Group items tagged

This is a short cartoon that satirizes the experience of using twitter to communicate. It has some funny phrases including when one friend inquires about people on twitter "who are they talking to?" the other friend responds "this is how we communicate now in bite sized yippity-yap!" Once the first friend becomes extremely cynical and essentially awakens the people in the "twitter-sphere" from a zombie-like slumber, the whole reality begins to crumble. As silly as it is, it says some interesting things about social networking and the public's perception of the different forms of communication.  Also, it's worth noting that the video was made prior to some of the Iranian and Egyptian conflicts in which twitter played such an important role in empowering the masses (but is it the opiate of the masses?).

This is another satirical look at what's going on online and how sites like myspace seem to be loosing relevancy. In some ways the video is actually a little disturbing, but it does at least partially bring into question what makes a good social networking site and what causes us to favor sites like facebook over sites like myspace. For instance, was myspace too customizable to the point that it left the user with too many choices and left visitors feeling out of place every time they visited a page that blasted music at them they didn't actually enjoy?

I talked about this in class and I've posted on this before, but when I first posted this the idea was still in the inchoate stages of development. Now you can click on different chapters of the story and there will be a menu on the right hand side that shows animated versions of people added to the story. By clicking on this drawing, the story will advance to the period where this person makes a guest appearance and will show the real photo used for the drawing which is sometimes a facebook profile picture. Why I think this is especially interesting is that it has elements of IF that are in use in electronic literature, but it also creates a participatory community based around a specific exigency which is buying products from AXE.

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

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.

This article (which mentions the Manning situation that is the focus of the video I posted earlier today) outlines the pros and cons of prosecuting Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing and disseminating thousands of classified State Department cables on his site. The First Amendment is at the crux of this debate: "How do you draft a law that targets WikiLeaks but leaves intact our system of press freedoms?"

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.

Some of the ins and outs of copyright law and DMCA.

Google is offering a Chromebook and cash prizes totaling $1 million for anyone who can hack its Chrome browser at the CanSecWest security conference next week: $40,000 for "partial Chrome exploit" and $60,000 for "full Chrome exploit." This event illustrates a concept from this week's readings: community collaboration can increase a service's effectiveness and bolster a company's success. The Google Chrome Security Team even stated that the contest provides "a big learning opportunity" and ultimately enables them to better protect users by revealing bugs and providing information about hacking techniques.

It is like at the start of Sneakers when they are paid to break into banks and show the various security issues. Also, it would be pretty sweet to log $40,000-$60,000 in that short a period of time. I suspect there would also be a job offer that came along with it.

A school district in Delaware recently proposed a rule that would require teachers to unfriend students, a district in Maine is banning all social networking, chat sites, forums, and other sites from state-provided laptops, and now the New York City Department of Education will now monitor teachers' interactions with students on professional social networking services. Teachers were warned not to expect any privacy and that administrators and officials should have access to the professional accounts. This makes me wonder if now workplaces and universities will require employees to loosen their privacy settings on their accounts.

My last day teaching was Friday and already they're trying to make it so I can't come back :( Though, I've seen computer poetry and I'm not sold on the idea that computers can gauge quality...

Keeping track of passwords is definitely a hassle for most of us, so a service that groups all of them didn't seem far off. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and if it will catch on and be secure.

Johanna Blakely discusses gender and social media in relation to demographics and women's popular use of social media.

A smart political article about the relation between communication and capitalism. Useful especially on the way technical networks both present themselves as political and foreclose the political.

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.""

I thought this was an interesting article after looking at the corpus last week that used books online. There is great discussion of how computers and machines will enable us to look at literary texts in entirely new ways.

This is the hypertextual poem by Stephanie Strickland called "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot," to which Hayles refers in her article "Electronic Literature: What Is It?" Hayles's idea that we must recognize "the specificity of new media without abandoning the rich resources of traditional modes of understanding language, signification, and embodied interactions with texts" is absolutely at work in this poem.

Really cool article (and magazine more generally) for thinking about things you can do with css and javascript (and getting advice/code). The options include: an analog clock; dynamic, layered index cards; creating perceived depth and 3d ribbons; newspaper layouts; navigation bars; and more.