virtualpolitik

Under the Bright Lights

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:27:00 +0000

Fellow Digital Media and Learning blogger danah boyd recently described a public speaker's worst nightmare scenario in the era of Web 2.0. As boyd explains in "spectacle at Web2.0 Expo... from my perspective," Twittering members of the audience derailed her talk with publicly visible snarkiness that rattled her nerves at the podium.

I think that the backchannel is perfectly reasonable as a frontchannel when the speaker is trying to entertain, but when the goal is to convey something with depth, it encourages people to be impatient and frustrated, to feed on the speaker. There's a least common denominator element to it. I was not at Web2.0 Expo to entertain, but to inform. Yes, I can be an entertaining informant, but there's a huge gap between the kind of information that Baratunde tries to convey in his comedic format and what I'm trying to convey in a more standard one. And there's no doubt I packed too much information into a 20 minute talk, but my role is fundamentally to challenge audiences to think. That's the whole point of bringing a scholar to the stage. But if the audience doesn't want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over.

The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can't multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can't ignore, that I can't control. And that I cannot even see.

Now, I'm AOK with not having complete control of the audience during a talk, but it requires a fundamentally different kind of talk. That was not what I prepared for at all. Had I known about the Twitter stream, I would've given a more pop-y talk that would've bored anyone who has heard me speak before and provided maybe 3-4 nuggets of information for folks to chew on. It would've been funny and quotable but it wouldn't have been content-wise memorable. Perhaps that would've made more sense? Realistically though, those kinds of talks bore me at this point. So I probably would've opted not to give a talk at all. Perhaps I'm not the kind of speaker you want if you want a Twitter stream? But regardless, what I do know is that certain kinds of talks do not lend themselves to that kind of dynamic. I would *NEVER* have given my talk on race and class in such a setting. I shudder to think about how the racist language people used when I gave that talk would've been perceived on the big screen.

I suspect that these kinds of more public backchannels may be here to stay at academic conferences. I know from my own talks, that seeing the critical responses of live bloggers and status updaters can be disconcerting, so I'd probably rather keep myself unaware of those exchanges at the moment of performance whenever I can.

From a rhetorical perspective, this conflict between traditional oratory and the text message is interesting, of course, but I suspect this won't be the last story about it.

Thanks to Vivian Folkenflik for the link.

All That Twitters May Not Be Gold

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:21:00 +0000

When commenting on the use of Twitter as a vehicle for public comment on proceedings of the Federal Trade commission, Steven Clift points out the limitations of this single-platform approach.

This may be one of the first government-hosted conferences using Twitter for people to submit questions. (I wonder why not also allow e-mail since most Internet users still don't use Twitter?) On a related noted, why only 31 public comment submission so far? -

Ironically, this short format communications channel is being used for a serious topic that deserves more column space, a "New Media Workshop" on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" to be held December 1-2, 2009 in Washington, DC and via webcast.

The Federal Trade Commission will hold two days of workshops on December 1 and 2, 2009, to explore how the Internet has affected journalism. The event is free and open to the public. The workshop will assemble representatives from print, online, broadcast and cable news organizations, academics, consumer advocates, bloggers, and other new media representatives.

For more see the FTC Twitter stream. Of course, as the screen capture above demonstrates (click to enlarge), it is important to follow the right FTC.

The Rifled Faculty Mailbox

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:09:00 +0000

A recent New York Times article, "Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute," details how the electronic mail exchanged on scientific mailing lists has become evidence to those who are global warming deniers. Hackers snatched almost two hundred megabytes of e-mail from the British Climatic Research Unit, which is suddenly receiving more traffic from the general public for open electronically published material on its servers as well. They attempted to upload the data to RealClimate.org, which published the following statement in response that provides an interesting commentary about digital rhetoric.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

It is interesting to analyze how these assertions operate and the implications they contain: that old-school listservs are better suited to scientific debates than blogs, that there exist private spheres as well as public ones, and that the Internet fosters conspiracy theories rather than a recognition of dissensus.

From the perspective of what my colleague Mark Marino calls "Critical Code Studies," perhaps the ClimateAudit attempt at reading lines of code is perhaps most interesting and their assumption that a simple comment annotation serves as the "smoking gun" rather than more sophisticated black box algorithms.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:25:00 +0000

Ren Reynolds of the Virtual Policy Network reports that the British government has recently released the Code of Everand game, which uses the design aesthetic of popular quest-oriented massive online games that are popular with K-12 students like Runescape, although developers adapted the MMO format for the education of young citizens about traffic safety.

