Cyberculture: April 2004 Archive Page

An online survey of 2,755 musicians and songwriters shows they are quite divided in their opinions about the impact of music file sharing by Internet users. There is no clear consensus regarding the effects of online file-sharing on artists.

Some 35% of this sample agree with the statement that file-sharing services are not bad for artists because they help promote and distribute an artist?s work; 23% agree with the statement that file-sharing services are bad for artists because they allow people to copy an artist?s work without permission or payment. And 35% of those surveyed agree with both statements. --Preliminary results of survey of musicians (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Interesting context for my blog on Braunbeck's "Of Awards, A**holes, and Assorted Aggravations."

As always with Pew, the full document is in PDF (boo!).

How would you feel if a group of people (who aren't associated with the IRS) just offhandedly decided that it was all right for them to steal one-tenth of your yearly income because they felt that what you did for a living wasn't really work, and you made all kinds of money from the advance anyway, and it's information and all information should be free, or whatever bullsh*t justification they use to anchor their highly selective form of morality? (And have you ever noticed that most of these Neolithic dipsh*ts who claim that "...all information should be free..." are usually in the process of shelling out or paying back tens of thousands of dollars for a college education so they can have a goddamn piece of paper to hang on their wall to show that they know what they're talking about because they've Got. A. Degree!? Talk about your "Never the twain shall meet...") --Gary A. Braunbeck --Of Awards, A**holes, and Assorted Aggravations: Part Two  (It was Already Broke When I Got Here)

This essay is marked as Part 2, but I can't find Part 1. This leads me to suspect that when Part 3 is obliterated, this essay will be removed. To top it off, this is elsewhere identified as "rant installment #4," but I can't find an index to the other 3 rants. These annoyances almost kept me from blogging this article, but I think what it has to say is worthwhile.

Braunbeck teaches in Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction program. What must be extremely infuriating is that it's the very people who enjoy what he writes that are taking money out his pocket.

A book that costs $7 earns him about sixty cents. The rationalization behind file-sharing is that rich publishing companies don't need all that money -- but, Braunback argues, starving artists (the vast majority of creative types) do.

Still, for every sixty cents that a file-stealer doesn't pay Braunbeck, a publisher is out $6.40. One imagines his publisher should be the one tracking down violators, but it sounds like Braunbeck is the one who's taking the time to do that. It's the publisher that can afford to give the modest advance that a writer might be able to live off of while churning out the book -- publishers are the patrons of the modern age, and are thus extremely important. But playing the sympathy card is difficult when fans see just how little of the book's cost actually goes to the author -- I'm not sure that somebody who's already decided to download a book and save $7 is going to reverse his opinion once he knows how much Braunbeck depends upon the 8% of that figure that he will get... and simply talking the consumer into sending sixty cents of guilt money Braunbeck's way is not going to solve the problem (because if the publisher doesn't make money on Braunbeck's next book, then it won't ask him to write another one).

Apple's iTunes is a good idea, in that it brings the cost of individual songs down into the realm of impulse purchases. There isn't big money in short fiction, at least not on the scale of pop music.

I do think Braunbeck is too dismissive of online culture and of academics who study it -- but this is perhaps just my emotional reaction to his emotional reaction. Since I'm not a fiction author, I'm more likely to be stung by his attack on academics than I am to be affirmed by his defense of fiction authors.

At any rate, I was teaching a class in "Writing for the Internet" the week Napster was closed down. One of the avid file-downloaders in that class was a music major. I asked her to imagine that she was good enough to be hired at a few gigs a month, had a CD or two that she was trying to sell, and the income from those CDs were just enough to be considering quitting her full time job and trying to make it as a professional musician -- and the day after she quits, somebody starts making unauthorized copies of her songs available on the Internet for free. Then somebody remixes one of her songs, using samples taken from a superstar's album, and the lawyers from that superstar tell her she's being sued for misusing their intellectual property. Now she not only has to scrabble to get her old day job back, but she has to fight a legal battle and pay bills. Now the music that she loves goes from being a source of income to an expense.

I don't know whether my little parable got that student to change her ways, but I could see she never really thought of it that way before.

I sympathize with Braunbeck, since the same file-sharing culture is also challenging the educational system. When I was a grad student, I knew an undergrad who would buy one of those big honking expensive Chemistry textbooks, and photocopy all the pages that were assigned in the professor's syllabus. This was before the advent of color photocopiers, so he would tear out the pages with color graphs, and then return the book to the bookstore.

Today I'm sure it's much cheaper for students to do a similar thing on the color scanner in the computer lab, and print the pages on the lab printer, all for "free". If universities were more progressive about rewarding faculty who produced quality online work, then more instructors would be able to find better work online; they would rely less on big honking $100 textbooks. Some schools, reacting to the cost of rooting through student computers for illegal file sharing networks, and paying lawyers to handle the lawsuits, have instead offered subscriptions to legal file-sharing services as part of dorm fees. That sounds like an excellent recruiting tactic, and a pro-active response to a problem that won't go away just because people stamp their feet about it.

