New Media

Blog on Blogging

2005-12-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-05T23:16:00.000-08:00

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)

2005-11-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-21T22:58:00.000-08:00

"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

2005-11-17T21:57:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-12T17:54:00.000-08:00

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.

countering systemic bias

2005-11-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_Systemic_Bias_Open_Tasks

I've been meaning to put up a link to the Wikipedia Countering Systemic Bias group for a while now, but it is particularly pertinant to our discussion of who is excluded from the net. The link above is to the open tasks list for wikipedia. Browsing this maps out to some extent the concentration of information in general on the web- right down to simply the geographical holes on wikipedia. Even if it doesn't really show what really is being left out, it shows at least what we are concerned is being left out. :)

Also, it was brought up in class today that the original conception of web-based communities and identity as a separate realm from RL, a realm to which people might escape to, has been replaced by an understanding of this kind of communication as an extension of RL relationships. My latest post was posed in terms of the more antiquated understanding: the web significantly changes the way people interact, you can masquerade on the web to an extent that is atypical for RL situations (depending on what kind of parties you go to), the same race, class, and gender concerns in RL change on the web to a different set of discrimination-type concerns. So we can either lift our discussion from race out of RL and apply it directly to the web, or we can recognze that although it may be an extension of RL communication, it transforms processes of recognition such that we need to address these concerns in new ways.

Maybe the extent to which we favor one approach over the other- in the beginning when the web was less populist it may have more akin to a masquerade than an extension of typical social interactions. Now those insults thrown around by the 14-yr-old-boy-types are probably just the racial/gender slurs they use in conversation with their peers- they do not experience any kind of identity shift when they move into the broader community of the web. As the web becomes more accessible, letting more people in, the refractive index of the screen approaches that of the air.

the minimalist lofT

2005-11-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

"I would prefer using Microsoft Windows exactly the way it was installed at the factory instead of customizing it in the hope of expressing my 'unique identity.'"

Is the statement ironic or simply paradoxical? In any case I think that Lev on pages 128-9 in the chapter "The Operations" is drawing from the same application of Simmel to new media that comes up in Bell.
He quotes Muschamp in the New York Times magazine: "the public realm has become a collective repository of dreams and designs from which the self requires refuge" - "pre-established identities" are the only ones available to the self in the land of selection, in modern life and new media.

just can t stop posting on this film

2005-11-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

We talked a lot about misrepresenting "identity" on the internet in order to get what you want- that is, in order to misrepresent yourself to the people you already know, to play a joke, to do something slimey.

But I wonder about what drives people to create alternative identities in these online communities- communities that Bell indicates often develop to be fairly conservative in their structures. I see these identities as a way to expand, so be able to do something you would never do in RL. (I think we talked a little about how things you'd say on a Messenger program you'd never say in RL.)

"Me and You and Everyone We Know" gives an odd example of one person using the screening effect of the computer to masquerade as something he is not, as someone with a lot more control and power over his own life. A three-year-old kid who doesn't know how to write manages to write on a messsenger program, primarily using the operations (cut and paste) to arrange a meeting with a woman. (two notes- it just hit me that he must be able to recognize the words as images, and that's why he can do the cut and paste. also, don't be concerned, this is not that kind of film. the situation turns out more touching than disastrous)

I bring up this example to illustrate the masquerade as power play, that is, as a kind of equalized for those who otherwise would be physically unequal. Oops, I've come to equality, didn't mean to do that. In Snow Crash Neal Stephenson's hypernet (I forget the word he uses) develops classism based on appearance- the quality of your avator, the technological savvy gone into it or its priciness allow people to make the same kind of visual judgements as in RL. (Stephenson's vision is more like virual reality.) Not a bad model- neo-discrimination on the web.

Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life," 1903

2005-11-06T15:49:00.000-08:00

In chapter five, Bell cites Herrington writing on Simmel: "Simmel's writings show how 'the individual uses the alienating experiences of modern life to promote a more cosmopolitan form of individuality.'" Bell interprets Simmel's writing to mean, "The expressive individual, who wears his or her identity on the surfaces of his or her body, performs a new mode of communication based on signs."

