brooks doherty produced an elegant radio essay as his project; go to the projects page to play it (note that I posted a severely compressed version of the large file he burned on a CD, so if you want to own it in hi-fi, contact him or me for a better rez).

even more "new media" than digital satellite radio (as provided by sirius or xm, both discussed by brooks and his interlocutors) is GNU software radio:

http://www.gnu.org/directory/GNU/GNURadio.html
http://comsec.com/gnuradio-eb.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/12/18/gnu_radio/
http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/09/27/1420201.shtml?tid=126
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/030409.html
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/3639
http://boingboing.net/2003/02/20/gnu_radios_got_your_.html
http://www.fcc.gov/oet/tac/GNU_Radio_12_4_02.pdf
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/2600hacker/gnuradfresof.html

my personal experience with technology and education?

some faculty have structured their course with content as foundation and built effective learning environments incorporating technology. but everyone has had the teacher that just reads a powerpoint presentation and thinks an online community for the class is cutting edge, whoa we are gonna learn so much reading forced entries of bored classmates.

ok peter is talking now. ml

I think it is funny that computer education to us is mostly associated with distance learning. Is this class a computer based one?

wh knew - Mr Ed is VERY new media these days

http://users.aol.com/mwn3/
http://www.tvland.com/shows/mr_ed/
http://members.aol.com/MILsnacks/MisterEd/main.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~horsefame/MrEdS.htm
http://www.timvp.com/mred.html

I read Turkles piece today and I find that she uses the same Little Tim and the orgot example in many of her papers. Generally, I concur with her ideas on cultural implications of the internet. I must have sunstroke because I'm having a hard time remembering an article I read a few hours ago. Well, its amusing to read 5 or 6 year old articles about computers because the hype or fear either just continued right along or was absorbed. Concerning Turkle: Moving from analytical understandings of the machine itself and even applying those concepts to teach broader analytical skills to the application skill based studies appears to be regressive. The muesum exhibit is a good example of this: really, an exhibit on what a keyboard, hard drive, etc is? silly. but an exhibit about what happens when you press a key on that giant keyboard, that is learning something. Turkle really pushed the generation divide in this paper. Her generation was schooled in the computer as calculator, i cant remember what she called it, but today's generation (me!me!me!) are involved in a simulation culture. true. Then she gave an example of a girl who knew raising taxes in SimCity cased riots and critiqued the lack of critical readership of simulation culture. Yea, critically media studies should be a part of K-12, and not only because of the advent of the net.

thats a lot of free writing.

In my experience, online learning hasn't worked very at the U. Most of the faculty are either afraid of using it (one teacher gave a 10 minute lecture on why she doesn't use email for anything serious and why she only uses it at her leisure because she doesn't want technology to control her life) or they just don't know how to use it and post a series broken links and partial pdf files. I think were going to have to wait a while until most of the faculty embraces technology and/or learns how to use it effectively ... and that might be quite a while.

In the past few days, I learned that technoculture and academia are, politically, diametrically opposed to one another, the one being phobic of the other. Simulations opens doors to the virtually inaccessable while closing doors to the accessable if you'd only try. Does "distance education" cater to the agoraphobic "learner" (they're no longer students, if you've noticed the terminology) who prefer the flat interface of the screen to the code and database of tactile, physical relationships with education? Is the "learner" agora- or precedent- phobic; the "student" who buries herself in passé literature a technophobe?
Kittler, probably, would say that the push to "distance education" is only natural, as computers are as mirrors of the subtly powerful subconscious (in "Symbolism" and something); and how better to learn than with self-reference? Many of his contemporaries, other professors, only use the computer if they have to. William Gibson wrote about computers on a typewriter. My final project is attempting to conflate poetry ("the beautiful" sociolinguistically encapsulated; how poetic!) with Manovichian (wouldn't he be pleased?) computer theory.

I would say that I was knowledgable on the internet taking over the roles of teachers. If only because I have now taken 2 IDL courses and should be starting a third awfuly soon. The overwhelming differences between a course taught through a computer and a course taught in a classromm (even one taught on computers in a classroom) are evident. Self-motivation is involved much more in a class that is soley on computers. It is required that you not just stick to a regular schedual of attending class and doing things when the professer tells you they ought to be done, but that you plan a schedual for yourself. The other irritating factor in taking online classes is that even in a chatroom, questions are slow to be answered. It is very easy to ignore the contribution or question of one person when that person is only a line of text. Writting a question in an email, a blog, or a chatroom does not have the same effect as asking one in the eerie silence of a lecture hall. I would say another glaring difference is the variation in enthusiasm. In person to person teaching there is a wide variety of enthusiasm for students and the class in general. In my experience with online courses, there is not much variation - everyone is apathetic. This could be that professors teaching online classes have many pressing, not-online, concerns. Maybe the problem lies in the value we place on online or computer based classes rather than on the lack of enthusiam from the professors. In either case, I find a certain apathy from online instructors. They leave for weeks at a time and fail to mention it to their students, they reply to emails only if sent 10-14 times to 5 different email addresses. Demanding a persons time is much easier in a face-to-face situation because politeness dictates that a professor not totally ignore someone talking to them and refuse to reply. I still place much value in the traditional classroom taught classes and little in the computer-based classes. Nonetheless, I am taking one more online class in about a month.

go see tron next tuesday at the st. paul theater, 7pm and 9pm. the only way it could be cooler is if tron-fan was in it.

