Convergence Three

Can a tatoo be copyrighted, even on a body?

2011-05-21T07:51:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/business/media/21tattoo.html?hp

Video Games and the Military

2011-05-02T18:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/technology/02wargames.html

A Darker View of the Web

2011-03-07T07:27:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine sent this on, and it's worth reading, I think.

http://www.thenation.com/article/158974/accelerated-grimace-cyber-utopianism?page=full

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Find Crowds Can Write as Well as Individuals

2011-02-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

Interesting piece on a study that found crowd-sourced documents scored as well as individually produced ones on a "national writing rubric." As the comments point out, it's worth thinking of this as a pilot, not a rigorous experiment, but I think the naysayers also ignore how many documents and messages around the workplace are by no means solely authored, even if the final edit is done by one person. I think these are promising findings.

tweeting, blogging, and democracy in Nigeria

2010-12-18T07:17:00.001-08:00

http://bst.sagepub.com/content/30/6/398

Two Interesting Bits: A Word Press in CO and an NPR Report on Multi-Platform Books

2010-12-15T05:25:00.000-08:00

http://chronicle.com/blogs/postcards/a-letterpress-shop-survives-printing-poems-in-the-era-of-youtube/654?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132057619/kids-books-make-the-leap-off-the-page-and-online

More on the Relationship between Economics and Access Globally

2010-11-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee314

Cedric Pollet

2010-11-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

Cedric Pollet

New Publishing via Aps

2010-10-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/business/media/25link.html?ref=books

The Esoteric Curiosa: Tiara Talk: Mrs. Ronald Tree

2010-08-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Esoteric Curiosa: Tiara Talk: Mrs. Ronald Tree

food networking: creating attention

2010-08-14T07:58:00.001-07:00

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/making-lunch-a-social-networking-game/?hpw

Blissfull Elements

2010-05-17T04:01:00.000-07:00

Blissfull Elements

ken macrorie, r.i.p. « FoolsCap

2010-05-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

ken macrorie, r.i.p. « FoolsCap

ROFLcon

2010-05-10T12:15:00.001-07:00

How about this? A conference on internet memes organized by a couple of Harvard/Yale grad students (a few of whom work at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society-- think Lessig, Palfrey & Gasser, Benkler). The speakers are, of course, the meme creators themselves...

ROFLcon

Composing and Remixing Music

2010-04-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/compose-your-own/?hp

Beware web coupons: you're identfied

2010-04-17T10:08:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/media/17coupon.html?hp

Convergence Horror

2010-03-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

A self-proclaimed Digi-Novel care of the folks from CSI-- and passed along to be by a friend in Germany...
Level 26 -- and the 'trailer'

MacMillan's ReWritable Digital Textbooks

2010-02-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

An interesting story from the NYT about customizable, digital textbooks. Somebody has been reading their Lessig...

More Dan Roam: Back of the Napkin blog- map of healthcare

2010-02-13T08:33:00.000-08:00

http://digitalroam.typepad.com/digital_roam/2009/08/american-health-care-on-4-napkins-now-all-together.html

See NY Times article from Wed Feb 10- Do schools need books?

2010-02-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/

A Few Interesting Blogs...

2010-01-27T16:40:00.000-08:00

In my explorations of experimental geography and art, I've been lucky enough to have been introduced to a few great sites that might be of interest here.

First is BLDGBLOG, a fascinating investigation of the convergences between architecture, urban spaces, landscapes...with a healthy dose of re-mix/assemblage.

Next, floatingsheep, a site where people post user-generated maps, raising those questions of authority, expertise, and the creation/design of knowledge again. Below, a map investigating the prevalence of churches/bowling alleys/guns/strip clubs in the United States, using GoogleMaps as a way to collect the data:

Then there's this post on Zero Geography: "Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content" that charts the frequency of geotagged Wikipedia articles globally; not surprisingly, the geographies are incredibly uneven (the most information tagged is about U.S. events while Africa is poorly represented). Since Wikipedia presents itself as a knowledge database, it is interesting to re-consider it in light of geopolitical/material factors such as these.

Last, the website of a fascinating artist, Ashley Hunt, who produces unique maps, but also assembles different mediums in fascinating ways. Take a look at her work here.

Exerpt from suddenly.org blog archive-- re-designed site will be up soon...

2010-01-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

In partnership with the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, suddenly hosted a public lecture by Thomas Sieverts, as part of an event series celebrating the opening of UO’s new facilities in the White Stag block in downtown Portland. Sieverts presented “a plea for an extended notion of urban design” in which he discussed the state of the modern city and the issues facing architects when confronting questions about how to transform the environments that were built during the 20th century into aesthetic unities in which the public could feel engaged. The issue, Sieverts claimed, is one that is especially important for architects because the problems that need to be addressed are not infrastructural, but cultural. To a great extent our cities are built already and it is not through further growth that they will be made more livable, but through thoughtful transformatons of what already appears. While this involves engineering, it is not a question for engineers, and while it engages planning, it is not a question for planners; rather, it is a new generation of architects who must rise to these challenges, Sieverts argued, primarily because these challenges require intense aesthetic considerations, for which architects are better trained than engineers or planners. These aesthetic considerations are essential for engaging the public in feeling a sense of care and responsibility for the spaces in which they live, for as Sieverts said, “if the public cannot see the urgency and importance of this work, then [these problems] can have no solution in democratic societies.”
As Thomas Sieverts discusses in Where We Live Now, creating a strong aesthetic connection with the new types of spaces which people inhabit is essential if you wish the public to have a sense of care and responsibility toward their own environment, without which none of the aims of sustainability and livability that designers aim for are possible. The creation and nurturing of such possible aesthetic connections requires architects (a term which Sieverts used in a very broad sense) to incorporate tools outside the traditional bounds of their discipline, such as the events of literature and the arts, in order to open up new spaces for plan and design.
At one point during his discussion of the new shape of cities, Sieverts proposed the idea that in some ways certain types of sprawl could actually encourage biodiversity by replacing tracts of monoculture with interspersed development and greenspace, suggesting that the drastically increased “edge-length” which characterized the modern city might be used to help lead us toward more sustainable models of productive interaction with the natural environment. What once formed a ground to the figure of the “city” has increasingly become itself a delineated aspect of the new all-encompassing ‘ground’ that urbanized areas have become. This inversion makes cultivating a sense of care for, and responsibility towards, these aspects of where we live that much more readily important when people can see that we now, to some degree, cradle what we consider an encompassing nature.
The second part of Sieverts’s talk was composed of examples from work that he’d engaged with for various entities. One of my favorite moments came when he was discussing a suggestion for development around a section of the Rhine River which was problematic due to its increased tendency to flood its banks. Thomas and his partners had asked the city leaders to consider working with the flooding of the river, rather than in opposition to it by creating developments which left space for the river’s overflowing of its banks. This process would allow for the creation of a series of new parks and greenspaces during dry times and waterways, during the river’s flooding, which created new housing opportunities. ”Let’s give the Rhine a new freedom,” Thomas suggested, “and treat it not as a slave, but as a distinct personality we have the opportunity to work with, treat it like a god as it was during Roman times. If you take the Rhine seriously, you create beauty in partnership with the river by allowing the flood to do its work through densely populated areas.” This idea of consciously inviting the force and flux of nature back into the urban environment, an idea so contrary to much of the historical (and, largely, contemporary) thinking on cities, reminded me of Fritz Haeg’s Animal Estates project, which sets out to invite nature back into cities in its own way in order to enrich the quality of life of both urban residents and urban wildlife, to create a sort of productive partnership. This sort of thinking and practice becomes possible, Thomas Sieverts said, “if you are not afriad, but willing to bring these new relationships into existence.”
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Convergence Next Generation: Ideas

2010-01-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

CULTURE
**Avator as an exercise in Ongian logic? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html?em
**Netroots (participatory democracy--it wasn't before?--and lots of links): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netroots
**Netroots nation: http://www.netrootsnation.org/
**Amount of time kids spend online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html?ref=education
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm
**Newton's apple goes digital: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/408/story/1189395.html
**Keeping online life alive after death: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/24/AR2010012402886.html?wpisrc=newsletter
**A new reading culture? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/weekinreview/24rich.html?scp=1&sq=book%20club%20with%20only%20one%20member&st=cse
**"For the Love of Culture": Leesig in The New Republic: widgeting culture.
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/the-love-culture

TWITTER
**Twitter as a backchannel rewriting channeling altogether--for conferences, classrooms, etc. (Several references here.)
**Twitter as a site for novel-writing http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122026529&sc=nl&cc=es-20100124
**Notes toward a theory of twitter: http://www.good.is/post/that-reminds-me/
**Twitter has left the train station: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/the-twitter-train-has-left-the-station/?hpw

CHANGE: REVERSE OF THE “NORMAL”
**Stephen Johnson's Everything That's Bad for You is Good for You
**Framing the historical moment: the difference a frame makes. (What's the appropriate comparison? Gutenburg, 19th century publishing technologies, the car?)
**The edge.org-->does internet culture change the way we think? (ie, forget reading ;)

READING, WRITING, AND TEXTUALITY
**Katherine Hayle's hyper and close attention: video immersion as a hybrid site. (PROFESSION 2008)
**Narrative and database as ways of knowing (PMLA 2008)
**Antecedent genres and texts
**New York Times: Kindle best sellers (Jan 22): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/books/23kindle.html?hp
**Listening to Braille: NY Times Jan 3
kid texters are better: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/latestnewsandevents/a/5695

EDUCATION
**Not a print article but here is the YouTube channel created for the
"Learning from YouTube" courses at Pitzer College taught by Alexandra
Juhasz (whose interest is activist video); the courses are conducted
entirely, I think, in YouTube, including student "papers" etc.:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MediaPraxisme

**Open Source curricula (eg, MIT; Harvard)
**Remediating a book review (Blair et al)
**We are all aggregators now: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/adding-controlled-serendipity-to-the-web/ (Online writing not as creation but as curation)
**Texting and spelling: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24FOB-onlanguage-t.html?hpw (is this a case where participatory culture does re-write the rules?)
**Will the new Apple Tablet change higher ed? http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/27/tablet

**Games and education: http://chronicle.com/article/5-Lessons-Professors-Can-Learn/63708/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
**Second Life-->Virtual Worlds http://chronicle.com/article/After-Frustrations-in-Second/64137/

SPACE/PLACE
**http://suddenly.org/ (not sure about this, but lots of cool folks in one site looking at place/space)

COPYRIGHT AND IP
**Flickr and copyright infringement: http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=872764
**http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/15/framing

MEMORY
http://chronicle.com/article/Our-Digitally-Undying-Memories/63747/

Amazing photo technology.

2010-01-03T05:54:00.000-08:00

Go to this
http://61226.com/share/hk.swf
mouse down phot- don't click. Changes from day to night. Cool!

From the Atlantic Monthly:

2010-01-02T05:08:00.000-08:00

"As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information"

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

"Is Puctuation the New emoticon?" from New York Times

2009-12-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

Following up on my cursor-point to the recent Swiss documentary Helvetica (about the obvious and subliminal effects of a ubiquitous font in our graphical lexicon), this post from an interesting blog feed, Artkrush

examines the humble puntuation mark and its rhetorical power. Interesting to consider, always, the often over looked subtleties of design strategies and how we are impacted by words when they become visual elements of texts. The hybrid-word in our digital age-- as not transparent, but physically present---as carrying meaning also in its face and demeanor---

http://flavorwire.com/55351/logo-design-punctuated

its rhetorical stance--- its body if you will, is a fascinating thing to turn our attention to.

Beyond New Literacies?