I think that Bell fails to explore the extent to which Simmel's exploration of personality in the metropolis can be extended to on-line communities. He draws the comparison between these communities and cities (plus virtual safety) but he glosses over Simmel as "making individuality work" within the anonymity, heterogeneity of the city.

Simmel makes the point in "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) that in the metropolis "extremities and peculiarities and individualizations must be produced and they must be over-exaggerated merely to be brought into the awareness even of the individual himself." (emphasis mine)

So these communities, these tribes as Herrington would have it, of people with common interests derives from over-exaggeration of these interests in order to define the personality within the onslaught of "existing goods and values."

Simmel is talking about the metropolis, but he could very well be talking about the web:

From one angle life is made infinitely more easy in the sense that stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention, present themselves from all sides and carry it in a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing. But from another angle, life is composed more and more of these impersonal cultural elements and existing goods and values which seek to suppress peculiar personal interests and incomparabilities.

So the last bit offhand doesn't sound like web- the suppression of interests? Blasphemous- you can be anything and anyone and find your niche. Actually, though, you have to classify yourself, define yourself as a member of one tribe or another, pit yourself in the great spectrum of possibilities. Given the reduction of the self to text, your only escape is rhetorical irony...

I see as support for this in Bell's article the example of Kaloski's adventures in the LambdaMOO 'sex rooms': "If you want sex, change your gender to female." was the message she received when she presented herself as a "a tall-down covered spivak." Turns out I can't figure out what a spivak is (is this a typo)? but the lesson is that you tailor your personality to fit in by over-exaggerating traits at the expense of individuality - "the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture."

the Operations

2005-11-01T23:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.mrpicassohead.com/create.html

Maybe a better example of Lev's "operations" chapter art as selection. Here art is actually a process of selection from a limited space, whose bounds we see, and yet the possibilities are virtually(?) infinite. There are even clearly delineated operations at the bottom of the screen. What makes this particularly Manovichean is that there really can be no input from the user outside the selections.

Is it weird that you can post-date Blog entries?

Lev misses the mark

2005-10-31T13:00:00.000-08:00

Lev misses the mark.

On paper, maybe this sounded good. Lev’s interview certainly is persuasive. Influenced by Mondrian. Navigating the database. Model for modern consciousness.

But there’s nothing that keeps you watching. Maybe if I knew what the parameters were that he was using, so that when I watched it I was thinking about the structural integrity of the thing, I would find it fascinating. And maybe that’s how Lev sees it.

The choices made by the artist is one factor that keeps me looking at a piece of art. Lev’s Soft Cinema feels like spaghetti on the wall- throw everything up there and see what sticks.

In trying to navigate the database he doesn’t find the right balance of human and machine, and the result is uninteresting.

remediated Book of Revelation

2005-10-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

Music, trading cards, time travel, robots, press conferences, the Bible
the apocalypse graphic novel.
http://www.e-sheep.com/apocamon/

And the way my neurons are wired together made me pull down my copy of Borges "The Book of Imaginary Beings," which has in its cover copy the description "the encyclopedia as art." In Bolter's chapter on Encyclopedias he doesn't really get into the art of the compilation and presentation of knowledge.

following the numbers part 2

2005-10-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

See? When did part 2 ever come above part 1? Will we see shifts in the metaphors we use for time because of this reversal?

I want to write a little bit about McLuhan's chapter on numbers, because I thought it was pertinant to Lev's mutterings about the continuous and the discrete. I'm just going to pull a few areas out of the numbers section of Understanding Media so that when I get to my main point about calculus you'll have the same background as me...

"The pleasure of being among the masses is the sense of joy in the multiplication of numbers, which has long been suspect among the literate members of Western society."
Suspicious of multiplication or of the masses? The masses as ,ultiplication because we seldom think about the factorization of large numbers- the pleasure of something being greater than the sum of its parts?

