February 27, 2005
how i win at kevin bacon
i'm starting to catch up with the class in watts' six degrees, and while i'm not holding on to as much of the math as i'd like to be (i spoke this language once, i swear, but it's been so very long), i'm seeing the impressions emerge, & digging the already-dead metaphors of streams and currents, webs and handshake-associations, even (although i'm glad i'm almost through that chapter) viruses--i knew about melissa, but i didn't know the simpsons had anything to do with it! & i'm finding a lot of kernels like that in watts, more, certainly than i expected: it turns out that all those years i spent as the only humanities major surounded in a social network of CEs & CivEs & double-Es & programming inclined nerds who dropped out but kept geeking anyway have paid off & informed my thinking & ability to grasp things that ought to be outside my realm in really fortuitous ways.
when he says, on pg 156, "just try playing six degrees of kevin bacon without the computer," though, i have to laugh at him.
geeks watch a lot of movies; i don't need a social scientist to tell me that. & while my geeks weren't at uva designing oracles for the purpose ("the university" has actually been the sworn nemesis of every school i've been at until now!) we were certainly familiar with the kevin bacon game. watts' initial treatment of the game as he knew it intrigued me enough that i went to the oracle (which despite my vast experience with the game itself i hadn't heard of until watts explained) & spent an hour-long aim chat with a friend in florida trying to find anyone in the movie database with a kevin bacon number of 4 or higher--we failed, & had to admit defeat & get back to work. part of what frustrated us, though, was the rigidity of the criteria. tv didn't count, bollywood didn't count, stage productions didn't count--and none of the tricks we used were even vaguely admissable. another thing that got old quickly was that the same movies that we'd never heard of kept coming up over & over. the computerized version lacked the resonant associations that mattered to us. it didn't even notice the movies we'd seen & enjoyed remembering, because they weren't significant enough as hubs for the purpose of the game--which wasn't creating interesting chains, at that mathematical level, it was just to minimize the number of steps. kevin bacon has been in a lot of heavy-hitter movies. watching the computer win just for the sake of winning wasn't fun for long.
the latter link above actually describes a much more accurate version of the game we used to play in college--only and always without a computer: whereas the oracle admits only hollywood actors & only collaboration on a film as legitimate associations, we'd take any connection at all, & in so doing, played a game much more like the kinds of multi-group, multi-path-type associative networking watts describes later on. for starters, our connections were relevant to us. if a movie came up in the game at all, it was because one or more of us had seen it (which often led to recommendations and movie-night selections)--it was a conversation, not just a fact. it was a genuine connection, the kind with multiple meanings, not just a binary data-blip flipped to "on" on both sides of the question.
more importantly and far more interestingly, though, we had fewer restrictions on our associations. any connection to kevin bacon was... a connection to kevin bacon. it was that simple. my friend in florida has a kevin bacon number of 3, because he dated a girl who had thanksgiving dinner one year with julia roberts, who was in flatliners with kevin bacon. & me? my kevin bacon number is 1: he & i share a birthday.
(x-posted to 711)
Posted by ttobryan at 09:53 AM | Comments (1)
February 26, 2005
do gnats dream of electric clowns?
i have all the focus of a gnat this morning, but i dare anybody trying to make coherent connections between quantum leaps & transactional reading theories to do any better.
quantum leap: the moment the both-possible solidifies, actualizes, becomes one, not both, & makes the other impossible... or maybe it's the many-possible (all-possible?) becoming one & thus denying all the others.
there aren't (are there?) any quantum leaps in network theory; possibilities increase or decrease the likelihood of other possibilities, but they don't eliminate one another. there are critical points, places from which movement, likelihood, & connectivity increase exponentially, but they're still arrays of options; there may be points at which one or another possibility is denied, but all the others remain open, creating instead of a yes & a possibly infinite array of nos, one or another no that actualizes, having little bearing on the overall array of possible yesses.
listening to:
this song has a repetitive electronic noise that sounds like maniacal clown-laughter in it, which is not helping solve the gnat problem. tricksy association games come full circle: quantum leaps are impulse-gnats, laughing like electric clowns. i'm blogging theory at 11:30 on a saturday morning. i think i hear the big white padded van turning onto the end of my street...
