Aden Evens is one of Dartmouth's most idiosyncratic professors. Though he doesn't have a cell phone, TDI managed to catch up with the highly-rated New Media scholar at the Canoe Club to talk about telecommunication, Twitter, and the nature of reality. 

TDI: We were that told if we interviewed you about cell phones and “New Media,” you’d say something controversial…

AE: Now the pressure’s on [laughter]. It’s pretty typical of me in these contexts, and it may well be true of my teaching also…well, let me put it this way: there was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the journal that everyone in higher education attends to (we don’t all necessarily read it), written somewhat humorously, about how we professors all think we’re impostors. No matter how much expertise or renown you have, you always imagine that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

TDI: Really? I’ve had plenty of professors who are “experts in the field” and have a sense of ego about it.

AE: Well, no doubt, there are people whose narcissism overwhelms their insecurity and they end up deciding that they really are experts. My guess is that at some level, even most of those people probably think, “God, there’s so much to know.” There’s so much out there in your field that it’s virtually impossible to read all of it and be an “expert,” but you’re expected to command your discipline. I say this because my interdisciplinary background makes my relationship to expertise especially severe. I did philosophy and math as an undergrad, philosophy in graduate school, and ended up working on technology and music before I finally said, three years ago, for this job, “Oh yeah, I’m a New Media scholar, that’s what I do.” Before that, I was a professor in MIT’s Humanities department, in a subdivision that mixed creative and technical writing. It was a weird position, and given my predilection for abstraction, it didn’t feel like the best fit. The point is that I come to New Media via a patchy approach. That’s going to be true of a lot of New Media scholars, though there are certainly people who have a more legitimized relationship to the field, who have studied in departments of media studies, communications. Are you recording this? Otherwise you would have missed all that great stuff! [laughter]

TDI: Oh yeah, we’re recording. How has the relationship between print and electronic media evolved, and where is it going?

AE: I don’t think there’s a single path that media is following—even print media. I don’t know that there’s even a dominant trend. I do think lots of things are happening. Industries are having to change and adapt. The economic situation paired with the cultural significance of online media is certainly having an impact on print media—it’s changing the way people access that media. My guess is that there are a lot fewer people outside of New York City who get the New York Times in print. These things are almost obvious, but if it looks like they point to the death of print media, I think that is overstated or premature. Print media may well find places in which it is most appropriate or accessible as a niche.

TDI: What do you think of the evolution of user-generated content, the so-called “Web 2.0” phenomenon?

AE: While it’s undoubtedly going to produce all sorts of new configurations of culture—blogs, opinion aggregators—and reshape how people make decisions, it’s not according to any overall dominant rule. While “Web 2.0” and its form of populist participation are here to stay, my sense is that we haven’t yet seen the ways in which that’s ultimately going to change culture. What we’re experimenting with right now in 2.0 is something that’s still relatively primitive and is going to be something else by the time it ossifies.

TDI: Would you take a stab at what that might be?

AE: I have no idea—that’s part of the point. I don’t think we can know until it develops. It’s going to be a combination of technological developments, infrastructure developments, and the spontaneous appropriation of these developments by culture according to various contingencies of history that can’t be forecasted.

Also, despite all the hubbub, I’m not convinced that Web 2.0 has made much of a difference in how people get information or how they understand themselves in relation to the world. It’s just culture spinning its wheels. As a matter of fact, I do have a theory about this, which is that much of the participation in Web 2.0 is not so much the idealist description of people finally having a voice and speaking many to many instead of one to many, but instead it allows people to affirm their own membership in our culture, to write in and say “me too” or “yes, I agree” or “no, I disagree.”

TDI: So it’s like a vote…that doesn’t count?

AE: Well, even in voting you know that it’s only via a kind of aggregating process that your vote makes any difference. You don’t imagine that your vote is a self-expression; it’s an expression of yourself as a member of culture. Web 2.0 tells you, “Here is your individual voice. Be an individual, not just the member of a herd. Contribute your own individual thoughts.” But that’s wrong. What we actually do is assert our belonging.

TDI: Is there a risk that it’s shortening our attention span?

AE: If I had to take a guess, I’d say, Sure, it probably shortens our attention span, but, to me, the more significant phenomenon is whether there are compensatory benefits. Maybe you have a shorter attention span but you are more likely to hold disparate associations in your mind all at the same time. You are more likely to understand realms of knowledge as being complexly interconnected, because that’s the topography of the Internet.

