Else-if-then

New Blog

2008-12-28T09:34:00.000-08:00

Currently spending lots of time making a new website and blog. Not quite finished yet, but you can see the new blog here. Torn between posting new entries there or here....

UPDATE: Now officially posting over there from here on out.

Wow, long timelines

2008-12-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I am amazed at how long journals still take to get articles and reviews into print. Given how quickly things get posted online, I would have thought they would all be changing their practices in order to not get left behind entirely. I mention this by way of introducing the following review. i wrote it for the European Journal of cultural studies and have just learned they expect to publish it in 2010. It's a book review, not a 20 page article requiring peers to read it. But anyway, I don't care that much, except I think the book really deserved more attention sooner, so I'm re-posting the link to my review (which I blogged a couple of months ago) here.

I also just learned that a chapter I proposed on the FB stuff has been accepted for publication in the Handbook of Digital Research (at least the proposal has been accepted meaning, I can send a full chapter, which I think will be also be reviewed), so that's cool.

On the downside, My NEH grant proposal has been rejected. I asked for the feedback, but haven't yet received it. I was approved for an internal grant of a few thousand dollars, but our school is so broke at the moment, there is no money to actually fund that grant program. Unless they find money somewhere in the next 2 weeks, it seems I will not be able to make the trip I had planned to the Netherlands in late January. I'm pretty discouraged about that because it will delay my work on my book projects by at least 6 months and they have already been held back by the fact that I can only visit each time for 1-3 weeks, have only been able to afford 3 visits in the last 2 years, and have such a heavy workload the rest of the time that (like almost all of my colleagues) I have almost no time for research anyway.

Lack of funding and too much work would be problems for any academic, but when you actually love your research like I do (as opposed to just doing it because your school requires some amount, and I personally know several people who take that approach) this is especially awful. If all I cared about was meeting a requirement, I could argue that the requirement was unreasonable under these conditions and have a powerful case, but I love the research. So much so that I've been doing it on my own time and out of my own pocket. --My school doesn't have a really good internal grant program to support junior faculty, nor are any time or money allotted to everyone just to support research.

So it boils down to my work being accepted by my peers for publications and presentations, but if I want to do the work and travel to present it, I have to pay for it myself because academic research is not sufficiently valued by the public to support it (not just mine, but most scholars') generally. Maybe I need to just leave the country. :P

A page from the Mirkopedia

2008-12-01T09:37:00.001-08:00

A page from the Mirkopedia
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

The defense is probably not quite over, but already Mirko's influence is spreading. It seems he has been recognized as exemplifying many sterling qualities!

--Update--

Now all is concluded and Mirko has been duly promoted to his proper place as Dr. Mirko.

Bastard Culture!

2008-12-01T00:51:00.000-08:00

My good friend, Mirko Tobias Schäfer is defending his dissertation today. In fact, by the time many of you read this, he may already be finished and recognized as Dr. Schäfer. :-)

It has been my pleasure for the last 15 months or so to read Mirko's manuscript, Bastard Culture! User participation and the extension of cultural industries, and I am pleased to report that he has posted a pdf online. --Particularly since I need to cite his work in some of mine, and have been waiting on this! It's a solid piece of scholarship. Briefly, it

steps beyond the usual framework and analyzes user participation in the context of accompanying popular and scholarly discourse, as well as the material aspects of design, and their relation to the practices of design and appropriation...

The availability of computers and Internet expand the traditional culture industry into the domain of users, who actively participate in cultural production, either by appropriating products from the commercial domain or by creating their owns. But while user activities constitute a significant loss of control for certain sectors of traditional media industries, especially in the area of distribution, the larger culture industry benefits from user driven innovation through the appropriation of corporate design.

Go and download it immediately.

So congratulations, Mirko. I'm proud of all your hard work and perseverance.

News From Comparative Media Studies at MIT

2008-11-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd see it, but Henry Jenkins is leaving Comparative Media Studies at MIT and moving to the Annenberg School at USC. The full story (or as full as will ever be made public, I'd guess) is on Henry's blog.

I express surprise, but in another way I'm not surprised at all. The whole time I was teaching in Course 21 at MIT I observed how little the Institute as a whole seems to value Humanities and Social Sciences. I had thought though that they might care more about supporting CMS because they have such a strong international reputation and really enrich the academic programs, the campus community, and the school's image. But in the early 2000s I saw how much time Henry had to spend on fund-raising, and how in spite of the MA program's growth and the creation of the BA, that no new faculty positions were created. So really maybe the surprise is that Henry waited this long.

I would hate to see that program disappear; all the things they do are so valuable in general, and I personally gained a lot from some of the programs they were running when I was there. But I wonder what it will take for MIT to stop treating the humanities as not even second rate? I know many people want to work there; they have a good reputation, good students, good location, etc.. But in fact this is at least the third member of the humanities faculty I know who has chosen to leave in the last four years, and likely there have been others. Maybe this will be a wake-up call at last, but I doubt it.

Florian's moment of revelation

2008-11-20T23:08:00.000-08:00

Florian at Ars Electronica 2007.

Note, visit Ars Electronica 2007 for more info. about Florian winning the Prix Ars prize for theory.

I was still a student in 1995, in Comparative Literature, and there was a conference in Berlin. It wasn't really a conference so much as a public culture event, and it was called Soft-Moderna --soft modernism and basically it was organized by people from the American Studies program from the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, and it imported the whole Brown University Hyperfiction discourse. So it was about literature and the internet and computing, but heavily based in the whole hypertext-hyperfiction paradigm. And bringing together Robert Coover for example and some German people who were doing early experiments in that field. And you could see the whole helplessness of people there, and they also operated in the new media paradigm so they asked a couple of media journalists and media studies people to be on this panel and discuss this whole thing. And you could see this complete helplessness. And I was just this young student and I just stood up and asked critical questions. I didn't talk so long, maybe two minutes or so, but I was really critical of what they had said. And then basically the organizer of the conference said well, you seem to know more about that stuff than the people we had on the panel, so do you want to be in the next conference? So that was actually my first public lecture and I was on a panel with Friedrich Kittler (!) and Andy Müller-Maguhn the spokesperson from the chaos computer club. And from there I got writing commissions and I gut sucked into this whole field.

This is a short one, but next time I'll be covering what Florian likes about the field, his concerns about the art being produced, and his own role.

I'm interested though to learn how closely connected new media and hyperfiction were early on and how hyperfiction/text was really one of the basic paradigms because today in the US, hyperfiction seems like a narrow genre that a few people are really getting into, like Nick Montfort, but at least on the conference circuit it seems to have lost it's place as being so basic, being something everyone knew about and discussed.

Florian Cramer on the problem of new media paradigms

2008-11-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

Florian at Worm in Rotterdam, Summer 2007
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

We moved on to discuss "new media" as a discipline and I mentioned how both Sher Doruff and Renee Turner had said one thing that attracted them (among other characteristics) was the lack of constraints on the field, because no body knew what was possible or not, and no one expected or required that any particular methodology be used. I'm afraid I also indulged in a mini-rant about how often I've seen presentations that were basically just descriptions of the speakers encounter with some situation involving new media, and just stopped at that--no analysis, no theory, no further data... Ahem. Anyway, Florian (as usual) had a far more thoughtful take on this issue.

I go even deeper than that and say that there is a lot in the so-called new media field, especially in the more alternative, or activist, or off-mainstream field, a kind of naive continuity of cybernetics. What do I mean by that? Well cybernetics in the 1950s and the 1960s was basically the idea that we operate with a notion of system-feedback-control and that these are descriptors that we could commonly apply to both artificial and natural systems. So that means we can analyze a society in terms of feedback, control or whatever. We can describe human organisms, we can describe politics, but we can also describe a machine.

And here I noted we had arrived right at Katherine Hayles! Florian agreed and continued.

Then what I see in the so-called new media field is that it was from the same paradigm except that it doesn't work with this classical behaviorist model which is really about almost totalitarian control fantasies, but their model is something like the rhizome. But the rhizome is just another cybernetic model and it is based on the same idea of using that structure in order to compare the internet to human society, etc etc etc. And that is something I find very questionable and I also want to do more critical writing on. And I think there is little reflection and little awareness of the continuity of these cybernetic paradigms. And nobody questions for example the notion of "system." System is a highly speculative construct. I mean you say we are systems, society is a system, the human body is a system, and a computer is a system. But I think this kind of rhetoric obscures and clouds more than it actually helps to analyze things and I think we have to go beyond that. For me, really critical media studies would be to question both notions.

But I see when I say this that I'm really making myself enemies. And even with people with whom I wouldn't have thought it. Well I thought they also come from a really critical camp. But it's really astonishing to see how deeply these paradigms are really embedded into the whole field.

So now, after these two entries, we are about 17 minutes into the interview, and I already feel like I've swallowed a rich media text! In the next entry we finally get to the actually reasons Florian got into this work.

The secret origins of Florian Cramer

2008-11-14T23:34:00.001-08:00

Florian during his interview
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Ok, there aren't really any secrets but I haven't seen any really biographical interviews with Florian anywhere else, so maybe it will be some kind of revelation. :-) I've known Florian for a long time now, about 15 years, but when working on my projects in the Netherlands, I realized we had never talked very explicitly about his own history with technology, art, culture, etc. --For reasons that will become clear, I am not using the term New Media.