In the readings for this week, I saw very little of the drawbacks of distance education discussed by any of the authors. The closest thing to criticism I recall reading was one of the authors discussing how often times computers are used simply to enhance other forms of media, whether it be an encyclopedia, TV or otherwise. I would like to have seen more balance. In this class, for instance, I think the chatroom discussion we had a few weeks ago was extremely interesting (more freewheeling discussion, open thought), however, I also think that format could be overdone. Chat sort of falls into that "enhancement of another medium" category. The blog is a different sport. It's an animal of its own kind (sorry for all the metaphors). Although it can be seen as an enhancement of our in-class discussions, it also has the ability to expand on the in-class format greatly by using internet links, which are crucial to the bulk of our discussions.

Virtual education? Sounds like a fictional state of being educated, which is a good description of University students. We pretend to be educated but most of us have no clue.

But as for what I learned online, online universities are an expensive way to get a degree most people look down upon. Blah biddy blah blah... I've never liked "free writes." I have to pay to come here, they're not free. And absolutly no validate thoughts ever come to my mind. Lessee, why are online universities looked down upon? I think it's because they seem easier to get than a full-fledged-I-attended-a-university-for-4-to-5-or-more-years degree. And they point of universities is to torture, I mean teach students, over an extended and currently accepted learning system.

What did I learn on the internet? Well, honestly, it's hard to say. It's not that I didn't learn anything, far from it; I've learned a good deal. The thing that's hard to distill is what I got from the internet specifically, and just how "distanced" you could call that kind of learning. It has seemed to me over the last week and through the course of the semester that it's not all that different from learning from most other texts, so are we to differentiate between learning from the internet and learning from the texts it supports? Well anyway, I'm willing to abort this question for now, but it seems to be an interesting and perhaps relevant one.
My personal experiences with distance education have been few, indeed numbering only this class, and even that only half-way. actually, if I've learned anything about distance learning, it's that it really doesn't ork the way I expected it to. I cite the problems this class experienced in attempting to conduct a class dissussion in a chat room a couple of weeks ago as some strong evidence. The internet is a great place for independent research and learning, but it really doesn't work, at least in my experience, for communal learning. I'm really not sure why that is, particularly since there are so many opportunities for people to get together online....the dynamics just aren't the same.
Anyway, that's what I have to say right now; just some disorganized thoughts. I might come back and edit this later.

Well, when I decided to do my first internship away from the University area, I thought taking a distance course would be a great way to continue getting course credits. The Shakespeare course was taught by a retired professor living (coincidentally) in the outskirts of Washington D.C. (where I was doing my internship). This was only beneficial because I hated the distance learning style. Going through WEB CT to have the classroom experience was more difficult than I had ever realized to stay motivated. After it took 4 weeks to turn in Romeo & Juliet, I decided to contact the Professor and come up with something else. We decided to meet for coffee in the D.C. and that would be when I would turn in my papers and we would discuss. I did that for the rest of my internship, and still had 3 books to finish to get the course credit. That was a year ago...I still do not have the credit.

Well, I have been amazed at all that has been written, created, shared, and critiqued pertaining to new media. I was ignorant to how much is out there under the heading "new media", beyond just the stuff about porn and pop ups. There are entire communities that I had no idea existed, and not the weird sort of sites that I had imagined when they mention on the news that there is some sort of secret chat room or something. I lost my train of thought. Also, I have learned that there are a lot of people out there who have been online and experiencing alternative realities for a lot longer than I had thought, the wide variety of info that has been made available simple due to the "internet revolution" is hard to grasp. We have covered a tiny fraction of it in this class, yet we have hit on so much more than I had previous knowledge of. Anyways I think that's what I meant, it is much more articulate in my head.

What I learned online is that this place I am in, the people who are around me breathing and typing do not really matter. For to learn online seems to be the next great thing, a way to learn without going anywhere or seeing anyone. This disgusts me. The establishment of Phoenix University or Walden is a disgrace, a violation of what eductation should be.

This is not to say that learning should not happen online. I am arguing that to eliminate this physical structure is to eliminate a special form on interaction and engagement that, while it may not appear everyday in a real classroom, has difficulty entering into online forums. The Internet allows a degree of separation from the everyday and, as a result, education becomes something separate. It becomes detached from its connection to life and to the people in it.

Instead of looking at the Internet as an alternative to brick and mortar institutions, it should be a complement. Our education does need reform, but the Internet is no savior. I question any suggestion that things would be a lot cheaper. Nor do I think that most people want to get degrees online. Learning about technology and its implications is an entirely different game than learning on technology, and while the former should be more emphasized, we should proceed toward the latter with a lot of trepidation.

ENPS
ENP1398 4 V 203 MPRXWR
SUING STUDENTS (DONOHUE) - 1605

THE RECORDING INDUSTRY HAS FILED ITS FIRST FILE-SHARING LAWSUITS IN MINNESOTA. THE RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA IS SUING TWO INDIVIDUALS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOR ILLEGAL FILE-SHARING. THE RIAA FILED ITS LATEST SET OF LAWSUITS TODAY AGAINST NEARLY 500 PEOPLE ACROSS THE COUNTRY. THE SUITS NAME 14 UNIVERSITIES WHERE DEFENDANTS ARE LOCATED, INCLUDING THE U OF M.

