writing machines

After reading Jori’s page titled “Online Deliberation” I watched several videos which I found fascinating. I think we should all spend time reading it and exploring it. One video really caught my eye and got me thinking about the culture of technology and its effects on our culture. It is Frontline’s Digital Nation available in nine segments at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

This video discusses the effects technology has had in our societies and culture. One of the points raised which really shocked me was the amount of time children and adolescents spend using technology. On the average young people spend about 50 hours a week (though some other research shows it’s only 22 hours) using technology, which is a long time. This is in a way may be an effective way to socialize or indoctrinate children though it may have some negative effects. For example, in this documentary Dr. Small from UCLA explains the impact in our brain, which may not necessarily be a positive effects. Check it out!

Scott Rettberg’s Kind of Blue provided a different take on what I had conventionally thought of as the serial novel.  The serial novel conjures up images of 19^th century literature as being written and distributed in serial form and being compiled into long books that we currently read and wonder why they are so long.  Rettberg’s novel though is in the 21^st century and is distributed through the form of e-mail, providing the reader with an ongoing experience of mystery and excitement for the next installment.  This modern take on an old phenomenon makes me wonder what it is that separates these two pieces of work and if it is tied to the form in which the literature is being written and distributed or if there is no difference between then and now.

The cost and time needed to print and produce print literature in a serial form is different than that of sending out an e-mail for free.  While, Rettberg isn’t getting paid for each installment that he writes it is clear that this is not about making a profit from these serial novels.  In the digital format the serial novel does more for the reader than it does for the writer, the reader is given full accessibility, convenience as well as intrigue without much work other than opening an e-mail. This changes the nature of the serial novel because the experience of print was focused around the consumption and act of procuring the next installment of the author’s book, while Kind of Blue is more about the reader being able to instantaneously experience the work that is being written.  If literature in the digital age works place the reader as the primary subject, then what happens to the writer?  Are they more appreciated in the world of print?

Shelley Jackson’s book Skin is an interesting concept because it brings the reader into this more sensory experience of reading.  In knowing that people can become words through the use of their skin it begins to do a lot to change this concept of reading, but it also does a lot to change the concept of our physical bodies as part of the reading experience.   This idea of investing one’s body into this piece of literature in order to consume and read the literature is the most corporeal experience of immersion that one can have when reading.  This makes me wonder if reading is an experience that needs to be bodily as well as mental in order for it to take on different forms and create different pathways into our cognition of the text.

This reminds me of this book called Tactile Mind by Lisa Murphy, which was created with the intent of creating pornography for the blind.  (Here is a CNN video about it) The $225 book is derived from images taken by photographer Murphy and then made the images raised of the page, with Braille text featured alongside the images.   This concept of using one’s hand to perceive a visual image is an interesting way to think about how our bodies and the text we read can become intertwined with one another in a number of ways.  If a body can become a book as in Jackson’s Skin and a book can become a body as with Tactile Mind it becomes increasingly more clear how easily our bodies and technology are evolving together.

So, I’ve finally managed to get a solid first draft that won’t totally confuse all of you. I’m sorry this took so long, but it took me a while to figure out the format I wanted to present my project in. I’ve also been playing around a lot with transposing content through different mediums; i.e. computer voice through telephone, text through photographs, analog audio through digital video, etc… I’m not entirely finished yet, but here’s a sneek peak at what’s to come. This is only about 1/3 of my project. ENJOY and let me know what you think! I will definitely be taking all comments into consideration for the rough draft due wednesday!

http://poetic-freeway.tumblr.com/

http://poetic-freeway.tumblr.com/

We have been talking extensively in class about the sharing of private information online. Missing from this conversation is the aspect of gender. I came across this article today on Jezebel, “Is Facebook ‘Girly?’? How Men and Women Use Social Media.” The article is written in response to a Forbes article that recently came out discussing “What Men and Women are Doing on Facebook.” The Forbes article cites that:

“the 400-million member site [Facebook] is 57% female and attracts 46 million more female visitors than male visitors per month. Plus, women are more active on Facebook. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says women on Facebook have 8% more friends and participate in 62% of the sharing. “The social world is led by women,” she concludes. And they’re leading that charge online.”

While women use social networks to share and connect, men only use these sites to increase their status. Jezebel responds by saying:

“So let’s say it’s true that women mostly use social media to share experiences — and, as the Forbes article has a duty to point out, be marketed to — and men to post on news sites and promote their careers. If we critique this as something that perpetuates women’s exclusion from influence and power, are we internalizing the belief that if a woman does something, it’s necessarily inferior?”

Does it matter that there are differences in the online behavior or men and women? Is it problematic that there are differences? Personally, I don’t think so. Not everyone uses the Internet for the same reason. However, I don’t think that we can chalk up differences in behavior to gender alone. Age, race, location, access, education – all of this attributes can make a difference in online behavior. Grouping people by their sex creates an incomplete picture.

Here’s a link to the LA Weekly article discussing the new facebook features, which gives users information to 3rd party websites.

http://www.laweekly.com/slideshow/thats-what-she-liked-20-reasons-why-you-should-audit-your-facebook-privacy-settings-29759410/

While the motives behind facebook and the other projects are different, what really separates them.  In what cases do we allow others to peer into our lives, in contrast to other situations that we consider invasive.  Is it the commidification of personal information that we’re uncomfortable with rather than it’s accessibility?

