Cynosure

Project: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

2005-12-10T18:10:00.000-08:00

My final project took the form of an information database, kind of like a Wikipedia, but clumsier and in html format, incorporating the theme of my dual theses in philosophy and sociology but tailored to some of the concepts we have addressed in this course. As Prof. Fitzpatrick pointed out, the project would most likely make a better Wikipedia than a mindmap, but I got some sort of compulsive satisfaction from making all of the little gifs that change in their boldness and tell you where you are in the map.

I was crunched for time working on the project, and so I uploaded (and wrote, and created) all of the content in the space of about 36 hours. In doing so, I was amazed how efficiently I could work in DreamWeaver, with tabbed browsers. Once I had created the initial template for the pages, I could easily select all and create another page as needed. I found that my focus flowed from the entry I was writing to screenshots that would illustrate my point to sources we had used in class to interview segments and newspaper articles with which I was familiar, and (due to all previous research and excerpts made available on my ad-stick and on my user space) I could switch from a main page to a glossary to a sidebar and back again, working as I thought of new additions. In this way I was able to work for literally four-hour segments straight, always doing something to add to the project.

As I approached the five o'clock deadline, I realized I could not complete all of the content I had wanted to, nor could I modify the original mindmap without a severe organizational headache. I still have a lot to add and a lot of ideas (some of which probably presuppose about five years' expertise in Java programming) to jazz up the graphics, adding pop-up windows, etc., but I do hope I can continue to use this project to organize my thesis and provide an exhaustive tri-disciplinary overview of the MMO phenomenon. I don't know if it's time to migrate to Wiki - I like the mindmap, for some reason - but I may do so in the near future. For now, the project site is at:

http://pages.pomona.edu/~ajc02002

Take a look if you're interested, and e-mail me with any questions or comments - I'll be doing more with this work next semester, through primarily philosophical (what are MMOs? In what sense are virtual actions moral and immoral?) and sociological (How are communities produced online? How is identity produced online, and within these virtual communities?) lenses.

My e-mail is ajc02002@pomona.edu.

--Drake (Ashley) out.

On Blogging

2005-12-10T17:39:00.000-08:00

To be honest, even before this class, the word "blog" had always been a pet peeve of mine, both from the similarity in saying "blog" I felt with involuntarily expelling certain bodily fluids and in the trivial content I understood blogs generally contained. Although my attitudes towards blogs are still by and large the same after this class as before hand, I do think that blogs made an interesting didactic tool over the semester.

The positives:

In blogging weekly reading responses and arguments for or against others' responses, I felt some of the academic formality of a five-paragraph paragraph slip away, and found it easier to spontaneously write on a topic once I had overcome the initial difficulty of getting started. Instead of a focused thesis-type paper, I wrote more or less stream-of-consciousness (which, for me, still ended up more or less focused and thesis-type, but that's beside the point...), and thus spent a lot less time producing essentially the same thing as I would have if I had turned it in.
As other people have mentioned, blogging in a web-page box puts writing in a different context than that ever-confounding blank Microsoft Word document page, and for me it helped make my own writing process less perfectionist and more smooth.

Also, as I found out with the project, the web makes inserting support or illustrations for one's arguments incredibly easy. Being unfamiliar with the blogging culture, I did not realize until about a week left that one of the main points of blogging was to include urls to different sites, pictures, etc. I just kinda thought people were being annoying in doing so, and because they didn't have anything more substantial to write. Again, this strikes me as a struggle over what we should do with a new medium, and my more composed responses also helped me to engage in the course material. I essentially took the project as a response paper submitted online.

Finally, the ease of looking over other peoples' posts through Machine helped me see how other students were grappling with the material. For my second entry each week, I responded substantially to a comment or observation made by another member of the class. I don't know how buried they are in Machine, but they're all there, somewhere. I liked the possibility of dialogue with other class members over course material.

The Negatives:

However, in my experience, commenting on other peoples' blogs was entirely fruitless. I only received one comment back, and it was a flame, telling me never to post on the person's blog again because I had apparently misconstrued his argument. I had to answer his concerns on my own. I also didn't get any substantial comments on my own blog, my own fault perhaps for writing on uninteresting or obscure topics, or others' for not keeping up with the blog in the first place.

I think because it is a new medium, the sense of responsibility in keeping up with the blogs is diffused much more so than in turn-in-and-get-back reading responses. If the professor were to wield the stick a little more obviously - for instance, commenting on blogs or at certain times with specific grades, or telling us individually that our work was adequate or inadequate, more people would have taken the blogging exercise seriously.