While I'm not aware of the precise identity of the "Neolithic dipsh*ts" to which Braunbeck refers, I do think that academics who advocate the open source philosophy are thinking about the long-term benefits to society. The open source philosophy attempts to subvert the tragedy of the commons -- the human tendency for the individual to take more than his or her fair share, eventually leading to the depletion of common resources and the destruction of a way of life. Those who take art without paying for it are taking proportionally more money from the lowly artists, who rely more heavily on individual sales (rather than, say, Britney Spears, whose music is completely incidental to her celebrity).

Ending months of speculation, search engine company Google plans to float by selling $2.7 billion worth of shares in an online share auction. --Google files for IPO (Internet Magazine)

The online community has been waiting for this for a long time. How long will Google's geek-friendly "don't be evil" philosophy last under the pressure to make money for stockholders? The online auction is an intriguing idea...

Because she does all of her teaching online, Ms. Achterhof can handle many more courses, at many more colleges, than she could face to face. She is an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions, in three states, moving among her teaching duties with the click of a mouse while her black Labrador lies curled at her feet. She hardly ever sees a campus, spending much of her time at home here in a 100-year-old cottage next to a small lake. --Dan Carnevale --Part-time professors, in demand, fill many distance-education faculties (Chronicle)

Interesting... "Carnevale" means "farewell to the flesh."

My last two classes talked me into holding class outside today. There wasn't much we could really accomplish, especially during the evening class (which was supposed to run until a few minutes ago, but I let 'em out a half hour early -- sshh, don't tell my boss). Last term I started a ritual of snapping a picture of my class on the last day... I'm not sure what it accomplishes, but it gives a good sense of closure. (It never feels right saying good-bye to a class when I'm about to hand out the final exam.)

Almost done...

though Limbaugh is wrong to decide that video games are entirely like other games, his comparison opens up interesting possibilities for anyone wanting to develop a theory of video games as a medium because it suggests that any such theory ought to deal with both sides of video gaming's cultural history. Though many readers in English departments will be more comfortable with the expressive aspects of games that essentially resemble those of more familiar forms like film or literature (even as they may be suspicious of the right of any popular medium to claim for itself the relevance of those forms), the present seems an opportune time for expanding the range of what literary and cultural study might do with new media. --Hayot and Wesp --Reading Game/Text: EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital Communities  (Postmodern Culture)

Via TerraNova.

In Dragon's Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It's personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything capable of generating friction has potential artistic application. I think of the sounds of a painting or etching or collage coming into being: fresh paint slapped with the flick of the brush onto taut canvas, acid eating away at a metal plate, paper torn and cut and pasted. Filtered through Dragon, these sonic waves become the choral voices of the atelier. --Unnaturally Speaking (accidentals and substantives)

Dragon's Naturally Speaking is voice-to-text software. I used it one semester when my carpal tunnel syndrome was killing me.

Here's the text Dragan thought it heard when the author colored a plastic plate with marker strokes:

With the bus to distance business assistance assistance with the only if the Pentagon and I think about that the think about that did it did that it with the submitted to think that the independent and that defendant at that it with the independent independent attempt to that defendant at the event of the equipment

Link via MGK.

On Instructional Technology and Face-to-Face InteractionJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I recently spent four hours in a training session, during which this was all I could see of the instructor without straining my neck. The classroom that I prefer has monitors embedded beneath glass-topped tables.

--Primetime Cheating (Pedablogue)

My colleague Mike Arnzen has already created the blog entry I was about to create, so I'll just link to him.

The Project's national phone survey of 1,371 adult Internet users conducted between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows that 14% of online Americans say that at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they no longer do any downloading. That represents more than 17 million people. However, the number of people who say they download music files increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since the Project's November-December 2003 survey. This increase is likely due to the combined effects of many people adopting new, paid download services and, in some cases, switching to lower-profile peer-to-peer file sharing applications. --The State of Music Downloading and File-Sharing Online (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

The full article is in PDF.

PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100. And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up one of his friends, a search engine affiniciado who took computer class. Matt arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this, and equally quickly Matt checked the rankings for some words Josh wrote in his blog. He mentioned "dinner", and boom, his site popped up on Google's number one spot for this word. Hundreds of millions of people visiting Google, thousands of them entering "dinner", hundreds of them being transferred to Josh at any second. --Jan Phillip Lenssen

--The PageRank 100 Incident (Google Blogoscoped)

Extremely interesting Twilight Zonish parable.