In fact my first question was how Florian got involved with new media to begin with, and this led immediately to a a lengthy and detailed explanation of the problems with the term from a historical perspective. I will try to encapsulate it:

First, new media means something totally different in the US than in Europe. Here it means digital or computer media, ala Lev Manovich, but in Europe TV and radio are often included in that, in fact, from a historical perspective, all media is new at some point.
Second, the terms medium and media are being used incorrectly throughout the field. For example, if we speak of radio, one of the earliest technologies to be discussed as a medium, then technically the medium, the carrier of radio waves, is air. This was then extended metonymically to include the waves themselves, then further expanded to include the devices themselves, the senders, and even the receivers (that is the people sending and receiving). So that the term now encompasses so much, it's not even very useful.

I explained that while I agreed with this critique, I've been using the term as the most broadly understood as covering the territory I mean to explore, but I am coming to believe that it's really time to dispense with it altogether. At any rate, I reiterated my question, how did he get started?

According to Florian he started by programing his own computers when he was 13, and in fact might be considered to have been doing the same stuff for 25 years: he used computers to generate random poetry which he published in his own punk fanzine. :-) The most fascinating thing for him then was the random generator, though of course now that he's "older and wiser" he knows that the randomness of a computer is not true randomness; it's "pre-determined chance." This shaped his interest; the kind of meta reality, textuality, emergence of code, and also the connection to society and all the arts.

But back to the timeline; I asked how at this starting point at 13, in 1982 how he even had a computer. Through friends he started using them, especially an older friend who used computers to trigger the light show for his music--all of this was programmed in Basic.

But his interest in computers went up and down; in the very early 90s he was on the internet but found it really boring; it was all controlled by system administrators and not much was going on. Now he reads papers by his students that glorify the old days, he says "oh but you couldn't do much then; you couldn't use your own server or install your own software; you could only dial up the university mainframe."

I contrasted this to Sher Doruff's experience that people felt even a sense of wonder at being able to connect at all. But of course she is older than Florian or I and so had a different set of expectations about what might be possible. Further, and I think this is a crucial factor affecting people's attitudes toward computers and "new media," Florian has always been quite skeptical about the technology itself and the promise it might hold. (A skepticism I share.) As he puts it:

They're not the perfect machines and they're not the dream machines, and this is what also cripples the whole new media field. Basically there have been all these kinds of utopian expectations. The first machine I had was incredibly primitive; it had 1 kb of memory. But today's machines cannot really do more. And the structure of programming is not at all different, it's just more comfortable. The machines have become faster but they haven't become smarter. And what also surpised me, when I came to the Netherlands, is that even more than in other parts of the world, is the expectation that somehow computers will become smarter or less deterministic. And you can name those expectations with certain names such as artificial intelligence --where computers are not just stupid sytactic machines, but become semantic machines that have a true understanding. Or artificial life; that you have something like emergence , or whatever, out of computers. And the third one I think is new media. The whole idea, especially in the 1990s with the whole virtual reality nonsense, is that somehow through multi-media interfaces, the machine wouldn't be this whole command-line deterministic thing, but would become more intuitive, less deterministic.... but if you're a smart computer user you know that a mouse click is the same as typing a command. The logic remains the same.

So that is Florian's take on new media as such, and a tiny bit about how he himself got involved. But in the next part we talked much more about the actual conditions of the field (however one names it) and about his own history, from being a graduate student in comparative literature to his current role as Director of the Media Design MA course at the Piet Zwart Institute.

datadirt

2008-11-12T16:04:00.000-08:00

A quick note to thank Ritchie Pettauer (whom I met through Facebook!) for asking to publish my Facebook paper on his blog, datadirt. As he describes it:

the main focus is (pro)blogging, WordPress and online marketing with the occassional media theory twist. I also like to blog about music and funny stuff on the net - yup, it's a wild mixture of highly personalized preferences; but hey, that's why it's called a blog and not a magazine.

I've been following it for a little while via Twitter and there always seems to be something fun and interesting posted over there. --A much cooler blog than this one! ;-)

And Ritchie has reformatted my paper in a really easy way to navigate--I'll have to steal it someday. ;-) Last, upon reading I see that in spite of my efforts, typos are plentiful in that text, and I want to make clear they are mine, not Ritchie's.

Brenno de Winter

2008-11-11T08:41:00.001-08:00

B. de Winter
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

I should also note that Brenno is starting to establish quite a journalistic reputation when it comes to reporting on IT and issues of privacy, freedom on information, and related matters. For example, he has relentlessly pursued the privacy problems with the OV Chipkaart. You can see the most recent article at WebWereld--all in Dutch though.

An interesting thing about Brenno's work is how he manages the rhetorical frame around these issues in order to be more persuasive. Rather than using the usual hacker image and discourse which is scary and paranoid, all about protecting individual's privacy, instead he talks about protecting data in more business-like terms which are far more appealing to government and business types, but in the end lead to the same desired results. An interesting example of someone co-opting corporate language and discourse in the inverse of the way corporations often try to co-opt user discourse.

Finally, Brenno de Winter

2008-11-09T18:12:00.000-08:00

Having got through everything I want to say for now about IR9, I hope to finish with my summer interviews--it's not too long now until I go back to NL for more interviews, so I have to get these done!

So actually one of the earliest interviews I did in the summer was with Brenno de Winter, who I actually first learned of through his podcasts and and website, Laura Speaks Dutch. --That's a great resource for learning Dutch, by the way. Strangely, he turned out to be the one who had translated the instructions for how to use GPG with Mac mail and when I realized he had done these two totally different but helpful things, emailed to thank him. Once I learned more about his work in IT security and as an IT journalist, I decided to interview him. Also, we've gotten to be friends, so it was nice to meet in person finally anyway.

Brenno has a fairly classic history with technology, from the gender standpoint. Like many male geeks, he started very young and was coding before age 10. But beyond that, I'd have to say he violates most other stereotypes about male geeks or hackers. He tends to wear preppy clothes, is quite sociable, has a very positive attitude toward people at all skill levels when it comes to technology, as long as they are trying to educate themselves, and he shows no hostility at all toward girl geeks. In fact he's very supportive.

Our conversation was not so focused because his work is really outside the new media stuff I usually look at, but we did have a very interesting discussion of what the atmosphere was like in the open source and hacker communities and how it might have changed over time. He felt that when he first got involved, it was very community-spirited, and even described himself as feeling tearful at some evnts, because he was so moved by how everyone cooperated and how warmly people behaved toward each other. Over time though he feels this has diminished and gave the example of his own efforts to found a house in Amsterdam where hackers could live for free. He met with a group of them and offered to help them find funding, which he thought might be fairly easy. But because the group could not reach any agreement at all about how the whole thing might work, it just collapsed and went nowhere.

This really seemed to echo some of how William Uricchio has described his own frustrations in trying to organize new media scholars in the Netherlands for everyones mutual benefit. I wonder if no longer being such small and beleaguered has actually made it harder for people in these groups to unite. This is a fairly common problem when a group that has been outcast starts to gain social currency; since they no longer have to spend all their enrgy and resources to survive, room opens to argue about how to spend the "excess." Or everyone gains a little power and security, and suddenly they have something to lose, and so they become territorial.

I guess no matter how technology changes, in some ways, people never do.

Anyway, nowadays Brenno is working on a project called Small Sister that aims to educate people about privacy issues and provide tools with which they can guard their privacy in these frightening days of increasing data-retention. It's already a cool project just in the way it collects together so much useful info about protecting your privacy, but I'm looking forward to seeing what they cook up themselves. He'll be speaking at 253C in December, so if you are around Berlin, go see him.

Bernhard Rieder and Algorithmic Proximity at IR9

2008-11-05T19:08:00.000-08:00

The last talk I saw that I'll report was Bernhard's, on Algorithmic Proximity. Bernhard started off with background on the work he and Mirko have done that led up to the hybrid foam model, but his main question in this talk was to look at lower level sociality, such as in sites like Flickr, where most interactions are singular, and connections are fleeting. He is trying to understand "socio-genesis" or the process through which these low level communications crystallize into a real relationship.

In reality, individuals stand at varying social distances, or in network theory terms, where individuals are linked by paths of varying lengths which represent the probability of association. Add to this the notion of homophily; that we tend to associate with those like ourselves. (on the twitter channel for IR9 a number of people agreed that while it was true, we hated to admit it because it seemed narrow-minded).

Next, it is possible to render social interactions digitally and what will that reveal? Skipping the math... we see the importance of space somewhat reduced, and status homophily seems to be replaced by value homophily, where interest factors become more important than socio-economic factors.

Algorithmic proximity is a form of social proximity produced by the rendering of many factors in order to make recommendations about friends or matches. For example, on Facebook, the number of friends you have in common with someone may lead to a friend recommendation in "people you might know." This is most noticeable on dating sites which aim to match people based on similarity across a range of categories, and in fact is almost essential if one is to effectively filter through all the possible matches. Bernhard went through a few other examples; Last.fm, Flickr, and Delicious, and said a bit about how on these sites, similar tagging practices might lead people to start following other users.

But what about serendipity? Is homophily a feature or a bug? If we only see people who are like us, then what? I think that's a frightening prospect myself; I can think of a lot of interesting ideas and people I would hate to have missed, but if all my encounters were based on some kind of homophily, we would never have met. A fun counter example, the Unsuggester. This site tells you what books you would hate based on books you like (and maybe by extension, the people). I'm afraid I do judge people by what they read, sometimes....

I really need to get the whole paper because I think the math would be interesting, and also, Bernhard makes very strong but closely argued points, and a lot of the details have to be left out of such a short talk. So I've emailed Bernhard and if I can get more details, I'll update this entry later because this seems important to me, thought it's a tangent to Bernhard's work.

