About:Blank

I'M STILL ALIVE AND WRITING

2011-02-01T21:48:00.003-05:00

Wow, the latter half 2010 was a doozy for blogging, huh? Twenty-eleven is going to be a big comeback, I think. Maybe.

I'm working on my thesis now which is taking up quite a bit of my brain power. I will write about it here when it's a bit more set in stone. I also have a bunch of ideas I've been working on about pop culture and technology, but I think those will have to be put on the back burner until I've progressed on this thesis creature.

Speaking of creatures and brainpower, I wrote a post about literature over at The Things They Read. Here's an excerpt:

You know how in the The Matrix Morpheus and Trinity strap down Neo into that chair on The Nebuchadnezzar and hook that thing up to the hole in his neck and email him into the computer program designed to simulate 21st century society in sleeping humans’ minds while the sentient machines consume their bodies for energy? Well, books are kind of like that. (Bear with me.) All 2012 robot apocalypse connotations aside, what I’m getting at is that meaningful fiction allows us to enter a kind of opposite matrix: instead of leaving a “real” world and entering a virtual simulacrum to facilitate enslavement, literature allows us to leave an experience of the physical world dominated by language to access a more viscerally “real” one constructed between our minds and the writer’s. Inside our heads, literature (and probably other creative artifacts) liberates us from the desensitized contentment of the linguistic world by warping us to psychic simulations that we feel rather than articulate. More...

Until next time, here's a picture:

Blarg...

2010-09-28T17:26:00.003-04:00

Haven't felt qualified to post here in quite a while... I drafted a few things that never panned out and have since been in a state of intense but healthy disequilibrium.

Things are starting to ramp up here at school with my master's thesis impending. I might pop in and out here to think about that, but otherwise I think I'll just start posting cool things I find on the Internet that are tangentially related to anything.

Like this cyborg arboretum:

Research Methods are Complicated

2010-06-23T22:19:00.004-04:00

This week, a study was released proposing clear evidence that face-to-face (F2F) instruction is superior to Internet instruction. Here's the excerpt from Educause:

"This paper, written by David N. Figlio, Mark Rush, Lu Yin, presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. Counter to the conclusions drawn by a recent U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of non-experimental analyses of internet instruction in higher education, we find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. The paper also provides suggestions for future experimentation in other settings."

I haven't read the paper yet as I am awaiting the free-ish (since your email "must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution," which basically means it isn't free) paper, but I see one glaring problem right off the bat, which is this:

"...live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same."

My issue is that these things should not be the same online as in a F2F class. I understand that this is what makes the study an "experimental design," but it reinforces a common misconception that online courses are just regular courses uploaded to the Web.

This is like saying instructors should teach a course the same way for a 7 person seminar and a 307 person lecture. They shouldn't. Each has its own set of social dynamics and pedagogical techniques, as do online courses.

This isn't to dispute the results of this study, and I will re-visit this when I get my "free" copy, but we must be mindful of these nuances when talking about computer mediated instruction and Web culture.

Facilitating Conversations through Social Networking Tools

2010-06-18T21:03:00.000-04:00

Venessa Miemis over at Emergent By Design has been throwing around some interesting ideas about the next step for social media. She is building on an idea that networks-- the social interconnectedness between us-- are essential to the future because "networks solve the problem of complexity." Social media tools that have emerged in the past 10 years or so have, indeed, centered themselves around networks. However, an essential component to building on and utilizing our networks effectively, she writes, is a remarkably simple return to plain, old conversations:

"...the most effective means towards helping people along their path of self-discovery, or helping them redefine their mission statement for their life or their business, or constructing a vision for their future, or transcending past hang-ups and fear and illusions, is all through conversation."

I think she's on to something.

Social Web tools available now are designed to share and filter information between people on a large scale. This in itself is highly empowering as it's a qualitatively different "way of knowing" than when institutions are filtering and disseminating information for us and to us. However, popular Web culture has not found a way to systematically turn this knowledge exchange into action outside of cyberspace. In other words, the social Web transmits information from people to people very well but does not necessarily do a good job facilitating what Jianwei Zhang calls "knowledge building," or "the sustained progress of ideas" (Zhang, 2009, p. 275). This is problematic, for what we do with the information we gather on the Internet determines whether this whole Web culture thing succeeds or not. While we have seen participatory culture pop up in small pockets here and there, especially with culture jamming and fan videos on YouTube, the average user (maybe...see below) rarely participates in the "extended, progressive inquiry and incremental advancement of ideas" necessary to have useful action or knowledge creation. (See slide 11 for participation statistics).

Here's where the conversation becomes important.

Online social tools like Twitter and Facebook are not designed to facilitate conversation. Twitter's 140 character limit is fun and useful in some cases, but not conducive to conversations. Twitter does not natively pair Tweet responses together, and so dialogic back-and-forths are difficult to keep track of. Futhermore, all utterances on Twitter are broadcast to a large number of followers. Again, this is useful for knowledge sharing, but detrimental to conversation because producing a large number of exclusive Tweets is a social taboo. Facebook has the same problem. Public utterances are confined to small boxes that rarely go beyond 3 or 4 lines of text. The one time I saw a decent conversation happening on someone's wall, he deleted it, probably because the email notifications became a burden. Even worse, the "Like" button has made it easier to respond to posts without saying anything at all. Instead, interactions are reduced to binary reactions rather than nuanced responses. (Can we even say the "Like" button is binary if there's no "Dislike" button??).

Online social interaction are increasingly moving to these spaces. Perhaps it's even replaced things like AIM instant messaging, which was a huge part of early Web culture in my peer group. In turn, synchronous conversations with real-time feedback and instant consequences (instant messaging, face-to-face interactions, phone conversations, etc.) have been replaced by small, discrete blocks of asynchronous reactions.

(Disclaimer: I know I am making huge generalizations here about what "typical" Web interactions look like based on limited data. This perspective is largely anecdotal. Further research [which I am interested in doing, myself] should focus on what typical Web participation looks like on a fine-grained level. This, itself, is paradoxical, however, because there may be no such thing as a "typical" Web user-- the Web, by nature, is fractured, diverse, and resistant to averages and generalizations. However, I need to rely on these assumptions for a minute to make my point, so bear with me).

Thinking back on my own Web participation, activities that provide opportunities for sustained conversation have been my most salient networked experiences. These experiences tended to be focused around a specific concept or idea in a relatively small-scale community, where each member was generally aware of each (or most) other members (kind of sounds like a "community of practice", maybe?). This blog, for example, has a small readership where I feel I can respond to each comment and anchor conversations to the post itself. I've had some interesting conversations through Google Wave, which is a platform centered on conversations. A small class I took last semester created a group Wave, and we had wonderful conversations outside of class. (Sadly, Wave has seemed to have fallen off the social media map recently... can we revive that now? I still think it's a great tool...). My participation in the Infinite Summer online book club and my membership to the Wallace-l mailing list have been the most long-lasting and consistent online conversation spaces. Both center around a specific topic-- David Foster Wallace and his book, Infinite Jest-- and have a cast of recurring participants whose personalities, ideologies, and idiosyncrasies are exposed. There's a sense of community and inclusion I feel on Wallace-l that I do not feel on Facebook or Twitter, even though those networks are made up of people I know in physical space and Wallace-l isn't. I think this largely has to do with the exclusivity and the conversations that occur through the listserv format that makes this so.

While I highly value both Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook, the social dynamic is totally different; my interactions there are centered around small, discrete updates broadcast to a large audience of peers. These are still important tools that have important social implications. It's just that these are not designed to bring us forward in the world of Web culture. That is, they are built for sharing and filtering information, not knowledge creation.

Therefore, facilitating conversation rather than discrete reactions is crucial. Junto, an open source project that Venessa Miemis is working on, seems pretty cool. I love the idea of bringing video chatting into the equation-- as Chatroulette has shown us, our faces and voices bring a totally different dynamic to social Web tools. But I think other social networking tools (particularly educational course management systems) should think about the media ecology and criteria of tool use that makes conversations happen.

Anyway, I pass the conch shell to you all. Where have you had full-on conversations on the Web? About what? Have these interactions been meaningful to you? What were the contexts or circumstances? If you've never had a full conversation via the Internet, why not?

Be sure to also join the conversation over at Emergent By Design.

Reference

Zhang, J. (2009). Towards a creative social Web for learners and teachers. Educational Researcher, 38, 274-279.

"Conversation: 6/365" photo courtesey of Ame Otoko via Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

"Little Brother:" Chicken Soup for the Hacker's Soul

2010-05-24T19:00:00.005-04:00

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s young adult novel Little Brother (a little late, I know), and it's a pretty solid read. I would expect nothing less from Mr. Doctorow, a great advocate for all things Internet-ey. It’s a book about hacker culture and privacy in the networked world which chronicles the life of Marcus, a rebellious techno-tinkering high school student living in San Francisco. He and his friends get nabbed as suspects by overzealous Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers after terrorists blow up the Oakland Bay Bridge. Marcus is eventually released, but the suppressive and surveillance-happy DHS is given free reign over the city. In response, Marcus helps organize peers on an anonymous Internet service dubbed the Xnet to subvert the DHS's futile attempts to protect San Francisco by any means necessary.

Sound familiar? It should. Although slightly embellished for comic-book-esque drama, the novel is a great conversation-starter for the world’s reaction to terrorism. While the DHS are allegedly trying to protect citizens from violent terrorism, the Xnetters struggle against them to defend the ideological freedom of the same citizens. Are these two conceptions of freedom dependent on each other? Is one more important than the other? If the Xnetters are subverting the DHS’s safety tactics, do they become the new terrorists? What about the original terrorists? The book makes no mention of who actually bombed the bridge, but perhaps that’s the point-- our reaction to terrorist attacks determines if they succeed or not; terrorists catalyze a virus of fear that feeds off itself and snowballs from within the culture they target. Is this a fair representation of the so-called “Global War on Terror?” In this story, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

Aside from the political themes, this book is also important as a book about hackers. Marcus and his friends hack into technology to make it do things it’s not intended to do; they make free Xboxes run user-created games and connect to the Xnet; they code programs on their school-issued laptops that let them secretly run chats and other programs over the closed operating system they are “supposed” to be using; they lock their Web interactions behind improvised cryptography. In short, they are controlling technology so that technology doesn't control them.

Similarly, Marcus and the Xnetters are hacking culture by questioning the ideologies they are “supposed” to live by. The students put rocks in their shoes to trick the gait-recognition cameras keeping track of them in the hallways; they skip school to play a collaborative scavenger hunt involving augmented reality, pop culture and math. They use the skills they learned from gaming culture to organize demonstrations challenging the DHL’s authority to surveil their families. They are controlling culture so that culture doesn't control them.

A central theme to much of Doctorow’s work is that the Web gives us the power to do this on a large scale. The ability to create and share perceptions of the lived world rather than being told what and how to think is a qualitatively different way of being for people in the information age. While Little Brother is aimed at young adults, it’s a fairly quick read and relevant to readers of all ages. It’s a good introduction to Web culture and important themes that will ultimately define our super-connected, DIY generation.

Also, while you are weaning yourself off Facebook, check out my profile on GoodReads, a neat little social networking site for books (via @myarbrough). I see a future in conglomerations of interest-based social networking (SoundCloud, Flickr, etc.) rather than these one-profile-fits-all kinds of things. Perhaps someone should start working on a way to link them all together with open standards and a global interface?

The alternate book cover spread above was created by Emerson College student Jeannie Harrell. The interrogation illustration and alternate cover image below are by Richard Wilkinson. Pretty cool, huh? All derivative fan art is made possible by Creative Commons licensing.

An Awful Lot Of 'Us'

2010-05-17T18:24:00.006-04:00

Here are a couple cool things I found on the Internet today that I think, put together, make a nice little found narrative:

>> How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet excerpt via Jason Kottke from a piece written by Douglas Adams in 1993:

...
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
...
So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back -- like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust -- of course you can't, it's just people talking -- but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV -- a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'
...
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

>> Cyberbullying 2010: What the Research Tells Us, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

View more presentations from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Basically, these statistics show that lots of students are spending lots of time on the Internet (slides 3, 4 &5) and a small percentage of these students are experiencing bully victimization in cyberpspace. A larger percentage of students report abuse from peers in school than on the Web (slide 15). Although the report considers cyberbullying especially dangerous because of persistence and spreadability, this supports my thesis that cyberbullying is not just a cyberproblem (slide 9).

>> Venessa Miemis' "Life Manifesto," AKA “My Human Life Manifesto As Of Today, Which I Have The Right To Modify, Edit, Discard, Or Recreate At Any Given Time Should New And Relevant Information Come To Light Or At My Discretion Without Explanation” via Emergent By Design:

...
And so, in one of humanity’s greatest displays of ingenuity, we have created the Web.

It is not a destination.

It is an interface between minds that transcends space and time.

It is not a solution in and of itself, nor a savior.

It is an opportunity and a tool to find our tribes and ourselves.

It is an environment and an ecology where communities can emerge and unite.

It is a training ground in which to experiment with what might happen if we learn to open our hearts, to trust, to share, to be authentic, to engage in discovery, embrace uncertainty, and allow ourselves and each other to grow.

The Web will not save us.

It can only show us that we already have everything we need in order to heal, and it’s not located out there.

It’s in here.

It always has been.

The solution is us.

We can only save ourselves.

Carry on.

Film It, Dude

2010-05-10T20:59:00.006-04:00

A few posts ago, I embedded a short documentary I made with a friend called "Central Square." Here it is again so you don't have to scroll back:

A Google Documents clean-out session turned up the tape logs from Sully's interview that cold, February day on the cobblestone sidewalks of Cambridge, MA. I'm posting them here for two reasons. First, I am re-amazed at how keenly aware and reflective he was about contemporary urban life in his drugged-out swagger. Expounding on the old days, his son's tour in Baghdad and his personal ethics, he shows a deep understanding of the fuzzy tensions between Boston's homeless and swanky college students; between urban apathy and "the brilliancy of the youth"; between modernity and postmodernity. In his soliloquy, he very poignantly states:

"Listen dude. I am covered man. I am bulletholed, shrapnell, I dont give a flip about nothin for nothing, but what I do appreciate is when I saw a war dog going like this. hey shit bum. get over here. Stand in front of the camera, give me your personal opinion."

