Humanities: April 2004 Archive Page

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).

Discuss William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. In-class activity: find a partner. Inspect what he or she is wearing or carrying, and write down every brand name you can spot. We will collate the results and vote on what is, or isn't "cool."

Brand Name	Cool rating?
VICTORIA SECRET	14+
Advil	14
Hanes	13
Adidas	12
Smackers	12
Eclipse	11
Twix	11
Blistex	11
Bath & Body	11
nike	10
Old Navy	10
Wal Mart	10
Bic	9
Listerine	9
Nickelodian	9
Orbits	9
SHU	9
Visa	9
Skechers	9
Big Red	8
Express	8
Giant Eagle Ad Car	8
Jansport	8
Juicy Fruit	8
Maybelline	8
Panasonic	8
roxy	8
Steve Madden	8
Verizon	8
Kohls	8
American Eagle	7
CoverGirl	7
Dino's	7
ETNIES	7
Extra	7
FOSSIL	7
MUDD	7
Nine West	7
Aquafina	6
Lerner	6
Ralph Lauren	6
Relic	6
Trident	6
Wrigleys	6
Extra	6
Altoids	5
Emily the strange	5
No Boundaries	5
BASIC	4
Paper Mate	4
PB	4
TIMBERLAND	4
Kay Jewelers	4
Aeropostale	3
Fashion Bug	3
George	3
Hillfiger	3
HURLEY	3
Jerzee	3
National City	3
Nokia	3
Tachikara	3
Tilt	3
Vaseline	3
Bad cat	2
clairs	2
J. JILL	2
Jeffrey Bean	2
Nextel	2
ROSE ART	2
Kyocera	2
Legend	2
K-mart	2
EB TEK	1
License	1
Micron	1
Northwest Territory	1
OPI	1
Pilot	1
Swerve	1
ULTRA BLEND	1
Unisoly	1
Virgin mobile	1
Athletic Works	0
Atlantic	0
Jerz	0
C.E. George	0
Canyon River Blues	0
East Port	0
Ed White Basics	0
Jostens	0
Modern Book	0
Motorola	0
Shop n Save	0
Uniball	0
wccc	0
Maxell	0
Cartier	-1

Cool Hunting at Seton Hill UniversityJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In the final weeks of term, it's not surprising that a headache pain reliever rates so highly. I was surprised at how highly various brands of gum and other oral products rated. Victoria's Secret actually got cheers, with some people, both men and women, putting up both hands. Hanes seems, by contrast, very boring to me, but hey, it's underwear, so I guess that was good enough for this class.

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.

About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing. In English, for instance, fewer than half of the new Ph.D.'s win tenure-track jobs initially, according to the Modern Language Association.

When confronted with those numbers, the apologists, as the Invisible Adjunct calls them, maintain that there will always be jobs for the good ones. --Scott Smallwood --Disappearing Act (Chronicle)

This link might disappear soon. Via Torill.

A Tree-Mail 'Thank You'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Sometimes, even for a cyber-guy like me, an old-fashioned, hand-crafted "Thank You" note just makes it all worthwhile. From my former student Kirsten Schubert, who really knows how to make a fellow feel appreciated.

You're very welcome, Kirsten!

Under the guidelines, which go into effect in the fall for Princeton's 4,600 undergraduates, faculty are expected to restrict the number of A's to 35 percent in undergraduate courses; for junior and senior independent work, the percentage receiving A's will be capped at 55 percent. --Princeton faculty approves grade-rationing plan (CBS/AP)

--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.

Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don?t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone?s there yet, but many are; many we don?t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some textbook or uninformed instructor asking them to write about ?a controversial issue? or their favorite shirt. Take it to the Web. There you?ll find the bizarre ideas and beliefs many of us hold linked together in Shaviro?s imagined connected world (Sci-fi? Life-fi as well). There you will create something to write about. --J Rice --More Blog. Less Talk. (Yellow Dog)

This admission is privately echoed by top players at magazines owned by major publishers, who sometimes cite more lax ad/edit divisions at European magazines as a catalyst. But a jacket showing up in a fashion layout doesn't equal, say, a series of paid-for Cadillac references showing up in a short story that doesn't have the words "special advertising section" topping it, nor a long account of a mountaineering expedition studded with mentions and visuals of the adventurers chowing down on Power Bars. --Jon Fine --Marketers Press for Product Placement in Magazine Text (Ad Age)

I blogged this as yet another example (see also "Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines") to show my students for why they should be extremely critical of anything that they read.