THE RIAA ONLY HAS NUMBERED, VIRTUAL ADDRESSES THAT INDICATE THE LOCATION OF THE DEFENDANTS' COMPUTERS. UNIVERSITY COUNSEL BILL DONOHUE SAYS AT THIS POINT THE INDUSTRY IS SEEKING TO SUBPOENA THE U OF M FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.


INCUE: IF THE INDIVIDUALS ARE STUDENTS, WE WILL BE REQUIRED TO GIVE THEM NOTICE, AS REQUIRED BY LAW, AND ONCE THAT NOTICE PERIOD IS UP IF THERE IS NO DEFENSE TO THE SUBPOENA WE WILL BE REQUIRED TO TURN OVER THE NAMES.

OUTCUE: TO TURN OVER THE NAMES.
DURATION:0'10"]

THE U OF M HAS NOT BEEN INVOLVED IN PREVIOUS LAWSUITS BY THE RIAA,
THOUGH IT HAS RECEIVED NON-BINDING NOTICES THAT CERTAIN COMPUTERS ON CAMPUS WERE INVOLVED IN ILLEGALLY SHARING SONGS. DONOHUE SAYS ALL STUDENTS ARE EDUCATED ABOUT ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING AND AGREE TO AN "ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY" DURING ORIENTATION.

// posted by Brooks @ 14:56

This quote from Paul is a bit misleading:

"The computer conference setting can be personal, friendly and inclusive. The medium is largely race-neutral, location-neutral, status-neutral, age-neutral, income-neutral, disability-neutral, and would be gender-neutral except for the clue of first names. Student participation in the discussion (in part forced by our course format) is greater than in any of our face-to-face classes. Some kinds of personal warmth appear to be more freely exchanged in the absence of bodies."

It is misleading because many of the computer programs or websites we (and students) use on a daily basis don't acknowledge the majority of cultures, either globally or domestically (see the BBC article above). In short, most computer systems, at least in the US, are anglicized. However, I do agree they are MORE race-, gender-, status-neutral than a traditional classroom setting. For example check out the following quote from Starr:

"The traditional dictionary had a cumbersome and inadequate method to describe the pronunciation of words; the multimedia dictionary pronounces them...... The computer thereby turns the passive reader into a participant; it cues the student of a need to do something, but not necessarily what to do."

First Starr says on-line dictionaries tell you how to prounouce words so you won't be able to make your own "cumbersome" interpretation. Next, he says computers don't tell you what to do. I see conflict, here. (If you've never gotten an audio pronounciation from Merriam Webster.com, do so. They select the whitest people alive to read these words.) Starr's article is extremely unbalanced.

1st Securities Northwest today announced the release of its Digital Rights Management ("DRM") industry trade report featuring commentary on several leading solutions providers in the sector, including Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), Apple Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), Macrovision Corp. (Nasdaq: MVSN), RealNetworks, Inc. (Nasdaq: RNWK), Digimarc Corp. (Nasdaq: DMRC), IBM (NYSE:IBM) ContentGuard (owned by Xerox) and InterTrust (joint venture of Sony and Phillips). The report claims that the primary driver of DRM uptake over the next year will be the entertainment industry's recognition that the Internet has got to be leveraged as a primary distribution channel for its premium content. DRM technologies are a compelling solution for music and movie content providers because they effectively address online piracy which is credited with costing the industries as much as $7 billion annually. Moreover, DRM is a flexible technology that puts the control and management of content back in the content providers' hands while supporting their business models. For the complete report, please visit http://www.otcjournal.com/feature.php .

"The New Surveillance" is an important study by Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law School (Pub-Law Research Paper No. 46 / Case Western Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 297, 200). You can find it online at SSRN. I quote only the opening salvo:

"A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously."

If you want a PDF copy of the paper, you can download it from the SSRN site, and a copy is stored locally for you too, here (1.13MB).

it's world intellectual property day.

to read up on intellectual property and its cultural and juridical implications, see Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property (a short review of it is posted for you here)

Our first few weeks of Manovich decided my project; I’m going to implement him after a fashion he’d probably hate. The works of Olia Lialina are inspirational, as well. You’ll see an epitomization of Wendy Chun and Sherry Turkle’s computer-as-vehicle-for-the-ultimate-narcissism theory as well.

Kittler Essays: How clever! Using a Gothic novel as a conceit, inaccuracy and pun intended, is the perfect way to get me into social theory. Kittler cemented the feminization of the typing machine (and medium; transportation vehicles are spoken of with the feminine pronoun; Mina is the only successful translator and medium between Dracula and the “good guys”; I only wish that he would have more examined the psychoanalytic [and attendant medical] implications of woman-as-disseminator for good or ill, Mina or Lucy, instead of (if understandably) skirting it.
On Romanticism: if books (were) the means of the ultimate indulgence in narcissism, where we can “read ourselves into” anything, how revolutionary, how different is the computer, as Turkle and Wendy Chun describe it?