2009-12-10T16:13:00.001-08:00

>
> The call is attached and reproduced below, please feel free to circulate to interested parties.
>
> Call for Papers for Special Themed Issue:
>
> Beyond ‘new’ literacies
> Guest editor: Dana J. Wilber
>
> Much of the work in literacy and digital technologies falls into the area of ‘new literacies’ (Lankshear
> and Knobel, 2006), a theoretical frame that defines literacies as new through tools and practices that
> previously did not exist. This special issue of Digital Culture & Education (DCE) seeks to reinvigorate
> and challenge approaches to the ‘new’ by drawing on existing and innovative models and approaches
> from outside of ‘new literacies’ to enrich this framework by focusing on the diverse roles digital literacy
> practices play in on and offline spaces (social networking, games, virtual worlds, etc.) as part of day-today
> public and private life. Specifically, the special issue seeks to expand the new literacies’ theoretical
> paradigm by asking:
>
> • How might we expand the idea of new literacies through fine-grained examinations of specific
> literacy practices with particular tools or technologies, like social networking, digital games, and
> multimodal design through different frames?
> • How can new perspectives, practices and/or theories (i.e. discourse analysis, feminism, Queer,
> gaming, literary theory, or post-structuralist) provide additional insights around the
> congruencies and/or tensions between literacies and digital technologies across institutional and
> non-institutional contexts?
>
> The concern of Beyond new literacies is to highlight research that develops a theoretical dialogue between
> literacies and technologies, as more than ‘new’, through either applied research or theoretical
> intervention by:
> • Making use of a wide variety of theoretical lenses to analyze and understand how literacies and
> literacy practices operate within virtual worlds or through specific digital tools.
> • Analyzing the digital literacy and technology practices of users through a variety of
> methodological avenues (including discourse analysis, case study, oral history, experimental,
> mixed design, rhizoanalysis, etc.)
> • Examining situated practices in everyday use, integrating issues of on and offline definitions and
> spatial distinctions
>
> We encourage submissions from scholars, researchers, and practitioners from around the globe,
> working in areas such as literacy and education, gaming, new media, sociocultural studies of
> technologies, literary theory and technology, fan studies, adolescents and digital media, and media and
> identity. Submissions from research groups working in projects like video games research, digital
> storytelling, and mobile learning are encouraged.
>
> Interested authors should send their manuscripts to Dana J. Wilber at wilberd@mail.montclair.edu or
> the editor of Digital Culture & Education at editor@digitalcultureandeducation.com by March 1, 2010.
> Beyond ‘new’ literacies will be published in May 2010.
>
> --
> Tom Apperley, Ph.D.
> Co-Editor Digital Culture and Education
> www.digitalcultureandeducation.com
>
>
>
>
>
\
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Remix....

2009-12-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

Matt J. Mason's Amazon Blog

Add this blog to your Amazon Daily

Remix Venn Diagram

8:55 AM PDT, May 7, 2009

By artist Olly Moss, via PSFK.
Share This

This is syndicated from The Pirate's Dilemma, and written by mattmason.

Comment

Korean Edition!

4:15 PM PDT, May 5, 2009

One more question--- ?????????

2009-12-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

Is anybody keeping up their individual blog past the classroom scrutiny? If yes why, or no why too? I bet Katie does. If we do continue to circulate within this frame wouldn't that make an interesting conversation to have? What about Wikipedia also--- anybody immersed now, and planning to continue contributing edits or to monitor articles beyond Convergence III's boundaries? Or perhaps weirded out by the intensity of Wiki-culture?

The lifespan of this blog?

2009-12-02T07:23:00.000-08:00

Kathy said she looked forward to reading this blog--- it occured to me that it might live on after this class is over? Or no? It does seem to have a voice of its own by now and I also have anticipated the daily adventure of exploring its offerings.
It is now Wednesday.

Is anybody still there?

I wonder... has circulation ceased with semester's end?
It is a fabulous beast after its kind.

Technology

2009-11-30T18:05:00.000-08:00

from Technological Medicine . . .

186 In general technologies are created by the existence of possibilities that the prevailing ideas, culture, and social climate of an era suggest to an innovator could be useful, interesting, or profitable. Thus, technologies are absorptive and reflective: they soak up and mirror back aspects of the environment in which they are created.

187 Technologies are material inventions developed to extend or replace human capabilities. They have two essential dimensions: form and purpose. Their form is designed most effectively to carry out their purpose.

Technology changes as new forms are devised to better fulfill purpose or as the purpose itself is expanded or limited. The hold of technologies on us is their power to channel our attention to those aspects of reality they were designed to influence and portray; they are directive. Powerful technologies, by definition, draw us into defined spaces with a riveting intensity, shutting out our surrounding realities to enhance the importance of the action or place to which they take us. In sum, absorptive, reflective, and directive characteristics are critical features of technologies.

188 The advantage conferred by the ability of technologies to act with such focused intensity is purchased at a price--tuning out and diminishing the aspects of other aspects of reality.

ubiquitous design

2009-11-29T06:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/helvetica/film.html

Here is a link to PBS IndependentLens site about Helvetica, Swiss documentary film discussing the history and rhetorical impact of this typeface. Click on the link to play game: "What font are you?" and discover your textual avatar.
I am courier evidently--- because I march to a different drum...

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

Pictures welcome ;)

Losh Questions

2009-11-23T16:32:00.001-08:00

1. 234 Digital satires: what difference does it make to create and circulate them?

2 . 276 is the point of a library or museum to foster a remix culture?

3. 279 should the govt fund digitalization of materials?

4. 330 what’s the relationship between a learning culture and a school?
What’s the relationship between experts, amateurs, and novices?

5. -- what’s the potential of serious games? Is serious games a contradiction in terms?

6. – if cataloguing is a form of knowledge-making, what does that mean for schooling? For participatory epistemology? Is participatory epistemology a contradiction in terms?

7. 327 what’s the connection between “economic circuits of information” and circulation?

Pastiche: Map

2009-11-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this site. "Pastiche" is a project that generates fascinating circulation between maps, keyword data from the web, physical/architectural space, and individual experiences within those spaces. Some detail:

"Pastiche is a dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view. Keywords are assigned based on relevance and recency, surrounding their corresponding neighborhoods. The result is a dynamically changing description of the city, formed around individual experiences and perspectives...Conceptually, Pastiche is a parallel experience of the city, a map that not only documents, but also suggests action. It is a public counterpart to the private physical architecture of the city. Its source an aggregate of individual blogs, Pastiche is a system that anyone has the ability to contribute to. It defines a new kind of public space, while both proposing an experience and inviting comparison—in the process of relating one’s own perspective to a larger collective subjectivity, one situates oneself in relation to an impromptu community, formed around the idea of New York."

The Sixth Sense, Redux

2009-11-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

Some of you may follow the TED Talks series, which, among other things, is a great place to see the debut of amazing information & communications technologies. Recently there was a piece describing a tool the inventors call "Sixth Sense" that has incredible promise in the realm of mixed/augmented reality.

Now just out is a more in-depth followup by Pranav Mistry, the primary brain behind this. What's most compelling to me is not just that this is gee-whiz stuff, but that it's so incredibly simple. It is often the simplest tools that create the most profound change.

The video takes a while to get to the really head-spinning stuff, but it pays off. And if you haven't already seen the earlier video, I recommend checking it out for a description of the incredibly inexpensive hardware they are using.

In the movie Apocalypse Now, a man sent to investigate the mad Col. Kurtz sends a telegram back to his wife:

SELL THE HOUSE
SELL THE CAR
SELL THE KIDS
FIND SOMEONE ELSE
FORGET IT
I'M NEVER COMING BACK
FORGET IT

Mistry's invention makes me think the same thing about the mouse, the keyboard, and the monitor. I can't wait.

Postmodern fashion from the Land of Tulip Speculators...

2009-11-18T07:38:00.000-08:00

Is this assemblage, re-mix, collage, other? See article below...

Dutch Designers’ Modular “Fragmented Textiles” are Like Legos for Fashion

by Abigail Doan, 11/12/09

Here’s another eco-fashion innovation that is both puzzling and promising: “Fragmented” clothing that features customizable snap-on pieces, requires no sewing, and reduces textile waste. Leading this charge is Refinity, a Dutch design consultancy whose Square Dress and Star Skirt are based on a click/fold assembly system that allows you to wear the same garment in countless ways, alter its design on demand, as well as wash or replace the parts separately.

Designers Fioen van Balgooi and Berber Soepboer created their Fragmented Textiles collection as an experiment in applying cradle-to-cradle principles to clothing production, use, and disposal. Made from Cradle to Cradle-certified wool felt in a range of vibrant colors, the Fragmented Textiles are based on jigsaw-puzzle-like zero-waste patterns that are designed to use every last scrap of cloth.

The click/fold assembly system allows you to wear the same garment in countless ways and replace the parts separately.

To create an interlocking skirt or dress, the square- and star-shaped modules are pieced together via small slices in the wool, which eliminates the need for yarn. (The felt doesn’t fray, either.) The resulting mosaic-like clothing can be worn in a variety of dynamic ways, so you can get by with fewer clothes and yet never get bored.

Fragmented Textiles was recently on display at the Beyond Green, Good Design symposium gallery at the World Fashion Centre in Amsterdam. Curated by Ingrid Horsselenberg and Annouk Post of I&A, the exhibit was further evidence that the Dutch are definitely the ones to watch when it comes to combining fashion-forward design and playful attitudes.

Citizen Mappers

2009-11-17T20:01:00.000-08:00

See
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/technology/internet/17maps.html

VW Westfalia Accessory Camping Tents

2009-11-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

Sorry I could not make class tonight, folks. Some of you know of my interest in antique VWs, and after scratching my head at length about the Wikipedia project I decided to add a substantial section to their article on Westfalia campers--those pop-top VW buses you have probably seen in one iteration or another. The existing page only mentioned the availability of an accessory tent for these collector vehicles, and so I am fleshing out the section Awnings and Side Tents. I realize it's a somewhat trivial and highly esoteric category, but it's one of my few specialized bits of knowledge that wasn't already addressed in detail elsewhere on Wikipedia.

I'll have more info on the background of this effort in my writeup, but I'd appreciate any feedback in the meantime. I will be adding images this week to enhance the article, as well as a few more paragraphs of text.

Google Books, Copyright, and your access the Oxford Library

2009-11-15T18:14:00.001-08:00

Not to get too heavy with the posting, but here's a development: Google Books reaches an agreement with everyone to digitize everything -- ok, I exaggerated, but not by much. Please post if anybody finds stories on this...

Brain Maps

2009-11-15T09:22:00.001-08:00

Do yourself a favor and get your mind blown here-- a 2007 interview on NPR's Science Friday (with Ira Flatow doing one of his best intros) about a book called "The Body Has A Mind of Its Own." -- I know as much about neuroscience as my family seems to know about rhetoric & composition-- so I can't say much about the research, but this is all over the subjects we've been talking about.
Keywords for us: space/place, maps, experience of technology, virtual reality, Second Life (there, I've suckered Katie, Josh & Joe), embodiment, sensation/perception, gender, behavioral learning, therapy of injury & disability, plasticity, cultural difference, and on and on...

Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions

2009-11-15T08:26:00.000-08:00

Oh, the Sunday edition of the New York Times: chock full of Convergence-related goodness. Here's an interesting article on the front page that stirs up some more juicy discussion about intellectual property. Do the lesson plans that we create as teachers belong to us or the institutions in which we work? If lesson plans are, in fact, the property of teachers, should we be selling them online?
Read the article here.

"Community Funded Reporting" from Spot.Us

2009-11-10T13:00:00.001-08:00

Just ran across this posted by a friend on Facebook (a major source of news for me -- the friends, not Facebook) and thought it was an interesting model for journalism. From the website:

We are an open source project, to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics. Contributions are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available through a Creative Commons license. It’s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate.

It'll never work, right? More at http://spot.us/.

Second Life in the Military

2009-11-09T13:02:00.000-08:00

Natch, I was all over Losh's third chapter on military use of games and simulations. Fascinating chapter, for this avatar. The products she mentions differ from Second Life in a couple of critical ways, especially the open-endedness that happens when the other agents in the game are not AI but real people. But I found much of what she said consistent with my own research there.

This made me wonder what uses the military might be putting SL to, especially since I'd already run across a story in the past about VR's possibilities for enhancing communication between deployed service personnel and their families back home. I found some links worth looking over. Importantly, some of the uses are not government sanctioned, suggesting the possibilities for reformulations and resistances that Losh mentions. There's definitely a paper in this somewhere! Links fyi:

Berlin Wall and Circulation

2009-11-09T07:37:00.001-08:00

Today is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that has great personal relevance to me. I've been reflecting on this a lot lately and, since I'm very interested in space and circulation, I began to wonder about The Wall--how it represents a material delineation of space that effectively restricts/manages circulation. I also wonder about the presence of other walls still standing: the ones enclosing/restricting Palestinians, the one along our southern border--I wonder how our understandings of digital/online/information circulation speak to these physical barriers. How potent of a force are walls in our contemporary digital environment? How does a wall, which deflects, spins, deforms circulation, affect knowledge? All of these walls were/are constructed under a heading of "security"--in an age in which, according to Losh, those who govern are anxious and defensive about "distributed networks and peer-to-peer forms of community organization that further destabilize an already fragmented representational structure", what sort of walls (both material and virtual) should we remain on guard against and how can ordinary citizens do so?

Also, consider how the Berlin Wall "fell"--an almost comical instance of a hiccup in governmental circulation:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/11/2009114131224353161.html

Berkman Center for Internet and Society

2009-11-09T07:26:00.001-08:00

I uncovered this site for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and I thought I'd share; lots of interesting and relevant material!

This Center is connected to Harvard's Law School and it even provides pro bono law advice concerning "cyberlaw"--check out some of their most recent cases here.

"A Marketplace for Knowledge"?