Another shortcoming - perhaps of my own - was in failing to write pseudonymously, referencing comments I had made in class, other classes I had taken with Fitzpatrick and how they matched up, and and generally making it obvious to anyone who cared to read the blog who I was in class. Oh, well. The one time where pseudonymity came into play was in the aforementioned flame, when I looked suspiciously at everyone in class to see if I could figure out who could be so uppity as to take well-meaning constructive criticism as an affront to their engagement with the course material. Then I suppose it was a good thing, although I suspect that by its very nature it escalated the rhetoric the person used to respond.

In conclusion, I think blogs have potential for class discussion, but would be more fruitful if people contributed more often, and if they received feedback (and evidence of observation) from both their classmates and professor Fitzpatrick. I still think that personal blogs are by and large trivial and generally time-wasteful, although I do get a voyeuristic sense in reading other peoples' blogs before realizing that I have something better to do with my time. And I haven't really had any experience with political blogs, although I can imagine they would work much like the daily humor of Penny Arcade or other online comic sites. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I don't particularly care for them.

So, here again, is a semi-structured response to the blogging question, unedited and unformatted, and done in forty minutes or so. Much better than reading responses! : )

--Drake out

Informal Tagging: Pwnage

2005-12-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

While wasting time on the Internet the other day, I actually did something that was relevant to the readings of the class. I had remembered that my friend often signed his forum posts with a funny image of Mickey Mouse standing menacingly over a small child, who was lying prone on the ground, covering his face with his hands, and screaming.

The caption of the picture read "pwn3d," a l33t sp33k reference originating from CounterStrike and other online games, referring to the domination of one player by another. (Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn for all you ever needed to know about the etymology and pronunciation of the term.)

When I conducted a Google image search for "owned," hoping to find the image my friend had used, I noticed the wide variety of images that came up. They ranged from funny to bizarre to sexual to potentially painful to violent and disturbing. All, however, were "tagged," either in the name of the file or on the images themselves, as examples of pwnage. I was fascinated and browsed the images for a bit too long, looking at them. I noticed, too, that different images came up when I searched for "pwned" and "own3d." I never found the image I was looking for, but

I think my experience helped to solidify some of the observations in the week's readings. While the tags I used for my search completely distracted me from doing anything productive for a while, as I browsed other people's conceptions of what "pwnage" means, knowing the tag did not make my search for a specific image any easier. I suppose finding versus browsing illustrates two conceptions of knowledge, one in finding specific facts and the other in understanding popular conceptions of knowledge.

One other observation, which came to mind when trying to find the following image to post,

was the extent to which the utility of tagged data relies upon common knowledge of jargon, slang, or l33t sp33k. Although some articles talk about democratizing the internet, it seems as though searching tags effectively often requires specific knowledge of how the online community is using certain terms. Kitties with guns and elitism within folksonomies - both things to think about.

Class Act: The Hidden Dimension of Internet Interaction

2005-11-20T18:15:00.000-08:00

In reading "The World of Ends," I found Searls and Weinberger leaving something out of the formula which I couldn't quite put my finger on. Reading Shirky's "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" helped me find it.

There exist elements of class that permeate Internet usage, and which go beyond notions of governmental access control and physical infrastructure which we have already addressed. In short, I'm not sure that using the Web is as easy as Searls and Weinberger (or NebraskaFarmBoy, for that matter :p ) make it out to be. One of Searls and Weinberger's most problematic assertions is that "anyone can use it":

"...if you're lucky enough to possess sufficient material wealth for a connection and a connective device, the network itself imposes no obstacles to participation. You don't need a system adiminstrator to deign to let you participate. The Internet purposefully leaves permissions out of the system (7)."

Although they explicitly bracket problems of access, there is a whole other group of class considerations which come into play. One of our previous authors already mentioned that 90 percent of web content is in English. Those without the fortune to be born in an English-speaking country or the means to learn simply cannot access 90 percent of the material on or pertaining to the Web. Translation codes are haphazard at best (try translating an excerpt from a work of fiction on altavista.babelfish.com to one language and back), and limited to the "main" languages. This problem becomes more complicated when considering the "how-to" or user manuals with no readily available translations in potential users' native tongues.

Notwithstanding the language argument, it takes a certain level of technological training to operate a word processor, let alone design and publish a web page. Although applications such as Dreamweaver and e-blogger may make web pages and blogs easier to produce, they provide no guarantee of their popularity. In fact, the nature of recent Internet fads (the "Badgers" flash animation, red vs. blue, even the recently-mentioned www.re-code.com promotional videos) illustrate that popular websites require a respectable degree of technological know-how to generate their hits. These are currently beyond my capabilities, despite two years of C++ programming and multiple Java and other programming books, and all of these assume access to the requisite education (classes, libraries, languages) in the first place.

