An article on CNET discusses a bill that will make bloggers and personal website operators responsible for reporting illegal images posted on their sites. While the bill is designed to remove child pornography from the web, it sets high and somewhat unlear standards. This legislation impacts "any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service," meaning that this blog is subject.

I was thumbing through and I found an interesting address by Azucena Gajo Uranza on ethics and electronic writing. While I did not feel that he touched all the issues here, Urzana did raise the issue of timeless morals in a culture of instant communication. He seems to have some consciousness of the power of representation reminiscent of Joyce and Hayles, though his ethical angle looks different. For those of us who believe that there are great truths out there that compell writing, this is worth a read.

No mind-bending explorations of theory from me this time around. Actually, I wandered across wikiHow whilst procrastinating, and I thought I'd pass it on. An interesting knowledge base, from how to gain the trust of a recently abused horse, to how to appreciate death metal. Joking aside, it looks like a nice use of this kind of community software.

Now that I've written the recap of my final project (which felt a little violent considering how far I had been from the project itself throughout), I'm deciding where to go from here. Part of me wants to be throught with the long walks to go photograph an unchanged landscape on Walker Beach or to repost another blank page of the journal. I did not feel like people got much out of the visual space, but there was a very interesting conversation going on in the journal when the project "ended." People were saying some very meaningful things, using the journal as a cathartic tool. Also, the journal "broke the bubble" when a group of sixth-graders happened upon it and joined the conversation.

This was in progress when I had to leave for class, but it represents a chunk of my reflections on my final project thus far. As marmalade observed in her presentation today, there is something really different about creating than theorizing. Likewise, the experience of working on a collaborative art project has been eye-opening for me in terms of understanding how much power there is in creating or reading a text. There is a real power in being able to decide meaning. In writing, it is that (somewhat terrifying) moment when all possibilities are open. In reading it is having the text open in front of you and the beginning of an interpretation in mind.

Magoo's post "Which Patterns are Good to Eat?" raised some new dimensions of Hayles' work for me, so of course I'm going to devote more words to pattern versus absence. The example of a the bunny and carrot is an interesting one, particularly because it depends on the primacy of an external reality. It is provocative that the bunny does not percieve the carrot as a carrot until smell compliments vision, at which point the "noise" becomes a tasty "pattern." The interesting thing here is that presence seems to separate from pattern as the bunny momentarily fails to represent the carrot.

So, I'm a little disappointed with my final project thus far. What looked like an interesting concept for probing the relationship between online and "real" worlds may be generating interesting results, but these results must be inferred from the near absence of participation thus far.

I liked my prospects when I launched the project late last week. The site looked professional, but simple, and the "are you really putting a journal on Marston Quad?" that I got in class seemed to indicate a level of interest that could fuel the project. Several days, many pictures, several digesters and a few personal pleas later, I'm looking down only two contributions to the project.

So, my final project depends entirely on a community that will participate in it. As a member of the Writing Machines community, I want to ask you to help me. Rather than telling you a lot about my concept, I'd prefer to let you try it for yourself and talk to me about it later. Seriously, it will take 10 minutes of your time, and it just might be fun. Check it out here. Many thanks!

So, with no ill will for being put there in the first place, I feel like I essentially floundered when presented with the opportunity to soapbox on embodiment in the last five minutes of class today. Really, embodiment and Katharine Hayles' essay are interesting to me, just difficult. Here are my thoughts, late and still partially-formed.

I'm still reading all of the sections, but I'd recommend checking out Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, an interesting paper by a MacArthur-funded professor out of MIT. Among other things, the paper presents concrete ideas for using media (often, but not always, "new media") to achieve unique kinds of education and explores the idea of participatory media.