2009-11-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

Interesting piece from the NYT on the impacts of "virtual classrooms" and distributed learning, repeating some of the high hopes and dark forebodings in many of our readings this term, only in a popular education context. Is education a series of "knowledge products" or is it a result? Do we want the market to control what is taught and by whom? One of the interesting things about this piece is the way it conflates technological change with market-driven ideologies, as if the two went hand in hand. Back in the mid-90s when the Web was first causing people to lose their minds, this same process of corporate colonization was in full steam: the Dot-Com Boom. Those of us Netizens with our idealistic visions of the democratizing Internet were dismayed by this and resisted even the small things, like naming Florida's website a .com rather than a .gov.

But if we unpack marketplaces and technological affordances, what kinds of evolutions might we see in the classroom?

"Stop Wearing Clothes: Start Wearing Paper"

2009-11-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

http://flavorwire.com/47957/stop-wearing-clothes-start-wearing-paper

This re-cycled map circulates in a different way. Link to other map fashions...

In the News

2009-11-05T05:13:00.000-08:00

In (merely!) the last hour, here's what I've heard or read that's relevant to the topics we're considering:

An interview on NPR with Harold Evans, a former editor of the London Times, who
made an intriguing comment about the relationship between circulation and the public good: he said that he thinks sometimes the quest for increased circulation is at odds with the public good, which sounds a bit like what some of you said about working the economy of attention and ethical behavior: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120091024
It captured my attention because so much of what I've seen in terms of resistance movements--be it the flyers of Red Orchestra in Nazi Germany or the diaries and newsletters of Japanese American internment camps--is located in the idea that the circulation of ideas will *lead* to the greater good.

A review of a book on the founding of Wikipedia, some of its features, and its likely future (and some of the findings seem at odds with what you all have found):
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/morozov.php It's an interesting analysis and a smart review.

Educause--the major IT group for higher ed--is having its annual meeting in Denver, with lots of interesting sessions, from cloud computing to tweeting in class: worth looking at-->
http://www.insidehighered.com/

And for those who think they'd like to focus on these issues as a career, here's a job for you:

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN SCHOOL OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

The new School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University
Tempe Campus invites applications for a full time, tenure track
assistant or associate professor to begin August 2010.

The successful candidate will join the faculty of the School of Social
Transformation and will have a joint appointment in two of the school’s
faculties: African and African American Studies, Asian Pacific American
Studies, Justice and Social Inquiry, and Women and Gender Studies. The
school seeks a candidate whose research focuses primarily on processes
of social change or social transformation, engages intersectional,
transdisciplinary research, and explores global and local
interconnections. The candidate will contribute to the development of
diverse new degrees and certificates.

Qualified candidates must have a Ph.D. by August 2010 in a relevant
field such as: African and African American studies, Asian
American/Pacific Islander studies, cultural anthropology, economics,
ethnic studies, geography, history, justice studies, literature,
political science, sociology, women’s studies; ability to work
effectively in an interdisciplinary and collaborative setting; and a
demonstrated record of scholarly achievement, including research and
teaching, in the study of social change and transformation. Grant
potential and evidence of publication activity desired.

To apply, email letter of application, cv, and writing sample in a
single pdf file to: r2@asu.edu. Please have three letters of
recommendation sent to: School of Social Transformation Search
Committee, c/o Roisan Rubio, Arizona State University, PO Box 874902,
Tempe, AZ 85287-4902

Deadline for submission of all materials is January 5, 2010. For more
information, please visit http:/sst.clas.asu.edu, or contact Dr. Karen
Leong at karen.leong@asu.edu.

Arizona State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action
employer committed to excellence through diversity. Women and minorities
are encouraged to apply. Background check is required for employment.

_______________________________________________
The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list
is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
http://www.aoir.org/

More ReMix: Cinema and Remixing History

2009-11-03T13:36:00.000-08:00

DJ Spooky's remix of D.W. Griffith's epic and controversial film A Birth of a Nation; first, some context:

An excerpt:

This makes me wonder: what does remix do to our understanding of history?

Another Funny, But Relevant Clip

2009-11-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Jon Stewart makes a great point about what we consider news, a discussion that relates to our previous discussions about reporting and what that field should look like. I received this clip from my same friend, Anton Dyer. He actually gets excited that he can share these clips with you guys, so please watch them...and maybe discuss them?

http://www.hulu.com/watch/105516/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-for-fox-sake#s-p1-sr-i1

Kendra

But I Like My Slick, Highly-Produced Music!

2009-11-02T15:09:00.000-08:00

Although remix practice offers many opportunities to create in new ways, I think it offers unique challenges, particularly in terms of quality of material. Lessig talks some about the quality of blog "reporting," but I want to talk specifically about quality in music and video. Fact: I enjoy listening to music and watching TV shows and movies with very high production values. Fact: High production values cost a lot of money.

It's true that digital technology has made better production technology available at a price that the average consumer can afford, but it's still not the best technology. I could, with a few more pieces of equipment, produce a good quality recording using Garage Band on my laptop. I couldn't produce the quality of recording that Columbia Records or any other major label could produce. I don't have a studio space, which is vital for proper acoustics, nor do I have a giant, multi-featured sound board. Without the help of a particularly foolhardy financial institution, I also have no way of affording these things. Same goes for video. There have been some wildly popular web series produced by amateurs and posted on YouTube, but no one would claim that they have the same production values as a TV show produced by a major studio with access to the best cameras, locations, and editing technology.

Remix promotes the idea that all content should move freely in the digital space to be used and reimagined by other users. There are a lot of ways in which I like this idea. But production at the level that modern consumers have come to take for granted is a pricey proposition. Businesses that rely on older models of creation provide most of this high quality content. However, without a working business model, they might not be able to do so much longer. Will the remix culture be satisfied if, eventually, all that's left to remix is what we can create on our laptops?

My Map

2009-11-02T15:04:00.000-08:00

I chose to do my map of Vuvox.com, but I didn't consider the fact that I don't know how to print this image from this site. Please help!

In the mean time, I have posted my map for others (especially ky) to see.

http://www.vuvox.com/collage/edit/0194978334

Kendra

Remix: A Pastiche of Creativity or A Collection of Stolen Goods?

2009-11-02T12:25:00.000-08:00

Ok, thanks to Matt, I was able to experience Girl Talk in all its "remix" glory.

While I do not believe in "recreating the wheel," I do believe that there are other forms of transportation that need to be explored (my failed attempt to remix a metaphor to express my disapproval of it). When I think about the problems of remix, I think about the chapter in Datacloud on turntablism and how those who practice mixing and scratching create new sounds with old music. Is this ok? I think that there are some genres that have more flexibility than others (like turntablism), but the lines are muddied. I empathize with the Souza's out there who spent years learning music and creatively orchestrating music in new, acceptable ways for a culture that was not as technologically ingratiated. Now, these artists, who do not receive any benefits from the remixes/mash-ups (Lessig 24), are forced to accept these changes.

I think that in composition, academia in general, the slopes are not as slippery, but they are slippery nonetheless. Increased access to the Internet and World Wide Web (different entities as noted by Christine L. Borgman) seems to complicate this notion of remixing for academic scholarship in general. Much like the unsuspecting proud mother in Lessig's Remix, authors who fail to show adequate documentation from credible sources within the field of study could be accused of theft, not praised for her creativity or mash-up.

Yet, I don't think everything about remix leads us down dark paths. In turn, I believe that Matt's link to Girl Talk demonstrates the a new direction that music videos and artists can take, a path that will allow various dissimilar genres to speak to each other in a civilized space, without interruptions, without biases. Within that one clip, I was able to see what Aerosmith and Run DMC did in the 80s (this is not to say that other groups have not successfully collaborated since then) with the video "Walk This Way." Yet, they did that voluntarily and with shared celebrity from the collaboration. Yet, like the Gillis suggests that this "interactivity with the albums"(Lessig 15) should be "treated as a game and not a product" (15).

The word "product" triggered the many conversations we have had in Comp theory about the issues that we all seem to have with CT: it's product-based. So, wouldn't "remix" be our alternative? But, if we jump to open access, where do we as scholars pinpoint the knowledge that we have added to scholarship? So, in the end, I now acknowledge that I cannot solely side with the producers (unless I am one of them), and I am hesitant to run to the aid of the Gillis's: I must negotiate something in between.

Kendra

Chastity Vows, Prohibitive Costs

2009-11-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

In Copenhagen in 1995, a collective of Danish directors, including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, established this manifesto (jokingly called "A Vow of Chastity" to govern the manner in which their films were to be shot:

I swear to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by Dogme 95:

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the image or vice-versa.
3. The camera must be handheld. Any movement or mobility attainable in the hand
is permitted.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable.
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action.
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35mm.
10. The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste. I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a 'work', as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

More:
http://www.brokenprojector.com/wordpress/?p=31

True, this vow of chastity is done partially tongue-in-cheek (in fact both filmmakers almost instantly try to break most of the "vows"), but most interesting is how it challenges kinds of filmmaking of the RO vein; offering less cost-prohibitive cultural production more closely aligned to RW philosophy. I would not say that this kind of artistic creation counts as "remix", but I think the commonality between Dogme 95 and what Lessig is promoting in RW culture is how they both generate a community (admitedly, the Dogme community would be more elite, but still) bonded by "emotional meaning" via a shared love of a specific field of artistic creation (I'm thinking especially of the creation of AMV's here). Dogme aims to heighten emotional power of an art that, according to the authors, has been diluted by a distancing that we *may* be able to attribute to RO culture:

Festen--"The Celebration", one of the first Dogme 95 films.

This emotional bonding, I think, is another important opportunity for education (and I think bell hooks might agree with me). "Interest-based learning" is education based upon personal (and thus, emotional) attachment to materials; I wonder if we shy away from these emotional attachements too much. If we are still uncomfortable with inviting emotion into our classrooms, RW projects are a way to begin this transition.

Apparently, I feel like talking about Lars Von Trier today. Consider this, a film originally made by Jorgen Leth in 1967:

Det Perfekte menneske - Perfect Human - Jorgen Leth 1967
Uploaded by piiker. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

And here's Leth's 2003 remix, forced upon him by Von Trier:

There is great emphasis (supplemented by my italics--remix?) on the ideal of renouncing an idea of a discrete "artist." In this case, Von Trier continually pushed Leth to remove his guiding hand in his remixes, to let the remix create unexpected meanings. Where does this fall on the spectrum of RO/RW? Does Lessig's definition of RW culture dismantle the artist or make the artist's hand more apparent and thus more impenetrable?

I also wonder what this growing RW culture will do to our public spaces and our conceptions of it. "Shooting must be done on location": as public spaces become more and more frequently stages for performance, how will community based RW culture affect how we look at these spaces? Will they become palettes for RW "paint"? I think this is an exciting opportunity. It might also suggest a breaking down of the divisions between the academy and the community.

***
Last, consider Jazz pianist Bill Evans' controversial use of overdubbing in 1964:

Conversations With Myself was a major undertaking, and perhaps, an even greater risk. Overdubbing was sneered at by most jazz people, looked at as "gimmicky" and "synthetic". But Evans, one of the most lyrical musicians the jazz world has ever known, was intrigued with taking the "conversational" approach his trio had been practicing to the next logical level. If three musicians could practice and play together long enough to be able to carry on musical conversations during a song, then wouldn't the musical ideas expressed and explored by multiple tracks of the same musician be even closer to an "idealized" perfection?

Again, controversial because it seemed to remove the improvised moment of artistic inspiration from jazz, seemed to also suggest a possibility that "amateurs" could creep into the artform. The classical pianist Glenn Gould experimented with overdubs with Bach and received the same scoffs. The Dogme manifesto emphasizes the spontenaity of "the instant", the unexpected moment of meaning making in artistic creation. In Evans' layered recording, new meanings were created in the spaces between the layers that he never expected. Although many would argue that remix removes this spontenaity, I would argue that it spreads invention further along the creation process, and results in continuing invention. Invention becomes an unceasing process that continues beyond the original creation, moving out into new spaces. I agree with Rory: "remix is invention made manifest. By remixing, by arranging, cutting, editing, incorporating, splicing, and the like, remixers are inventing."

Great share everyone! See you in class!

Layers - An Image & Some Sounds

2009-11-02T07:21:00.000-08:00

And a soundtrack while you read:
GirlTalk's Hold Up which has so many layers it's unbelievable. The cultural knowledge it takes to make the song-- and the video. And to recognize the artists-- for instance, at one point Nas comes right after 50 Cent-- an ironic comment on the famous "beef" that the two rappers had at one point. And then later, Weezer underneath the title track "Hold Up"- which were both hits at the same time, but it much different genres (right about the time I was in 8th grade if my memory serves me right). And that's only thematic. There is also a layer on music itself- time signatures, bass drops, and on and on. Here is another Summer Smoke --most of his best stuff isn't KY appropriate, but you can find it online :o)
and DJ ZTrip, who gives his music away free...when he's not performing live to raise money for the Obama campaign.

Thinking about Benjamin and (Re)Production

2009-10-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin writes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Manmade artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain.