While humans are still going to be biased and imperfect no matter the venue, academic articles are supposed to be free from this kind of manipulation, thanks to the peer review process.

Via M. L. O'Brien.

He cried when she showed him photos she had taken of giraffes. Then, in one of his unexplained flashes of clarity, he told Debbie: "I don't want to have Alzheimer's." -- A frank, gripping article by Marsha King --A journey through dementia: Family surrenders to reality  (Seattle Times)

In the 1980s millions of teenagers world-wide would battle dragons armed with just dice, paper and pens. D&D became part of youth sub-culture but as the game celebrates its 30th birthday, is anyone still playing? --Darren Water --Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? (BBC)

Colorado-based independent scholar Marie-Laure Ryan, author of Narrative as Virtual Reality and editor, most recently, of Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, who has offered comments here at GTxA, spoke about the ludology vs. narratology debate, admitting that she was preaching to the converted, not to the heathens...

She took on the anti-narrativst arguments advanced by Aarseth, Eskelinen, Frasca, and Juul and offered convincing answers to them. All right, I admit: I was already convinced. She suggested that a cognitive approach to narrative, which saw story as a world that had characters and objects undertaking meaningful actions, actions that had consequences in a system with rules and laws, was particularly amenable for use in understanding some computer games.

My basic reaction was, Yes! --Nick Montfort --Montfort on Narratology vs. Ludology (Grand Text Auto)

Nick Montfort also makes a few good-natured jabs at his ludologist friends in this post, a summary of part of a narrative conference sponsored by the University of Vermont and Middelbury College. Once again, at a conference geared towards literature, it's not surprising to see the narratological approach to computer games dominant. I like Nick's observation that if we focus too much on finding a theory that accounts for Tetris, we risk specializing in Tetris Studies.

Update: "May all future discussions be both ludolicious and narratasty." --Andrew Stern

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.

Handwriting Analysis and Fortune Telling

Yesterday I was at St. Vincent College's "Earth Day," where a man named Dennis collected handwriting samples and offered a personality reading.

I let him go through his schtick -- which included all sorts of affirming things like I am a resource person for too many people, I've either had a financial opportunity recently or I will soon, and I've recently been having some kind of medical problem in my left knee, or possibly my right shoulder, or somewhere in my back; perhaps it's an old injury or it's a sign of something that will come soon. He then did the same for my wife, and much of what he told her was the same -- probably because the harried looks on our faces as we chased our kids around was pretty much a neon sign that blinked out "I feel overstressed and tired".

When he was done, I told him, "About 30% of what you told me may possibly apply to me, another 50% would apply to anyone you see walking down the street, and the medical stuff about knees and shoulders and backs is completely wrong." Then, feeling like a bit of a jerk (after all, this guy was volunteering his time at St. Vincent's and he wasn't charging anything), I added something like, "... but it was fun to hear what you had to say, thanks for volunteering your time."

There was a line of about four people waiting for their turn, so I left.

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.

Crunch Time: Seton Hill Blogs Bursting at the Seams

Blogalicious... bloginator... "blog rally"... my students have been fiercely you-know-whatting, in order to fulfill the broad, very general requirements of their blogging portfolios. These range from the typical "write a blog responding to book X" or "blog about classroom activity Y," to "disagree politely with one of your peers" to "write a blog entry that sparks a discussion on your blog". One prompt, "Blog about how your English major affects your work in non-English classes," has sparked some soul-searching in the "Intro to Literary Study" class, which I think is welcome in this foundational course for all our English majors (lit, creative writing, and journalism).

• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph.
• The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

--how not to write metaphors (Schoolzone)

This list of howlers is prefaced with the note, "These are (allegedly) metaphors from actual GCSE essays." A lot of the items on the list are not metaphors but similies (only the latter of which uses "like" or "as"). But they're still funny. In the right context, many of these would actually be very good.

One of them, however, is a faded derivative of Douglas Adams's descripton of the hovering Vogon spaceships: "The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't."

Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns and sounds like the wailings of damned souls issued therefrom. They pranced around the stage with a motion that suggested a cross between the danse du ventre and a fox trot, strange creatures with painted faces and hideous mien. Effie is spavined, Addie is knock-kneed and stringhalt, and Jessie, the only one who showed her stockings, has legs without calves, as classic in their outlines as the curves of a broom handle. The misguided fellows who came to see a leg show got their money's worth, for they never saw such limbs before and never will again--outside of a boneyard.

--Articles on the Cherry Sisters (Oldebolt History)

From a collection of articles about the Cherry Sisters, an apparently ghastly sister act from the 1890s. The lawsuit generated by the above review led to a court decision that protected newspapers from libel suits launched by performers wishing to get revenge against papers that published bad reviews. Via Metafilter, which features additional links to some great context.

Knowledge is different from capital, and from material goods, in that there is no inherent scarcity to knowledge. A piece of knowledge, once produced, may be replicated almost for free, distributed around the world in the blink of an electron, fed almost as easily to one person as to one billion people. Oh sure, there are some pragmatic issues: knowledge can be expensive to create, and as those of us involved in distance and online learning will attest, distribution is not free. However for the greater good, people in a society - and across societies, in a global society - pool their resources, funding public universities for the production of knowledge, and a public education system for the distribution of knowledge. --Stephen Downes

--Unrest in the Ivory Tower: Privatization of the University (USDLA Journal)

A good article from 2001, which argues that the more loudly traditionalists argue for preserving the quirkiness (and inefficiency) of university culture -- particularly in the humanities -- against the streamlined marketing philosophy of the marketplace, the sooner the marketplace will win.

It turns out, in the wider world, that people do not want to spend their time and money (a) meeting someone else's needs, (b) paying for work that doesn't need to be done, (c) not knowing the results, (d) not knowing what is being produced, and (e) more than they can afford. If this is the picture of academia that the traditionalists are defending, then it is doomed, and if by falling it must fall into corporate hands, then their own logic has as its inevitable consequence the privatization of education.

Time to get my AARP card, apparently. I'm 22, and I have officially been "ma'am'ed" for the first time. --Donna Hibbs --Ma'amed for Life (Nothing Left to Do but Rant)

While pondering the language politics of the situation Donna describes, I was surprised when I realized that I would feel comfortable referring to a polite adolescent boy as "young man," but for some reason I wouldn't call a polite adolescent girl "young lady" -- the latter term seems to carry with it a scolding tone.

Obviously, the two terms should be perfectly balanced...

As a sign of friendliness to a young boy, I might call him "son," but a young girl I would call "sweetheart". Why wouldn't I call her "daughter"?

If I were annoyed with a female stranger who accosted me on the street, I might say, "Look lady, I'm just trying to buy a paper, " but I wouldn't say to a male stranger, "Look, gentleman..." I think that "Look, sir," could come across as patient and respectful, or insolent and aggressive, depending on how I pronounced "sir," but for some reason "Look, lady" is only something I would only use if I had passed a certain level of annoyance -- maybe becuase I worry that I'll sound like Jerry Lewis: "Laady! Hey, laaaady!"

Okay... the offspring-impaired among you may wish to skip to the next paragraph to avoid the upcoming parental sappiness... My son objects when I accidentally call him "sweetheart" becuase he knows I'm doing the "harried parent can't spit out the right name for the kid" thing.... My wife can still call my son "Sweetheart," but he knows my nickname for him is "Mister Boy" (it used to be "Mister Baby"). On the other hand, my wife is more likely to call our 2-year-old daughter "Miss Baby," while I call her "Sweetheart" or "Honey Bunny". I make it a point to try to compliment my daughter on her accomplishments, not just on being "sweet" or "pretty" (though she's undeniably both, to my parental eye).

