watching the watchers
Twitter Vote Report is just what's needed on Tuesday.
Internet Studies Archives
11.02.08
09.03.08
I've been spammed by Sarah Palin!
Will the mendacity and evility never end?
02.10.08
tomorrow
is all-day-dinner-on-the-grounds at the UMN Networks and Neighborhoods in Cyberspace Symposium. The ongoing diss research will be among the demonstrations — and I get to finally meet Momo. (We might have met years ago, actually, but neither of us were paying sufficient attention so that one doesn't count.) There will be all sorts of fascinating Internet researchers from around the U there as well, including our local famous atheist, PZ Meyers. I don't see how it could be anything but a good time.
12.19.07
some things
The word weblog celebrated its 10th anniversary on the 17th.
There’s now The Organization for Transformative Works, ‘a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.’
Of particular interest to me because of the whole ‘agency’ angle of the diss: A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
Fake Steve Jobs is maintaining one of the best repositories of of anti-OLPC writing around. He recently linked to a WaPo review of the product, which scratches the surface of the colonialist aspects of the whole project:
All in all, I'm conflicted. It's an absolutely amazing accomplishment -- this is a tough, high-tech computer that works, and won't break, and it sells for $200. On the other hand, I'm a little unnerved by the pukka sahib mentality you have to take to fully endorse it -- you know, it's a maddening machine, a devil to use, I'd never expect MY kid to be satisfied with it, but it's fine for the po' kids in loincloths?
The Last Supper in 16 billion pixels.
The Internet was closed so I thought I'd come outside today.
10.24.07
against the $100 laptop
About a year ago, one of my Scientific & Technical Presentations students did an informative presentation on the $100 Laptop. Her audience was my unusually diverse class (although it’s really not so unusual in the Twin Cities). She was Moldovian, and there were students from Thailand, China, Ethiopia, and Somalia as well. (The Somalian guys ended up being some of my favorite rambunctious students ever. But I digress. They deserve a post all their own someday.)
The presentation was more or less an encomium for the project and Negroponte, as so many pieces on the topic are. When she finished and asked for questions, H., who was the only Ethiopian in the group, raised his hand. He rarely spoke in class and stood apart from the other Africans he hung with; he was quieter, taller, and thinner. Skeletally thin still, having been born during the mid-80s famine in Ethiopia.
He was a remarkably reserved man, but when he spoke this time, his voice shook with anger. “People who are starving do not need laptops,” he said in his softly accented English. “When you have not eaten for so long that your brain cannot work, that you have dementia, a laptop will not help you. Sending us machines does no good! You need to send food to Africa. You need to send doctors and medicine. Not computers!” He stopped then, not wanting to insult the speaker. She looked at me, along with the American students. Clearly, there was no rebuttal for his argument, and no opposition to his ethos.
I was reminded of that moment the other night while watching the 60 Minutes special on Plumpynut. The product is being called “a revolution in nutritional affairs,” and it provides a new, hopeful solution for starving populations. It’s a paste made of peanut butter, powdered milk, powdered sugar, and enriched with vitamins and minerals. It doesn’t require refrigeration, cooking, or water. The chief nutritionist for Doctors Without Borders said in the interview, “It is like an essential medicine. In three weeks, we can cure a kid that is looked like they’re half dead. We can cure them just like an antibiotic. It’s just, boom! It's a spectacular response.”
Watching the video (linked above), all I could think about was H.’s impassioned speech. These kids don’t need laptops. They need food and doctors. A month’s supply of Plumpynut costs $20 per child. The real cost of the $100 Laptop — between $140 and $208, depending on what you read— could feed a child for 7 - 10.5 months. In terms of childhood development, that’s a tremendously significant length of time.
Before, I might have been able to come up with an argument against that — educational resources, cultural participation, etc etc etc — but my students teach me, and sometimes they change me. I cannot find a compelling counterargument for H’s speech these days. Certainly there are not-quite-so-impovershed countries who will benefit from this program. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that we are none of us free until all of us are free.
08.20.07
Colbert v Andrew Keen
03.20.07
a short list of longer lists of things to read
03.14.07
twitter and privacy
I've been watching twitter blow up over the past couple of months. Some smart things are being written about it already. And I just got my first email from someone who wonders why I'm not already twittering.