Speaker #n will present a statistical analysis of the activity on a student weblog community in order to identify possible correlations which may advance our understanding of the pedagogical value of weblogs. The community is a group of personal blogs, all hosted on the same server and sponsored by the university. Activity on the site will be monitored during the summer break, during which all students will have the ability to continue posting to their blogs.

While most members of this particular community are undergraduates who are required to blog for course credit, but the server does not, at the moment, host any "class blogs". Those students who blog for credit do so on their own personal blogs, where they are given free reign to blog on whatever they wish, in addition to their academic blogging. A small number of faculty and students who are unconnected to the classes where blogging is required nevertheless keep blogs on a voluntary basis. About 5% of the bloggers in the group are responsible for about 50% of the activity on the site, and the voluntary bloggers are well-represented in this list of active users. Preliminary analysis of the ratio between number of posts (top-level entries created by registered bloggers) and comments (brief responses, which can be added to the main entry by any web visitor, including random web surfers) reveals several interesting details: male bloggers wrote less frequently than the female bloggers, but typically attracted more comments per post.

Other areas to examine include the relationship between the blogroll (a sidebar containing a list of a blogger's favorite weblogs) and the classroom seating chart, and the usual computer-assisted textual analysis subjects such as word count, word frequency, and average word length. In order to present this information, an analysis of the peculiar ethics of this particular research situation may prove illuminating. All students who blog for class are informed of the inevitably public nature of their work, which makes the invention of pseudonyms almost pointless (since Google would easily help the curious audience member identify the "real" author of any quoted passage). Information such as average number of posts per month, or average number of comments attracted by each post, is already public (even though only the weblog administrator has push-button access to an up-to-the minute master list). Other factors which may be examined for possible associations include the degree to which the student personalizes the blog templates (leaving it "plain vanilla," modifying it in simple or complex ways), the average number of links per post, and the average number of inbound, on-site, and off-site links per post.

Discovering Metrics for Evaluating an Academic Weblog Community [First Draft of CCCC 2005 Proposal]Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

First draft of my component of a panel proposal for next year's CCCC (I am "speaker #n".)

I was resisting putting in buzzwords such as "emergence" and "network," since I think of this as a practical exploration of just what it is possible to learn once we learn to read all the data that's being encoded in the networks the students form when they link to each other and post comments on each other's blogs.

I can't really come up with a cuter humanities-style title for the paper, not until I've actually got some results to work with.

I was thinking of "Mene, mene, tekel, uparshin," if only to remind me to look for signs that weblogs aren't the heaven-sent answer to every single thing that might possibly be less than perfect in academia.

There is no day on the calendar six months or a year away, when you can say, ?OK, I?m done promoting now, and I can stop.?

Promotion needs to be a significant part of the ongoing work of maintaining your blog.

If I?ve learned one thing in my years working with creative people of all kinds, the vast majority of them want to devote their time to their chosen field ? whether it be writing, painting, sculpture, whatever, and do not want to spend any time promoting. Perversely, they?ll waste a lot of time (and often money) trying to figure out ways to avoid promoting. --Trudy Schuett --Getting Noticed in the Crowded Blogosphere (Wolves)

Via Doctor Daisy, who also offers a glowing report on BloggerCon 2.

Conseco, which sells life, health and annuity policies to middle-income clients, expected to save millions by moving the work to the world's second-most-populous nation. Instead, the switch was hurt by 9/11, cultural differences and intense pressure to quickly cut costs.--Bill W. Hornaday --Outsourcing didn't pay off for Conseco (IndyStar)

Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads.

"This is what happens when the game's off, basically," said Mike `Burnie' Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue's creators. "They're chatting away, spending their idle time like the rest of us do, just passing the day away."

And so they do ? gossiping, arguing, strategizing and generally wondering what the heck they're doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, fighting blue guys or red guys for no apparent reason. The comedy, absurdist, military, and oddly bureaucratic, was compared by one critic to the plays of Samuel Beckett. --Spielbergs with a joystick (Toronto Star)

Tonight I'll be discussing LPattern Recognition with my literature class... that book centers around the underground cult phenomenon of a strange film being released on the Internet as anonymous clips.

This article also includes a reference to "My Trip to Liberty City," by new media artist Jim Munroe.