Finally, there is the issue of the temporal investment it takes to become a moderate figure on the Internet. In addition to presumptions of time and state of mind (Shirky mentions that if bloggers did not post constantly their popularity would wane) that arise from leisure time available only to those who don't have to work practically nonstop in order to survive, there are considerations of the time it takes to educate oneself and become proficient in technical skill, and the persistence of online presence on forum boards, in chat rooms, making blog posts. Even assuming the education for writing properly, being able to include hyperlinks, etc., if one does not have two hours a day to devote to blogging or a similar activity, one cannot expect to maintain one's popularity online.

Even assuming access to it, can people really use the Internet as a source of empowerment if they are, due to lack of language, education, and leisure time, unable to attract enough attention to their messages or websites? Even if the Internet facilitates the on-line equivalent of free speech, the power of this speech is still as much tied to methods of dissemination, identification, and popularity online as offline, considerations to which we have not given sufficient consideration.

A Ray of Hope

2005-11-15T15:37:00.000-08:00

In reading the first half of Shaviro, and commenting upon two other peoples' posts about his dystopian vision of connectedness and the network, and especially where we are today, something came to mind.

Somewhere around pages 25-50 Shaviro addresses Napster, file-sharing, piracy, and surveillance. Specifically, he mentions how purportedly privacy-enhancing techniques such as steganography can be used to embed digital watermarks in mp3s, video, and other downloadable material that will indicate that they originated from copyrighted content. Shaviro also mentions web "spider" programs that can track down these watermarked images and initiate legal proceedings against people who possess them.

In commenting both about forms of resistance within the dominant culture and about my vicarious knowledge of computer engineering, I remembered something my dad told me about the nature of technology ultimately resisting any attempts for software and video industries to regulate its piracy. The simple argument is as follows - ultimately, no matter how cleverly encoded, watermarked, or copyright-protected, downloadable content must be decoded into a sensory output - sound, video, etc. At this point it can be reproduced simply by capturing the effects on screen, if nothing else. This process can potentially erase any embedded watermarks, code, or identifying material, and re-convert it into "pure" ones and zeros.

A crude illustration of this technique is to play a CD or an mp3 on your computer while simultaneously recording it through your computer's microphone to an mp3 file. Unless the identification of the CD is encoded into the sound itself, rather than just the data, and the variations of this sound can be picked up by other recording devices, digitally-imbedded identification will not transfer. This technique is a sort of quarantine of "viral marketing," reproducing the final display but not the actual code.

While many of our previous theorists have reduced atoms to bits and then seen utopian or dystopian themes played out in binary, it is important to remember that, at least as far as we're concerned, these bits must eventually be recompiled into atoms. Shaviro does eventually mention this when he cites the interdependence of the real and the virtual (130), but he does not hash out the consequences as far as they could be taken. Although I believe it is possible to encode unique product IDs into actual atoms - that is, somehow make the digitial signature emit a unique audible pattern distinctly evident in the song or video - I don't think this is what Shaviro had in mind. It's possible, though...

Drake

Identity Theft: Identity as Performative

2005-11-08T22:17:00.000-08:00

One of the most fascinating intersections of sociology and media studies comes into play when we talk about mediated identities. Several peoples' experiences with AIM and similar content-mediated communication exemplify the confusion and second-guessing we avoid or cause when we successfully or unsuccessfully appropriate another's identity online, and try 'pass' as someone else.

Here the sociological conception that we constantly perform our identities - not only as ourselves, but as males, as latinos, or as members of the lower class - becomes more clear when the social cues and signals we use to construct these identities are mediated through text-based chat program, and become more easy to perform or replicate without discovery. The sociologist Irving Goffman studied how spies adopt the mannerisms and appearances of different people in order to pass as them; the Internet reduces the necessity of looking like, sounding like, and moving like people ot merely typing like them. Various communications media restrict the dimensions in which we can perform our identity, and inversely facilitate deception from impostors; the telephone, for instance, necessitates replication of tone, pitch, cadence, speech patterns and inflections, syntax and vocabulary, but not visual similarity, while handwritten letters necessitate a certain curvature and spacing of text, syntax and vocabulary. Internet communications mediums such as Instant Messenger standardize the text characters, so that differences in identity presentation come from vocabulary, syntax, and idiosyncracies alone. The restrictions of this medium are finally approaching the point where it provides such little identificatory data that even our finely-tuned perceptions of identity cues can be deceived. Still, it is interesting how readily we can pick up on imposters posing as our friends on IM if we know their supposed expressive conventions well.

