Do Rainbows End?

I found this book to be fascinating. This book overlays the digital onto the physical world in a way that raises a lot of big issues that are tied up with our newfound digitality. Here are my highlights:

1. On page 33, Roberts comments on the watching other people flail around as they are communicating with other people virtually, or are experiencing a virtual overlay that Roberts can't yet see. He calls this "a parody of cellphone discourtesy." The term that I've heard used for this sort of public discourse is "mobile privacy." Personally, I hate talking on the cellphone on the bus or in a crowded place, but it's become a common occurrence for us, and one that we are expected to ignore or, at best, tolerate. I think this gets back to my first post about who is blogging and why, and how it seems we're becoming a culture where are lives are "in view" on a constant basis. I believe much of this has to do with the technology (simply having the ability to be on the bus and talk with someone who isn't on the bus with you). But is this "mobile privacy" based on our constant going, our need to squeeze productivity into every moment of our lives only now facilitated by the technology? Or, did the technology raise our expectations for productivity?

2. Mobile privacy is predicated on the notion that everyone else around you doing the same thing; they are also always connected and plugged-in. That brings me to the next point of interest from Vinge's book, the idea of "crowdsourcing." Vinge construct this notion in two parts. First, on page 214, as Tommie is talking about how he came up with solutions for getting them into the biolabs, he effectively says that he sent the information/problem out to the whole web community, but he broke it up and had it solved piecemeal. This is a fantastic idea. But I think that it is part two of Vinge's crowdsourcing that really makes waves. On page 189, Vinge reverses the idea of sending information out to be solved when he brings up the idea of a single person collecting the information. The Mysterious Stranger says to Robert, "Knowledge is piled metaphorical light-years deep. Given that, the truly golden skill is the one I possess--to bring together the knowledge and abilities that make solutions" (189). This sounds like a page out of Lev Manovich's work on the role of the database. As I recall, for Manovich the database is the foundation of new media. Rather than new media or new technologies creating new experiences for us, now new experiences will come from the indexing of millions of pieces of information and our role in sorting them and putting them together into something coherent. We as individuals will have the power to customize any and all based on our proficiency in databasing. This speaks to my initial post as well, in that knowledge has now become an issue of filtering. It is rapidly becoming the case that information is no longer hard to come by, but rather we need to be able to sort and process these mountains of knowledge and distill them into something manageable and usable.

3. Along with my interests in space and place, I was interested by Vinge's discussion of the physicality of the university and of the library itself. For example, on page 116 when Vinge paraphrases the bible, "What shall it profit a university, if it shall enroll five hundred thousand, and lose its own soul?" And later on 268 when, during the virtual battle, the library "decides" the victor. In my other class this semester, Visual Narratives, we've been looking at Dada and Surrealism and, of course, have come across Duchamp and his readymades. For Duchamp, it was the idea of the artist "nominating" a bottle rack, a urinal, a piece of junk as art. The artist had the power to proclaim anything art despite what the rest of us saw as artful. The reason I bring Duchamp up is that I'm curious how "spatial nomination" works in Vinge. If a person can overlay any sort of virtual covering onto a physical space, does that space lose its sense of meaning? What happens to the notion of "place" when a person can "experience" it from anywhere? Robert's caveat it similar to my own about the blending of virtual and physical space: if we all see what we want to see, how do we see, and more importantly, be collectively? Doesn't the joy of physical places come from sharing the same experience?

4. My last point is more of a question for the class. On page 39 Vinge notes that, "For Robert Gu, real creativity most often came after a good night's sleep...'sleeping on it' worked for him." Much later on page 277, Vinge says, "Rabbit was not always fast...he had to sleep on it." Wow! What are we to make of this? At first I thought that Rabbit was somehow Robert's disconnected creativity or soul. Going back to Dada and Surrealism, is this Vinge positing a commentary on the separation of mind and body in the new digital age? Why do these two characters share the same process for creative problem solving when it is something that seems very personal and unique? I put this out there for anyone with any ideas on the subject. I'm stumped and am excited to hear what others have to say.