Why has openness so far been neglected in the field of Composition and Rhetoric? Most likely because until recently, open source has been publicly viewed as the domain of hackers, a fringe movement which has gained recognition as an effective software developmental model only in the last few years; indeed, some in the information technology industry, thanks largely to the success of Linux, now see open source as more effective for creating software than proprietary, closed source production models. The concepts of open access and open content are themselves also fairly new. The open access movement, for example, has gained most of its momentum since the Public Library of Science initiative began in September 2001. Similarly, the latest developments in intellectual property which shape a more gloomy prediction for access to digital texts?for example, the 2002Why has openness so far been neglected in the field of Composition and Rhetoric? Most likely because until recently, open source has been publicly viewed as the domain of hackers, a fringe movement which has gained recognition as an effective software developmental model only in the last few years; indeed, some in the information technology industry, thanks largely to the success of Linux, now see open source as more effective for creating software than proprietary, closed source production models. The concepts of open access and open content are themselves also fairly new. The open access movement, for example, has gained most of its momentum since the Public Library of Science initiative began in September 2001. Similarly, the latest developments in intellectual property which shape a more gloomy prediction for access to digital texts?for example, the 2002 Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act?are so recent that they have yet had opportunity to exit the publication cycle, despite advanced interdisciplinary conversations in electronic venues which have moved beyond the analysis available in Composition and Rhetoric scholarship. --Charlie Lowe --Prospectus: 'The Future Is Open' for Composition Studies: An Alternative Intellectual Property Model for the Digital Age (Cyberdash)

This is Charlie's dissertation prospectus. Sounds very exciting. Charlie is always refreshing and stimulating (except when he's obsessing about Drupal ;) ) because blogs or wikis or content management systems or individual media objects are, for him, never an end in themselves; they are just one piece in a puzzle that includes multiple different technologies and, most important, the mindset that generates the need for those technologies (and which also generates the resistance to technology that threaten the status quo).

Miners know they have a significant problem when the canary they keep with them stops singing. Hobbyist/part-time programmers are our industry's version of the canary, and they have stopped singing. People who program four to eight hours a week are being cut out of the picture because they can't increase their skills as fast as technology changes. That's a danger signal for the rest of us. We need to address the problems faced by these programmers before we lose their important domain expertise. But we also need to look at the increasing training demands, because it's becoming difficult for any of us to remain competent with technology. --Kathleen Dollard --Save the Hobbyist Programmer (Visual Studio Magazine)

After this paragarph, Dollard sort of geeks out, focusing on the technology rather than the cultural significance of the practice of hobbyist programming. But alembic adds precisely the layer of context that I was hoping to find in the original article -- here's an example of a blogged version of an article being much better (for my purposes) than the original.

Circle Games and CyberpunkJerz's Literacy Weblog)

While I figured cyberpunk wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, I hoped that the likeable protagonist Nell and the fantasy sequences she encounters in her Primer would get students who don't much care for science fiction to enjoy Stephenson's The Diamond Age. In order to discuss some of the key concepts in the novel, I had to make sure that my "Intro to Literary Study" class (English majors, overwhelmingly freshmen) grasped some of the basics of network theory. The novel came out when the World Wide Web was still pretty young, and long before teen culture embraced such things as AOL buddy lists and blogging, so I think the average young person probably intuits more about networking culture than Stephenson expected, but still I wanted to bring everybody up to speed in a way that didn't involve a dry lecture.

In order to dramatize a few key details about the power of networks, while at the same time releasing a little end-of-semester stress, we we cleared tables out of one side of the room, and performed an exercise that I borrowed from an activity that Joe Pino, when he was an MFA drama student at U.Va, inflicted on the cast of the First Year Players' production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, back in spring, 1987.

Three volunteers went into the hallway, and everyone else stood in a ring; one student, who was the leader, started performing a simple motion -- clapping, tapping, stamping, swaying, pointing, etc., and the idea was that everyone else around the circle would copy the motion and stay in synch. One of the students from the hall stood in the center of the circle, and had to figure out what was going on -- what were the rules? It was really just one simple rule -- follow the leader. The person directly opposite the leader was mistaken for the leader three out of three times, because the leader never introduced a new motion while the person in the center was looking at him/her -- the new motion was always introduced while the person in the center was looking away from the leader, so the person directly opposite the leader (who was naturally watching the student in the center) picked it up first, and the people on either side of the leader picked it up from the person opposite, after which it spread quickly (if the students were paying attention and not giggling, and if the action wasn't too abrupt). At one point, a leader sat down cross-legged on the ground, but this wasn't an action that everyone else was expecting, it couldn't easily be accomplished gradually, and it was unlikely to have been introduced by the student wearing a miniskirt -- so basically that one simple motion easily elimnated half the class as potential candidates for "leader".

I suppose when I introduced the exercise, I over-emphasized kinetic actions, and not other forms of communication. At one point, the leader started giggling, and I was hoping that that would lead to everybody else picking up on that action and feeding her giggling back to her, which (given everyone's basically punchy attutide) would probably have dissolved into self-destructive chaos (which is exactly what happens when the "Drummers" in the novel participate in a kind of computational orgy that leads to one of their members, whose body becomes a central processor, produces so much heat that she burns up).

