new media theory

2005-12-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

I had never used a blog before until this class. Without ever doing it, I had discounted it as an outlet for lonely people with no one to listen to them. I mean, honestly, does anyone care what happened to you (or me) today? No. There are people who are oppressed and dying everyday, and you’re writing about your life and putting it on the internet? Get over yourself. I just figured that the only people who blogged were people who had no one to bore over dinner, so they chose to spread tales of their mundane existence across the world via the internet—the largest dinner table in history.
Now for the revelation, right? Not really. After reading numerous blogs—not ones written for our class, because those had a specific purpose and were meant to spark dialogue—I still think that about ninety percent of the people who are blogging are losers. Okay, this is a little facile and a little juvenile, but I just can’t get over the inherent geekiness coupled with self-centeredness that manifests itself in blogs. For me, it’s like leaving an away message on A.I.M. that says “Class, gym, dinner, work, party” or something stupid like that. Dude, no one gives a rat’s ass what you are doing. Please just get hit by a bus. Maybe I just don’t like them because they’re trendy. That too is a definite possibility. Or maybe I’m just delusional because I’ve only slept 20 hours in the past five nights (and eight of them were in one night). That’s more likely.
However, there is one thing that’s fun about blogging, and that is that hypothetically anyone can read it. It’s nice to know that if you have something to say you can put it out there and maybe someone will read it. Then maybe they’ll have something to say, and you’ll spark a dialogue. Unfortunately, most people don’t have anything worthwhile to say, and bloggers are no exception.
As an exercise for a class, I thought it was cool. I don’t feel that the results would have been much different than if we just had to turn in a one page paper every class, but I did like the leniency blogs provided. I liked how I could do it on my schedule. I also liked that we were using the technology that we were talking about. For me, this was the best thing about blogging: it gave me hands on experience with an application that we would constantly refer to in class and that I would not have used had I not been forced to. It also made sense for us to be blogging in the context of our media studies class, and as I said earlier, I did feel that it sparked discussion. I definitely wrote a couple blogs in response to what others had posted. It took on the form of an ever-present, out of classroom discourse, and that was a good thing.
A friend of mine is what we call a.c. about i-pods. A.C. stands for arbitrarily cynical. For whatever reason, he just hates the things and anyone who has one. He refuses to acknowledge any value in them, regardless of how useful they may be. I’m like this with blogs, but to a lesser extent. I see the value in blogging. It really could be a very useful resource for encouraging dialogue and spreading ideas, and the way that we used them in class was effective at doing this. However, in my experiences with them, the vast majority of blogs turn out to be nothing more than the glorified electronic diaries of people who are very boring and very into themselves. For me, reading what someone like that writes, is more of a waste of time than watching Cheaters, and believe me, you know nothing of misusing your time until you’ve spent a couple hours watching that show. Maybe I've just been looking at the wrong blogs.

And if anyone is interested, here is the link to my final project:
http://pages.pomona.edu/~jlc12002/title%20page.htm

2005-12-06T20:56:00.000-08:00

I saw something very interesting on the news this weekend. This guy John Seigenthaler Sr. who was assistant attorney general to Bobby Kennedy was on MSNBC or CNN or some other cable news network, and he was mad. He was mad because in his biography on Wikipedia—and at this point the entry had spread to other sites—said that, although nothing had been proven, he may have played a role in the assassination of both John and Bobby Kennedy.
I was laughing hard when I saw this old man on television turning red with anger about being accused of such a thing. Clearly it’s irresponsible on Wikipedia’s part, but it was funny nonetheless. And this illustrates a problem with the internet. The consensus in class seemed to be that Wikipedia is a reputable source. I never use it because I don’t trust the fact that anyone with a computer can contribute, but for some people this is the beauty of it. They believe it is an organic and communal source of information, and they use it in good faith. But when people abuse the freedom Wikipedia it leads to things like this. But it’s not all bad. Sometimes it’s funny.
Here’s the link to an editorial Seigenthaler wrote about the whole thing: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm

2005-11-29T22:30:00.000-08:00

I’m in poststructuralist theory class this semester, and one of the main ideas we’ve studied resonates especially loud among a lot of the voices we’ve heard. This is différance, and books can be written on it, and I’m not going to do it justice with the paltry (and most likely contradictory) stuff I’m going write in this blog, but I’m going to try. So here is a very un-technical and highly reductive explanation of what différance is.
First of all, it’s not an actual word. Derrida more or less invented the word to use it as a metaphor for a concept that isn’t a concept. Différance is basically the space where some degree of communication is lost in the exchange between the signifier and the signfied. It’s the search for an origin and the realization that there is not one because our thoughts need language to exist so our thoughts and any ontological or metaphysical debate falls subject to the pitfalls of language. It fits into the larger ideas of poststructuralism because by denying origins, it tears down structures. The internet, I feel, is another materialization of this principle. I’m not really supposed try to force différance into a mold because it doesn’t really fit, and that’s the point of it, but I’m going to any way. It’s not as bad because I’m acknowledging it. Kinda like killing babies. Just kidding. Différance is kinda heavy, so I figured I’d add some comic relief.
So like I was saying, the internet is a materialization of différance. It has no origin. Sure, we have homepages, but those can be changed at any time, once a day, once an hour, every time one sign’s on. But, even beyond the homepage, the hyperlink is a thing that destroys origin. We can lose ourselves on the internet. There are an almost infinite number of pages, certainly enough to keep one occupied for a life time if one read every page, and the way they are accessed is sometimes programmed and sometimes random and sometimes a product of the input. Sure, there are some pages that come up over and over again, namely Google. Of all the webpages around, I have to believe that Google is the one which is most used. Any query I have I use it, but this doesn’t mean that I have to. Derrida (I feel) would say that using Google was a structure and a self imposed point of origin.
The notion of no origin excites people. It seems Searls and Weinberger were especially enthusiastic this. No origin means there is nothing absolute, nothing right, nothing wrong, and more importantly for pioneers of the burgeoning internet, no reason why the little guy with a webpage run out of his basement can’t beat the big mean corporate webpage run from the thirtieth floor of some huge building on the suburbs of New York because anyone from anywhere can access any page. But it doesn’t work like that and neither do people. Dealing with différance is hard, as is finding obscure webpages even if you use a nice search engine. Derrida acknowledges that there is no ultimate end to différance because once you find it, it disappears, because it is that which is not known among that which is known, so it disappears once it is found. Sorry for confusing you. I’m confused myself; I’ve been stumbling through this stuff for a semester like a wino with his shoes tied together.
In order to advocate this stuff, to author it and lecture on it, it seems a man has to really believe it. It seems to me that Derrida, although he doesn’t know where he’ll end, is constantly conscious of différance in everything around him, and Searls and Weinberger certainly believe that no one owns the internet and that it is just a series of ends. But in reality it isn’t. For Derrida, it’s just because he’s smarter than 99.9% of the people around him, so no one really attempts to think as he would. It wouldn’t be practical. For the other two it’s a matter of quality, which usually boils down to a matter of money, especially when we are talking about the place where most web journeys begin: a search engine. A search engine has to be comprehensive, and preferably, the more archives the better. That’s why Google is awesome. Images, pages, audio, maps, it’s all there. It’s awesome. But then the problems we discussed, page ranking, Google bombing, etc…arise. So really, despite the doors Google opens up, everything is still filtered through the lens of Google and those who [can] control it. I’m not saying that Searls and Weinberger would be against Google or other browsers, I just think that they have a too optimistic view about the internet. It’s just going to be commercialized and the best sites are going to be run by the people paying the best programmers the best money. That’s just how it works in America, and seeing that ninety percent of the pages are in English, it’s safe to assume that a huge percentage of them come from America. So American logic is applied to the internet, plain and simple, and it becomes another store front.
The thing about différance that’s really cool (among others…it’s like a poem, and there are many layers, as many as you would like) is that just by mentioning it, it disappears. It’s nature is of that which cannot be seen, cannot be named. It’s like Kaiser Soze, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and Yahweh mixed in one. And yes, I Googled Heisenberg’s name.

2005-11-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

So it’s almost the end of the semester, and I’d just like to present a thought from an long before the internet. Everything that we have studied this year has either been about or leading up to the advent of the computer age. One of the key ideas of these writings is the notion of no (or multiple) entry and exit points. This is one of the things that is special about the internet and about text on the internet. However, this is not a new notion. This quote is the preface to Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen—a collection of prose poems, most of which are no more than a page—and I’d like to present it to you as an early embodiment of the ideas that we so vigorously discussed in class this semester, ideas which came to fruition with the advent of the internet:

To Arsene Houssaye
My dear friend, I send you a little work of which no one can say, without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. I beg you to consider how admirably convenient this combination is for all of us, for you, for me, and for the reader. We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not keep the reader’s restive mind hanging in suspense on the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot. Take away one vertebra and the two ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again without pain. Chop it into numerous piece and you will see that each one can get along alone. In the hope that there is enough life in some of these segments to please and to amuse you, I take the liberty of dedicating the whole serpent to you.

He wrote this book between 1855 and 1867, long before computers were ever conceived of, and we generally don’t think that people were trying to do things like this until the modernists rolled into town with their collage—both visual and written. This was written when Eliot and Pound and Picasso were in diapers. Pretty advanced stuff. It’s just interesting to see that the movement for an interactive text, a text with no beginning or end or plot, has been underway for a long time. We’re just lucky enough to live in an age where the technology is not limiting to the imagination, as it was for Charles Baudelaire.

