I’m a southern-transplanted upstate New Yorker. I’ve lived in Atlanta, Georgia since 1988, having moved here when a job I was well-suited for gave me the opportunity to relocate from the small town where I grew up. I was always a bit of a city-guy at heart; so I made a smooth transition from a community of a few thousand people, to one with several million.

My career has been in information technology. I fell into it, frankly. One of my first full-time jobs was as a desk clerk and auditor at a hotel, before computers made their ubiquitous appearance in and permanent attachment to all our lives. The auditor job led to a bookkeeping job; the bookkeeping job morphed into an IT job shortly after the company I worked for bought this gigantic steel box that was an IBM System/34 computer. It was early enough in the IT industry’s development that people still taught themselves how to do things; I taught myself several programming languages and developed some extensive business application experience, then jumped at the chance to move south to take a job supporting the very system and applications I had taught myself to use.

The IT career has served me well. It’s been fascinating, exciting, frustrating, and maddening at turns; anyone with even the faintest involvement in IT knows what I mean by that. But I’ve always had very strong interests that had little or nothing to do with IT or with computer technology. Writing, photography, literature, history, philosophy, and politics have run various threads through my life and my thinking since I was old enough to read. Some would characterize it as a left-brain/right-brain phenomenon. The left-brain, you might say, drew me to the hard logic of computing; but the right-brain kept forging a path of its own. There are other – a whole slew of other – psychological and personal considerations, I’m sure, but this is just an introduction, not psycho-babble or an autobiography. So let’s just leave it at that.

In any case, once upon a time a few years ago, I decided to try and formalize all those things I had been learning on my own. It took me a while to figure out what direction to take; I think I spent about a year just trying to come up with a general approach. I looked at local Georgia schools – there are certainly some good ones – but in the end returned to something I had tried years earlier. Shortly after high school, I had enrolled with Empire State College – a distance-learning arm of the State University of New York – with an eye towards a degree in philosophy at the time. I re-enrolled at ESC in the fall of 2002, but this time began pursuing my bachelor’s degree in historical studies. I was able to pick up where I left off, to some extent, because of the nature of the courses I had originally taken. Here’s a list of the earlier courses I moved into my new degree program, in no particular order:

• Elementary French
• French Conversation
• Political and Philosophical Foundations of American Democracy
• The Philosophy of Aristotle
• Survey of English Literature
• The Romantic Period in English Literature
• Creative Writing

Here are the courses I’ve completed since re-enrolling, in approximately the order I finished them:

• Educational Planning/Degree Program Planning
• United States History 1492-1865
• United States History 1865 to the Present
• World History I, to 1600
• European Civilization Since 1815
• The American Political System: An Introduction to American Government
• The United States Constitution: A Survey
• The United States Constitution: Topics for Our Times
• The Enlightenment
• Introduction to Web Publishing with HTML
• American Intellectual History
• American Modernism
• Historiography
• Science and Technology in Western Culture
• Exploring Place: History
• Pacific Asia: Culture and History
• Nature in American History

Here are the courses I have left:

• Modern Russia (in progress, started May, 2009)
• Statistics
• The African American Experience
• The Middle East
• Eastern European History
• International Politics and Relations
• Globalization: Business and Society in the Information Age

One of the best things about taking on the program through ESC is the freedom it has given me to explore on my own. I’ll usually read a half-dozen related books on my own for each class I take, using the course materials and required texts as my guide. Several of the classes have been (and will be) independent-study, where I have worked or will work directly with one of the college professors, giving me excellent guided opportunities to tailor the classes and research to my interests. American Intellectual History and American Modernity, for example, were independent study; the kinds of discussions I had with the professor and the guidance he gave me through some very complicated material was an intellectual-life-changing experience. Of particular importance was the writing I did for both those classes, writing which my professor evaluated as graduate-level quality – great news since I’m already thinking ahead to graduate school.

It’s been a little odd cranking all this up in my forties, yet I couldn’t even explain how glad I am that I did it. As I continue – juggling one or two classes at a time against my still full-time career in IT – I’m extremely proud of the work I’ve done so far and completely open about where it all might lead me. As this blog (whose name and design, by the way, stems from some work I did for the HTML class) develops, I’ll write more about what I gained from some of the classes. The constitutional interpretation, intellectual history, enlightenment, and historiography classes – for example – changed my thinking permanently and significantly altered how I view society and culture. Equally important, those classes more than any others have helped me clarify my own thinking, allowing me to turn a more thoughtfully critical eye on the world around me. It has been and is an amazing intellectual adventure; and now it’s part of the story of my life.