After playing the game for an hour, I soon discovered that much of the game actually plays more like Frogger, since players have to avoid being crushed by the "monsters" whooshing by in the "spirit channels" that they may attempt to cross, preferably at a designated crosswalk. In addition to traps and spells, the main protocol of the channel crossing involves looking right and then looking left to prepare to enter left-side-of-the-road traffic. (See below.)

The "about" page elaborates the game's design philosophy as follows:

Code of Everand is a multiplayer online game, which has been developed by the Department for Transport, to engage children making the transition from Primary to Secondary school, on the topic of road safety. The aim is that players will improve their road safety behaviour and apply what they have learned in the game, to the real world as a learned response. The Department for Transport’s aim is to reduce child pedestrian casualties and deaths among this age group by allowing young people to practice good road safety behaviours through a channel which is known to be very popular among those making the transition to Secondary school.

As a recent article explains, the game was actually developed by Area/Code, a firm perhaps best known for its theoretical work with ARGs and pervasive games.

Science Fare

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:55:00 +0000

The MacArthur foundation has been trumpeting the White House's announcement of the Lab Day initiative today and its involvement with new plans for science education and digital learning, so I checked out the streaming video of the event at a website that prominently also encourages citizens to join the commercial social network site Facebook and plugs the hipper new government URL WH.gov, which might get more play in the limited character world of texting and status updates.

I had mostly turned in to hear the brief mention of digital learning initiatives, which gave little play to work being done with computer programming or social networking by MacArthur and other philanthropic organization: "The MacArthur Foundation and industry leaders like Sony are launching a nationwide challenge to design compelling, freely available science-related video games." But I was struck by the introduction of reality TV show stars from Mythbusters by the president and the links between pedagogy, DIY, and reality television that I have also been exploring in a new project.

As a transcript of Obama's remarks indicated, students will "have the chance to build and create, and maybe destroy just a little bit..." and be "the makers of things, not just the consumers of things." Obama also expressed his enthusiasm for the White House's plans to host an "annual science fair" and continue holding events like their recent "astronomy night." The entire spectacle ended with a robot demo from two high school students.

Losing Touch

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:59:00 +0000

A Recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece, "If Odysseus Had GPS," points to a relationship between technological innovation and narrative genres that might not be necessarily there. Of course, telephone communication is often featured in movies, and cell phones have become an important part of plot lines that once created suspense by having characters out of contact, but the continuing contemporary fascination with castaways seems to indicate that the Odysseus storyline is a permanent part of our culture. It could be argued, in fact, that the more we are connected, the more we experience anxiety about disconnection.

Thanks to Peter Krapp for the link.

Brussels or Bust

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:04:00 +0000

For the next few days I will be at the Video Vortex conference, which has been organized by Geert Lovink's Institute of Network Cultures. After I get back I plan to report on the conference, along with the recently held Mobile Media conference at UCLA. As if that weren't enough conference madness DAC 2009, the international conference on Digital Arts and Culture will be at UC Irvine in just a few weeks.

Why Can't I Do This?

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:03:00 +0000

The use policy on the White House Flickr photo stream makes a series of demands in the legalese posted next to the images.

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

In this case, I've added some relatively lame Photoshop editorializing that is certainly not my best critical work. But by manipulating the photograph to insert a wounded Iraqi child into the White House Halloween holiday scene, I'm clearly violating the terms that are specified next to the image. But this alteration also makes a political statement and should thereby be protected speech on first amendment grounds.

I also have questions about the rules that limit use to news publication and personal printing by the subjects in the image. If a mother of one of these children prints out the image, is that a violation of the terms of use? What about a pro-Christian anti-Halloween activist who might want to show the image to others at a political gathering that should again seem to be under free speech protection.