It would have been very easy for Sully to write us off as some white kids whose parents sent us off to an expensive college to trade imaginary numbers around on Wall Street. But instead, he recognized the power of the camera as an opportunity for social empowerment.

Second, I want to illustrate that in the process of editing, Sully's story becomes partially our story as filmmakers. What made it into the film and how vs. what was left on the cutting room floor is a powerful reminder that what we see on our screens is not the capitol-T-Truth, but rather, "a truth."

So here are the transcripts from Sully's interview. Please excuse the spelling errors... Final Cut does not make logging easy.

These are the kinds of diverse insights we can find with more accessible production tools and the digital literacy skills to use them. Going into our communities with a camera, tripod, and open minds can be a profound opportunity for perceiving the world on our own terms, no matter how rough the final product is (and this short is rough)

But who cares? In the words of Mark John Sullivan, "...look, film it, dude."

This is What Progress Looks Like

2010-05-02T13:01:00.005-04:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a frustrated blog post about my Educational Web Design class. I was just hellaciously shocked about the distance between my own perceptions of the Internet, and typical practitioners' experiences with the networked world. I guess I saw this resistance to participate in Web culture threatening to what I am trying to accomplish academically and professionally, that is, teaching people about mass amateurization and network participation as powerful ways of knowing and being in the world. Publicity about educational leaders who just don't get it tend to put me in defense mode about this sometimes.

However, after seeing some of the students' final projects in progress, I see how wrong I was. These Websites are awesome. Wikis, discussion forums, communication hubs between students and parents, self-tests with feedback built in-- all built from scratch without the crutches of an expensive, pre-packaged course management system or proprietary framework. Some have even mentioned starting to use wikis and blogs as supplemental class activities for high school-age students already this year.

It's amazing what exposure to Web culture and the opportunity to noodle around with digital tools can do to a room full of teachers. And I bet it can do the same to a room full of students.

"Postering for Progress" image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ratio/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

"NYC - Brooklyn - Williamsburg: OBEY Progress" image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A Critique of Microsoft PowerPoint, or Freudian Slip?

2010-04-27T21:08:00.010-04:00

As it turns out, even the Executive Branch of the US government has a hard time with PowerPoint presentations, the New York Times reports:

"The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world."

The military apparently uses poorly designed PowerPoint presentations so often that some officials are banning reductionistic bullet-pointing as an "internal threat." We've all seen enough PowerPoint faux pas in our lives to know what they mean: hideous slide layouts, nauseating animations, speakers putting whole chapters on one slide and lifelessly reading off of them, etc. Perhaps everyone should witness Lawrence Lessig's brilliant minimal slide designs-- now that guy knows the power of a slide show.

But here's the kicker: quite possibly one of the most insightful and profound quotes of our entire generation comes from Brigadier General H. R. McMaster 's assessment of the Microsoft program:

'“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”'

I just invite you to think about the implications of these words spoken by a United States senior military official. Seriously, just think about it. Carefully.

The Most Awesomest Thing Ever (dot com)

2010-04-23T11:33:00.002-04:00

I never thought that in my life I would be forced to decide between crayons and vikings. And yet, here I am....

My friend introduced me to this the other day, and it's quite fun. From the mostawesomestthingever.com "about" page:

"By endlessly pitting two things against each other, we’ve created a stage set for destruction. You will battle, winners will emerge. Only the strongest shall reach the hallowed halls of the Most Awesomest."

The thing is, by pitting two completely random and unrelated things together, you can actually decide a winner. Quickly. And justify it. Industrial Revolution vs. Burger King's Whopper? Industrial Revolution wins, hands down. Why? Because you couldn't have a whopper without the socioecomonic conditions set forth by mechanization. Makes sense, right?

Sure, it's just a game developed by some nerdy programmers at a creative agency. But hidden behind its frivolity is something very interesting. Set in front of a burning, post-apocalyptic urban street corner, you are told to battle between two arbitrary things. Larry Bird vs. Edamame; Prada vs. Nutter Butter; Batteries vs. Portsmouth, NH. The design of the website makes your decision over which one wins epic and urgent, blowing the loser into a fiery oblivion. One prevails, and one is destroyed. One can only exist without the other. A binary opposition; either a 1 or a 0.

Computers operate in binary code, but the world doesn't. That's an important distinction. Yet I've felt that in the information society, things are increasingly presented to us as such, deeply embedded in an ideology of mutual exclusion. Regulation vs. Deregulation; Universal Health Care vs. Privatized Health Care; Socialism vs. Capitalism; Religion vs. Atheism; Gay Marriage vs. Heterosexual Marriage; Red vs. Blue. Pundits shape the modern world as a field of mutually exclusive phenomena, and this, I think, is "a stage set for destruction." We are battling, and winners will emerge. But in a continuum of experience artificially packaged as unrelated, dichotemous constructs, how can we decide a winner?

It's also interesting to note that the Internet is ranked the #1 most awesomest thing... just ahead of Life and Oxygen. Now that's pretty yaka-wow.

Cyberbullying as a Non-Cyber Disposition Part II

2010-04-09T17:34:00.002-04:00

You cannot understand 21st century students without participating in 21st century tools.

During a lesson on Web 2.0 in my Web Design class, one student shook her head in refusal to download a podcast. "You have to take a risk!" our teacher responded. Everyone laughed. I cringed. When participation in Web culture has to be sold to educators as "taking a risk," it shows a crucial disconnect between learners and teachers in the digital world.

In our online message board, another student questioned the use of blogs in an educational context because of her "fear that they can be used for bullying." Sure, this fear is partly legitimate. But it's also oversimplified. Here was my response:

I think cyberbullying is much larger than the tools that students use to facilitate it. Let me ask you this: before the proliferation of the Internet, bullying happened all the time. Would the elimination of recess be an effective solution for bullying? What about allowing recess to happen, but making the students ask the teacher permission every time they wanted to talk to another student? Would these scenarios eliminate bullying?

Unfortunately, events like the recent suicide in Hadley as a result of cyberbullying cause people to have gut-reactions against technology, viewing it only as a new medium for kids to be mean to other kids. It really isn't that simple, and cyberbullying should never be an argument against using technology in school settings or for making new media tools too private or walled-off from the outside world for them to be of any use.

Sure, students could use spaces like blogs to bully other students, and yes, perhaps moderation would filter this out. Yet at some point, moderation would become unsustainable as more students collaborate. The delay that moderation creates would make the tools less authentic and useful for the students familiar with the open Web, and they would likely abandon them or move to other tools that do the same thing without moderation or school branding. Students are smart about these things: as soon as Wordpress is blocked from a school firewall for behavior, students will immediately go to Blogger, Drupal, Livejournal, or a myriad other sites that work the same way.

Bullying is a much deeper problem that needs to be addressed with deeper methods that get right down the the culture of school in general. Blocking and restricting websites is useless...it's like having weeds in a garden and snipping off their leaves when they get too big-- this will stop them for a moment, but they'll always grow back until you pull them out from the roots. Cyberbullying needs to be addressed from the roots, not just snipping off the leaves of social networking.

Sorry about the rant, but I get really frustrated when people dismiss new media because of its potential for bad behavior. However, it's definitely a reality we have to face as the Internet empowers everyone, not just those we want to empower.

Web culture is a deep part of young peoples' identities, and this is not a bad thing. It's a different thing. And parents, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in leadership roles around students must understand this. So instead of fearing that which you don't fully understand, go read a blog, write a post, share a link on Twitter, just do something interesting on this thing we call the Internetz, because that's what everything is really all about, in the end, e.g., this:

Man in a Chicken suit plays "What is Love" on Pianica from Ring Mod on Vimeo.

The iPad I'm testing at work is.........

2010-04-06T12:14:00.009-04:00

It's just so....shiny, and.....

And it has..... books, and the Internet, and.....

But I just can't.......justify......

Gahhh.......My ambivalence is distracting me from a fully optimized user experience...

*Update*

And then there's this:

That's way cool.

(Thx for the demo, @TSindelar)

Metablogging: Blogging About Blogging

2010-04-01T10:16:00.014-04:00

This interview with David Lipsky over at The Howling Fantods made me very, very excited for the Rolling Stone journalist's new book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.

This man, Wallace, will be, or maybe is, a legend. Dude was able to make you crack up with familiarity and blow your mind right out of its skull in the same damn page. He could use the words "catadioptric," "astigmatic," "cojones," and "weenie," in one breath. One sentence, even. There will be a very interesting tension between " author: the person" and "author: the writer" embodied in Lipsky's book. Or perhaps its not a tension at all, but a congruence? Either way, it will be fascinating and sad and hilarious and profound and, I'm sure, deeply inspiring.

This quote from Wallace himself in the Fantods interview really got to the nut of what makes his work so special:

“What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

And isn't this, in a way, what bloggers do with the Internet, too? Give us the freedom to be hyper-aware of the world around us and share it with the world? (Or four subscribers on Google Reader?)

Ustream, iStream (so on and so forth)

2010-03-25T20:17:00.014-04:00

Ugh... haven't been able to write in a while. Many ideas are floating in my brain folds, but I can't seem to find the words to express them in the time I've been allotted here on P. Earth. Please point me to the killer app that gives me more time in the day...

Things I've been internally pontificating about, lately:

1. Chatroulette: What a rich sociological gem this one is! Developed by a 17 year old student from Moscow and brilliantly re-appropriated by piano chat improve guy (Ben Folds??), the real Ben Folds (Live), and hundreds of dudes who lost their pants or just forgot to put them on, Chatroulette is a Website that randomly pairs up two users who can see each other and talk through their webcams.

What I really like about Chatroulette is what it reveals about the state of the Internet. We've been jamming away on the "social Web" for the last few years, but there is still something very uncomfortable or foreign about the social web + strangers + Webcam combo. "I'd never show my real face on that thing," a friend of mine said after telling me about his late-night sessions on Chatroulette wearing a giraffe mask and playing guitar (if you see him, tell him I say hi!). That we are totally ok with carefully constructing our Web identities through asynchronous, text-based interactions but not quite ready to fully attach these interactions with our facial identities in real-time is significant. I think we've seen a similar phenomenon with location-aware social networking, which may be wearing off.

And if you've been living under a digital or physical rock and haven't seen this yet, just.... watch it:

2. The "digital divide": I've had a post drafted about this for, like, weeks. It's still not done. Maybe I will post it someday.

3. Graduate School: I'm in it. I just got done writing a literature review about "authentic tasks" in education, and so I've been thinking a lot about "school culture" and how to use technology to extend beyond it. The efficiency of the academic factory model has grouped learners into a bland simulacrum of the lived world instead of creating a safe space for exploring their intellectual boundaries in situated, authentic tasks. Simply put, operating within the norms of exams, grades, detention and recess just doesn't jive with the culture found outside of school in the "real" world, and therefore new knowledge and learning is cognitively filed under the "school" category rather than the "everything else" category.

One really interesting tool I've been seeing recently that extends the traditional classroom into reality is Ustream, a free service that let's users stream live video over the Internet. Last month, Karl Fisch used the website to facilitate a conversation between his 9th grade class and Cory Doctorow to talk about his book, Little Brother:

I would have loved the chance to talk to a real author about a real book while I read it in high school, it just makes the concept of literature seem so much more salient.

Also, an elementary school class got to chat with the owner of Molly, a barn owl who has recently hatched baby owls live on Ustream:

I fondly remember every pet I ever had in my classrooms, and by observing someone else's pet via the Internet, you never have to clean its cage! (Which, if you watch the above video long enough, you will learn that Molly is sitting on about two inches of her own vomit, thus making any cage cleaning empirically gross).

Anyway, there are tons of other ways to facilitate authentic tasks or experiences with technology, some of which I cover in my paper. If you are interested, I would be happy to send along a pdf.

2010 Emerson Film Festival

2010-03-05T14:11:00.007-05:00

I'm very happy to announce that a documentary short I made with fellow filmmaker Kady Buchanan will be screening at the 2010 Emerson Film Festival from Emerson College.

The Los Angeles screening will take place at the Writer’s Guild of America in Beverly Hills on Thursday, March 11th at 7:30. Here's a clip reel of all the student films that are in the festival (underwater rigs?? air planes?? mysterious Radio Flyer accidents??? Can't wait to see these!). Our movie is called "Central Square" and appears at around 04:26.

(Be patient with this video player, it's kind of......slow-ish)

These films will also screen in San Francisco (3/10), Santa Barbara (3/12), Silver Spring, MD (4/6) and New York City (4/8).

They look awesome, so if you can make one of those screenings, please do!

*Update*

I finally got a copy of our film and put it on the Internetz. Here it is:

Isaiah Zagar and I, Philidelphia, PA 1/6/2010 @ 4:01pm AKA VID00050.MP4

2010-02-16T21:37:00.007-05:00

I'm constantly trying to represent my trips and experiences through digital media, and I still haven't quite figured it out.

I'm fascinated by the concept of "home video." Some of our parents had 8mm or 16mm movie cameras and some faded pictures. Our parents made VHS tapes and boxes of saturated 4x6s. Our conception of how they/we lived back then are preserved in the aesthetic of these media. For a long time, I thought my grandparents lived in a black and white world. In some ways, they did.

How will our kids experience our pasts? On computers? We take thousands of pictures, but where do they all go? Will format changes and broken hard drives, images buried under long-forgotten, password-protected Facebook and Flickr accounts render memories themselves a thing of the past?

In the absence of reifying what was, will we revert back to an oral culture? Or will the Internet morph into a giant, collective photo album, making whose memories are whose indistinguishable and unimportant?