2005-11-25T13:36:00.000-08:00

I have a few questions about legal issues on the internet, so I figured I’d post them and home that someone has some answers.
Who has legal jurisdiction over the internet? This question stems from a conversation I had with my parents about the legality of online gambling. The first issues was whether or not it was legal in the U.S. Let’s assume that it isn’t, but that it is legal in Barbados (or wherever). Because it’s legal there, can someone in the U.S. use the website without breaking any laws? There are no borders on the internet. One can go from the U.S. to Spain to Nigeria to Germany with the ease of…well clicking a button. Does physical location of the user take precedent over physical location of the server? What about something less innocuous than poker? What about something like pornography? Suppose another country has a different idea of what constitutes child pornography than we do, and therefore the industry flourishes in that country. Is it legal for an American citizen to access that site? What about purchasing contraband? Suppose you buy some dope from an Amsterdam based website. Is the purchasing illegal or would it only be illegal if you had the drugs shipped to your home in the States? Would the company also be held accountable? Have there been any court cases dealing with any similar issues? I tend to believe that if you are in America, regardless of the country the website is based out of, you have to follow American laws. It seems like a sticky situation with lots of loopholes, so if anyone has any answers, please either comment on this post or post it on your own blog to it ends up on the aggregator.

2005-11-21T03:01:00.000-08:00

In response to inanycase’s blog:

I think you’re being too reductive in how you look at some of the issues that are addressed. I agree that they are a little naïve about how utopian a place the internet can be, but I think that you are being too cynical. Obviously the internet will be used to sell people things, and really there is nothing wrong with that. If it’s a free space, as they advocate, then merchants should be able to do business there just as anyone else, and I think that they realize that there is nothing that anyone can do to stop the expansion of business throughout the internet.
What I think they are advocating is keeping the internet as wide open of a space as possible. Just because the internet is being used to sell things does not mean that it has to be used exclusively to for that. Television and radio are always trying to sell you something. They have to be, that’s how they maintain their broadcasting apparatus and the programming. However, the means required for putting up a webpage and for creating a television show are very different, and webpages are comparatively much cheaper. Therefore anyone can put up a page, and because of this the internet does not necessarily have to have corporate sponsorship. However, it would be very easy for the entire internet to slip under government and corporate control. If the people who are using the internet become complacent, then it will gradually fall under their control until they control the entire thing and the internet is stripped of its merits. This is why they espouse that the internet can be bettered by anyone and that everyone is an end. I feel it’s supposed to be a sort of empowering message: be vigilante, and in this space the individual can defeat the corporation.

2005-11-15T21:25:00.000-08:00

One of the things I found interesting in the first half of Shaviro’s book was that he didn’t take on quite as cheery a view of technology as almost all the other people we have read this semester. Everyone else praised the technology, and rightly so, but they virtually ignored the down sides of the technology, particularly television, which is feel is an almost evil entity. I really liked the Warhol quote about television: “I kept the TV on all the time, especially while people were telling me their problems, and the television I found to be just diverting enough so the problems people told me didn’t really affect me any more” (p 72). He also talks about “fifteen minutes of fame” and this idea has already been realized in reality shows. Now anyone (of course it’s not anyone, only perceived as everyone) can get on TV. At home I didn’t have cable, so I watched a lot of the reality crap on network TV if I watched anything at all. So one night last summer I wrote a poem, a piece, whatever you choose to call it, while trying to go to sleep in front of the television. It’s pretty rough, unedited, and at times vulgar, but I think it’s funny and pertinent at times and will share it with you all (and it does have some profanity, so if that bothers you, you should probably skip it):

she’s a victim, i’m a victim
and we all had bad
parents as far as
we were concerned.

television loves victims.
propping us up there
with a sob story and
some makeup.

mother never held me
and dad said i was fat.
sister dressed me up in drag,
brother beat [dressed] me with a baseball bat.

it disempowers us
its prevalence
often makes for tacit
acceptance of its opinions.

it’s like a third child,
an only child, with
beautiful green eyes
and a big mouth.
very entertaining,
with a grin to make you
laugh and a frown to
make you cry.
a child that makes
you forget about all
you other children
with it’s boisterousness.

who is the well-adjusted
one—the guy on the dating
show or the guy watching
the dating show?
shit he’s a fucking douchenozzle
but he’s getting some
pussy tonight, as is
generally the case with
douchenozzles,
and i’m sitting at
home at two in the morning
watching him?
do people really behave
like that?
they must, it’s on tv.

the real question is,
are they acting for the
cameras…the critical thing:
how real is reality tv?

i don’t give a fuck.
that’s like asking
who’s shit is smellier,
the bulls or the cows;
shit is shit and
anything on tv is
nondescript shit.

of course i generalize.
there are good shows
on television.
idol, of course, is
a beacon of luminescence,
showing how easy it
is to make all your
dreams come true.

and then of course,
if you are runner-up
you can tell your tale
of woe and b-list pussy
to pat o’brien on xtra
or to a fake shrink,
a parasite in psychiatry’s
gut who will
console you and schmooze
you right out of you dignity.
yea. that’s right jug-head
your best friend did
father your fiancée’s baby.
aren’t you glad a
couple million people
now know this?

but it appeals to the people
who can’t afford the test,
and that is usually the way
that scummy things work,
victimizing the people
who are already the victims.