If I am to figure out how people connect and stay connected, I think this could be a really important piece of the puzzle, and also suggests measurable data I could look at in order to see patterns -- for example, what kind of proximity, exactly, seems most important? Are there certan values or other shared chracteristics that correlate more strongly with connection than others?

A really thought-provoking talk.

My Panel

2008-10-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

I don't want to brag..well, actually I do. The panel went very well considering how many speakers we ended up with. Everyone kept to the time limit, no one had technical problems. And the talks themselves were all quite good; I think even exceptional in going beyond the anecdotal case studies we so often see when it comes to work on participation. Since we had so many speakers, there was really no time for discussion; that was the one downside, but I did have some short chats with people later on about our panel, so I guess they liked it.

Here is a link to my prior post which has links to all the full papers.

I also recorded audio for the whole panel and hope to eventually make podcasts for each speaker.

Big thanks to Elfi, Anders, Christian, and Mirko. You guys rock! :-)

Finally, I really have to thank Bernhard Rieder for his masterful work as respondent. He had quite a job having to read all five papers and find some way of summing them all up. I also recorded that, thankfully because Bernhard had good ideas that inspire further development of my ideas at least. --I heard the same from Elfi, in fact.

Marianne van den Boomen at IR 9.0

2008-10-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

The next talk I saw was Marianne's; a much more developed version of the research she presented at New Network Theory in Summer '07. The title this time was "E-sociability metaphors:
From virtual community to social network and beyond," and looked at the evolution of metaphors used to describe social relationships on the Internet.

The most interesting point for me was the really concrete way she identified ways that Web 2.0 platforms in their technical workings actually might be described as undermining the previous kinds of online communities that were so much glorified.

As she puts it, Internet communities were once like this:

localized social aggregation on the Internet
based on shared practice, interest, or value
gathering at a collective place
having a core of recurrent active users
engaged in on ongoing group communication
and so developing a common frame
of reference

But, Web 2.0 technologies create this:

the page is dissolved as unit for collective gathering
on the fly aggregation and reassemblage of user enriched data
interacting data entities rather than interacting users
no common collective place of gathering
no ongoing debate between a recurrent group of users

At least in part these changes occur because of technologies--scripts, usually--that allow dynamic html content to be generated, saving time and bandwidth by not serving page after static page or creating whole new pages from scratch. This means that users don't have to interact with each other or with other real people (web-mistresses, sys-admins, site owners or whomever). Instead the system can answer most requests.

While this is true, in fact, fora still exist, and people often interact through blog comments, wall-posts on Facebook, etc. But it's probably true that the focus is not any more on centralized "gathering places." Insteadit seems more like visiting neighbours, to me. Occassionally you all get together socially, but most interactions are one to one. But that is often what we do in person too, isn't it? Phone calls, meeting for coffee or lunch, sending email. Historically we might say that this is more typical, so I don't know that we can really blame web 2.0. On the other hand, I haven't researched the whole history of human intercation (yet!), so maybe this is so. SHould have asked about this at the talk, but I guess I can just send a message... ;-)

IR 9.0 talk, Camille Paloque-Bergès: Internet as playful business : interactive hypertext in net.art

2008-10-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, I went to this talk for two reasons, first because I am interested in the ways communities construct knowledge and in how we can observe that, and because Camille is a student of my friend Bernhard Rieder and I know how hard it can be as a grad student at a big conference, so I wanted to be supportive.

The talk itself was hampered by how little time was alotted to speakers in every panel--only 15 minutes instead of the usual 20. That missing 5 minutes equals 1-2 pages of text and it's quite a challenge to explain any but the most superficial ideas in only 15 minutes. Unfortunately Camille's talk was fairly complex, and I think it didn't all come across clearly. However, since she has posted her slides and paper, I was able to take a closer look and found that my initial impression was correct; she is onto something quite interesting.

I'll quote a short passage from her paper that sums up what she is studying right now:

From this quick contextualization, we can specify two major directions the net.artists have followed in Internet cyberculture: the economy of things (the growing population of hobbyists among the sub-cultures on the Web), embodied by informational objects (content and form) that are collected and shared in most of web communities, and the economy of people (triumphant in the Web 2.0’s fashion), embodied in the usage of applications, information processing and communication networks.

In the talk she went on to discuss the example of nasty nets, a site that was active from 2006-2007 and at which a group of net.artists shared links and images of interest that they discovered while surfing, identifying an emerging vernacular that counters the serious or high culture (or hacker, which is an interesting connection) approaches to both the Internet and to net.art. Talking afterward, there was some thought that the 4chan "/b/" image board may be a good place (or even the best?) to spot the bleeding edge of memetic evolution online. --Not that we needed an excuse to visit it, but what the hell. ;-)

Talks at IR 9.0 -- Mimi Ito Keynote

2008-10-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've had some more sleep and will start commenting on talks I saw. Honestly, I didn't see as many as I would have liked or register them as clearly as I should, because I was exhausted and sick for the whole trip, but I did at least see a few. I'll just mention the high points--otherwise know as the talks I can remember having attended!

In her keynote, Mimi Ito reported on a really large project being carried out at USC to look at youth culture and the internet, and she identified two kinds of participation, and focused on discussing the second. The first kind is not so different from kinds of socializing that have existed for a long time, but the latter is newer, or at least the extent to which it is available to teens is new and is allowed by the Internet.

1. Friendship-driven learning and participation

--hanging out
--overcoming limitations in local social network
--highly motivating to participants -- who are producers of knowledge and social reality
--social life becomes more public and persistently remembered.
--capacity building, jumping off point for...

2. Interest-driven learning and participation (Example, Naruto fans)

--expanding social networks beyond local groups
--unprecedented opportunity to connect with like-minded peers.
--learning new skills
--higher publicity potential

Naruto Fans who produce Anime Music Videos (AMVs) and who engage in Fan-subbing exhibit:

--high degree of collaboration and reciprocity
--mastering esoteric knowledge leads to status
--peer-based ecology of review and critique
--directed outward mainly to other subbers, but also to "leechers"
--become media creators--a moment of recognition and identity creation when they see something produced by another fan
--competing with industry

In general they found fans enjoyed:

Diversity of genres of youth participation
peer-based learning, participation, and reputation building
small scale, local networks and communities
accessing broader publics and audiences
routing around traditional gatekeepers such as parents and teachers.

The most interesting point (to me) was the extent to which these interest based communities resembled similar communities typical for adults, such as acdemic discipline-- the AoIR being an obvious example of course, except maybe that the line between industry and fan scene is blurrier for adults because many adults are in the industry. Of course there are plenty of adults in hacker groups, demoscene groups, filesharing groups etc. --this last point is mine, not hers though.

It was a nice talk with fun video examples, but I really wish she had done more than just describe the Naruto fan scene.

Mexican Restaurant in Denmark

2008-10-20T18:36:00.001-07:00

Mexican Restaurant in Denmark
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

More of our group, different night. I think there are some real advantages to maintaining a group like this during a conference. I felt much less burnt out by the conference itself, I think because our ongoing discussion of the conference helped me digest it. Also, since we didn't all attend the same panels, I could hear about other panels from my friends, and since we had this ongoing conversation and got to know each other's general views, we could more accurately judge how someone's review of a panel would map to our own reaction. At least that's what I think.

Also, we came up with fun nicknames for certain people, and rules for others.

Cozy ambience

2008-10-20T18:31:00.001-07:00

Cozy ambience
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

More of our little group. Well, not so little. Actually, though maybe we were rarely all together at once, there were, I think, eight of us hanging together much of the time. Groups of 4-6 seemed to be the optimum conversational number because with more than that, the talk split into groups that lead to fragmented conversation.

Part of a lovely dinner group

2008-10-20T17:58:00.001-07:00

Part of a lovely dinner group
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Some of the conversational participants... I am so tempted to going into a lengthy and silly post about participation that is really about the nice time we all had... maybe when I feel more human! --Currently unable to manage that thinking thing thanks to sinus headache. Alliteration abilities still seem stable.

This is not a post

2008-10-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

ok, of course it is, but not a real one.

By that I mean that I have a ton of things to post about the IR 9.0 conference and other things as well, but I'm exhausted and sick right now, so I can't muster the energy, will, brainpower, or anything else needed to compose something coherent.

Instead I will just say that I had a really good time seeing people I usually only see online. It was actually kind of strange at first because I noticed that I had gotten so accustomed to speaking with people individually through email, or FB messages, or Skype chats that being with them in a group where we all talked together felt very strange at first. But it was actually lovely, and sometimes a really amazing group chemistry would develop.

I also noticed that when most of your socializing is one on one, you can't develop much sense of what people are like in a general way, only of what they are like with you. So that's something to think about incorporating in my latest paper on Facebook.

So yes, all you people know who you are and I'll name you later when I talk in a more professional way. Now suffice to say that you all proved even nicer, smarter, and more fun in person than I had even expected. So thanks, people. :-)

--and yes, I just bet a few of you are almost feeling sick because I am writing in this so personal and gushy way on my, gasp, research blog. It's called leading the examined life, my dear ones. ;-)

Tiny Update on IR 9.0

2008-10-16T22:28:00.000-07:00

Good conference so far-- seen all interesting talks, but still so so jet-lagged. Really wish I could have come a day earlier to get more rest before it all started. Also, all European colleagues seem to have lighter workloads and more travel funding than I do...

I recorded the audio of our panel; will edit and post it next week and/or possibly coordinate it with slides for a podcast.