"Cyberbullying?" Or Regular Bullying That Happens to Take Place Online, Sometimes?

2010-02-10T12:59:00.025-05:00

It's difficult to believe that it can happen. That the solipsism of human beings, even young ones, can be so innately air-tight that another's existence is treated about as animate as a skipping stone. But it can, and people do.

Last month, 15-year-old South Hadley High School student Phoebe Prince killed herself after her peers tormented her online and in person. South Hadley, with a quaint, old downtown area and the prestigious Mount Holyoke College, is practically in my backyard. Its interesting how striking physical proximity still feels in a world freeing itself from the boundaries of space and time with computers and cell phones.

Ever since Lori Drew and her daughter posed as a 16-year-old boy and eventually prompted the suicide of 14-year-old Megan Meier, cyberbullying has endured warranted mainstream scrutiny. Yet this scrutiny seems to exist in a vacuum of our pre-Internet history and tends to overemphasize the "cyber" part as some new paradigm in child relations as if bullying has never had victims before.

I don't see cyberbulling as a new problem. Rather, it is an old problem with a new face, one with enhanced persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisibility. These qualities may very well bring entirely new social implications, but they are still merely side-effects of a much deeper, more resilient problem. Victims of cyberbullying are not committing suicide because they are being bullied on the internet, they are doing so because they are being bullied.

The Internet is a hugely empowering tool. Its writable nature gives users a collectively powerful voice in the media sphere. Each contribution supports all other contributions which are filtered through social interactions. The problem is, it empowers everyone, not just those who we agree with. While blogs and re-tweets contribute to a fairly robust networked public sphere, Al Qaeda and pro-ana groups are just as robustly connected. The lack of discrimination about information packets traveling through the Web make it what it is today, and because of this, we must figure out how to navigate Web culture rather than chalk it up as a social liability.

In fact, young students' ability to transfer their behavior from physical space to online space is normal, probably even desirable. A keen ability to exploit computers and the Internet is a crucial skill in the networked world. However, this means that all behaviors are apt to become digitized, including-- you guessed it-- bullying.

I'm not a child psychologist, and I won't pretend to be an expert on cyberbullying. Yet in my experiences as a digital native just bridging the gap between networked youth to networked adulthood has given me a few hypotheses that should be considered and explored further.

First, educators and parents are not meeting children in these shared spaces. Students do not typically see adults using or participating in Web communities. As a result, children feel that they are hidden from view in cyberspace, free to perceive digital social spaces as their own, spaces where repercussions for poor behavior are invisible to those who care. Think about it: where does most teasing happen in the playground? Around the corner, underneath the jungle gym, behind the slide...far away places where they think no one can see them. Because of the disconnect between young, digital natives living their lives online and digital immigrants who don't, the Internet has become the farthest possible place for students to act however they want.

Second, the typical response to cyberbullying (or sometimes even a preemptive measure) is to simply take these tools away. This doesn't solve anything. Students are smart and the Internet is vast. Block Livejournal, and kids will find Blogger, Wordpress, or Drupal. Take away Facebook, and there's Twitter, Wave, and a myriad of free email clients. Censor YouTube, and watch students go to town on Vimeo, Flickr, Google Video and others. Keep trying to block all of these, and we will put educators at a huge disadvantage for teaching students to be effective human agents in the networked world. Internet blockage will not change the behaviors of students-- they will always find ways to do what they want in digital spaces whether we "let them" or not. (Just look at all of China, for example!)

So what can we do about it?

Enter their digital spaces. Use social media in class. Explain participation in the networked public sphere and why it's important. Create discussions about online identity and what that means. In short, adults need to show students that they are aware of online spaces in a way that makes interactions vulnerable to scrutiny. This will crack the delusion that online spaces exist only "for them." (I'm actually hoping that Glitch, a new social, online game created by the Flickr developers, may be an interesting avenue for adult-student collaboration in an online game space, although I don't know too much about it, yet).

Explicitly teach in the context of the mediated world. How do students learn how they "should" act in different social situations and domains? Talk about personal identity in terms of cinema, television and music that make violence look cool and learning look lame. Why was that Super Bowl Doritos commercial with the smacking kid so funny? (Who made it? Why? What the heck does it have to do with Doritos? Perhaps it has more to do with masculinity...What is "masculinity?" Do you see where I'm going with this??) What does "being a teen in America" mean to you? Why do we have the conceptions we do about being a teen in America? Giving students the language to explore these expectation failures early on might push them to consume media in more critical ways.

Attack bullying at its roots. Unfortunately, I don't really have an answer for this. Be more aware about students' social relations? Confront students about bullyng as an entry point to a more philosophical discussion about ethics and the concept of "self?" No matter what,"bullying" should be addressed as a deeply human problem, not a technological one.

Or maybe these are just delusional and idealistic. Can students really talk about their online identities and mediated experience of the world at the age when cyberbullying is usually a problem? What about learning other, more traditional subjects that are required for passing standardized tests? Can educators cut a chunk out of the "traditional" curriculum to more adequately confront these issues?

I certainly think so if we hope for a less globally antagonistic future. But maybe that's just delusional and idealistic...

Coming From a Digital Native

2010-02-04T23:28:00.018-05:00

I just got done watching PBS Frontline's Digital Nation on the Web, and overall, I think it was a pretty decent production as far as made-for-TV documentaries go.

While it tread lightly on the surface of the true complexity of our networked lives, the show did frame the contemporary human condition in a fair-ish (albeit a bit clichéd) light by questioning networked culture with a slightly more-than-healthy dose of skepticism. An urgent call to action for bringing schools into the 21st century certainly pleased me (minus Todd Oppenheimer's whacked-out ludditism).

But one thing that Digital Nation touched on but did not emphasize enough is the lens through which we look at networked postmodernity. Are peoples' cognition getting weaker and less focused for functioning in society? Or are our expectations of what comprises a functioning society changing? Can we really look at where we are today through the lens of who we were yesterday and judge it by any sociocultural absolutism? Do students have a hard time paying attention to lectures and books because they are over saturated by media and distracted by multitasking? Or have these institutions failed to connect with students' lived experiences in the 21st century in a way that engages them, misleading older, third-wave academics to perceive them as less motivated?

Certainly, new technologies come with new implications and the program articulated this well. The idea of treating technological side-effects with...technology (a need for connectedness with Second Life, combat PTSD with combat simulations, etc.) is a fascinating paradox.

Yet the biggest disappointment was how little creators Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff talked about the highly empowering qualities of the writable Web. My ability to talk through this very blog-- even to the five or six people who actually read it-- marks a profoundly different experience with the media universe than ever before. Mix that with peer filtering and you've got yourself a technologically mediated universe that displays peoples' experiences of the world so-far, and encourages them to articulate it in creative ways, pushing our experiences to new levels of public reflection (linked to an iTunes podcast with a slightly different opinion about media universes).

Our ability to play with culture liberated by networked computers and share it with each other makes right now one of the most exciting times in modern history. If used thoughtfully, the digital tools that make up our digital nation places human agency in the intersection of thinking humans and networked machines. If used thoughtfully- that's quite a loaded phrase. Brings us back to education, really...

In the end, Digital Nation seems to accept balance over total skepticism which I am totally on-board with. Sherry Turkle poignantly states that "technology is powerful and complicated." I couldn't agree more. But to me, that's not such a bad thing. As Rushkoff says in his final video-blog-ish interstitial, our ability to "remake the world on our own terms" keeps me a technology enthusiast on the edge of my desk chair, both glued to the screen with fascination of the virtual universe, and a new-found perspective on the physical universe; a territory not taken over by the map, but one oozing with potential to be navigated and annotated in infinite, keenly percipient ways.

The trick is to get all other users to see that, which brings us back to education, really...

For an in-depth review of the program from someone who was in it, check out Henry Jenkins' blog post:

"As someone who works through ethnography, I do not necessarily see any group as representative of the national norms. There is no one digital culture or digital generation, simply many different ways that groups have integrated digital technologies and practices into their lives, some rewarding, some potentially destructive, but each distinctive."

Also, killer intro and credit bed by video extraordinaire Tom Guilmette, who has empowered himself with the Web to impressive ends.

Does The iPad Come With That Surfing Dog?

2010-01-29T11:04:00.009-05:00

Behold the the future of computing:

Why anyone thought that single-purpose devices (i.e. Kindle, Nook) would survive after Apple got it's shiny, highly marketable, ultramodern, silvery-whiteness on the tablet market is beyond me.

I'm super bummed that it does not have a full operating system and all apps go through the app store unlike Windows or Mac OS. I fear that this closed, proprietary model will also be the future of computing, creating a single gate-keeping entity that the tech world has thus far been able to avoid.

However, I can definitely see some highly attractive instructional uses with this device, and with a $500 price point, it's actually more affordable and WAY more awesome than most full computer systems. It's a field device, a presentation tool, a multimedia hub for e-books, pdf documents, magazines, newspapers, games, video, (no camera? Not a multimedia production tool...yet), a Web browser, a notebook, a research center, and a portable communications device all with a brand new, soul-yearning, multi-touch interface. Don't fight it-- you all want to touch that thing. Finally, we have a device that truly bridges the gap between paper and multimedia. This throwback to papyrus, the most enduring of all technologies, is why it represents a whole new era for the computer.

However, if the iPad does enter the educational market without tactile feedback built in, what will the institutional response be after the debacle with Kindle, Arizona State University, and vision-impaired students? Can people without sight even use this device at all?? Can it be modified to accommodate all learners?

I'm sure people are going to hack the crap out of it (hopefully including a stylus at some point?) and we will definitely see some pretty interesting uses and mods for this thing. I can't wait.

Open Course Content

2010-01-26T09:35:00.002-05:00

Here's another blog post I wrote that's been published over at UMass Amherst' TeachOIT blog. It's about sharing free course content over the Internet:

As teachers begin to post multimedia lecture material on their SPARK courses, they often ask our Instructional Media Lab staff how to stop students from downloading, saving, or re-distributing course content outside of the UMass SPARK environment. The short answer is: you can’t. While SPARK is a safe place to post files for educational fair use, original course materials such as lecture videos, powerpoint slides, and syllabi are always exposed to the elements of the Internet to some extent. Instructors entering the world of the writable Web are beginning to face savvy students’ abilities to access content on their own terms outside of class, or even send it to fellow students taking a similar course elsewhere. Yet is it really a bad thing? Is this lack of teacher-centric control a new form of cheating, or is it an emerging paradigm for curricular development and open learning?

I Want To Be A Maker: Ambivalence (Part 3 of 3)

2010-01-24T21:12:00.001-05:00

This is the third in a series of three posts in response to Cory Doctorow's new novel, "Makers," available online for free, for hard copy purchase, or as an audiobook.

(BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!)

Innovation and progress in the face of Nostalgia isn't easy. Navigating uncharted territory is scary, and the book's epilogue sums this up nicely. Lester's mechanical computer and his and Perry's love of their baseball gloves shows that while clearly pioneers of the future, they are still on some level connected to the past. In their old age, this connection-- nostalgia-- holds their friendship together. When they go to the kitschy diner in L.A., Lester asks to sit at Orson Welles' table. "I like this place," Lester says to Perry, "Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultrmodern place come here. They come because they've always come-- to sit in Orson Welles' booth" (p. 405). Orson Welles, one of the greatest storytellers of the modern age is the link that holds humans together through story; through nostalgia.

For Lester, especially, progress is dangerous. It turns out that the bioengineered fatkins alterations that made the world's obese into sex-crazed bodybuilders ended up unsustainable. Most fatkins have died and the few that survive are on strict diets as their bodies eat themselves away. Lester's foray into the future of biological alterations-- leaving behind the nostalgia for how bodies naturally process food-- was his destruction in the end. "How'd we get so screwed up?" Lester asks Suzanne (p. 411). "We're not screwed up," she responds,

"We're just people who want to do things, big things. Any time you want to make a difference, you face the possibility that you'll, you know, make a difference. It's a consequence of doing things with consequences."

For Suzanne, the risk of progress is worth it, even if it is at the expense of your self.

At the end of the book, Lester and Perry's final invention are robots that play catch with a baseball and vintage baseball gloves. Every few throws, a robot misses and the hard baseball smacks into the anthropomorphic bots, loosening their bolts and gears each time. "It is now officially a feature, not a bug," Perry proudly explains (p. 415). The flaws are built into the system to allow for future systems, a cunning acknowledgment that relying on nostalgia cannot sustain itself for very long. Entropy must exist to allow space for progress to evolve.

After all, doesn't that hold true for much of what we encounter in our lifetimes? Political systems, relationships, interests, careers, inventions-- it all exists in an ebb and flow, a stability->chaos->death->rebirth->stability cycle which we can accept or reject, ride or resist.

We are all change-surfers in some way, and our agency to ride the waves how we want is what gives us our humanity in the digital age.

Baseball glove image by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26471464@N07/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Robot image by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jannem/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Part 1: Nostalgia
Part 2: Stories
Part 3: Ambivalence (this post)

I Want To Be A Maker: Stories (Part 2 of 3)

2010-01-21T13:10:00.001-05:00

This is the second in a series of three posts in response to Cory Doctorow's new novel, "Makers," available online for free, for hard copy purchase, or as an audiobook.

(BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!)

"Story" and "narratives" are also central to "Makers." As Perry and Lester's ride grows with user-generated content, the users notice a story emerging from the old artifacts. As someone on the message board puts it, it develops "like that story that's inside our collective unconscious" (p. 190).

The idea of a collective story is closely linked to nostalgia. Nostalgia and narratives are a duality: we understand our nostalgia as a story of the past, and the stories of the past proliferate nostalgia. In this way, stories and nostalgia inform one another, helping people fill their empty consciousness with meaning. The ride becomes a vessel for users to enter this duality: "Once we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and reinforce the stuff that felt right," Perry explains, "it was only natural that they would anthropomorphize the world into a story...stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories." (p. 176). Similarly, Sammy's DiaB, a box that makes tiny replicas of Disney attractions, sought to fill the same existential void: "Really, wasn't that every kid's dream?" Perry wonders, looking at the shiny DiaB box. "A machine that created wonders from dull feedstock?" (p. 320). Out of the nothingness of electronics and goop come little objects that orient our cultural narratives around nostalgia.