2005-11-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of things going on right now and there is a whole lot of media, people more or less trying to sell you their version of the truth. This blog focuses more on the spread of information, of news, as opposed to mediation for the purpose of art. Art, the mediation is forgivable, it’s expected. One is (presumably) viewing the art for the purpose of having one’s perspective mediated. But news, that’s an entirely different story.
Last week (I forget what day of the week, but it was the day after the three suicide bombings in Jordan) I was watching the news. Now I’m no conservative, but I do like to watch the occasional Fox News shows to at least get a little perspective inside of all the liberal garbage that gets thrown around among college students. So after watching a little bit of MSNBC and CNN, both of which were either talking about the three bombings or the Lewis Libby debacle, I tuned to everyone’s favorite and completely objective journalist, Bill O’Reilly.
Up until now this point (and this is after watching significant amounts of Fox News) I never really bought Michael Moore’s theory about how they corrupted the voting in the Presidential election, and how they are biased, and this and that. Let me be clear, I know that the network has slightly more conservative leanings, especially among the journalists who they give a lot of rope to, but I always though that news is news and for the most part, every network is going to be showing the same news. I mean, they should be, right?
So I turn to his show. Now of all the things going on in the world: suicide bombings in Jordan, troops dying in Iraq, oil price gouging, and indictments in the White House, which one of these gold mines does Bill O’Reilly choose to discuss? The Beach Boys. The goddamn Beach Boys. With the middle east going straight to hell and the White House backtracking over virtually every step they’ve made in the past three years, Bill O’Reilly decides to talk to an ex-Beach Boy who is suing Brian Wilson for song writing credits or some sort of nonsense that should have probably been resolved in the late sixties. Unbelievable.
This isn’t meant to be some sort of half-assed college polemic against “the system, man” and all that, but really, come on. I just couldn’t believe it. And to think, that if these jokers on television didn’t tell us anything, we’d be none the wiser.

2005-11-11T19:33:00.000-08:00

In response to Irob and the ‘amazing’ video blog:
The more interesting thing to me is what if the virtual reality was seamless, what would this do for our perception? Let’s say that there was no headset and the technology was completely immersive, like say a 3-D, interactive, completely surround everything movie theater. What would that do to someone’s perception of reality and of the medium? Would it replace reality? Could it? If you had an interactive, tactile, immersive 3-D virtual reality simulator would you ever go anywhere in the ‘real’ world or would you just stay inside of the machine the entire time? I think I would spend a lot more time in that thing than would be healthy.
I primarily wrote this because, as Amazing is to Irob’s blog, there is a story for this one: “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. It’s good, it’s short, it’s pertinent. Read it.

2005-11-08T20:16:00.000-08:00

I have a few comments on anonymity and identity on the internet in general, and after reading CourtandSpark’s post about the mayor of Spokane and how he was more or less entrapped by a reporter who he believed was someone else, these thoughts are further solidified. I feel that internet identity is an assumption. Because we cannot see the people on the other end, we must assume that they are who we think they are (or more appropriately, who they’re screen name says they are.
Honestly, as unethical as it all may be to trick someone into thinking that you are someone who you aren’t, I’ve done it before, and it isn’t hard. A lot of people have their passwords remembered by A.I.M. or whatever, so there’s not battle there. Also, as was said in class, the ‘l’ and ‘1’ look virtually the same (the letter is the first one), and I’ve used this to create false screennames. Once I even had a conversation with my ex-girlfriend’s best friend over A.I.M. I had dated this girl for a little while at the start of high school, and, as I’m sure was the case for a lot of y’all’s high school (at least early high school) relationships, a good deal of the communication occurred over A.I.M. It was just a lot easier for making plans and doesn’t require the focus or hands of being on the phone. The point of all this being; I knew her online mannerisms. I know that’s a weird concept, but people do type in distinct manners. Some people never use caps, some people use weird abbreviations, and some people put lots of exclamation points at the end of their sentences!!!! So if you can imitate that you can be anyone. And if you’re just trying to be someone random, come on, that’s easy. Okay, now that I’ve sufficiently wrecked my credibility as a decent human being, here is a funny anecdote about a misstep of identity on A.I.M.
Some people have auto sign in on the A.I.M so that once their computer is turned on A.I.M. is brought up. My friend Frenchie (his parents are both French and this will be important later so remember it) signed on and I shot him a message. However, my greeting had something obscene in it, like ‘hey ----head’ or something like that. Anyway, I got a strangely worded message back, saying something to the effect of “this is not your friend this is his father.” Now my friend is a pretty crafty bastard, so I figured that this might be some sort of ruse. I responded with a plethora of obscenities and called him a liar. He reiterated that he was not my friend, that he was in fact my friend’s father and that he was at work. He also said he was very upset at being talked to this way and that he was going to contact my parents. Once again, I didn’t believe him and ran my mouth (fingers). After a little while I signed off and watched tv or whatever.
Okay, so you guys know what happened next. It wasn’t him, it was his dad and he did call my house. Fortunately my parents didn’t care and were actually more pissed off at him for harassing them (you know how the French can be) than they were at me for swearing at him up and down. But the moral of the story is: you never really know who you are talking to.