Papers for IR 9.0

2008-10-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Here is our panel, by the way:

Web 2.0 sites are praised for promoting sharing and collaboration; at the same time, they are criticized for violating user privacy and profiting from the free labor of users. This panel considers the complexity of relationships among users, and between users and system designers. In particular, each paper explores what motivates user behavior, whether website loyalty, desire for sociality, indoctrination in networked behavior, or the power relations among owners/designers, consumers, and prosumers.

Elfi Ettinger presents in-depth interview results from users of an e-recruiting platform and interviews with system designers of the same platform, conducted in order to determine which design would insure long-term participation of its users.

Anders Fagerjord relates a study of what Norwegian Facebook users publish about themselves in their profiles and the way they represent themselves through "prescripts" provided by popular applications and publishing tools.

Christian Ulrik Andersen analyzes the Facebook software interface, in particular the Vampires game, to explore its discursive and semantic properties and reveal the political aspects of the software.

Kim De Vries combines a rhetorical analysis with an auto-ethnographic study of academic and scholarly Facebook users to explore how we interpret the social connections made through social networking applications.

Mirko Tobias Schaefer explores user participation that in the last 10 years has developed on a global scale and now contributes to the development of software as well as changing, commenting, creating and distributing media content.

A collection of all the papers is posted on the IR 9.0 conference site, but only members can see it and some papers are slightly abridged, besides it being one giant file. You can see full, individual papers here:

Participation Inside? User activities between design and appropriation. by Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Networking Vampires -- Life in a social network seen through a game. by Christian Ulrik Andersen

Anders is missing ”is”: Posting and Prescripts on Facebook. by Anders Fagerjord

Sustainable e-Recruiting Portals: how can we motivate career-long applicant participation? by Elfi Ettinger

And I will add mine later today... Ok, I didn't, but it's finished and out for feedback, so probably by tomorrow night... damn, good feedback means revision...

Ok, here is mine though I am probably going to revise further; at least I feel this draft is not too embarrassing. Your Friend has just tackled you. Bite, lick, or tackle them back, or click here to theorize about what this all means.

Some people are stupid...

2008-10-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

Now, I am aware the Creative Commons Licenses are seen as problematic by some people in the FLOSS scene. Having said that, I think it is outrageous when someone uses a fairly generous flavor of the CC license, and still gets ripped off by someone else who refuses to listen when notified that they are violating even those minor requirements.

My friend Aaron posts about such an incident in his blog, and I refer you all to it here, in an effort to at least let people know what a JERK Jillian McDonald is being.

Goth Morris Dancers

2008-10-07T22:11:00.001-07:00

Goth Morris Dancers
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

I also went to Folsom Street Fair where there were Goth Morris Dancers. --That's why I went, of course. Isn't that what brings most people? ;-)

More on the fair later...

And note that neither the other pictures on my Flickr set for the fair, nor the fair's site itself, are work safe. NOT SAFE AT ALL. Just so you know.

Update...

2008-10-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, I still have two interviews left from summer-- Brenno de Winter and Florian Cramer. Florian's was 3 hours long, and was actually recorded! So that may take several entries at least...

But I'll put that on hold, for a bit. In a week I leave for IR 9.0, the Association for Internet Researchers 9th annual meeting, which is Copenhagen this year. I got two panels accepted but they got compressed into one because they were short on rooms and we lost a panelist, though that will be a pain, but on the other hand it should be a really fun panel. Also a good one; I know the work of all the participants from articles and other conferences and I am also happy to report that they already sent me full papers, which I'll link to soon. So none of those half-assed "done on the plane the night before" slide shows here. :-)

Also, on the last weekend of September, I went to San Francisco for Arse Elektronika where I got to meet Johannes Grenzfurthner and some others from Monochrom. I also met Aaron Muszalski, who was speaking at AE, and Richard Kadrey, author and photographer, who also spoke and did a reading. I managed a short interview with Johannes and talked to Richard at length on Friday before meeting him for an interview on Saturday. --They were all great! So reports on all of that are coming up.

Nancy Mauro-Flude Youthful Veteran of Dutch New Media

2008-10-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

Nancy Mauro-Flude
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

As mentioned earlier, I spoke with Nancy and Audrey together and this is Nancy's half of that conversation, plus info from a few, brief, subsequent chats.

I had been thinking of Nancy as part of the new generation in the Dutch new media art scene, but in fact she's been involved for 15 years though she only finished her MA at Piet Zwart in Spring 2007. Now on the one hand, maybe I am just ignorant, but also wonder why have I not heard of her before? I'm tempted to think this supports my contention that's women's participation is just not being documented. But in fact the scene is not very well documented overall. I will need to look at many examples before I can say for sure that one group of participants has been differently reported than another.

Anyway, Nancy has been on the scene for quite some time but in this conversation we mostly talked about the Genderchangers and differences between that environment and her experiences learning about tech in other venues. Nancy didn't seem to feel she had encountered as much impatience over her lack of tech experience in academic programs, but she took it for granted that she'd had to prove herself to "the boys" in other tech groups, or just generally techie guys.

I find very surprising how little attention she seems to have garnered, because she has been doing interesting, technically ambitious work for quite some time, yet doesn't seem to get what I would consider the attention she deserves. Particularly interesting to me are the projects that combine a performance, which is ephemeral, with creation of an artistic tool which may have many future uses. For example, one of her most recent projects is Bag Lady. Follow this link to a description/review by Mirko Schaefer.

I need to talk more with Nancy, and get the story of those 15 years.

Review of Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Digital Media and Gender in a Nordic Context

2008-09-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

This review will be coming out in a few months and once it does I'm not supposed to publish it elsewhere for a year! So here's a sneak preview...

Malin Sveningsson Elm & Jenny Sundén (Eds.) (2007). Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Digital Media and Gender in a Nordic Context. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. isbn: 9781847180896. UK: £34.99 US: $69.99 295 pages

Malin Sveningsson Elm and Jenny Sundén launch this collection with the claim that other research on gender and digital media has been US and UK-centric, taking the experiences of people in those countries as universal and ignoring differences in the construction of gender and in the actual living conditions of men and women in other countries. As they point out, this blinkered view of gender and technology, and of cyber-feminism in particular, parallels the development of feminism itself. It is discouraging to think that the realization of a narrow view in the general case did not prevent a similar error in subsequent cyber-feminist studies, but this book offers a good example of the work needed to clarify our understanding. Further gaps the authors seek to fill are in providing a more critical view of technology and most importantly, solid empirical research on the intersections of gender and digital media.

The ten chapters are divided into three parts: “Sexualities, Bodies and Desire,” Gender Identities, Performance, and Presentation of Self,” and “Gendered Computing and Computer Use.” The cohesion even within sections is a bit loose because the editors aimed to include research from each of the Scandinavian countries, scrupulously avoiding the essentialism they critique. One common theme though is the ways discourse around gender and technology tends to make some users and practices visible and others invisible, and the way it constructs some users and practices as normal or positive, while others are placed firmly in a deviant or negative category. Because, as argued in the introduction, both gender and technology are socially constructed, understanding these discursive practices is essential to understanding the ways men and women perceive and use technology.

In Part One, Jenny Sunden considers “intersectionality,” which

has come to stand for research that explores the ways in which power relations, constituted in and through socio-cultural categories, such as gender, sexuality, race, and class, co-construct one another in multiple ways (32)

and how it may be applied to the study of technology and cyber-culture. This chapter serves to further illustrate the need for country specific work because by definition, an intersectionalist approach would be based in this specificity.

The next two chapters by Susanna Pasonen and Janne C.H. Bromseth are even more specific. Chapter Two explores what Finnish online pornography reveals about definitions of some sexual practices as good and others as less good. Passonen draws our attention past the usual critique of heternormativity to point out that pornography has been largely ignored by Nordic internet researchers because it is part of less good sexual practices, and that further, porn is inaccurately perceived as homogenous, thus making some sexual practices invisible and inaccessible to discussion or study. Chapter Three follows a debate that occurred in an online lesbian and feminist community over who counted as a “real” lesbian, demonstrating that in online communities as in offline, “hegemonies of identity, gender,and sexuality are also reproduced (93).” In particular, Bromseth teases out the discursive practices of online gender construction, and the ways this is shaped by the Scandinavian context which is characterized by (among other things) steady government promotion of equal rights, and a less adversarial relationship between men and women than found in studies of online culture in the US.

Part Two offers three studies of gender performance in online communities, some in which the performance is explicitly stated to be opposing stereotypes, and others in which representations of gender roles are conscious, but aimed at other purposes, such as what is believed to be historically accurate. These chapters are valuable in the way they document the actual practices of online community members, and in the close readings they offer of websites. For example, Sveningsson Elm's study of Lunarstorm in Chapter Four illuminates the interaction between users, culturally bound gender stereotypes, and the hetero-normative design of the social networking site. Particularly interesting are the analyses of what information is included or excluded from personal pages, which often point toward stereotypes that are unconsciously fulfilled by the creator.

Charlotte Kroløkke studies players of the Danish online game Powerbabes in Chapter Five; in this game all characters are female, but players are both male and female. As Kroløkke finds, they find ways to co-opt the games affordances and both feminist agency and cultural production can be seen. In the last chapter of the section, Six, Åsberg and Axelsson analyze the websites of several Swedish historical reenactment groups, finding that in some cases a display of female confidence and agency expressed through the pride in intricate details of costume and assertive poses for the camera. But perhaps most striking here was the realization that in many cases women were the ones behind the digital cameras and creating the websites.