Ultimately, the fans of Perry and Lester's ride develop a religious devotion to "the story." Death Waits describes seeing it in a "meditative state" (p. 315). The friends that get Death Waits out of the hospital are fanatics of The Story who are obsessed with keeping it alive, eliminating all noobish elements that don't jive with the narrative.

Yet at the same time, its authenticity is debated. Death Waits acknowledges this ambiguity: "The collective judgment of people who rode through had turned chaos into coherence. Or had it?" "These discussions bordered on the metaphysical," he continues, "what was an "organic" ride decision?" (p. 290). Furthermore, Perry explains that "people see stories like they see faces in clouds," acknowledging the subjectivity of stories and in turn, nostalgia (p. 176). By protecting the ride narrative, Death Waits was "telling the story he knew" (p. 288). But is the story he "knows" an authentic one? Can one tell a "real" story mired in nostalgia?

In this way, the ride explores nostalgia and narrative as a simulacrum, an artificial representation of the past that manufactures a desire for that past. The ride and the story it is telling isn't the essential nature of human history. Rather, it is a construction of how people want to remember the past. When the police invade the rides all over the world and destroy its contents, each networked ride reproduces the destruction. Perry explains that "the smashed exhibits were not smashed exhibits-- they were replicas of smashed exhibits" (p. 230). The ride and its story is a replica of a replica, all objective meaning lost in its technological duplication.

Regardless of its reality, the sense of nostalgia largely determines how the future unfolds. Therefore, the key to cultural narratives is who is telling the story. For Sammy, it was Disney's job to force stories onto his customers by pushing proprietary, copyrighted stories out of the DiaBs, prompting Lester to hack into them and circumvent their firmware. "I want to redesign this thing so that it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control," he says (p. 342). For Lester, "autonomy makes us happy." Our ability to determine our own narratives and deal with nostalgia and existential meaning on our own terms-- our ability to attain full agency-- is of utmost importance, and Sammy's Disney machines undermined this ability. Hacking culture, therefore, becomes a way to recapture human agency.

At the end of this scene, Lester exclaims that he is done with the ride that has made him so famous to the dismay of the character ominously named Death Waits. It's time he does something else, he says, as he turns his back on Death.

Part 1: Nostalgia
Part 2: Stories (this post)
Part 3: Ambivalence

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/ / CC BY-SA 2.0 via BoingBoing

I Want To Be A Maker: Nostalgia (Part 1 of 3)

2010-01-17T15:52:00.001-05:00

This is the first in a series of three posts in response to Cory Doctorow's new novel, "Makers," available online for free, for hard copy purchase, or as an audiobook.

I finally got a chance to read Cory Doctorow's "Makers," and it is a spectacular book opening up a dialogue about extremely important contemporary issues. While sometimes goofy in that sci-fi literature kind of way, the book is a sign of the times like no other. Exploring peer production, intellectual property laws, modding, bioengineering, proprietary vs. volunteer production, surveillance culture, free economics, opennes vs. secrecy, "Makers" is a sprawling narrative that articulates the essence of today and a lucid projection of the future. The cycle of innovation, antiquity, death, and innovation will continue. You're either with it-- a savvy "change-surfer," as Tjan, a progressive businessman puts it-- or you're against it. And even with all of progress' dangers and destabilization, you will be a better person living as the latter.

(BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!)

Yet one particular theme bubbling under the surface of Makers struck me as indicative of postmodernity, a microcosm for our hyper-changing times. Emerging from both Perry and Lester's underground, crowdsourced wiki-style ride and Sammy's Disney Fantasyland is the idea of Nostalgia-- appealing to viewers by celebrating what was rather than what could be; boring deep into collective memory and extracting a pipeline of sentimentality that audiences cannot resist; a drug that keeps people addicted to re-consuming the past.

"The nostalgia's thick enough to cut with a knife," (p. 141) Perry exclaims as he describes how the geeks and the "civilians" are flocking to their ride which is a slow-moving, time capsule that people drive through on electric wheelchairs and vote on the objects they see. The ride automatically adjusts itself to the desires of its audience, later incorporating the ability for anyone to add objects that are 3-dimensionally printed in other rides all over the world.

Simultaneously, Sammy is trying to recapture his fledgling audience by exploiting the same desire at his Fantasyland park, a subset of Disney World that is overrun by goth teens and made-up troublemakers. "It's hard to say without research," Sammy says to the other Disney execs in describing how to re-brand the park to "fatkins," genetically modified people who have to eat a ton to stay skinny, "but I'm willing to bet that these guys will respond strongly to nostalgia" (p.197). While taking two totally different approaches to audience theory-- Perry and Lester embracing distributed production and an open protocol, Sammy exploiting a top-down, proprietary model-- both attractions are vying for the same audience: those who desire to escape the "now" by re-experiencing a recreated past.

Another novel that explores the postmodern human's irreconcilable longing for a dying past is Alan Moore's "Watchmen." During chapter IX entitled "The Darkness of Mere Being," Dr. Manhattan brings Laurie to Mars to discuss the fate of humanity and his allegiance to it. While the non-human Dr. Manhattan lives in all time at once, the chapter juxtaposes ubiquitousubiquitous time with the exploration of Laurie's past. It is interspersed with panels featuring a perfume bottle flying through space with a capitol "N" on it standing for "Nostalgia," Adrian Veidt's famous line of designer products. During one flashback, Laurie recalls a snow globe from her childhood that she was enamored with and accidentally broke. As she recalls the snow globe, Laurie tells a story:

"And there was this toy, this snowstorm ball, with a tiny castle inside, except it was like a whole world, a world inside the ball... it was like a little glass bubble of somewhere else. I lifted it, starting a blizzard. I knew it wasn't real snow, but I couldn't understand how it fell so slowly. I figured inside the ball was some different sort of time. Slow time. And inside was only water."

The snow globe represents past as she sees it through her memory, a utopia of yesterday with augmented time and beautiful scenery that is and should be longed for. Yet when she accidentally drops the globe, she exposes the truth in glass shards: that the object was only water and synthetic materials, a fragile, phony illusion of impossibility. At the end of the chapter, Laurie throws the Nostalgia bottle as she discovers the truth about her father and it shatters against Dr. Manhattan's Mars structure, spilling the fragrant memories inside. By exposing a false narrative about her past, Laurie is painfully enlightened by the jarring truth. By the destruction of Dr. Manhattan's falsely constructed narrative about humanity, he is enlightened to care.

In "Watchmen," the future is illuminated as a malleable inevitability by the destruction of nostalgia. (Rorschach cannot handle this realization which leads to his destruction as he insists on keeping good and evil as binary oppositions). Yet the characters in Makers take a much more ambivalent stance towards nostalgia. All are stuck in it in some way, wading through the thick muck of sentimentality threatening to hold them back from progressing forwardly through time. Yet the characters deal with the muck in different ways.

While Perry and Lester "go with the flow," if you will, making artifacts and rides that exploit the notion of nostalgia by means that are entirely progressive (crowdsourcing, open sourcing, etc.), Sammy tries to control it. Both are exploiting peoples' longing for the past in some way by appealing to this notion, but Perry and Lester paradoxically bring nostalgia into the future, creating conditions for new manifestations of human consciousness and existence. Putting "ethics before greed" (p. 310), Perry and Lester innovate and allow users to become "citizens" of their ride. Sammy conversely tries to monetize, viewing users as commoditized customers who can be manipulated.

Yet in the end, neither approaches to the exploitation of nostalgia are sustainable. As Suzanne says to Perry, his "superior technology can not make inferior laws irrelevant" (p. 286). Still, Sammy's Disney franchise was threatened by Perry and Lester hacking the DiaBs and unofficially empowering their users. Not until Sammy re-experiences the park with Suzanne-- re-immersing himself in human nostalgia-- does he realize what he has to do: leave behind Disney's standard operating procedure and consume Perry and Sammy's innovation, creating a whole new being. He doesn't even want their ride, he says. He just wants their brains, their essence of creativity, on his side. Thus, Sammy re-starts the cycle that New Work went through: peaceful comfort, innovation, resistance, chaotic death of the past, rebirth of the future, back to comfort again. It's inescapable and we are all part of it. We just need to decide which part we're in and operate accordingly.

Part 1: Nostalgia (this post)
Part 2: Stories
Part 3: Ambivalence

A Mediated Earthquake

2010-01-13T18:36:00.003-05:00

On my way home from work today, I listened to stories on NPR about the earthquake in Haiti. Crushed bones, head injuries, death, and grossly limited means for treating any of it.

It really made me think about global tragedies and information technologies: do instant media in the form of pure information bring us closer to these catastrophes, or do they push us further away? Do blog posts, images, choppy video and journalistic radio stories provide an adequate reflection of humanity brought to ruins at the hand of grinding tectonic plates? Or are they merely a simulacrum of awareness, a map of tragedy filled with predictable banalities and the minutia of human language?

Can we really feel the sadness and loss in the Haitian community by technologically mediated means?

UPDATE:

I'm still not sure it really does it justice, but it's the closest I've seen yet.

Top Stuff of 2009 by YOU!

2010-01-01T01:00:00.007-05:00

The end of the year is always a time for magazine editors and writers to capstone their expertise by making ubiquitous "best of" lists. Rolling Stone's top songs of the 2000's is particularly disturbing, naming Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" as the #1 song of the decade (Sorry in advance if you like that song, but the best? Really?). Pitchfork's top 100 is far more nuanced and has a neat interface for their diverse and extensive lists, letting users listen to the full tracks they name as the best of 2009. Paste Magazine released a decent compilation of the best Documentaries of the decade. New York Times Magazine has a feature of notable people who died in 2009 which doesn't even mention Michael Jackson, choosing to focus on more subtle characters like columnists and Chimpanzees. Kottke.org even has a list of lists!

Sure, these pages have value. I was introduced to some good tunes embedded on Pitchfork's 100 best tracks of 2009. But under the surface, single-authored "best of" lists are really just the culmination of individual preferences filtered into arbitrary categories; lists of who had the strongest marketing campaigns or the most exposure. They aren't indicators of the best, or the most thoughtful, they are lists of who pushed the right buttons for the right people in power to decide that they are the best of '09 or of the decade.

So, as I did exactly one year ago on the very first post of this blog, I bring you the best of 2009 by YOU (or at least some of you...) which lie completely outside the boundaries of genres, mediums, styles, editors' picks or the profit motive. The most popular Web artifacts voted up by the nerds to submitted them. Here are the best Internet phenomena of the last 365 days crowdsourced by thousands of disparate users with the wonderfully organized chaos that is the Internet:

10. This is why I love Digg
Taking The Onion's fake, keyboardless Apple computer at the last minute, this is a brilliant example of peer produced, amateurized, remixed, Web folk art. At least EMI didn't sue them for it...yet...

9. Girlfriend's angry emails to her vacationing boyfriend
Who knows if this is true, but it's interesting that the social Web, widely regarded as a cesspool of angsty futility, can actually be used to criticize angsty futility. Also, a great example of telling a story and distributing with networked tools.

8. Mythbusters vaporize a car with a rocket sled doing 650 mph
Replaced here. Nothing to say other than Mythbusters always makes science REALLY COOL.

7. AT&T blocks 4chan!
4chan may be the dingiest, dirtiest, sketchiest back alley of the Internet, but the beauty of the thing is that it can exist at all. We should all be amazed at the /b/ community's ability to organize, and the larger Web community's aversion to threats to Net neutrality.

6. The Pirate Bay Trial The Official Verdict Guilty
Founders of the popular, Swedish bittorrent site, The Pirate Bay, was found guilty in February of illegally distributing copyrighted content via the Web. They each face up to 1 year in jail and tons of money in fines. Now, walk into any undergraduate classroom in the modern world and ask the students to raise their hands if they have ever downloaded a music track or movie for free even once in their lives. You will observe every hand raise into the air. In a liberal democratic society like America's, where the government is neutral to what is Right and Just and these boundaries are set by the culture of its citizens, why are we jailing people for things that everyone does? As Digg user tinsanta writs, "Wont change a thing, cut 4 heads off 8 more will grow." Rather than making up for its losses with futile law suits, the music industry should start to re-boost its mojo first and foremost by signing legitimate artists rather than sexy hacks, and become trusted hubs for new media rather than slimy used car salesmen.

5. WeDidn't Start the Flame War Music Video
Taking crowdsourcing to a whole new meta-level. If I could pick one video to define the last decade of the Internet, it might be this one. What video will define the next decade?

4. The Story of Prisoner F95488
An extremely well-written story of a modern-day "To Kill A Mockingbird" trial that shows that race is still very much a problem in this country. Here's the saddest part:

"Eric never blamed corruption, never called anyone a racist, never called the girl a liar. He continued to uphold American values. And he maintained faith that our justice system would see him through."

This heartbreaking sentence is followed by,

"Frimpong put that faith in an all-white jury of nine women and three men."

Where is the justice that this Ghana immigrant came to America searching for as his identity was recklessly reduced to a number? The comment section, on the other hand, is a whole different story. I'm not even sure what to say about that...

3. Digg this if you're sick of power users stealing stories
Here's a leftover from 2008, but it's still a good example of the users' ability to voice their opinion about modern companies or organizations. Digg takes its transparency seriously but this power user thing is difficult to thwart. The site did add a comment filter and voting system, which is great. I'm just wondering when we will be able to filter them by geospatial data??

2. Michael Jackson Dies
You know how you always remember where you were when crazy things happen? Well I'll always remember hearing about the death of MJ on Twitter. That the world's most famous pop star's death was so closely linked to Internet traffic isn't a surprise, but this particular spike in traffic was exciting to be a part of if not for such a sad reason.