2005-11-04T16:34:00.000-08:00

I have a few comments on response to CourtandSpark’s recent entry about the democratization of the internet. Obviously it would be great if the internet were completely democratized, but we all know that that will never happen. Intrinsically, it would be possible for it to be, intrinsically any medium is capable of reflecting democracy, but the simple fact is that the people who control the medium don’t want it to be a democratic space. I know this may sound like a conspiracy theory, but just think about it. Someone is controlling the servers. Someone has the rights to almost any domain name you might want, and although the internet isn’t censored, per se, the censorship is just up to the people who control the space and any space that we use is controlled by someone else.
So the question is what can be done about it? Granted I didn’t go to the lecture, so I’m sure I missed out on some good points that Anyanwu made that I couldn’t infer from the blog, but I’m not really sure. I know that sounds pessimistic, but frankly, I think that a lot of these developing countries have much bigger problems to deal with than internet access…okay, now you say that that is just another manifestation of large world wide problems and to not deal with it is to contribute to it. There can’t be democracy on the internet if there is corruption and genocide and despotism in politics. It’s just not possible. Before we begin trying anything like that we need to end the genocide and curb the spread of AIDS, then we can start talking about the internet.
As for the “insider-outsider” binaries there is really nothing to be done about that. As individuals we can do our best to try to avoid these traps, but they are intrinsic to the way we think, the way we speak, the way we do anything. The insider-outsider binary comes into everything we do. I know that I am me and you are not me because of this binary. I know what the word “cat” means and how it is different from the word “dog” because of this binary…it doesn’t have to necessarily be “insider-outsider” but all binaries are more or less the same: they set one thing in opposition to another in order to differentiate. As I said before, I don’t know what exactly Anyanwu said about this, but from the blog it seemed that he believes that some how these binaries can be overcome. I would disagree, but this doesn’t mean much because I don’t even know what he said. All I’m saying is the binaries exist and they will continue to exist as long as human beings do. Saying that we can be rid of them is naïve because all we will do is either disguise the binary or change it’s focus from one opposition to another.

2005-11-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

I am pretty ambivalent about Tracing Thinee Decay of Fiction. As an exemplar of database narratives, I feel that it does an excellent job. It is interactive and has a degree of randomness. Also, it is a computer based which goes a long way in satisfying Manovich’s requirements for database cinema. Visually it was pretty cool and its subject smacked of Raymond Chandler and the ‘good old days’ of L.A. before it got bloated and smoggy like an obese menopausal dragon.
However, and I know this sounds juvenile, one question kept popping up into my head: who cares? Okay, so this movie is made from a computer ‘randomly’ generating a sequence of pre-selected images. As a concept that’s cool and as a manifestation of that concept, Tracing The Decay of Fiction is successful. However, I felt that there was no real draw to the movie. Outside of the classroom—outside of a classroom where you are specifically studying the medium of database cinema—it seems to me that these films are nothing special. I don’t see why anyone would go see one other than for the novelty.

