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Nele Noppe

When I Became a Mom I Put Away Childish Things | Geek Feminism Blog - 0 views

geekfeminism.org/...mom-i-put-away-childish-things

fans fandom feminism gender fan_fiction cosplay family motherhood children fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 12 Sep 09 - Cached
  • And even as a convergence culture encourages and invited media property holders to create and engage fans, such behavior remains generally perceived as ridiculous, embarrassing, and often hidden–unless it revolves around more masculine exploits such as sports teams, of course. Fantasy football and wearing team colors are acceptable behaviors where fanfic and wearing Hogwarts uniforms are not.
  • Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family.
  • So what is it then that makes a fannish mom such a threat, such an offense? Fannish practices are a focus away from the children, from a mother’s duty to put her home, husband, and family first rather than to indulge herself, both literally and metaphorically.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But that’s not the end of the fannish mom’s depravity: media fandom in particular often engages women’s sexuality with its erotic writings, explicit imagery, and frank discussion of nonstandard desires. As such, it not only juxtaposes the selfless mom identity against the selfish fan identity, but also juxtaposes the sexless madonna against the perverse whore.
  • Within fandom the geek hierarchy is alive and well: who doesn’t like to think of those folks weirder than ourselves–and if noone’s left, we still have the furries! That many fans themselves seem to think of their hobby as the opposite of life is certainly noteworthy, but the insult is often modified into terms of age, becoming “Don’t you have better things to do as a grown up. My parents would never sit and discuss a TV show online.” Likewise, there’s an expectation among many younger fans that they themselves will eventually “grow up” and leave fandom. Adulthood is in this context seen as fandom’s antithesis, and parenthood is often the ultimate marker of adult status.
  • Nele Noppe on 12 Sep 09
     
    And even as a convergence culture encourages and invited media property holders to create and engage fans, such behavior remains generally perceived as ridiculous, embarrassing, and often hidden-unless it revolves around more masculine exploits such as sports teams, of course. Fantasy football and wearing team colors are acceptable behaviors where fanfic and wearing Hogwarts uniforms are not.
Nele Noppe

Amateur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/Amateur

amateur_professional fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 13 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Amateurism can be seen in both a negative and positive light. Since amateurs often do not have formal training, some amateur work may be sub-par. For example, amateur athletes in sports such as basketball or football are not regarded as having the same level of ability as professional athletes. On the other hand an amateur may be in a position to approach a subject with an open mind (as a result of the lack of formal training) and in a financially disinterested manner. The lack of financial recompense can also be seen as a sign of commitment to an activity; and until the 1970s the Olympic rules required that competitors be amateurs. Receiving payment to participate in an event disqualified an athlete from that event, as in the case of Jim Thorpe. In the Olympics, this rule remains in place for boxing.
  • Many amateurs make valuable contributions in the field of computer programming through the open source movement.
Nele Noppe

ARE WE TOO PROFESSIONAL? | More Intelligent Life - 0 views

www.moreintelligentlife.com/...are-we-too-professional

fans amateur_professional sports measurement education phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 13 Jan 10 - Cached
  • How did the concept of professionalism become so dominant? And why is it assumed to be innately desirable? Professionalism has certainly travelled a long way in a short time. In the space of a hundred years, the words “professional” and “amateur” have virtually swapped places. At the end of the 19th century, an amateur meant someone who was motivated by the sheer love of doing something; professional was a rare, pejorative term for grubby money-making. Now, amateurism is a byword for sloppiness, disorganisation and ineptitude, while professionalism–as Humphrys suggested–is the default description of excellence.
  • Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”
  • Measurement is another fetish of professionalism, as if something that cannot be measured isn’t quite real. This was a central criticism by Sir Ivor Roberts, who wrote a stinging valedictory telegram when he retired as the British ambassador in Rome in 2006: “Well-conducted diplomacy cannot properly be measured. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution. Indeed, we should be sceptical of ‘permanent’ solutions or models.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “The nature of many kinds of skill cannot be defined,” Kay adds. “If  we could define or completely explain them in terms of a set of rules then anyone could do it.”
  • Kay also questions the professional mantra that we should slavishly copy winners
Nele Noppe

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books - 0 views

weekly.ahram.org.eg/...bo3.htm

umberto_eco literature internet open_work phd phd_unfinished

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The WWW is the Great Mother of All Hypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. The Web is the general system of all existing hypertexts. Such a difference between text and system is enormously important,
  • Today there are new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem, can be transformed to hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no longer, or not only, a physical one, but rather one that concerns the very nature of creative activity, of the reading process, and in order to unravel this skein of questions we have first of all to decide what we mean by a hypertextual link.
  • Notice that if the question concerned the possibility of infinite, or indefinite, interpretations on the part of the reader, it would have very little to do with the problem under discussion.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • No: what are presently under consideration are cases in which the infinity, or at least the indefinite abundance of interpretations, are due not only to the initiative of the reader, but also to the physical mobility of the text itself, which is produced just in order to be re-written. In order to understand how texts of this genre can work we should decide whether the textual universe we are discussing is limited and finite, limited but virtually infinite, infinite but limited, or unlimited and infinite.
  • First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.
  • If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
  • Grammars, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are systems: by using them you can produce all the texts you like. But a text itself is not a linguistic or an encyclopaedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
  • A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.
  • Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.
  • How can hypertextual strategies be used to "open" up a finite and limited text?
  • The first possibility is to make the text physically unlimited, in the sense that a story can be enriched by the successive contributions of different authors and in a double sense, let us say either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. By this I mean that given, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, the first author proposes a starting situation (the girl enters the wood) and different contributors can then develop the story one after the other, for example, by having the girl meet not the wolf but Ali Baba, by having both enter an enchanted castle, having a confrontation with a magic crocodile, and so on, so that the story can continue for years. But the text can also be infinite in the sense that at every narrative disjunction, for instance, when the girl enters the wood, many authors can make many different choices. For one author, the girl may meet Pinocchio, for another she may be transformed into a swan, or enter the Pyramids and discover the treasury of the son of Tutankhamen. This is today possible, and you can find on the Net some interesting examples of such literary games.
  • AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.
  • Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both.
  • I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.
  • A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.
  • All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.
  • n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.
  • At the last borderline of free textuality there can be a text that starts as a closed one, let us say, Little Red Riding Hood or The Arabian Nights, and that I, the reader, can modify according to my inclinations, thus elaborating a second text, which is no longer the same as the original one, whose author is myself, even though the affirmation of my authorship is a weapon against the concept of definite authorship. The Net is open to such experiments, and most of them can be beautiful and rewarding. Nothing forbids one writing a story where Little Red Riding Hood devours the wolf. Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and with the profound charms of books.
  • A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.
  • Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
  • That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.
  • Its model is not so much a straight line as a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestial images at any new navigation point.
  • Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.
  • Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.
  • Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.
  • There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.
  • Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.
  • Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
  • TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.
  • Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
  • Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.
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