Finally in the last section, four chapters focus on gendered use of computers themselves. AnnBritt Enochsson studied how Swedish boys and girls used the internet to determine what differences and similarities were present. She found that while boys and girls spent about the same amount of time online (182), and often might engage in similar activities(188), these activities were described differently by the media, in the structure of research studies, and in the accounts of users themselves(184, 190), suggesting the differences have more to do with culturally bound expectations of boys and girls, men and women, than with the actual computer use itself.

Chapter Eight offers a history of computer adoption and appropriation in Norway, from 1980-2000. Hilde Corneliussen teases out the discourse used to promote computer use and create a consumer market, and also reveals how this discourse depended on a highly gendered rhetorical frame. She identifies discursive practices that have favored boys and men: women who were highly competent were ignored if they weren't programmers, while men who did not use computers tended to regard that as a valid choice rather than a personal failure and so presented themselves as potential users, rather than non-users (215). Again it seems that the biggest differences may be in the way we talk about computers and gender.

In Chapter Nine, a study of gender and surveillance technology in Iceland first argues that "if men predominate in engineering and the production of technologies," ... they may "focus on problems of primary interest to males (226)." If women do have different preferences in the way they use technology, then male dominance may be self-replicating. The analysis of surveillance technology also revealed that because the division of labor is highly gendered, men and women were observed in very different ways that usually led to women feeling more powerless and anxious (237-238).

The section concludes with a chapter exploring women in programming culture in Sweden, a culture which Fatima Jonsson argues is neither as misogynistic nor as male dominated as in the US and UK. In a thorough literature review, Jonsson demonstrates that hostility toward women is clearly visible in some hacking cultures, and that research on computer culture more generally tends to reinforce it's image as a boy's club, but that women have been active and that some computer subcultures are more welcoming (250). Though Swedish hacker cultures share much with its US and UK counterparts, the differences suggest it is worth further study.

Finally, the book ends with Anne Scott Sørensen's essay on feminist and Nordic approaches to digital media and cyberculture. She reiterates the opening arguments about the state of cyberfeminism, and proposes a new framework for feminist action through incorporating "third-wave feminism, the performative turn and cyberfeminism (265)." In particular Sørensen calls for including the concept of transversality, the recognition of one's own position and shift to others, or transverse in order to recognize commonalities (269). This closing essay goes on to review each of the preceding chapters to identify points in common as well as significant differences, enacting the approach Sørensen urges we all follow.

The value of this collection is far greater than the worth of each essay--those will be of primary interest to individual scholars working on related research. But the book as a whole, by allowing comparison of gender dynamics around technology in numerous contexts reveals things that have been invisible until now. The way we speak about how men and women use technology, the way research questions are framed, the way users describe their own activities, all of these discursive practices are shown to have a profound impact on our perceptions of how men and women use technology and of the technology itself. In raising these issues and revealing our blind spots, Cyberfeminism in Norther Lights makes an invaluable contribution to research on both gender and technology.

Now this is funny!

2008-09-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

A list of the top 15 criteria for interactive or new media art has been posted by the Near Future Laboratory. Based on the responses I've seen so far, this really struck a chord with many readers. I also notice that one of the main purposes of new media might be providing conversational topics. Maybe my next "project." ;-)

A younger generation of women using tech-- the Gender Changers

2008-09-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

Audrey Samson
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

OK, finally I'm on the last women I spoke with on this last trip, Audrey Samson and Nancy Mauro-Flude. This joint interview was less formal and in depth because we had trouble finding times when they could meet and eventually met altogether for just about and hour. They'll be among the first with whom I follow up. I originally met Nancy and Audrey last summer when they were graduating from the Piet Zwart Media Design MA program. I had been impressed by both of their projects and was interested over the subsequent year to see that they were both involved with the Genderchangers as well as continuing with their own work.

Audrey grew up in Canada and got her pilot's license before going to school for a BA in Art and Design. She didn't do too much with computers at first, apart from learning skills that might make her more employable. One of her ongoing concerns is how people communicate and she's interested now in how different technologies can shape and facilitate that. When I asked about what she had observed or experience around gender, she felt there were definite stereotypes. She felt she had to prove her tech savvy to men sometimes--for someone who can fly a plane, this seems especially tiresome. More than that, when she was learning to code, she felt that the men around her got impatient if she "slowed them down" by needing more or different explanation.

Now she is working with the Genderchangers and she has felt that Genderchangers is more comfortable as a place to learn than what she has experienced before. Though Audrey has had less experience and less time to reflect, I was interested to see that again time seems important, or in this case, speed. I'll be speaking further with Audrey to see how things look to her as she continues teaching. ok, next time I'll continue with Nancy.

Finishing up with Marianne

2008-08-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

So I will get back to this at last and wrap things up from this interview a little more quickly so I can get to the next ones of the women, plus I still have Brenno and Florian to add, and I then have to actually do the interviews with Jaromil, Mirko, and maybe some others, not to mention follow ups with Hajo and Alex. Yeesh.

So, toward the end of the email part of the interview, I asked what Marianne thought about the the people involved with new media, whether it was or is a community.

No I don't think in terms of community, more in terms of a scene, which I consider less coherent than a community. Very different people, hackers, journalists, organizers, artists, idiots, designers, querulants, activists, often fighting each other (as at the aftermath of the Digital City).

And the same question again--did she still find this range of people getting involved?

Actually I am not sure. It may be that I just don't attend as much of the meetings and events as I did before, but I would say today there are less journalists involved and more students. And mor artists/dsigners - but that may be my perspective, since I have spent the last weeks with all these plans of e-culture institutions. What is clear anyway is that what was once a scene is now a social-cultural sector, the e-culture sector.

I think this has been a gradual change, but the changes in the Dutch funding structure seem as though they could potentially lead to a petrification of the e-culture sector because there will be so many more bureaucratic hurdles to get through in application for support that only very established professional groups will be able to manage it.

Finally I asked her what had led her back into academia to get her PhD.

That must have been somewhere in 2000, when I was finishing my book Leven op het Net - De sociale betekenis van virtuele gemeenschappen (in Dutch, title can be translated in: Life on the Net - The social meaning of virtual communities; though here the nice ambiguity of the Dutch word 'leven' which means both 'life' and 'cosy noise' is lost.)

Every time I was really inspired in writing and was starting to have real fun (when writing about the meaning of media, of space and spatial metaphors), the publisher said: No, that's too complex for the intended audience for this book, don't do that in this book, write a PhD if you want that kind of stuff... And so I finally did. First as a nomadic savage, without an appointment, later at Utrecht University, which also had connections to my supervisor in Rotterdam, the Dutch 'cyberspace philosopher' Jos de Mul.

When we met in person I followed up on the e-culture aspect, but unfortunately the whole discussion has to remain confidential. I need to speak with someone in charge if the sector who would have the authority to say I can reprint or repeat her replies without her getting into some kind of trouble!

But we did talk about other things, one being what the dept. looks like from her perspective which was interesting in the way it is similar or different from what I've heard from Erna, William, Mirko, and Nanna. Overall they all have good things to say, but for example, the extent to which they find it very collegial or just somewhat, leading the way, or keeping up--all these things depend on the other communities and academic groups they compare UU with, and on their own personal preferences. So someone who really pushes to publish and go to conferences and is always in the middle of the global academic debate on new media may feel the dept is ok, but just keeping up, or maybe out in front, but shouldn't relax. While someone who is not so interested in that may feel it's a bit of a pressure cooker already. Very subjective.

I'll be following up with Marianne later, as with everyone, but that's it for now. Time to get to my next victim, I mean interviewee... ;-)

hopefully getting back on track

2008-08-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

OK, so I ended up spending much longer on the East Coast than I originally planned for this summer, which means I had a really poor network connection--both slow and sporadic--and I didn't have the books I needed to finish up various articles, reviews, and so on. Then I came home, and oh yeah, no day care. Sigh.

Now I might normally feel a bit bad that I am complaining about my kids being home, but anyone who has tried to write while small kids are in the area interrupting every 2 minutes (literally) will understand. Also, I had the dubious pleasure of having my mom and sisters insist to me for most of my visit in the east that working so much is hurting my children. This was especially ironic given my current research on women's use of tech and participation in the new media scene in the Netherlands. I heard from several women there that they often encountered a sort of incredulity from other people at their not wanting to be home all the tie with their kids.

Incredulity is bad enough, but I wonder how many encounter what I have? Actual resistance from the people we might have expected to help us manage work and family. I now know that I can't turn to my parents or sisters if I have another research trip or conference, because they don't think I should be going anyway. My husband travels as much as I--he's also an academic--but apparently "it's different for men." --So says my mom. It's no mystery that women are still not equally represented in so many fields or at upper levels in fields where they are present if we are still being pressured and socialized this way.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled discussion.

Quick update

2008-08-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

For a variety of reasons (some will be elaborated later; most will not) I have fallen behind on my entries, especially on writing up the interviews. Fear not. Posting will resume shortly.

Marianne van den Boomen part 2

2008-07-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

So, more from Marianne... First her account of how she encountered the internet:

The Internet came into view in 1993, when I attended the famous Hacking at the End of the Universe camp (the HEU, as it is called) in a Dutch nowhere land polder, organized by the hacker-techno-anarchists of Hacktic (later called Xs4all, still my Internet provider, and I am proud that my e-mail adresses at Hacktic and xs4all are still working. I was there with my tent and laptop to write an article for De Groene about the hacker movement. Man, what fun did I have there! Hundreds of tents on a site, lectures, workshops and demonstrations in bigger tents, 300 public computers connected to the Internet, 1000 boys and 10 women/girls camping, talking, internetting, listening, laughing.