EDIT: theory-genius husband-person, while reading over the short paper the above puzzle was a part of, said "where'd you get 'both-possible'? who is that?" i'm sure i looked very sheepish when i said "it's me. i don't know. i didn't know what else to call it." i'm still sheepish about this. am i allowed to do that? make up terms? are the theory-police going to lock me up? rhetorical giants come after me with their thumb-wide sticks?
excuse me while i scurry back to the safety of the six degrees of kevin bacon.
Posted by ttobryan at 11:02 AM | Comments (2)
February 12, 2005
"an insane flowering"
searls & weinberger in world of ends:
When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.
some part of me knows that "value" here in too many ways only means money, but i'm stubbornly holding into believing that that isn't all (& if it were, anyway, the "wai-wai-wait" flag everybody threw at EPIC wouldn't always land at the "& everybody contributing gets paid according to the (popularity?) consumer-value of his or her contribution" point). because when people write metaphorically i fall in love with the pictures clusters of words make, and i'm seeing this great sparkling empty sphere surrounded by a tight-weave of contagiously rippling buds bursting into bloom.
no wonder people (i'm thinking of a few of my marketing majors in particular) get sucked into the rhetoric of "market" & "potential" "optimize" & "opportunity," when it's set up this way.
the flower metaphor continues: "the internet's value grows on its edges" like weeds on the garden-wall; but we all, like gardeners, have the power to "grow value on its edges"--to plant & nurture roses instead? like weeds (& roses) the flower-net is "outside," "open," "unowned," "not in the...hands of," "connective," "resiliant," "natural," "transporting" "bits" like water wicking up a stem, encouraging users to "flit" like butterflies.
& the metaphor's enemies are rigidly inorganic: "artificial," "barriers," "ownership," "propriety," "control," "force," "censorship," "permission," "private," "exclusive," "authorized," & "hate[fully]" resistant.
do i think the elaborately thematic rhetoric here might be a little over-the-top in an effort to jam an idea brightly down a reader's throat? i do. but i don't mind, & not just because i want the organic model & the laughing piracy of "hah--take that, recording industry!"--to win over those steely-grey words in my second collection above every time. it's a way of looking at the internet that we'd do well to listen to, & spread around perhaps like fern spores, even while also listening for some of the warnings i'm sure less effusive models offer.
(xp to 711)
Posted by ttobryan at 03:34 PM | Comments (1)
February 02, 2005
a post-what WHAT?
brooks, nichols, & priebe characterize their students responses to using blogs in a variety of ways to extend classroom work into other writing opportunities as follows:
the generally positive response to weblogging that emerges despite these differences suggests that as the genres and motives for weblogging are understood more clearly, the practices has sufficient cultural and pedagogical appeal to encourage and motivate student writing even in a post-literate age.
i hit the end of that paragraph like the titanic on that infamous iceberg. a post-literate what? a post-what age? i'm beyond confused, but i think first that maybe i'm missing something; maybe this is one of those terms that seems transparent but in usage has come to masquerade as something else.
so i "google" "post-literate age,"--an activity, i hardly think i need to add, that involves a several-tiered process of textual negotiation requiring a great deal of print literacy (what i assume they're referring to) in addition to what others variously call "computer literacy" or "technology literacy"--and found two dominant explanations of the term. one distinguishes between a "scientific" & literal conception of language and a more poetic, fluid conception, applying the term "post-literate" to the latter; the other, which i'm assuming is what brooks, nichols, and preibe had in mind, can be exemplified by the following explanation in a 1997 essay by brian rotman:
We are at a juncture when computer technology, a medium as awesomely powerful, transformative, delimiting and invasive as writing once was, is changing the world forever; we've reached a point when 'writing', as the linguist Roy Harris put it, has 'dwindled to microchip proportions' [The Origin of Writing: ]. We are living in momentous times: the inventions spawned by computing and the digital logic that goes with it are gobbling, at an accelerating pace, ever larger chunks of human culture and rendering obsolete practices that have lasted for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. As the medium of writing displaced orality and changed forever how humans encounter, respond and imagine each other, so the medium of computing, just as totally and relentlessly, is displacing literacy.
