'47 per cent believe they spend too much time on their mobile phones!'

The Demon on My Palm | Snippets from An Outlook Feature 

Outlook, dated 16 September 2019

Even as there’s a spate of digital device-related disorders that have been downing its devotees for the past decade and more, right here at Bangalore today, we all musta heard about the shocking news of a boy, by name Raghuveer Kumbar, who beheaded his father Shankar Devappa Kumbhar (61) after Shankar started advising his son not to play the PUBG game and asked him to stay away from his smartphone! The full news item HERE!

Well, as teachers, it becomes our bounden responsibility to emphasise on this harmful addiction of the mobile phone on our wards, and help them come out of its obsessive-compulsive lures and pulls, ain't it?

Coincidentally, Outlook magazine, has done an extensive feature - surprisingly just this week - on its magazine, on the addiction to the smartphone and the enormous digital distress that it leads people to!

Just reproducing excerpts from this week’s issue for y’all –

Here goes –

The addiction to the internet is emerging as India's newest lifestyle disease but we are not ready to accept it. The smartphone revolution is causing enormous digital distress!

As screens, clicks, taps and emojis mediate experiences and interactions more and more, the lines between real lives and ­virtual realities are getting blurred.

An unnerving new word is doing the rounds for unnatural attachment to digital devices: internet addiction. Yet, the phenomenon remains virtually undocumented in national surveys.

In contrast, China, South Korea and Japan recognise internet addiction as a serious public health problem.

In May 2019, online gaming addiction, or the unhealthy need to access online games, has been given the status of a unique disorder, similar to gambling addiction, by the World Health Organization. “Digital disorders are hugely under-recognised in India,” says Dr Rajesh Sagar, head of psychiatry at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi. “But it is fast emerging as India’s newest lifestyle disease.

Outlook decided to chronicle and analyse the health-seeking behaviour of a society in the throes of major socio-economic changes.

Market researcher Karvy sent out field workers across nine ­cities—Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai, Indore, Calcutta, Patna, Chennai, Bangalore and Vijayawada—asking 1,648 men and women, between age 18 and 55 years, about their attitude to health and sickness. Over 70 per cent respondents were executives or business owners, all graduate and above.

The survey reveals that many of the ­respondents are aware of their unusual ­attachment to digital devices: 47 per cent believe they spend too much time on their mobile phones. Over 62 per cent admit they remain attached to their devices even when they eat.

What’s more, one in five across all age groups say they feel tired from excessive social media use. Hunched over their computers, smartphones or tablets for 7-10 hours every day, back pain is their biggest bane, forcing one in nine to pop painkillers regularly. Depression, anxiety, anger and guilt wear out 28 per cent respondents.

When questioned about the addictive potential of technology, 45 per cent readily confess they want to bring down the time they spend on their mobile phones.

India may embrace technology with open arms, but doctors are worried about the range of behavioural aberrations they come across: from anxiety and irritability to sleeplessness, neglecting important ­activities, avoiding face-to-face inter­actions with family and friends, and ­drifting away from intimate relationships.

Are you game for the 'Digital Detox' Challenge???

Dear friends,

We are so mightily enthused by the response we’ve got from our friends, students – past & present, - and from all our well wishers for our past digital detox challenges that we have had thus far!!!

Now, spurred and enthused much-o-much by the success of our past digital detox campaigns, yet again we are planning on a digital detox time, in which period we would be practising digital minimalism of the highest order, that Cal Newport suggests!

As such, those of you who would like to join us all on our little ‘digital detox’ bandwagon are gladly welcome to do so! Just drop me an email, and then I would respond with a one-page guideline on how to make your digital detox time a great success, connecting with real life friends, walking amidst real nature, doing some real angling, visiting real libraries, reading real books and a host of like-fashioned spirited ventures!

9 September 2019 sharp at 12 midnight we start and end on 9 October 2019 the same time!

Mail me at rufusonline@gmail.com if you’re really game for a digital detox!

Oh Come! There's more to life than the ones we find on our digital screens! There's more reality to games and playing than the 'virtual reality' we enjoy on our gaming consoles! There's more to nature than the animated fish we relish watching on our digital screens, fishes that 'seem' to wiggle their tails and move around on the screen in such measured sanity!

And yes! let's give the barons and the tycoons of social media a run for their money at least for a month's time! ;-)

Well, you might want to read more on our vibrant detox guru Cal Newport on our past post HERE!

But for some excerpts here - 

To Cal Newport, - and I quote -

This process of the digital declutter requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction. 