Here we have either new (original) or reproduced (unoriginal). As new technologies were developed that enabled mechanical mass reproduction Benjamin mourns the loss of authenticity and the depreciation in value of a work of art. He goes on to write: “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.” However, there is something else that is lost when “art” in the broadest sense of the term is mechanically reproduced (he also refers to the reproduction of images of specific landscapes); this would be what he has famously referred to as the aura. He writes:

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.

While we might read this and think: oh, Benjamin is talking about remix. While we might be able to say this … here I will just say that I think that there is a slight difference. Is it the original that is being reactivated? Or, is it something else that is being activated/formed?

Let’s take, for example, the multiple reproductions of the Mona Lisa. Well as we reproduce and reproduce these images Benjamin is arguing that something is lost of the original as well. Not only are the images on our coffee mugs inauthentic, but as this inauthenticity clutters gift shops across the world that small board safely enclosed behind a thick sheet of Plexiglas is also losing its aura. The original is being “reactivated” when we (and copyright law perhaps) would really just rather leave its last activation at the fingertips of da Vinci in the 16^th century.

Well, remix offers a solution in many ways and builds on this discussion of Benjamin’s. I might even go so far as to suggest that we could apply Benjamin’s logic in discussing the benefits of remix as a concept. You see, if you were to walk into my apartment and see a (cheesy) poster of the Mona Lisa hanging up – I think that we could generally assume that this choice of décor in my house, among other things, might reflect that I admired the piece, liked the work of da Vinci, and perhaps might even be desirous to own an original but this framed reproduction was all that I could hack. (While we could argue that this is in itself remix – I will risk just being plain wrong and say that I do not think that this is). This display of the Mona Lisa in my home still relies on a referent that is hanging in Paris – reactivates that referent, too ...

Remix seems to rely not merely on an “original referent,” but it seems to create an entirely new referent that draws on a viewer’s position in the specific context in which the remix is being placed. Lessig writes, “But anyone who thinks remixes or mash-ups are neither original nor creative has very little idea about how they are made or what makes them great” (93). Remix, he writes is in part successful and increases in value because it is only “by the hundredth time that one begins to understand it enough for it to make sense” (95). While I might comment that this is a rather elitist approach (that somehow correlates goodness with complexity or value), I think that he does hit on something pretty cool. What this is is an economy of attention that keeps our attention and pulls us in as active participants. A side effect of this active listening/participation is that a new referent is formed. While this referent may feel nebulous – it is there … somewhere.

A remix that brings together a Beethoven piece, the Mona Lisa, and collection of other materials tangibly recontextualizes all of them to create not only a new context, but a new referent as well. Remix, in this way, draws our attention to the fact that when we make a meaning for the Mona Lisa, this meaning is not restricted to the image that is on the wall of my apartment. This meaning is embedded in the Louvre, the style, the paintbrush technology used in its creation, and the way in which this image has become iconic through various means and with various intentions – both subtle and not so subtle. Remix exploits this ‘dirty little secret’ of disciplinary meaning and juxtaposes this notion of a static referent in such a way as to create new contexts, new referents, and new meaning(s). Thus, it seems that Benjamin’s mythological aura does not disappear, but becomes increasingly and perhaps startlingly local in remix. The cult value does not, in this way, “recede into the background” as Benjamin suggests. Instead, there is a new cult and a new value. The public is “an examiner,” but most certainly not “an absent-minded one.”

While I would classify the above as an opportunity in the concept of remix, I will offer an opportunity in the practice before moving on. This is creativity. Since I have arrived at FSU I have heard Dr. Yancey express on more than one occasion her belief that being able to think visually makes us better thinkers. While my initial impression was, Ooh, yea! That sounds fun! As I have engaged this process I have come to see that this is no walk in the park. I have also discovered that several things usually happen when I do this 1) what I was going to say changes in significantly unexpected ways and 2) as a result I often have a hard time rearticulating what it is that I ended up saying. This difficulty leads me to reexamine my writing and (perhaps) become a better writer for it. This is to say that I think remix not only creates new meaning and reflects new ways of thinking – but, it allows this to occur is some profound ways.

When describing the Soderberg lip-synch of George Bush of Tony Blair singing “Endless Love” Lessig writes, “The obvious point is that a remix like this can’t help but make its argument, at least in our culture, far more effectively than could words.” He seems to take the implication of this newness and increased efficacy one step further and make a connection between creativity and freedom. He writes, “Remix is an essential act of RW creativity. It is the expression of a freedom to take “the songs of the day or the old songs” and create with them” (56). Thus, it’s not too much further before remix becomes part of our freedom of speech.

Reading this and being a fan, I was able to identity more challenges than I expected. 1) The idea of remix seems to counter Lessings’ celebration of increased personal investment and engagement by individuals in the actual composing process. 2) What about the economy of time – this stuff takes forever (figuratively) – and who has this kind of time? And how does and for whom does spending our time in this type of activity actually pay off? 3) Clearly, access to this equipment comes into play. 4) Do we really have as much freedom as he is suggesting? Or, is this freedom a little exaggerated perhaps because of the novelty of newness? The interface of iMovie, MovieMaker, etc. do not necessarily provide a utopian freedom for the creative mind … Perhaps the more we think about this, the more disciplinary generic conventions may come to light.

Share: What challenges and opportunities do the concept and practice of remix offer us?

2009-10-29T22:30:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the easiest way to compose this blog entry is to make a list (and I apologize in advance for the length; this is just something I’m passionate about). So, I’ll start with the good, with the opportunities remix provides us, and then I’ll conclude (very briefly, as you’ll notice) with the bad, with the challenges remix poses.

The Good

The use of the 5 canons of rhetoric: To begin, I should clarify why I consider the use of the 5 canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, memory) to be a good thing. For me, the use of the 5 canons validates the act of composing: it demonstrates that rhetoric is being created. Yes, there are numerous examples of people creating and then employing rhetoric for pernicious means (the bad, if we want to think dichotomously for a second, uses rhetoric too). But the act of creating and employing rhetoric is, above anything else, not mindless. It is intentional. It is purposeful, regardless if such purposes are harmful or insidious in nature. It is the work of the intellect. It is a conscious, meaningful act.

And most, if not all, of what occurs during the process of remix can be understood, as any sort of composing can, via the 5 canons of rhetoric. Arrangement’s and delivery’s influence seem the most obvious, and perhaps the most prominent, in this process, but what is of interest to me is the influence of invention. Some might question how much of a role invention plays in remix: after all, these people are relying on other people’s material. What then, some would argue, are these remixers inventing? Those with a more capacious understanding of invention and those who understand the nuances of remix realize that the very act of remix is invention made manifest. By remixing, by arranging, cutting, editing, incorporating, splicing, and the like, remixers are inventing. They are taking the old in order to make the new. If that doesn’t qualify for invention, I’m not sure what does. And this entire process of inventing produces the next item on my list.

The making of (new) meaning: Many of remix’s antagonists fail to comprehend this crucial point: in remixing, people aren’t simply engaging in plagiarism squared; rather, these people are creating new meaning, meaning that is most often drastically different from that inherent in the original materials. If the former was all that was happening, we wouldn’t call it remix; we’d call it theft. The point of remix is to create something new while using the materials of the past. And by doing this, the remixer is producing the next item on my list.

The ability to see and understand in new ways: Because remixing results in new meaning, it simultaneously creates lenses that result in new ways of seeing and understanding. To an extent, this process involves the de- and recontextualizing of materials, and when remixed material is recontextualized, when it is rhetorically paired with other de- and recontextualized materials, we come to see these materials differently. Moreover, this new product, this remix, allows us to see these former materials in a way that was previously impossible. A remix allows us, as consumers, to understand material differently, to make new connections and gain new insights. Just as important is that most of this remix involves new digital technologies, which in turn makes easier the next item on my list.

The means to access this new meaning and ways of seeing and understanding (i.e., circulation): Lessig notes that remix isn’t necessarily new, but that it was largely censored economically; that is, in the past, attempting to accomplish the remixes of contemporary RW culture would have cost far too much (and this doesn’t even consider access to such equipment). Now, due to new digital technologies, many people are able to partake in remix culture (83). That said, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that this type of access is still very limited for some (yep: I’m thinking about the Digital Divide), but access to and the ability to remix is more ubiquitous than at any other point in our history. Arguably more important than remix’s ubiquity, if not solely responsible for its ubiquity, is the next item on my list.

The voluntary participation: For me, the most remarkable aspect about the remix is that a vast majority of people are remixing of their own volition: people generally enjoy engaging in this process. As teachers, we often struggle to get students to invest in their work, to see the value in not only what we’re teaching them but also what we’re asking them to accomplish in the various acts of composing we assign them. Well guess what: remix isn’t homework for (most) people. And remix, though still work, is inextricably linked to learning and knowledge. As Lessig states, “It takes extraordinary knowledge about culture to remix it well” (93).

Remix, as I’ve already stated, is the making of new meaning; it is the producing of new ways of seeing and understanding. Remix is also very much a literacy practice. And really, who, besides the elite worried about their coveted spot atop the hierarchy, conceives of literacy in a pejorative sense?

The perpetuation of the “prosumer”: In the RO culture that Lessig documents, the culture on which big business parasitically thrives, depends on a consumer. In RW culture, in remix culture, people are able to be both/and rather than either/or. And this is a world, according to Lessig, that is empowering, a world he desperately wants his own child to experience. Lessig states that RW doesn’t entail the demise of RO—that really, the two can work in concert—and if they do, he believes we’re better for it: we’re increasing our education. In remix culture, the common person can occupy a role traditionally reserved for the uncommon. And although this will surely result in more “crap” through which to sift, it will also allow those whose creativity and meaning making abilities were frequently marginalized to be accessed and subsequently circulated. This, I believe, results in a more informed culture, one that can question information rather than have it spoon fed to them.

As you can probably tell, I’m a proponent of remix, and really, I only see one problematic aspect to it.

The Bad

The fact that “permission [is] vital, legally”: And really, this part frustrates me—and on numerous levels. I understand the inclination to protect what’s yours, especially if what you’re protecting is connected to your livelihood. That said, I don’t see how remix is destroying (at least that severely) anyone’s livelihood. A point Lessig continually stresses is that our anachronistic copyright laws are making our kids out to be criminals. Like Victor Stone, I too believe this is a problem that will be solved “‘ten or twenty years [from now]’” (97). I just don’t want to wait that long. I want to solve this problem now. And the only way we can go about solving it is to understand that the system needs changing. We need to fight the law, but unlike the famous song, we need to reverse the trend and win.

Lessig claims that part of remix’s power is that it is able to convey meaning that words alone cannot. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with an image, one emblematic of the way I see this legal problem.

Colbert: Remix is OK

2009-10-29T06:02:00.000-07:00

In case you're not sucked in enough by now- check out colbert's "Remix is OK"-- Stephen actually challenged his citizens to remix him and many have done so
He is in love with people loving him--- and how could you not?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVzcWGi4QA

Three more videos-- one is homage to mash-up

2009-10-29T05:58:00.000-07:00

that's this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oar9glUCL0

then two part interview with book smith, San Francisco---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY57oiC0wm8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOGwVmEBOKU&feature=related
Look on you tube-- search Larry Lessig Remix... there are a lot of videos about him

Lessig versus Colbert

2009-10-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

For those interested, HERE is a link to a clip from The Colbert Report, where Colbert interviews Lessig about his book Remix. Lessig looks pretty exasperated at times--though perhaps rightfully so, as Colbert seems more contentious than usual (if that's possible)--but it's surely an interesting watch because Colbert embodies the other voice in this discussion, the collective voice of those oppossed to a remix culture.

By the bye, I'm still siding with Lessig, and his remark about how Colbert's entire show is a remix--both in terms of it remixing its predecessor, The Daily Show, and remixing the content it delivers--is spot on.

Tweeting Literature?http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/books/28electric.html?hpw

2009-10-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

See what you think?

Net neutrality and the NSA money hole

2009-10-26T17:58:00.001-07:00

“The social Life of Paper” Gladwell’s review of The Myth of the Paperless Office (Sellen and Harper) says that “Paper enables a certain kind of thinking” and that papers are the “artifacts of the knowledge economy”… so “a group at Apple studied piling behavior” (!) Piles are arranged by the maker of them with an idiosyncratic awareness of time and space—they represent a system for this creator that allows an interaction between a general process of thinking-things-through and the perception of (shifting, emerging?) the relative importance of discrete elements in the pile. Psychologist Alison Kidd (from The Myth) says piles represent “complexity”; she calls them “contextual cues” that show “the contents of our brains” and that “piles are living breathing archives” (94). Gladwell also brings in Levy’s Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Visual Age which talks about how the need to organize and store paper so that it is accessible and useable creates anxiety (something I can personally attest to!), and that since (especially) Victorian-era businesses’ needs shaped the concept of how to approach this task, to them we owe our orientation toward systems of warehousing and retrieving information- at least, prior to digital technologies. Using air-traffic controllers as examples Gladwell ties the visuality of piling to this practice of “situation awareness” (Endsley) which entails perceiving, understanding, and then projecting (96). So, Sellen and Harper argue, it was never the paperless office at all—because we still need the materiality that paper affords to manipulate our thinking, to make it apparent, to make it tangible. Maybe the real innovation is to think about “keepless paper”? Gladwell says that it might just be a “historical accident of innovation” (96) that we are now considering whether we ought to do away with paper, asking: if the computer had come first then would we now look at paper as the new and elegant solution to information management anxiety???