What does this all mean? Maybe standardized text-based communication presents a threshold of mediation through which we can no longer accurately perceive social cues as to personal, gender, racial, or sexual identity. If so, then the Internet really is a medium with truly revolutionary potential. But what fascinates me is the point a user calls another user's identity into question, especially in terms of gender or race. If the accused user wishes to defend his/her presentation of identity thus far, s/he must employ a variety of social conventions - essentially stereotypes - to perform a personal identity, gender, race, etc. Although such performances can be and often are successful, they necessarily perpetuate preexisting stereotypes to do so. Although it might be a victory for the individual in successfully deceiving others about his/her race, gender, etc., it seems a blow to the gender or race in that offline stereotypes continue to pervade the online environment.

Any of this making sense? I feel like I could be tying this together more coherently...

Drake

Intertextuality

2005-11-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

As advertised somewhat spuriously in class, Dr. Chica Anyanwu from the University of Adelaide in South Australia gave a talk about "Virtual Diaspora" at CMC's International Place today. Several elements of his lecture shed new light on points we have talked about.

Specifically, Dr. Anyanwu related his experience in going to the hospital in this country for an upset stomach. Upon his arrival, he was asked to fill out a series of forms detailing his name, address, date of birth, and medical history, and then had to wait while the secretary entered this data into the hospital computer. He was also asked to quantify his level of pain, on a scale of 1 to 10. He said he was then conducted into another room, where the doctor informed him he needed blood tests, an electrocardiogram, and a urine sample. Only after having these tests conducted and receiving the data back, could the doctor diagnose his problem, as one easily remedied by an over-the-counter medication.

Dr. Anyanwu used this story to illustrate an underlying point - that, increasingly in this culture, we value data more than personal experience. He also used an anecdote about passing through customs where the officer did not look up at him once - he merely made sure Anyanwu's passport and papers were in order. He also presented what he called the 'living dead' theory, accounting for the discrepancy between data and body in two different ways - even if we are clinically dead, we can live on if our records and data say otherwise; likewise, although we may be clinically alive, if our records show us as deceased we can no longer function 'on paper' in our society.

Ayanwu's anecdotes reversed the term 'database narrative' for me. We are constantly being reduced to and reducing ourselves to constituitive catalogued numerical and documentary evidence of our own existence. In our society we are born into and constantly leave an increasingly digitized 'paper trail,' and can quickly find ourselves institutionally, bureaucratically, or legally dead if we cannot produce them upon authorial demand. We have our social security number, our medical records, our school ID numbers, and our passports and visas. The back of our plane tickets read 'retain this stub as evidence of your journey.' When we go on trips, we bring back (digital) photos to continually prove that we have gone.

I suppose we are the subjects of two database narratives, really - one governmenally constructed and maintained, and in an age of increasing surveillance, including not only identification numbers and documents but also fingerprints, last known whereabouts, images captured from surveillance cameras, known associations, etc., the proverbial FBI file. The other is our own, which we increasingly assemble in scrapbooks, memoirs, diaries, letters, resumes, and photo albums. It is in first disassembling our existence, in reducing ourselves to data, that we can then use our data to reconstitute our own narratives. Privately, we pull together sequential photos to help us tell our vacation stories; we maintain long-distance relationships through e-mails and telephone conversations. Publically, we bring our name, SSN, Driver's License, and fingerprints to verify our identity when we take the LSAT; we assemble from various hours of commitment, personal statements, and letters of recommendation our candidacy for a particular institution.

Does postmodernism drive this fragmentation, or technology, or something else? What are its implications for us as private human beings, as public actors, as institutional members? Why do the prison system, the educational system, and interlocking international political systems reduce us to identification numbers, and now digitize us, and what are its consequences?

The Story Machine

2005-11-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

The following paragraph, from Select and Combine:

"But while the technology that drives interactive database narratives may be new, the idea isn't. Director of the Labyrinth Project, Marsha Kinder reminds us that virtually all stories - like language itself - derive from combinations of narrative elements within a given set of parameters. Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual process of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories, Kinder explains, particular data - characters, images, sounds, events - are selected from a series of databases or paradigms which are then combined to generate specific tales."

All sorts of ideas coming together here. First I am reminded of the widely-held notion that there are really only three or four stories, told over and over again in many different ways, through different cultures and time periods. Hamlet in the Holodeck author Janet Murray identifies as many as twenty different tropes:

1. Adventure
2. Ascension
3. Descension
4. Discovery
5. Escape
6. Forbidden Love
7. Love
8. Maturation
9. Metamorphosis
10. Pursuit
11. Quest
12. Rescue
13. Revenge
14. Rivalry
15. Sacrifice
16. Temptation
17. The Riddle
18. Transformation
19. Underdog
20. Wretched Excess

(Murray, paraphrasing Tobias, quoted in Arthur Berger, Video Games, London: Transaction Publishers, 2002).