“How can public institutions remain healthy and vital if they ignore, or worse yet, belittle the opinions of their customers?” This woman, by conflating a “public institution” with a business institution (by use of “customers”) inadvertently betrays herself; why not question the political technologies that keep technology out of public schools? She, evidently, doesn’t realize (or care) about gratuitous standardized testing and the “circuitous and selective… dismissal” thereof is that testing has little do with the “beneficial effect of technology to learning” (she seems to feel that educators are all technophobes), but to the sociopolitical implications thereof. It upsets me to read things like this.

wired piece that meanders from game designers to commentators to the simon wiesenthal center to blog pundits... also, check out recent journalism about games: in the ny times and in calgary (thanks to grand text auto); the red vs blue machinima I wanted to show last night was written up in the wall street journal (if you're not a subscriber, bungie has a pdf file for you), and the terra nova blog offers miscellaneous comments. also consider playing text-based quake rather the the graphical one you're sooo over...

For the recent conference on The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity (April 15-16, 2004, University of Surrey, England), Ned Rossiter, Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, writes:

organised networks are emergent socio-technical forms that arise from the limits of both tactical media and more traditional institutional structures and architectonic forms. Organised networks are peculiar for the ways in which they address problems situated within the media form itself. The organised network is thus one whose socio-technical relations are immanent to, rather than supplements of, communications media. The paper argues that the problematics of scale and sustainability are the two key challenges faced by various forms of networks. The organised network is distinct for the ways in which it has managed to address such problematics in order to imbue informational relations with a strategic potential.

Read the rest of his paper here (via nettime)

if you feel like shooting down some foucault, I'll re-post the old link here...
there's more in the gadget section of my site krapp.org

you can find agrippa here, here, here, and here, as well as elsewhere;
and this is kirschenbaum's own digital culture class

I enjoyed this chapter because it motivated an analysis of cultural implications of games. At the same time, I was frustrated with the lack of concrete opinions on behalf of Liestol. The chapter meandered around exciting ideas, but never drew them together in a conclusive manner. So I will offer up some of mine.

Can games be "read" in similiar ways as other artifacts of popular culture? Liestol does not answer one way or another. She focuses on summarizing cultural interpretations, but then backs away from making any claims. I believe that the game creators arent doing anything new, culturally speaking. A form of entertainment is created that the participant navigates/experience. Duke Nukem is a very similiar experience to popular Hollywood action movies. You are subjectivly relating to the main character. In the same way that you take on the experiences of the main character, you play out the experiences in the game. Both forums funnel you through pre-written values, options, meanings. (In this case misogynist hyper-masculinist themes)

A point that is specific to games and worth further investigation is where the game creates the illusion of choosing an experience. In the conclusion, Liestol states that play is both object (allowing detachment from actions/choices) and a relationship (to the actions and choices). The detachment mirrors other media filtering processes, we ignore the racism to laugh with the sitcom, or we tune out the political message to feel the drama. However, the relationship to playing and choosing scenerios is a distinction from other pop culture artifacts. What does it mean to be immersed in a subjective game with limited options for action/purpose? Leistol's discussion about the Boy Scouts states that a fundamental concept for Boy Scout activities: "These were games in which boys, without really being aware of it, assume responsiblity for theri own education through active participation." But then she discredits that same effect in game playing. I disagree.

Duke Nukem thwarts that question of responsiblity by sarcastic remarks when a player pauses to contemplate their role, urging action without thought. The fact that this is built into the game demonstrates that players will stop to think about what their role is, what they can/nt do. And the fact that its not encouraged is an indicator that your relationship is in fact being constructed as well as your action. So, without being aware of it, players are actively educated through participation, though in this case it is to detach ones actions from resposibility.

Another point worth thinking about: the level of detachment. In the case of a film or novel, one can be disappointed if the hero you relate to does something you would never have done, but in the game, you are forced to do it.

p.s. Liestol's theories answering why people play these games (identity crisis, home sweet home, technophobia) are LAME and justify the perpetuation of shitty sexist ideology. :)

In addition to the interview Brooks points to, in his blog, psy-fi writer and proto-blogger Cory Doctorow enthuses about Neal Stephenson's Confusion, the new, enormous sequel to Quicksilver. See Cory Doctorow's post at BoingBoing.net, and read the Salon review of Stephenson's new book by Andrew Leonard.

everyone, whether or not you are planning on a creative project instead of (or along with) your final paper, please consider the following two or three things: a) now is as good a time as any to get started on papers and/or projects - don't leave it til it's too late just because I seem very lenient. b) email me or stop by to brainstorm if you are not sure how to narrow it down to something manageable. c) consider sharing papers and/or projects with the class via the blog - post a link, or email me your text and I'll put it up with a blog link here.

2004 DPI: DESIGN/POLITICS/INFORMATION 2
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
HANSEN & RUBIN on Design and Dynamic Data
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thursday, April 22 / Rm 3-120, Molecular & Cellular Biology Building
420 Washington Ave. SE, Minneapolis
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reception 6:30 pm / Lecture begins 7:30 pm FREE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What does the Internet sound like? Thousands of people are
contently nattering to each other in myriad chat rooms, but where
can one eavesdrop on all the sweet banalities exchanged therein?
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin figured it out with Listening Post, a
lyrical installation that offers a spatial, visual and auditory experience
of these ethereal online conversations, using a bunch of cash
register VFDs (vacuum fluorescent displays), text-to-speech
software, and some deft data processing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ben, an MIT Media Lab-trained sound and video artist, is founder of
Ear Studio, New York; Mark, formerly a Bell Labs research scientist,
is now an associate professor of statistics and design | media arts at
UCLA. They first met at a program organized by Brooklyn Academy
of Music and Lucent Technologies that brought artists and scientists
together, reprising the 1960s Experiments in Art and Technology
(E.A.T.) projects. On April 22, they will discuss their collaborations
in the design of dynamic data, ranging from Listening Post to a
forthcoming installation at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, San
Francisco, in partnership with architects Diller + Scofidio.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
their site, www.earstudio.com, explains; see the review in the ny times