The idea that feral hypertext–”projects [that] accept messiness, errors or ignorance and devise ways of making sense from vast numbers of varying contributions”–actually exist shows how incredibly complex and evolved our intelligent machines have become. The idea that something “feral” can make sense of a multitude of arbitrary information is extremely fascinating.  Once again we find new ways to make computers emulate the brain by creating “intimate extensions to memory”; feral hypertexts, unlike domesticated hypertexts, work a lot more like our brains in that they allow for interruption and aren’t strictly bounded based on linearity or guidelines.  Domesticated hypertexts needed these guidelines and rules in order to allow for a more thorough comprehension on our part. Humans need machines and programs to be straightforward in order to completely understand their purpose and to summarize their objective. Feral hypertexts, on the other hand, are a lot more free-flowing and allow for interjection, looping back, and randomness that still manages to represent some sort of “collective narrative.”  The idea of intertextuality resonates throughout feral hypertexts–all texts, are somehow interrelated and can connect to one another through algorithms that recognize similar traits in other texts–thus they form a comprehensible, yet sporadic narrative, a narrative that is definitely a lot harder to try and fully understand due to the vast extent in variations of the hypertext itself in its crude and unbounded form. 

The lack of discipline in feral hypertexts can, however, cause some problems. In Jill Walker’s “Feral Hypertexts” brings up the point that “our idea of authorship is the only thing that keeps fiction from enveloping our world.” She goes on to quote Foucault who makes the same argument in his statement: “How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: one can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.” Walker goes on to defend Foucault by bringing up the point that so many spammers, hacksters, and hoaxes exist on the internet now a days in this age of feral hypertexts and their lack of authorship.  The fictions we’ve created with these wild narratives run rampant on the internet and can sometimes be quite difficult to wrap our heads around. 

Are we paranoid of these types of texts? Should texts necessarily be bounded for the simple sake of being able to fully understand our texts? Should we cage hypertextuality so that we know it through and through from front to back? I feel if the evolution between machine and human is to continue, we must continue to explore the boundless areas of these machines we humans have created. In order to see how much we’re willing to progress should we not allow our computers to be sporadic machines merely following one of the most basic laws of physics–entropy–so that we can continue to understand the regression of these machines only to discover how different it can be. In order to build on the strengths of our creations we must know how far they’re capable of slipping into the faulty; as Walker says,  ”feral hypertext draws from our collective ideas and associations to create emergent structures and meanings. That is valuable , if only we can see it and appreciate it.”

A friend of mine and his parents are computer programmers. They are in the midst of creating a software that is very similar to We Feel Fine. However, they aren’t creating an Art project, they are creating a database that they pitch to companies as a marketing tool. For example, they will go to a company and tell them that they have a software that can survey the Internet for consumer feelings and sentiment and provide a report that will tell the company exactly what they want to know about their target audience. We Feel Fine is taking our sentiments off the Internet and putting it into book form. In two different ways, We Feel Fine creators as well as my friends are able to profit off public material on the Internet. Are we okay with that? Should we be okay with that?

While We Feel Fine might bring up debates on privacy issues, I think that it is important to talk about our own behavior, versus the people who are just taking advantage of that behavior. People seem quick to defend their intellectual property when they see it used, yet do not think twice about posting very private material in very public places. What is it about the Internet that gives users a sense of security, or even this urge to post statements and feelings that before, they might not even verbalize out loud – and surely they wouldn’t publish publicly?

Ten years ago, people probably wouldn’t post pictures of their weekend all over their office walls, for anyone to see. However, today, come Monday morning, it’s not that strange to post your weekend festivities all over the Internet, for anyone to see. Not only do we not think twice about this, we relish in the thought of posting these photos. We define moments in our life as “oh that would be a great profile pick,” or “this would be such a good photo.” We evaluate our real lives by how they might appear in a condensed online public portrayal. While reading through We Feel Fine, I almost felt uncomfortable reading through statements that were so private and personal, yet so publicly said. And it’s not just a generation thing. Plenty of Internet users that grew up “offline,” are using the Internet in a similarly public fashion than those that grew up “online.” I don’t really have answers to these questions, but it is definitely something we should all think about. I wonder if any of this behavior will change.

I found both of these mediums really interesting.  I agree with Rachel about how they are able to bring into question our ideas of authorship as well.  Something I found intriguing was We Feel Fine’s ability to determine the sex of the publisher, and their emotions based on the post.  Initally, as I read their description of the project, I was a little uneasy about this assumption, but after reading many of the excerpts, I saw how gendered many of the posts were.  I also though the statistics at the bottom of each page were helpful in contextualizing the posts that I was reading.

I think both works also bring up the issue of “the end of the era of privacy.”  The people who have created this content are unaware of this outside usage, and some of the authors have posted personal information. People are becoming increasingly comfortable posting personal information on the internet, and this is only highlighted by these two projects.  It’s slightly bizarre, but I feel like most of us are guilty of it, assuming that what we are posting can old be read by friends.

Here’s a link and I’ve e-mailed to the google group what I have so far of the actual program.  It might be confusing right now, but let me know what you think.

Thanks!

http://tkohoh.wordpress.com/