Differences & Repetitions

…and thanks for following me from what’s now the D&R legacy site.  I’m basically up and running around here, although I expect to add “about the author” and contact pages within the next couple of days.  Within a few weeks I’m hoping to launch a new Differences & Repetitions Wiki, moreover, which will link directly off of this site as a sub-directory.  I’ll let you know when it’s live.

In the meantime, I appreciate your sticking with me though the move.  Let me know what you think about the new D&R and what content/features you might be interested in seeing.

You may have noticed that things look a little different here at D&R. After four-and-a-half years under the old blue, orange, and gray regime, I thought it was about time for a change.

The old template I was using started to seem, well, a little dated and generic, plus the star graphic that appeared in the upper left-hand corner began to smack of Texaco to me.

The new look makes D&R more visually consistent with the suite of sites that I maintain: The Differences & Repetitions Wiki; The Late Age of Print blog; and Bookworm, my academic website hosted at Indiana University. It’s not just about preserving a consistent red, white, gray, and black color scheme, though. I’m also a fan of the Twitter feed that now appears prominently in the header.

So there you have it, the newly-designed D&R. I hope you like it! I may regret opening up this can of worms, but your comments on the new look are welcome. Gulp…

I’m feeling a little like a deadbeat dad these days, given my neglect of D&R. I’ve been having a blast over on my book blog, The Late Age of Print, but unfortunately that’s taken up a bit too much of my attention. Case in point: Monday, September 14th was the fourth anniversary of the launch of this blog. I’ve been pretty good about marking the occasion in the past, but this year I’m ringing in the new year belatedly. As any deadbeat dad worthy of the name would say, “Hey, at least I remembered.” Sigh.

Anyway, it’s nice to have an occasion in which to reflect a little here. I’ve missed D&R, honestly. Late Age is wonderful in that it gives me ample opportunity to explore issues relating to books, publishing, and reading. Nevertheless, I miss the eclecticism that has come to characterize D&R over the last four years. I wouldn’t say that anything has been fair game for me to address here, but as the tag cloud appearing below and at right shows, this little blog of mine does indeed have quite a range. Sometimes I just prefer broadcasting over narrowcasting.

I’ve been puzzling over something of substance that would be interesting for me to share on this, the belated fourth birthday of D&R. Mostly I have half-formed thoughts about monism and dualism, inspired in part by my reading of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, which I reviewed here this past summer.

Much of my philosophical training in graduate school was spent reading, studying, and discussing the work of Gilles Deleuze. In this I learned to abhor the negative ontology characteristic of dialectical philosophies and to celebrate monism, whose principles of singularity, affirmation, and holism at the time resonated strongly with me. They still do.

Yet, as I myself grow older, and as I grow older with this blog (whose name I cherry-picked from Deleuze’s masterwork, Difference and Repetition), I find myself becoming less patient with monism. I am beginning to see its cracks. Mostly I am concerned with its penchant for disengagement, for its tendency toward monologue, for its unwillingness to let itself be shaken to the core by some other. I see in monism a profound insularity or desire to turn inward (what Deleuze would call “involution”), whereas in dualism I increasingly perceive a desire to experience the world outside of oneself. Could it be that monism is a kind of philosophical agoraphobia?

Again, as I said, these are only half-formed thoughts–significantly a result of my not having given D&R its due this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back on course in the coming weeks or months. For now, thanks to everyone for your contributions here over the last year. Your comments and questions challenge me, your readership inspires me.

I’m pleased to announce that my new blog, The Late Age of Print, is now up and active. It’s a companion to my book of the same name, which will be published by Columbia University Press in the next month or so. (You can learn more about the book by clicking on the link on the D&R sidebar at right.) This isn’t the new site’s grand opening, which I’ve planned to coincide with the release of the book. I’m still adding pages, links, and features, so it’s best to describe this as the site’s “soft opening.”

The Late Age of Print blog will certainly have some thematic and conceptual overlap with D&R, but the former has a much more specific focus on the past, present, and future of books and book culture than does the latter. The new blog’s tagline is “Beyond the Book,” which is something of a pun in that it both extends the arguments I introduce in Late Age and provides a forum for reflecting on the purpose, meaning, and value of books at a time when, according to some, the medium has had its heyday.

So where does the new blog leave D&R? My intention is to continue posting here, albeit a bit less regularly. I’ll try to keep cross-posting to a minimum, although from time to time I imagine there will be appropriate material for me to do so. I may also try to solicit more guest posts for D&R, which in the past have generated some impressive response.

In any case, I do hope you enjoy The Late Age of Print blog. Please spread the word about it, link to it, comment on it, etc. And thank you for your continued readership of D&R.