Second, I think of Noam Chomsky and his idea of grammar and syntax as "hard-wired" within our brains, and the various "rules of grammar" that govern at least our sentence constructions, and perhaps our thoughts as well.

Third, I remember how the essays I have written for classes several semesters ago seemed formulaic, and how I could complete them without much difficulty on "auto-pilot." I also know how beginning in high school and even into college we teach struggling writers to write according to a five-paragraph formula, with an introductory paragraph that narrows to a thesis describing three main points of analysis, three body paragraphs reflecting these three main points, each with a topic sentence, textual evidence, paraphrase, analysis, and transition to the next section, and a conclusion that either restates the thesis or relates the three main points to each other in a broader context.

When combined, I wonder we essentially use our working vocabularies and class texts as databases to compile our academic work, and whether, given the Oxford English Dictionary, a computer program could ever produce similar work. We have talked about the Turing test thus far only as applied to short stories - that is, creative ficiton. It is one thing to figure out whether computers can write creatively, and another to see if they can write coherently. Several years ago I read about a newspaper sports-writing program that, given the stats of the game, could construct a readable summary in the formulaic newspaper sports-writer style. I imagine the process would be quite easy to accomplish.

In terms of essay-writing, the process seems more complex, but still essentially the same. I wonder whether we will develop the technology to the point where it can search pre-existing data and combine it to a manually entered thesis, and if so, what such technology will do to academic research.

I also wonder whether automated creative fiction essentially differs from research or journalistic productions, and if so again the present failures are only technological. It seems we could make a strong case for all our writing as essentially the same process, a complicated and as-yet organic process of sifting through our various linguistic and referential databases in order to construct coherent narratives. If so, we can teach machines to replicate them...

This post has been constructed by The Story Machine, c 2005, patent pending.

On Interactivity

2005-10-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

hLev Manovich's first chapter struck me as particularly self-reflective and anticipatorily critical, but the end seemed to leave the argument hanging.

We have seen the notion of interactivity surface at various points so far in the semester, and critiqued its 'myth' as Manovich does, but I wonder whether we set our expectations too high. We have tentatively defined 'true' interactivity as the ability to do anything that comes across your mind, to interact with any object presented to us in any way we please. I can see problems with any environment - certainly those of video games, possibly all virtual environments, and arguably even our 'real' physical universe - conforming to such expectations. On this continuum, I don't know where we should draw the line at interactivity, or how we should qualify it in stages, or gradations, of interaction.

At one end, single-player computer games provide a complex yet fairly clear medium in which interactivity is restricted. I read theory describing game environments as the ultimate teleological constructions, tailor-made to allow, challenge, or deny players' movement. In Tomb Raider or any simple side-scroller, the character simply cannot reach certain platforms, or execute certain actions, because the character and environment are coded in a certain way. This is notwithstanding other choices a player may want to make, such as engaging bosses in negotiation or free-form dialogue rather than blindly fighting them. Yet within these confines players can still get to places the programmers didn't intend to be accessible, and can still aim for goals different than those intended by the game. Do such actions constitute interactivity, or a degree of it?

The issue becomes more hazy when the game facilitates interaction among players. Here a vast social dimension of game-play opens up, where players can not only interact with each other in the ways the game intends them to, but can communicate with each other, negotiate, and collaboratively achieve alternate ends. A good example of this alternative collaboration is the Velvet Strike phenomenon, which aims to subvert the traditional player-killing goal of the popular online game CounterStrike with anti-militaristic actions and slogans. Here players can interact in ways the programmers didn't intend, even if they do so within the programmed structure of the game. I like to think that the presence of other players into a game environment constitutes a basic level of interactivity, as here the environment serves as a medium for person-to-person communication and perhaps other traditional interaction.

Virtual environments like LambdaMOO and Second Life depart from the telos of game play to offer free-form worlds in which the players themselves can write bits of code that modify or replace the initial programmed structures. Here, when the players become programmers of their own, I see a very strong argument for interactivity, as players are literally able to modify the elements of their environments in manners they see fit. They still find themselves limited by code or other, seemingly immutable structures of the environment, but have a surprising degree of flexibility.

Finally, in our own world, our interactions are limited by physical laws, and influenced by social and moral considerations. To say no interactivity exists in the 'real' world seems a reductio of the issue, but perhaps our interactivity here is still somewhat limited. To compare 'real' and 'virtual' environments I would argue that basic strictures that govern virtual environments parallel physical laws in the real world - both restrict our interactivity somewhat.