By the third time, the students were doing such a good job concealing the "rules" from the student in the center that the exercise went on for three times longer before the leader was revealed. We also experimented with changing the rules (I named two leaders on our fourth run), and the exercise prompted a discussion of Western individualsim vs. Eastern Confucianism.

While I had always intended on doing something involving meatspace interaction (rather than the cyberspace variety) as we discuss the ending of the book, it's perhaps fitting that the blogs were down for part of the day -- we used a low-tech medium -- our own bodies -- in order to experience how easy it is to hide in a network (though I'm sure Joe had a different motive in mind).

To viewers, the hourly show appears as one continuous, somewhat overwhelming four-block-long image -- and it's programmed that way by teams of animators who spend as much as four months to create the shows. But what viewers won't be able to see is that the image -- and the "screen" -- is broken down into eight sections, each managed by a separate computer responsible for displaying its portion of the image in sync with the others. --Steve Freiss --Downtown Vegas Sees Big Picture  (Wired)

We're discussing Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age in "Intro to Literary Studies," so this discussion of real-world "mediatronics" seemed blogworthy.

Rural users lag in broadband adoption, and infrastructure availability is a reason for this. Here are some highlights from the Pew Internet Project’s February 2004 survey:

• 55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans – have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job.
• 39% of adult Internet users – or 24% of all adult Americans – have high-speed access at home, an increase of 60% since March 2003.
• A surge in subscription to DSL high-speed Internet connections, which has more than doubled since March 2003, is largely behind the growth in broadband at home.
• DSL now has a 42% share of the home broadband market, up from 28% in March 2003.
• For the first time, more than half (52%) of a key demographic group – college educated people age 35 and younger – has broadband connections at home.
• Only 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans.

--Broadband Penetration on the Upswing (Pew Internet Trust)

I hadn't realized how popular high-speed home connections are.

The full report is available as a PDF.

There is still the childhood picture just where it?s always been, right above "I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974." And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: "When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this." The minute I read that I knew this was not going to be your typical mid-90s nerdobiography. And eight-and-a-half million gut-spilling Web-autobiographies later, it still holds up. --Rob Wittig reviews Justin's links. --Justin Hall and the Birth of the 'Blogs (http://www.electronicbookreview.com)

Via Jill/txt.

Instead of starring a busty young woman or a porn stud with rock-hard abs, the Flash-powered site features an actor in a chicken suit, dressed in lingerie. And unlike previous big-business attempts to cash in on an Internet trend, the Subservient Chicken site quickly became an Internet hit. --Chris Ulbrich --Porno Hen Hawks for Burger King (Wired)

I noticed this story last week, but didn't blog it because 1) it's a Flash site, and 2) I hadn't found a straightforward newsy-account of what the heck it was all about.

I confess I still haven't visted the site, but now that I see it apparently uses some kind of text parser (or at least it looks for keywords) it should probably count as a kind of text game.

While I study the classic interactive fiction works that don't include any pictures at all, many games during the genre's heyday mixed words with images; the hybrid genre hasn't attracted much attention.

There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging ? but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the way of a democratic and public activity. It follows from this view that the Internet in general, and Weblogging in particular, are conscious answers to these challenges. Nico Macdonald --The future of Weblogging (The Register)

The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this year. --Interactive Fiction Competition Opens (Slashdot Games)

Sigh... I remember when I had time to code for events like this. I've got a WIP ("work in progress") dating back to 1998... I don't think I've touched it in two years. Someday... someday...

It's been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods's pioneering computer game Adventure and its descendants are finally beginning to garner the critical recognition they deserve. At only 286 pages, Twisty Little Passages is a small, accessible book that addresses a deep and complex subject. The author's stated intention is to bring us the first book-length consideration of interactive fiction (IF) as a legitimate literary field, and he has certainly succeeded. --John Miles --Twisty Little Passages [Review] (Slashdot Books)

In order to gather sufficient resources to support my self, my spouse, and my offspring, I must augment my vision with externally mounted lenses, which I wear on the bridge of my nose. My glasses make me feel professorial; without them, I still feel like an ordinary person pretending to be qualified to teach. But if I didn't like them, I might consider eye surgery.

Twenty years ago, I got a cavity in a molar; the filling recently fell out, and now I wear a ceramic inlay that perfectly matches the color of my teeth.

In Florida, a newborn was recently fitted with a pacemaker the size of a quarter. How many of us know people who wouldn't be alive now, or at least wouldn't be the same, were it not for some technological advancement? Even if you exclude pills and other medical technology that doesn't actually live with you in your body, or treatments that reduce the pestilence that would have destroyed food and thereby limited our access to nutrition, or things such as an oxygen mask that can help us breathe for short periods of time, I wonder how many of us were at one point hooked up to some device that kept us alive or help us function on a daily basis.

