Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

More airline woes: US Air offers Infocult a Ballardian day

Following what now appears to be, alas, an Infocult tradition of noting bad airline services, this morning's post concerns a US Airways flight which is so bad that it still isn't over.  I'm typing this from the Philadelphia airport, where I'm about to go to sleep.

It's another case of the major American air carriers getting away with treating customers poorly.  There's no accountability built in to the system.   I fired off an email to US Air, which will probably be ignored.  I'll call in the morning, and mail off a print version, as Jesse recommended.  But they clearly feel that they don't need to change their practices at all.  Sure, there's the business crunch and possible collapse - which might lead some companies to think about winning customers to their side to increase cash flow, or build crucial loyalty.  But this isn't a US Air thing by itself.  It's generic.  They don't see the indie carriers as competition enough, and we who must fly have no other choices, at least in the US.  They know it, and act accordingly.

One part of this is the old favorite, whereby the airline breaks a connection and evades responsibility for it.  So US Air delays my flight from San Francisco,  letting my little plane flight to Burlington take off before I land.  That's not blogworthy by itself, though.

The second part of that I've been put on standby for all day tomorrow.  Yes, they won't guarantee me a flight home.  I'm going to hang out in the F terminal and hope.  So my flight is literally interterminable.  I anticipate a day of Ballardian numbness.

The third and completing part: the well-honed coldness of US Airways staff.  Perhaps half of my fellow passengers were hoping to make a connection, and not once did I hear a flight attendent express sympathy or hope for these customer.  At Philly, the lone gate guy insisted on not springing for a hotel for us (hence the sleeping in airlounge bit), forbid a food voucher, refused to show sympathy, wouldn't apologize, and got irritated when asked to explain things plausibly.  He also tried the timely technique of repeating himself, but slowly, so that the mentally thick in the audience might catch up.

Flyguy: playful wandering

Speaking of FlyGuy, I should probably say a few word about it in terms of gaming and narrative.  The entire thing is a single Flash file, living in a browser.  The point of view character is manipulated by a few arrow keys.  No goal is evident from the start, and the relaxing music emphasizes a drifting, noncompetitive style of play. 

Yet some game interactions teach the player to move upwards.  If you track left or right for several screens, repetition sets in.  Further, some encounters (the xerox machine, getting punched) drive you back to the ground, which becomes increasingly irksome, and to be avoided.  Going up is the only way to preserve novelty, and, as it turns out, the path to the game's conclusion (a holiday greeting cutscene).



There aren't really puzzles to solve, beyond learning which encounters are live, and which drive you downwards.  It's a calming, somewhat dreamlike experience.  There is no score, and no penalty for failing to reach the conclusion.  It's a Walter Mitty-like celebration of dreaming oneself away from work, especially given the finale.  There is some mild suspense during the course of exploration, especially avoiding obstacles, but they're all quite easy.  It's a third-person daydreamer.

Toys of the surreal

While showing people the delightful FlyGuy, I found this site for very strange toys.  Disturbing, yet cheery objects.

Man penalized for underage cybersex

The BBC reports on another case of prohibited sexuality and cyberspace:

Ross is understood to be the first person in Scotland to be charged with sexual offences against someone in a different room.

Note the grooming language, which rarely appears in US discourse along these lines.

Subtle tweaks to the evil internet meme from the Times

The Times is carrying an argument for more closely scrutinizing violent computer games.  It generally fits into the rhetoric of "internet - threat or menace?", or what I've been calling the haunted spaces meme.  Passages like "Grand Theft Auto has made its way into thousands of little boys’ bedrooms" combine the specter of paedophilia with a sense of the home being violated*.  So it's worth noting and archiving here.  Or the concise image of this:

weeks or months spent alone in the creepy glow of the console screen, inhabiting a universe where everyone involved is brutalised and brutalising.

But what's interesting is that the article offers some fine tweaks to the meme, reflecting an unusual awareness of the argument's historicity.  Consider a few points.  The author decouples sex and violence, which are usually synthesized in this rhetoric:

We are hysterical about the question of children and sex. Every chat room is seen as a haunt of paedophiles, and parents worry about their child stumbling upon inappropriate sexual content on the internet. But the violence in these games is far more likely to cause harm.

And the author concludes that regulation is not the answer.

*Home being violated: it's worth remembering that the German word for uncanny, unheimlich, literally means "un-homely."

Tool show at Northern Voices

Northern Voice is showing off cool tools.  Some highlights: easy blog publishing and feed tools Lektora, Qumana.  Seb points to Webjay, a music playlist sharing service.  Scoble shows Memeorandum, which compares the blogosphere to mainstream news.

Multimedia blogging at Northern Voice

I'm blogging another afternoon session at Northern Voice, this one on multimedia blogging.  Presenters have mentioned some resources: Blogosphereradio and ILoveRadio.

Marc Canter raises the question of metadata and podcasting.  "Metadata got left behind when we invented podcasting."  He also draws our attention to Ourmedia, and its relationship to the Internet Archive.  Also, blogs are about microcontent.

General discussion about filtering and trusted sources.  How do we manage to get a diverse media diet while maximizing individual taste and interest?

Dedman raises the idea of tagging moments within video.

Some furious discussion about scrubbing and compressing video.

Infoshare is blogging Northern Voice, too.

Blogging and academia panel in Vancouver

I'm blogging this from a panel at Northern Voices, on blogging in academia, with Stephen Downes, Seb Paquet, Laura Trippi, and myself.

Laura Trippi began the discussion by identifying several areas for applying blogs to education: personal research platforms, courseware (teachers augmenting their pedagogical platforms), and enterprise-wide social software and knowledge management (program planning).  One challenge this represents is "perforating the academy," opening up academia to the larger world.

We are now talking about resistances to, and affordances of, blogging in education

One audience question: people write far more slowly than they speak.  What is lost in pushing for digital work?  Downes points out making learning materials available to those otherwise without access.

Another audience question: how does academic reward blogging, or is there a problem?  The panel replies: yes, it can be difficult.  Iterative publishing is a possibility, but runs afoul of traditional publication.  I argued that blogs are light, effective course tools, and that blogs as public intellectual/research tools will eventually become part of an academic's tenuring or promotion.  Downes argues that we need to rethink quality.  Trippi notes that student voices expand once they blog for a global audience.

What about blogs and novelty?   Blogs are biased that way, but are also good at discovering older resources.

Downsides of edublogging?  Not as synthetic, collaborative as wikis (Bryan).  Assigning writing tasks might not be the best use of the medium; moreover, assignments can be difficult to mark (Laura).

What can be improved?  Downes: push the tech into the background.  Trippi: better integration of blogs and wikis.  Seb: blogs are still at a very early stage.

Blogs as genre general discussion: amateur ethos, which we should protect.  Can we consider blogging as a textual form?  Downes: extensive blogging as alternative to writing a book.

Blogs recapitulating earlier problems.  One audience member: it's like the early Web.  Paquet: we are recreating something like peer review, but after publication.

Some projects shown:

Gateway to a series of digital culture classes
Bowdoin Romanticism class
Pepys diary as blog

Digital Bicycle

Speaking of new tools for digital video, Digital Bicycle is a community-oriented video sharing project.  Beta, for now.  It publishes web content via Drupal, and big video files through torrents.  The team calls it "Supernova for community television."

Still more goodies from Northern Voice...

ADDED: the same presentation points to Free Vlog. Free video blog for the taking.
ADDED MORE: and a videoblogging.info site.

New client for videoblogging: ANT

ANT is Not TV is a downloadable tool for videoblogs, and audioblogs as well.  Mac for now, PC coming soon. Another nice thing from Northern Voices.