Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

While watching the Giants OT victory over the Bengals today I saw this new Microsoft ad:

Video: Pride

The ad is a direct response to Mac’s outstanding I’m a Mac, I’m a PC campaign, which effectively makes the argument that PC users are the dorks and Mac users are the cool kids (full disclosure: I have a Mac laptop from work and a PC desktop at home, and I also have a beard—the pause after the bearded guy says “I have a beard” is perfect). Microsoft takes aim at this classification scheme by having their own John Hodgman look-alike start the commercial waving “Hello, I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype”:
The Microsoft ad is effective at deconstructing the stereotype that the only people who use PCs are cubicle-swelling brown jacket wearing nerds who are really extensions of anti-environment corporate interests.

The ad campaign web site, however, is a complete disgrace, and continues to showcase Microsoft’s inability to understand and design user friendly web sites, operating systems, and applications.

Al Gore’s TV network, Current, has joined forces with Twitter to Hack the Debates.

Twitter users watching the debates can send a tweet with the additional extension “#current” which will be scraped for inclusion. According to an AP article by Jake Coyle:

During the debates, the network bent on viewer-created content will broadcast Twitter messages — or “tweets” — from viewers. In close to real time, Current will display comments on the screen while Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama face off.

It’s an all the more interesting new kind of interactivity in political discourse given that Current was co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore. Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current, said the technique — dubbed “Hack the Debate” — was not Gore’s idea, but he and Gore both share a dim view of post-debate punditry.

“He certainly shares the belief that the punditry aspect of the process has not been enriching to American democracy,” said Hyatt. “We’re trying to empower young adults to participate in the process, to have their voice heard, to join the conversation.

Current has been fielding questions from Twitterers all day. I’m excited to see how this works.

Naveed Lalani, a Fall 2004 Web Design student of mine at The University of Texas at Austin, has launched a new company called Pyrix.com, which “offers non-partisan political software that fuses technology and democracy for the masses—empowering the average political entrepreneur.” The first point in their 10 point Philosophy:

We Don’t Take Sides. We are non partisan. Regardless of class, race, age, gender, or political affiliation, democracy is unbiased. Freedom is unbiased. We believe a diversity of views and backgrounds strengthens democracy. Piryx is here to provide technology to strengthen the system — to empower everyone.

They have also lauched a new non-partisan political blog, RealPolitix:

Check ‘em out. He and his colleagues are doing exciting important work.

The October 2008 issue of Harper’s (subscription required) has a hilarious excerpt from Chris Offutt’s “The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms” (.pdf) which was published a year ago in the Seneca Review. A few goodies:

MEMOIR: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

CHICK LIT: A patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

ACADEMIC ESSAY: Alas, an unread form required for tenure.

COMPOSITION WRITING: An academic development in response to the economic needs of recently graduated MFA students.

POEM: Prose scraps.

PROSE POEM: Either a poem with no line breaks or a lyric essay with no indentation. No one knows.

Dan Cohen plots the over 500 edits to Sarah Parlin’s Wikipedia entry composed by hundreds of people. Fascinating example of distributed collaborative writing.

From The New York Times:

It’s interesting to view the mapping of the major speakers’ words with the words of Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches. They’re mapped here using the very cool Wordle, which my dear friend Suzanne Tiedemann introduce me to. Obama and then McCain (click on image for better resolution):

Whereas the overall focus of the Democrats seems to have been to link McCain to Bush and call for the need for Change, the Republicans were focusing on God and Taxes, with secondary interests in Business, Change, and Obama. Obama, however, mentioned Change much less often than one might expect; indeed, he the speech seems to have been written with the understanding that Change would be emphasized by everyone else. He would, instead, describe the Promise to the county of creating One America. McCain’s most used word, on the other hand, Country and Fight suggests something altogether different, one located in a protection of the homeland and taking the Fight to whomever needs to be fought.

The New York Times has reported the death of Robert Giroux, one of the most important editors and publishers ever:

How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be for the future to decide. As he himself insisted, it can take decades for a book to become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is now on any list of the century’s best, Edmund Wilson’s work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, “To the Finland Station” (1940); Mr. Giroux judged the manuscript to be nearly flawless.

He was also T. S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s “1984,” accepting it at once despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful.

Mr. Giroux introduced a long roster of writers who would achieve fame, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Louise Bogan and William Golding.

The breadth and importance of his work is incredible. And with the emergence of new electronic forms of publishing his passing is one more signal of the end of the print media era.

Absolutely amazing:

“The Long Run: As a Professor, Obama Enthralled Students and Puzzled Faculty,” is an interesting article by Jodi Kantor that will appear in tomorrow’s print edition of the New York Times. Kantor has some wonderful phrasings, like here when she is yoking together his political successes and the topics of his courses:

Before he pushed campaign finance legislation there, or outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw the map of his own state Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status.

Also great to see is Obama’s syllabus for his 1994 course, “Curent Issues in Racism and the Law” (.pdf). (Especially great to see is the topic of racially-motivated gerrymandering, which I saw in 2003 in Texas when Tom Delay drove the Texas legislature to re-drew the districts along appallingly obvious racial lines). Also included are several of Obama’s final exams and answer memos. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January I posted a video created by Richard Miller and colleagues at Rutgers that described what they are calling the new humanities. Part of that future is in the form of video compositions. This morning Richard posted a new video called WOW (as in, OMG! No Way! not World of Warcraft) in which he details the distributed effect of the distribution of the New Humanities video. It takes its model from Michael Wesch’s ground-breaking "The Machine is Us/Using Us" and builds on his work by incorporating invented writing spaces, Google Earth mashups, and images of the video on multiple blogs (disclaimer: including this one). Take a look.

He announced his video to the WPA List, a post that was forwarded to the techrhet list—(virtual) reality imitating (virtual) art imitating (virtual) reality, in a way. The list has, as lists tends to do, immediately taken a negative view, labeling it self-aggrandizing and self-promoting. Perhaps because I have known Richard for over a decade I cannot help but think that something else is going on. That the WOW is just as much about the fact that Richard is doing this kind of work as it is with the impact that his New Humanities video had on his career, travels and Rutgers English’s evolving reputation.

The WOW is also to show other not-as-tech-savvy faculty the impact that new media technologies can have on the distribution of information in so short a time period (and, hence, on their own careers). I also think it is about play—playing with new ideas, new technologies, new techniques. A kind of play that was just beginning at Rutgers in the days when as their first director of Instructional Technology in the Writing Program I, for example, began playing with web design and created their first web site—a web site that was woefully inadequate, but it was the first time we had attempted such a thing, just as these videos are his (their) first foray into video compositions. Our reaction to the web site: WOW. My reaction to the fact that I built it: WOW.

The imitation is homage here and is used just as we would use in writing and new media classes. We ask students to take a look at what other, more experienced folks have done and as a way of getting to know the technologies, imitate their methods, modes, and processes, and then see what you come up with. Often a student’s reaction is just that, WOW.