I notice that even then, there were far fewer women, but interestingly, Marianne felt the following way:

The amazing thing was that the atmosphere was really like what I knew of women's festivals - I came right out of the women's movement, and here there were boys and men all over the place, sharing their stuff and experiences, discussing how to get human right violations reports out of Gaza over weak telephone lines, how to get rid of the fascists on their bulletin board systems without betraying their principle of freedom of speech, talking about Gopher (the text menu based navigating system, no web yet) and newsgroups and mailinglists and FTP.

From here we talked further about gender stuff and Marianne had some interesting observations. I'm not sure a man who did not know how computers worked (who was not a nerd) would have felt any different than what Marianne describes below.

Mm, my prior experiences with computers did not really impress me. At school 'computers' were something unseen, a hobby of a few boys with the wrong clothes, who went studying math and physics. Classical nerds, and at that time 'nerd' was not associated with anything sexy or fun at all. When I studied psychology I had my first hands on experience with computers: mainframes behind glass...(the typewriters connected to the computer did not even have screens). I did not have a clue what I was doing and it did not interest me at all. ... no, not my cup of tea. For that matter, just a classic women stance towards computers.

The first time I had an idea about computers was again at the research institute were I worked, actually before they bought the word processors. In the hall there was a piece of furniture I did not understand. It was a huge table, in which a kind of typewriter was built in. No one used it, it was just standing there. I asked other people what it was, no one knew, but one day the publisher visited the insititute, he saw the thing and he told me that it was a word processor, on which you could save and edit text. And that is was a shame that the institute did not know how to handle it. At that moment I got a glimpse, I had a idea what could be done with such a device, I have been involved in several feminist magazines as a volunteer, and some of these we had to typeset ourselves at the printing house. ... Though there were ways to correct a letter or a word, you usually ruined the rhythm of the words and the sentence cause the font types were proportional, there was not enough space or too much space after deleting and then inserting a new letter. I realized that this problem would be solved with a word processor.

So in that sense my computing education is 'classical feminine': I did not see anything in computers as long as it was about calculation, but when it turned out to be about writing, language and typesetting I got it. Of course, this is a tricky stereoptype male=calculation, language=female, but it worked for me. I have to admit that I used this stereotypical argument in my book 'Internet ABC voor vrouwen' (Internet ABC for women, 1995) to convince women they had to get their hands on this stuff, because otherwise the Internet would remain a toy for boys. My message was basically: don't be afraid, the Internet it is more about language and communication than it is about computing and technology. I am still a bit ashamed for that argument... But it worked.

I really question the way we use this stereotype of pragmatism versus play. Marianne and others have said they cared about tech once they saw it could help them do something they wanted to do, and they seem to think this is more how women think, while men use tech more often for playful reasons. But This distinction rests on what we define at "just for fun" or "for a serious purpose" and no one seems to question those categories.

Oh, I suddenly remember another 'computing' experience which was perhaps also crucial. Actually, I would not call it computing, but it definitely had to do with micro-electronics and chips. I was playing in a punk band, and in Amsterdam Michel Waisvisz from STEIM (institute for experimental electronic music) had designed a so called crackle box, a very primitive synthesizer which did not have a keyboard as interface, but turning keys and a metal plate on which you laid your fingers. The resistance (temperature, moist. movement) of your fingers was then translated by VOC's (I don't remember what it meant, voltage operating circuits or centers, I think - anyway, they were computer chips) into eh... sound, noise, great noise! But you never knew before what noise :-)

To me, this sounds like just the kind of playful appreciation usually attributed to men.

I wanted to play a crackle box too! ... I went to STEIM and they gave me the drawings, the schemes, and a list of stuff needed: transistors, VOC's, and all kinds of other tiny little things you had to buy in a radio hobby shop. I had a friend who was deeply into electronics and soldering, and he taught me how to do this. I have ruined so many chips and two print plates by my unexperienced soldering! Eventually we never did a gig with the crackle box, it blew itself up all the time, and that was completely my fault since I changed the original design: I did not want to work with batteries but with a transformator and ordinary net current... Which was pretty stupid, since the thing worked by direct touch contact. I have had my portion of electroshocks...

I think for me the point was, both with the word processor and the crackle box: if I have an idea of what I want to accomplish, and if I have the idea that this can be done with a technology on which I can lay my hands on, which I can appropriate, adjust, tweak, then I am into technology. I am not a hacker, of course, but I always liked the old hacker's slogan: hands-on! Because it is both literal and figural a matter of hands-on, both with the crackle box and the computer (which' most important interface is the keyboard, and not the screen.) Strange enough such a basically pragmatic drive is not usual in women. I at least had no women friends who have the same fun in appropriating technology.

So Marianne seems to have really gotten into a kind of hardware hacking, or even circuit bending, which again is usually assumed to only be interesting to men. And she even describes this as atypical among women. I talked to her further via email about this, so I'll get into that in the next post, as well as finally getting to the in-person interview! --and if you think this has been long (even though I edited out a lot) just wait a few entries until I get to my interview with Florian Cramer, which I managed to actually record. Or rather he did. ;-)

Interview with Marianne van den Boomen

2008-07-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

On the same day I interviewed Erna I went also to speak with Marianne van den Boomen, who is also working on a PhD at Utrecht University, in new media. Marianne has already been writing about technology for some time, so she has a very well-informed perspective. Before meeting in person we exchanged a series of emails, so I will start with some excerpts from that exchange.

I guess I have to make a distinction between new media and Internet, because I encountered these separately.

My first involvement with new media was in 1984. I was working as an editor of a magazine called Marge, a monthly magazine about social work, community work and social movements (feminist, gay, squatting etc). That year the research institute where we had our office had bought a word processing system (not even MS DOS, it was a dedicated Dutch word processing system, with huge 8 inch floppies, on which you could store I think 30 pages). The system was meant for just the secretaries, to type reports, but we, the three magazine editors, went with the secretaries on a course to learn it. We had the idea that with this we could publish the magazine without the expensive, bureaucratic and tiresome steps in between the editing and final printing (manual copy editing on typescripts, sending it by snail mail to the typesetter, getting strips back by snail mail, proofreading, sending it back again, doing the layout with the returned corrected strips, sending it back again, and then final proofreading - and always fights with the publisher about delivering to much typesetting work). So we started to do the typesetting by ourselves in-house - that indeed did save us money we had to pay to the publisher, and it was big fun, but of course it increased tremendously our working hours... First mistake :-)

Nevertheless, I was completely in love with those word processing machines - magical typewriters, which enabled bypassing intermediary institutions by doing-it-yourself, hands-on (I still consider PCs that way). The same year I organized a conference and a special issue of the magazine about 'The electronic social worker - Information technology and welfare'. The issue was about what would happen when computers would enter the field of social and community work. The issue and the conference addressed computer democracy, community building, client-registration systems, privacy issues, Orwell's 1984, new labour relations, changes in quality of labour, social and cultural impact etc.

To write the general overview article I visited several clubs and institutions, among these an open day of the Utrecht School of Arts, which showed the latest stuff in the field of computer aided design and games. It was impressive, color screens, moving images (I had never seen that before), proud technophilic teachers giving demonstrations. But the most impressive moment was when three boys sneaked in (I guess 14-year old, clearly not the intended student target group, they had the wrong age, the wrong coats and the wrong Utrecht accent). They asked if they could show their stuff, because they had 'some problems with sequencing' they could not figure out. The teachers allowed them to put their cassettes in a computer, and at once all the other CAD-stuff in the room looked bleak and dull: this was the real stuff, very professional funny animations and games, including music. Homebrew! The embarrassed teachers immediately pulled the plug. The boys left, and I now regret forever that I did not talk to them. But that was the moment I realized: there must be a whole subculture out there, doing things with computers which will amaze the world...

Later at my work MS-DOS computers with WordPerfect and 5 1/4 inch floppies replaced the Océ proprietary system, and we started to use telephone modems to send the magazine completely laid out to the publisher. I started working as a copy editor at a weekly magazine, the Groene Amsterdammer, and because I had a little bit more knowledge about computer systems I also became the system manager (teaching the editorial team Windows and e-mail!), and now and then I wrote articles about computer culture, and later about the Internet.

Marianne really took time to reflect on what she thought when she first encountered computers, and I note that for her as well there is an idea that they can confer some kind of freedom; freedom from layers of control, freedom from the constraints of some other medium. Also, like Sher and Erna, Marianne had the experience of being the most knowledgeable in a community or workplace, and so sort of fell into the role of tech expert, and in her case actually gaining a title of system manager. I have a tone of material for this interview, so tomorrow I'll post another entry but try to make it a little more of a digest.

Erna Kotkamp part 2

2008-07-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

So I talked to Erna quite a bit about gender stuff, since she actually has worked in that area for some time and she has reflected pretty thoroughly on her own experiences and observations. For one thing, she finds that she does have to prove her technological expertise more often than male teachers, and when she observes the teachers she trains she sees the same thing. In a class on computer use, women teachers are still more likely to be asked "test" questions than men, which suggests that though men and women may use computers for daily tasks in the same ways, and may be aware that they use them in the same ways, when people talk or think about being "experienced with computers," they tend to use a narrow definition that depends on actual programming or other creation, rather than just use, and that men are still perceived as being more competent.