The Wide, Wide World

(I typed this part last but thought I should bring it up front because it's more to the point than the rest of my scattered thoughts, see below for the beginning)
So, what sort of world do I want to live in? ...I'm currently doing research on Second Life and I'm finding out that there are the same sort of problems in the digital world as there are in the physical one. That leads me to think, that perhaps "What sort of world do I want to live in" is looking at the wrong end of the situation. Maybe the way to look at it is "How do I want to live in the world. What sort of me?" Instead of thinking about the medium or the interface, what if we think about the message that WE bring to the equation? Does that line of thinking reject the aim of this assignment and even the class? And yet, the question of digital text and digital space only becomes pertinent, I think, when it is interacting with a user. But then, where/how do medium-specific issues come into play?

What sort of "me?" I suppose on some level I feel an amount of anxiety in the physical world. Insurance, bills, grades, work, the environment--yeah, yeah, I know, glass-half-empty. But how do we go about addressing these very real concerns? Ultimately I would like to be more comfortable with these issues. Is there any "world" that can facilitate that? Can the digital help with that in some way? Is there a digital Buddhism? This conversation seems to be turning more and more to hybridity. What about "born digital" elements? I hope this question continues forward throughout the course this semester, and beyond, it is crucial for all of us to grapple with.

(This is where I started writing, and how I got to the above paragraph)
In class last week we were asked to imagine what sort of world we wanted to live in. Hard question. How is one to conceptualize a response to this? Do I focus on a grand-scale, like world-peace? Or, maybe, something more individual, like how my street could function better? My academic interests revolve around space and architecture, and currently I am fascinated by the possibilities (and limitations) of blending the physical with the digital. I'm also at a loss for knowing how to connect these two concepts that seem impossible to interweave. Responding to this question in class, I wrote things like: I want a world of constant revision; I want a world where text and image merge (what does that mean?); I want a world where writing becomes a physical act; I want a world of mutually experiential texts.

Now, if we address the notion of interface (writing v. reading, physical v. digital), what sort of different "worlds" do each of these create for us? How does the type of interface alter our perception of that world (writing a book v. reading a book)? Our class is focused on writing and how it is changing in the context of the digital. In addition to this, I am also interest in how space-as-text changes in relation to the digital. However, there seems to be a fundamental problem with the idea of space as digital text. What about the body? I was enthralled by Vinge's book "Rainbows End" (I'll talk more about the book in a later post). Perhaps this is the sort of world I want to live in, one in which the digital has been integrated into the physical. Does that means I want "enhanced life?" What's wrong with analog life?

ready, set...

1. Do I read blogs? Yes, I think so. I'll often waste time by going to Wired magazine or Slate.com (assuming that the content of each can be counted as blogs), but I don't read any of them regularly. More often I click on what looks interesting that particular day. I often find myself wondering who the heck all of these people are. On a different but related note, why would anyone want to read my own ramblings? That raises the question of who (beyond the class assignment-as-catalyst) am I writing for? Am I writing to hear other people's responses and enter into a conversation, or am I just writing to work through my own thoughts? If it's the latter, why am I doing this on the web? I journaled a lot while I was in the Peace Corps, why is blogging better than what I was doing overseas?

2. Setting up the blog was a piece of cake. The hardest part was trying to come up with something witty for a title, which didn't seem to work out anyway. I have no better reason for choosing 'blogger' than the fact that I already have a gmail account, and I just wanted to keep my number of accounts to a minimum.

3. I picked the template I did because I like the colors and boxes that section off and delineate the little bits of the blog. (I'm curious how much someone could glean about the blogger by analyzing her/his answers to these questions...)

4. Yes, writing here is different. It seems a bit like journaling, but in this odd way that other people will see it. It feels a little like "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" in the sense that I can say anything, but I don't have to be present for anyone's reactions. Also, I think I can distance myself more from the blog-as-text better than I could from tacking an essay up by the elevators in Curtain Hall. Maybe here there's more freedom because the accessibility creates less legitimacy... maybe there's more legitimacy because there are less filters on the results. Obviously, I'm a novice, but I'm cautiously curious about where all this will lead.