"In isolation, number is as mysterious as writing. Seen as an extension of our physical bodies, it becomes quite intelligible..." --> Hints here of the connection he sees between alphabets and more sophisticated numerical systems: the alphabet and numbers as equivalent- he doesn't seem to address that the alphabet is a finite set, something Ong stressed as differentiating the roman alphabet from character systems.

"number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch"
"the sense of touch is necessary to integral experience"
"Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind?"
--> So when he puts out the book "The Medium is the Massage" the quantifiable quality of new media is just an extension of touch? Does this make sense to anyone out there?

"the iconic power of number" - products branded with numbers, he gets into a little William James here and the faith placed in numbers- 21 choices, 76, etc
a little Baudelaire- "number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number." -->to be elucidated by what comes next:

"Exact repeatability" he says comes directly out of Gutenberg, from print culture, and inspired the development of infinity in the Renaissance as well as calculus:
"uniform, continuous, and indefinitely repeatable bits [of print technologoy] inspired also the related concept of the infinitesimal calculus, by which it became possible to translate any kind of tricky space into the straight, the flat, the uniform, and the 'rational.'"
So calculus set the stage for discrete representation of the continuous? Lev says the with enough pixel density there is absolutely no information loss- an image may be more precise than a non-digitized image. I can't really wrap my head around this- does it just mean that the pixels would be so fine that they were at higher resolution than the limits of the physical medium- crayon, pencil, etc.?

I really like thinking about the quote from Baudelaire in terms of calculus- is experience quantifiable? In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash you can download a drug through your computer...

Whoops. the other thing he writes about is that the assembly line breaks down continuous processes into their smallest units, their atoms- as part of a universal shift that allows us to break up everything into its constituents

Also, my confusion about the terms raster and vector in the introduction was due to my not realizing that scalable vector graphics (SVG) creates a rasterized image as its end product.

following the numbers

2005-10-28T20:20:00.000-07:00

Funny how blogging reverses the temporality of conventional writing- from the scroll to the journal, has the most recent thing ever before been the thing at the top of the page?

Since each new post is the first thing that you're going to see, each one needs to be complete unto itself. References to what I've written before can't be too cryptic because presumably you will read this first, and then if it's good enough maybe continue to see what came before.

Is this part of the rapid turnover of technology- what was relevant last week isn't worth our time this week? Or perhaps the way a lot of people want to read literature- read what is current first and then work backwards in time, unpacking the lines of influence. Of course our English dept wants you to take three classes before 1700- we still read the Blog's first entries as a gateway to what comes later. But that's increasingly difficult to do.

I haven't said what I wanted to say yet, so it's getting its own post...

micropayments

2005-10-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've been browsing the lists of sites using the bitpass system for micropayments and thinking about just what would be so tempting that it would push me over into the system. Since I know that once I did get an account I would probably spend at least a brief period totally and unhealthily absorbed in my computer.

The site is:
http://corp.bitpass.com/marketplace/index.html

I was looking at the way in which the participating sites are categorized- which categories are virtually empty and which are virtually unnavigable.

It seems like the sites where you buy images you're paying for the resolution- with descriptions like "suitable to print out 8 x 11 etc.) So you're actually paying digitally for something that you plan to reconvert to a physical object.

Micropayments make more sense to me for things that you can actually leave in digital format- like the graphic novels. I guess I would never buy an image because when I buy a postcard or an art print the printing quality is part and parcel to the cost. Maybe if printing technology improves this will change.

The category I was most intrigued by was recipes- wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to download recipes from cookbooks without having to buy the entire book- as an electronic book or otherwise?

surveillance

2005-10-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

I thought it was really interesting that the concept of surveillance came up in the discussion of forms in class yesterday, partly because I thought that his argument about how the modern computer interface evolved out of surveillance technologies was very persuasive and something I hadn't heard before.

In any case, the article in the New York Times today "Where to Play Superman and See Architecture, Too" brings up the issue of modularity on a broad scale- how do we combine these already enormous resources- like Google Earth with other large databases of knowledge- like pinpointing interesting architecture.