First Time Farce, Second Time Tragedy

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:24:00 +0000

My UC Irvine colleague Peter Krapp gave a talk today called "Of Games and Gestures: machinima and the suspensions of animation" in conjunction with the new lecture series at the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds in which he argued that the "trained motion of players" and the "virtuoso ballet" that may build on "an archive of gaming performances" initially should not be "reduced to fan culture" not only because gaming is inscribed within certain historical conditions but also because such "gestures are neither necessary nor natural" as they express an "attitude or emotion" and also convey information about the "motion of the camera in game space." In thinking about machinima in the context of silent cinema, Krapp argued that the pantomimes of both art forms reflected a kind of melancholy about increasing technologization and the need to prove one's humanity. Unlike contemporary big budget films that can be summarized in their pitch lines or in their plot round-ups on IMDB, machinima can be difficult to summarize. By combining game demo, fan art, and media history, machinima represents much more than a mass-mediation of user generated content. He conceded that there was also "a ludic angle" to the record of performance, but that this record has a longer history that dates back to Muybridge. (I had seen Krapp earlier this year give an interesting talk that also referenced Muybridge about Taylorism and scientific management that offers a database of employee maneuvers.) Krapp asserted that a society that has lost its gestures is consequently obsessed with them as life becomes indecipherable and the subject must retreat to bourgeois concerns, interiority, and psychoanalysis.

Krapp showed a number of classic machinima favorites, which included I'm Still Seeing Breen (above) , along with Cantina Crawl X, the first episode of This Spartan Life, Warthog Jump (which inspired the Flash game Warthog Launch), and A Few Good G Men (below).

Yesterday, I saw Enda Walsh's play The Walworth Farce from Ireland's Druid Theater, a devastating play about a paranoid schizophrenic patriarch and his two terrorized sons who are forced to reenact an alternative version of a fratricidal family drama. As the two young men act the same play over and over, the pathos of a visitor gives their puppetry particular emotional investment. When Krapp had to answer the familiar question about when videogame content would be enough to make someone cry, I thought about how machinima could probably bring about this same emotional power of an "off" reinactment, as Walsh's play demonstrated.

Open and Shut Cases

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:57:00 +0000

Thanks to my fellow NEH-Vectors Fellow Micki McGee for this image of the banner for the 2009 Adobe Government Assembly. Of course, having a company that manufactures proprietary software celebrate its openness in a bid for more government contracts might seem a strange rhetorical move, but at least it indicates that Google isn't the only one making this pitch. Choosing to highlight a YouTube video on the platform of its Mountain View competitor in a number of fields may also seem strange, but the conflation of the administration's rhetoric of "transparency" and the PDF format loathed by pro-disclosure groups like the Sunlight Foundation depends on inferring a presidential endorsement.

Suggestion Blocks

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:49:00 +0000

The idea of using collective intelligence aggregated through the Internet is nothing new. Whether it is editing a Wikipedia article or figuring out a good hotel in a strange city, the process of so-called "crowd sourcing" plays a role in many forms of decision-making.

Because of what researchers call the "availability heuristic," which makes information easily recalled overvalued, there is a tendency to make decisions based on a single vivid anecdote rather than a mass of information derived from as many data points as possible. In theory, the quantitative approach of crowd sourcing should derive either a broad consensus or the odds of a singular brilliant insight, as actual trends and truths would be more likely to be spotted.

Now this theory is being applied by the General Services Administration of the federal government, who -- according to "GSA aims to improve procurement process" -- have now embraced the approach of soliciting volunteer labor from amateur analysts and are using "rapidly expanding social-media tools -- such as Facebook, Twitter, and wikis" to foster changes in the government procurement system.

Do you have an idea for improving the government's $528 billion-a-year acquisition system? The General Services Administration wants you to share your plan with the world on an open Web site. It might even use your suggestion in a future procurement.

The article explains that the initiative involves two web addresses that are on .com domains rather than .gov sites. BetterBuyProject.com and GovLoop.com. (Sadly there is no Awesome.gov as the latter site seems to imply.)

Truth Be Told

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:43:00 +0000

Since I happen to know that the U.S. government has created military videogames about washing hands to avoid dysentery, this doesn't seem so unlikely to me. Games about learning common nouns and verbs in Arabic, negotiating with the locals, and spotting IEDs in monotonous landscapes are already in the field.

Thanks to Michael Zyda for the link!

Club Reporter

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:00:00 +0000

My first blog posting for the Digital Media and Learning website is now live, which features my interview with civics educator Joseph Kahne at "Digital Media and Democracy: Early Returns."

As I've written before, I've had some reservations in the past about the MacArthur Foundation's seeming infatuation with the exoticism of digital youth and their absence of what I have taken to be serious critiques of the proprietary software model. But over time I have come to respect their support for important new initiatives in higher education and in civic institutions and for their funding of even-handed scholarship that may question the utopian assumptions that philanthropic organizations might otherwise tend to find very appealing.

I also feel very fortunate to be part of such an excellent team of bloggers.