2005-10-31T17:59:00.000-08:00

This weekend I went to a music festival. It was good: Kweli, Trey, Panic, etc… Anyway, at the main stage there were huge jumbotrons set up for people in the back to see. I had seen this before at other huge concerts, as I’m sure others of you have, and I found myself staring at the screens as often as at the stage. I even caught myself doing this when I was close enough to the stage to see well enough. So this is no big deal and it clearly serves a practical purpose.
All this media studies goes to a man’s head, however, and I began thinking about what it meant to be at a concert but still watching it on a television. I have nothing against the television as a machine, but in my mind television (as both a word and a concept) is metonymous (is that even a word?) with television programs and, although I watch more than enough television, I still think it sucks. But they were showing the concert on television, so the content was better.
It was still a little off-putting though, once I began to think about it through a MS 149 paradigm. So here I am at a concert, a unbelievable concert, standing not thirty feet away from the stage, and I have my neck craned back like a ninety-year old on morphine slouching in a low backed wheelchair. It wasn’t because I couldn’t see. The televisions screens were showing a closer perspective than I had with my eyes, but I was no further back than I had been at other concerts where there weren’t tv screens. The televisions would show interesting things, like montages when the music got fast, or pretty girls in bikinis, but still I felt a little phony watching it. I was at the concert for myself; I didn’t like the idea of watching it on the screen.
I didn’t like not having control over what I was seeing, even though sometimes it something was cool, and most of the time it was what I would be looking at anyway (zoomed in too). So why did I have this big problem? After thinking about it for a while I think it comes down to a simple string of reasoning. At a concert I want to be present to the concert. I want be watching the guys play, seeing their heads move, getting run over by their music. When I watch it on a tv, even though it is a tv in the stadium that is not projecting any of the sound—which is, superficially at least, the reason that one is at the concert—it still feels like a barrier has been put up between me and the band. The experience feels less immediate. To me it felt almost like I wasn’t there when I was watching the bands on the screen.
However, this barrier is an artificial one. The idea that there is a barrier because of the screen is one which, although I may have felt that way at numerous other concerts, I was never able to express that feeling until I got the vocabulary and spent a little time thinking about the nature of mediation. Something that I think would have been incredibly interesting to see would have been Pink Floyd when they toured for The Wall (in case you aren’t familiar with their antics, they erected a wall on stage in between themselves and the audience as the concert progressed). This would be a physical barrier; I wonder how this would change the perception of the concert. Would it make it less immediate as the television screens did? More immediate, because not only was one part of the artistic construction of the music but also of the physical construction of the wall? What would it say about the artist and the way they perceive their audience and their audience’s relationship to the music? Those questions, however, are for a different blog.

2005-10-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

Manovich writes “far from being a transparent window into the data inside a computer, the interface brings with it strong messages of its own” (p 65). For obvious reasons, this phrase smacks of McLuhan. The thing I don’t like about it, nor did I like about McLuhan’s (and more so McLuhan) is that I think it is too reductive. Ok, Manovich isn’t saying that the interface is the message, exactly, but phrasing his sentence as he phrased it, knowing that his readers would at the very least be aware of McLuhan automatically brings McLuhan’s idea of the medium being the message to the forefront of the reader’s mind. Other than that, I really enjoyed the reading. His expositions of concepts is very clear and I like the fact that we are for the most part talking about technologies that are not either horribly antiquated, conceptually inferior to the current technologies, or peculiar, esoteric devices created by lonely mad scientists with bush gray hair.

2005-10-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

Manovich writes “every visitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom version of the site” (p 42). He writes something very similar on page 37 as well. I think he is incorrectly using the word ‘custom.’ He calls the page custom assembled because there was nothing and then all of a sudden this page, created for your computer at the specific instant in time that the information was received by your computer is unique. I suppose that’s technically true (although the more appropriate word might be unique), but he neglects that all of these custom webpages, in most cases, are the same. Some pages can be slightly customized, for instance aol.com displays the weather for whatever zipcode a user previously entered, but even still the webpages are homogenous for an entire zipcode. Custom cars, custom bikes, custom blinds, custom whatever have you, lack the homogeny of Manovich’s so-called custom webpages. I also find him to be a little loose with the term ‘variability’ in order to make convenient associations between different ideas. I like his ideas a lot, I just would like his prose to be tighter.

2005-10-05T02:40:00.000-07:00

The Landow article resolved some issues I had been having with some of the claims in the reading. I thought it was good; it was nice how he synthesized a lot of the ideas and essays we had already read into one essay.
One unresolved question I still have: how would the function of hyper-text differ in an academic or scientific work as opposed to a literary one? It’s pretty clear how it would function in the former. It would bring up tables or graphs or equations or references or whatever. I suppose that would how it would function in a literary one as well, but would this be a good thing? Clearly it is for an academic paper as that it can only enhance it. But literature is a different animal. Knowing about Hemingway changes the way that one reads his fiction. Sometimes it’s good to know about a writer, to have his references tagged, but I think that it can also be a detriment. It could shift the emphasis of the reader from discerning what the work means to tracing what of himself, of his story, the writer is conveying in his work. Hemingway is kinda a bad example though. I just wonder what the hypermediated version of One Hundred Years of Solitude would be like…