Let’s take a closer look at this article by Timothy Garton Ash later:

What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance….

Above all, though, there is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich north….

However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies – and they will be very ingenious – somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more….

Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?

Ash has an odd mix of good and bad points throughout the article; but in general he seems to have little interest in an actual definition of capitalism. There’s a lot of weakness in intellectual discourse along the lines where history and economics meet; Ash’s article is more accurately about corporatism and consumerism than it is about capitalism.

And, well, I’d like someone to show me one generation in history that hasn’t at least partly embraced the myth that it was a step or two away from doomsday. Funny thing about doomsday … the deadline keeps slipping.

For my Science and Technology in Western Culture class, I’m reading Society and Technological Change by Rudi Volti. One of the assignments for the current module was to read Volti’s chapter on the development of printing technologies. Volti has a short discussion in this chapter on the psychological effects of printing; that is, on psychological changes that might have occurred as print technology improved and publishing began to flourish.

Volti briefly writes about Marshall McLuhan, and about some of McLuhan’s ideas on the fundamental social changes that occurred in conjunction with the expansion of print publishing and other media. Says Volti:

Some fascinating possibilities … have been suggested by Marshall McLuhan, for whom media such as print and television had consequences that far outweigh the overt messages they carry. Printed books fundamentally changed civilization not because of the information they transmitted; the greatest consequence of printing lay in the different modes of thought and perception that it fostered. In McLuhan’s analysis, each medium engenders a distinctive way of looking at the world; as his famous aphorism has it, “the medium is the message.” The reading of the printed word makes readers think in sequence, just as a sentence is sequentially read from left to right. – pg. 190

I’ve never read McLuhan, so I don’t really know how well this represents his views. But this is perhaps what Tim Lacy is asking about, in his post What is Linear Thinking? from earlier this week. It would seem reasonable that McLuhan – or at least Volti in his interpretation of McLuhan – is highlighting a significant change in the technology of thought that came about in conjunction with the increased availability of the printed word. While I think there’s much to be said for this dramatic change in thought processes, I’m not convinced that linear thinking of this type adequately encompasses what happens in our minds when we read.

Obviously, we tend to read sequentially, at least in the sense that we typically read both books and other materials from beginning to end, and, further, we expect some logical relationship between the ideas presented at the beginning and those presented at the end. So the activity of reading does strike me as a linear process. However, reading and learning from what we read are two different things entirely. For sure, I can read something from the first page to the last page, absorbing what I read in the sequential order the author provides – but that isn’t necessarily how I learn from it. If the reading offers me anything at all, then the linear process combines with a variety of other mental process where I make associations, form concepts, increase prior knowledge, absorb and relate details to others I’m already aware of, and (hopefully!) emerge from the reading with either a more solid understanding of something I already know or at least a beginning understanding of something entirely new. Reading – at least reading to learn – is a much more iterative and hierarchical process than it is a sequential process. If this might be described as “non-linear thinking” (and I suppose it might), I would think that non-linear thinking is not the same as illogical thinking – since illogical thinking suggests an inability to build on prior knowledge when attempting to learn something new (or to think about anything else, for that matter).

Continuing the quotation above, Volti goes on to say:

Reading also produces an egocentric view of the world, for the reader’s involvement with the printed word is solitary and private. – pg. 190

This was actually the part that made me suspicious of the “linear thinking” statements about reading. While it is undoubtedly true that reading is a solitary and private activity, I don’t think that adequately describes the personal, cultural, or social significance of reading (or of writing, for that matter). As Benedict Anderson describes so well in Imagined Communities (I swear, I’ll be referring to that book for the rest of my life), one of the true revolutions that occurred through the explosion of printing was a new awareness among human beings of the simultaneous existence of other human beings. At minimum, my reading of a book implies an awareness of one other person – the book’s author – and in all likelihood embraces some sense that other people have read – have experienced – the book in ways similar to mine. If I spun that theory out to one other logical conclusion, I might even say that the reason so many people write, and so many more want to write, is that the sense of existing in a world simultaneously with other people has become an endemic part of the way modern men and women perceive (the significance of?) their existence.