Tangentially, but somewhat to the point—i.e. the anxiety of paper—are the issues surrounding (specifically) scholarly publishing in the digital age, as laid out in Borgman’s book: access, publication, authentication and peer review, funding, conservation, and uses of data vs. information. Her main question is a sort of where-do-we-go-from-here query that has as its base the infrastructure of sources for scholarly materials—their availability, their legitimacy, and their preservation. Whatever we design as far as systems-of-use goes will be with us a long time and will shape the future of academic work. She doesn’t explore the larger social context very much—certainly not mainly, but keeps her focus in the academic arena. While most of what we have been reading for Convergence III centers on the sociality of information, Borgman mentions economics and politics briefly, un-job related social networking not at all. But I am not sure academic concerns can be isolated at all neatly from the larger societal picture.

Two things have caught my attention in the news this week that pertain to the digital-information sphere.

Both are political and neither speaks to academic issues per se, although both can affect the scholarly world. One is the debate over “net neutrality” and the other came to my attention via an article in the New York Review of Books. The first, net neutrality pertains to the public’s access to broadband internet. Candidate Obama said that he supported rules to keep the Internet neutral, laws to keep service providers from arbitrarily restricting the byte-stream to computers. In July 2009 the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” (sponsored by Democrats) was put forward to protect public access to the Internet. Last Thursday, in what is being hailed as a victory for the open Internet, the FCC voted unanimously to begin crafting rules to “forbid network operators from restricting access to lawful Internet content”, also included is language which would “prevent network providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications”, still allowing management (cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/24/net.neutrality.politics/). Before the FCC had even finished the meeting John McCain countered with legislation to block this move, saying such rules would cost jobs and stifle business. He called his bill “The (oddly misnamed) Internet Freedom Act of 2009”. The FCC is under pressure to create “fair and reasonable rules of the road” while Comcast, in a lawsuit, and other service providers protest the FCC’s right to control the Internet. What is at stake is money for some and access for many; whether the Internet itself will become a series of gated communities or remain more like an information commons. The outcome of this debate would surely impact the issues surrounding scholarly research and publishing. Borgman’s observations and predictions are predicated on the idea that the internet is open and passable.

NYRB covers a book out about the National Security Administration’s plan to construct two giant memory holes in San Antonio, Texas and Camp Williams, Utah. I also found in The (12/3/2008)SanAntonioCurrent:“ThePanopticonEconomy”(sacurrent.com/news/story.asp?id=69607) an article that quotes author James Bamford (from his third book on the NSA, the Shadow Factory) saying “the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the world” (Really?) and will cost upwards of $130 million to build. Its mission is the Orwellian project of “Total Information Awareness”. (Seriously?) The dynamic conflict here is a fight between “automated data mining” for Homeland Security and “electronic civil liberties”. The feedback on this Current piece in the form of audience postings to the webpage was vociferous and many of them seemed excited with the idea that the US government could foil terrorists by surveilling everyone’s every move (NSA data hole does bring 1500 jobs to San Antonio) as well as angry about “lefties” who don’t like the being scrutinized by a mysterious government agency. Some portion of readership was anti-NSA shouting things like “1984 is happening now!” This NSA data mining thing is all over the Net, and The Register (British tech publication website with links to whitepapers in the field) reports that the new Utah plant will “require at least 65 megawatts of power and cost $1.93bn”. According to this article “In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported the agency's Fort Meade location maxed out the capacity of the Baltimore area power grid” (theregister.co.uk/2009/07/03/new_nsa_data_center). That’s a lot of juice! These centers will require as much electricity to run as a small town and they intend to capture and archive every cell phone call, and library book check-out list and internet search made in the US. The NSA has a pretty terrible record of actually doing anything with the information they do have (they ignored 911 intelligence, for instance) and now they want a gazillion dollars more to spy on Americans through these giant data dumps. Whether the glut of stuff they capture and store will ever become useable information is debatable, and whether they get tremendous amounts of money to build them, and can successfully pull the electricity to run them is a political question.

Class Notes Available to All ;)

2009-10-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

OCTOBER 26 Class

∞ Wikipedia/Encyclopedia~~

What did you find?

∞ Blogs~~

What did you find?
Nominate a grade

∞ Literacy—consuming knowledge—Ong, McLuhan
∞ Literacy—creating knowledge?—Faigley, assemblage
∞ Literacy—how it works (attention, circulation) and where-->Datacloud

NOW: Who has knowledge and of what kinds?
Culture
Processes
Practices
Local
Generalize-able
Medium
Circulation

Brown
Shirkey
Siegel
Jones
Borgman

Literacy?~~Making knowledge, writing-->SEED

Our blog?
Sharing and SRR’s—relative merit
Aggregating information
Blogging as an effective classroom practice
Visualizing the role of maps in how we envision—changing our brains?
Posting on Bb and here: the same?
Return to maps—add (Siegel) and Borgman and future

COUNTDOWN ;)

1 week Circulation maps due and one pager explanation
3 weeks Present on Wikipedia entry to class: 5 minutes each
Include visual and handout
4 weeks Wiki entry due (Reflection in class)
5 weeks Project share in class: handout and visual. Response keyed to revision
6 weeks Exam week: project due

The "wicked machine" and your little dog too...

2009-10-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

This passive glassy eyed faux-community of Internet zombies seems to react pretty much like a vespid and interconnected natural community (i.e. wasps; ants) when disturbed.
Above: Chinese paper wasps building their “nest of hexagonal cells” from “masticated wood pulp with adhesive saliva” (cooperatively) –photo courtesy of Natural Wonders, a visually beautiful blog about the world’s creatures (smallnaturewonders.blogspot.com)

by Yuwaraj Gurjar A/24, Vishwajeet Society, Veer Sawarkar Marg, Naupada, Thane (W) - 400 602, India.
Thank you blogosphere! For enriching my everyday life and satisfying curiosity, extending metaphor…

Witness the swarm of bloggers ready to clean Siegel’s corpse—available in Kathi’s trail of links, re: Siegel, via her post. ‘Seems like people are pretty invested in the meaning, value, and integrity of their online world. Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes being just one virtual salon where a heated discussion about Siegel’s critique of, and self-misrepresentation in, the online world is happening.

(Christian Oth for The New York Times: Lee Siegel)
People’s blogs are important to them. They care for and tend them like a Giga Pet for real, like a cyber companion that links them into a wider conversation and to a community that is robust (for say artists) but who’s members may be physically dispersed, and who find their actual place of habitation doesn’t offer much support. It is wonderful to discover that somewhere, out there is a whole lot of other folks who love what you love. (I guess and hate-what-you-hate, if that is what motivates you. But it’s not like if we all stopped blogging we’d be rid of the haters). Green’s post links to “Bye Bye Blogger”, Siegel’s NYT interview with Deborah Solomon. Acting “under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine” Siegel said that to him, the blogosphere was a place where “you can speak without consequences”. Solomon kept stinging but Siegel brushed
it off, using her as a straight man for his gags. “He's not just an observer. He is the sinister side of Internet culture. Only after he was found to be misrepresenting himself on his blog did he turn on the medium” says Regina Hackett, Seattle Post Intelligencer art critic on seattle pi blog page. A post below her column says that the chronic complainers haven’t got past the “chat rooms and porn sites” and that the initiated actually “reap many more rewards from computer and internet technology than the nay-sayers can comprehend”.
Boston Globe arts writer Geoff Edgers (linked to in Hackett’s seattle pi blog) offers the bona fides: “Siegel, quoting his bio from a book review in The Nation, "writes about television for The New Republic and on art for Slate. His writing has also appeared in publications from New York Times and The New Yorker to Radical History Review and Tikkun. In 2002 he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism” and links to Lee Siegel’s “Diary” on Slate.com. in which he says that “lies are a consumerist tool”. I guess it’s just a question of the pot calling the kettle black.

Man Against the Machine

2009-10-26T07:32:00.001-07:00

So a question: what difference, if any, does the following information make to your view of Siegel's argument?

In the back matter, Siegel thanks lots of folks, including Janet Maslin. And this is the same Janet Maslin who reviewed his book in the NYTimes.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/books/17masl.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

And more-->

http://blog.seattlepi.com/art/archives/129837.asp

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/archives20060901.shtml#107450

Current Net Neutrality News

2009-10-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

In reference to this week's reading, I thought it might be of interest that the FCC approved net neutrality rules earlier this week.

Here's the Wired article

A Writing Revolution § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

2009-10-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

A Writing Revolution § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Something in Between

2009-10-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I was mildly surprised when I read the excerpt from Alex Jones’ book, Loosing the News. In particular, I was rather taken back by the following statement: “No matter where the conversation about public affairs takes place, it is almost always an outgrowth of that daily iron cannonball.”

Perhaps I am wrong, and this is an awfully small excerpt from which to base my opinion. However, it seems as though Jones is presuming to possess knowledge of some mythical point of origin that conflates experience and knowledge/truth that circulates about this experience: “the iron core.” If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one hears? (or whatever that saying is.) Within this framework is the day to day of our lives is surpassed in importance by the reporting of the iron core? You plebeians, think what you may. But, the news gives us the truth – the iron truth, that is. (Iron as both valid and bounded.)

The news reports what people want to know about – or, rather, what it thinks and tells people they want to know about. The core center that Jones imagines is a core center for a generally homogenous audience. Even though it may not be reported, there is lots of news, news that interests us, is applicable to our lives, and that many of us may never hear about from the iron core. Well … that was until the boundaries of this “iron core” began to see themselves challenged.

This challenge comes from the increasing ability of individuals to participate in a process that simultaneously reports ‘news’ and makes news and truth through the implicitly creative act of ‘reporting.’ This is a large part of what I think culture is – the way in which people come together in herds, navigate relations with each other, respond to other herds, and become conscious of this. It is this awareness that tempers herd mentality with bandit individualism. Thus, when Siegel writes, “What cultured, thinking people have been suspicious about since the advent of the written word is the herd thinking that commerce encourages” Here, I would suggest that he is missing the mark. Communities would have little meaning if individuality wasn’t tempered by some degree of herding. This leads me to ask how much of what we have read this week reflects criticism of individual action more than it actually addresses an broader dynamic of change that we are witness in our culture as it increasingly incorporates extended means of participation.

Montgomery/Bridgman Synthesis of "Share Submit" Discussion

2009-10-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

Synthesis of “Submit and Share” discussion on Convergence 3 Blog

Please take note of shape, shade, and color. For example it is purposeful that the top third uses red and blue which when combined make purple, that the green in the center of this image appears nowhere else, that the bottom third does not reflect binary colors so much as a gradient, etc. The image is also intended to be “read” from the central third (green section) outward. Thus, Stacy’s prose discussion that follows the image uses this visual starting point as its point of departure.

I originally intended to graph the salient points of this synthesis in order to visually demonstrate how many people expressed certain opinions. However, I found that my classmates had addressed the question so diversely that such a task was doomed to fail. So instead, please imagine this reflection situated in the green middle portion of our VUE presentation.

In terms of style, everyone who referenced it agreed that the Submit is more formal than Share. A few of us acknowledged the tendency to ramble on the blog, while the length of the Submit is much more firmly constrained. There was also a great deal of discussion about the tightly limited audience of the Submit. As far as we know, Dr. Yancey is the only one who sees that. Most of us acknowledged our classmates as at least being the audience that we are most conscious of on the blog. Although, there was considerable disagreement about what kind of value such an audience provides. A couple of people also pointed out that the potential audience of the blog could be much larger as it is publicly available and searchable.

Caleb gave us an excellent semantic analysis of the terms “submit” and “share” and the potential power relationships implied by them. Several people referenced his post. All were in agreement. While not everyone expressed a preference for one format over the other, those who did were fairly evenly divided. There was some concern that the potential for collaboration on the blog was not being fulfilled. Proposed reasons included the size of our class, the perceived likelihood that earlier posters actually return to read and consider later posts, and the tendency for the blog to dissolve into eighteen separate conversations. There was a strong consensus that the Submit helps to organize our thoughts on the reading.

Many of us referenced what I’ve mentally dubbed “the Yancey Factor.” This is a certain terror at writing for and being evaluated by none other than Dr. Yancey. All seemed to be in agreement that this stress is more present in the Submit option and mitigated (to a greater or lesser extent) by the Share option. Several people did point out that the ultimate evaluator is still Dr. Yancey regardless of whether we submit or share. However, the general consensus seemed to be that the Share is less stressful in this regard.