New York Times, February 21, 2003

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin
'Listening Post'
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street
Through March 9

Nothing becomes a new technology more than aesthetic restraint and an impressive artistic pedigree. "Listening Post," Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's electronic audiovisual installation at the Whitney Museum, has both. Descending from the work of John Cage, Philip Glass and Jenny Holzer, and graced by a handsome Minimalist presentation, it operates in the gaps between art, entertainment and documentary; it is almost irresistible, like magic.

In a dark room, random words and phrases gleaned from Internet chat rooms light up more than 200 tiny LED screens suspended in a curved, curtainlike grid. Simultaneously, these words are recited by a chorus of eight (male) computer voices emanating from different speakers around the room, punctuated by sonorous Glassesque musical chords. It is as if Hal, the haywire computer from Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," were giving an avant-garde poetry reading with subtitles.

Mr. Rubin, an artist who works in audio, video and digital electronics, collaborated with Mr. Hansen, a statistician with Bell Labs at Lucent Technologies , under the auspices of Lucent and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the work was shown last season. The environment they have devised is something like a thinking person's lava lamp: it both lulls and disturbs. The aural and visual rhythms, orchestrated into six scenes, remain roughly the same. Random words flow in waves across the screens, or crawl, like stock market figures. They scroll vertically in identical lists, or expand into short fragments that begin with phrases like "I am" or "I love." The artificial voices speak separately or in unison, in call-and-response or round robin.

But one is eavesdropping on the world in real time; nothing repeats, ever, but nothing changes much either. People make simple introductions, discuss politics, identify their sexual proclivities. English is abbreviated, phoneticized and sometimes touchingly mangled. "I like man much." "Are you man?" The sameness means that what is at first thrilling becomes titillating, then boring, then saddening.

What Mr. Hansen and Mr. Rubin have devised is both an instrument of mass if random surveillance and a chapel to the human need for contact. One can imagine its becoming as familiar as wallpaper or being used for digital war memorials that recite the names of the dead in hypnotizing perpetuity. On another level, "Listening Post" is simply the latest twist in the familiar modernist tradition of making art from chance arrangements of everyday materials, and is more a result of technological progress than genuinely new thought.

ROBERTA SMITH

hey, if your keyboard has a left- and right-arrow key, this online "kill bill" game is about as accomplished as the two movies are... not. (but don't worry, no need for a czech computer to play...) ;-)

I really enjoyed Liestøl’s article; in light of her conclusion of Duke Nukem’s being a consummately masculinist (where women are objects—of anxeity, of desire, etc.) game, I wonder if there are feminist games in existence or being produced (when/if the population of women/feminist players becomes vocal/active/noticed).
I used to be a Quake fiend; Quake, despite its violence, becomes relatively genderless (the monsters are genderless and we play in first-person, effectually becoming the brain of the shooter), and isn’t as offensive to feminist players (which our various articles about all-woman Quake clans underscore). It’s interesting to contrast both games to Tomb Raider, which objectifies by divorcing the (female) shooter from the (male) player; the player acts as literal puppet-master of a gun-toting Barbie doll (is it true that, when first designed, Lara Croft was [much more] realistically proportioned, and therefore didn’t pass beta-testers?) .

georgia tech blog "smashing up digital narrative, poetry, games and art"

Futures of Writing
[lectures on writing and new technologies]

“Hacking Agrippa: The Secret History of an Electronic Poem”

Mathew Kirschenbaum
Assistant Professor of English, University of Maryland
Thursday, April 22, 3:30 ­ 5:00 pm

Location: Department of English, 207a Lind Hall
207 Church St., Minneapolis MN 55455

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in digital studies, applied humanities computing, images and visual culture, and postmodern/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humanities computing at Virginia's Electronic Text Center and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

'Net ninjas' take on web censorship

A small group of 'net commandos' at the University of Toronto are looking to help people get around government controls on the internet, as technology correspondent Clark Boyd reports.

Ron Deibert's computer screensaver is a two-word message. It spins in those rare moments when the political science professor's machine is idle. It reads "Hack Off".

It is a fitting sentiment, given Prof Deibert's loyalty to the original idea of hacking.

"Traditionally, the term was associated with someone who is interested in opening up their technology, understanding how it works, not accepting something shrink-wrapped," he said.

"And to me, that's not just a hobby or something that geeks do, that's actually a skill that is fundamental to a liberal, democratic society.

"Citizens can't just accept technology at face value. They need to open the lid, so to speak, understand how it works, beneath the surface," he explained.

Prof Deibert's belief that computer science can aid civic activism led him to establish the Citizen Lab in 2001.

"What I wanted to do was create a hothouse environment, where I could bring together researchers, students, in different disciplines - computer science, political science - in one setting where they could feed off each other, complement each other's specialties.

