News from the Front Porch Republic (copy)
Greetings from the Porch,
We still have a few of the free registration slots for students thanks to the generosity of Plough. So if you're a student (or know a student and want to encourage them to join us), register soon to get one of them.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about cheese, solidarity, and tradwives.
- Lenny Wells describes the challenging economic conditions that farmers face but also shows that small farmers can find ecological niches in which to carve out a livelihood: "There are much easier ways to make money than farming. The primary goal of a good farmer is to find success in caring for one’s land, community, and family."
- Frank DeVito encourages people to build the culture we need rather than simply fulminate over its dysfunctions: "Society needs its most talented individuals to not just dive into the fray of politics and policy but to build the institutions that shape culture."
- In a similar vein, Eugene Callahan commends good art: "If someone of a conservative disposition wishes to produce excellent art that, in a certain sense, supports conservatism, the best thing they can do is to focus simply on producing excellent art."
- And speaking of good art, Dixie Dillon Lane praises a new children's book by David Lyle Jeffrey: "This book is something special: a new set of Christian fables on natural law that do more than teach simple morals or seek to modify children’s behavior."
- Nadya Williams questions the growth of the tech industry promising to take over the work of parenting: "A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love."
Pardon the self-promotion, but a book I've been working on for the past decade publishes this coming week: Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope. My own participation in the FPR community has demonstrated to me that digital tools, despite their many negative affordances, can serve meaningful, convivial discussions. And among other things, this book tries to articulate the attitudes and practices that foster such possibilities. A short excerpt will run at FPR, but here's the publisher's description that lays out the aims and scope of my narrative. If you're interested, Baylor will give you 20% off and free shipping with the code "17FALL24":
The industrialization of print technologies in early nineteenth-century America transformed print culture in ways that parallel the transformation wrought by the digital revolution. Understanding how a previous era was shaped by the assumptions print technology engendered may enable us to recognize more clearly how our verbal habits and practices are formed and deformed by our enmeshment in digital technologies.
When powerful new verbal media come along, our options are not limited to naive optimism or resigned pessimism. And some of the most helpful guides in charting a path toward genuinely convivial modes of reading are the literary authors who lived through the antebellum industrialization of print. Those authors sought to understand the effects of technologies such as the telegraph and the steam-powered rotary printing press through the most fundamental tool that language provides: metaphor. Evocative metaphors are a potent way to raise cultural awareness regarding the hidden affordances and subtle nudges that are latent within dominant communications technologies.
The argument of Words for Conviviality follows a pilgrimage with three stages and considers a set of metaphors that such authors deployed to answer three underlying questions: What does industrial print tempt optimistic readers to imagine themselves as? What does it lead its victims to fear they will become? And what alternative metaphors might ground more convivial reading? The metaphors of hope that Jeffrey Bilbro discusses suggest that to wield textual technologies well, we need to develop cultural practices and institutions that strengthen our relationships with one another and our commitment to a common good. Instead of developing new technologies to solve the problems that technologies have caused, the authors considered here propose developing better readers--readers more attuned to the power of the textual technologies they use and better able to imagine and practice healthy, convivial forms of discourse. These authors obviously did not eschew industrialized print, nor they did they simply embrace the technologies of their day. Rather, they developed metaphors that might inspire us to beat textual swords into plowshares.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro