Final Project 1.0

So, if it's not obvious from my last post, I'm interested in the slippage between physical and synthetic spaces. Specifically, this plays out in the nesting of synthetic spaces (on cell phones, laptops, etc) within physical spaces, and how this trouble/extend the relationship between spaces and places. Again, Chun's notion of dissociating place from our desire for spatial containment is important here. My question is: if de-spatialized synthetic places are becoming interspersed in our physical spaces, how do they trouble or redefine how we ascribe meaning to spaces (or what I consider their place-ness).

For the project, since I'm interested in moving through layered spaces I've decided to try my hand at Flash. My idea is to begin with an image of a coffee shop (like the Grind in the library) with various people engaged in various spatial mediums (cell phone, laptop, book...). The user would be able to click on each of the different mediums and "dive into" the layers associated with it. Also, I would like to talk about the limitations of all the spaces: physical, synthetic, textual, visual, etc; not only the limitations of the medium, but limitations in the sense Chun talks about, the danger of assuming freedom without any sort of control.

Paranoid Cyber-droid (Chun)

I would like to spend this post on Chun's first chapter, "Why Cyberspace?" I'm increasingly interested in the blurring definitions of "space" and "place" as we migrate back and forth between the physical and the synthetic. I looked up Barlow's declaration and was fascinated by his ethos (right term?): "Governments of the Industrial World...I come from Cyberspace...You have no sovereignty where we gather" (web-cite). And, then again at the end, "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." Out there, but limited because, I believe, that as we flow between the physical and synthetic spaces everything will change.

More precisely, I'm interested in Chun's assertion that cyberspace "freed users from their bodies and their locations" (Chun 38). She describes cyberspace as space-less because it lacks "all reference to content, apparatus, process, or form, offering instead a metaphor and a mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial" (39). I'm not so sure about that. What does "space" really mean? How are we interpreting space/place in synthetic environments? And, how do these interpretations reconfigure who we are and how we view physical spaces/places? Personally, I define "space" as potential; whereas "place" is what is done within space, or more ethereally as meaning.

Deeper still, her comments about Manovich's "databse complex" and how that limits our conceptualization of cyberspaces further dissolve our definitions. "The metaphoric use of place," she says," blinds us to the Web's fluidity" (46). So, if we're spending all our time ascribing "place-ness" to cyberspaces, we're missing out on its fluidity, its innate ability to be many cyber-places all at once. Also, Chun is addressing here non-games cyberspaces, or typical websites: Amazon, ebay, etc. The previous post on PMOGs (passively multiplayer online games), I think, is right in the middle of this discussion. Later she talks about navigability defining "new media" and our navigation of non-contiguous URLs/cyberspaces, therefore, defining who we are in these space-less spaces.

As Cheney said recently, "So?" Does this discussion about spatial/platial fluidity have any bearing on physical spaces/places? The notion that cyberspaces/cyberplaces are defined by their lack of indexicality would imply no. But, as these cybers become more ubiquitous and nested in our various physical spaces (technology and new devices are key), then I would contend that the indexicality of our physical spaces are becoming blurred. The space-ness, the potential, of a physical space is losing the reference of its physical characteristics when we can be on the phone and on the bus, or cross-nationally video-conferencing online in a university union. Or...maybe the dispersion of cybers actually increase the potential of our physical spaces, adding to their meaning, adding to the capacity of place-ness we are able to ascribe to them.

Is the cyber world staying cyber?

First, here's a link about WoW and terrorism. Apparently, there's been a run lately of bio-terrorism in World of Warcraft that some folks think will help us thinking about terrorism in a physical context.

Second, PMOG, or Passively Multiplayer Online Games. The idea is about turning the web into the playing field for your interactions with friends. Check out the article, but i think this is a really cool because it addresses the Web at large as the game space not just specific realms like Second Life or WoW. In my mind this spatializing of online non-spaces like Facebook and the like (you can make booby traps for your friend, or collect points by surfing) is pretty exciting and hints at our inability someday to distinguish the difference between the two.
Here's where you can download the PMOG program.

Internet Archive

Here's a link to a slide show put out by WIRED. It's about the Internet Archive's goal of digitizing public domain books. So far it's done about 350,000. Also, there's mention of a machine that can print a book in 10 minutes for $10 plus a penny a page. This seems to erase the idea of "out of print". Also, here's the link to Internet Archive itself.

Footnotes Forthcoming

There will be a new set of footnotes posted in a week or two. Here is a list of the new constraints:

1) text only: black on white or white on black
2) no distortion of letterforms
3) incorporate radical scale shifts
4) incorporate figure/ground reversals (implied by #3: ask me if this is not clear)
5) select subject words either randomly or with the "N+7" method.

Please post any other suggestion. Thanks.

Footnotes to the Footnote

Below are three shorts I made for my 782 class with Lane Hall, "Visual Narratives." This project asked us to, "Create a text that uses forms appropriate to conceptual strategies culled from our investigation of experimental literature."

In Lane's class as well as my 709 class with Anne Wysocki, "Visual and Digital Rhetorics," I've been interested in the slippage between image and text, especially in terms of digital production. With that in mind, the three shorts explore the calligram, which is a work that uses text to construct an image; or, as Foucault calls it, "A figure in the shape of writing" (This is Not a Pipe, 23). One of Foucault's points about calligrams that interests me is that, " The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates" (24). I think this is a particularly important relationship to explore in the context of new media.

Also, I have incorporated Peirce's three kinds of signs: icon, index and symbol. Gillian Rose, in her book, Visual Methodologies, describes the three: "In iconic signs, the signifier represents the signified by apparently having alikeness to it...In indexical signs, there is an inherent relationship between the signified and signifier...[and] symbolic signs have a conventionalized but clearly arbitrary relation between signifier and signified" (83). I feel that adding these elements expands the notion of the calligram beyond the one-off text-as-image in favor of a more in depth relationship between text and image.

Finally, in his discussion of calligrams, Foucault uses the examples of "a bird, a flower, or rain" (24). These seemed as good a place to start as any. Enjoy.

Movement 1: Bird

Movement 2: Flower

Movement 3: Rain

Parallel Worlds

It's good to see the "social production" model used on Benkler's own book: posting it to the web for comments and critique. Imposing himself as the "scholarly lawyer" is also interesting given our discussion of Weinberger last week about the three areas of rhetoric. Here's Benkler posting his in-process book in the hopes of not only getting feedback on it, but, like the band that gives its CDs away, he can now charge a greater amount of in-person shows. Also, I wonder how this model contributes to keeping the book current. As we talk in class following the second-half of Nakamura, it's hard to keep media-related books from sounding dated. Benkler's strategy seems like it gives him the option to post a draft (get his work/name out there), revise it and have continued coverage of his work. Seems pretty savvy.

All that in mind, I'm not entirely sold on his idea of "social production" for the rest of us. He mentions it at one point that, yes, this is for a limited range of people at the higher end of developed nations. Taking this a step further, what happens if the world does adopt this new way of functioning, what happens to everyone who is left out? Leaving that big one hanging, I mostly agree on his biggest point: "the relative economic role of sharing changes with technology (120), yes, but there are a lot of conditions related to who is sharing (gender, social class, economic status), if you're not fighting to stay alive, you have more leeway to be generous.

Last week I posted on Weinberger and Corbu about creating more tagging/density as a solution to disorderly piles of information and overcrowding. Now Benkler says, "As the size of the audience and its geographic and social dispersion increased, public discourse developed an increasingly one-way model" (29). Information had to be generic and wide-reaching in order to be cost-effective to address such a diverse audience. Now, let's reconnect everyone. Get everyone talking together and we'll close theses gaps of generic, filtered information and get at the real deal. My jury's still out on this one. As I posted, upping the density failed for Corbu, but these other guys, the results remain to be seen.

The problem I have is that it sounds like the implementation of his ideas would result in parallel economic worlds. Yes, it's great that people will share and contribute out of the goodness of their hearts, but I'm skeptical. Maybe its the result of growing up in the capitalist environment, but all I can think is when are theses folks gonna get paid? And assuming they don't, what are their day-jobs? The cynic in me thinks that if people participating in a task that is "unrelated to 'making a living'" seems unlikely in on a grand scale.

I read another media-oriented book by another economist, Edward Castronova, who is also overreaching slightly the ability for the digital/virtual/synthetic world to imprint its structure onto real life. Castronova also says that, "all things being equal", the activity that is most pleasurable wins. Therefore, he says (and I'm oversimplifying), that the real world will have to adapt to the strategies of the synthetic worlds in order to keep people from migrating there. Soon jobs will be based on leveling-up (like Super Mario Bros.) not on politics or resumes...right. Also his notion of "equal opportunity", which Benkler also raises seems far fetched. The notion that everyone can participate and the redundancy of it all will result in the cream rising to the top, doesn't square. Here redundancy is supposed to work because it's cheap? And in the future, everyone's doing it for free, so who cares?

This idea of taking economic/social models from synthetic environments and overlaying them onto real life seems unlikely and utopic to me. Yes, it sounds cool and empowering for everyone to have a voice and to contribute, but can a functioning economy, in real space and real time, actually be based on such a model? Obviously, I'm skeptical.

Tag, you're it

Rainbows End, here we come: Here's an little article about the invention of a pair of goggles that we can now use to record and TAG our physical environment. Wow. If we are close to merging digital capabilities physical reality, what then?