John Miedema

My blog has been renamed to I, Reader. It is the working title of a project I have undertaken, an exploration of the connections between deep reading and web participation. The title is a nod to Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories, I, Robot, a vision of a future in which robots are commonplace. Asimov’s stories explored the relationships between people and technology, and consequent questions about identity. These themes are also explored in this project. (The title is also an allusion to the i-Pod, a technology that has …

Robots and Readers, Pt. 1
I read I, Robot in the early eighties, when the personal computer was not yet mainstream. In Asimov’s 1950 vision of the future, robots are the ascendant technology, while computers that we would recognize get scarcely a mention. We interact with our computers by reading a screen and typing on a keyboard. The characters in Asimov’s stories speak and listen to their robots. Complex instructions are fed in by printed sheets. Print books are commonplace in this future, but then so is smoking. In a world …

Robots and Readers, Pt. 2
When I read I, Robot again after many years, it was the mass publication with Wil Smith on the front, a inevitability of the movie release. Anyone who has read the book but not seen the movie must wonder what character Wil Smith could possibly have portrayed in the book. No doubt his Spooner character was loosely based on detective Elijah Bailey from Asimov’s other robot books. The movie was unlike the book. I disliked the movie when it was released, but watched it again recently …

Robots and Readers, Pt. 3
As a reader of this web post, chances are you like technology more than you dislike it. There are some who love technology, envisioning a blissful future in which it solves all our problems. Others hate it, foreseeing the grim demise of humanity and the earth. Most of us find a balance in favour of technology for the advantages it gives us, and only get irritated with it on occasion.
Frustration with technology is nothing new. In Information Ecologies, Nardi and O’Day describe the seventy-year-old film, …

Robots and Readers, Pt. 4
Do robots have a soul? Perhaps that seems a silly question. Robots do not eat. They do not sleep. They have no family. In Asimov’s I, Robot, they may not own property. After all, property cannot own property. Objects cannot own objects. Objects may be intelligent, but the intelligence is artificial. Robots do not have a soul. But how can one tell for sure? An inquiry into reading may provide some insight.
In I, Robot, machines have brushes with the divine. The Laws of Robotics forbid machines …

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 1
There are many kinds of reading. I glance at the nutrition facts on a box of cereal in the morning, and at street signs in traffic. My eyes scan email and news snippets in iGoogle. I scroll through technical documents and pages of code faster than other eyes can follow. I may speed read chapters of a text book. When I really want to understand a complex idea, or savour a pleasurable read, I seek out a print book and read it slowly. Reading …

Photo entitled “creative reading” by anemone achtnich, used with permission. She adds this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.”

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 2
The following is a compilation of related thoughts I have expressed previously in different places in this blog
Creative reading is an art form. There is no external artifact of this art form; no book, no painting, no sculpture; but like all good art, creative reading exercises our imagination to develop interiority, our psychological framework.
Readers shy away from their reputation as introverts, mainly because introverts are stereotyped as passive sorts. Some brain science will make them think twice. Johnson measured the difference in brain activity …

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 3
Why do we read? In the previous post I talked about the development of interiority as a product of creative reading. What follows here is about the discovery of others as a motive for creative reading.
We are creatures of appetite. It distinguishes us from the robots. We have many appetites, for food and sex, for friends and fulfillment. We are born hungry. It is first expressed as a physical hunger, but even before we can name it, it is also a psychological or spiritual …

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 4
Creative reading has two directions: the path inward to expanded interiority, and the path outward to the discovery of ‘other’ in the philosophical sense.
The inner path is a journey into the poorly lit domain of the unconscious. Introspection is a limited tool. We lack the interpretive framework to make sense of what we see, the scaffolds to traverse the interior. We enlist stories and their symbols to help make sense of our inner experience.
The interior seems like a free space. It is a …

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 5
One of our oldest stories, that of Gilgamesh, tells of the discovery of “other” in a philosophical sense. Gilgamesh is a tyrant king who discovers a wild man, Enkidu, outside the city walls. Gilgamesh brings him into the city, and they become brothers, together more powerful and wonderful than before.
Gilgamesh was sovereign inside the city walls, but Enkidu was wild outside them. The discovery of Other threatens our sovereignty. When we bump into another, a line is drawn. Our self is compelled to take …

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 6
This series is an inquiry into the connections between reading and technology. The current theme is creative reading, examining how reading relates to the deepening of self and the discovery of other. The point is to uproot fundamental constructs of mind, constructs relevant to reading and to technology.
A similar pattern can be seen in mathematics, thus making another connection with technology. Philosophers of mathematics analyze numbers in great depth. I will briefly offer just a few, then make my own associations.
Zero is distinctive …

50 Books that Changed Me, Pt. 1, Youth
I want to lighten the series up and talk more directly about reading with this new theme, ‘50 Books that Changed Me’. It will be four or five posts, briefly describing a selection of books that changed me in ways that are reflected in this “I, Reader” series. I would be delighted to hear about books that changed you; leave a comment.
Farm Animals. Author unknown. Books on farm animals are a first for many children. For me it was a book aptly called …

50 Books that Changed Me, Pt. 2, Teen
The last post described books that influenced me in ways of which I was not aware of when I was reading them. Those books correspond to the blissful pre-conscious state described in the last theme. This post describes books from my teen years, in which I began to find my way through darker ideas, corresponding to the discovery of other.
I, Robot. The first time I watched Star Trek on TV, it was against my will; a friend wanted to watch it. After that, …

50 Books that Changed Me, Pt. 3, Undergrad
Every extension of mind breaks a rule. Undergrad years are a good time for innovative thinking and rule breaking.
Psychology 020 text. I took a year off before going to university, but I knew I wanted to study psychology so I read an introductory text, learning the scope of the field and how to think about psychological phenomena in a scientific manner. I tried to apply my high school physics to craft an ‘atomic’ psychology. I later learned that a turn of the century …