2005-10-03T03:32:00.000-07:00

Page two of the Bolter reads “many, perhaps most, of these texts will someday cease to be printed and will instead be distributed in electronic form.” He goes on to theorize that after a while all but thick science books will be electronic with people buzzing around on their fancy high speed monorails reading futuristic i-books in some sort of paperless utopia. Well that’s not exactly it, but I get the impression that he would have written that if people would still take him seriously if he did. Anyway, I think that it’s a pretty empty statement. Okay, so books will be bought online instead of from a bookstore…so you download a book like we downloaded the reading. But guess what, we print it out. It’s an empty statement because it only superficially changes the book. Sure, there aren’t any more ‘books’ as we know it. There aren’t homogenous covers and homogenous pagination, but those are just ornamentation. The text is the same. It seems like he does this a lot: make sweeping statements about a technology that seem like they really change the way we interact with it when in actuality, for kids like us, all this stuff he is talking about is no big deal. It’s almost intuitive. Maybe this means he’s right; I just think he’s being obvious.

2005-09-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

On page 187 in the chapter Automatic Writing, Gitelman writes “the connections between authorship and writing became attenuated and obscure when the latter became newly ‘automatic.’” I have a question for all of you: how does this attenuation/obfuscation of the author affect the author’s process or position? I have a hard time thinking about this because for me, the classic image of an author is some white-haired, sweatered old man sitting in a beige room banging away in front of a typerwrite or glowing screen. However, I could see someone who was used to writing by hand seeing this as almost a Milli Vanilli (or however it’s spelled…I don’t think they deserve me to take the effort of getting their shamed name correct) act. It seems like it could be perceived as a sort of magic box, an unnatural extension of man. However, even though it affects the process of writing, I do not feel that it affects the position of the writer. Writers I feel will always be revered because there is no more efficient of a way to convey information than by writing…film may convey more directly (or rather with less room for the viewer’s imagination, thus more control of the artist) but I think it levels off after a while…someone like Faulkner is just as effective as a filmmaker…however, imagine an encyclopedia on film. That would suck. So what do you guys think?

2005-09-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

I feel like a lot the readings have made a key oversight about the nature of modern media. Maybe it’s because they were all written at least a few years ago, before the advent of the internet as we know it, and didn’t account for the soon to be ubiquity of the internet. I don’t know…but I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of this.
Anyway, so what it is, this mind-blowing revelation, is that far from merely consolidating information, the internet totally changes the way that we access information (and I don’t mean in the sense that we can do things from home that we would have had to go to a library to do ten years ago, although that is equally big). I think a fundamental difference between the internet and any other media or database or whatever word you want to use for it is the way the input/output works.
So the internet is on computers, and computers (or calculators) work by someone inputting data and then the machine spitting out an answer. I feel like this is a pretty conservative, safe, basic definition of a computer. The only difference between the internet and a T.I. 89 is the amount of information that the machine can accept in the input and spit out from the output.
This whole (and definitely very profound) revelation (which is not yet fully revealed) came about when I was looking up the number of a pizza place (San Biagio’s in Upland…I’m telling you guys, go to this place—it’s in the same shopping center as Trader Joe’s, on the south side). So I went to the phone book and found the number. Last week my roommate had looked up the number online. I got to thinking about the difference between our two methods, how I knew what I was looking for and then had to find it in this assembled mass of phone numbers. My roommate knew what he was looking for, typed it in and the website spit it out. I haven’t figured out how this difference affects people or media (save in the sense of convenience) but I think that we can all agree that in some way it is fundamentally different and something that would have been inconceivable before the advent of electronic information processing (even as primitive as the arithmetic calculator). I just haven’t noticed any of the reading bring up this very elemental difference…has anyone? If so, which author(s)?

2005-09-20T04:54:00.000-07:00

For a while after reading the McLuhan and the Bolter and Grusin I was kinda like, “ok, so what’s your point?” A fair bit of the material seemed intuitive to me and that which wasn’t was more or less comprehendible after one or two look overs. It seemed like they were just verbalizing things that I could easily understand…little observations that had no direction. Then tonight something kinda hit me. The sheer fact that a lot of the material seems intuitive is almost creepy. These things that they are talking about are what we are thinking when we aren’t really thinking and the things that are precursors to understanding media when we are thinking…they are engrained in media, innate to the point that I didn’t even think about how they were affecting my thought processes until now because the t.v. and the computer and the playstation all feel so right at home in my living room.

2005-09-19T01:23:00.000-07:00

McLuhan…what’s his deal? It seems like he would have all of us living in th woods sending packaged pipe bombs to captains of industry.
I enjoyed reading him, although I rarely agreed with what he said. I don’t think that the medium is the message or that technology necessarily numbs us. I got a big kick out reading him because he seemed to say things out of nowhere with no way of backing them up. Here are a few:
“Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an eggs’s idea for getting more eggs.”
“The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural. He is outrage by our visual spying, however, finding this quite unnatural.”
“But since TV, the frive to participation has ended adolescence and every American home his its Berlin wall.”
These are just a few examples; the article is rich in them. He tries to prove reality using comparisons from Shakespeare and makes unfounded claims (or at least very very broad generalizations) all over the place. He seems like more of an activist than an academic, using scare tactics that would work only if the Soviet Union was still in business. He seems to have no faith in the people (not that I have that much faith in them…). I found what he was saying to be engaging, but very very wrong. It’s like watching a gifted orator spout b.s.: very captivating, but ultimately it results in an even deeper hatred for the speaker because of his eloquence.