We are becoming posthuman.

In a talk that covers the same ground as her book, How We became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles notes that becoming posthuman invokes both feelings of terror and pleasure. The terror, she says, is easy to understand -- she cites others who suggest that "Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now extinct, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves."

She has more, however, to say about pleasure:

For some people, including me, the posthuman evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human mans. In posting a shift from presence/absence to pattern/randomness, I have sought to show how these categories can be transformed from the inside to arrive at new kinds of cultural configurations, which may soon render such dualities obsolete, if they have not already.

She traces challenges to Plato's assumptions involving a "stable, coherent self that could witness and testify to a stable, coherent reality." As humans, Hayles wants us to emphasize our embodied condition: "the complexities of this embodiment mean that human awareness unfolds in very different ways than intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines."

Our fascination with artificial life is not new. In the past, divine intervention was responsible as Cadmus sowed dragon's teeth that grew into an army; Ezekiel saw dry bones in the desert come to life and start praising God; Pygmalion carved the perfect woman who came to life as Galatea.

While I haven't done a full-scale examination of the history of artificial life, it seems that the earlier stories depended upon the gods, and tales that people of the past told each other to help them deal with the natural phenomena they observed but could not control. There are stories of mechanical birds and other toy-like amusements that depended on simple mechanical principles (springs and so forth) that only emperors could afford.

While we are fascinated by hybrids, but that fascination is closely mingled with repulsion.

Pairings of the gods with morals, half-human images such as the Sphynx, and the Minotaur, the story of which is worth quoting . Minos, king of Crete, offends Poseidon,

who avenged the insult by causing queen Pasiphaë to fall madly in love with the white bull. Her request to Daedalus was that he should help her consummate this passion. He did so by building an ingenious hollow wooden cow, covered with hide and with a door on top through which she could lower herself inside. Together, they wheeled it into the pasture where the bull was kept; Daedalus helped her get in, and then discreetly withdrew. Pasiphaë was completely satisfied, but to everyone's horror, she then bore the Minotaur, a creature with a man's body but a bull's head.

Our more recent stories rely more directly on the efforts to control nature. You may know Disney's version of The Sorcerers' Apprentice, where an army of brooms comes to life; that story is based on a legend, which seems to have more to do with science than with religion (a sorcerer, of course, being someone who can control the powers of nature in a God-like way, and who is therefore a threat to societies that would prefer not to have freelancers performing the duties traditionally reserved for uniformed specialists whose goals are better understood). The lazy apprentice uses magic to get out of doing his chores -- and the result is chaos.

Another quote from my book...

McLuhan queries the relationship between soul and machine with the following parable:

As Tzu Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager.

Tzu Gung said, ?There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort ?. You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw well.?

Then anger rose up in the old man?s face, and he said, ?I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.? (Understanding Media, 63)

The gardener in the parable seems to have no problem using tools (such as the shovel, with which he presumably dug the ditch, or the water vessel, both of which mimic the human action of cupping the hands). Yet the old man is ?ashamed to use? a machine (a word that comes ultimately from the Greek word for ?expedience?) that would allow him to ?do much with little effort.? (Jerz 4).

While my job wouldn't exist were it not for computers, it's far from a common experience that people who touch computer suddenly become rich without doing any real work. (Insert angry diatribe against the evils of e-spam.)

I read in the news that a military robot blew up in Iraq.

This is a good thing, those in the know are saying, because one of the things the designed to do is dispose of explosives. In "Firm Cheers Loss of Robot in Iraq," we read the CEO of iRobot saying, "It was a special moment -- a robot got blown up instead of a person."

 The Czech play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)," introduced the word "Robot" to languages around the country. In the play, Robots are an artificial form of life, created from what a non-scientific character in the play calls a chemical substitute for protoplasm.

The mad inventor Old Rossum was bent on usurping the role of the Creator by artificially reproducing a man in painstaking detail, while the practical industrialist Young Rossum produced a stripped-down version of humanity to be sold as inexpensive workers:

Domin: Practically speaking, what is the best kind of worker?
Helena: The best? Probably the one who-- who-- who is honest--and dedicated.
Domin: No, it's the one that's the cheapest. The one with the fewest needs... [Young Rossum] chucked out everything not directly related to work, and [in] doing that he virtually rejected the human being and created the Robot. (41)

Mass-produced by Robot-run assembly lines, Robots remember everything, and think of nothing new. According to Domin, "They'd make fine university professors." Rejecting Helena's theory that Robots have souls, the psychologist Hallemeier admits that once in a while, a Robot will throw down his work and start gnashing his teeth. The human managers treat such an event as evidence of a product defect, but Helena prefers to interpret it as a sign of the emerging soul.

