Blog on Blogging

Having to blog about the readings in a form accessible to my peers (and to the world at large and to my dad) made me more aware of my schoolword as self-representation. Do you all know this is me? Even in an anonymous situation I can feel all those eyes crawling over my words, maybe especially in the anonymous situation because there's no other physical representation of me round out the curves- except maybe my color scheme.

My blogs are much more edited than a reader response would be- not edited for content but sliced and diced of exceess baggage. When I'm writing on the internet about texts I've read on the internet, it feels useless to summarize or explicate, because you can just read the thing yourself! You're on the internet, right? My reaction needs to be a thing reduced, not reductive, but reduced to a focused, incisive analysis. Maybe its a reaction the blogs as mental diarrhea, but even more so than in a paper the blog form wants me to be terse: you don't have a lot of time, right? E-mails, blogs, wikipedia, they all have to be DENSE with information, not emotion.

My project is http://pages.pomona.edu/~lkd02002/ARCHYpages/main.htm. The links need to be put in still...

achewood

http://achewood.com/

I only just realized that the characters in this on-line comic strip all keep blogs. Even though the strips themselves are generally in classic newspaper type format, the strip as a whole is definitely adopted to the webpage format. This week even brings us back to old blog entry from 2004

in purgatorio, only the surveillance camera is watching (maybe)

http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/7064

Just saw Ariel Dorfman's play "Purgatorio," which puts Medea and Jason in purgatory seeking redemption through each other, with only a surveillance camera for audience. Purgatory looks more like a white-walled asylum and the camera plays the role of both audience and judge, even though no one knows if anyone is ever really watching. While in the acts where Jason plays interrogator, the camera is always on but Medea argues no one's really watching, when their roles are reverse, Jason wants the camera to be on, wants to play to the audience, plead his own case, but it's never on.

I was reminded of the Surveillance Camera Theater Troup as well as the Panopticon, both discussed by Shaviro. Shaviro said the Panopticon has been updated for today - it is more diffuse, it is everywhere. The first time I read this it made sense, the 2nd time not so much: isn't the point of the original that wherever you are someone's watching, isn't it already diffuse: what's the update? Now I'm reconciled to Shaviro's point. The audience is more diffuse. Anyone, anywhere could be watching.

Dorfman's play shows how differently people can react to that kind of presence: you don't know if the camera's on or off, but you know it's set the opposite way from what you want.

Web 2.0 IS Google

"in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

"While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide."

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

paranoiac

I'm still letting Connected sink in, so maybe I'll have something comprehensive to say tomorrow

I guess a book about the dangers of being connected really can't be internally connected if it has any self respect,

and just a few words about paranoia,
that quality seems to be the consensus

since I went to John Farrell's talk on Paranoia in the Modern World:

(Regarding the characters in Gravity's Rainbow):

any attempt to make sense of the way things are is paranoia
Shaviro does avoid to make sense of things are, rather he just lays things out

so they try to find something in themselves that is themselves (ie not something conditioned by outside forces of manipulation, ie something disconnected)
we think he's paranoid because he shirks connection, and you're connected even if you're just surrounded by a crowd - what is there if you subtract the connections?

but finally they realize that the search is itself something conditioned in them, so finally they free themselves from that search
and write a book that is a connected web, where the substance of the connections between sections is lengthened for emphasis

A Half-Dozen Ways to Watch the Same Movie

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/movies/13farb.html

Article in the new york times discusses the prominence of movies with interweaving storylines this season... The title though suggests a self navigated movie like the database narratives, but they're talking about traditional cinema.

Acknowledging that overlapping plots have become a formula on television, Mr. García suggested: "Maybe these multiple story lines are just a symptom of our impatience. That could be the downside of this trend."

Mr. Kirkman, however, cited the disruptions of an increasingly splintered society: "I think these movies reflect a sense of disconnectedness," he said.

Or maybe a sense of connectedness- the web lets us search the database for all the related stories, no one story can stand alone.

Jib jab jibe

Strong bad e-mail dvd's at the corner movie rental?

Maybe it has been a while since I went to a movie rental place, but I was surprised to see Jib Jab: the Early Years and 100 Strong Bad e-mail dvds at Video Paradiso today. If sites take their most popular material off the web in order to market it as dvds, they are moving in exactly the opposite direction from the innovation Scott McCloud sees becoming possible on the web. Not only must their material be suitable for the dvd format, which discourages innovative use of the internet spaces, but this is generally a backward step in the distribution of information. This is exactly the kind of material that could draw people into micropayments systems, but instead it's being sent through the distribution machine.