Group items tagged

Dare to do this? "Paul Miller gave up the Internet at midnight Tuesday. Miller, who was and still is a senior editor at a tech news site called The Verge, plans to stay offline for a full year. When he needs to post something to the website that employs him, he will hand his editors a thumb drive with his stories saved in offline files. If he needs to look up a phone number, he'll get on the phone and start calling people -- who hopefully know people who know the person that he's trying to reach for an interview."

DO IT!

Here's an interesting interview with N. Katherine Hayles (author of this week's readings) for a program called The Artist's Craft. Hayles talks about some of the concepts found in this week's readings and also touches upon some new ideas. I find the material to be extremely accessible in this Q&A format.

Interesting in terms of our discussion on the democratic nature of electronic literature.

This is a module that traces the evolution of the Republican candidates' Wikipedia pages during the course of the primaries. Some of the yahoo user comments at the bottom of the page are quite entertaining too

The divide between the "digital" and the "real" is false. This dualism serves a useful purpose, however: "Part of the seductiveness of the cyberspace fantasy is that, by denying the complex, mutually determining relationship between our society and the Web, it makes our lives and our everyday judgments simpler."

Interesting yet slightly morbid. Does immortalizing the dead on a social media platform that by definition requires interaction among the living to fulfill its purpose reveal yet another narcissistic impulse? For whom are we writing? Obviously not the dead (unless you can make some sort of argument that they check their feeds from the afterlife). For ourselves? If that were the case, we could just as easily sit at home and mourn a photograph. It seems more like this type of mourning is much more performative and public than that...

Publication of Simon Morris's retyping of Kerouac's On The Road. I find this interesting because I wonder how Goldsmith's discussion of Morris's retyping of the text onto the blog might change now that the text is found within yet another context (the published, printed book). I'm considering buying a copy. . .

I'm posting this article because the author and this website are referenced in our book and I think this is also relevant to the ideas presented in O'Reilly's book. We often see discussions about knowing the audience and bringing them to certain and specific actions which brings into question the kind of rhetorical situations we react to online.

According to the Terms & Conditions of Pinterest, all users must have complete ownership of everything they "pin," a condition that completely goes against the purpose of the site, or legal action can be taken against the user. Not only should this article be a wake-up call for Pinterest users (including me), but it is also an interesting addition to the conversations of copyright and ownership/distribution of digital information.

What strikes me as especially interesting about this book review is that it emphasizes and leads with the buzz surrounding its predominantly digital publication instead of the controversy about the popularity of hardcore erotic literature for women.

This short article begins the discussion of what role the Digital Humanities will play when Google comes out with glasses that have cameras built in that will enable "real-time geolocation, facial recognition software, the journaling and storing in the cache and third-party's servers of everywhere you go and see whilst wearing the glasses." He questions how we can use these gadgets to our benefit while still protecting human rights and freedom of speech.

I really like the black-and-white photo in this article that shows the group of people wearing 3D glasses--that's exactly the visual I had in my head while reading this article. It's kind of unsettling to think that that image could become an everyday reality in the not-so-distant future.

This is an interesting article about how "the digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities," and how this is a revolution of sharing ideas that, "affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and scholarship.""

Remember that artist we talked about a few weeks ago, Hasan Elahi, who "actively discloses countless mundane details of Elahi's daily activities" as an experiment in sousveillance? This article from Hydra Magazine argues that Elahi's project, which stems from the artist's ideas that "the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," does not at all interfere with the government's surveillance programs--"it only adds variety to the realm of possible facts that may be invoked when it's your turn to play suspect."

This probably seems ridiculous that I'm sharing this, but this directly relates to a paper I wrote last semester about the rhetoric employed by AXE and now I think they're making a move that applies to this class. Here we have some combination of McLuhan's idea of media being an extension of man and we see elements of IF as people actively contribute the making of a graphic novel and then are characterized by the creators for their input all the while fusing their digital selves to some sort of global and digital AXE alliance. Imagine how difficult it would be to by a different product once you become part of their story and your digital self participates (to channel the ideas of Barry Brummett) in this particular reality.

In our last class (I think it was last class), Sandy mentioned the Electronic Book Review. This is the search results for "Electronic Literature Collection" on the website. As he mentioned, not all works deal with electronic literature; however, a huge majority of the essays engage in discussions that are highly relevant to the discussions we are having in class. I'll also bookmark a couple of key essays and give a short blurb as to why I think you all might want to check them out.

This seems like a smart commentary on many of the issues we're seeing in the book and it helps modernize the Miller v California debate. It's again, largely focused on the idea of policing rights which focuses on freedoms of expression.

Facebook is coming out with an IPO within the next few weeks. With all the talk of Web 2.0 being the last bastion of innovation, this offers food for thought on why social networking sites are choosing to list themselves on the share market.

Finally (and what will appear first), all this talk about digital technology and web design pulls up an equal impulse in me to talk about other skill sets that get undervalued in an information economy. I read this a bit ago and enjoyed it. There also seems to be a trend currently that is leading us toward a sort of steam punk utopia where we will have a mixture of high and low technology. For more on the philosophical argument being put forward in this article, I highly recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Mind at Work. To see some indications of the trend I'm talking about watch How It's Made (which tends to skew toward human components of the production process and is based in a tactile fetish of understanding modes of production since you do not learn how to make things ... or really how things are made) and check out all the books on craft skills, cooking, and carpentry that are exploding all over Amazon with noticeably nostalgic titles. Speaking of which, did the knitting craze end or am I just not around 50 people that have recently taken up knitting anymore?

Oh! Also add to the "evidence" list farming/gardening and the back to earth books ... and psychologically the zombie and (to a lesser extent) virus craze in movies, books, games, etc.

The popular app Foursquare will notify users of nearby places/things to do/people that the user may want to explore on its update in iOS 5. With this update, the user can receive notifications of places to eat and things to do nearby even when the app is closed.

I apologize for all of the posts about WikiLeaks, but I'm fascinated by Assange's views of his work. One minute I feel like he's a hero and that these leaks really can open the masses' eyes to political corruption and scandal, but the next minutes I feel like he's playing with fire and am fearful of the consequences of uncovering these documents.