"I like to think of this area as 'hacktivism', the combination of hacking in the traditional sense of the term, and social and political activism."

Code ninjas

Prof Deibert wanted to create an internet commando unit that could employ its technical skills toward activist ends.

He secured non-profit funding, as well as a commitment from the University of Toronto and then scoured the political science department for student recruits.

He found Nart Villeneuve, a hacker with a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Working out of the lab's basement bunker on the University of Toronto's campus, Mr Villeneuve explained how the work of the Citizen's Lab centres on a project called the OpenNet Initiative.

"We're attempting to technically confirm reports that we get in various countries that the reason why they can't access certain websites is because the government or the internet service provider is deliberately blocking access to those websites, as opposed to it being some network error or some other reason," he said.

Simply put, the Citizen Lab is trying to find out which websites a particular government or internet provider might be blocking, and how they are blocking it.

"From China to Saudi Arabia to Iran to Cuba to Uzbekistan, it's a trend we're seeing grow worldwide," said Mr Villeneuve.

"We've been studying internet filtering in Iran for the last six months, and they've actually shifted to a superior system of blocking.

"And this system is similar to systems being deployed in other Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Syria."

Cultural controls

The Citizen Lab employs all manner of hardware, software and code-writing skills to essentially tap into computer networks around the world, and expose their inner workings.

Michelle Levesque, a computer science student who works for The Citizen Lab, says they also have to tap into human networks and knowledge to get their job done.

"If you have a website that's being blocked, and it's all in Persian, you've no idea why it's being blocked," she said. "It could be some political website, or a gay rights website," she said.

"So you need to get people in who can read these other languages and let you know what the content is, who can give us pointers to the kinds of things that might be blocked, so that we know what to check."

The Citizen Lab also actively develops circumvention technologies designed to help citizens in say, Saudi Arabia, get around government imposed blocks that restrict internet content.

"Saudi Arabia says explicitly that they censor the internet to preserve their Islamic culture and heritage, which is a pretty valid claim to make," explained the lab's Graeme Bunton.

"For us to start looking at ways to circumvent that is a difficult challenge for us. We do think that information should be free, but we do need to find a balance for respect for sovereign states to preserve their own culture."

But Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert says that nothing the group does is illegal, at least in North America.

"We probe networks, using methods I like to say that hackers, criminals and spies use all the time use all the time," he said.

"I think it's irresponsible for someone in my position as an academic not to use those tools to push the frontier of what's going on, in spite of the controversy that it raises with some law enforcement people.

"Some authoritarian regimes obviously don't like what we're doing. But we feel we're working in support of broader principles of human rights, so don't mind the controversy. Sometimes it helps."

Clark Boyd is technology correspondent for The World, a BBC World Service and WGBH-Boston co-production. This story from BBC NEWS: news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3632757.stm

this game, a shoot-em up ('featuring george w. bush and condoleeza rice') at miniclip.com/bushshootout.htm, is nicely combined with a Republican ad criticizing democrat john kerry, for maximum impact. enjoy... um...

Ubiquitous computing, in the phrase coined by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC, is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. Witness the Orb, the tangible bits envisioned by people at the MIT Media Lab, or other ideas in networked computing.

Since last summer, Julian Dibbell has boldly proclaimed on his blog that on April 15, 2004, he would "truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods, and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer." For months, he's been buying and selling gold pieces, suits of armor and other artifacts from Ultima Online in an attempt to live up to his self-imposed challenge. He'd decided to measure his success or failure by comparing his monthly take as a broker of virtual goods against his best month as a writer. But tax day has now come and gone and Dibbell fell short, in the end, by just $683.

Compare the wired story to the terranova blog entry linked above.

audi, the car company named by translation into latin of its founder horch (which in german literally means "listen") is using david bowie for its ads now, and he recently cut an Audi commercial that mashes up his classic "Rebel, Rebel" andhis new "Never Grow Old." now Audi and bowie are holding a competition to see who can do the best new mashup of any two bowie songs, with a new car promised to the winner: see http://www.davidbowie.com/neverFollow/

A Monterey Herald article declares that the PDA is becoming obsolete.
''The Palm really became a duplicate . . . It turned into super high-priced carbon paper.''

This year, for the first time, smart cell phones are expected to outsell PDAs. Consumers increasingly find that cell phones more easily handle the address book and calendar chores the Palm Pilot had commanded when it burst on the scene 1996. IDC predicts two smartphones will be sold for every one PDA in 2004.

What's in your pocket? Are you a dual-device user (e.g. Nokia 3650 + Palm Tungsten T3), a hybrid user (e.g. Sony Ericsson P900 or Treo 600), or relying solely on a handset with good PIM functionality (e.g. Sony Ericsson Z600 or Nokia 3650)? What's soon (in your estimation) to be in your pocket?

Is your PDA going the way of the dodo? What do you think?

[From www.mobilewhack.com/pda/rip_pda.html]

for those who are not easily turned off by lengthier, weightier reading matter, I recommend L'Univers de Jeux Video (by Alain and Frederic Le Diberder) or Trigger Happy (by Steven Poole) as good introductions. Oh, and for you literary types I recommend the book by Martin Amis, Invasion of the Space Invaders - it's a bit dated, but still enjoyable.

fuel for those malcontents who want to eschew the chatroom for another meta-verse: how about prison?