Also, Erna made a really good point in saying that she defined her own level of experience differently in different settings. Among her colleagues in Gender Studies, who are not so focused on tech, Erna describes herself as very experienced, but among people who program a lot, she describes herself as less so. So I think we need to look more closely at what standard people are using when asked to either describe their own practice or to evaluate others.

She also made an interesting comment about relationships and careers; as I said in part 1 of the interview, she mentioned herself still feeling like she had to have serious reasons to use tech, not just enjoying the playful aspect and that this was part of an old, embedded gender stereotype. She also later said that it was easier for lesbians to escape that dynamic because between two women (and I assume his would hold for gay men) choosing to work or not did not instantly force you into some stance in relation to traditional roles. Oddly, in a completely different context, a gay friend of mine here in the US recently said the same. So that may be a real issue, but hard to get at since if self-reporting about tech use is unreliable, I would guess that self-reporting about partner's attitudes or relationship issues connected to work with tech might be even less so! And I'd really prefer to avoid using tiny spy-cams.

Erna in particular found that ICTs were important to her because she doesn't like F2F communication so much. She claimed that she simply would not talk to people or stay as connected to them without email, chat applications, and Skype. This went really counter to the assumption most people seemed to make that connecting, speaking, or performing live was always better.

Finally, continuing the theme of socializing, she felt that while New Media as a field was more cooperative than some, it was not very cohesive, compared to E-Learning, for example. What I start to notice is that the artists I speak with find it quite cooperative while the academics do not, which suggests again another case where people are using different baseline criteria. Really a great interview in the way it helps me to start seeing larger patterns and figuring out which questions I need to ask next.

Interview with Erna Kotkamp

2008-07-15T09:01:00.001-07:00

Erna Kotkamp 2008
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

My next interview was with Erna Kotkamp, who is at U. Utrecht where she has been doing work on gender studies, and more lately on technology. Erna described her use of technology in a way that, so far, more closely resembles the "classic geek mode" than any of the other people with whom I spoke. She said she was most comfortable with a screw-driver in hand, tinkering with a computer's guts. At the same time, even she was not completely comfortable saying she just found it fun, admitting any frivolous reasons for her use of tech. And she noted herself that it was interesting to find such an old gender old still affecting her so much.

Though Erna is not focusing explicitly on gender in her current research, which is on open-source software and e-learning, it was more explicitly part of this interview than in many, maybe because she notices that aspect in her work as a matter of course. She mentioned that 10 years ago, it was still common for people in humanities disciplines to feel comfortable ignoring tech or even announcing their ignorance of computers. At that time she was the "tech-y one" in Women's Studies at U. Utrecht and was often called on to help others do things with computers, even to make PowerPoint slides. Now people are not so comfortable admitting techno-illiteracy, but Erna still feels some she knows need to be more savvy, and more importantly to recognize that knowing how to use tech and how to think critically about it are both essential basic skills now.

This conversation seemed to be be much more organic (that is to say non-linear and recursive) so this write-up will also be that way and also since I thought I was recording it and the device turned out to not work, I will probably have to come back and edit details later. :P

Though Erna is the most inclined toward hardware hacking and of the women I've spoken with so far, one of the most proficient at coding, she seemed to get started sort of incidentally. Her family always was much more focused on arts and humanities kind of stuff, so neither she nor her brother were encouraged to do much with math, science, or tech. So though Erna feels her strengths lie in these later areas, she never really had much chance to develop them (or maybe even recognize them?) until by chance she took computer classes during her BA studies.

Anyway, Erna had quite a few insights into her own use of technology, the open-source scene, and the impact of gender...but that will be in the next post because in fact i have to go do family stuff myself right now!

Renee Turner part 2

2008-07-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, slowly trying to catch up on these interviews... So, Renee is now working on an MA in fiction, and interestingly, she seems to share some of the same interests as Sher in thinking about writing or text as part of artistic practice. Right now she's finishing her MA project which involves both fiction and non-fiction intertwined and she's thinking about going on to a PhD in which she can explore narratives in electronic literary forms. Work she's already done in De Geuzen reflect some of these interests, like the virtual seance with Guy Debord or some aspects of the Female Icons series.

Along with discussing these aesthetic and theoretical aspects, we talked a lot about how she used technology and what really affects women's use. A couple of really interesting things emerged from this part of the interview. Because Renee has been a tutor at Piet Zwart this year, we were talking about that experience, in particular about women learning to program. Anyone who knows Florian Cramer (the director of the Media design MA program at Piet Zwart) knows of his preference for the command-line and has probably heard his reasoning on why graphical user interfaces are limiting to users. Since I know Renee is not a really avid coder, I asked her what her view on this was and how the students reacted.

(Since coding is almost always part of gender stereotypes around tech, this is a useful way to create an opportunity for gender to arise in the discussion without forcing it into the story artificially.)

Anyway, a couple of things came up. First, all of the students seemed to manage the coding without too much trouble (and the class is about 50/50 women and men). Second, at the same time, the students most likely to get into "tech as toy" thinking were men, but in such a small group, that doesn't really show anything. Third, and most interesting, she thought the real reason women appeared to have a harder time learning to write code or use the command line has to do with the way their time is structured, especially if they are taking care of kids or other family.

Renee felt, and I can certainly confirm this from my own experience, that learning a programming language or to use the command line takes a kind of sustained attention over time that often women don't have if they have families. She realized this after reading Martha Rosler's work on how women read magazines (among other topics). Apparently women read magazines like Vogue because they can put them down and pick them up easily, and being interrupted is not too much of a problem. So her idea is that graphical user interfaces enable a similar ability to put down and pick up computer work. Her own experience has been that if she is trying to (or succeeds at) learning how to code something or do something via the command line, if she then has an interruption of several days (or of course longer) she loses her place and has to start over figuring out how she did it. I have found this as well, and when I later spoke with Erna Kotkamp and Audrey Sampson, they each independently mentioned similar experiences

I don't think this indicates a difference between how men and women think, rather, anyone would probably have trouble if they were frequently interrupted and I think women are more prone to being interrupted or perhaps allowing themselves to be. Certainly anyone with children experiences this problem, and women are still more likely to be primary caregivers, especially when kids are very young (a time when one is lucky if one can squeeze out an hour of uninterrupted time from caretaking). But further, I suspect that women are less likely to insist on uninterrupted time because it may seem self-centered. --The persistence of this particular aspect of gendered socialization is still surprisingly strong and it showed up in most women's reluctance to feel using tech for fun was even relevant to our discussion.

So when I ask how or why they use tech, most women only talk about reasons they feel are serious, worthwhile, important, etc. Though some may actually play with it in the same way men do, or use tech in the same way for the same reasons, they seem to perceive or at least describe their use very differently. This raises interesting challenges in how to best interpret my interviews if I want to make any general comment about women and tech/new media in the Netherlands.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some other important ideas--but maybe the ones that stick are most important. Yeah, that's it... ;-) Well, I'll check with Renee, but that's it for now.

Renee Turner 2008

2008-07-10T06:18:00.001-07:00

Renee Turner 2008
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

My next interview was with Renee Turner, a member of De Geuzen, for whom I gave a talk last January. De Geuzen is a group of 3 women conducting what they term "multi-visual" research, and most of it involves computers and digital media in some way.

Renee describes herself as a perpetual student and this is pretty clear looking at her educational history: BA University of Dallas, [1984-1989]; MFA University of Arizona, [1990-1992] and MAs from Rijksakademie, Department of Photographic Media, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [1993-1994], and the Jan van Eyck , Laureate: Theory, [1995-1996]. Now she's finishing an MFA in writing from a UK school and is considering going on for PhD in New Media or something like that. But this seems in a certain way another point in common among the people I've interviewed, especially the women--they are always pushing into new areas, learning new things. That's not to say this is reserved for women, or new media scholars/artists, but more people have explicitly mentioned that as a motive. I suppose maybe it's no surprise that people studying new media (and as a foreshadowing, I have trouble even writing that phrase now that I've officially interviewed Florian) are more interested in continually having to learn something new.

Anyway, Renee started really with photography, but soon got in to digital images. She said that for her, new media seemed to allow more freedom from disciplinary constraints, but also that it allows her to much more easily combine and remix media (the advantage of digitality, of course).

She summed up her overall view as this: "I want to be rigorous, but I'm not into being disciplined at all."

more on Renee's work soon...

Sher Doruff part 2

2008-07-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

Ok, so...the creative industries. I must say that so far I have not heard one good thing about the plan to change to this model, and Sher was no exception. She feels the added bureaucracy will prevent any really interesting and original project from ever getting funded. While maybe this will push some artists into doing much more interesting work because they have no funding,but do have some freedom, in the meantime the money is going to some kind of domesticated, tamed crap.

The issue of tech becoming tame is interesting. Sher felt really strongly about that; how the ease with which we can now do things has eliminated the wonder people used to feel, and also made the practice of connecting online really routine, so that people don't think about new possibilities, they just use it for pragmatic things. (Practice is really important for Sher, as I'll get to later). To illustrate, I can compare something like google docs which numerous people edit a doc, even simultaneously, or that site (I forget the name of course) that let's people kind of jam together and lay down musical tracks, to the tool Sher worked on for her PhD project at De Waag KeyWorx. The developers of this platform created a

Multi-User Cross Media Synthesizer - a distributed application that allows multiple players to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds and text within a shared realtime environment. As an instrument it allows communities of players to dynamically control and modify all aspects of digitized media in a collaborative performance.

and Sher described it as really exciting because you gave up control, couldn't always tell what was going to happen or what would happen because keyworx would let other people change not just the media files that were being produced, but the actual functioning of the scripts that transformed the files, so it was a kind of live coding as well. (I think) Anyway, this tool really only makes sense for people who know some scripting or programming languages, so the availability of other tools that do much less but are much easier may stop artists (or whomever) from going as far as they could to learn a more flexible but also more difficult practice.