say what? i'm no less confused. everything i do with relation to computers is textual, literate, screen-print (most of it easily transferable to print-out). my geeky (no offense, anyone) coder/programmer friends spend all day writing--sometimes documentation in sentence form, sometimes memos and briefs in paragraphs, sometimes, yes, code, in a different language than the one i'm using now, but it's still a writen language system--it's still writing. it still requires literacy, where literacy = the ability to decode/make meaning from (theoretically definable as two very different things, i know, but i'm leaving that be for now) a visual collection of symbols representing word-based information.
how can that possibly be post-literate? when has any civilization ever in the history of the world made literate practices--reading, writing, whether on paper or on screen, usually both--more fundamental to its functionality? if anything, i'd call us uberliterate--but "post"? or is there something about what these writers mean by "computing" that's eluding me completely here? or is there some theoretical association with "post" not actually meaning "after b/c instead of" that i'm missing?
i've spent long enough looking for the context of the harris quote rotman's working with; i don't expect 1997 = 2005; i'm out of disclaimers. maybe instead of missing something i'm missing a lot of things. but... post-literate?
(x-posted to 711)
Posted by ttobryan at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2005
blogging (with) students
lowe & williams have--and link to--a lot of really productive ideas for using blogs in, instead of, alongside, etc. classrooms--as teaching tools, as interactive media, as semi-public spaces, as hybrid forms of journaling & peer collaboration...
and i'm really enthusiastic about these ideas. or at least i'm enthusiastic about them as ideas, as terrific ways for other people to engage other students in other blog projects. i don't have any intellectual reservations about class-wide blogs or individual blogs on class-wide aggregators, on closed or open systems... it sounds like an awful lot of play room with huge potential for using new spaces to get new students to do more of the "old" thing--writing--which of course is never really old, because it evolves along with its users and media...
but i have emotional reservations that i don't entirely understand.
(x-posted to 711 & compositionism)
i've had a personal blog--one that's not really a diary because i'm too conscious of who's in my audience, but that serves as a space to keep in touch with my far-off friends and talk primarily about things that are not academic--since 2002 (my goodness, i'm almost old school!), and i don't think i had it running for 24 hours before i started thinking about its implications as a classroom tool. so it's not like i was slow to catch on to the idea.
but since 2002 i've held off on implementing any of those ideas, and not because of the technology involved. (like blogger accounts, livejournal accounts are free, incredibly easy to set up, and terrifically user-friendly. they make closed communities easily, or can be left open. they have an array of who-can-view-this posting functions... all push-button accessible.)
i've held off for reasons having more to do (as i think about it now) with those shifting definitions of personal and private space. blogging with my students, when i imagine doing it, feels like an invasion. in both directions, to some degree. my blogspace is my blogspace--sharing it with friends is one thing, sharing it with a faceless, infinte public is another, but sharing it with students... there's a line there, and things change with its crossing. (i could certainly create an alternate "identity" to work with students online in, and never tell them that the ones i've used so far exist. there are ways to both be "out there" and invisible. but it feels like a place to me--too many viewings of tron as a child, perhaps--and unlike the supermarket, it's a place where teachers--as they appear in my head, however against my inclinations to say i don't see them this way at all--and students--in those same constructions--don't mix.) there's also a line the other way--i know most of my students have some kind of online identity, whether it's in a blogging community, through friendster, or just on instant messenger, and although i've started using IM to conference with students in the past few years, i'm still very respectful of the distance i perceive as appropriate. i almost never "ping" them to initiate conversations--if i do, it's to respond to a question i said i'd gather more information before answering.
i want them to have their world without me in it. the fact that it's in many ways an almost entirely textual (with bright pictures) world makes that more important to me as a writing teacher rather than less--i want to interact with them in ways that encourage/foster writing, sure. but (and maybe this is because all of my teacher-training was focused on the teaching of adolescents) i can't help feel that one of the most encouraging things i can do with regards to their writing is to leave them a space where they're alone--or at least alone-with an audience of their choosing & defining--alone away from me--to do it in.
