Cyberculture: September 2006 Archive Page

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. --Vannevar Bush --As We May Think (The Atlantic)

In a "Writing for the Internet" class, I assigned this classic essay, in which the author spun a series of fantastic ideas that imagined an information distribution network that would use the technology that was available during his day.

I have the students blog what they think about the readings before class, so I can get some sense of what to expect. For some of the students, the thing they most wanted to write about was how hard the essay was to read!

Since the class includes freshmen who may be encoutering a full-length essay for the first time, I'm sure part of their reaction simply stems from their unfamiliarity with the genre. But we've also just gone through some practical material on why online writing should be shorter and punchier than print, so they're noticing the difference now when we move to the print-based genre.

--Asskicking Device (YouTube)

Amazing. A...ma...zing.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Who doesn't wish to keep a record of a beautiful sunset that particularly impressed us in childhood, our first kiss or, for that matter, an important conversation with the boss that took place a few months back? One of our shortcomings is a constant struggle to remember. How difficult it can be sometimes to recall the name of the person you need to meet in an hour, the important phone number your secretary just read you on the phone, or that very important item your wife told you not to forget to bring home this evening. But what if you had a magical device that would allow you to rewind reality and see exactly what happened? --Iddo Gennuth --Saving Your Life on a Hard Drive (The Future of Everything)

One passage reads, "But hardware issues are slight in comparison to the problems on the software end."

Let's talk about problems on the ethical end. Such a device would not only record information about yourself, but information about the people with whom you live, socialize, and work. How will a juror in a mafia murder trial feel, knowing that eleven other jurors are recording everything he says during deliberations? How will a student feel, knowing the professor is recording everything the student says during a conference in which the professor points to a passage and says "This looks like plagairism"?

The author does refer in passing to "socio-psychological and legal problems," but this is a rah-rah article about technology, not a thoughtful essay about the possibility of cultural change. (Actually, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age does a good job imagining what a society would be like, in a post-privacy future, where manners replace secrecy.)

Truth is: The flow goes both ways. We don't move invisibly through the links, we leave a fine trail, much more real than pixie dust, but as intangible. Gathering information, we leave a trail of information. The ivory tower does not protect us here, and there are no sets of information gathering ethics protecting the subjects clicking on a link online. There shold be though. Information is power, and the right to gather and display information should definitely be discussed in a wide range of contexts. --Torill Mortensen --Privacy, scrutiny and research ethics (thinking with my fingers)

A concise, powerful insight into the privacy debate that flared up last week in the corner of the blogosphere amorphous, many-tendrilled subnexus of the blogosphere where I hang my virtual hat.

The 40-hour gamers are able to play in a way that I used to when I was a teenager, but can't anymore. They devote full evenings and entire weekends to marathon play-sessions. They get into the zone -- that Csikszentmihalyian state of "flow" where all distractions drop away, and you focus with lizard-brain survival intensity on solving the puzzles, leveling up, methodically remounting and remounting dread fights against the bosses until you spy the chink in their armor.

And hell, anyone can lick a game in 40 hours easily if they play like that. --Clive Thompson --The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer (Wired)

The other day I was imagining what I would do if I get a little extra cash from a consulting gig. What games to buy?

And I realized I have such a backlog of games already, and such a long to-do list for the 2-3 hours I get each night after the kids are in bed, that nothing really appealed to me.

My wife is planning to take the kids to visit her parents for two weeks during Thanksgiving (and we didn't have enough airline points to get me a ticket too). There will be a little time for games. But I'll probably be a good boy and work on my syllabi for next year during that timeslot (so that I'll have a more relaxing Christmas break).

--White and Nerdy -- Weird Al Yancovic (YouTube)

E-mailed to me by a student who knows me well.

P.S. Kirk, definitely.

"(Video games) are a little bit like documentary films were in say the '60s or '70s," says Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder of Games for Change, a support organization in New York for makers of video games dealing with social issues. "Film had been a popular medium for a long, long time, (but) it took quite a while for it to mature enough to sustain real-world content. Games are at the same place now. They're being used for more serious purposes." --Fred Marion --New generation of video games takes on serious subjects (Springfield News-Sun | Cox News Service)

This discovery, if validated, will be one of only 10 remaining pages left in existence today, and according to unnamed sources at Seton Hill University of Internet Sciences, could expose the true reasons behind the almost complete depletion of both public and private schools circa 2300.

Though several prominent scientists at the competing University of Saint Vincent claim that the site is a flagrant forgery, the official declaration thus far seems to be that the relic is genuine, causing quite a stir in the scientific community.