In my book, Technology in American Drama, I comment briefly on the aesthetics of the Robot society:

The Robot is the ultimate commodity?a factory-built living machine, marketed by an idealistic businessman who hopes to turn human society into a work-free utopia. After human anxieties and greed lead to wars and depopulation, an awakening Robot society learns how to hate and how to kill. Lacking any frame of reference outside of the technological environment which gave them birth?no Nature to follow other than the restrictive order of the assembly line?their rebellion ushers in a grotesque new civilization that values nothing but self-serving efficiency and meaningless industry. After the extermination of all human consumers, unwanted goods pile up in storehouses, and the Robots keep working, simply for the sake of the ideals of productivity and efficiency. (17) (emphasis added)

If the story of robots taking over the world appears cliche today, that's because it speaks so powerfully to our present condition that artists can't resist putting their own spin on the story.

Posthuman AestheticsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once.

While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box, real learning is going on as well. Children who go online to play the World War II shooter fantasy Medal of Honor Allied Assault might last all of 14 seconds if they just hit the Normandy beaches with guns blazing. To succeed, they must come up with a plan - either by typing messages or talking through headphones to teammates whom they may never have met. --Daniel Rubin --Ahead of the game? (Philly.com)

This reporter still equates videogames with juvenile behavior -- the "cute" conclusion equates studying videogames with never having to grow up. Other than that, this is a good article, which very quickly moves beyond soccer-mom fears about computer games.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism", "Jewish" or "Jewish people", the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

• http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
• http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp
  

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, it's likely that most of the people currently using Google to search for "Jew" are those who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves. --An explanation of our search results [Or, Google and 'Jew': Why is This Search Different from all Other Searches?] (Google)

Since Google determines page rank based on the number of links leading to and from pages, there's an effort in the blogosphere to supply some more raw material for Google to use. So, here's a link to Wikipedia's article "Jew".

Notice, by the way, how carefully worded this statement is. Google doesn't come right out and say "The results for this search are not informative or relevant." Instead, it characterizes the results of other searches as being excellent, then acknowledges that this one is "different". (The subtitle I added in brackets is a reference to the line spoken by the youngest child in the household on Passover: "Why is this night different from all other nights?")

You may feel excitement or dread -- or a combination of the two -- if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It's a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you're likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which to cover everything. --Mindy McAdams --Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course (Online Journalism Review)

I won't teach the "Newswriting" course again until Fall 2005, but I will be teaching a new one-credit "Media Lab" course that will be for those students who want academic credit for working on the student paper. Our first job will be beefing up the website for The Setonian Online, which at the moment is essentially an archive of our print content, poured in to an HTML template. We can do better than that, though, if I can manage to tap into the enthusiasm and talent my students have so far shown. This should be exciting.

Better Dialog BoxJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I recently wrote about a survey with a confusing dialog box... while trying to download a Microsoft update, I came across this dialog box, which does a much better job.

[H]e looked overseas where he could pay $6 an hour instead of $60 for programmers. He hired a large, reputable Indian outsourcing firm a few months ago, then sat back and watched his troubles mount. Not only did the offshore team produce code that was full of bugs, they ran up big bills working overtime to fix their mistakes. Bertch finally canned the offshore contractors, hired several local programmers and started preaching to industry colleagues that managing such projects across oceans is doomed to failure. --Brad Stone --Should I Stay or Should I Go? (MSNBC | Newsweek)

The fact that this is more or less exactly what I've been wanting to read makes me wonder... how much of the "onshoring" trend is due to PR folks fulfilling the desires of reporters looking for a fresh angle on the outsourcing story?

"Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what's deep inside them quickly and easily," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. "All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past." --Yahoo Launches Soul-Search Engine (The Onion -- Will Expire)

Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.... Rosser has developed a course called Top Gun, in which surgical trainees warm up their coordination, agility and accuracy with a video game before entering the operating room. --Verna Dobink --Surgeons Who Play Video Games Err Less (AP Wire/MyWay)

Infocom is long gone, but never mind. The original Infocom games are available for download at www.latz.org, and also for free play through AIM. A Web programmer named Andrew Baio has written an "AIM bot" that makes it possible.

Bots are simple programs that act like a human being who's subscribed to an instant messaging program. Hundreds of such bots have been written; America Online, for instance has its Safety Bot, which tells Internet users how to protect their privacy. Any AIM user can try it by adding AOLSafetyBot to his buddy list.

You can play some of the old text-based games in the same way. Just install one of Baio's bots, named InfocomBot, InfocomBot2, or InfocomBot3. Send a greeting to your new "buddy," then pick from one of several Infocom classics. Not sure what to do next? Visit brasslantern.org, where you'll find a beginner's guide to text-based gaming. It's all free, and you don't even need a buddy. --Hiawatha Bray --With IMs, friends can be foes (Boston Globe)

Bray did a great job on this piece. Great to see not only the Old Skool games mentioned in the mainsream press, but brasslantern.org -- a great resource by Stephen Grenade, a tireless promoter of current events in the IF world.