I’d like to wish all of my readers happy holidays and to thank everyone for your many contributions in 2008. This will be my last post until the new year, so I’ll see you again in January. Until then (and after), peace.

Not sure if you’re aware of this, but one of the best blogs out there (and not only because I contribute to it) is shutting down as of today. A bunch of us have been posting our goodbyes over at Sivacracy, and Siva Vaidhyanathan, our fearless leader, should be posting his farewell there sometime this evening. So check it out, leave some parting comments, and help give the site the send-off it deserves.

Even though Sivacracy’s shutting down, rest assured that I’ll still be here on Differences & Repetitions. We’re three years strong now, and I can’t see any reason to call it quits.

Sorry to keep obsessing over new blogging features, but I have another exciting one to share with you. Now, along with comments and sharing, you can weigh in on the quality of my blog posts using the “ratings” attribute, which appears a few lines under each entry. What’s nice is that you needn’t be logged into Blogger or any other service to do this. Simply scroll over the stars and give the post as many (or, ahem, as few) as you want.

I should add that something about this feature vaguely reminds me of the American Idol version of “democracy,” but I suppose that’s a post for another time….

You may have noticed that D&R looks a little, well, different than it used to. Yesterday, I made a few changes that I hope will result in a more readerly site.

The first thing I did was get rid of the “DIGG” tags that used to float to the upper right of each blog post. I liked them, but unfortunately, they caused D&R to load much too slowly for my tastes. You can still DIGG my posts, though; in fact, you can do a lot more now. I added a new feature to the site, which you can find just below each blog entry. Simply roll over the little gray box, and you can share any post instantly on Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Furl, Google, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Twitter, Yahoo, and many other popular social networking/bookmarking sites. Please, try it out!

Hopefully these changes not only will make D&R move a little faster, but also will help the site to become more interactive. I do it all for you, dear readers, always. ; )

After trolling through a bunch of Blogger discussion groups, at long last, I’ve finally discovered how to fix the strange header error that had been plaguing me here at D&R. That’s the same error that compelled me to change the design of this blog for the last week or so. Anyway, I’m glad to be back to the look I’ve come to know and love for D&R, and I hope you are, too.

While I’m pretty sure everything’s fixed now, I’m not all that confident in my html abilities. So if perchance you find that certain aspects of D&R aren’t displaying properly in your web browser, please drop me a line.

One last thing: I still find it disconcerting that I have no idea how, exactly, my template spontaneously(?) changed. What’s the saying? Deus ex machina…

I recently left a comment on Sivacracy responding to a post about Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. My remark was pretty snarky, admittedly. I said this: “Isn’t The Tipping Point a readerly, if watered-down, version of Everett Rogers’ The Diffusion of Innovations–a book that’s been out for decades?” I still stand behind the spirit of comment, at least, insofar as I believe Rogers said essentially what Gladwell is now often credited with saying (and Gabriel Tarde before Rogers….You can see where this is going.). By the same token, I regret having too quickly dismissed Gladwell’s work and contributions.

Perhaps what impresses me most about Gladwell’s writing is his ability to make the history of the idea of communication engaging to popular audiences. Take his piece on “The Spin Myth,” for instance, in which he tells fascinating stories about the role the late public relations doyen, Edward L. Bernays, played in shaping perceptions about media influence. Then there’s the video I’ve embedded above, in which Gladwell shares a series of parables about the food industry’s discovery of diversity-in-taste (spaghetti sauce is the operative example). This is no small matter. What Glaldwell is addressing are the epistemological assumptions individuals and groups bring to bear when making judgments about right and wrong, good and bad, tasty and displeasing, and more. He is also offering some intriguing commentary on personal influence and group dynamics, two longstanding issues in communication theory.

All that to say, having taught about the intellectual history of communication, I can appreciate the work that must go in to making his stories and lectures as captivating as they are. And while I wish his work were more critically inclined, I can’t really hold that against him. After all, who am I to criticize an apple for being an apple, and not an orange?

In other news, after weighing the decision, I’ve decided not to join Facebook after all. I still may sign up one day, but as I said earlier, it’s hard enough for me to keep the lights on here at D&R. Another online commitment (to whatever extent Facebook is a commitment) would just be too much right now. I’m not sure if anyone had designs on friending me, but if you were, sorry to let you down.

Also, in case you’re wondering, I’m going to leave the design of D&R as it is for the foreseeable future. Ron tells me it’s a bit busy, and I agree. But until I can get the issue with my old design template resolved, I don’t want to change the site again. I worry that folks might come looking for D&R and think they’ve stumbled on some other blog.