Official reports state the name of the page to be "Black Tears at Midnight," and it contains, among other things, an official log of an apparent 18 year olds decision to drop out of an antique public school. In a private interview, Dr. Dennis Jerz VIII of Seton Hill told The Post that 8 out of the 10 existing pages contained remarkably similar accounts, possibly linking the overuse of sites like Myspace to the decline and eventual demise of almost every type of organized education. --Paul Crossman --New Evidence Points to Myspace as Catalyst in Educational Depression of 2300 (The Stoop)

One of my students submitted this for an assignment that asked them to use digital documents of today to support claims about what researchers from the future might conclude about our society. I encouraged them to be creative.

YouTube, You To Be, To Be You, You Be Too. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Jay Leno and Videos he found on YouTube. About 3 minutes. The first clip looks like a scene from America's Funniest Home Videos -- nothing new there. Two of them are just clever video tricks, and while they're nicely done, they don't show us anything that TV hasn't shown us before. "The Easter Bunny Hates You," is a hilarious spoof of action movies, but once again, it spoofs the kind of thing that TV has been showing us for decades. Is this really what YouTube is about? This is the selection that Jay Leno chose because he thought it would entertain his home viewers. Views: 375,060.

If you've got about 10 minutes, take a look at YOUTUBERS, a video response to the Leno clip. I watched it while gnawing on my PowerBar at my desk. It's poignant, sweet, cringe-worthy, unintelligible, and touching. Views: 2,739.

When displayed on the huge flatscreen TV on Leno's set, the YouTube clips look amateurish, and they only serve to set up Leno's jokes.

But seeing a compilation of YouTubers talking about YouTubing gives a much better sense of YouTube's cultural power. Yes, it's narcissism, poorly lit and sometimes inaudible. But it feels much more like reality than "reality TV" ever will.

Documents to Go and VersaMail Woes (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I love my Tungsten T3 handheld computer.

I also love Documents to Go, which is bundled software that lets me edit files (mostly word processor, but also spreadsheet and slide show) on my handheld, and then synch my changes with the version of the file on my desktop. It's great for whenever someone is late for a meeting or I have to stand in line. I get a lot of paperwork done, and store a lot of brainstorming.

I'm also happy with VersaMail, which is bundled software that synchronizes my e-mail, batch downloading my in box (with attachments up to a certain size).

But for the past month or so, when I try to open an attachment in VersaMail, I get "You have not saved the changes you made to your last open document. Documents to Go will open this document now."

The only option to click is "OK," and what I see next is just the list of my Docs to Go files -- no file opens for me to save.

This means I cannot open any attachments.

I guess that's not technically true. I can save the attachments to my expansion card, and open them from there, but they won't automatically open, and I'll have multiple copies of the same file that might get out of synch.

This was a minor bother over the summer, but now that the semester is in full swing and I'm getting more e-mails, it's becoming a pain.

A handful of other people have mentioned the same problem in support forums, but nobody has bothered to post answers.

If I find the answer, I'll be sure to post it here. If you're looking for the answer, too, feel free to share your tales of woe.

Firefox Upgrade 1.5.0.7 Resets Personal Settings (and keeps resetting them) (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My preferred web browser is Firefox, but this morning when I logged in, Firefox had upgraded itself automatically, and it wiped all my bookmarks and personal settings. I was able to reload the bookmarks pretty easily, but the darn thing is resetting to the defaults every time I change the navigation bars to the configuration I want. I can't add my preferred search engines, either.

It's free, and I know you get what you pay for, but I'm booked almost solid from 10:30 to the end of the day today, so the timing was very bad for me.

(The same upgrade happend on my computer at home without any problem, so I don't know what the deal is.)

Last week, the Lonelygirl15 videos were indeed exposed as a hoax. The girl depicted was an aspiring actress named Jessica Rose. She subsequently discussed the videos on CNN, The Tonight Show and MTV -- not bad exposure for a previous unknown. The creators of the video were revealed to be film professionals who describe their efforts as a "new art form".

These filmmakers are misguided though -- this isn't art, it's deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact is not art, it's advertising. The Lonelygirl15 videos were created for the explicit purpose of promoting a product, in this case the actress Jessica Rose. --Chris Stevens --Truth or illusion: What's real on YouTube? (C|Net.uk)

I don't have much to add, I'm just blogging this because it offers a good overview of the situation.

Update: I guess I do have something to add after all. Hypertext theory describes how literary criticism responds to the democratization of the writing process, whereby the audience and author essentially share the same tools, and the boundaries are blurred. While those theories were developed long before the blogosphere and wikis made any real impact in the democratization of electronic text, they really did a good job predicting the changes on the horizon.

We're seeing more changes in the world of video, now that we're seeing professional using their expertise to mimic the gritty realism of amateur productions (think Blair Witch Project).

I have been thinking lately of the importance of the internet-distributed "footage" that is pretty much the MacGuffin in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I taught that book in a literature survey course a few years ago, but very few students could get into it. I wonder if I should try that book again, with upper-level students, now that the online culture of dissecting and analyzing bits of video is part of mainstream culture instead of part of science fiction.