Via GoogleNews (where I've set up a bot to send me an e-mail when a new article shows up with the words "interactive fiction").

Here at work, one of my co-workers captured a screenshot of the blue screen of death and made that his screensaver.

I'm wondering if it is to make people feel bad for him, because if he is behind on a project and his screensaver comes on, then you think 'poor guy is going to lose all his work because his computer crashed again.' --Brian McCollum, in a comment. --Blue Screen of Death (Work in Progress)

Very clever!

Lawley is not alone in looking to blogs as a potential escape from the "course as online powerpoint slide" stranglehold of today's commercial course management systems. Charles Lowe of Cyberdash.com recently published an account of his own experience using open source weblogs (PostNuke) to support his online writing class; in a companion piece he compares PostNuke to Blackboard, and finds Blackboard lacking.

And he is not the only one coming to this conclusion. Laura Gibbs, in her blog post "Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web," pretty much captured the differences between a blog-based online learning experience and one provided by the traditional vendors when she said "Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students." --John Kruper --Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?  (The Electric Lyceum)

At Seton Hill, we actually have two different systems -- one for administering grades and course registration, and the other for content management. While I find our CMS cumbersome, next year I will probably use it to let students upload copies of their papers. I don't really have that much of an opinion about our registration/grade reporting tool, since I've used it only a couple times -- just to log on, enter midterm or final grades, and leave. Yes the interface is clunky and stupid, and yes it's insulting that the web-based program expands to take over my whole screen, so that I can't open my spreadsheet gradebook in one window, and copy and paste the grades in another; instead, I have to print out my grades, switch to another window, and type them in from the printed page. Stupid. Annoying. But I so rarely need to use that program that I don't get worked up about it.

While the MoveableType back end is much better designed, because I use it all the time, even the minor annoyances consume far more of my time than the major annoyances in SHU's course registration program.

Another thought... while it's possible to set up a course so that a student must participate in Blackboard forum or post on a blog, the motivation to do is smaller, since the penalties for not doing so (or simply for not doing so today) are infinitesmal compared to the penalty of not getting any courses at all. How frequently do students need to add or drop courses, anyway? Yes, that's important technology to provide, but the tools to let students do that don't have to be perfect, because students have to register for classes if they want to be a student -- just like I have to report the grades, or I'm not doing my job. The interface can be less than beautiful if it gets the job done.

While I can see that the administrators -- who are usually the ones making the decisions regarding the purchase of courseware and registrationware (sorry for the dorky neologism) would think otherwise, I would prefer that my teaching not be leashed to software optimized for the occasional (once-a-semester) administrative needs of registration.

My students can still register for courses using the university's system if I ask them to blog. But Kruper makes a good point -- if my specialty were teaching human anatomy or French verb forms, I wouldn't have nearly the motivation to learn all this technological stuff. There would be other technological solutions that would appear to meet other, more immediate, needs.

To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn't believe in "game research". You're either working on a shippable product, or you're bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can't be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will?

Michael Mateas --Whither Game Research (Grand Text Auto)

Mateas focuses on interactive drama.

Do you know the origin of term BSOD aka ?Blue Screen of Death?? Well, the term ?Blue Screen of Death? was not the original acronym for BSOD. The original term meant the ?Black Screen of Death? and was seen when running under Windows 3.0. A user would attempt to run a DOS application and instead of the DOS application running, the entire screen would turn black with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner of the screen. --Wallace B. McClure --Origin of BSOD ['Blue Screen of Death'] (All About Wallym)

For Julie & Donna.

The faithful, in order to be more true to the 'Jedi Code of Honour', crouch before each other and duck their 'heads' down as a mark of respect before enjoining battle. Some people think that's silly.

I thought it was silly, the first time I saw it. Then I saw everybody was doing it. And then I felt silly not doing it. --Bow, N*gger (Extra Life)

This is not just a game review -- it's a literate, engaging, gripping personal essay. Via bradblog, whose blog entry traces the influence of this particular review.

In an online world where bloggers' frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki - a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete - could hardly be more antithetical to the Redmond way. In a sense, the Wiki is to the blog what open source is to proprietary software: a communal effort where group dynamics rather than a leader's fiat determine the end-result. --Glyn Moody --Of blogs and wikis (Netcraft)

Wikis are a great tool for collaboration and concensus-building, but who wants to be entertained, amused, and challenged by the collective opinions of a faceless group that has carefully formulated its opinion into a seamless collaborative text? These tools serve different purposes. (Hat tip: Culturecat.)