If I Can Measure It, It's Information

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Virtualpolitik friend Siva Vaidhyanathan is quoted in today's Los Angeles Times article, "Google to buy AdMob in bid to reach mobile users."

"They define everything in the universe as information," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, "which means everything in the world is potentially in their domain."

Because Google is fundamentally an advertising company, Vaidhyanathan said, its highest priority is to "harvest users' attention" and sell that commodity to eager marketers.

Vaidhyanathan raises an interesting point about how information is defined and how that definition assigns a monetary value and how the number of potential factors classified as information in Google's scheme reaches into the realm of sublime numbers. Of course, when information was first being defined with mathematical theories during the Cold War, information scientists like Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener realized how this quantification might have economic and political effects, even if they understood those effects in the context of a battle with a Communist other.

In contrast, some argue that "Google Devalues Everything It Touches."

Distance Counseling

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:58:00 +0000

According to "Second Life Duty Now Required for Penn State's Online Advisers," academic advisers for the Penn State World Campus Island will now be meeting with students in the online virtual world Second Life to help their distance education students pursue their curricular objectives. It might be somewhat disquieting to have mentors who look like undergraduates themselves with their younger, fitter avatars.

Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.

Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So students who want to meet with Rachel Zimmerman will find themselves chatting with a character called RachelM Snoodle. Looking for Karen Lesch? The adviser goes by KarenM Magic. All advisers are required to cover at least two hours a week.

Given how often support staff deal with tears from frustrated students, I'm not sure that the "exact same thing" is possible in an environment in which there is such limited paralinguistic contact.

Calling the Kettle Black

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:31:00 +0000

The four-part story on NPR The End of Privacy largely focuses on discrete platforms, such as Facebook, cell phones, digital records, and online data, rather than the British model of the more integrated surveillance society, which also includes public surveillance cameras in the mix. It also caused the station to find itself justifying its own cookie policy on the grounds of the code's preservation of anonymity, a claim that privacy advocates might find dubious, given how easily it is to use web surfing data to tie behavior to an individual.

As one commenter points out, the network's explanations are highly suspect:

The cookies that Mr. Robinson pointed out in his comment are third-party tracking cookies. They are used by advertising companies to profile users and their habits across the internet for marketing purposes; they have nothing whatsoever to do with the usability or functionality of NPR's website. NPR's "response", rather than addressing the issue raised by Mr. Robison, instead tries to shift the attention to first-party cookies -- those which ARE legitimately used for website functionality. NPR does not in any way address the third-party tracking cookies.

It's ironic and angering that on a series having to do with personal privacy and the internet, NPR tries to whitewash their own practices. NPR, of all organizations, ought not to underestimate its audience's intelligence.

Virtual News

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:18:00 +0000

Sometimes the New York Times has excellent coverage of the Internet and gaming, especially if it has work written by new media journalist Clive Thompson. Sometimes it has terrible coverage. Not all the stories about online gaming in the newspaper were ill-informed today. In "Chinese Agencies Struggle Over Video Game" not only describes an interesting dispute between the authoritarian government's Ministry of Culture and the more culturally conservative Administration of Press and Publication over regulation of the game World of Warcraft. It also pointed out that U.S. massive games tend to have a much smaller part of the total market share than games developed in China. For more coverage of the controversy, check out "Clarification from the Ministry of Culture" from Web2Asia.

But "Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays" makes a number of missteps, even though it talks to real gamers about their virtual purchases and identifies sources from big players in the market of social games like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom. The big mistake that it makes is relying on the opinions of venture capitalists, who tend to have poor understanding of reputation economies or the subversive potentials of online social networks.

Analysts estimate that virtual goods could bring in a billion dollars in the United States and around $5 billion worldwide this year — all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce.

“It’s a fantastic business,” said Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested $10 million in several virtual goods companies. “Because it’s digital, the marginal cost for every one you sell is zero, so you have 100 percent margins.”

First of all, anyone who collects virtual goods will tell you that not all digital items are created equal and that "few hours of work by an artist" has to be done by someone who can create a compelling image using only a few pixels wisely. Games that are successful, like Farmville, which is one of their examples, rely on having a range of crop and animal animations that are visually engaging at a number of scales. To have the cuteness quotient of what the Japanese call "kawaii" characteristics requires a particular attention to the aesthetics of the screen.

Second, the idea that players are merely passive consumers eager to purchase meaningless tokens underestimates the likelihood of player revolts, particularly since -- as the article itself admits -- most players play for free. For example, last year's PackRat revolt, which I am writing about in the upcoming collection Facebook and Philosophy shows how participatory culture punishes what it perceives as systems of greed.

Finally, there is a tone of amusement at this mysterious behavior, despite all the explanations that the article offers, that seems ironic, given that something like the greeting card industry doesn't get similar amazement for having customers. Buy your friend a greeting card and it may well cost you over five dollars, including stamp, gas, and time for selection. And then who can see it? How does it give your friend any continuing pleasure once it is opened? Virtual goods are profoundly about the social and the public dimension of online interactions, a quality that the NYT doesn't always seem to get.

Theory You Can Dance To

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:18:00 +0000

In preparation for the conference on The Internet as Playground and Factory, Virtualpolitik friend Trebor Scholz is inviting people to go to an online archive of video clips of the presenters and then create a new composition from the components.

Download the clips from Vimeo and remix them with some great dance beat. The material is licensed under a creative commons license. We'll feature the best submissions at the ...event and archive all mashups on the conference website.

Contestants have until November 11th, so get your open source video and audio editing software ready!

Following Heroism

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:39:00 +0000

As the news media begins to publicize the apparent heroism of police officer Kimberly Munley who shot Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan four times despite being wounded herself, it is interesting to see so much attention paid to Munley's Twitter feed, even though her most recent post was from July, where she remarks that she is "still recovering from a long night of work from Saturday!" Hundreds of people have become followers of Munley, who is still hospitalized, and many have sent messages of thanks and well wishes.

Battle Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:29:00 +0000

The culturvis photostream now is publishing representations of videogame play to promote a new form of documentary evidence in game studies.

Mix and Match

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Sketch2Photo promises to automate the work of selecting and compositing images from different sources in order to create seamless montages with the right composition and visual rhetoric without the multi-step alterations of an image editing program like Photoshop.

Latin Killed the Romans and Now It's Killing Type Designers

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:01:00 +0000

This Lorem Ipsum generator for designers of web pages and print materials is designed to replicate the classic "dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry," which has been "the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book." According to the site the scrambled nonsense originated in "sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of 'de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero," one of history's greatest rhetoricians. The maker of the generator promises to deliver text "free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words."

Pictures from an Exhibition

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:32:00 +0000

The White House has released a Flickr set called the "First 100 Days" that presents a carefully selected digital album of images. Of course, some of them borrow from the visual language of the Kennedy years, but what is also striking about the collection is how many show Obama on the telephone, a traditional landline with a curled cord. Often he looks uncomfortable with the device, as though not accustomed to being tethered in this way. None of the images show the Chief Executive on his Blackberry or interacting with mobile computing, although he does appear to be holding it sealed in its case in one moment of gesticulation. And when computers are shown, the focus is elsewhere, in this case of a game of football in the outside of the Oval Office.

One notable exception to the visual rule about omitting mobile devices is this image, where "Blackberrys, cell phones and communications devices are tagged with post-its during a briefing on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Cabinet Room 3/26/09."

Sentenced to Death

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:11:00 +0000

As someone who teaches academic writing to college students, I am always struck by how much difficulty they seem to have with the most basic sentence formulae, such as "According to _____," or "__________ argues that . . ." Now the University of Chicago Writing Program has created a tongue-in-cheek sentence-generator called "Make Your Own Academic Sentence" that will create an overly wordy theoretical string of words for "your next article." I like the fact that the first choice on the first pull-down menu is "the public sphere" and that the revisions actually work grammatically as well. I think this produces much more elegant results than the similarly themed Postmodern Essay Generator, which I write about in this essay and in the Virtualpolitik book.

Thanks to Siva Vaidhyanathan for the link!

Tagging Someone's Property Because a Website Tells You To is Thinking for Yourself?

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:36:00 +0000

This is a line that I heard last night as I watched the premiere episode of V, the remake of the 1983 TV miniseries about aliens who pose as humans to disguise their identities as carnivorous reptiles. ABC is trying to encourage online fandom by plugging the "Peace Ambassador Program" and emphasizing the plot device that aliens are recruiting human collaborators by using the Internet to spread their propaganda. (Of course, the Internet is also the source of paranoid conspiracy theories that bring doubters to the resistance movement as well.) Given all the online tie-ins, it is surprising that the network didn't make the website that they show in the series "visitmothership.com" a working site.