I wouldn't refer to an annoying female stranger as a "pal" or "buddy," but when the tension level starts rising between me and another male I might find myself reaching for those words (and I'm thinking of a hypothetical "A stranger's umbrella has stabbed me in the back three times in the last thirty seconds while his coffe cup is dripping on my suitcase and he's invading my space and pushing me off balance" kind of thing -- something that would prompt an immediate outburst, not an intellectual disagreement I have with a colleague, or a student who takes a cell phone call in class). These friend-labels form a kind of rough alliance with my rhetorical opponent, as if I am acknowledging that we are both getting annoyed with each other, but that I see value in continuing the conversation. Maybe men have more of a cultural need to remind each other (and ourselves) that we are presently attempting to engage each other in conversation; the lack of continued conversational cues signalling our goodwill may signal that the aggression level will soon rise to the point that insults or fists will be next. But because male/female disagreements operate on a different power structure, the subtleties of that interaction aren't fully represented in the language of blunt confrontation (which probably serves the needs of men, since women can have epic fights with each other just by glaring, snubbing, fake-smiling, etc).

While I like to think I understand the value of gender-neutral language, I can see that I have nevertheless internalized quite a few linguistically encoded cultural message message about gender roles.

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).

Random Acts of Music

Just now, a student crept up behind me and slipped a pair of headphones over my head. I don't know her. She doesn't introduce herself. Small voices, like backwards chimpmunks, say something inaudible to a hip-hop beat.

"I randomly subject people to whatever I'm listenting to," says the student. I thank her "for the subjection" and she moves on.

I suppose it's a good thing students at Seton Hill find me so approachable. But I'm definitely filing this one under "weirdness."

blogs.setonhill.edu is down

I've notified the server admin, who says he'll won't be able to look at it until early this evening.

A shout out to Rachel Crump, who was just about to give an oral presentation on Dungeons & Dragons when the blogs went down at about 3:45 ... she had prepared thoroughly enough that she did a smashing job anyway, but what a nightmare!

I always bring a plain paper version of my talk, since I've seen plenty of presenters who were depending on technology crash and burn.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: "Score a few points for Bud!"Dorky but bookish (therefore fun) 'open the nearest book to page 23' meme

Found in several places this week. The one that actually prompted me to post was here.

Questions (by whom, I don't know) had been raised about my collegiality and some had reached the ears of the search committees where my applications were under review. I racked my brain for the comment or incident that could have sparked such rumors. Had I inadvertently said something in a seminar or a conference that offended someone? I've never been arrested for brawling, malicious mischief, or damaging property. I remain undefeated in schoolyard fistfights because I've never had one. I could think of no professional circumstance where a teacher or a fellow student watched me fly off the handle.

And then a light came on. I had lost my cool in front of hundreds of witnesses by signing my name to a penguin mugging. --Jon T. Coleman

--Haunted by Penguins (Chronicle)

Coleman deals with the repercussions of publishing an article in The Chronicle in which he admits he was so angry about his (unsuccessful) job search that he assaulted a plastic penguin named Lighty. Bloggers -- and anyone else who writes about their profession in anything other than a strictly professional way -- should take note.

Some of my students insist that they should be free to write whatever they want in their academic blogs -- and indeed, I don't restrict them at all. But early this term I did ask a graduating senior to address all my classes on blogging ethics and the potential drawbacks of being too confessional (or, as Coleman might put it, "honest") in one's writing. Coleman's most recent article doesn't mention that Lighty was the victim of a "drunken rage" (emphasis added) which certainly makes for a more dramatic opening. The original article mentions his continued rage, with the added observation, "now I can bench press 350 pounds". I recognize the humor in the essay, which is part of a genre in which authors are known to embellish details in order to heighten the emotional experience for the reader. Still, if you construct an image of yourself as that angry, I don't think it should be a surprise if people start treating you as if you have a bad temper -- even if you don't.