You’ll take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds. Most importantly, the declutter gives you the space to refine your understanding of the things you value most. At the end of the thirty days, you will then add back a small number of carefully chosen online activities that you believe will provide massive benefit to these things you value. 

Going forward, you’ll do your best to make these intentional activities the core of your online life—leaving behind most of the other distracting behaviors that used to fragment your time and snare your attention. The declutter acts as a jarring reset: you come into the process a frazzled maximalist and leave an intentional minimalist.

Just giving y’all some delightful, mindful quotes from this lovely read!

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car, or, as President Lincoln discovered at his cottage, while sharing your lawn with two companies of Union soldiers, so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts. On the other hand, solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude. Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.

Now, after reading Cal, if you're really really really convinced of the importance of  a digital detox time, do mail me! Else pls don't! ;-)

Best,

Rufus

'The concern of 'Critical Practice' is not what we read, but the reading process itself!'

Belsey & Certeau | On the ‘Reading Process’

The Reader as Poacher ❤️

#onreading

Michel de Certeau, French philosopher, who is widely known as the ‘philosopher of everyday life’ gives a metaphoric high to the activity of reading, by characterising the reader as indulging in ‘poaching’ in the ‘forest’ of the literary text! 

The reader hence becomes a poacher in the domain of the ‘text!’

Says he,

They move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write!

Reading is both a public and a private activity: one can be observed reading, but the thoughts that the reader takes from the work remain unobservable, unless the reader chooses to make their engagement with the text public, through discussion and creative dissemination of their own.

In this regard, it would be apt to quote Terry Eagleton’s axiomatic lines on Iser -  

‘The most effective literary work for Iser is one which forces the reader into a new critical awareness of his or her customary codes and expectations,’

says Terry!

Well, Iser’s theories would assume great significance to those literary beings who are curious to know more on ‘how’ texts are ‘consumed’ by the reader! 

Again, to the literary philosopher Francis Bacon, 

‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.’

Interestingly, Mark Heyer’s categorization of books do such an amazing connect with metaphors borrowed from our ancestors’ ways of gathering food: grazing, browsing, and hunting. 

In like fashion, to Heyer, there are three different ways of reading or gathering information, based on the gentle art of reading!

Reproducing interesting excerpts from Heyer, over here, for us all –

In the grazing mode, the ‘‘reader’’ picks up everything coming out of the book. For this purpose, we shall call that mode ‘‘continuous reading,’’ in the sense that the reader aims to construct a significant whole out of a long text, even if the reading spans many sessions. 

This mode of continuous reading is most typical of the novel where users have to immerse themselves in a book in order to create a fictional universe. 

It is also the case, albeit with significant differences, with long essays where the reader has to master a series of arguments and relationships, like Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

In browsing mode, readers pick up only what is of interest to them through the ‘‘scanning of a large body of information with no particular target in mind’’. That mode became fairly common with the advent of newspapers, magazines, big catalogues, and coffee table books.

In hunting mode, the reader seeks specific information. This mode is relatively recent and became a real possibility only when alphabetical order was adopted for dictionaries!

Now, therein lies the ‘Shavian’ difference between reading for pleasure and reading for profit! Ain’t it?

Neil McCaw’s lovely book has been such inspiration to me in this regard. It’s titled, How To Read Texts, and is a definitive guide for all of us in the literary arena, to be guided into the nuances of reading! You may want to read excerpts from this Neil McCaw delight on our past post HERE!

This takes us to Catherine Belsey, yet another amazing professor of our times, [and the dominant spur behind this blogpost,] who interacts with us through her renowned book titled, Critical Practice, on the ways in which we make meaning in the process of reading itself!

Professor Catherine Belsey

This book would sure be a launchpad for an exciting adventurous trip down ‘theory-lane’ you bet!

Well, Critical Practice discusses in such nuanced detail the basic concepts on all things ‘theory’, and highlights for us all, the myriad ways in which we locate meaning in a text, and the possible interface between human beings and language, readers and texts, writing and cultural politics etc.

Just a cursory look into her Preface, would tell you how engaging she is, in all her critical interventions!

Here we go –

Writing the first edition of Critical Practice was a learning experience for me. New theories were arriving from Paris by the planeload, giving rise to heated debate. 

They seemed to change everything we thought about culture in general, but there was only one way to find out what difference they made to the practice of reading in particular. 

How do we know what we think till we see what we write? I wrote the book to find out—and have never been the same since.