"You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.

New Hampshire is 'two-party consent state - one of those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a conversation to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs and others."

Mark D. Rasch knows why he writes this: he has a J.D. and is a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit. However, I am a bit disappointed: this is simply a faint echo of what happened with all the devices people started attaching to the telephone in the 60s and 70s. At first, taping (and answering machines) were not illegal - later, the law caught up with technological capabilities and permitted answering services while prohibiting surreptitious taping of conversations.

a good book on the topic of computers and conversation is ian hutchby, conversation and technology - it's suffering from some heavy-handed social studies approaches to transcription (which might have been illegal in new hampshire...) but still gets all the salient points right.

Georgia State’s Ted Friedman (see Peter's blog posting on video games) says that all video games are "ideological constructions." I'd like to hear people's thoughts on that comment, just out of curiosity.

Since chatrooms are "paralyzingly banal," I vote in favor of having our next class discussion in the metaverse.

In some seriousness, I find the concept of the metaverse criminal fascinating. Not just the meta-criminal itself, but all the peripheral issues as well: neighborhood watches, policing (or not), establishing a criminal justice system (or not), not to mention being headless. A lot of this is rehashing some of the issues we discussed after reading "A Rape in Cyberspace," but adding the visual element to a MUD makes it much more interesting to me. I've never been to either a MUD or the metaverse, but I would imagine the latter would be a much more emotional experience. It makes (as Rossney alludes to) Snowcrash that much less fictional. How scarring would it be to send a group of kindergarteners to the metaverse docks for a birthday party instead of Chuck E. Cheese's? That would be post-post-modern.

(P.S.) Pamela McCorduck's profile of Sherry Turkle is excellent. Except she left out the part about profiling Sherry Turkle.

"So implicit politics might be the better way to influence player opinion. But as a political vehicle, games may have an inherent bias. Bridging an ideological chasm, libertarian Iain Smedley and socialist Julian Stallabras agree that computer games possess a native individualism. Writing a decade ago, Smedley noted the 'heroic and individualistic philosophy' of video games, in which the player 'does not merely cheer on the hero in [his] struggle; the player’s actions determine the outcome.' Writing contemporaneously in New Left Review, Stallabras concurred: In games, 'the passivity of cinema and television is replaced by an environment in which the player’s actions have a direct, immediate consequence on the virtual world.' For Stallabras, this makes computer games 'a capitalist and deeply conservative form of culture.'

Stallabras’ wide-ranging indictment of computer games is remarkable for its combination of savvy ('in Doom...all the corpses of a particular monster always look exactly the same') and pessimism ('The defining image in all this comes, not from any game, but naturally enough from a blockbuster film, Terminator 2; it is the jarring crunch of human skulls under the bright chrome of a robot foot'). Stallabras contends that many offensive traits of games are concealed by 'chrome,' by which he means slick user interfaces and graphical eye candy. What would he think of the recent release whose title is Chrome? Probably the same thing he writes about the video game as a medium: that it tricks players into imitating idealized markets and sweatshop labor through repetitive manipulation of game objects and numbers, that it is shaped by 'the parameters of the computer industry’s links with the military,' and that its innate objectification 'leads to...an ever greater blurring of the use of people as instruments in the world and the game.' But he might appreciate the irony that Chrome developer Techland is located in Poland."

From Reason Magazine, an article analysing the ways that video games influence our politics and world-view: Kevin Parker, "Free Play: The politics of the video game," http://reason.com/0404/fe.kp.free.shtml

"Despite its relative obscurity, gopherspace is accessible to many more Web users than people realize. Gopher support is built into Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox, most versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer up to version 5, although the degree of support varies. People who want to stick with the familiarity of http can use the public gopher proxy at Floodgap.com, which translates gopher pages into HTML.

Visitors to gopherspace will find a piece of the Internet's history, some of which, Goerzen says, isn't available anywhere else. They will also find The Gopher Manifesto, a document praising gopher's simplicity and elegance.

The Gopher Manifesto describes gopher as 'a hypertext Eden"' that existed before the clutter and commercialization of the Web. 'Is it time for a new Renaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?' it asks."

Criticism:

I've got a post-problem, admittedly. It's characterized, as Turkle puts it, by "the precedence of surface over depth, of simulation over the real, of play over seriousness." A definition by absence, then. Has there been, excuse what may be improper use of the canon, a constructavist explanation of "post-modernism"? I'd be interested to read/hear it.

May we try WorldsAway in class next week, or have we got to be CompuServ customers? But there's another way to make money at this business, using a model that comes primarily from the world of magazine publishing. Get enough people to live in your metaworld, and you'll own something very valuable in these marketing-oriented times: a population with well-defined demographics that has access to an excellent conduit for advertising. The metaworld to become, as its work-of-reference discussed, a virtual stripmall. The ad-free spaces will become pay-spaces.
Interesting that, on page 10 of the article, the author supposes that the presence of avatars will help us to "communicate [more effectively]". What did the Clints and Brandies of Snowcrash communicate other than the shallow depth of their users' technological intelligences (and surely, we're in that stage with avatars, at present).