- Stacy Montgomery & Katie Bridgman

SNL + Colbert = Your Viewing Pleasure...

2009-10-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

So, my friend, Anton Dyer (who seemed to care whether or not I referenced him on this blog; I guess this IP stuff matters even on a blog), convinced me to watch this SNL clip recently. I had no idea at the time that Seigel would reference Colbert. This clip captures Seigels statement on page 139, though: "You don't have to possess a perceptive, synthesizing, verbally nimble mind ti be a journalist; all you have to do is present yourself as a journalist and insist...that you are doing journalism."

So, sit back and enjoy!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/101182/the-colbert-report-thu-oct-8-2009#s-p1-so-i0

A different kind of encyclopedia...

2009-10-19T19:20:00.001-07:00

As we have our lovefest with the internet, participation, circulation, and knowledge-making, what do we make of Conservapedia?
To think about it, have a look at their Conservapedia Commandments , at least 6 of which sound like something we might generate in class (#4 might not make all of our lists). Or have a look at how they differ from Wikipedia -- most of which sound nice-- especially #1, which encourages sharing and circulation.
And then maybe contrast a few entries. The one on "professor" seems pretty down the middle. The one on "Barack Obama" ...eh, notsomuch. In fact, it's kinda hilarious.
Just as an fyi, the one on "literacy," which was my term for the analysis, is no less informative or more slanted than what I found in Brittanica...
So, what do we think?

Seigal is very wrathful and frothy about the Internet!

2009-10-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

Seigal’s chapter from Against the Machine titled “The Context of Participatory culture” is contemplating “the rise of ‘Corporatism’ as America’s value system” (84). Stability Vs. “relativism and ambiguity”, whether looking to the key to the Internet-effect in the past (Johnson) or the coming future itself (Rushkoff), Seigel finds in them both a similar and eerie belief that “the future is an Internet-shaped mystery that only knowledge of the Internet can unlock” (85). Now the “cool kid” in high-school is being marketed as a universal personality type and Michael Hirschorn’s (Atlantic Monthly) belief is that this confident kid will lead us through the land of social networking on the Web (88). The downside, says Seigel is that “In its obsessive stress on youth, the Internet plays to the lowest common denominator of youth” (88). Seigel views the Internet’s evolving persona as a popularity conscious teenager who doesn’t want to be seen as different and is conformist at heart (89). This boils down to a conflict with (particularly Eastern intellectual’s) distaste for the “herd thinking that commerce encourages” that can lead to, not democracy, but to the “rule of the Mob” (93). This makes Malcolm Gladwell’s “Connector” into something like an Amway salesman- a pyramid schemer who has learned tricks about leveraging popularity to pull a fast one. This “Connector” says Seigel can be the “intermediary between different social worlds” (Gladwell qtd. 94) or “unpleasantly malleable and servile, bending without principle to satisfy the interests of the powerfully placed. This “dark type of “Connector” Seigal continues can be called a “hustler” and a “weasel” (94).In “Being There” Seigel continues his rant, focused this time on Wikipedia. Well- maybe the article about elvis and Marlin is awful- but at least you get a film title (The Wild One) that you can Google and look for more relevant stuff (145). As my recent experience with Britannica taught me—Alvin Toffler is not a household name. However on Wikipedia I found you tube interviews and analysis of his four books, including the iconic Future Shock from 1970. Britannica? Not a whisper, not Macro nor Micro. The Internet offers convenience, sure! But too much information and that unfiltered and unvetted by professionals (150). And yes, gossip is a problem—in the blogosphere and everywhere else. But really—Stephen Colbert just like George Bush? Now you’ve gone too far!

Lee Siegel's Second Life Profile is Empty

2009-10-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

Culture-protector Lee Siegel's facile (and unoriginal) dismissal of Second Life at the end of his epilogue--a minor rant that seems only there to make him seem current ("I know what Second Life is!") and at the same time an independent thinker ("But I'm not taken in by it!")--made me curious. After all, he invites us to "'right click'" (why does he put that in quotes?) his avatar to get all kinds of questionable details about Lee or Delbert.

Well, I didn't bump into Delbert--SL is a pretty big place, harder to make sweeping generalizations than the average snarky pundit would have you believe--but I did pull up his profile, the first tab of which appears with this post. It's pretty sparse. It makes me wonder how much time he actually spent in the environment he dismisses. And did he pull off the personal information he mentions in his book because too many people ragged him about the 2006 episode in which he posed as a reader of his own blog in order to compliment himself? (See Louis Bayard's review in Salon.) One wonders; Bayard calls Siegel's book a "wounded-vanity project." I sent Delbert a greeting & will be interested to see if he responds.

I'll address Siegel's & Jones' laments in the comments section elsewhere, as everyone else is doing, but I thought this profile bit was rather amusing and, to me, telling. Siegel's elite gatekeeper model of information flow would make it more difficult to ferret out little ironies like an empty Second Life profile.

What’s the role of participation in what we know?

2009-10-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

I’m a big Michael Carter fan.

Or perhaps more accurately, I’m a big fan of his article “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.”

In it, Carter says, “Doing is the middle term that links writing and knowing” (389). For him, the very act of doing—that is, of writing in a particular genre or metagenre—is an expression of knowing. In other words, he states there is difference between how we typically conceive of knowledge and how he articulates knowing: for those outside the academy (and probably some inside as well), knowledge is static and discipline specific; it’s something one can acquire and must necessarily acquire in order to be part of a particular profession or community. Here, knowledge is the end game. Carter, however, encourages us to see knowledge as intrinsic to the act of doing. By partaking in doing—again, writing in specific genres and metagenres—we are actively displaying knowledge. The act of doing is knowledge in action. (As a sidebar, I think there are some interesting connections between this and Brown and Duguid’s Social Life of Information.)

I bring up Carter here because if we buy into what he’s selling, if we see knowledge as expressed via doing, then participation seems absolutely necessary in explaining what we know. Perhaps I’m taking a different angle on participation than KY had intended, as in this context, I’m using participation in terms of actively engaging oneself, in terms of its verb form to participate. Therefore, by participating, we are partaking in what Carter would call the act of doing, and thus the act of knowing.

But what happens if we step outside Carter’s framework? What if we try to understand what we know as well as participation’s role in what we know through, say, the technological cynical Siegel’s eyes?

Siegel’s understanding of knowledge seems to align with Carter’s description of how many people typically conceive of knowledge: that is, as something static—and probably even platonic. Siegel says, “Knowledge means you understand a subject, its causes and consequences, its history and development, its relationship to some fundamental aspect of life. But you can possess a lot of information about something without understanding it” (150). For Siegel, knowledge begins to devolve into information as a result of the participatory nature of the Internet, and according to him, this is perhaps no more apparent than with Wikipedia. “Under the influence of the Internet, […] knowledge is withering away into information. Wikipedia, with its videogame-like mode of participation, and with its mountains of trivial factoids, of shifting mounds of gossip, of inane personal details, is knowledge in the process of becoming information” (152). In this context, participation seems to be an ugly term, a means to erode the revered. Our ability to participate in the construction of knowledge, while seen as perhaps empowering to many, is counterproductive and damaging to the status of knowledge because, for Siegel, there isn’t a vetting process for this participation. While Siegel openly admits some will see this as elitist, knowledge is nonetheless a sacred entity for Siegel, and it certainly shouldn’t be subjected to the whim of just anybody (or at least anybody with access to the Internet).

I guess what I’m trying to accomplish here is to demonstrate two conflicting views of participation and of its influence in what we know: one more individual and one more collaborative. We have Carter, where participation involves the expressing of knowledge (individual participation), and we have Siegel, where participation by the many (collaborative participation) can quickly result in the deterioration of knowledge into information.

Wordle Tag Cloud - Share vs Submit

2009-10-15T16:13:00.001-07:00

Just for fun, I pasted all our comments on the Share vs. Submit question into Wordle and it generated this tag cloud, where font size is proportional to word frequency.

What’s the role of participation in what we know? Are current versions of participation a threat or an asset or something in between?

2009-10-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

For someone with no credentials as a journalist, it is remarkable that my blog has an audience at all. Whether or not I have anything worth saying (a debatable thing indeed) is irrelevant here. After listening (in the real sense of the word) to Alex Jones’s lament for the passing of the traditional investigative news reporter, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty, as if I were standing there, hammer and chisel in hand, contributing to the tearing down of the wall that has until now, according to Jones, protected the “news core.”

In writing this post, I first asked myself whether or not this demolition is a good thing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that news is always subjective, no matter how professional the person is who is reporting it. And so the question changed from whether or not the news was any of my business to how my subjectivity compared with that of professional reporters. Because no matter who writes it down, the news is always entrusted to human hands, it must always be subject to human prejudices. These are the prejudices Siegel warns against: “What cultured, thinking people have been suspicious about since the advent of the written word is the herd thinking that commerce encourages. They fear that the supplanting of independent thought will result in the victory of prejudice and bias, and of the stereotypes that they produce” (93). Of course, when you put it that way, who wouldn’t want to be aligned with “cultured, thinking people”? The problem here, however, is that even this group of elite thinkers has prejudices and agendas, just as the men and women who work to produce Jones’s “news core” do, just as every person who has ever had a word to say about anything has had.

And so the contrast is not between objectivity (Jones’s “accountability news”) and subjectivity (Siegel’s “herd thinking”) but rather between degrees of subjectivity. I think that the question of participation in knowledge-making is tied up in all of this somehow. If all news passes through human hands, then what the consumer receives will be tainted by opinion. And when the consumer becomes a processor (perhaps producer goes too far as a term, since the information does not originate with the reporter), he tacks on his own opinion to pre-existing opinion. Participation in knowledge-making, then, is nothing new. The difference is that today’s technology opens access to everyone to participate, and not just the professional few.

The danger or threat, then, is not that through increasing participation in the making of knowledge we are in danger of losing objectivity, but rather we are in danger of neglecting the extremely important fact that all knowledge that has passed through human hands is influenced by those hands, and that no group of reporters, no matter how dedicated they are to their craft, is capable of totally removing bias from their reporting. When people claim objectivity, they are at best displaying ignorance and arrogance, and at worst actively misleading their audiences. I wonder what the case is for the growing group of amateur reporters or news processors. When the boundaries between ignorance and malice become impossible to delineate, that is a problem indeed.

Blog Reflections

2009-10-12T17:49:00.000-07:00

Choose 5 Criteria of these 10:

1) Citations elsewhere by others
2) Comments on posts
3) Visual Design
4) How we generated attention
5) Hits- active users
6) Number of Author Posts
7) Invitations by readers to become authors and the number accepted
8) Genre coherence
9) Effectiveness of attention getting tools/methods
10) Coherence between posts

Reflection
2-3 pages single spaces
Due 10.26 (I am almost positive. You'd be better off to double check)

In your reflection you will show your understanding of blogging, rhetorical situation, and economics of attention.

Connecting Blogging, Sharing, Submitting, Organzing, Rhetorical Situation, and Making Knowledge

2009-10-12T14:54:00.001-07:00

Yes, you ;)

SRRs and Blog Posts

2009-10-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

What are the alternative values of an SRR submit and an SRR share?

OR

What is the value of something that comes to a teacher versus something that is shared more widely, like on a blog.

Share with us...........

If I may...

2009-10-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

since the question being circulated around this week is about medium, I thought now would be a good time to show this clip. In Canada in the late nineties, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a series of short television clips called "A Part of Our Heritage." Each clip presented ("packaged" may be a better word) a little snippet of Canadian history; these clips were circulated ad nauseam on Canadian television. Here's the one for that Canadian national hero, Marshall McLuhan. Cheesy and silly? Welcome to the Canadian landscape, ladies and gentlemen.

Embrace or be anxious about changes happening because of dig tech rev?

2009-10-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

Chartier makes a point that both ambiguity and anxiety are conjured by the new. He says we cannot possibly bridge the gaps to understanding because language is primarily contextual, and if a text is cut loose from its linguistic and cultural moorings it loses much of its meaning. I think he fears that we will jettison our heritage in the rush to digitization, and that while it is nice to imagine we can speak a common language on the Internet, thus crossing boundaries of nation and ethnicity, we may be moving to what he calls a “new illiteracy” because the ubiquitous technologies effectively exclude and ignore anyone who is not able to use them to communicate. This references the digital divide concept, and stresses that politically, access for him is still a central problem of digitization, that and also the need for the preservation of texts in their original forms because we don’t receive a text the same way when its materiality is altered. He worries also that if the “author function” (Foucault) is diluted or disappears then a significant form of quality control goes with it. Anonymous is not subject to the ethos of responsibility as is standing by your word. When we consider writing and architecture and all cultural productions as the same thing-- simply an “ensemble of signifying practices” (Chizuko) then we risk losing the ability to make distinctions (and value judgments?). The “media revolution is neither imposed nor suppressed by our desires” -- but what will be the result of it? There is no way to predict how a new “structuring of textuality” that will “elicit a new kind of reading” will affect cultural institutions. He ends by saying that we are now obliged to distance ourselves from the “materiality and categories we associate spontaneously with the written word”. I think he is feeling pushed and pulled along too fast into new modes of writing/reading/text and consequently is concerned about the stability of our agreed upon platforms for knowledge-making. Chartier is worried about authority and verification, and believes that the systems for the circulation of texts, and the nature of the texts themselves are being altered without any understanding of how whatever is replacing the older established ways of making and storing knowledge will work.