Hope I’ve given you enough of a teaser or an appetizer to make you get the book for yourself! Please don’t don't download the book! Experts say that, the possibilities of reading a book that’s been downloaded in our mobile or on our computer screens are an abysmal one percent!

And for once, could you please just forget Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age! Please! ;-) Thank you!

That done, go ahead, lay hold on your own personal hard copy of Belsey’s Critical Practice, that’s up for grabs on all e-stores - and that for a paltry sum - and thereby motivate such scholarly Professors of the Belsey-ian types to write more and more!

Because, as Lewis Hyde in his memorable read titled The Gift observes, ‘In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.’ Well, these great minds then, unlock these great ideas for us, with all care and concern, through the vibrant creative spirit within them, and, for this, we owe them thanks! And this ‘thanks’ we owe them, by purchasing a copy of their books! Ain’t we? :-)

So ladies and gentlemen, please allow me the honour of signing off this post, with Belsey’s lines from her Critical Practice –

The concern of Critical Practice is not our individual commitments, not what we read, nor what politics we bring to bear on what we read (though my own sympathies are transparently clear in the text), but the reading process itself.

Gives us all the more reasons to cheer Catherine and her creative spirit! Alley!?

images: amazondotcom, learnedsocietyofwalesdotcom, bloomsburrydotcom, & this bloggers's!

Dr. Manalan on Libraries!

Reading & The Institutional Library

The institutional library thrives in India, enveloping learners, scholars and teachers in its democratic embrace, writes NAHLA NAINAR for The Hindu, Metro Plus!

Excerpts - 

The world may never see the libraries in Alexandria, Nalanda and Baghdad again, because they were all burned down by invaders. The pillaging of repositories of knowledge — thought policing at its crudest — continues to this day.

In the recent past, to pick just a few examples, Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Public Library (1980s), Iraq’s major libraries (2003-04) and Cairo’s Egyptian Scientific Institute (2011-12), have lost their volumes to looting by random forces.

Doomsday prophets may argue that we are metaphorically burning our libraries by abandoning the printed book in favour of electronic learning. But, it would be wrong to dismiss the library as a relic of an unwanted past, say professional archivists, who have been seeing the world of knowledge harvesting change with the society that shapes it.

As India celebrated National Librarian’s Day this week (August 12) in commemoration of the Father of Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan, MetroPlus found that the institutional library thrives, enveloping generations of learners, scholars and teachers into its democratic embrace.

Ranganathan formulated five laws of library science: books are for use, every reader his book, every book its reader, save the time of the reader, and library is a growing organism. How effectively are they being followed?

“‘The book shall die a natural death shortly,’ is a permanent forecast,” says A. Srimurugan, former university librarian and head, Department of Library and Information Science, Madurai Kamaraj University (MKU). “But the aesthetic pleasure of printed material, in feeling the paper and reading without any technological assistance, cannot be totally erased.”

Srimurugan cites the example of the University of Toronto’s ‘Demand a Print’ service that allows users to pay the library to print a single copy of a book instantly, as proof that the traditional perusal of print publications will retain its appeal.

With 40 years of experience in the field of informatics, Srimurugan says that while India’s academic libraries have adapted well to the information boom, the decision by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to limit the use of its UGC-INFONET on campuses has hampered wider and collaborative study, especially among women researchers.

“Indian scholars need support, not only from the State and Central Governments, but also more from the Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals, a majority of whom lack thorough knowledge of the digital environment they handle,” he says.

Few people are willing to study Library and Information Science, and those who do, fail to equip themselves with the required technical and professional skills, feels A. Amudhavalli, professor and head, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Madras.

“Digital technology is only a medium, and not an end in itself. This is why I am confident that though the functional role of librarians may have changed, the paper media will continue to exist,” she says. But the decline of the reading habit among school and college students despite vast advancements in technology in India needs attention, she adds. “It is lamentable that there is no focus on libraries in all the talk about education reform by government agencies,” she says. “In Tamil Nadu, there is still no sanctioned post for librarians in Government schools. The authorities need to realise that critical thinking and communication skills are missing among students today, because the library is missing from their education.”

The days of libraries being monolithic institutions are long gone, says Jesudoss Manalan, librarian of Bishop Heber College in Tiruchi. “Libraries have to allow others to access their documents because of the diversified nature of users. And, computerising operations has helped speed up the transfer of information. Earlier, when a lecturer would recommend a text book, students would rush to the library to borrow the same volume. Today, we expect user needs to be more diversified because of the Internet,” he says.

But relying on non-linear and non-indexed pools of data provided by the Internet is problematic too, Manalan says. “Librarians are trained to look for accurate information, with key words and Boolean methods, so that specific data can be fetched out immediately — which is why students should approach them for assistance.”