But as a teacher in the humanities, I’m a big proponent of a kind of long-term critical engagement with ideas, and it seems to me that that’s not the sort of engagement you can get in thirty-second chunks. It was Noam Chomsky who said that the problem with the media in the last 30 or 40 years is that they reduce everything to soundbites—you can’t say anything that hasn’t been said before in thirty seconds. You can only refer to already-known ideas. So if we want new and creative ideas, we’re going to have to get beyond Twitter.

TDI: As an English professor, how do you think the “great novelists” of the late 19^th and early 20^th century would react to the Internet and the effect it would have on their work?

AE: I take issue with your premise. I’m not sure the model of the “great author” has the relevance it once did. Now, art is kind of a “selection” of different parts of culture that are juxtaposed and reflect something that is extremely timely and extremely appropriate to their particular moment, but not necessarily something lasting.

TDI: Our generation was the last one born before our culture’s almost-unanimous use of cell phones and the Internet. Our generation didn’t get these technologies until a certain age. Where would you draw the line—when will your sons get cell phones, the Internet, etc.?

AE: I don’t have a cell phone because I don’t understand why I would need one. The things that people do with cell phones aren’t things I generally need to do. I grew up living in a small town without a cell phone and that seemed to work just fine. Maybe it means I’m not as busy or connected as other people, but I think it just means I don’t waste as much time as they do.

We tend to use text-based communication in my field anyway. I don’t think a lot of my colleagues in the English Department are phoning each other on cell phones. We call each others’ homes when it’s necessary, but for the most part we email. It seems to work fine.

Two of my classes (ENGL 17 and COCO 9) start with George Myerson’s Heidegger, Habermas, and the Mobile Phone. His basic argument is that if you look at the rhetoric surrounding mobile phones—advertising, newspaper articles, what people say when they’re interviewed about their mobile phone—when you look at this rhetoric, it gives a certain image of what communication is, an image in which communication means “getting your needs met.” So to communicate means to have this device that allows you to reach out to the world and shape it how you want it to be. You can arrange things with other people, have coffee ordered for you at Starbucks, get your pizza ordered. You can be doing a whole lot of things at once, “take care of business.” He contrasts this with what communication means for the German philosophers Heidegger and Habermas, who see communication as multiple people working together to arrive at a common understanding.

Myerson thinks we should be worried about this because it reduces the world. It’s not that you can’t do “authentic communication” anymore, it’s that more and more of our lives are about exchanging information rather than working on difficult understandings of ourselves and the world around us. When people talk on cell phones, how long do they tend to talk for? How long do they talk before letting the other person talk? I’d guess it’s very short increments, because they are Twitter-sized “exchanges of data” rather than expressions of affect, or ideas. Though it’s possible to be creative, I think people tend not to be.

Five years ago, you could ask someone “What do you need that cell phone for?” because it’s just another forty bucks a month, and they would say, “Well, my daughter could miss her ride,” etc., etc. So yeah, I get it—cell phones are good for urgent exchanges of information.  But I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason to have them.

TDI: What’s it going to be like for people born in 2009 to deal with these technologies?

AE: Well, when I was ten or fifteen, we imagined that computers would become an increasingly commonplace appliance. We knew at some level that they were going to get smaller, but I don’t know if we anticipated, at age ten, the connectivity or communication that was going to be possible. What we really imagined over all was that the people who were born in this new age were going to be computer experts,  that everyone would grow up knowing how to program computers.

TDI: I must have missed that boat…

AE: I think it’s gone in a very different direction. I think people are now universally comfortable with computers; they can use them as an appliances. But there is, in my opinion, a very widespread ignorance of what goes on “behind the scenes.” I don’t think people understand how what happens on the screen relates to the hardware. People know how to push the buttons but eventually they’ll be even more enslaved to their software.

There is a countertrend, though. Programming has become so built into computers that at some point in the future, you’ll just be able to say, “Type an English sentence,” and program the computer without having specialized knowledge.

TDI: Do you think cell phones and the Internet change our perception of reality?

AE: Without doubt. One of the premises of New Media studies is that our media shape our world, they shape who we are, they shape how we understand ourselves, they shape what we see as our possibilities for existing, they shape our discourse, they shape our further developments of technology. There’s no question that any technology, especially when it’s as powerful and pervasive as the Internet and the cell phone, is going to change reality, change what the real is and how we understand it. Could you imagine saying that the automobile didn’t change our perception of reality

I think it would be dangerous, though, to try to sum that up. It goes without saying that reality is constantly being shaped. Clearly, the Internet changes who we are. But what that change amounts to, I don’t think anybody can say.