1. Barack Obama Officialy Becomes 44th American President
A leftover from 2008, but it's still true and it's still awesome. Overall, 2009 was a pretty awful year, but by keeping this one on the list as #1 it shows that Web nerds still have faith that he can make it better.

Have a happy new year, everyone!!

Playing With Connectivism

2009-12-17T20:21:00.023-05:00

I just finished reading a second book yesterday about education and technology called "The World Is Open" by Curtis Bonk. I also read Allan Collins and Richard Halverson's "Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology" earlier this semester. While Collins & Halverson call it "the life-long learning era" and Bonk dubs it "the open world," both books discuss three basic themes emerging from the networked information economy:

The Internet is opening up immediate, mobile, personalized, interesting ways to find information and learn. (What George Siemens and Stephen Downes call "connectivism." I like that term).
There are a whole bunch of tools that make these trends a reality. Some are good, some are bad, lots of them are free.
These trends and networked tools are leaving the contemporary mass-production/assembly line-style of education completely in the dust.

Yet, as with a lot of new media theory, the question remains: "Sooo...what now?" We've established that things need to change, that the S.O.P of education is broken, or at least injured, and technology can save it...but how? What comes next?

While the literature always inspires me to keep learning about this stuff, both books were missing something. Some lack of focus, or too narrow of a focus on scratching the theoretical surface...something I can't quite put my finger on that is just not cutting it for me in pushing forward the dialogue about the role of technology in education. The books both have a healthy bit of skepticism, which is important in discussing technology. Maybe they just aren't written for me? Their audiences aren't EdTech scholars, but transitional, third-wave teachers unfamiliar with Web culture?

Perhaps more salient is that these books aren't written by digital natives. They are written by education psychologists and teachers that are in some way on the outside peering in. While the authors are clearly "users" and understand digital media on some level, there's something different about observing and writing about African culture and actually being an African growing up on the Niger Delta. They lack an "edge" that we frequent Web users can smell through text on a screen.

Additionally, I think they are missing....no, not missing... poorly explaining (?) larger changes in the cultural hierarchy that global citizens are absorbing from the Web and what these mean for society outside of the classroom. From this perspective, maybe we can move our attention away from specific technologies and start setting goals that we can realistically move towards. In this way, EdTech becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself; technology as a tool with which we can explore a stronger and more enjoyable learning structure in the networked/mediated world.

Early in my academic career, I don't want to make too many assumptions that could cloud my learning, but this is the basic ideology that is driving my research now. More specifically, here are a few trends that I am deeply interested in:

Building communities at the classroom, school, and local level
By stripping away competition from the culture of academic institutions, students can learn how to negotiate meaning between community members rather than working against each other. Furthermore, by giving students an audience of peers and community members, their motivations change from a system of merits and demerits to one of social reinforcement. Of course, this puts the scale of reward-based assessments in a strange place, but it is still a viable alternative to the performance-goal orientation of purely individualized, graded behavior.

Embedding EdTech into the natural Web behaviors of students
Most importantly here is: what are the natural Web behaviors of students? Establishing these norms will be an important branch of research as the social Web settles into a consistent readable/writable entity. Digital learning tools are still somewhat foreign to students who resist them based on the fact that they are not designed with digital natives in mind, a user base that is highly sensitive to the idiosyncratic nuances of the social Web. EdTech tools won't become a natural part of students' learning until we start building ways to connect WebCT accounts to Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Second Life avatars. When these networked tools and online identities are seamlessly connected with everyday Web activities, critical learning skills will be embedded into them as well.

Teaching students how to live in the networked/mediated world
These books hardly mention media literacy skills or what this really means. We need to start clearly defining media literacy and how to teach it to give students the technical skills AND the intellectual skills to negotiate a networked world constructed through media. Although teachers should use networked tools- wikis, websites, videos- in their lessons, thinking critically about media does not necessarily include technology at all. Instead, users can compare old media to new media to stimulate contemporary debates: how would the court case in To Kill A Mockingbird be affected by Twitter, the blogosphere, or Digg? How does this algebra lesson relate to basic computer programming? With these conversations in mind, we need to give students digital play spaces (Photoshop, iMovie, Garage Band, Processing, blogs) to explore their mediated identities and make relevant contributions to the emerging digital folk culture prevalent on the Web. Simultaneously, instructors must open up a deep dialogue about copyright, remixing cultural sign systems, what it means to be human in a society with intelligent computers and cyberworlds, the distinctions between data sources (mass media vs. mass amateurization vs. crowd-sourced content). We must give students ways to talk about their "self-ness" in a world full of marketing campaigns and Hollywood movies designed to construct their notion of "self" for them. We must introduce Benkler's notion of the "networked public sphere" and how to be a part of it. In fact, if it were up to me, I would make "The Wealth Of Networks" required reading for all undergraduate students or even high school seniors (or some kind of abridged version, that book is quite a doozy).

Making the Web available for people living with disabilities
While the notion of the "digital divide" and how to un-divide it are arguable, the debate rarely involves people living with disabilities. As we move to a more multimedia-infused culture, where does that leave the visually, aurally and physically impaired? How can we efficiently include everyone? Furthermore, can technology and new media actually increase their autonomy? Do virtual worlds put typically developing children on the same social level as children with Asperger's? Can we use robotics and OCR technology to help the blind read metro signs? Will it be the norm to have classmates with bionic hearing who have blue tooth technology in their skulls that let them hear a lecturer better than people with organic cochlea? Will they also have digital podcasts uploaded into their devices by making the cochlear implant software open source? (Perhaps this last one is over the top, but that would be AWESOME and totally possible with freer access to the source codes).

And finally, underlying all of the above, how do we make these new practices the norm? How do we incorporate these changes within the boundaries of the contemporary education system and standardized testing that is currently in place? How can we begin training teachers to be effective leaders in the networked/mediated world?

So that's the framework that I'm coming from, and until there's a book that says all that, right up there, than I will stick to the separate media studies books and learning theory books and continue synthesizing them in my own research.

Techno_Boundaries in the Global World

2009-12-11T11:33:00.006-05:00

For the past thousand years, humans have struggled to maintain the spatial boundaries we have created between each other. These imaginary lines have been something worth killing and dying over for so long that comprehending their arbitrariness is unimaginable. What would a world look like without lines?

Some see technology and the Internet as destabilizing or eventually eliminating human-constructed, geospatial boundaries. When we can live in cyberspace without State boarders or international jurisdictions, a PhD student from UMass notes, who becomes "We the People?"

But what about the spatial boundaries that humans embed into the technologies themselves?

This clip is from an early Russian WWII film that a Professor wanted to play for her film studies course. We needed to create an elaborate work-around for her because the DVD was formatted in PAL, which won't play on American NTSC DVD players. The result of viewing the European footage in American standards eerily illustrates the disconnect between free-flowing information and man-made boundaries:

Between the grey pixels and rhythmic audio misfiring are the shadows of doomed Jews and German SS guards filmed long before the US even wanted to discuss the existence of concentration camps. Yet these stories, preserved now on DVD, are shrouded by format conversion, a new language boundary, a new spatial limit, for the digital age.

While created to protect Hollywood's marketing and international release infrastructure, is there a larger cultural significance here? That when we try to "play back" international ideas, they are horridly distorted? That we require complex hardware/software to crack international copy-protection and convert footage to the "American" way? That in doing so, we are breaking American copyright laws and exposing ourselves to litigation?

~~I'll get more information about these clips next week and post them here.~~ The footage is truly shocking.

UPDATE: This footage is actually from a rare dub of "The Unvanquished" (AKA "The Unconquered," AKA "Nepokoryonnye") directed by Marc Donskoy in 1945 starring Venyamin Zuskin. I can't find too much information about it online, but apparently, according to Umass Amherst professor Olga Gershenson, it was one of the first films to explicitly illustrate the Holocaust within the Soviet Union.

Digital Suicide

2009-11-30T20:47:00.006-05:00

Today I answered a Facebook event request from a loosely-tied Friend who is celebrating the deletion of his Facebook account....on Facebook.

Setting all irony aside about his bashing Facebook...on Facebook, blah blah, postmodernism, blah, many would (and will) solute his efforts to kick social networking as an act of self control, an active delay of gratification, a digital abstinence that will prevent his impregnation with narcissism and trivialized data surfing.

Yet I would argue that the act of publicly deleting a Facebook account is, in fact, by far the most narcissistic act possibly imaginable on the entire social Web. Rather than an establishment of self-control, it is in fact a complete surrender to the forces that Facebook mutiny is trying to avoid. It is a digital suicide, with the event request to attend the funeral serving as the suicide note, the flamboyant, final reification of the victim's existence.

What is the purpose of physical suicide? It is not just the culmination of all forces that a person interfacing with an unbearable world can no longer deal with, but also an attempt to manifest or externally convey the seriousness of the victim's interior pain. Eliminating one's self as an escape from a feeling that no one else feels at the expense of creating pain in others left behind is, well, selfish. Suicide is the final act of complete narcissism; it is the singular expression of full introversive control of one's self in an otherwise uncontrollable existence.

Public digital suicide, then, is similarly hyper-narcissistic. Calling out for alternate ways of keeping in touch doesn't quite justify it-- why would one delete his account in the first place if he wants to maintain the relationships that exist in that space? Wouldn't it make more sense to just keep the access? Publicly eliminating one mode of communication in favor of another is like calling everyone in your phone book and asking them to write letters to you instead of calling because the phone just isn't working out for you anymore. Why not just take the phone off the hook? Or contact people through different mediums with encouragement to respond via the same medium?

Now I'm not saying that destructively frequent users should maintain their Facebook behavior, and deleting an account may be required to direct attention elsewhere if Facebook becomes a compulsion. Yet lowering use of or quietly ignoring social media tools is a far more honest, albeit less sexy, way to eliminate defunct digital identities.

The above image is the cover of Amanda Plamer and Neil Gaiman's photo book/short story collection entitled "Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A Collection of Photographic Evidence" available here.

Backchannel Discussions Guest Post at TeachOIT

2009-11-12T20:59:00.004-05:00

My guest post for UMass Amherst's TeachOIT blog got published today! It's about using networked tools to create a backchannel discussion in which students discuss the lecture while it's happening.

"Networked discussions, however, encourage students to channel their desire for connectedness and interactivity into the content of the class rather than their Facebook walls. Being connected through networked discussions offer everyone in class a voice to comment or ask questions, even those who are typically too shy to raise their hands. Not only can all students participate more easily, they are also given an opportunity to create connections between concepts, experiences and other students during class without disruption. A networked classroom is much more active, and for students who have grown up with the participatory nature of the social Web, far more interesting."

Read the rest of it at the TeachOIT blog.

UT Dallas' "The Twitter Experiment"

Google Wave/Human Wave

2009-11-06T12:50:00.010-05:00

So I got on Google Wave last week. It’s clunky, unstable, confusing, and I love it. Or at least I will love it, once I can start actually “Waving” with people who aren’t totally lost in the interface (for a great overview, see Gina Trapani and Adam Pash’s “The Complete Guide to Google Wave” along with these goofy videos).

The initial usability of Wave is, well, a bit disorienting. It combines several modes of Web interaction that people haven’t yet seen mashed together. I like to think of it as a real-time wiki combined with email and instant messaging. Like email, you can send messages (called “blips”) to one person or multiple people (I somehow don’t think this word, “blip” will stick...but I’ll use it for now). Each of these participants can respond within the blip like a typical email chain. However, if any of the users are on Wave simultaneously, they can actually watch each other type, letter for letter, into the blip. Additionally, participants of the wave can edit any blip, even those created by others. Each change is notated by a yellow highlight and the addition of the editor’s icon in the blip (the edit feature is a bit rudimentary right now, but it will surely be improved in the full release, as will many other bugs).

You can also make a wave public, which means it is open to every Google Wave member to view and comment on. Many early members are making special interest public waves about integrating it into college courses or other emerging uses of the product. However, jumping into the public Waves is extremely confusing, and makes the browser lag like crazy, probably due to the live-type feature happening all at once from each contributor (which you cannot turn off as of right now).

Yet I think these two features- the poor interface for public Waves and view-as-you-type blips- mixed with the editable nature of each blip, are Wave’s strongest features.

Editing Blips
The innovation of the wiki-style editing is pretty obvious. If anyone can edit anyone’s blip, the nature of Wave conversation is totally different than what’s come before in mainstream social networking. Mostly, this popularizes the idea of wiki editing and lowers the transaction costs for collaboration, making it easy for users to do things together like brainstorm, make lists, and edit documents. The editing is straight forward, and you can use the “Playback” feature to see previous versions of the blips as a history archive.

Small Groups
I do not think the poor interface for public waves is a flaw; instead, it’s what separates Google Wave from all other popular social networking tools so far. The structure of a wave begs for conversation between small-ish, more close-knit groups so that the wave stays manageable. When it gets too big, it is impossible to participate meaningfully. This limitation encourages real, multi-directional conversation between known participants with a sender, one or more receivers, and a responder. This is directly opposite from the culture that has developed around Facebook statuses and Twitter updates, where most utterances do not require either a receiver or a responder. Like email, each wave is useless without a corresponding blip, inducing a two-sided conversation. When I asked my friend Zach how the Waving was going, he replied (via Wave), “Its no fun without people to wave to.” This is entirely different from Facebook and Twitter where you can expound your thoughts or send out links with the illusion that people are paying attention. With Wave, people have to pay attention, otherwise, it's no fun.

Live-Type Idiosyncrasies & Conversational Substance
Lastly, if the live-type feature is smoothed out and catches on as a norm for Web chatting, I think we will see interesting new ways of emulating human speech develop. Blips, for example, will be populated by more “umms” and “ahhs” to signify thinking. More importantly, though, it will create real-time consequences to the style and substance of our language familiar to face-to-face communication. Instead of the passive nature of comments left on a Digg.com post, or a re-Tweeted message on Twitter, participants can actually watch each typer’s thought process unfold as they type their response into the blip. This fundamentally changes the substance of our Web communications, and makes text-based interaction, in a way, more “real” (or if you are as uncomfortable with that word as I am, it makes it more “similar to physical interactions”). With the added social pressure of the live-type feature, where each person can see the other type their thoughts out live like how a sentence flows from one’s mouth, people will be held responsible for their utterances more similarly to conversations that take place in close proximity.