Criticism is a serious engagement with the pleasures of fiction too!

A Future for Criticism | Belsey

Catherine Belsey usually has her trademark witty liners splurged across her pages in equal measure albeit in varying degrees!

One of her latest books titled, A Future for Criticism is no exception to this credo!

In this book, Belsey traces back through time, the original intent of a teaching agenda, in days past, which focussed much on persuading students to ‘enjoy’ Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, but in practice ‘this stern imperative was supported by morality, and moral severity, not pleasure!’

And to this end, citing Arnold, she says, that, Matthew Arnold, promoted culture as nothing less than ‘a pursuit of our total perfection’.

But Belsey begs to differ!

To her, then, criticism ain’t necessarily synonymous with ethics, morality, responsibility, politics, or agency. It is more than an assessment of a text’s commitment to civic virtue. And this includes an understanding of textuality itself and a serious engagement with the pleasures of fiction too!

Therefore, ‘If criticism is to promote morality, let it at least be a progressive morality’, she pleads!

'It is through interpretation that teachers attempt to transmit cultural values, but...'

On Interpretation and Beyond! | Culler

To Nietzsche, there aren’t facts but only interpretations! Well, he calls it perspectivism, by which he connotes to say that, since perception, experience, and reason change according to the viewer’s relative perspective and interpretation, there is no objective reality that is free from ‘perspective’ or ‘interpretation’!

Susan Sontag’s seminal 1966 essay titled, “Against Interpretation,” is an admonition for all those interpretations on art! And hence her famous dictum that, interpretation had become ‘the intellect's revenge upon art.’

Jonathan Culler, in his profound book titled, The Pursuit of Signs, posits the need to go beyond interpretation. His opening essay to the book is quite an eye-opener of sorts!

To Culler, the nuanced exercise of criticism has a strategic place in the production of literary tradition, but that does not mean that it should dominate literary studies.

He is of the opinion that,

Readers will continue to read and interpret literary works, and interpretation will continue in the classroom, since it is through interpretation that teachers attempt to transmit cultural values, but critics should explore ways of moving beyond interpretation. E. D. Hirsch, for many years a leading champion of interpretation, has reached the conclusion that criticism should no longer devote itself to the goal of producing ever more interpretations: ‘A far better solution to the problem of academic publishing would be to abandon the idea that has dominated scholarly writing for the past forty years: that interpretation is the only truly legitimate activity for a professor of literature. There are other things to do, to think about, to write about.

And therein lies the importance of The Pursuit of Signs, which explores some of the possibilities in this direction of thinking beyond interpretation!

image: amazondotcom

The 'hows' of writing an Effective Abstract

Writing an Abstract | Tips

Those of us who are planning on writing an academic research paper might have had problems drafting the most important part of our presentation or paper, which is the drafting of an abstract. 

Well, these little guidelines would - i'm sure - help give you an outline for writing an effective abstract for a research paper.

And this could be done quite easily by plotting them using the ‘4E’ approach!

And remember, an abstract need not exceed 300 words (maximum)!

They are –

Firstly, Establish the problem clearly!

Secondly, Explain the structure of your paper!

Thirdly, Elaborate on the methodology that you are going to use! (define and justify)

Finally, Emphasise on the importance of this contribution!

Best wishes!

image: ucanwestdotca

We ‘misrepresent the world in ideology’ because we want to do so, because there is some reward or benefit to us in doing so!'

You've Got Mail | As an Example of a Product of Mass Culture

Any discussion on ideology would sure prove grossly inadequate and incomplete without invoking the name of the awesome Althusser!

And any discussion on Althusser would possibly allude much to his student Foucault too! And for added info, it would do well to remember that Macherey, whose Theory of Literary Production we’d discussed in our previous post was also an admirer and devoted student of Althusser!

I should also add to say that it was Louis Althusser who was quite instrumental in reconstructing and reinterpreting the legendary Marx for the lay soul, the literary soul, and the philosophical soul alike, with such simple and refined elegance! 

One reason why, one of his most celebrated of essays, titled, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, (1969) elaborates much on the Marxist conception of ideology! This essay also bespeaks to how ideology interpellates individuals as human subjects!

[Well, in his extended notes to the concept of Agency, in an invaluable reference tool titled, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Bill Ashcroft has given us the three chief means by which human subjectivity is constructed. I quote Bill: ‘human subjectivity is constructed by ideology (Althusser), language (Lacan), or discourse (Foucault), the corollary is that any action performed by that subject must also be to some extent a consequence of those things!]