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.

An increasing number of us seem interested in learning political news only from media that tell us what we want to hear.

That's dangerous for the press and the people. What should be done? --Unvarnished Truth?: Perception of bias undermines media (Dallas Morning News)

So much for the evolutionary advantage of love. As to the proximate, immediate cause of love, scientists have found that the mother-offspring bond in humans and other animals is mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.

What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the same regions of the brain. The implication is that maternal love is the evolutionary basis, the foundation, for romantic love. --Rowan Hooper --What's love gotta do with it? (Japan Times)

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.

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...

Testing my new RSS feed

I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you've got a content aggregator, and you'd like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know.

BTW... What's a content aggregator?

Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator of their progress. The earliest uses of weblogs thus far have been as replacements for writing journals. Despite difficulties, there are several advantages to the use of weblogs in this setting, especially in that they provide a more immediate and social environment for writing (Kajder & Bull, 2003), which when combined with the improvements to student writing that seem to accrue simply by moving to a computerized form of journals (Goldberg, Russel, & Cook, 2004), represents an obvious area for experimentation.

There has been a move over the last decade toward using portfolios of student materials to improve evaluation and learning. --Alex Halavais --Weblogs as 'replacement' educational technology (Alex Halavais)

Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting through a number of final presentations from graduating English majors. My colleague Mike Arnzen blogged about the online portfolios that some students chose to produce instead of traditional 3-ring binders.

While praising the information management and convenience of the online portfolios, Arnzen also noted a few downsides -- one of which was the fact that an e-portfolio is geared towards serving up the final product, rather than presenting a coherent reflection on progress.

But my freshmen who have been blogging almost since the first week of school will have a tremendous archive of material to consult when they are seniors. Those students who choose to submit electronic portfolios will probably be the ones who have taken plenty of new media journalism courses (and if I'm the instructor, I imagine they'll be blogging). To compensate for the weaknesses of the online portfolio genre, and to help students take fuller advantage of the strengths of the online medium, perhaps we need to rethink the reflective introduction assignment, which currently assumes that the student will write an ordinary prose essay. For those students who choose to submit an online portfolio, perhaps that introductory essay needs to be rethought as a series of individual blog entries, which themselves contain links back to important blog entries from the past. Thus, instead of clicking on items in a table of contents, the evaluation of an online portfolio will be like reading a hyperlinked narrative, written with the full knowledge that the very nature of the WWW means that the reader of an online portfolio will be reading the same way he or she reads any online text -- looking for bold keywords, bulleted lists, subject headings, and links, and slowing down to read in more detail only when the text is particularly interesting.

Link found via KiarosNews.

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)

I'm sitting in class
and it hurts my ass
I stare at the clock
and watch the time pass.
Tick tock; Tick tock
the professor; I mock.

The class is like hell,
unfortunately no bell
to ring to ring to let
me be free
I can't wait
I have to pee! --Amanda Hoffer --Cover slam...whaaaaat (Hoffer's Log)

Amanda says she wasn't writing about my class... her sense of timing was impeccable, drawing a lot of laughs from the riveted students. One of the many excellent performances at tonight's "All-American Poetry Cover Slam," part of my "American Lit 1915-Present" course.

By the way, I responded by reading "Did I Miss Anything?", which predictably got mixed reactions (the education students loved it!).

This was another one of those days when I remember why I wanted to be a teacher. I also feel we had a good day in "Intro to Literary study," though the students there weren't feeling quite as relaxed about poetry -- I've been asking them to wrestle with "Prufrock," and of course they have other work to do as well. Still, all in all a good day.

Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates' personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said.

Lamb, who teaches a creative writing workshop at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, said Wednesday that 15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison's school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over.
--Lamb: Inmate Writing Erased (Norwich Bulletin/AP)

One would hope that so much work would exist somewhere on a backup file.

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, Punk Rock, 
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airlines --Billy Joel --Annotated 'We Didn't Start the Fire'

I once thought about doing this kind of thing in a class, but I couldn't find the right environment.

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