Lauren Mitchell at Viz points to Square America, which is a gallery of vintage photographs found and purchased at garage sales and flea markets. The site’s developer, Nicholas Osborn, writes: "Square America is a site dedicated to preserving and displaying vintage snapshots from the first 3/4s of the 20th Century. Not only do these photographs contain a wealth of primary source information on how life was lived they also constitute a shadow history of photography, one too often ignored by museums and art galleries." I really like that phrase, "the shadow history of photography."
One of the more striking exhibits in the Square Photography gallery is called "What Was On (November 1963)." What Was On is a series of 140 photographs taken by Martin Johnson of CBS’s coverage of the JFK assassination and funeral. Osborn presents 33 of the 140 images—each of which essentially the 1960s version of contemporary screen shots, providing a window into the events of the day and the medium being used to present those events. Consider these images:
Jonathan Harris’s TED talk from March 2007 discusses three of his recent mapping projects: "We Feel Fine," "Yahoo! Time Capsule" (which will re-open in 2020), and "Universe."
It is interesting viewing this presentation—which is essentially asking if there is universal human identity—after having read Marshall McLuhan’s 1977 interview with Mike McManus (under the chapter heading "Violence as a Quest for Identity") which is included in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan (MIT Press, 2005). In the interview they discuss McLuhan’s ideas on the "global village" which, contrary to what most would think when they see that phrase, is not friendly, but savage, violent, unrelenting:
McManus: But I had some idea that as we got global and tribal we were going to try to— McLuhan: The closer you get together, the ore you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve heard of. When people get close together, they get more savage, impatient with each other. McManus: Well, why is that? Because of the nature of man? McLuhan: His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of . . . very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. (p. 265)
Harris’s graphical representations in "We Are Fine" that are the direct result of his "passive observation" suggest that the global community (or the community writing in English from which his data set draws) is inherently interconnected, an array of colorful dots and squares floating in the ether. It is, indeed, a thing of beauty. We get a similar portrait in "Universe," where words shape themselves into multimodal constellations of information and representation. And, yet, I wonder just how many of these feelings (how people classify their feelings, that is) and words are the direct result of some form of violence, some form of identity quest. McLuhan argues:
[A]ll forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody. Therefore you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody, and so you become very violent. And so identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. Sit it’s only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.
Another question I have is whether we can see this play out at all in Web 2.0 identity construction. Do we find, for example, on Facebook, seeds of any form of violence in the construction of our online virtual spaces?
Posted inmaps|Comments Off on mapping our feelings, our ideas, and our information
On 18 January 2008 I presented a workshop entitled, "Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems," with Diane Penrod at the 4th International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society in Boston. The workshop was planned thinking that we had an hour: 15 minutes for me, 30 minutes of workshop and exploratory discussion, and 15 minutes for Diane. On the way to the conference location I realized that we actually had 30 minutes. So, we had to revise the session on the spot, removing the workshop portion and drastically cutting the talks down. Though it felt quite rushed, the presentation went well, overall. I present the talk I was to give in full here as I think it better showcases what I have been thinking about than what I was able to discuss at the conference. I welcome all comments and suggestions.
"Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems"
Several weeks ago my sister gave me a Wii as a combined holiday and birthday present. Ten years younger than I and a graduate student at Columbia living in Manhattan it has been rare in the past several years that she had been able to afford to buy me a gift of any kind. To help support tuition payments that student loans do not come close to covering she has been working at Planet Hollywood, waiting tables, running orders, exhausting herself on weekends. However, now that she is in her third year she is only required to register for one course. This, combined with a weak dollar that brought many tourists over the holidays to New York City and to the tables of Planet Hollywood created a kind of a tip-infused cash-windfall the likes of which my sister has never seen (and will probably never see again). When the stores were out of Wiis, she bought it on eBay-a palpitating thrill as she won her first eBay auction. It arrived in a box that once held a Sharper Image 1x/5x Mirror with Variable Lighting for Daylight, Office, and Evening.
