Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Web 2.0 narrative: Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Pomona

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is presenting on blogging and narrative, at Reed College.

Blogger as character: character emerges from text, and this works for blogging, "the accretional of numerous databases" (citing Dibbell).  More: shared, emergent conventions, leading to a new literary mode.  Steve Himmer:

As one day’s posts build on points raised or refuted in a previous day’s, readers must actively engage the process of “discovering” the author, and of parsing from fragment after fragment who is speaking to them, and why, and from where whether geographically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.

Voyeurism is part of the pleasure in reading blogs, but (I'm reminded of Crampton's argument that blogs aren't confessional) also the pleasure in co-producing content by assembling past content and the intent of reading in the future.  Reading is always rereading, then, accreting and reinterpreting materials.

Exploring distinction between blog types: "serious" blogs (politics and archiving) vs diaries.  Such distinctions sidestep the political nature of making private content public through blogging.

Fitzpatrick looks to a historical background for some hostility to blogging, seeing a parallel with resistance to the rise of the English-language novel.  We should probably look to connections on the emergence of new subjectivity, following this parallel.  Disciplinary forms appear in both, analogously.  Formal similarities are present, but epistemological parallels are more powerful (self not as individual, but as part of network).

This networked subjectivity, and the historical parallel, lead to prominent questions about truth value.  Example: She's a Flight Risk, which built up a large audience based on the nature of the poster's reality (Esquire investigative article, Wired piece, both 2003).  Example: Where is Raed? What is the ontological status of the author? Anonymity is a challenging, pleasureable, productive threat.

Sense of self emerging in part from contemporary fiction: hence the threat of the blog, a possibility for transforming the current self.

Back to that present tense, between the accumulating archive and the future intent: always in the middle are blogs, no clear endpoint.  Yes, rhizomatic like hypertext, but that's spatial, not sufficient for describing the blog, which is more temporal, diachronic, based on emergence over time.  An ever-growing present, disappearing into the archive - think in terms of soap opera (especially the quotidian), seriality.  Feminine form, there.

Here's Fitzpatrick's very, very cool Writing Machines class, currently going on.

Good digital images podcast on Radio Open Source

Radio Open Source has a good podcast on digital images.  It covers a lot of ground, including history, technology, pop culture, media, amateur vs professional.

Unfortunately, a major funder for Radio Open Source, UMass Lowell, just pulled out.  That's a bad stroke for a fine podcast.  We wish them well.

Learning management systems at Reed: coming up this weekend

I'm flying to Portland, Oregon today, in order to attend and present at our first learning management systems conference for liberal arts colleges.  NITLE's CODEX program is the sponsor, led by the brilliant Eric Jansson; Reed College the generous host.

I'll live blog the entire event at the NITLE Liberal Education Today blog.  Hopefully we'll see some Flickr action, too.  In fact, hopefully others will chime in on the open Web.  Here's the tag: LMSLAC2006.

One note as I head to the airport: bringing Web 2.0 to an LMS discussion reminds me a bit of introducing gaming to an educational technology conversation.  There's a wide, diverse field to sketch out.  The world is energetically using the stuff, in ever-growing numbers.  Corporations, governments, militaries, and civil groups increasingly deploy gaming and Web 2.0.  And we can set up a surprisingly similar framework for connecting the two, looking at distilling and applying concepts, using pre-existing tools, and making one's own.

Missing body parts in Second Life

So Second Life claims to have hit one million residents today.

How will this last if their software is so horribly buggy?

To the right is today*'s error.  I think it's part of this bug.  Most of my appearance, and all of my body parts, are gone.  No reason.  An hour passes between logins, and down the memory hole goes some amount of time I invested in this thing.

Meanwhile, lag eats up screen resolution.  My map takes up to 60 second to show another location.

For balance, I do enjoy the surrealism and Gothic-ness of such an error message.  Up to a point.  And one online helper was quite helpful.

But how will newcomers respond, especially nontechnophilic ones?  And how much good will goes each incident like this consume, when Second Life is trying to get us to invest even more money and time there?

  *Today: I have yet to experience a single month without a disabling glitch on SL.

Textual eyes, or the first Second Life ideological schism

Just glimpsed this great image, while visiting Mia in Second Life.  Her eyes appeared differently:

Those textual eyes are the result of a SL rendering problem, not a deliberate fashion statement.  Warren Ellis spotted this a couple of months ago ("The girl with error-message eyes").

Second Life is built on such accidental art.  Our avatars' bodies move independently of our selected gestures and motions, communicating to other players signals beyond those we chose.  If SL is the new golf, where players meet players, what is the metaphor for this communication between player and someone else's avatar?

As we move through space in SL, especially as we teleport, accidents of bandwidth and caching determine what we see.  A slow pace, for instance, yields an extra layer of depth, condensing through a sort of fog, out of which buildings and people emerge.  We can't help but interpret the order of each thing's arrival - why this person before that one?  Isn't this object important, since I could touch it before all others?

This accidental aesthetics opens up a deep divide in the way we approach Second Life.  On the one hand, some will want to corrall these bugs, pinning down perception onto what was built, like Web designers preferring to control a user's browser through Flash or .pdf.  On the other hand, there's a surrealist approach which enjoys these contingent moments built on error and delay, celebrating the additional layers of meaning.  Think of the screen grabs posted outside the SL client - some are trophies of accidents, while others are triumphs of successful design.

In fact, grabs published elsewhere constitute a second medium for that accidental art, one relatively static.  Such extracts are more historical and less political, if we can play with those terms a little.  But, like all historiography, this secondary SecondLife medium should also be a place for these ideologies to battle.

We'll probably see more of this split as SL continues to populate.

More on computer games versus children

"Shielding [our children] from violent video games": that's one virtue assigned to an American political candidate.  So runs a video ad to reelect Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY).  Note the classic location of agency in the game, rather than in its designers or players.  And the hoary protect-children trope.

Clinton is clearly developing a longterm computer game censorship strategy (blogged earlier here and here).

There's an interesting gendering to that commercial, too.  Men as soldiers, women as child care providers or as children.  The latter is where the game language comes in.  Will Clinton's strategy develop this further, feminizing people allegedly harmed by computer games?

(via Hit and Run)

Chertoff on iQaeda

US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff returned to the e-Qaeda idea this week, arguing that jihadists use the web to organize.  It's like telecommuting for terror:

"They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said. "Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites."

I like the hint of the echo chamber meme in "or speak with anybody else".

Ars Technica, where I found this, links to a useful 2004 survey of the many information operations options the Web affords canny jihadists.

It's not the coffin they carry you off in...

I'm ready to pick mine out:

(thanks, Ladi)

Making pumpkin cookies with Charlotte

Making Fiends has a game for the season, wherein you pelt Charlotte with pumpkins.  I like the way both characters each explain the rules to us.

Puzzles with the Bobitos

The Bobitos is a logic game, requiring movement over a 2x2 grid within certain constraints.  The puzzles get increasingly addictive- er, challenging.

(via MetaFilter)