential distortions and of course the massive and wasteful energy costs that accrue from large numbers of people asking what are, in all probability, banal questions that could easily be answered in other ways. There are larger questions - questions that probably lie outside the ambitions of Rethinking Digital Literacy most of which circle around notions and definitions of agency and intentionality, and what we think intelligence and computing are in the first place. The vast computing power of a well-trained Large Language Model hangs on an extremely complex and sophisticated predictive guessing game of which word comes next in any given sentence. And what an achievement that is! But it's not how I go about thinking or writing. There is no representational model of the world, no genuine sense of what is valuable, no hierarchy of values, no overarching intentionality and little of that erratic, whimsical fuzziness that leads to creativity and invention, perhaps just as often as it leads to frustration. It seems that the doom narrative - that AI will rapidly discover that humans are wasteful, inefficient and obsolete and then dispense with them altogether - reflects a somewhat negative self-evaluation of the human condition rather than the likely future of computing. This wasn't written by ChatGPT and only partially reflects a desire to increase the profile and sales of Rethinking Digital Literacy.

The book

 

In spite of everything I may have written about the changes in literacy, the feeling of holding the book itself is still significant! The print copy of Rethinking Digital Literacy has arrived, and it feels important to hold it - even though it is light in weight when held against the hours of writing. It is a slim thing, but I'm proud of it and particularly appreciative of how it looks. I owe my thanks to my good friend for the great cover image and of course to my publisher, Edward Elgar, for doing all that publishers do and for their part in producing such a handsome volume. The book is, of course, available in digital format but I can't help thinking that readers would be missing out - even though they might be saving something like £45. But, having said that, I'm not really sure that I know what it is about print books apart from familiarity, nostalgia and habit that makes them seem so special. Rethinking Digital Literacy is an almost entirely digital thing. It was written and researched onscreen, on my iMac, at my stand-up desk. Open, on that desk, to my side, I would have had a notebook and pen, but that would be for a few scrawled reminders - that's all. It was a digital thing. It took form through tapping on a keyboard, it was saved sent, revised and checked digitally. I've never met anyone from the publishers - or even spoken to them on the phone. They might as well be machines or creatures from outer space as far as I know! I'm not complaining, I didn't feel as if I was missing out on anything, in fact I was undisturbed. The process was smooth, frictionless. I think of myself as being fairly measured. I don't go in for grand flourishes or big statements, but as the book developed and as it drew on some themes from Why Writing Still Matters, my previous book, I began to find myself arguing that there had been a revolution in writing - not just a revolution in how we produce text, but a revolution in the reproduction and distribution of text, accompanied by a discernible shift in the place of writing in the ecology of communication. As if that wasn't enough we are now obliged to take account of technological agency - not only the active work of search engines and algorithms, spell-checkers and other digital resources, but also the way in which AI and chatbots can create original text. The old monkey-typing idea- the idea that eventually (perhaps) a monkey's random keyboard tapping might produce the complete works of Shakespeare seems outworn now that AI can produce plausible and original Shakespearean English in a matter of seconds. All told, I've talked my way into a rather strong assertion. So whilst my ambition to write a powerful, popular book for a wide readership seems to have abated, I know that if I did it would be called The Writing Revolution or - perhaps its slightly weaker as a title - A Revolution in Writing. It would need someone to throw down the gauntlet before AI comes up with a version.

Digital literacy - again?

When I first started thinking about the impact of new technologies on language, any idea of what might or might not be referred to as digital literacy was not really on my mind. I was convinced, however, that these technologies would change the face of written communication in a fundamental way. This was in the late '90s - and, as I studied the ways in which teenagers were beginning to innovate with the resources that were rapidly evolving, it seemed to me that we might soon have to think about literacy in new ways. A short piece, published in 2007 called 'Writing the future in the digital age', captures my thinking at the time. And in this piece I did use those two words 'digital literacy' and began to engage with the debate about what it might mean for how we talk about writing and reading - as well as the broader semiotic landscape. What were the implications for education in particular? There was plenty of opinion, both radical and conservative back then and in that sense nothing much has changed. But I noticed, as time went on, that a lot of effort was being spent on trying to pin down the term - particularly by those who wanted to influence policy and practice in schools. Instead, what interested me was the direct experience of children and young people and the ways in which new communication played out in a rapidly changing social, cultural and linguistic milieu. My linguistic training had led me to an understanding that whilst spoken language changed quite quickly - over the course of a lifetime - written language, being more strictly codified, was much slower to change. But here, new written forms were popping up all over the place, with novel conventions of address, abbreviation, new methods of distribution and - because of rapid connectivity - new ways of relating to one another. To call it a revolution in writing seemed too bold, but it was certainly a time of rapid change. I'm now of the opinion that a good argument could be made for calling digital literacy a revolution in writing and I've made my peace with the term and all its multiple meanings. Revolution wasn't on my mind in my last book, 'Why Writing Still Matters', even though that work was concerned with describing and analysing the changing face of written communication. But when Edward Elgar asked me to write a book called 'Rethinking Digital Literacy' I gradually came round to that way of thinking. Because I really wanted go into all the different layers, and all the various implications of this shift in communication, it seemed economical to start using 'digital literacy' again and to try to get a grip on the sweeping changes that it's caught up in. In this new book I finally am suggesting that we're in the midst of a revolution in writing!

