Can we talk about information for just a second, here? Is anyone having the same problem as I am?

I came to a point tonight -- it was when I was looking for citations at the root of the debate over whether video games should be looked at as narratives or considered as play, and instead I found myself reading an article by Gonzalo Frasca on Grand Theft Auto -- where I just had to step away from my computer and go lie fetal on the living room couch with the cats galloping all over my motionless bod. I had too many windows open, too many ideas I was pursuing, and too many options in trying to find them. I was completely overloaded with information.

I do so much work with information -- taking it in, spitting it out, making information about information -- that the world has come to look totally different to me. It used to be that I could watch a sunset or a rock for hours and just enjoy it on the level of pure sensation. Now I can't even look at something if it doesn't have text or icons on it. I've said this before: I feel like I'm just a midwife to information.

More and more I find myself awed by computers. Aren't they incredible? I admire them so much. They can tell me that there have been over 7,000 pieces of scholarly or professional literature written about video games, and that about half of those are about violence or other deleterious health effects. Then they can help me find specific articles, or even specific words in articles. They can keep track of all the websites I've been to for the past week, and call them up even if all I remember is the first few letters. They keep track of the books I've read -- hell, they recall every single word of every article I've read for school over the past two years, and then some I haven't even read yet.

So really, why don't we just let them keep track of all the information? Really, I feel quite redundant. I'm supposed to be synthesizing all this information and making sense of it, and the level at which I can do this is so pathetic compared to what computers can do with gathering and storing that I just feel ridiculous even trying.

Of course, I am hindered in my quest for synthesis. Chief among the hindrances is school. School demands I take courses. Courses try to stuff all kinds of information into me for which I have no current use. They are thus, as the courses THEMSELVES are teaching me right now, making poor use of my comparatively wimpy cognitive capacities, which would do far better if I was allowed to read what I needed to in order to support my own research interests. This contradiction has come to a head tonight as I scramble around looking for literature to make a case which I know could be made, but can't make. I haven't read most of the literature I know I need, but I know it's out there (the ludology/narratology debate I mentioned a second ago, as well as information on performance studies). I have only heard this literature described and referred to. Given my head, I would have read it by now. Instead, I have had to read some weekly amalgam of theoretical discussions of the purposes of the university, descriptions of the developmental stages of toddlers, essays on narrative, rubrics for instructional design, blog posts about social software, and chapters of chatty hints about how to do better ethnographic work.

It's not that these things aren't useful. It's just that they're not useful *right now*, and they're not useful all lumped together without proper integration.

It's my fault, I know it's my fault. I could have signed up for content-loose credits this semester, and I didn't. Frankly, my education to date still hasn't equipped me for doing independent research, so I'm a little scared to give myself that much of a break. I just wish I WASN'T taking a very solid four-course load during the first semester I've really felt like independent research was all I wanted to do. Now that we're past the add-drop period, I have no way of giving myself time for the articles I want to write and the presentations I'd like to prepare.

As much as I love my professors and their relish for the kind of broad-range work they encourage us to do, they honestly don't seem to understand the task they've set out for us. (I exempt my advisor from this statement. He pretty much gets it.) We are in a highly interdisciplinary program. Interdisciplinary means we are held responsible for multiple disciplines. I was called on the mat at a conference in January for not knowing how to frame a paper in terms of the ludology debate. Last week I watched a visiting job candidate whose dissertation was ethnographic face down queries about whether she'd considered cognitive methodologies. Some of the professors in our department still shove reading at us like they think theirs is the only academic tradition we could possibly be considering. How are we supposed to cover all these topics if we're not given serious time to think and synthesize and forge our own connections between them? Our only options are to become lopsided in our approach or to maintain large gaps in our knowledge.

Enough. I go back to California for spring break next week. Maybe I will go into the mountains for days without even a tent. I need to get away from all this information. (Sadly, if I don't finish this paper, I'm not likely to have a chance to.) I already know it's hurting me to play midwife all day; everything beyond five feet is a blur now, and I have so much to think about even in my downtime that getting to sleep is a chore in itself.

man, I wish I could just leave this paper to my computer to write. Posted by Gus at March 07, 2005 01:49 AM | TrackBack