Posted by ttobryan at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2005
711: lexicon
today's new words:
transclusion. bloggers apparently know this word, and use it right and left with great furiousness. wikipedia's entry, like most of those i've come across, can't help but get into coding. apparently this isn't just a verb, it's a technical, medium-grounded verb, a verb that can't be metaphoricized or removed from its physical circumstance of existing only in the non-physical web-world.
and remediation (which is not like "remedial")--"new media present themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media" (cgb).
ex: "hypertext remediates books" (cgb)
and weblogs, as we learned firsthand this morning, don't easily, at least in their current-natural capacities, remediate classrooms.
Posted by ttobryan at 03:18 PM | Comments (3)
January 26, 2005
711: blogs and (+"rhetorical") genre
this particular slice of van dijck's article i selected as a direct result of derek's challenge to applying the term genre to blogs (madeline, i hadn't read yours yet when i started this):
i too have the same problem with calling all "blogs" members of "a genre" as does van dijck below:
Weblogs or ‘blogs’ is a rather general container for a variety of genres; the so-called lifelog seems to come closest to the traditional diary genre. But can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be a paper diary and diary writing? As the cartoon implies, the answer to this question is a paradoxical ‘yes and no.’ Cultural practices or forms never simply adapt to new technological conditions, but always inherently change along with the technologies and the potentialities of their use.
as van dijck points out, the problem with naming a genre "blog" is that there are many kinds of blogs--people blog in many different genres. (i'd never heard the specific term "lifelog" before--how 'bout the rest of you?) but people talk about them as if they are a genre, or a few genres ("lifelogs" vs. "academic blogs" vs. "poly" (multi-authored) blogs vs. ???)--a move that seems to make at least a little sense because they're clearly something other than the print-genres we're used to--so, the logic goes, they must therefore have a genre of their own.
i see the slippage there coming from two places:
1) new technology seems to easily lead to blurred distinctions between genre and medium--a blurring that would never occur in the standard print-genres of the technology we've gotten used to. one doesn't wonder whether a poem is still a poem or becomes prose if it's on parchment rather than notebook paper. it's possible to say that "blog" is the same thing--just a different kind of "page" on which any type of thing can be written.
in their 1997 "postings on a genre of e-mail," michael spooner and kathleen yancey* have the genre-vs.-medium debate about e-mail (the title is misleading; the designation begins and ends under debate, so they never agree that e-mail is a genre at all). the arguments they present will sound similar: e-mail is a way to convey information, but that information can appear in different forms--so it can be used for many different genres. BUT it also allows for, encourages, even demands textual practices that are different from what print media allow, so it creates (or allows the creation of?) (a) new genre(s). their point (that they can't answer the question?) is underscored by the format of the piece--appearing in a collection of scholarly essays, their contribution appears as an e-mail transcript, a print-out of a conversation going back and forth between correspondants, much like these postings turn into conversations in the comment sections. print genres don't do that. one person speaks. another person might speak later in a rebuttal, but both (many) voices don't appear to challenge and contradict each other. in e-mail, as in the blog (and here i'm getting to madeline's ideas), the audience speaks (strikes? i couldn't help it!) back.
2) genre means very different things in the literary tradition, where it's primarily spoken of as a form-based classifying appellation each particular work carries or a set a work belongs to, and in rhetoric & communication fields, where "genre theory" is theory about & the study of the purposes that drive, demand, and modify form. so while coming out of the literary tradition we might look at a blog to see what properties it has on its page, and compare those properties to the propertires of other pieces of writing on their pages, and from such observations decide what generic category to place it in (or that it needs a new one), a rhetorical genre scholar is more likely to look at what the blog does--what need it was created to fill, how it fills that need, what other ways of filling that need there might be--to answer questions about the uniqueness of that need. are blogs just another, comparable way of doing something old, or do they do something different and new?
*in bishop, wendy; hans ostrom, (eds.), genre and writing: issues, arguments, alternatives; portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook publishers. at comppile, search under "myka."
(x-posted to 711; see comments there)
Posted by ttobryan at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)