campus republicans find it doubtful that "a videocassette that forces itself into an American's home at gunpoint, ties him to the couch, and plays itself" - but apparently on the net, the smutty types are still assumed to reign supreme. it is even claimed sometimes that the personal computer first brings the danger of porn into people's lives, and only "the #1 christian porn site" (xxxchurch.com) will deliver us from the perils of pixelfuck. what is behind the easy assumption that the net is mostly porn and porn is mostly on the net?

ok, so muds are neat. they free people from the terrible constraints of perception in the real world, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. but if you are providing a self-made image/persona, and someone else is assesing you through this contrived presentation of yourself, what are you really accomplishing? so, because someone cant wickedly judge you because of your lack of control over self-presentation in real life, you are able to have a flourishing relationship? i dont know, so, youre going to then meet this wonderful "virtual" person in real life, or you're not. if not, are you really achieving any sort of meaningful interpersonal relationship w/ another person? everyone can have different standards to determine what constitutes a meaningful relationship, but i dont buy the notion that a virtual mud can achieve this in and of its own devices. people need to look into each other's eyes and feel that connection, that trust, that inclusive understanding; people need to touch each other, physical contact (and i dont mean sexual mind yous) is inherent to the forging of a more special bond. i guess, in short, i just dont believe muds can achieve the pinnacle of a meaningful relationship.

This poem by Sharon Olds popped into my head when I read Wendy Chun's words: "most discussions of fiber optic networks focus exclusively on the self."

And since we're on the topic of sexuality and the internet, Olds believes that most -- if not all -- acts of lovemaking focus exclusively on the self as well. Coincidence? More like an observation.....

If you have a moment, give this poem a close reading......

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

--Sharon Olds

I reference the piece by Amy Bruckman "Gender Swapping on the Internet"

Bruckman wrote this in 1993, so I can imagine that the technology has become much more complex in 11 years, but I think the point still remains. On the internet people can be something they are not thereby challenging the social discourses set forth. Men can be women, women can be men, children can be adults, etc.

Bruckman's main concern was that "The constant assumption that women need help can be damaging to a woman's
sense of self esteem and competence. If people treat you like an incompetent, you may begin to believe it."

I would like to advance the question as to why is the common trope for women that they need to be saved? And is New Media different in its depiction of women, such as Trinity, or Molly in Neuromancer?

claim 2 (still in the introduction) : " From ubiquitous male-to-female connection plugs to online sex through debates about censorship and data-privacy, sex and sexuality have emerged as the master tropes for contact, identity, and communication in cyberspace. " - Is pornography endemic online because of the way it screens over the relation to self, to other, to communion, to alterity? Consequences for ethics?

claim 1: "From telephony to high-speed data communications, fiber optic networks enable unprecedented interactions between self and other.  Yet, most discussions of fiber optic networks focus exclusively on the self." - Is it feasible, then, to view the net as inherently selfish, semi-autistic, anti-communication?

In Chapter 4: These authors simultaneously reveal, excuse, and establish themselves through their confession, as well as establish the referentiality and reality of cyberspace. They establish cyberspace as extraverbal since a confession “includes an extraverbal moment: even if we confess that we said something (as opposed to did), the verification of this verbal event, the decision about the truth or falsehood of its occurrence, is not verbal but factual” (de Man 281). The privileged extraverbal event—whose reference is also constituted by this confession—is cybersex.

I don't believe that "factuality" and "verbality" are mutually exclusive; furthermore, cybersex- to which Chun is applying this concept- is overwhelmingly textual, which must first be verbal (be communicated to us via language) in order to be factual. Care to enlighten me?

this site, which came to my attention after its demise, sold teledildonics and other virtual sex products (on cd-rom etc.) - but the ruins are almost more instructive: posted on the main page you find a letter detailing the economics of adult entertainment online.

On page 65 (a propos the MCI commercial), Chun remarks briefly upon the "normalcy" of "white, male and literate", and the unnecessityof intellectual disembodiment for such people as, they've been historically disembodied as the bulk of the "authorial" class, if I may. Indeed, the "[usurption of identity]" is for those deviating from the "white, male, literate" norm; such a disembodiment would theoretically allow the extra-web disenfranchised¹ to attain a parity with the "elite". Chun doesn't discuss the implications of such an equalizing, what though it'd be interesting.

1. Ironically, the bulk of "normal" operators of the internet, if they're defined by understanding and relatively seamless operation of software/hardware (hackers) are, as we've herad ad nauseum, "white, male and literate".


Pornography, glossed:
Patriarchially, "free speech"; continuaton of the male prerogative to "use" women by reducing them to types. Feministically: "silencing (88, Dworkin quotation, I think)", reducing women to physical types as commodities to be enjoyed by men, no matter how much money Annie Sprinkle makes.

Hacking and hacktivism tie into the cryptographic imaginary. I would suggest that as the public image of hacking oscillates between terror and play, we may recognize in its structure the antinomy of mythological reception. It is the pivotal feature of myth that it allows you to switch from fear to stories about fear, from play to observations of play. Understood this way, one may appreciate about hacktivism exactly what the mainstream finds suspicious and threatening: the relaxed, loose, playful approach to “control and communication,” that is to cybernetics as social power. The tyranny of closed systems is most unsettled by those who seek root, or radical access to its structure. This myth and the structure of its reception become legible as a precarious balance of secrecy and access in the dispersed, oral cultures of the Internet in particular and of mass media in general.