Shirkey points out the same types of sweeping changes but he is not partaking in the same worry-fest or operating in the atmosphere of overwhelming anxiety present in Chartier’s afterword. I think Shirkey feels that we should trust the process and that we have seen these types of changes before. What spelled doom for the scribes opened up new horizons of science and math which in turn fueled technology and many things we take for granted now to the point of invisibility. He basically thinks this is good, although like Chartier he agrees that we can neither make it happen nor wish it away. I think he would say that the changes brought about by advances in digital technologies are mostly good and helpful and provide platforms, opportunities, and structures for people to inhabit and self-organize for often beneficial changes. The example of anorexic girls forming a support group online to continue being too thin is a kind of counter argument to the internet-as-beneficial social force—they are using social networking to harm themselves, but he says that the actual promise of the site is “Someone will pay attention to you”--- leaving open the possibility that maybe this cyber gathering spot could actually promote some of the girls’ physical/mental healing, in spite of its stated mission to help them continue harming themselves, just by virtue of its being a group forum. Similarly, Shirkey mentions glancingly that networking sites can be used by terrorists too, but obviously he does not see this as is the main implication that the connectivity offered by computer networking holds for society.

Information Overload

2009-10-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

Reading The Social Life of Information, I couldn't help but thing of this ad. I don't have a lot of substance to include here, I just think this is really interesting in light of our discussions/readings about circulation and information.

Resources

2009-10-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Baker-t.html?hp

November 19

Dear all.

As promised, I am posting the list I've made for myself based on the
suggestions from all of you lovely people. I've tried to divide the
books into different categories, though some books may fit into
several categories (or should be moved to another category...). The
categories themselves might also need some revising and it is not
sorted alphabetically yet.

The idea of creating a bibliographic resource sounds great and I would
love to collaborate on it, if possible!

Here is the list I've made so far (which is still far from complete -
I'll continue to work on it!).

I've also posted the list on my blog, complete with links (the blog is
in Norwegian, but the list itself is in English):
http://lindaeo.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/tips-til-bøker-og-artikler-om-den-sosiale-veven/

BOOKS

History of the Internet
- Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben Netizens: On the History and ?Impact
of Usenet and the Internet (1997)

Critical approaches to the Internet
- Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran
Kelly: ?New Media: A Critical Introduction (2009)
- Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu: Who controls the Intenet - illusions of a
?borderless world (2006)
- Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It (2008)
- First Monday, Volume 13, Number 3. A special edition edited by
Michael Zimmer (2008)?

Internet possibilities:
- Clay Shirky: Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without
?organizations (2009)
- Jeff Jarvis: What Would Google Do? (2009)?

Theory and background
- Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to
Google (2008)?
- Glen Greeber and Royston Martin: Digital Cultures ? Understanding New Media
- Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Networks ? How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom (2007)
- Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and
Araba Sey: Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (2009)
- Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)
- Mizuko Ito, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, Danah Boyd et. al:
Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New
Media (2009)
- Knut Lundby: Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences (2009)
- Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone: Handbook of New Media (2006)

Digital generation
- David Weinberger: Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New
Digital Disorder (2008)
- Henry Kressel and Thomas V. Lento: Competing for the Future: How
Digital ?Innovations are Changing the World (2007)
- ?Kathryn C. Montgomery: Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and
?Childhood in the Age of the Internet (2007)
- David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New
?Digital Disorder (2008)?

Social behaviour
- Howard Rheingold: Smart Mobs ? The Next Social Revolution (2003)
James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice, Social consequences of Internet use:
?Access, involvement and interaction (2002)
- Steven Vedro: Digital Dharma: A User's Guide to Expanding
Consciousness ?in the Infosphere (2007)?

Social networks
- Jenny Ryan: The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social
?Networking (E-Book)?

Blogs
- Michael A. Banks: Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's
Top ?Bloggers (2007)
- Jill Walker Rettberg: Blogging (2008)

User-generated content
- Axel Bruns: Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From
Production ?to Produsage (2008)
- Douglas Thomas: Hacker Culture (2002)

Privacy
- Daniel J. Solove: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and
Privacy on ?the Internet (2008)?

Searching, finding and wisdom of crowds
- Cass R. Sunstein: Infotopia ? How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (2008)
- Peter Morville: Ambiant Findability (2005)
- John Battelle: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the
Rules ?of Business and Transformed Our Culture (2006)?

Impact on news and journalism
- Dan Gilmore: We the Media ? Grasroots Journalism by the People, for
the People (2006)
- Jeff Gomez: Print Is Dead: Books in our Digital Age (2007)
?Business, marketing and innovation
- William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi: The Internet and ?American
Business (2008)
- David Teten and Scott Allen: The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors
and ?Closing Deals Online (2005)
- Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
?Transforms Markets and Freedom (2007)
- Lawrence Lessig: Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the
?Hybrid Economy (2008)
- Andy Beal and Judy Strauss: Radically Transparent: Monitoring and
?Managing Reputations Online (2008)
- Eric von Hippel: (1988). The Sources of Innovation (1988)
- Eric von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation (2005)?

Politics
- Garret M. Graff: The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the
?Race for the White House (2007)
- Randolph Kluver, Nicholas W. Jankowski, Kirsten M. Foot and Steven
M. ?Schneider: The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative
?Study of Web Campaigning (2007)?

Health
- Monica Murero and Ronald E. Rice: The Internet and health care:
?Theory, research and practice (2006)
- Ronald E. Rice and J.E. Katz: The Internet and health communication:
Expectations and experiences (2001)

Software
- Christopher M. Kelty: Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free
Software. Durham (2008)
- Eric S. Raymond: The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and
Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (2000)?

ARTICLES

Social media
- Jill Walker Rettberg: Freshly Generated for You, and Barack Obama -
How Social Media Represent Your Life

Web 2.0
- O'Reilly What is Web 2.0

?OTHER RESOURCES

Danah Boyd: Research on Social Network Sites
Danah Boyd: Research on Twitter and Microblogging
Social Media: 20 free e-books about social media
Jay Rosen: Journalism
Webnographers.org

:-)

Siterer Alexander Halavais :

> Several of us discussed the use of Zotero groups to this purpose
> during the conference. I think this would be good way of creating
> bibliographic resources that are highly reusable. Jeremy Hunsinger set
> up an AoIR group earlier in the year--I've emailed to ask that he open
> it up so that more of us can contribute.
>
> I'll also note that in previous such discussions I've used the aoir
> wiki, and you will find several biblios linked from there:
> http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=Topical_Bibliographies
>
> But I think creating a number of topical folders in a Zotero group is
> the way to go!
>
> Best,
>
> Alex
>
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:10 PM, wrote:
>> As it looks like we are starting to get a small sub group of persons
>> interested in helping pull this together--and I/we hope we can get
>> a few more
>> people to join in, I suggest we set up a separate discussion group somewhere
>> (Ning, Yahoo Groups, an AIR-l sublist if avail??) so we can discuss and pull
>> this together as a group.
>>
>> Bob Berkman
>> _______________________________________________
>> The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list
>> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
>> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>>
>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>> http://www.aoir.org/
>>
>
>
>
> --
> --
> //
> // This email is
> // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded.
> // [X] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing.
> //
> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
> // http://alex.halavais.net
> //
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>

_______________________________________________
The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list
is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
http://www.aoir.org/

November 1

More resources ;)

One details Rupert's intent to charge for Internet access to a London paper he owns.

Another argues that the potential circulation on the Internet actually leads to what's called "cyberpolarization."

In addition to the handout I sent on last week . . . .http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/02/091102crbo_books_kolbert#Replay

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2009/11/michael-wolff-200911

Here I'll simply post some info you might find useful. Another way of putting this is to say that I see a third term of this course in someone's future!

OCT 3, 2009

I'd include Heidi McKee and Jim Porter's book on researching in online environments.

I'd look at _Ourspace_ by Christine Harold, which seems to be like Jenkins' _Convergence Culture_, only more theoretical and probably smarter, in some ways a cross between that and books on smart mobs (eg, Rheingold)-->http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/harold_ourspace.html#TOC

Another site for those interested in news/blogs/journalism issues is here (and an interesting set of theoretical approaches, too)-->http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/sine_stercore/sine_stercore.cfm

In terms of how universities are bringing blogs and students together as a magnet for recruiting, see here-->http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/education/02blogs.html?_r=1&hp

OCT 4

This article talks about how quilt squares are mounted in the mountains of NC to serve many purposes, including evoking a past located in domestic activity and the Underground Railroad; inviting tourists to the area and guiding them; and speaking to a family history. The use of the squares, which aren't made of fabric but of wood?, is an interesting combination of remediation and material circulation. See http://www.charlotteobserver.com/474/story/977950.html

An interesting interface in light of Datacloud

2009-10-01T13:40:00.001-07:00

This is worth a look if you haven't seen it. I've used an earlier version, but the multi-touch version now out is pretty interesting--check out the video. But does it really change anything? Does it result in a different kind of interface with information?

Video: BumpTop 1.2 with multitouch support available now

Role of Medium in International Context

2009-10-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

Our first task in this week’s blog is to discuss “how information circulates.” Frightened by the sheer broadness of the question (not to mention I don’t foresee myself having the time nor the intelligence to answer the question sufficiently), I’ll cop out, thus deferring to my peers, and instead focus my attention toward answering the second question: “what role if any does medium play in an international context?”

Drawing on the expert from The Book and the Chapter, I agree for the most part with Chartier, who is agreeing with Chizuko: “‘The Internet is not the great equalizing medium that some claim it to be’” (123), most notably because of access, cultural differences, and language barriers. Even locally, we can see that the Internet is not an equalizing medium. In fact, those of us who have read Cindy Selfe’s “Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention” or simply know about the digital divide can say that while the Internet does have the capabilities to bring people together in interesting and important ways, it can just as easily exacerbate current economical, racial, and gendered inequities. In other words, for all the equalizing the Internet purports to do, it participates in just as much unequalizing (if that’s even word). And despite many examples to the contrary, there’s merit to Chizuko’s claim that “[t]echnology may evolve, but human nature does not. People merely use the new media to indulge in old impulses” (138). Yes, this is a generalization, but it rings true for some, though certainly not all or perhaps even a quarter of, Internet users.

That said, let’s move back to the Roundtable Discussion and the role the medium plays in an international context, which I think is a very large role. In fact, the import of the Internet as a medium was the sole impetus (I believe) for even having this Roundtable Discussion; that is, these authors would not have had this conversation without the Internet as medium. The Internet, at least for these select individuals, gives them a shared context despite their personally different contexts, cultures, and experiences. In order to have this discussion, however, it seems as though they had to talk about the Internet and its current and future ramifications on a much broader level; they had to grapple with questions about the Internet’s influence on a global, rather than local, scale. Yes, many of them were drawing on their own experience, which seems only natural, but the questions they seemed to discuss on the whole dealt with the global consequences of Internet as medium.

Resonating with me was how many of these authors noted how the Internet (also referred to as “cyberspace” and “digital media”) as a medium is changing or will change the traditional way we understand text, though perhaps not as drastically as some might assume. For instance, Chartier states that while the Internet does not entail “the death of the author and the book” (126), it nonetheless is changing how we understand texts. Where before texts were easily discernable, as we often conceived of them as tangible and in print, now they’re also digital, therefore altering our conceptions of text and author as well as expanding our definition of genre. Wongyannava also speaks to this idea, assuring us that “written tradition will [not] be lost; rather, its medium is changing from printed to electronic” (130). This change in medium, I assume, will result in many of the changes Chartier forecasts, such as expanding notions of text, author, and genre.

In closing, I want to propose a question. Zhiming suggests that, in the future, digital media will be the dominant medium (131). And I ask: is that not already the case? Perhaps Zhiming was speaking on a global level. But at a local level, I’d argue that digital media is already the most pervasive medium, and it will become even more ubiquitous as we move forward.

Some Architecture/Interface Photos

2009-09-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share some photos I took in the Seattle Public Library and at the Technical University of Copenhagen last year. The latter link includes a few shots around the campus, but this building (pictured above) was the one that tonight's Interfaces discussion reminded me of. The blocks hanging out in the air are meeting spaces for students; the building is primarily classroom space.

Where yo blogs at?