I’m the sort of person who doesn’t leave my cell phone on because I don’t want to be easily reachable. (Well, that’s slightly less true since we jettisoned the land line.) I never remember to sign on to IM, even though I understand the value of presence, and I can’t bring myself to make sign-on automatic. So it follows that no, I don’t want to provide the world with multiple soundbites about my life each day. I really can’t imagine what I would say.
This stance bothers me a bit, because it seems strange for someone who hasn’t minded blogging the past four years of her life and who dumps almost all of her photos into flickr. But in those spaces, it feels less like the world looking over my shoulder and more like a book that I’m making.
The only time I can see myself using it is when I’m traveling and don’t have the time to regularly blog. I was intrigued by the way Maggie Mason used it (and flickr) to keep the masses updated during her labor. The idea of twitter fiction has a lot of possibilities, and no doubt people will find business applications for it. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops in the next few months.
03.01.07
New Old Media
These are books I've been reading about old media precedents to new media forms. The Smith & Marx anthology on technological determinism isn’t explicitly about this sort of thing, but I figure determinism factors into this particular interest of mine. I've also ordered Lisa Gitelman's new book, Always Already New. Is there anything else I should be looking at?
(Of course, there's history of the book and new media theory and orality/literacy and digital texts and on and on. I've got a lot of that stuff around here. What I'm looking for right now are materials that deal specifically with old media precedents.)
01.08.07
The Real Computer Monster
Featuring a very early Cookie Monster with teeth.
01.05.07
on concept mapping and foundational literature
This is a literature map that I drew in preparation for a comps question that asked me to sketch the foundations of the field and map transitions between the periods when we called ourselves computer-mediated communication, Internet studies, and new media. It was challenging to prep for, since I knew I needed to cite the literature from 1945 forward while keeping the list to a length I could discuss in two hours. There’s nothing inherently post-worthy about that. The map isn’t comprehensive; I kept adding stuff in my mind (McLuhan, for instance) and making minor switches between areas. What’s interesting to me are two things I learned in the process.
1. I’ve always claimed that concept mapping doesn’t work for me. I’ve played around with Cmap and other, similar programs for years and even made pretty maps with them, but I didn’t find the process particularly useful or generative. (Which is not to say that I would ever discourage my students or anyone else from such things.)
When I was writing my thesis prospectus, my advisor and I staked out an empty classroom with a huge whiteboard and I wrote all over the thing while we argued. When we got done, I had a real, actual plan. The argument was part of it, but a very significant component of it was just having a huge, erasable space to fiddle with. I’ve tried to recreate that in my home study* over the past few years, writing on small whiteboards and the windows. (Since I rent and the landlord spackled the walls with stucco-ish stuff, I can’t write on my walls. Plus, I’d be too lazy to paint over it when the project was over. And it’s too permanent — half my walls would be scratched out.)
So I went out and bought a set of multi-colored, fine felt-tips and the biggest pad of newsprint I could find. I spent a morning making the thing at the top of this post. It seems that the value of mapping shows up for me when 1) I’m doing it in actual, physical handwriting and 2) there is an undefinable but sufficient amount of physical space to write on. Bright, varied color also seems central, even though that first board-map I did was just in black dry-erase marker. The act of writing it out by hand provided a clarity that I haven’t found in many other processes and seared it in my brain. When I’m babbling in a nursing home and can’t remember my own name, I’ll still be able to tell the nurses that Vannevar Bush wrote “As We May Think” and it was published in the summer of 1945 in the Atlantic. And what it has to do with Wikipedia and networked writing.
2. Some of you will probably find that last fact unfortunate for a number of reasons, some of which depend on what you value in the literature. Derek and I have been progressing in our programs at roughly the same rate for the same amount of time, and he was cool enough to post his reading lists awhile back. It’s amazing to me that two people studying in the same general area in programs that are both assumed to be in the same general field would be trained so differently. (Not superiorly or inferiorly, just differently.) Part of it, I think, is that my department has a much heavier emphasis on scientific and technical communication, which drives the social/psych and e-health emphases in my list. Part of it is that one of my Internets Advisor’s hobby horses is deep citation of the field. Part of it is just that our advisors have very different research interests, were trained in very different ways themselves, and come from slightly different academic generations.