The question, then, is where to draw the line at 'interactivity', and whether these different examples offer discrete levels of interaction. Where to go from here?

The Evolution of Media

2005-10-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

McCloud contextualizes comics within a history of recognizeable sequential-objects-moving-through-time that begins with the 'paleolithic cave painting found at Lascoux' and winds its way through Egyptian tombs and Trajan's column (216-217). Neat. Comics, in codex form, are truncated remediations of ancient linear series, spirals, etc. that give a complete visual map of how everything relates to everything else, a concept which McCloud hopes the Internet will revitalize, and which he has experimented with on his site.

What several blogs have picked up on, and what McCloud mentions in his 3-D Spider-Man example, is the possibility that traditionally 'comic-book' media will converge in three-dimensional simulation or virtual reality (212-213). Trouble is, the medium of virtual reality, at least as a real-time simulation, seems as fundamentally opposed to providing McCloud's comic-definitive 'temporal map' as hypertext. And if that's where comic superheroes like Spiderman are going, it's difficult to see comics as part of the evolutionary process, as relating to computer-generated movies. They instead look like an evolutionary dead end.

One complication, then, of my understanding of remediation - McLuhan and others say we always describe new media in terms of the old. But does remediation account for or reflect failed technologies? What is the place of temporal sequencing in comic books in a world of live-action video?

Interestingly enough, I understand that at least live-action animation and perhaps movie direction as well employ storyboards to provide just the sort of temporal map that defines comics. Perhaps, then, still-frame temporal maps are still necessary in the final production of live-action animation, and - like the animal-like forms the human fetus goes through while it develops - still incorporated into the evolutionary process, even if their form is not evident in the final product.

Horizontal Rain and McLuhanesque Postmodern Essays

2005-10-14T03:08:00.000-07:00

So when we discussed Larsen's Disappearing Rain in class, I forgot to share the way in which I read the piece, which seemed unique and rather straightforward. Early on I clicked through the words, and as I did so I noticed the highlighted words at the bottom change. Specifically, Disappearing Rain consistently has a set of double haikus for each part, in what I soon took to be a navigation bar. I found that by clicking these in sequence I constructed a coherent and chronological narrative of the events, and thought throughout the first part that these fourteen pages were really all there was to the story.

When I re-visited Disappearing Rain, and read the second section, I noticed that I had not yet experienced crucial elements of the story, such as the last web page Amy had looked at before she disappeared. Only by clicking on links within the story did I discover that the second set of fourteen pages did not encompass the entire narrative. Even so, I found myself beginnning at the 'first' page and systematically exploring each internal link.

Unlike Afternoon, Disappearing Rain allowed me to manageably map the links within the article, and so to cover all the literary bases of the story. Perhaps I did not do so in a purely linear fashion, but I got the sense that through the navigational nodes the story advanced sequentially, although along parallel story lines.

My relatively total exploration of Disappearing Rain contrasted with the practical difficulties in navigating Afternoon, and brought to mind an interesting question. Can we ever say our reading of a (cyber- or hyper-) text is technically complete? I could argue that even after reading every page of a print book I could re-read it to find different meanings, but I have nevertheless examined the words on every page and can compare my experience to others based on shared content. The same totalistic approach can be said of Disappearing Rain and Afternoon, insofar as a reader can at least examine the content of every page, if not their structure and particular order. At least in this sense we as cyber-/hyper-textual readers could technically still share in the totality of content covered.

A counter-instance to all three of these cases, then, would be a device like the Postmodern Essay generator, where each permutation is ostensibly unique or at least rare enough so as to make a totalistic reading practically impossible. Scholars then could not even begin their discussions by appealing to overlapping content. What then?

It seems, if anything, that such devices would call attention to the formulae that produce them, as only this would remain constant from user to user. Our attention on the Postmodern Essay Generator naturally focused on its formula, if not the specific pools of words from which it pulled, then at least the general recurrent syntactical structure. Here McLuhan may encounter a rare form of medium that, since its content changes so drastically from one use to the next, actually highlights, rather than obscures, its form, at least in one sense. The Essay Generator draws attention to its syntactic formula, even if it obscures the fact that it is online.

I wonder if any medium could be truly transparent, in that its content, if not invisible, is so incongruent so as to draw attention to the medium itself...

Practical Theory

2005-10-07T15:56:00.000-07:00

So Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Jones visited campus this week, and I attended two of his presentations for a class. In addition to the inherent awkwardness of having a bunch of smart-aleck students (and adults) ask him questions about his books, I noticed several interesting comments he made.