While it has tons of bugs that need to be worked out, I am really looking forward to Wave becoming a large part of our Web presence. Combining all the best features of email, chat, and wikis that make a whole new Frankenstein-like creature, I don’t see it replacing all other Web identities. Yet it is creating a Web presence more similar to our physical identities, which is perhaps exactly what the “Web 2.0” world needs right now to eliminate the clutter.

Digital Ripples in the Physical World

2009-11-03T21:15:00.006-05:00

I realized a few days ago that one of my two Gmail accounts spontaneously stopped forwarding to the one I usually log on to. In turn, I missed out on work opportunities and important messages from a few of my teachers. It's amazing how a defect in cyberspace with purely digital information can have very real effects in the physical realm...Definitely something to think about with the digitization of our existence.

Speaking of which, a student in my class made a presentation the other day about Transhumanism, which is an intellectual movement that is advocating for the advancement of human nature through technology. As humans become infused with technology which, if you wear classes you already are, where is the line that defines who gets to vote and who doesn't? Who has the right to participate in sports or is woo mechanically enhanced to do so? Who is human and who isn't? How will we reconcile equity issues when people with the proper income can become perfect, and those without remain flawed? What will happen when machines can think and be self conscious? What will happen when our thoughts are uploaded to the Web and our bodies cease to be necessary at all?

What, then, will happen when an "inbox" in part of our brains spontaneously stops forwarding messages to another "inbox?"

By the way, another piece of mail lost in my Gmail account fiasco was a Google Wave invite from September that I finally just activated. Thoughts on that momentarily...

"Mathematically Uncontrolled, but Humanly Contained:" Why Limitations are the Future of the Internet

2009-10-23T20:20:00.012-04:00

Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Earth" photograph taken from the Voyager 1 in 1990

Cybercultural theorist and philosopher Barry Vacker visited my Technology and Civilization class the other day and posed one of the simplest and yet most profound questions, in my opinion, of the entire 21st century. A question that, in an age where technology is moving more information faster than we can possibly rap our minds around, may very well define the turn-of-the-century. That is,

“Is the internet working for your or are you working for the internet?”

While computing is proliferating based on Moore’s law, Vacker elaborated, where the power of the computer is doubling every two years at a fraction of the cost, how can we double our capacity as human beings in the same amount of time?

Vacker’s book series cuts through the contemporary mediascape with a powerful, philosophical scalpel that forces us to reconsider our place in the virtual cosmos. (How, for example, do we reconcile the fact that we are communicating through a system of information storage designed for the sole purpose of surviving a nuclear holocaust developed shortly after James Bond smashed his futuristic Aston Martin into its own reflection in Goldfinger and Ronal Reagan, prospective simulacrum of American-ness, hosted the national opening of Disney’s Tomorrowland on TV??). Vacker posits that new technology is moving so fast we are losing our ability to understand it. Media reveals concepts so profound that we have a hard time dealing with it, and this pushes some individuals and groups to revert their intellect to pre-modern myths and ideals in the face of technology’s discoveries. As we face a war over progress in the Middle East, the Voyager spacecraft, a piece of technology designed by humans to take pictures of our galaxy and send them back to earth, has floated so far out into the solar system that it cannot even see earth anymore.

So where do we begin to understand what this means for humans back here on earth? How do we adapt ourselves to make technology work for us? With such a heavy quantity of information in so many different forms and contexts on the Internet, I propose that the first step, ironically, should be to proliferate not access, but limitations.

This may sound counterintuitive at first, but think about this: the size and speed of cyberspace transcends space and time in a world-flattening, self-empowering way, but at what cost? The ability to stretch our knowledge out into this vast information-scape has a flip-side, and that is the thinning out of that very knowledge. Sure, we can find more stuff with the Internet, but we have a harder time reflecting on it and synthesizing it. It’s as if you have a rubber swim cap that has a finite mass which can stretch past its homeostatic size- the rubber stretches out farther and farther as you pull harder and harder until it could cover a whole basketball but the rubber of the cap thins out to a point of near transparency before it snaps and breaks apart. Similarly, our intellects are getting thinner and thinner as our RSS readers fill up with more stuff that we simply do not have time to read with any depth or interpretation.

A surprisingly relevant theme lies at the heart of the late David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest: the futility of the search for perfection. The characters all seem to be in search for the perfect something- the perfect high, the perfect entertainment, the perfect film production- which all end in destruction- overdose, vegetative states, death. It’s like when you spend an hour flipping through 600 television channels to find just the right show to watch before you realize you haven’t actually watched anything. In search of the perfect news story, the perfect blog post, the perfect YouTube video, we are potentially destroying our intellect in the same way. Without limitations, only verstiegenheit.

In this way, we need to find ways to organically limit our consumption of information before we realize we haven’t been digesting any of it. Blogging, for example, is a good way to pause and think about what we are reading, seeing and experiencing by writing it in a coherent way for a potential audience. As information moves faster and faster around us we can easily forget how to ground ourselves in it and a forum for synthesis and reflection is a way to filter information that is relevant to you. Rather than consuming without thinking, blogs allow us to think about our consumption and export it back into the networked cybersphere.

There’s a reason why Twitter, a service whose entire functionality is based upon a character limitation, is so popular right now. By limiting our thoughts to 140 characters or less, we are faced with the challenge of thinking about what we will write while also making it easier and quicker to read others’ thoughts. Sure, we can’t write dissertations through Twitter, but we can produce the kernels of our thesis and ask for feedback from people who care.

I predict more limit-creating applications as the future of creative Web products. Tech news website Slashdot uses an innovative method for limiting comments through a complex peer review system using “karma,” “moderation” and “metamoderation.” Perhaps other websites such as Digg and Current- places that most people end up talking “at” each other, rather than “with” each other as a byproduct of the size of the networks- can start geotagging comments so the users can filter the comments and limit their conversations to local peers. Only through such limitations will we make Moore’s law apply to our cognition, too, and have the Web work for us rather than the other way around.

View Vacker's film "Space Times Square" in it's entirety on YouTube

EDIT: This weekend's New York Times Magazine featured a great piece by Peggy Orenstein called "Stop Your Search Engines" about limiting our knowledge intake:

"...the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same."

He Probably Won't Read It, But I Wrote It Anyway...

2009-09-22T20:36:00.006-04:00

Here is an email message I wrote to Daniel Lyons in response to his idiotic Newsweek article about Twitter culture:

Hi Mr. Lyons,

I read your commentary today about Twitter in your article "Don't Tweet On Me" and I am really quite embarrassed that Newsweek would publish such a poor, banal piece of critical thinking.

The anti-Twitter bandwagon is an easy one to jump on, but it constantly misunderstands and mis-categorizes the medium of microblogging and other current Web technologies. One of your biggest misconception is that you describe all twitter users- "D-list celebrity half-wits and pathetic attention seekers" as you call them- as having the same audience, and this is simply not true.

When users interact on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, although, technically, they are broadcasting like a television show or radio program, their utterances and comments are not meant to be looked at through the lens of traditional broadcasting. From a broadcasting point of view, their comments do indeed seem bland, pointless, or self-indulging. But in fact these comments are speaking to a small set of fellow users that are friends and acquaintances who might care about what the speaker is talking about. In this way, figures like "40 percent of the messages [on Twitter] are 'pointless babble'" are totally useless. It's like saying 40 percent of what you said today on your lunch break is pointless babble, or 40 percent of what you said to your family at the dinner table last night was pointless babble. In the context of those situations, your speech makes perfect sense, but judged against the entire content of the internet, it may seem a bit useless. (Also, please point me to that study, I'd be very interested to see its methodology and how it defined the term "pointless babble....")

You "third-wavers" often forget that twitter is a tool, and people use that tool in whatever way seems useful to them. The beauty of Twitter is its choice and openness, and if people are choosing to pay attention to Dane Cook's blabbering in 140 characters or less, perhaps its the fault of the culture industry that created him and not the freedom of the tool. Can we really blame the telephone for the substance of the human conversations that take place through it?

Twitter isn't going away any time soon, and I invite you to reconsider your cultural criticism in a more thoughtful, intellectual way, perhaps even reviewing the literature (perhaps start with some Clay Shirky or Yochai Benkler) before you regurgitate your trite, vapid, antiquity all over Newsweek's readers and help spread a naïvely misleading and destructive luddite-ism throughout the modern world.

Thank you for potentially reading this,
--
// Jason Blanchard

I'm just getting sick of the same dumb comments that lack the very substance they claim the Web is destroying....

We are in here.

2009-09-12T20:06:00.004-04:00

"The internet is clearly a force for like-minded people. Huge fans of the television show "The White Shadow" can get together and share anecdotes whereas before they had that chance maybe 2 or 3 times a year at some White Shadow convention. I'm not dissing it, I just think it's probably a "Net" thing..."

-- David Foster Wallace, February 21, 1962-September 12, 2008

2009-09-04T11:54:00.007-04:00

I got back from a long trip to Portugal and Spain a few weeks ago, and I've been slowly re-integrating myself back into the whirlwind of wired life- no easy task coming from a part of the world where appointments and police are scarce phenomena.

2,198 digital pictures later, I have been wrestling with the impossibility of displaying my Iberian experience to friends and family. As a documentary film editor, I have experience telling visual stories and I am familiar with the concepts of story structure and the editorial processes. But for some reason, this time, it’s just so hard to convey to anyone the magnitude of the Alcobaça monastery, the manueline windows of Tomoar's Convento de Cristo, or the the euphoria of leaving the discoteca at 6am to watch the sun rise on the beach.

I uploaded the images to Picasa, but no one wants to listen to my awkward narration for 2 hours while I click through 400 pictures in a web browser. The aura of physical prints feels slightly more real, but flat images and all the adjectives in my head cannot convey how I felt when my eyes wove over Gaudí’s Sagrada Família- the organic curves, the deep physical and conceptual detail, the sheer...beauty; there was something unexplainable or pre-lingual or, in a way, spiritual about standing underneath that anthropomorphic structure that simply cannot be accessed from a picture series.

The digital tools that we now have at our fingertips let us do amazing things. They are transforming how we experience our adventures, and how we remember them after they are over. (Imagine taking two thousand photos in the film era? It would have been impossible.) And yet I still think we are in a weird intermediate period where we’re not sure how to use them, and we cannot easily conceptualize their implications. (Tagging, arranging, uploading, sharing, 2,198 digital pictures is quite a time-consuming project).

With digital production methods, we are reaching a point where the magnitude of what we do can sometimes overpower the meaning of what we do. Yet if we can practice using our digital resources to dive deeper into contemporary life along with- or perhaps instead of- trying to represent more of it, the intrinsic worth of our content will flourish into something worth consuming.

From Portugal- Fatima, Tras-Os-Montes, and Braga

From Portugal- Estremadura & Ribatejo

Eric Lewis as an Example of the New Media Cultural Landscape

2009-07-08T14:18:00.009-04:00

The other day I was poking around on TED.com and I stumbled upon this stunning video of Eric Lewis playing the piano:

Not only did Lews' performance send my mind to another world of sonic capabilities, I recognized that Inside this whirlwind of sounds, textures and melodies at Lewis' fingertips lay a polyphonic illustration of the contemporary cultural production landscape proliferated by the digital revolution.

First, Lewis, a skilled Jazz musician who studied at The Manhattan School of Music in 1995, has upended the traditional use of the piano, one of the most traditional instruments in western music history. Lewis reaches inside to the guts of the piano where he plucks strings, mutes hammers, and touches sounds. He totally re-evalutates how one is "supposed" to play the piano and treats the entire instrument, rather than just the black and white keys, as something that can be played. This skill of thinking creatively outside the norms that society lays on us is important in a globalized society that relies on innovation and outside-the-box-ness to create new ideas and generate new industries. Without brains like Lewis,' I'd still be mining coal and typing on a typewriter.

Lewis also patches together a pastiche of different styles and genres, from Jazz and Rock, to fringe avant-garde. The organized chaos of this piece is clearly preconceived and moves between traditional harmonies to wild dissonance, often at the same time, while staying inside the framework that Lewis has created. Digital information in the computer age similarly coexists with different kinds of information and also must be arranged from the chaos of information overload into some kind of structure that we can make sense of. Peer reviewed essays and journalistic features exist beside blogs and amateur websites, evening news next to user uploads on YouTube, and we are challenged to organize these, sometimes simultaneously, in a way that allows us to connect the dots and participate meaningfully.

This piece is also a cover of Evanescence's "Going Under," a hard rock song re-arranged by Lewis on the piano. Repurposing content is not new, but, with the rise of Girl Talk and YouTube mash-ups, the early 2000s will be remembered as the decade of re-appropriation. Remix culture is a huge part of contemporary Web scene and it is a unique way for participants to make sense of an increasingly mediated world which, unfortunately, is sometimes in direct opposition to how media corporations want us to experience cultural artifacts. Regardless of what the culture industry thinks, re-appropriation will not go away. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, an African-American playwrite and director who has written a modern, multiracial interpretation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick wrote this about the politics and ethics of remixing, reprinted in Henry Jenkins' blog:

"The first step in remixing novels is to stay honest to the original text. Put a value on that, understand it, appreciate it, and then start the remixing process. Edit down to the big questions. Why? What? Why is it important now? And then take the reins off, take the leash off, take the bit out of the mouth and let imaginations run wild, and be careful not to censor too harshly."

In this way, remixing is an important tool for the 21st century mind that allows us to dive deeper into the essence of culture.