2009-09-27T18:40:00.001-07:00

Although this might be jumping the gun: as I found myself half-stalking Convergence classmates on Facebook to see if their blogs were up yet, it dawned on me that a much easier option might be to post our blog links here. So, here's what I found on FB:
Katie's on space & place
Leigh's on responsible food
Joe's on virtual worlds
and mine, on funny teaching stories
So what else is already floating out there in the interwebs?

Maps Deux

2009-09-26T19:29:00.001-07:00

Upon reflection, here are maps part deux. How do they create an interface, and what is the logic of that interface?

Circulation

2009-09-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

Circulation is, of course, one of our key terms.

And you'll be tracing a term's circulation; no doubt we will learn a lot from your pursuit ;)

Here's some of what I've been thinking.

In academic circles, circulation is shown in two ways, at least. One: citations. In some fields (eg, think biology and other sciences), there are citation indexes that tell how often a given piece of work has been cited. Google Scholar attempts to provide the same service, although it's less systematic. Two: reprints. If a given text has numerous readers, the author of the text is often asked if the piece can be re-printed. For a good example of this, look at Villanueva's _Cross Talk_ and Miller's _Introduction to Composition Studies_.

I mentioned during class the first night Peter Hales' study _Atomic Spaces_: Living on the Manhattan Project_, where he documents how the circulation of information providing the foundation of science was shut down as the government sponsored the development of the atom bomb during WWII. I also suggested that the same attempt to suppress circulation of information has been documented in Germany in the run-up to and into WWII, with a counter effort to circulate information to resisters (see _The Red Orchestra_); ditto Cuba during the rise of Fidel Castro (see _Havana Nocturne_).

And although no one thus far has documented completely the events of Iran this summer (and into the fall), the (new) government there seems to be trying--through shutting down Facebook, for example--to stop the circulation of information that allows people to acquire a view of the news not controlled by the government.

There are many other examples of circulation. For instance, a couple of weeks ago on NPR's Diane Reem's show, there was a program focusing on Obama's health care initiative and the folks opposing it, especially those who call it "socialized" medicine." Well, according to the show, it seems that the first time this expression--socialized medicine--was used was in the 1940s (before *any* of us were alive!), specifically to discredit some reforms Harry Truman (of all people) was trying to introduce. Here we see the persistance of an expression over decades.

Another issue with policy implications has to do with water, more specifically with the Appalachicola basin. As you may know, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida are arguing over who owns the rights to the water that circulates from the mountains in GA down here.

A different public policy issue is monetary policy per Berneke, particularly regarding inflation. It's very delicate dance: setting long-term interest rates that affect loans that agencies overseas make, which loas affect inflation world-wide, including ours. In other words, our money is in circulation, yes, but our monetary policy is in circulation with other such policies world-wide.

Here are some issues re circulation on the dark side, if you will.

The first is a report on a study showing that students who are gay cluster in terms of friends on Facebook: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/MIT-Students-Facebook/8139/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Question: why focus on gay students? Why not focus on students who are heterosexual or from LA?

The second is a blog that is part of a networked approach to finding a woman's daughter. My assumption is that the mother hopes the blog will contribute to the circulation of information about her daughter and thus increase attention and the odds of finding her-->
http://www.bringkatehome.com/

Last but not least, perhaps circulation isn't social only but *physical* as well. Consider this, from Science Friday http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200909255 :

How can your friends -- and your friends' friends -- affect you? We'll talk with Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, two researchers exploring social networks and how they affect our health and behavior. In their new book 'Connected,' the pair describe research into how social networks tie into obesity, smoking, voting behavior, happiness, and more.

Nicholas Christakis
Co-author, "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives" (Little, Brown, 2009)
Professor of Medicine, of Medical Sociology, and of Sociology
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

James Fowler
Co-author, "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives" (Little, Brown, 2009)
Associate Professor in the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems and the Political Science Department
University of California, San Diego
San Diego, California

Lots to consider and explore.

Connections

2009-09-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

One of the liabilities of cloud computing is that there are so many spaces. I have several email accounts; a flickr account; many folders on three computers (well, four: an older laptop; my current laptop; a workstation at school; a workstation at home, which is over 9 years old so I really should say goodbye to it); a cell phone; two phones, an office and a home land lines; a NING account; several blogs on blogspot; two blogs on wordpress http://kbyancey.wordpress.com/ ; a google sites account; and more . . .

At one point we thought that there would be a single "utility" (the I-phone?) that would accommodate and provide for these multiple purposes. Now, it seems that won't happen. In which case, what's the interface that holds it altogether?

Maps/Interfaces

2009-09-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

Here are beginning representations expressing the relationships between key terms and understandings of historical shifts, the narratives accounting for which (Ong, McLuhan, Faigley, Lanham) aren't of one mind. To call them representations is a finesse, in one sense, in that they could be described or identified more specifically. Are they maps? Are they interfaces? Are they both?

Are they something else?

Maps as of Sept 14: What's the Interface?

2009-09-20T18:41:00.000-07:00

Interfaces, according to Datacloud, speak to the relationships between people, materials, networks. But as Wysocki and Vielstimmig suggest, the page itself is an interface.

What does this do to the McLuhan/Ongian notion of the page as an exercise in standardization of the visual?

Key Terms as of Sept 14

2009-09-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

consciousness
sense-ratio
orality
print
technology
alphabetic writing
agency
attention
culture
literacy
spatialization
closed system

1. Senses
2. Paradox
3. Consciousness
4. Attention
5. Grality
6. text
7. digital/electric
8. materiality
9. technology
10. economy

1. Materiality
2. Literacy
3. Sense (Ratio)
4. Technology
5. Text
6.
7. Consciousness
8.
9. Oral(ity)
10.

1) Materiality
2) Literacy
3) Sense-Ratio
4) Text
5) Consciousness
6) Orality
7) Attention
8) Tecnology
9) Phonetic Alphabet
10) Culture

Attention
Surface
Context
Tactility/Touch
Paradox
Resistance
Interplay
Language
Culture
Determinism
History
Reconfiguration
Image
Phonetic Alphabet
Global Tribe
Open/Closed

Some visual literacy tools

2009-09-16T13:39:00.001-07:00

Reading Datacloud and attending a "Visual Literacy" Educause webinar today - a nice convergence. Some interesting tools and ideas worth a look. The periodic table of visualization methods and VUE are also intriguing.

As for me, I am really looking forward to the post-keyboard society. Jeff Hahn's TED Talks touchscreen demo (3 years ago!) is compelling. And on a more modest scale, BumpTop is an interesting attempt to deal with workspace size.

2009-09-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

Although there were many quotes that I would consider "provocative" in McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, the one that I will attempt to articulate refers to the meaning of words and the relativity of what reality. On page seven, McLuhan states, "The word atom or electron is not used as the name of a piece. It is used as part of the description of the observations of physicists. It has no meaning except as used by people who know the experiments by which it is revealed." This seems to relate to our Lanham reading, when he states that "the more you ponder that information, the more you understand about that stuff, the more real the stuff becomes."

The Galaxy Reconfigured-- Artistic Purpose

2009-09-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

I had a difficult time finding any of McLuhan's writing provocative-- except that most of it provoked me to sleep. I did however enjoy the book if I took it like an extremely large pill prescribed by a doctor (lots of water, wrap smaller portions in food [applesauce, yum!]). That is exactly what I had to do to make it through the book. The largest difficulty was understanding McLuhan's source material. I found that I was unfamiliar with most of the people and works that he quoted and that, in itself, made me feel somewhat illiterate. The experience of reading this book was made doubly difficult by the fact that my copy is ancient and carries that musty smell like the back of the library (where I always inevitably fall asleep while studying). It's the same smell that I've always associated with Ebola since the copy of "Hot Zone" that I read in tenth grade had the same scent (smell as composition?) and that gave the whole experience a very ominous sickly feeling as if McLuhan's words were slowly sloughing-off my intestines (ick).

Deadly infectious diseases aside, the quote that I found most provocative is actually a paragraph so bare with me. The quote is from the Galaxy Reconfigured portion of McLuhan’s text:

“As the market society defined itself, literature moved into the role of consumer commodity. The public became patron. Art reversed its role from guide to perception into convenient amenity or package. But the producer or artist was compelled, as never before, to study the effect of his art. This in turn revealed to human attention new dimensions of the function of art. As manipulators of the mass market tyrannized over the artist, the artist in isolation achieved new clairvoyance concerning the crucial role of design and of art as a means to human order and fulfillment. Art has become as total in its mandate for human order as the mass markets that created the plateau from which all can now share the awareness of new scope and potential for everyday beauty and order in all aspects of life at once. Retrospectively, it may well prove necessary to concede to the period of mass marketing the creation of the means of a world order in beauty as much as in commodities.”

So why’d I like this quote out of all of the others that I could have chosen? McLuhan wrote this during his discussion of market economies that developed from the invention of the press—and I rather like market economies, and I rather like art, so it seemed to fit. I think that it is interesting to look at our own response to literacy and circulation through the lens of market economies and the social history that constructed them. Even on this blog we can see individual authors (most of whom never would have been able to write let alone read back in the day) who are constructing narratives of text and image with deliberate effort in an attempt to convey meaning in a way that our hyper-visual society would understand. As a matter of fact, in response to this quote I could provide you with my feelings in a series of three movements, each one designed to elicit response and judge response to better position my art in relation to the market economy.

Overall, I’d say that this quote provides interesting fodder on which we could open discussions of the market economy and the construction of literacy in higher education. We might ask ourselves whether our composition and the circulation of that composition is driven purely by the norms of our subculture—are we as student academics permanently questing for recognition in the academic hierarchy of our department as well as our field, and how does the construction of a market economy affect the way that we read and write and respond? Very very interesting.

Beyond McLuhan

2009-09-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

Like Rory (and pretty much everyone else), I'm having a hard time distinguishing the most provocative quote because, for me, the entire book was provocative (well, the parts of it I could understand, at least). So, instead, I'll approach this in chunks: a few quotes, reactions, and thoughts at a time.

McLuhan makes the somewhat depressing observation that "...print culture confers on man a language of thought which leaves him quite unready to face the language of his own electro-magnetic technology" (30). Not only is it exciting/terrifying enough to the one generation that has to deal with a revolutionary shift in technology and literacy, McLuhan has to be a downer and point out that we don't even know how to go about handling all this new information and means of distributing it. Not that I'm disagreeing with him. In fact, I'm still quite amazed at his vision of man's relationship with technology, considering The Gutenberg Galaxy was written at a time when most people didn't even have color TV. Regardless, this quote reads like a warning: pay attention, this is really important, and yet we're still surprised to find out that Google isn't making us stupid.

However obvious the shift into new litercies has become, I do wonder how technology has affected our relationship with "old" literacy practices such as reading a real, live book, or writing by hand (as Jen pointed out, her student couldn't physically write due to a heavy reliance on computers). On page 77, McLuhan discusses how old literacies demand attention to content (as Richard Lanham also points out), while new literacies ask us to consider form as an equally important factor. You'll notice, for example, in a lame and transparent attempt to attract attention to my blog post I've utilized several of the affordances of digital technologies: pictures, links, playful fonts. Is text enough anymore? Think about the textbook for ENC1102: it purposefully mixes genres to not look like a textbook. It's shiny, full of pictures, boxes, colors. It's a multitasker's dream-for someone used to handling all kinds of information at once, Beyond Words is way easier to digest than say, McLuhan. For me, it's a little schizophrenic (yes, a deliberate McLuhan reference), but for my students, it's perfect.

I'll end with one final quote: "The producer-oriented or ruler-oriented version of the message of Gutenberg is simply that it is the ruler's right to impose uniform patterns of behavior on society. The police state precedes the consumer society" (236). This quote emits a kind of creepy 1984-type vibe. It's funny that we generally associate new literacy practices with freedom, but here McLuhan once again points out that technology has some disturbing downsides. With the development of digital technologies, more consumers become producers, so it seems that more people have power. Yet "the externalization of our senses" (32) allows others to more subtly monitor us and exercise their power. We all know about the marketing companies that track your online behavior in order to develop a (usually scarily accurate) profile of you and the kinds of products you might buy. With more and more of ourselves located beyond our physical bodies, the implications are a little disturbing.

Lanham's The Economics of Attention

2009-09-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

According to Lanham, provocation clearly is the most effective means of gaining attention in this age of information. I admit I have been wrestling with questions of how I can employ what he is suggesting here into my blog. To a certain degree, I wonder how relevant my content really is in an environment in which style not substance matters (is my content incendiary enough? Is this really all that matters in circulation--getting the blood flowing?). I suppose I am having some ethical issues regarding the implications of his ideas, in particular: how can I produce saleable objects from my blog that emphasizes questions of communal space? Doesn’t this cheapen the content? What if my subject is not applicable to this particular economic system? Is it doomed to fail? Should I just get over it already?

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