So now let’s begin with Althusser!

‘Althusser’s most influential contribution to literary and cultural studies has been his theory of ideology’, says Luke Ferretter!

And this Althusserian concept of ideology is first explicated in Althusser’s essay, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, published in the year 1963. In this essay he defines ideology as, ‘a system of representations, (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and a role within a given society'.

Giving below, Ferretter’s take on ideology from Althusser’s perspective, for y’all –

Here goes Ferretter –

Althusser means that ideology is primarily the kind of discourse that we do not consciously appropriate for ourselves, rationally judging it to be true. It is not the kind of discourse to which, having critically reflected upon it, a person makes a conscious act of assent. Rather, ideology comprises the stream of discourses, images and ideas that are all around us all the time, into which we are born, in which we grow up, and in which we live, think and act.

Ferretter continues –

The messages of the advertisements by which we are constantly surrounded, for example – the images of a healthy family relationship, of a mother’s role, appearance, weight, hairstyle, reading matter, interests, and so on, of the ideal male and female bodies, of the ideal clothes, lifestyle, home, eating habits, entertainments, of the way in which we are supposed to think, look, and want – all these are examples of ideology in Althusser’s sense. It comes to us primarily in the form of obviousness – common sense, popular opinion, what everybody thinks, what we take for granted.

Continues Ferretter, Western culture is better than Muslim culture; people should get married and have children, especially women; the British are fundamentally decent, tolerant people; hard work brings success. All these assumptions, insofar as they remain assumptions, rather than becoming objects of critical reflection, are examples of the kind of sub-conscious conceptual framework that constitutes ideology.

To Althusser then, says Ferretter, ‘ideology is the way in which people understand their world!’ Or in other words, ‘the set of discourses in whose terms we understand our experience – it constitutes the world of our experience, our ‘world’ itself’.

And he opines that we ‘misrepresent the world in ideology’ because we want to do so, because there is some reward or benefit to us in doing so! A general does not send his men out to die for their country, without firmly believing that it is their duty to do so!

Ferretter is awesome for me, on many counts! He applies Althusser’s theory of ideology for the study of culture, and how! ;-)

Follow the storyline now, to know howww and the wowww of it all!  

Let’s for a moment, get back on track to memory lane, down the days, down a time travel of two decades ago, when the romcom You’ve Got Mail hit our silver screens! Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were the vibrant pair who made such an impact on their roles as Kathleen and Joe! ain’t they!

Well, Ferretter takes up this movie as an example of a ‘product of mass culture’, in which, a representation of an imaginary relationship to real conditions of existence is offered to the reader.

‘Tolstoy’s silences are eloquent’!!!

Interpretive Criticism | An Ideological Fallacy

In the previous blogpost we discussed on a few salients pertaining to ‘consciousness as a social product,’ and how all the literary, cultural and artistic output of a given society, are manifestations of the ‘forms of consciousness’ that’s determined by the given society’s relation to the ‘means of production’; or in other words, how they are all aspects to its ideological conditioning!

This post intends to give an overview of Pierre Macherey’s seminal work titled, A Theory of Literary Production (1966) in which he vouches to this aspect of a literary text as a ‘creation’ of its forms of consciousness or ideological conditioning of which it is a part of!

That said, there are lots of commonalities, similarities and convergences between Gerard Genette’s ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’ and Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production, but just a cursory look into their hypotheses would give out the proverbial ‘chalk and cheese!’

To Genette, then, Structuralist criticism purposes or proposes to form a poetics or a theory for a scientific study of literature, through a study of literary works. Macherey also in like fashion, advocates the formulation of a scientific theory of literature, and thereby proposes a scientific literary criticism!

However, Macherey’s text takes a sharp detour from thence on, and goes ahead to contest the claims of literary critics who cry on rooftops that the function of the critic is to explicate with finesse the meaning inherent within a text!

To Macherey, since all literary and cultural output are manifestations of the ideology or the forms of consciousness of a given society, if a literary critic has to produce authentic, genuine knowledge concerning a literary work, [and not an ideological misrepresentation of it,] she should avoid the ‘interpretive fallacies’ that have been, by default, the staple of such readings!

To put it short, interpretive criticism is in essence a misnomer or an ideological fallacy!

Because, to Macherey, a literary work is NOT the creation of an individual author! [Don’t you see the savour and the flavour of Structuralism here?] On the other hand, a literary work is an ‘ideological product’ ‘created’ out of a socially determined methodology of production!