Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

Via if:Book, the current issue of First Monday takes a critical look at Web 2.0. The table of contents:

Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 by Michael Zimmer

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 by Trebor Scholz

Web 2.0: An argument against convergence by Matthew Allen

Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0 by Kylie Jarrett

Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation by Søren Mørk Petersen

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0 Michael Zimmer

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance by Anders Albrechtslund

History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward by David Silver

More on this later.

In two of my classes this semester, Writing for Electronic Communities and Technologies and the Future of Writing, we spend some time thinking about mid-20th century predictions about the future of electronic technologies. We read Vannevar Bush’s (1945) "As We May Think," view Doug Englebart’s (1968) presentation that introduced the mouse, word processing, as well as many other personal computer technologies; and in WEC we read Understanding Me which is a collection of Marshall McLuhan’s speeches and interviews. Now, thanks to a brief discussion on the techrhet list, we have another text to watch and consider:

What I find fascinating about this video—from a Philco-Ford production "Year 1999 A.D."—is how the producers have attempted to transform existing technologies to function (and to a lesser extent look) as they imagine they would in the future.

Bolter (who we also read) writes about remediation as a cultural competition between or among technologies (I’ve read it so many times I have no idea if that is actually his or my words anymore) in which we see features of the old technology reified with the new. In this video, however, we see something different: a kind of anticipated remediation before the technologies or the cultures have been invented for remediation to take place. The 1960s microfilm technology, which was obviously used to project the imagines on the couples’ screens, is trying so hard to be something it is not—and the actors (including a young Wink Martindale) are trying to interact with the current technology as if it were more advanced that it was. It is too bad, as well, that though technology was to advance as such a rate by 1999 gender roles seem was to stay the same.

A student blogging at Care4Poor posted a link to this site as a humorous break from the all the technology frustrations she was having. Its an interesting video, however, to consider in terms of our reading for this week—Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice (interestingly, students have been blogging most about (read: complaining about) Wenger’s instructive style and also calling it "common sense"; more on that later)—and the below discussion of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s review essay "Naked in the ‘Nonopticon’" on the ubiquity of surveillance. Enjoy.

The March 2008 edition of Harper’s arrived today, and in it is a wonderful example of how internet technologies are not value neutral. Ginger Strand’s annotation "Keyword: Evil" (which Harper’s has made available for free online) spans two pages as she uses call-outs connected to an architectural schematic to dissect the energy-use implications of Google’s planned server farm site, The Dallas, which rests on the Columbia River in Oregon. Two screenshots of the article:

Read the rest of this entry »

Some folks at Viz are having an interesting discussion about Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video which I blogged about below. Melanie also points to this hilarious (and somewhat frightening) parody in which the performers try to find three words from John McCain that can inspire as much as Obama’s “Yes we can”:

Marshall at Read/Write Web has a useful new post “Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche.” The real discovery for me has been the Ask.com Blog Search. For the last hour I’ve been looking at the results of a search for “education“—the link to Weblogs in Higher Education was worth the time. This will be a fixed reading for all courses where blogs are assigned, something I am doing more frequently as I try to better understand the relationships among multiple Web 2.0 writing spaces.

Via Mind the Planet, “Yes We Can” by Will.i.am, performed by Will.i.am and others:

This past Friday I was at Writers House at Rutgers talking with Richard Miller, Paul Hammond, Darcy Gioia, Elin Diamond, Carolyn Williams, and a few others about the future of the humanities, what Richard is calling New Humanities. Part of that future is the construction of multimodal video compositions. These compositions ask students to engage with a range of Web 2.0 technologies and challenge their understanding of composition, writing, authorship, scholarship, collaboration, text, as well as the role that computer applications play in determining the shape of the composition. Richard and Paul demonstrated the way that Final Cut Pro can be used to compose multimodal, multilayed texts by re-naming the application’s functions to map onto stages of the writing process that are often discussed in composition classes: pre-writing, research, storing citation, writing the text, reviewing, revising, and so forth.

The above video is one that is consistent with the kind of writing that we discussed: borrowing a source’s words/ideas that were presented in one medium and mashing them up in the medium in which the student is working and for the point that the student is trying to make. Will.i.am’s mashing up of certain phrases from one of Obama’s speeches with others saying, singing them in unison recasts Obama’s message to the other. The borrowing of his words (and the image of him saying the words) results in significant questions that can lead to classroom discussions of distributed authorship: Is Obama speaking the words that we have been saying? Or, are we recasting those words as our own because we believe in them?

Diane Penrod over at Blogdelirium Redux points to this hilarious student-created eHarmony parody by creating stories around Facebook relationship status updates, groups, and poking (as well as another by the duo Rhett and Link). Hilarious.

Credits: Produced for EXPOSED, a variety TV show at the University of Southern California. Directed by Mu Sun; Produced by Adam Sussman; Written by James Grosch.

Update 9:48am, 1/29/08: I just noticed that an argument could be made for this commercial being yet another example of the person of color as tech expert. See here and here for prior discussion.

Richard Miller (at about 1:35 in) to the Rutgers Board of Governors (1/24/08): “It goes without saying that we are living at the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history.”

The latest issue of The Chronicle has an article called "Blog Comments vs. Peer Review: Which Way Makes a Book Better?" which describes an interesting experiment: to see which is more effective for reviewing a book, blog comments by a community of online peers or traditional peer review. Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting portions of his upcoming book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies to his blog at Grant Text Auto and with the aid of The Future of the Book’s CommentPress is asking readers to comment.

After browsing quickly through the comments—just to see if they appear in the expected range of nit-picky and expository—I came across the following:

From Wardrip-Fruin:

The surface of a work of digital media is not transparent — it does not allow for direct observation of the data and process elements created and selected by the work’s author(s), or of the technical foundations on which they rest. Given this, adopting only the audience’s perspective makes full engagement with the work’s processes impossible. Some systems, through interaction, may make it possible to develop relatively accurate hypothesis of how the internal systems operate (in fact, some works require this on the part of the audience). But this is a complement to critical engagement with the operations of the work’s processes, rather than a substitute.

An a comment from Lev Manovich (whose wondeful book, The Language of New Media was removed at the last minute from the required list for my grad course Writing for Electronic Communities):

To a significant extent, modern thinking about culture can be characterized as “surface studies.” This is true of film studies, media studies, art history, literary studies, etc. Although each of these disciplines produced some work which engages with the production processes which led to the outputs presented to the audiences - films, literature, television programs, etc. - these works are a minority. A great majority of books, articles, and academic papers take these outputs as given; they are then interpreted using different methodologies (Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, etc.). What is not considered are the theories and concepts of the people involved in production, the technologies involved, and what can be called “cultural logistics” – the organization and consideration of networks of people, machines, media, distribution systems, etc. I think that one of the goals of Software Studies is to focus on all these dimensions and to demonstrate to the rest of humanities why their study is crucial.

If this is the kind of blog-based peer review we can expect, then I think traditional peer review could potentially have a formidable distributed competitor. Obviously the thing that makes it work here is the reputation and quality of the author, the blog, and the blog’s readers’ commitment to devloping new knowledge and exploring new ideas. For blogs with fewer readers it wouldn’t be as effective. But, Noah is starting a discussion that is very much worth having.