This new book by Justin Gregg examines anthropomorphism, or our tendency to humanize our pets, inanimate objects, and even chatbots and considers its biological benefits and our psychological vulnerabilities.
Gregg highlights the evolutionary advantages of assuming that eyes, movement, or language for example constitute evidence of human attributes. This tendency, which Gregg describes as an Anthropo-Dial, is counterbalanced by another tendency, which he calls the Humanity-Limiter, that reduces the chance of delusions.
These tendencies Gregg acknowledges can be exploited by propaganda for example or in advertising, and can also help explain dehumanization in racism for example or other prejudices. However, these tendencies especially when coupled with critical reflection, can produce better relationships and fuller lives as well as a more humane world.
I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended.
Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge conventional ideas about facts in the digital world. To do so, she outlines a framework for facts that includes allies, or those who author or edit Wikipedia content, and companions, or sources that validate and verify these assertions.
Ford uses these results to challenge conventional Wikipedia principles, such as neutral point of view, verifiability of facts, and prohibitions against primary research. Instead, she argues that facts are contested and change, and as such illustrate the reality that knowledge is not objective but rather situated, especially in a digital world.
This account systematically examines her observations and consistently supports her claims. Moreover, it establishes context through interviews with central participants, including those who led early efforts to establish this page, and in so doing shaped the narrative around this event, such as whether, and when, to call it a revolution.
I wanted more synthesis, implications, and even application, especially beyond the Wikipedia world, but I admit that at least the latter wasn’t the ostensible purpose of this book, which is a successful account of academic research. As such, it illustrates a way of bridging the academic and the public, and offers a way of thinking about more relevant research.
And I found it to be useful in ways I didn’t expect. For me, its engaging style consistently demonstrated a grad school tenet — knowledge as situated — that seemed intuitively true, and yet to have wide-ranging implications, especially for institutionalized practices, which I could never confront.
I think Ford’s account clearly illustrates an interim step in an effort to transform a grad school stipulation into a useful foundational principle.
I was more intrigued by Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer (2023) at its beginning than I was by its end.
This book is presented as an audience memoir by its author. In it, Dederer considers the question of art created by artists who have behaved badly. She considers a range of different artists, including herself, and she concludes that audiences emotionally respond to whatever moves them, which for her seems sufficient.
Others readers’ reactions included a debate about the ethics of Dederer’s conclusion and this question. One for example advocated for a distinction between artists who would remuneratively benefit from the consumption of their art, which audiences should avoid, and those who would not, which was acceptable to consume. Another argued for the standards or criteria she had obtained from The Feminist Mystique, which determine her decisions about what, or whose, art to consume even as she was willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of others’ limits.
Both of these reactions ignore the effects of distribution networks for example and larger social and economic forces that affect whose art is available for consumption or what art certain audiences are expected to consume. Some even so far to argue for the impossibility of ethical consumption in capitalist economies, which could make the more conventional conclusion — art should be separated from artists — that Dederer criticizes the only attractive answer.
Some reviewers describe this noteworthy and award-winning book, which expands on Dederer’s Paris Review essay, as part memoir and part debate, in which she resists the option of extending her original thesis across hundreds of pages and insists upon repeatedly rethinking her answers to this question. Others suggest it’s more a meditation on the moral ambiguity of this issue that connects the history of artists with the histories of audiences.
One problem I had was that I expected a wider range of answers, which wouldn’t have precluded Dederer’s conclusion. This expectation is less a criticism of her personalization of this subject, which in retrospect is understandable, as it is a suggestion about its oversimplification, or reduction.
I also object to her conclusion, which is another problem with this book I have. Such a conclusion allows art consumers to do little more than accept others’ experiences. At most, we can only inquire into others’ interpretive (consumptive?) experiences, or ask how they came to their conclusions about the art they’ve consumed. Such questions are intriguing yet ultimately limited and for me unsatisfying.
I did appreciate the way this undeniably entertaining book engages its question and its readers, which is an accomplishment. I just wanted more of both.