Gabriel?

Gabriel - I think of it as a literary name, a name that you'd expect to find in a novel, but rare in everyday life. So to add to my thread of literary coincidences, meeting a character called Gabriel in two different novels shouldn't be too surprising. But reading one after another there's always the danger of contamination. Fortunately though, the Gabriel or 'Gabe' of Maggie O'Farrell's excellent Instructions for a Heatwave is radically different to William Boyd's accidental spy in Gabriel's Moon. The similarities begin and end with the name. Both authors are leading exponents of contemporary English fiction and both do character very well, although their approaches are quite different and quite distinctive. In these two novels O'Farrell explores relationship through interaction, through inter-relation and social behaviour, and whilst this features in Boyd, he ends up taking us down a more analytical, psychological path. There are, of course, all sorts of ways that the impression of character can be conveyed. Modern novelists have often used descriptions of facial expressions and features, physical bearing and movement to identify and communicate something about character. O'Farrell has some delicate touches in describing how the family in her fiction dress - and this is important in capturing an era, principally focused on the Summer of 1976. From her I learnt what a sprigged dress is - and how well it sums up the Laura Ashley era. Some writers can't seem to hold back on this topic. Think of Flaubert who has 'a Polish girl in a salmon-coloured velvet spencer' with a 'gauzy skirt over pearl-grey stockings encased in pink boots edged with white fur', but then again this is him describing a fancy dress ball! But in Boyd it seems overdone. A double agent in a 'crisp white shirt and Royal Artillery tie', a minor character in 'a simple, close-fitting white dress', an artist in 'an olive green cotton drill suit with a dark orange silk tie', a barman in a 'starched double-breasted jacket ', a waiter in a 'cerise jacket' and the enigmatic Faith in 'navy blue pedal-pushers with a matching short blouson jacket' - all in the space of ten pages. Is Boyd giving wardrobe instructions for some future film adaptation or is he trying to capture something of the spy genre? Or is he inventing his own genre? After all Gabriel's Moon is described as the first of a trilogy of Gabriel Dax stories. What characters wear and how they wear it can supply important detail to the reader, it can anchor them to a particular culture or point in time, but in the hands of a skilled writer it can also convey a character's age or social status and something more subtle about their relationship to the world. I'm not sure that Boyd's descriptions do any of that work, but in other respects Gabriel's Moon is a very readable book. I'll sign up for the next one.

Waiting on the Platform

After a fanfare of message alerts and email notifications my copy of Literacies in the Platform Society arrived today. It's a collection that's skilfully edited by Philip Nichols and Antero Garcia and I would like to wish them every success with it. The book has a chapter that Cathy and I wrote which may or not pass the test of time, but it reflects on the way that academic work has become commodified and drawn into a market economy under the influence of technological processes. One of the features of this piece is our use of an imagined dialogue with the software. We use that technique to capture or characterise the internal experience and affective responses of those scholars who have to engage with journal publishers' platforms. That strategy of layering fictional accounts into the academic practices of theory and data has been a long-standing pre-occupation of ours. It might make for a more readable text, it's fun to do, but more than that there is a sense that fictional work can carry more complex meanings than something that is baldly scientific. In a way it's the next logical step forward from narrative research. There's quite a lot of it in my new book Rethinking Digital Literacy which is due to be published in October. Since submitting the manuscript of that book my writing life has turned quite decisively towards fiction. Of course, I've been doing bits and pieces for some time now, but this is both more serious and more playful. My first short story, a fiction that seems to me to be more or less complete in that it stands on its own two feet, is finished and I'm poised for a follow-up. I have no particular ambition for this new writing. No contract. No deadline. Free from all that I can just explore writing as a purely creative process - one that I have considerable investment in and derive a certain sort of pleasure from - and then see where that takes me. I'm happy with the transition although I have nothing but fond memories for the academic writing I've had the privilege to be involved in - even a strange sort of nostalgia for those journal platforms, successor to what we once called 'electronic submission'. Looking back on it that seems like such an odd term. Were we even then submitting to an unknown power? The power of the electronic. In contrast 'platform' is such a neutral term, but as our chapter title suggests, it's where you wait.

Academic outputs

At about the same time that academia was force-marched into accountability, the writing that academics do came to be referred to as outputs, as if in some sort of quasi-mechanical fashion scholars were being paid to sit on a production line watching ideas, data, themes or perhaps chunks of half-formed text rolling down a conveyor belt to be riveted together into papers, journal articles or monographs. According to this new industrial logic the productivity or worth of an academic would depend on the availability of high quality material published by a reputable publisher in a prestigious journal. Academic writing would then be on the market, favoured or favourited, liked, bought or somehow consumed by others. Just as the ways in which we think about publishing has had to take account of digital distribution and open access, academic activity, and writing in particular, has been reshaped by new market forces. Much has been written about this, and there's still plenty to debate, but the hidden cost lies in the reshaping of academic labour into something that appears to be measurable, even quantifiable in some way. A single output certainly could be described in terms of its weight as a printout, its word count or average word length - and people would be right to scoff if these were proposed as measures of its importance. So perhaps the number of citations an output receives seems more scientific - but then, if we think that influence or popularity is the same thing as quality we'd be fooling ourselves. Such measures are at the most a very rough guide, as is the h-index of an individual academic, dependent as it is on the cumulative market value of citations. Could we ever achieve consensus on the quality of academic writing? Perhaps in very broad terms we might agree that some outputs are more persuasive than others, that some develop a robust argument, develop or introduce a new perspective or contribute to the advance of knowledge. But as with writing in general, perceptions of quality are, in the end, an individual and even a temporary judgement, partly because of the way in which our own reading reflects shifting interests and purposes. For me it has frequently been the case that what I've read, and perhaps cited, may not be particularly well argued or well founded, but something that has caused me to stop and reflect - just as going to a presentation that annoys me can help to clarify my own thinking. Even academic writing that has had a formative influence may not be recognised as significant till later on, until its ideas have been absorbed, debated and reinterpreted. After all, even Einstein's groundbreaking work failed to make an immediate impact. Steady and considered assessment and re-assessment is how knowledge evolves, how ideas build within and across academic communities. As we know, a piece of writing - an output, if you must - is always in dialogue with other writing, with other discussions, and with a range of practices and perspectives. At the end of Middlemarch, George Elliot claims that the 'growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' and owed to those 'who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs'. The accumulation of knowledge and the evaluation of the work of academics in general seems to me to require the same sort of logic - a recognition of a community of practitioners many of whom may live a hidden life, rather than an assembly line of outputs judged by their market value and the prestige of the individuals who produce them.

Reading with the algorithm

Georgi Gospodinov has an enviable light touch as a writer. Reading his novel Time Shelter I was delighted by his description of temporary havens from years gone by - havens initially designed as a comfort for those suffering from dementia. In Gospodinov's fictional world the idea becomes so popular and so contagious that it extends to whole cities and then eventually whole countries. Under referendum-like conditions, citizens then vote to remain or return to earlier times. It's an engaging and thought-provoking political satire. But it also encourages deeper reflection on personal and cultural memory, on identity and the meanings of nationality. After I'd put Time Shelter down almost straight away I picked up Sanak Hiiragi's Lantern of Lost Memories, which is a very different sort of book, a different kind of writing, but equally engaging in its own way. The coincidence of choosing two novels that explored the theme of time and memory struck me as odd, despite the fact that it's a common literary trope. Of course you could develop a whole reading list on that theme - one that for me would have to include Proust, Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and Yoko Agawa's charming novella The Housekeeper and the Professor. It's not surprising that time and the novel is a well-worn theme, and scholarship still looks back to Bakhtin's essays on the subject for inspiration. Yet despite knowing that this is a recurrent trope, it surprised me to read two such well-matched books. It was only later when I remembered that I'd looked for Time Shelter on Amazon, shortly after reading a review of it in the London Review of Books. It was the Amazon algorithm that had recommended the Hiiragi book to me. Thank you Amazon, but it pulled me up short. I'm continually realising that I don't enjoy as much agency as I think I do. I'm under the influence. Of course there's upbringing and education. In fact there's all those forces that formed me as a reader, and a particular kind of reader at that. I'm influenced by all sorts of social, cultural and political forces that manifest in all sorts of ways (taking out a subscription to the London Review of Books is just one small example of this). I'm influenced to follow up on Gospodinov, and then I'm influenced by the algorithm! All in all I'm caught up in, influenced or even produced by, a condensation of heterogeneous forces, algorithms included. We know how algorithms influence us, how they nudge us in different directions, influence what we think is important - what we buy, where we go and how we get there as well as what we watch and what we read. I used to argue strongly for the importance of having a community of readers - peers, colleagues, friends and family - in fact all of the wider social network is worth considering. And these are still so important, but there are wider forces at play, too. Now technologies are beginning to play an important role as well. Perhaps non-human factors have always been there, but the development of algorithms and AI signals an enhanced technological participation in how we experience the world. I read with the algorithm.