2005-09-17T19:53:00.000-07:00

Ong is constantly referring to how people in the past viewed writing. While I feel that it is important to be aware of the past, I feel that how people in the past felt about writing is more or less irrelevant to our world. Ong calls writing a technology. I accept that it was a technology (although at this point it is so prevalent that I feel skill is a more apt word). Okay, though, so it was a technology…even assuming that it is still a technology…why should I care how people five hundred years ago viewed writing? Now everyone (almost) can read or write…his brining up how writing was conceived of in the distant past is like talking about what the first person to make fire thought. Yea, I’m sure they thought it was great, and it was and it’s still really great, but I can just go to my kitchen and make fire so why even worry about it?
The nature of the written word has changed since then. It is changing now, and technology is evolving so fast that the world is entirely different from how it was fifty years ago. I just thought that his whole little section on the history of writing and the shaping of consciousness was a little unnecessary or at least not fully thought through.

2005-09-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about the internet tonight, more specifically, I was thinking about internet porn and wondering what the amateur (I suppose semi-pro would be a more appropriate term) porn business would be like if there was no internet. I suppose it would be non-existent unless you were to get two VCRs and sell VHS copies of yourself and whoever to your neighbors. Because of the internet any one or two or six people can have sex, film it, and charge anyone anywhere with a computer to view it.
Then I thought about the differences between ‘amateur’ and professional porn—mostly about cinematography (amateur porn certainly gives the viewer more of a feeling of immediacy: the camcorders, the sloppy camera work, and the p.o.v. shots)—and accidentally stumbled into the territory of the theory we were talking about today.
The internet is used to convey information or expression just like every other traditional medium we have ever come across. In that sense it’s no different from television or radio or the movies. However, one, if not the predominant, factor that separates the internet from any other established medium is the lack of an establishment. Sure, sure, ‘anybody’ can make it in the movies or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that to get a movie made, or book published, or a song on the radio an artist has to please some one who has access to the equipment to make something like that possible. It takes money, significant amounts often times, to do things like that. Money that most people do not have.
However, to distribute something on the internet, all a person needs is a computer. You can get pro-tools, record an album, and allow anyone with a computer to access it. This will cost around twelve hundred bucks and will completely bypass the entire established music industry. A person can write a novel and put it up for all to read without the approval of some editor trained in finding bestsellers. Basically the internet has made the media more immediate. It not only, because of its speed and accessibility, makes the obtaining of information easier, it also removes any sort of censorship, creative or otherwise. It gives the common man with an idea and a little motivation a space to put up his poems (or his porn); it levels the playing field (at least as much as one can ask for). It has the power to unmediate the media, and that, I feel, is it’s greatest virtue.

2005-09-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

Can there be varying degrees of immediacy or is it simply that something is immediate or it isn’t? Take concerts for example. I’ve been to concerts where the bands just play the songs exactly as they are on their record. True, this is an immediate experience because you are there, it is real, and they are performing. However, take a band like Phish. They never play the same song the same way twice. This is what drives their fan base, the knowledge that by going to a show you are guaranteed to see something new. Does this make the experience more immediate?
I feel that in some way it does; it’s a matter of improvisation versus repetition. One is in the moment, a live, mutable, and unknown entity, the other is basically a puppet show. I don’t argue that one is immediate and the other one isn’t…I’m just wondering is there are varying degrees of it because it certainly seems to me that improvised music is more immediate than non-improvised if only because improvisation makes the music immediate to the musicians as well as the audience.

2005-09-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

What did everyone think of the Invader game? I thought it was an interesting idea but all in all a failure. I believe that if someone creates something and decides to use a non-traditional medium then they had better have a good reason for choosing that medium and had better execute their creation flawlessly. Basically, why write a videogame when you could write a book?
Clearly there a reasons to create a videogame instead of a book and videogames can be excellent story telling vehicles. However, those are excellent videogames and the interaction between person and CPU is crucial to relaying this story. This was not and excellent game. I felt that it was largely a dog and pony show to make up for poor story craft, which, because it was a self-proclaimed “story told in ten videogames,” should have gotten more attention. I found the words hard to read and the games boring. I was largely confused by the plot and the games and did not see how they really related to each other. Basically, I thought it was a neat trick, but nothing more than that.