Finally, the production and distribution of this performance on the TED website, an organization "devoted to ideas worth spreading," is one of the most significant aspects of this piece in regard to the contemporary cultural landscape. Unlike other performance exhibitions such as America's Got Talent, or American Idol, this video is available to anyone with an Internet connection, at any time, on demand, just...because. It is not judged or scrutinized by a celebrity panel. Its quality will never be voted on by a live studio audience. It doesn't need to qualify to move on to the next round, nor does it need to be marketed and sold as an economic commodity. As cliché and banal as it may seem, it can just...be. Licensed under Creative Commons, the video can be embedded anywhere and will spread on its own merit outside of the profit motive without being restricted under proprietary conventions, allowing a cycle of active consumption and innovation to ride on its back (such as this very blog entry).

Eric Lewis' barrage of sound waves fed from the World Wide Web, through my computer speakers and into my ears sonifies what the Internet and the Information Age can accomplish. It creates new forms, explores old ones, distributes them outside the gatekeeping mediums of yesterday, and returns cultural production and consumption back into the hands the general public- something we all can be a part of.

Here are some more clips of Eric Lewis' performances that are definitely worth watching:

Playing on the "Tavis Smiley" show

Performing "Mr. Brightside" at the White House

Year of the Inter-Web Social Authorship

2009-06-30T15:32:00.007-04:00

So I've been spending much of my unemployed summer exploring one of the key features that the Web offers its users: the ability to easily switch from a consumer of information to an author of information.

This here blog, for instance, while serving mostly as a repository for my inner musings slightly formatted for outsider consumption, does have a readership. And, although most likely small, this (potential) audience is enough to make me (the author) self-conscious enough to strive for more coherence and depth than the average "Dear Diary" would require. By writing for an audience, I am able to think critically about content, style, and accuracy that would be impossible without online distribution.

I've also been poking around on Wikipedia, creating whole new entries (Speaking In Code, Wighnomy Brothers) and improving existing ones (see "tennis in popular culture"). Wikipedia is a fascinatingly vast and complex tool that is really only understood through participation. Wholly different than the traditional encyclopedia and protected from chronic graffiti by its large community, Wikipedia thrives on the "power-law distribution," in which the largest portion of users contribute just a little bit and a small portion of users contribute a lot. (Shirky 123). The sum of these contributions mixed with a small number of informal moderators and administrators is one of the largest and most significant reservoirs of information ever created. It's fun the be able to be a part of that.

But the nook on the Web that I am most excited about being a part of is Infinite Summer, a Web community dedicated to reading the epic book, Infinite Jest. IS gathered four bloggers designated as IJ guides, and a boatload of participants asking questions and discussing plot points on the IS forums. Infinite Jest, a book screaming to be decoded and deliberated, is the perfect chunk of literature for such a project. Reading the guides' stories of how they stumbled upon IJ, clicking through the links, and reading others' interpretations about the novel have made my deep appreciation for the piece even deeper. This is how literature is supposed to be enjoyed: alongside a group of intelligent, dedicated co-readers all contributing to each other's understanding of the written word.

Perhaps this is how all media should be consumed. We are social creatures, so why shouldn't we participate in information dissemination socially in a way that contributes to the global understanding of the world around us? Whether we are publishing our own, unique visions of the world on a blog, discussing the merits of an image's copyright on Wikipedia, or enjoying a book with other readers, the Web offers us a substantially more human way to connect all the dots and learn about our place in this crazy whirlwind of words, data, and ideas that is modern society.

Thanks to Wikipedia user Husky for the Power-Law curve image.

Using Computers as a Metaphor to Meditate on What Comprises Human Life

2009-06-19T09:17:00.005-04:00

Computers process things. That is, they operate by solving complex mathematical problems that are perceived by humans as instantaneous and absolute.

The computing process is one of those things that most people don't understand. Windows and Mac operating systems function the way they do so that consumers don't have to understand it. However, it's this disregard for “the process” that computers and robots essentially contain, a total non-understanding of what it means or how it feels to go from point A to point B, that we humans can extract and reflect on ourselves as having little in common: we humans have value only in this process. In complete opposition to the computer, our perception of existence lies in the organic code of our lives that make us function from { birth to death } .

For while computers eschew the process and only strive for, understand and present the answer, human worth lies in the substance of our operations. To computers, there is no feeling for the "how" or "why" the electricity passes through the silicon nodes and channels. To humans, that's all there is.

We humans continually consider and perceive the process that precedes a final result. We are able to walk to the store for the goal of a gallon of milk and enjoy the color of the brick we see on the way. We can take pleasure in the creative process before a work is complete. We can even evaluate the ethics of a means to an end as justified or not. Computers do not put value on this process. They have no in-between awareness or appreciation, merely discrete steps of 1 or 0, boolean values of 'true' or 'false.'

Our entire life, thought of as a function that has a question and a solution- an open bracket at birth and a closed bracket at death with a bunch of stuff in between- can be thought of as a process. In this way, human processing is what it means to be human, alive, conscious. If we didn't celebrate our processes, our lives would feel as instantaneous and banal as determining the pixel placement of these letters on this screen. Instead, we can create the value of what the pixels mean.

Perhaps our whole awareness of a processes happening is what qualifies life itself. That we can appreciate the stuff between the brackets rather than use it as a means to calculate our code is unique to the human condition. It is the “life stuff” that makes it all worth it. It is what allows us to understand ourselves in a spiral of neon time.

Social Networking Anonymous (SNA)

2009-06-03T13:05:00.007-04:00

The other day, I received this New Yorker cartoon from a friend via Twitter depicting a distraught-looking man so “over” twitter that he is simply waiting for it to vanish. This cartoon illustrates something that I've been hearing a lot of lately around the popularity of social networking: a sort of pseudo-hatred for Facebook and Twitter that paradoxically manifests itself in more time spent on Fb and Twitter...complaining about Fb and Twitter. It's a sort of digital addiction, a craving for text, numbers and gossip that can only be quelled with more text, numbers and gossip; a vicious cycle that easily leads to a catatonic state of idle non-productivity.

And yet, unlike other products built by the profit motive that depend on this kind of addiction and passivity, this sentiment is not the fault of the platform or its creators, but rather is a misunderstanding by the complaining users themselves. Social computing is not something meant to be addictive to or abstained from. It is not a replacement of social interaction in Physical Life. Users cannot sit in front of their newsfeed and expect it to do anything useful for their psyche. The social web is not meant to be consumed like the one-way bubble of television. It is a social tool. Most tools have a right and wrong way to use them yet the beauty of social networking is that there is no right or wrong way to use it- just a right and wrong way to think about it. And if we can re-think sites like Fb and Twitter as social tools, why not learn how to use them effectively?

First, in addition to strengthening relationships with close friends, the large networks users gather on these sites increase our access to “weak ties,” or people whose relationships are loose, but friendly. Social networks make these “acquaintances” powerful assets to our friend libraries by bringing us a more diverse set of information than what we would get if we were stuck in a small cluster of friends with similar interests. Users can also leverage weak-ties as a larger talent pool of peers to help with tasks, promotion, housing, jobs, etc. For example, say you live in Boston, but you are moving to San Diego and need work and a place to live. You don't know anyone in San Diego except that one friend of a friend of a friend you hit it off with at a party two years ago. Before Facebook, it would have been difficult or awkward to ask this person for help, but in Fb land, it is standard operating procedure.

Social networks are also a great tool for self-expression. The Internet makes creating and sharing information really easy, and places like Facbook, Myspace, and Twitter provide communities through which users/authors can distribute ideas and information that is important to them. Social networks give users an on-line audience outside of their immediate friends and family that would be difficult to gather otherwise.

The great thing about social networking platforms is that there is no intended use for them and so users can get extremely creative about the data that is out there. Twitter and Flickr's open API have lead to amazing innovation with data visualization. Facebook recently opened its API, and I'm sure we will see equally innovative projects behind it.

So if you find yourself wasting more time hating on Twitter via Twitter, or surfing Fb aimlessly rather than really using it for something, try these simple augmentations to your online routine:

// If any of your friends are broadcasting annoying, or bogus information, ignore them! These tools give you full control over who you “follow” or are connected with, so use it!

// Find a good hobby and frame your social networking around that specific hobby or interest. I am currently reading “Infinite Jest,” and a simple Twitter keyword search led me to an online group that is devoted to reading IJ together this summer and discussing it. Brilliant!

// Remember that people are listening, so broadcast with some substance! Contribute your own unique information and treat your online network as a medium through which you can express yourself meaningfully to an audience rather than a place to extend your physical self merely for your own enjoyment.

These websites and modes of communications are not going away. This is why we need to leave the cliché idea that they are annoying, boring, or useless, and instead embrace them as a tool for self expression, information aggregation, and social innovation. If you are looking like the guy in the cartoon above, sitting around waiting for Facebook to just go away, I guarantee you will be wasting your time.

If you are interested in reading more about social computing, I high recommend Clay Shirkey's Here Comes Everybody, and any of the links embedded above.

Google Wave and The Future of Social Computing

2009-05-29T14:08:00.005-04:00

Once again, Google has innovated its way into the future. No, it's not flying cars, or cars that drive themselves, or tiny computer screens that sit in our retinas. It's much less sexy. It's a rejuvenation to online communications. It's "Google Wave."

Wave is a web-based communication interface that combines texting, emailing, sharing media, and social networking. Essentially, it's a long conversation between users (think twitter meets gmail) graphically united in a simple list view in which users can embed images, maps, or polls, chat with friends in real time, or leave messages for offline contacts. The application groups conversations together making it easy to jump in later and not embarrass yourself by repeating someone else (a difficult feat in gmail's 'cc land). Google is also opening Wave's API, so new, innovative uses and applications will quickly arise. (Check out Tim O'Reilly's wonderful overview here).

Wave is still early in development stage, but its release will have an interesting effect on the state of social computing.

Google foresees Wave not only mimicking existing communications, but erasing the distinctions between them. In other words, email conversations, text messages, Twitter comments, and photo sharing will all take place in the same stream-of-consciousness interface rather than having unique websites with singular functions. We will no longer decide if a thought or picture is for our Facebook audience or our Twitter audience. We will no longer be forced to choose between the Flickr community, and the Picasa community. They will all be syphoned into Wave, and we will have one identity within it. I know I have a different voice for email, Twitter, Flickr, and in text messages...would this variation be erased? What will real-time Web communicating (seeing other users' comments as they type, letter by letter) do to these voices? On Wave, our user profiles will be a more singular portrayal of our web identities rather than a piece of the whole scattered over different Web applications.

Personal aggregation has serious implications for online privacy. What happens when all this data is housed on Google's server farm? Thus far, Google has acted in the best interest of its users, but what would happen if it fell in the hands of some future social media conglomerate with dicey incentives or a savvy network hacker? Rather than having different information on different sites, it would all be confined to one space and easily connected to real life users. Will people be concerned with this risk, or will the benefits outweigh the risks? What will Google put in their Terms of Service to protect our privacy?

Wave also lets users edit their own and others' posts. This means that collaboration will become a more significant aspect to online dialogue and sharing. Perhaps this would turn Wiki-style content and participation into the norm rather than an esoteric Web concept.

I'm also interested to see how Wave will be integrated into mobile computing and location-aware applications. The Web is constantly integrating itself with physical space, and housing all our communications data under one roof will open up many possibilities as we get more comfortable with locative social networking. Again, will privacy be a concern?

So what do you think? Will Google Wave be just another social broadcaster that people love to hate but join anyway? Or will this usher in new, new communication revolution?

Images compliments of "O'Reilly Radar." Sign up for Wave updates here.

Terminator: Salvation & Modern Technology (featuring some spoilers...)

2009-05-26T10:38:00.005-04:00

What I like about the Terminator franchise is each movie's ability to reflect a generation's relationship to technology.

In 1984, when the first Terminator film was released, the world was just finally beginning to resolve a 30-ish year nuclear arms race that left Americans with a clear-cut sense of "good," and "evil." The film's plot has an equally lucid separation of power, mapping West vs. East over Man vs. Machine: a Terminator robot is sent back in time from a machine-ruled, nuclear-ravaged future to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the future's human resistance leader while the humans send back Kyle Reese to protect her. Together, the duo crush the Terminator robot, clearly implying the victory of American values of "love" and "honor" onto the humans who defeat the robotic, eastern-European-sounding Terminator robot.

"Terminator 2: Judgement Day," on the other hand, adds a contemporary twist. Released in 1991, almost 10 years after the first, as the technological floodgates of cell phones, computers, and the Internet began to be breached, T2 features a terminator robot sent back in time to defend John Connor from a new Terminator model sent back to destroy him. This time, John Connor and the Terminator 'bot become close friends: Man, Working Side-By-Side with Machines, vs. Machines...

"Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," has a similar theme, as another Terminator robot is sent back to help John Connor fight yet another more advanced robot. Yet this film introduces a vivid concept to the 2003 audience: the persistence of the Internet. Although they defeat the time traveling machine monster, its essence leaks into the Cyberdyne network and now lives in "the cloud" where it is everywhere at once and impossible to track down and eliminate.

This past weekend saw the release of a new Terminator movie, "Terminator Salvation," and even possibly a new trilogy. So what did this film bring to the cultural table? Artificial Intelligence: a part human-part robot hybrid cyborg, designed by Cyberdyne to infiltrate the resistance post "Judgement Day," that doesn't know it is a robot at all. Instead of fulfilling its micro-processed mission, this cyborg, in the form of ex-convict Marcus Wright, somehow gains free will and decides to sacrifice his own human heart to save a dying John Connor.

Clearly, the fourth installment of the series is saying something (perhaps a bit obvious?) about the ubiquitous fusion of humans and networked machines. Yet I feel that the way this was played out in the Hollywood ending was, among others, the film's biggest disappointment. Instead of portraying something prolific about the modern grey areas of humans and machines, about the mixed identities of living in both the physical world and in digital spaces, about the technological identity crisis if, say, John Connor was saved by becoming, himself, a human-machine cyborg destined to save a race he is only "part" of in theory and in essence- instead of diving into all this, Marcus Wright destroys himself for John Connor's survival, in itself a kind of human triumph over machines that is exhausted over the last three films, proving, once again, that the good-old flesh and blood "human heart" is somehow dialectically opposed to networked machines who cannot, by nature, "feel" or "love."