See
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/arts/design/27eart.html
you'll need a log-in name, sorry.

the interface and The Machine Stops

2005-10-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

So I recently read a student's paper comparing The Machine in E.M. Forster's novella The Machine Stops with the internet. In the story people have come to live in hives under ground, in rooms which they never leave because the machine supplies all their needs (and they come to shun the outer world as being soulless, void of ideas, and ultimately toxic.) The machine allows them to communicate with one another, visually as well as with sound, attend group lectures, give lectures, do research, listen to music, it provides light and air and food and bathwater and bedding and an apparatus that comes out of the ceiling to diagnose illness and provide medicine.

In short, the Machine provides all the functions of the internet, and a little more, but what ultimately makes it different is that their is no interface! Forster's Machine is communicated with by the operator using a buffet of buttons, communication takes place through pipes that come up out of the floor.

Maybe we can see this as the expansion of the interface: the entire room is the interface between operator and machine. My first inclination was to say that Forster circumvents the entire concept of the screen, the interface, in favor of a machine-created virtual reality (given the machine-as-internet metaphor). In the instance of a mechanical internet, the interface between man and machine disappears- like in vr, when the scales are the same the interface appears to disappear, here the physicality is the same?

In any case, the operator in the novella is certainly imprisoned by the medium!

When I am King

2005-10-19T14:07:00.000-07:00

McCloud made me remember a graphic novel I read on the web last year. It's funny how seemlessly the comic book conventions can be integrated into an entirely different web interface, making something that is an entirely new experience that you can still make sense of. The address is

http://www.demian5.com/

I encourage you to check it out, because it really helped me understand some of what McCloud is getting at when he talks about thinking outside the box- not just putting "pages" on the internet but actually doing something new with sequential art.

The site is also an interesting example of purchasing- here the artist wants a yearly subscription to the site. I'd like to talk about incremental payments in class- I imagine a system somewhat like Claremont Cash-

cover to cover

2005-10-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

I just began reading a novel (in bed) and it occurred to me that the experience of reading this book wasn't as different from hypertext, or even a "cybertext" as I'd been thinking, when thinking in the abstract about reading novels.

Within the first few pages of the book, we find out about a sequence of voicemail messages that the narrator hears all at once. However, we only hear the first. Seventy pages further in, only one more has been revealed. If I want to, I could flip ahead for the next one, especially since the message will look differnt on the page.

Just because the book suggests a linear reading doesn't mean it has to be read that way. I have the freedom to work through the text in any order I choose. Similarly, both afternoon and dissapearing rain had suggested structures you could abandon yourself to (I spent some time just hitting return to work though Afternoon.

A friend recently told me he never reads books through cover to cover anymore- he thinks he gets more out of the book, gets a better sense of it, working through in his own way. People read magazines backwards, or flip through the pictures first, or read the ending first.

I guess any text can be approached "ergodically."

canon under attack?

2005-10-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

Bolter wrote in his introduction that hypertext is an assault on the literary canon "taken as a definition of a liberal education," "the ideal of cultural unity through a shared literary inheritance." I don't see the destruction of the canon to the extent he does- people are still reading the same texts, even though they may be hypertexts.

.Is the canon suffering or only changing over time in response to the culture, and thus reinforcing cultural unity. So maybe people are more inclined to study non-canonical literature, but isn't that how new things gain entry to the canon? I wonder if in a hundred years the way we approach literature will really be significantly different. If we extend the canon to encompass not just written works but also music and video and so forth, are we going to completely lose cultural unity? What we be the basis for the discussion- we will be forced by default into the new critical approach?

So when you read a hypertext everyone reads something different- but I think that every reading of every text is different. A hypertext is still a closed system, so that anyone navigating in the same way will encounter the same things. What if it isn't closed though? The users input might illicit different responses as the text changes over time. Even then I think that we don't lose the canon, because it isn't so much about the experience of the individual text, but how we make sense of the body of literature we inherit. Therefore hypertext must still shake out into some sort of canon.