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
--F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Useit.com)

Your goal as a web author is to put your best stuff in the hotspots. Obviously you can direct the user's attention somewhat, using whitespace and graphics. But note how little attention readers devote to the boxed content on either side of the main column.

Should Students Send a 'Thank You' Message after Every E-mail Exchange with a Professor? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In Writing for the Internet, I had my students read some articles about e-mail and power relationships in the classroom. They are raising some very good questions in response.

One asked me whether professors expect their students to send thank-you messages after every e-mail exchange.

I just checked with two colleagues, and their reactions confirmed my own gut response. If it's just a routine question (what format do you want me to use, do you want it on paper or online), all three of us agreed that we don't expect a thank-you.

If I answer with a quick two or three word reply, and then a few minutes later I see another message from the student in my in box, I'll assume that the student has a raft of new questions.

If the request required me to look something up, or give an opinion that takes longer than two or three seconds, then yes, a thank you might be appropriate.

Anyone else want to chime in?

A man with a black trench coat whose shooting rampage in a Montreal college killed one person and wounded 19 others before he was slain by police said on a blog in his name that he liked to play a role-playing Internet game about the Columbine shootings. --Montreal gunman liked 'Columbine' game (Yahoo! | AP)

Of course it must have been the video game that caused this horrible tragedy. And to think -- he blogged about it, too!

The mainstream media coverage of Columbine was only reporting and reflecting on something that was there already, right? Only video games and things people write in their online profiles can cause people to snap like that.

Damn those games! Damn those blogs! They're ruining society!

Kimveer Gill's vampirefreaks gallery also includes a shot of his favorite movie poster (The Corpse Bride), and alcohol; his profile (what the mainstream media seem to be calling a blog) includes the following shout-out to Quentin Tarantino: "Keep making those kick ass movies man, you rock."

When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world.

Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just friends and family, could read those stories from the scene. --Robert Andrews --9/11: Birth of the Blog (Wired)

Birth? No. Perhaps, when blogs were able to provide information and solace that the traditional media could not, blogs reached the age of reason.

The assassination of JFK was a similar turning point in TV journalism, and the overnight TV coverage of the 1980s hostage crisis in Iran led to the birth of cable news TV.

Once the initial chaos had died down, on 9/11/2001 I sifted through my notes on technology and human culture, and posted World Trade Center: Literary and Cultural Reflections.

At the time, I was still editing my blog more or less by hand, and my system didn't involve posting blog entries on individual pages, nor did it permit readers to post comments.

Thus, I felt the need to post this as a static web page.

The e-mails came at a steady clip, from all around the world.

The outcry suggests the exhibitionism and voyeurism implied by participation in social networking sites has ill-defined but nonetheless real limits, and expectations of privacy have somehow survived the publishing free-for-all. For many people, apparently, pushing information to everyone on a friends list is not at all the same as publishing the same information on one's own page for those people to find. --Michael Calore --Privacy Fears Shock Facebook (Wired)

Thanks for the suggestion, Karissa.

It doesn't sound as if Facebook is acknowledging that a vocal portion of its users might have legitimate cause to be concerned.

In addition to creating massive numbers of phony blogs, sploggers sometimes take over abandoned real blogs. More than 10 million of the 12.9 million profiles on Blogger surveyed by splog researcher Vasa in June were inactive, either because the bloggers had stopped blogging or because they never got started. (The huge mass of dead blogs is one reason to maintain a healthy skepticism toward the frequently heard claims about the vast growth of the blogosphere.) "Nobody is watching or moderating the comments and posts on those abandoned blogs," says Tim Mayer, director of product management for Yahoo search. As a result, he says, scammers are looking for ways to hack the interface of these blogs to post to them and take advantage of their inbound links to increase the ranking of spam sites. For obvious reasons, it is difficult for a Google or a Yahoo to discern when a previously valuable site and its links slip over to the dark side and become part of a spam empire. --Charles C. Mann --Spam + Blogs = Trouble  (Wired)

Adolescence was a long time ago. Grad school taught me to relate to others more as colleagues than friends. If I need reassurance of my students' esteem, I need look no further than my course evaluations (Ha!). So my sparse friend count doesn't normally bother me.

But when I first opened my account, it read "You have no friends" at my institution. Such a bold declarative statement has the power of persuasion. --John Lemuel --Why I Registered on Facebook (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

The primary audience for this publication is college administrators and professors, so most readers would understand the "I" in the title as referring to "a professor".

So far, I've spent much more time and effort researching the internet at large, though I'm following eagerly the work published by grad students and younger professors who are more closely associated with the internet's social aspects as defined and experienced by people of college age and younger. (Even my earliest forays onto the internet were for academic or professional reasons, though of course I enjoyed the virtual company of others who were similarly excited by the possibilities.)

Once when I told a class of students that I don't have any friends to exchange IMs with, I got a sympthetic "Awww!!" What I meant, of course, was that I keep in touch with friends through other media.