So let's really think about this: is it really the "strength of the human heart" that separates man from machine??

UPDATE: Check this out-

"In trying to understand presence – the propensity of humans to respond to fake stimuli as if they are real – the researchers are not just gaining insights into how the human brain functions. They are also learning how to create more intense and realistic virtual experiences, opening the door to myriad applications for healthcare, training, social research and entertainment."

Digital Water

2009-05-14T16:31:00.004-04:00

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

I've been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace these days. This man was an incredible genius and a master craftsman of the written word. He was able to reach into the idea of a written story and turn it inside-out, twist it all around so that you're left with a pile of Merriam-Webster's finest that makes you feel rather than understand.

I'll be graduating from college in a few days, and so the whole life advice/new beginning thing is very rich for me. Riding on the wave of my current obsession, I found a graduation speech from Mr. Wallace in which he expounds wisdom about overriding our instinctual, default setting that makes us think we understand certain 'T'ruths about the world around us:

"The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance."

This speech was delivered to Kenyon College seniors in 2005 amid President Bush's second inauguration as president, riots in France, CIA leaks, and debacles in the Middle East. While these events unraveled around our assumptions of the world, we saw the rise of 50 Cent, Ipods, and, of course, intensely social Web tools such as Myspace, Facebook, and Wikipedia.

In a way, 2005 was the beginning of the so called "Web 2.0," the tip of an iceberg we haven't discovered the rest of yet. As we continue to exist and socialize through bits and bytes on our computers, how can we make sense of the "water" around us? What will happen when/if we become totally de-sensitized to the circuitry that we rely on to bind us?

I like to think that by exploring it, we can exploit it, use the Internet as a tool of reflection, self-expression, and social empowerment in physical space. Yet the bombardment of information and entertainment also available on the Net makes it difficult to choose what to pay attention to and how, and so the key to all this is, perhaps, choice:

"If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship..."

And I like that.

5 Trillion Words

2009-03-01T11:23:00.003-05:00

I wrote this blog entry for my class this afternoon in response to the above video, and I thought it would be relavent here:

Last semester, I took a seminar class entitled “Networked_Art and the Transformative Creative Practice. This class looked at the convergence of art and networked technologies: where tech minds met creative minds to create work that used and commented on some of the most advanced technologies of today. One of the conclusions in the class was that the artists making these creative works were no longer artists by trade at all: these new mediums required skill sets that only computer engineers, scientists, and tech scholars could tap into. In this way, the line between “engineer” and “artist” became blurred, as did the line between art and computer programming, art and video gamming, art and practical communication technologies. In essence, we learned that we must “rethink the artist and her work in the digital age,” just as the “Information R/evolution” video urges us to “rethink information [in the digital age].”

In the same way creative work is no longer being created exclusively by professional artists, information on the web is no longer being written solely by professionals. Our latest homework assignment in this class, for example, was to watch a YouTube video uploaded by a user named “mwesch,” which I doubt went through the peer review process that traditional college-level readings go through. So sure, in this way we should be re-thinking information…but we should also be thinking harder about how to organize this information.

While studying the ontology of networked art in my seminar class, my professor tried to teach with the disjointed flow of information evident in most web-based works. The class followed no conceptual narrative, no cause and effect chronological account of the information being conveyed to us. Our teacher taught texts in webs and nodes rather than in a linear story- and this failed miserably. We left the class feeling as if there was something important being conveyed to us, but no one really knew what it was.

In some ways, teaching the class in this way was progressive. Perhaps that’s how all classes will be in the future as we all get used to learning and thinking in this way. And yet right now, we are still stuck in a hybrid learning model, a cognitive limbo in between networked thinking and traditional thinking in which the organization of data, while relying less on categories and “shelves,” is ever increasingly important. With over 5 million words on the web already and a limited mind capacity in which to decode it all, we cannot yet afford to cast off organizational structures as outdated functions somehow above the freedom of the Web.

The “Information R/evolution” video claims that the current “information revolution” is “without limitations,” yet I think that it is indeed limited- by our capacity and willingness, as humans, to decode and learn from it. Therefore, we need to learn how to sort through the information infrastructure and use its power efficiently, otherwise its sheer volume will overwhelm us and destroy itself.

However, the current “Web 2.0” technologies provide hope for this to happen by making the information both more searchable and more interactive. Users can now participate and upload their own information, causing us to pay a different kind of attention to it. In this way, we put the machine’s potential in all of us to contribute, collaborate, and collectively decode meaning. Therefore, I would emphasize the final message of the video: …the responsibility to harness, create, critique, organize, and understand is on all of us. Are we ready?”

So are we? Or, as Trebor Scholz warns, will a corporate-focused “Web 2.0” blind us from information our enlightenment?

Cyborg "art"

2009-01-31T17:46:00.004-05:00

Somewhere in between expounding about my devotion to digital and networked technologies, I had quite a breathtaking experience inside the photo lab at Emerson College that fired off some new neurons in my brain.

After shooting three exposures on one roll of 16mm film with a Bolex hand-cranked camera, I blindly shoved the film into a canister, filled it with chemicals, and sunk it in water. From the crystals on the film emerged beautiful, thick, dreamy, black & white images of city lights, marker ink, and urban streets. What amazed me most was that this process did not involve one joule of electrical energy other than that which heated the water in the photo lab.

This experience, which gave me great delight to watch and do, made me think about where these types of organic processes, particularly in the “art” world, fit in with the whirlwind of digital technologies available today. Surely, photochemical emulsion takes much more time, patience, and expertise than does a program like iMovie, which puts the post production process in the hands of the average consumer. Feature films today are still mostly shot on 35mm film, but the industry is increasingly moving towards all-digital production workflows, as is the commercial photography industry. Yet still, there is something intimately satisfying about feeling the film in your hands, pouring the chemicals, watching the images appear, and stringing the film into a projector; there’s something about watching your creation for the first time that makes you feel as if you have conceived, birthed, and reared the project into maturity.

Yet synthetic and organic processes both have their advantages and disadvantages, and I don’t think one can really claim victory over the other. The proliferation of digital works merely give organic projects a new kind of meaning, one that can be exploited and juggled as any other conceptual polarity can be.

Now where the two converge…"cyborg 'art?'"

For Better or For Worse?

2009-01-22T22:05:00.003-05:00

“Dude…that’s so messed up,” my friend said when I told him that someday, in theory, the Internet might be a three-dimensional virtual world that we could walk through and touch. His response seemed to say, “I like my Internet how it is- flat, anonymous, and stagnant.”

With a new President in office who owes a lot to emerging technologies for the opportunity to fumble the presidential oath sitting in his new Oval office without a computer or a blackberry, we should consider our knee-jerk resistance to new technologies. Is a different layout for the Internet wrong or just…different? Is instant messaging and text messaging destroying our language, or just changing it? Are YouTube and web videos lowering our attention spans, or just changing the kind of attention that we pay?

Consider the fact that I am now sitting in my underwear at my apartment in Boston, expounding my mildly educated opinion to potentially (highly potentially) thousands of people, who can then instantly respond with their humble opinions, creating a cloud full of thought-precipitation. This opportunity exists only through a shift in technology from the Internet of the early 1990s to the current “Web 2.0” that allows and encourages active participation rather than consumption hegemony. Worse? Or just different?

And what of the storm of “information-clouds” that are so numerous and overwhelming they couldn’t possibly all be decoded? Are we just tossing information into cyberspace as if skipping a rock into a pond full of other, similar rocks? No, because in that instant of active writing, blogging, chatting, responding, posting, or uploading, if never even exposed to the eyes of one other human being, that creator, blogger, chatter or responder has had a deeply more intimate moment with that information than was ever possible before. And that is powerful.

So we can resist new technologies, kicking and screaming about the detriment to our youth, or we can inspect it, use it, play with it, roll with it, and flourish along side it (or inside of it!).

So let’s think ahead, and consider letting President Obama keep his laptop.

Your Top 15 of 2008

2009-01-01T11:58:00.002-05:00

With personal top 10 lists flowing through the blogosphere for the past month, I'd like to start the year off with a top 15 list based on the opinions of millions of other people- Digg's most popular stories in the past 365 days from January 1st, 2008- Jan. 1st, 2009.

Digg, a popular social news aggregator, allows users to submit links to images, videos, and news articles on the Internet. Users can then "digg" these stories, or vote for them to increase their popularity on the site, making them more likely to get responses and appear on the homepage.

With over 29 million unique visitors in the past year (NYtimes.com, in comparison, got just over 15 million visitors in the same time frame), Digg has become somewhat of a cybercultural indicator for what is notable on the Net. The "Top in 365 tab," then, is a digital road map for which moments were most important to Digg users in 2008:

15. "The Constitution Dies Tomorrow" // 14,834 diggs
Digg users have made it clear that they are extremely skeptical of the Bush administration's expansion of executive powers. The average American can’t do much about this directly, but discussing it is our best defense- something mainstream news seems to have forgotten.

14. "Coolness" // 15,188 diggs
I think this has a lot to do with the "at-least-I'm-not-that-guy" reaction mixed with a little "I-can't-look-away-from-the-car-wreck" phenomenon. The 15 thousand diggs on this article is the virtual equivalent to a rubbernecking traffic jam.

13. "Jon Stewart Annihilates Sarah Palin's Media Surrogates" // 15,860 diggs
Nothing was more pleasing to liberal voters than to watch Republicans squeal under the tabloid-esque headlines of 2008 vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, and let’s face it, Digg users tend to be pretty liberal. The brutal contradictions of Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, and Dick Morris over the Alaskan Governor exposed on Stewart's The Daily Show were pure music to their ears. Yet I think we all can agree that you could not script these clips better, and that the GOP probably should be shopping around for a new image.

12. "You should never ask for help on the internet" // 17,315 diggs
"Wrong place wrong time dawg," is all they really had to say, but instead, they made the funniest thread 3com11 had ever seen and accrued over 17 thousand Diggs. As hellsing47 responded on Digg, "This is a shining example of the internet at work." Indeed, where else would completely anonymous people bother to take the time out of their day to work this photoshop magic?

11. "This is how police SHOULD react to protesters" // 17,462 diggs
This is quite possibly the nicest officer in the entire United States police force, and we are lucky to be able to share it on the Internet. With such wide coverage of Iraqi journalists throwing shoes at our President, Illinois governors selling Senate seats, and Wall Street investors sucking the entire global economy into a financial black hole, let's be lucky that this guy made it to the top 15 this year to give us some sense of American human decency.

10. "Click if your computer screen is dirty." // 18,655 diggs
Digg users have really dirty screens? Love puppies? Watch Kevin Rose on G4 Tech TV? It’s hard to tell.

9. "Senator Obama will be President Obama." // 19,510 diggs
The 2008 election was a Digg hit. Every single day, the homepage had something juicy on the Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin showdown that kept me refreshing the site hourly. Sometimes I still think the post-election Digg seems a little tame…

8. "Digg this if you're sick of power users stealing stories" // 19,572 diggs
This one snuck its way into the top 15 last minute, yet I think it exemplifies one of the beauties of social news aggregator websites: the impeccable ability to truly have voices heard. When users feel that something is compromising the integrity of the Digg website, they can vote it up on that very same site and the Digg team will take notice. Maybe the United States government should take a look at this model? Are they already listening?

7. "Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!" // 19,716 diggs
What 2008 Internet top whatever list would be complete without a viral video involving a cat?

6. "George Carlin has died" // 20,406 diggs
One of the most widely respected comedians of all time honored with over 20 thousand diggs.

5. "Heath Ledger is Dead" // 23,117 diggs
I think this shows the pure shock of Ledger’s untimely death. With a highly anticipated role as The Joker in "The Dark Night" that didn't disappoint, people found it hard to reconcile his liveliness on the big screen with the shroud of his death. We’re even still waiting on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

4. "Digg this if you are sick of $cientologists burying articles" // 26,575 diggs
Do Digg users have faith? Who knows, but they do not like any groups who bury articles for a personal agenda. Again, this is another instance of the Digg community effectively speaking out against a potential Digg flaw.

3. "Digg's April Fool's Day Joke?" // 32,380 diggs
A company-wide April fools joke is a great sign of a solid business plan these days, as made evident by this one's 32 thousand diggs. People view such antics as an affirmation that there are real people behind the administrative duties. Digg's presentation of a random symbol instead of a number of Diggs was on par with Google's post-dated and hand delivered emails. Maybe the auto industry will give us something good this April?

2. "Barack Obama wins the 2008 Presidential Electio n" // 34,472 diggs

1. "Digg This If You Voted For Obama!" // 36,754 diggs
It's really no surprise the Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency takes the first and second most popular stories of 2008. His is a phenomenal story, and Digg users love Barack Obama. His young, tech-savvy aura is understandably appealing to the demographic which is in stark opposition to McCain's grandpa-needs-help-on-the-computer-again reputation. Barry is the first president ever to have a computer in the Oval Office. Let’s hope he stays plugged in.

So why should anyone care what people on Digg decided were the most significant stories of 2008? What do sneaky cats, super-cool collar poppers, and President Elect Barack Obama have in common? Nothing, and this is exactly the point. There is no partisan agenda, no financial incentive, no top-down control of expression. These stories are related purely by the voting that put them here in a way that you and I can be an active part of.

Digg and other social news sites such as Current.com and StumbleUpon represent a new generation of the global public, an informed public that understands the power of the Internet for an active exchange of information. As the world falls into a brand new economic model amid a tumultuous international scene, education and participation for global constituents is crucial, and the Digg community is on the front lines of this breakthrough.

Things are going to change this comming year. Let’s hope those in power understand this ideology shift, and shift with it.

Happy 2009, everyone. Keep Digging!