You, Me, and Everyone We Know

2005-10-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

Someone posted a little on AIDS in Me, You, and Everyone We Know. THis movie also did interesting things with the remediation of drawing- how we are learning to draw within the constraints of the keyboard. The two kids have a book that gives them patterns to use dashes and other signs to draw within the e-mail or textbox- in one scene they're making a tiger. One kid is reading out the the order of inputs ("dash dash space semicolon etc) while the other enters the data. Funny that the computer symbols for drawing should be translated into print form... and then that they should be vocalized, converting a two dimensional image into something that can be ENTIRELY SPOKEN. That sterile image can be passed unambiguously by speech in a way that speech can not- McLuhan might say they're heating up the medium of speech by destroying the listener's need to participate and fill in the blanks of meaning.

So we have a circle: the reversal from computer back to printed text, all the way back to orality, in order to complete the full circle back into the computer, and all along it's just the information of this two-dimensional image. Similarly, the artist in the film takes photographs, which capture the world somewhat in the way the computer images capture a drawing, and adds sound and time back into the pictures with voice recordings.

I guess what I make out of all this is that if all these older technologies are going to stick around as new ones are being created, they're going to be in more and more interesting relationships with one another.

)>><<(

Archy and Mehitabel

2005-09-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

Seems to me Don Marquis was picking up on some of what Gitelman says about the typewriter and automatic writing:

From "archy and mehitabel" 1929.

i. the coming of archy

The circumstances of Archy's first appearance are narrated in the following extract from the Sun Dial column of the New York Sun.

Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story.

It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, instead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. Mme. Blavatsky's ego went into a white horse after she passed over, and someone's personality has undoubtedly gone into this rat. It is an era of belief in communications from the spirit land.

And since this matter had been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago.

We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping upon the keys.

He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.

Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found"

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
...

The poetry of Archy (the cockroach) is shaped by the medium- he can't work the shift key so the poetry is all lower case and lacks punctuation. The shifts of the medium of poetry from an oral tradition to handwritten to typewritten is paralleled by the reincarnation experience by the roach. Marquis then is descries the importance of studying older technologies in order to understand New Media... Don Marquis has published two volumes of Archy's poetry.

back to Bergson

2005-09-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

With Gitelman drawing our attention back to the end of the 19th century as well as the antiquated notions of pschical studies, I think it may be worthwhile to take a quick look back at what McLuhan had to say about Henri Bergson. Bergson, he says, was writing in a

"tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality."

This actually helps me to understand what McLuhan is saying about understanding media: the myth of Narcissus and the idea that media are amputations of the self mean that studying media, working in these media, is akin to Narcissus staring at his reflection in the pool. Why do we study literature? To know more about ourselves? All media are inherently inward turning, conscious man studying conscious man.

Except Gitelman argues that the typewriter made us more aware of the lacuna between the creator and the thing created. Perhaps the awareness of the process of creating space, of the fabric of the gap, resurfaces awareness of the "vastly wider reality" by calling attention to those processes of which we were previously unaware in simple writing or speaking. Language now calls attention to the collective unconscious through the filter of technology- thus the parallels between the psychical studies and the introduction of the typewriter.

My Dad: The Future of Man

2005-09-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

“As soon as optical and acoustical data can be put into some kind of media storage, people no longer need their memory.” Kittler, 110

My Dad programs, writes code, for a living, and he's been saying something to this effect to me since I was a little kid. Mainly, "I don't have any short term memory" or "I'm losing my short-term memory since I don't need it at work" etc. 26 years working with computers (he claims) has restructured his experience of consciousness. Two more things he has said to me: first, he claims he doesn't think so much in words as he does in "pictures" and he has trouble articulating himself sometimes, and second, he says the one day writing code just clicked and it's been easy ever since, that all the problems are the same now. I think the former may give the impression that he has a lot of trouble articulating himself, but it's not something anyone would notice talking to him. However, I do think that just maybe this is anecdotal evidence in support of some the dystopian changes Kittler is arguing for: the obsolescence of language, the obsolescence of memory. In any case, it might be worthwhile to study the brains of people who are very talented at programming computers.

spatial metaphors for time

2005-09-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

So when I was telling a cognitive science major friend about reading Ong's Orality and Literacy he referred me to this article about up/down spatial metaphors for time used by native Mandarin speakers.