For example, in order to add detail and visibility to a literary scene, Jones told one aspiring author to 'write as though you were watching a movie.' I took this as illustrative of our concept of remediation, here, a bit of a reversal on the 'horseless carriage' theme as re-describing the older medium of the book in terms of the newer medium of the movie. Yet here was a literary author telling his audience that when he writes he envisions his characters as actors in a film. I wonder whether or not the advent of movies and the detail and staging that they incorporate has fundamentally changed the genre of fiction novels, as authors seek to appeal to their audiences' interests by writing more like the screen.

It also strikes me that this concept need not be created by motion pictures alone. Even before the kinetograph and camera, authors dealt with, and perhaps competed against, stage performance as alternative fiction. Certainly several authors wrote novels or dialogues adapted for the stage, with scenery described and characters' actions in italics, and lines attributed in the familiar theatrical format, but perhaps other literature adapted conventions from the playhouses in their 'staging' of certain scenes. I am interested in whether such influence is even plausible, and, if so, demonstrable, since, as we know from Ong, oral plays, presentations, and epics predated written poetry and novels.

In response to a question about whether his stories changed from draft to draft, Jones said he did not know, because he 'uses a word processor, and the first draft is now lost.' Again, I saw his admission as illustrative of the influence which new technology has over the writing process. Admittedly, Jones could have saved separate drafts at different points during his revision process, but the medium encouraged him to simply re-write and replace his stories in one text file. I wonder whether writers before word processors tended to keep their previous drafts around, so that they could chart the evolution of their story arcs and revert to previous versions if needed, or whether, like Jones, they wadded up the paper and threw it away, as unrecoverable as in an electronic wasteland.

Two points I found interesting, as they show that new technologies really are changing the ways in which old technologies function.

Dr. WarTech, Or How I Learned to Stop Writing Longhand and Love the Bomb

2005-09-27T23:07:00.000-07:00

Now perhaps I can spin my whimsical title into something of significance. Warden-Fruin and Montefort are the third and fourth of our theorists to mention the significance of the military and in particular the atomic bomb on the development of technology: They begin, in fact, with "the blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki" . Frederich Kittler hints at the origins of the World Wide Web as an alternative, military communication network in the event of nuclear holocaust: "For it is well known that nuclear explosions may send a high intensity electromagnetic pulse through traditional copper cables and cripple the connected computer network" (101). And our favorite Marshall McLuhan quotes General David Sarnoff and Cardinal Newman in relating technology to war: "[Napoleon] understood the grammar of gunpowder" (13).

This correlation between technology and the military seems to exemplify the more general interaction between culture and technology that we have seen and recently talked about in the past few classes. More specifically, they illustrate both the (military) contexts from which new technologies emerge - recently, I would assume, as high-speed and low-interference communications - and the departure from intended use that they can achieve (the WWW as a communicative defense network versus the information latticework it is today).

As the military-industrial complex is a scary, scary government-created thing, it seems as though this link makes relevant another fascinating topic of media studies - that to do with cultural hegemony, production, consumption, and resistance. As we have hinted at in the VHS / Beta example, new technologies do not simply spring from the minds of lucky inventors to take the culture by storm. Their production, promotion, regulation, copyright, and distribution are all regulated by the powers that be. Even if our government and its military-industrial wing don't generate the lion's share of technological innovations in this country, they nevertheless attempt to control the use and meaning of such new technologies; likewise, perhaps ironically, we will learn of new technologies and mediums primarily through the old. So, in comes discussion about the struggle over meaning, representation of technologies, and various ideas of power, ideology, and hegemony.

Take Napster. Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. Combined with another new technology, mp3 format, it initiated a revolution in the music and movie entertainment industries. The government ultimately legitimized it as a pay site, but other p2p services in the spirit of Napster continue to provide technological alternatives to paying for music. Here, then, is a relevant debate about the intended use of a piece of software - to share legitimate files, or illegal files - and the steps that both cultural enforcers (the government, lawyers) and countercultural figures (pirates, hackers, and servers in Canada) have taken to produce meaning around the service. You can have the same debate about Linux (a free alternative to the Microsoft operating system), or cellular telephones with cameras (used to cheat on exams) or weblogs. As new media are introduced, different sides of the cultural debate strive to appropriate them for their own purposes.

Interesting. A lot of gaps that need to be filled, but I'm pleased to come up with an insight that I don't think we've addressed specifically in class.

Drake

Our New Oral Culture

2005-09-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

"The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology, developing cultures - enemy of the people, capitalist war-mongers - that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes" (Ong 38).

