Group items tagged

I found this site for a company that creates products that allow us to mix our real-world and digital experiences at once. One interesting product creates the image of fire or waves on a pool table that chases the pool balls as you hit them. I wonder in what way this is like e-literature.

Eric, some of these technologies reminded me of Hayles's explanation of site-specific installations for interactive literature. I'm not sure how "literary" these things would be considered, but I found there to be an interesting parallel between the two ideas.

This is the social networking homepage of a online gaming website, IGN. I wanted to share this because it seems to overtly combine the gaming and social elements of social media. It also, similar to the AXE site, allows users to follow certain products and claim an identity based on what products the user owns in comparison to other members of the community. Within the site itself members have some level of gaining badges and competing by listing and comparing their games and interacting with each other. Also, on the level of competition, there are prizes available for different interactions on this site which further invokes the sense of gaming and competition.

A really awesome example of gaming on a giant scale. Also marks an interesting intersection of where hacking meets productivity, or breaking with positive outcomes.

Our reading this week touched upon the idea of "sock puppets," or fake users "often created for the purpose of talking up or praising a product" (Crumlish and Malone 305). This article explains how a company that creates and sells a program for learning and mastering guitar was fined a quarter of a million dollars for fabricating online reviews.

I've only given cursory attention to this site (when I checked it out, I found it less useful than I had thought it would be), but we've talked about technology monitoring people, breaking their identity into tiny bits of data, etc. and this website encourages people to do that to themselves to live a productive life ... in some ways it is kind of like the guy who photographs all his food, combined with an OCD, capitalist mindset. See also: any website that tracks your miles run, your calories consumed for the day, etc.

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.

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 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.

Highly influential article about the essentially plagiaristic nature of all culture production, an article that itself is composed entirely of "borrowed texts." An excellent short and direct argument for uncreative writing.

A really great investigative piece in which a 'Wired' reporter actually takes up the commissions of a spam message to find out what's going on under the hood of its product and project.

"The e-books include items such as the shooting script, production notes, storyboards and on-set photographs."

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.

Argument (with some decent solutions/suggestions) for making the transition from paper to electronic publications.

This article examines how Red Hat transitioned from free open source software to a system they sell through a subscription with updates, patches, and bug fixes. Red Hat still provides free code, though; a community project called Fedora provides "a testing ground for the enterprise features delivered to Red Hat's paying customers," allowing both the company and the users to benefit from collaboration. This article shows the balance of sustainability between free and paid access. It also echoes Kenneth Goldman's claims in Uncreative Writing because the CEO says, "If you believe in the concept of modular innovation where a lot of different people add to works that came before them, patents clearly slow that down."