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/mandarin.pdf

However, the approach of the article is that LANGUAGE restructures consciousness, not literacy. My friend's point I think was that the vertical writing is tied to the use of the up-down metaphors, but this approach is not given any time in the paper (as far as I could see). The study shows that native mandarin speakers are better able to use up-down metaphors than their lateral thinking English counterparts, even after the English speakers are given training, and vice versa. It seems that it is possible to show how language restructures consciousness but comparing literate and oral cultures becomes increasingly difficult, since even some exposure to a literate culture makes a difference. Am illiterate person in a literate culture will still think like a literate member of that culture.

Irony and Mimesis

2005-09-14T13:34:00.000-07:00

Episodic narrative was the natural form taken for lengthy story telling in oral cultures and Ong thinks this may be because "real life is more like like a string of episodes than it is like a Freytag pyramid" (Ong 145). I disagree with this statement because I think that in the context of the printed text an episodic narrative in a fixed order has a kind of stasis that is entirely contrary to the experience of recalling the thread of "real life." I find it much more satisfying to think of the Freytag pyramid as a kind of adaptation of narrative to be better at mimesis in the context of the printed text.

Frank Kermode says in The Sense of an Ending that "Peripeteia ... has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in rhetoric" (Kermode 18). Peripeteia is that reversal of expectations that Ong talks about mostly in the context of the well-made detective story. I don't exactly understand the equivalence, but I am certain that irony is important to the written text, maybe as the unexpected memory of something that suddenly has new import in changed circumstances. An oral narrative that changes with each re-telling, that is perhaps always quasi-familiar, would perhaps create the sense of surprise that a straight-episondic text could not, because of its physical deadness. So the Freytag pyramid keeps narrative alive. Kermode rights about irony in the context of Finnegan's Wake: "There is no mimesis here in Aristotle's sense, except ironically. Writing is indeed the seedbed of irony, and the longer the writing (and print) tradition endures, the heavier the ironic growth becomes." (Ong 102).
Reading that in the context of Kermode:

"The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality; and the more certain we shall feel that the fiction under consideration is one of those which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naive expectations, is finding something out for us, something real." (Kermode 18)

pushes my thoughts in the direction that a literate culture is not necessarily further from the experience of real life than an oral culture, but instead its fictions to the materials it is working with for the best approximation of experience.

oil painting, realist theater

2005-09-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

"The tension between looking at and looking through" (41) that Lanham sees underscored by hypermediacy resonates with the shift from tempera to oil based paints. In oil based paints the flecks of pigment are suspended in the oil, the luminosity acheived by oil painting is only possible because light actually moves through the layers of paint before being reflected back to the viewer. So in order to represent light, to work towards realism in painting, light itself had to be incorporated in the painting: so in oil painting as well as in photography there is "some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents." (30)

I was thinking about realism in the history of theater. If "unmediated presentation is the ultimate goal of visual representation," (30) then why in the theaer where perhaps the experience of realism is perhaps the most acheivable of any medium the style was for so many years so highly mannered, so consciously mediated? Perhaps along with the development of improved capability to acheive realism is digital media, style will move away from realism, perhaps after only a brief flirtation with realism as in the twentieth century theatrical movement that gave way to symbolist/poetic theater.
"
If you think that Dutch still lifes are super-cool or were at all intrigued check out Simon Schama's "The Embarrassment Of Riches : An Interpretation Of Dutch Culture In The Golden Age."

Testing...

2005-09-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

I did not want to play that last game on The Intruder, it felt like condoning the crime.