Funny how that also applies to American media today -- *cough, cough* foxnews *splutter*. Although it's been a while since I've even sat down to watch TV news - shortly after the AOL-Time Warner merger I became disgusted by CNN - I seem to remember political and TV 'talking head' rhetoric alike falling into a pattern disturbingly similar to what Ong describes.

What significance does this similarity pose? I almost want to draw a parallel between the traditionally illiterate 'peasants' quoted in Ong and the media illiterate viewers of such programs, but to do so degenerates into nasty and unsubstantiated 'mudslinging'. I will, however, explore the similarities a bit further.

Do our news media have the same version of such storytelling epithets as 'wise Odysseus'? Don't we hear about the 'bull market,' 'Communist Russia', 'President Bush', 'rogue nations', and 'nuclear watchdogs'? I don't know if all or even any qualify as such, but media buzzwords such as these and '9-11', 'shock and awe', and 'war on terrorism' at least seem to be as much fixtures of TV talking-head politicobabble as recurring characters and themes in preliterate oral traditions. Is it possible that such TV personalities and Presidential speechwriters are generating a new oral tradition?

When given enough time, Noam Chomsky has often voiced his frustration about the format of the news media. He has been invited as a guest onto shows like Hardball precious few times, a fact he attributes to his discourse not falling within the dominant ideology, and what Ong might describe as "a passing thought, however complex, [which does not fit into] heavy patterning and communal fixed formulas in oral cultures" (Ong 36). Within the format of the TV news interview - or, more likely, the soundbite - orators invoke a constellation of such 'buzzwords' in order to present complex solutions to vast foreign and domestic policy problems. I am interested in the ways in which such 'buzzwords' resemble those found in oral tradition. Is it possible that our politicians are re-casting the world in terms of such mythology? Are 'weapons of mass destruction' the new monsters which 'our' heroic 'troops' must defeat?

More on this when I'm not so hungry ; ).

The Jargon Dictionary

2005-09-07T02:21:00.000-07:00

From a previous MS course, and resurrecting the MarxWiki in some way, I've found that an attempt to pin down various important-looking terms bodes well for a more straightforward semester. In the spirit of shared academic experience, then, I am hoping to post on some of the terms Bolter and Grusin throw around in their essays on Remediation. Please comment, correct, discuss, link to, pass around - hope this exercise helps.

First up, the terms on Monday which I meant to ask around but never did:

immediacy: unmediated sensory experience, or sensory experience mediated invisibly or transparently to the point that the reader does not notice the medium

hypermediacy: multiple, or multi-media, often divergent and thus self-evident as such, but possibly convergent (as in visual, aural, and sensory cues) and therefore, paradoxically, able to dissolve the impression of the experience being mediated

Bolter and Grusin relate these early on in Remediation, arguing that 'our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them' (5). Still a paradox, but one that, with the convergent understanding of hypermediacy, is starting to make sense. That is, at least, the perfect virtual reality (VR) simulation; but I wonder if divergent hypermediacy can ever also distract from the fact of its own (hyper)-mediation.

remediation: re-mediation, re-presentation of material already mediated in some other form
or, as B&G tell it, 'pouring a familiar content into another media form' (68).

A bit of a round-about definition, and one sure to expand, but the literal meaning of the word makes some sense in this context. I recently watched Stuart Hall in another class, and the concept and discussion of representation seems ot parallel the topic at hand. B&G do seem to tread the dark path of saying that everything mediated is a remediation, and that everything remediated is a mediation, and so on. Makes more sense to me to say that in this sense, there is no mediation, only remediation. Oh, and that in remediating we are necessarily intertextual.

Example time. The Intruders: a re-mediation of a Borges short story, in that it takes elements of the one medium - a written work - and re-mediates them in terms of scrolling text, fragmentary text, sound clips. Also a re-mediation of Pong and other classic arcade games, as it takes the medium - an Atari or otherwise technologically challenged graphic representation - and alters the symbols slightly, as in the female O+ bouncing between the two paddles. Intertextual, as it pulls from Borges, Space Invaders, and Pong, and recombines them in ways that arguably give each new meaning. The Borges story, in turn, is a remediation of perhaps that classic aeons-old story of two men fighting over a woman (or two women fighting over a man, or two men fighting over a man, or other politically correct permutations), told perhaps orally, but through the medium of the spoken word. The spoken word, in turn, is a remediation of another telling of the story, and so on...

Terms of interest, to be explored when it's not so early in the morning.
Scopophilia and the male gaze: I read a good article on this subject about Lara Croft, Tomb Raider (the videogame). More forthcoming...
Albertian window: (25)

That's a night.

Drake out.