So I’m wondering if we Rhet/Comp folks who study Internet-related topics agree on any texts that would be essential to the field? What are the things that you would expect every job candidate in this specialty to have read? I’d be surprised if someone didn’t know Bush, Licklider & Taylor, Landow, Lessig, Ong, McLuhan (but which McLuhan?), Bolter, and Turkle. I suspect that Collin and Rice would say Manovich and Selber, among other things. What else?
*When I buy a house, I am putting a classroom-sized whiteboard in the hallway outside my study, assuming it won’t fit inside.
12.28.06
clearing the link vaults
Oh, the blessing and curse that is the "keep new" feature in Bloglines. It means that I’ve cluttered up that place with all sorts of good stuff, some of it a year old now. It’s all links that I meant to do something with or save for some wonderful future purpose, but never deployed. The end of the year compels me to clean some of it out, so I’m moving it over here where it can go safely into the archives of oblivion for future reference. (Am I the only one who still likes storing links in the same place I keep everything else instead of keeping them in deli.cio.us?)
New Media
Andrew Lih on How Wikipedia Ranks
danah boyd on making net neutrality relevant and writing community into being on social network sites
The blogging special issue of Reconstruction
Media from Johndan’s old blog: the Eames’ Information Machine and the original iPod launch video
Via Infocult: timeline of the Wikipedia/Britannica controversy, a history of FaceBook, the Foucault-Chomsky debates on YouTube, and frightening instructional AT&T videos.
Information Aesthetics spotlights email thread visualizations, blogosphere linkology, and treemaps
Clay Shirky argues that news of Wikipedia’s death is greatly exaggerated
Anne Galloway’s working bib on The Internet of Things
Fodder for Teaching Presentation Skills
Guy Kawasaki on the art of panels
Dean Dad’s interesting threads on grading group presentations and ">handling difficult classmates
Academic Whatnot
50 ways to take notes
Book History
From Old Books: images from, um, old books
Jill points out material aspects of the original publication of “Death of the Author”
Professionalization
Via Prolurker: The Academic Departments: Home Base for Doctoral Students and the Center of the Graduate Mission of the Institution and Thinking Beyond the Dissertation
AKMA on productively structuring argument in academic writing
Sherry on study breaks (I’d send this to new grad students if I were putting together a comprehensive advice file.)
Pop Culture
scribblingwoman rounds up Brokeback spoofs
The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time, with linked video for each. (High ratio of Warner Brothers, of course.)
Just Beautiful
Aunt B: Breathe In, Breathe Out.
03.19.06
medical discourse and the internet
For those of you who are interested in intersections of medical and public health research and the Internet, here are a couple of articles we’re reading this week in the Internet Research and Theory seminar:
12.20.05
The prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul
It's late for the Great Pumpkin, but this fan-fic marriage of Peanuts and H.P. Lovecraft is worth filing:
As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch—mostly Autumn Gold and Big Max, as I thought he would find the Atlantic Giants tacky. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.
(via infocult)
12.28.04
the world brain
Mister Boyfriend blogged about the advent of microphotography a couple of days ago, and I was struck by an H.G. Wells quote he included. Wells is commenting on the possibilities of building a commons through microfiche, but it also sounds like the utopian dreams we have for the internet (and a bit of it‛s reality).
It . . . . was the beginning of a world brain . . . . a sort of cerebrum for humanity . . . . which will constitute a memory and also a perception of current reality for the entire human race. . . . . In these days of destruction, violence, and general insecurity, it is comforting to think that the brain of man-kind, the race brain, can exist in numerous identical replicas throughout the world. . . .
Also: The American Anthropometric Society and Walt Whitman's Brain
12.06.04
notes to self
Tagging a couple of older things here so I won't lose them:
Collin on "Mecology Revisited"
Knowledge Management: Social Network Analysis (I'm not sure where this one came from, but I suspect I nabbed it from Ton Zijlstra.)
Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: A Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Statement of Bruce Lehman. Pointed out to me by John Logie.)
Update: Also Johndan Johnson-Eilola's After Hypertext.