We also talked a bit about specific institutions and while I feel like maybe it's gossipy, on the other hand, I think it's informative so... I had suspected last summer that De Waag had really moved away from an art focus to a much more creative industry kind of focus, yet they were still applying for art funding, and also in site of having some massive budget already (not sure where their other money comes from). --This is what I have gleaned from numerous conversations, but of course what defines an "art focus" is debatable. V2_ on the other hand has become really hermetic and narrowly focused, (again, this is what I thought last summer when Alex told me he wasn't really interested in outreach at all, and it seems to have been an issue for them this year. It's also problematic (I think) in terms of how they participate in the scene because in the end they are just talking to themselves and not really participating in the development of new media in a way that affects or takes into account what anyone else is doing, or the socio-economic events going on around them.

Steim, I learned, has been around for ages and continues to do interesting things (don't know as much about them) but they've never had enough money and don't seem as well publicised (but maybe that's because everyone already knows them?), which may also be why they have trouble. In fact, neither V2_ nor Steim seem to have communicated very clearly what they are contributing to the new media scene. --This is my sense because when I try to ask people about what they aim to do, I haven't yet met anyone who says clearly "oh yes, they aim for this."

--In fact since originally writing this I've emailed with Sher a bit more and she said that Steim is not actually interested in the new media scene, but rather is focused on instruments, interfaces and sound. Of course a group probably shouldn't worry about explaining to people everything they are not concerned with, but on the other hand, many other people have said I should talk to some members of Steim, and seem to consider them part of the new media scene, so there really does seem to be some confusion. The conflicting perceptions of both the scene of what's good for the scene or not are turning out to be really interesting. I think that I may end up with something like what one sees through a "dragonfly eye" rather than a single picture.

I mentioned Worm and Sher didn't know them very well, but was interested in the kinds of things they've done, especially the collaborations with Piet Zwart--it's funny but I find myself feeling the impulse to connect people I think would offer something good to each other, which seems to be a basic feature of this scene. I've seen Florian do it a lot, William Uricchio, Sher herself offered to help me contact people...I guess it really is very cooperative.

Finally, Sher spoke about a project she is working on right now with support from Brian Massumi and Erin Manning; it's an artist's residence, but her project is textual. She is trying to develop writing as an artistic practice and has evolved an approach that includes pasting texts and images onto an 8 meter scroll of paper everyday, taking pictures of that and reintegrating them on the scroll, cutting up the text, moving it around, and creating a kind of collage that represents the development of her ideas over time. Of course this immediately rang a bell because this process is very similar to things we have students do sometimes in the writing classes, but Sher is doing it in a much more sustained way, and also thinking more rigorously about it as a practice (or process, to use the comp. theory term). I'll be interested to see where it takes her.

So yeah, a really dense interview, and probably there are things I'm forgetting right now. More than any of the other people, Sher had a clear sense of herself as a practitioner, always looking for a new challenge, always exploring and testing. Like many of the people, especially the women, she seemed to really enjoy taking a moment (or several hours) to speak about these things. I'm wondering if it's because no one has really been interested before (which seems unlikely with Sher) or if being officially asked to reflect is somehow interesting... well, maybe that will become clearer as I go on.

Interview with Sher Doruff -- a different view of new media fragmentation

2008-07-07T23:20:00.000-07:00

Or discontinuities, or whatever term captures the idea that a field that previously seemed really fluid and border-less no longer is so. Coalescence? Coagulation? Choosing the right metaphor seems much more important these days.

I spoke to Sher Doruff a few days ago and really wish I'd by then acquired a recorder--still working on that in fact--because it was a brilliant interview. She has been working on new media for a long time, much longer than most of the others with whom I am speaking. In fact since the mid 70s, before any one was even talking about new media the way we do now, Sher was working with electronic music. She was part of a band in this genre before moving more into computer work and even more experimental audio stuff --we didn't go too far into this part of her story though. I really started with the points at which she moved into new media, and at which she came to the Netherlands. It seems she feels she started with new media pretty early, as I said, and mainly because of the freedom she believed it would offer both because the technologies were so new, no one had any pre-conceived idea of technical limitations, they just tried anything and everything. Further, in those early days, there were no stereotypes about computers being only for men, or that men were more inclined or more skilled at them--no one really felt very skilled.

This was sort of a revelation to me because the other women I've spoken with are younger--between 25-45--so they entered the larger story much later. Most of the other women mention the lack of perceived limits when it comes to what the tech can do, or at least the feeling that it offered more freedom to them in some way, but most of them did not have such an experience of thinking they would be able to completely shed gender stereotypes related to careers or activities. --I can see this will be a point I need to look at in all the ineterviews since so many people have mentioned it.

Anyway, Sher had a pretty good career developing in New York but then her apartment burnt down and she decided to go to France, ended up doing a residency there, and they went up to Amsterdam where she started doing some stuff for Steim, and just stayed there for awhile. Most recently she was at De Waag, where I spoke to her last year, but now she is teaching at the Theater School (part of the Hogeschool in Amsterdam). She has had other more immediate reasons for leaving one path for another whenever she made a change, but she also seems to reach a point in any medium where she feels she has figured out what she wanted to know and then turns to something else. Sometimes she later goes back, and of course, she doesn't abandon any of them really, but rather shifts the focus of her inquiry (from what I can tell).

Sher had a mixed view of the New Media scene in general. On the one hand, she feels that new media artists, especially people working online, are paralyzed precisely because the tools are now so easy to use. I know what she means; it's similar to what happens with course management systems at the university. Those CMSs make it pretty easy to put stuff online for a class, but maybe not in exactly in the way you want to try. But it's so much easier than doing it all from scratch, and seeing how it works in the CMS can make thinking of alternatives even harder.

But my own experience has been that while the majority of people don't go beyond the limits built into most plug 'n play type software, usually there are some number who hit the limits, get frustrated, and switch to learning how to really do it themselves. Maybe artists who can do that ought to rethink their whole practice (or even career choice) anyway. So that's one of the more negative things she said. But she thinks there will eventually be a crisis, and then a renewal, or a new approach.

On the other hand, she was not so worried about the coagulation of the new media field. She feels that the separation into different subfields will create difference, which she generally regards as a good thing, and that these different groups will come up with different ideas, questions, and answers, and different ways of thinking about the shared ideas, questions, and answers. --And so these groups when they do interact, would have much more fruitful exchanges. I asked Sher if she thought the groups actually would interact and share, because so far I find that they don't seem to communicate so much lately, and William felt this as well. But Sher thinks that they still cooperate far more than most other disciplines. I wonder though if it's really that the new media organizations Sher works with are cooperative, but that other types, like universities, are not so much. I mean, maybe it's over-generalized. Another point to compare across interviews.

We also talked about the creative industries, some of the specific Dutch institutions, and her current work with Brian Massumi, but I'll put that in the next post.

M/E/M/E 2.0 by Danja Vassiliev

2008-07-06T05:32:00.001-07:00

Node Mode by Danja Vassiliev
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Another great project was Node Mode which consisted of a computer that created a network, a mechanical device made of 28 cd drives that would open and close via a web interface, and a camera mounted on the device that sent pictures of the open cd tray back to the browser. In each tray was a disc made of circuit board material and etched with various "buttons" typical of those we click every day on webpages. The pictures of these discs became image maps in the browser windows.

Both this project and Gordo's are interesting in that they are concrete objects that a collector or museum could display and at the same time can be controlled by or have an impact on websites which anyone might access. This seems a much more interesting kind of interactivity.

Playsureveillance

2008-07-06T05:13:00.001-07:00

Playsureveillance
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

One of the coolest of the projects I saw at the Piet Zwart graduation show was Playsureveillance by Gordan Savicic. There are several simple games that as you play, collect data about the user and post it to a Facebook page, including sexual orientation and dating interests. A great comment on privacy issues, among other things.

William Uricchio part 2

2008-07-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

So one of the biggest issues in many of my interviews has been funding and William talked about this as well. Right now there is a lot of money available for digitizing historical archives and so every school is looking through their library to see what might be worth proposing as a project. The money comes from both education and art funding, so this also represents quite a shift in emphasis from supporting art creation to supporting art history. Not to say that all the money is shifting, but a million or two million euros is still quite a big chunk, and some of the smaller organizations don't get much money, or have much of a budget at all, so even small cuts are big problems for them.

Also, there is a change to the funding system underway because of a decision to use a "creative industries" model. Since the 1980s arts funding has worked as follows: "a long-term grant is awarded with the proviso that once every four years all the institutions receiving these subsidies (more than 800 of them) will be inspected – all at the same time (Smithuijsen 2005)."

I know this system is still in place now because all the organizations I've been in touch with in the last year just recently got recommendations about whether or not their funding should continue and on the same levels. It turns out that many lost funding, in part because of the above archiving project, but also because a shift toward a "creative industries" model is underway. This refers both to Richard Florida's book about the Creative Class and also to a model of cultural policy developed in the UK over the last 10 years.

I encounter very mixed responses to this change; most of the artists and new media institutions seem unhappy and William also was intensely skeptical that this would be a positive change. I still haven't heard a systematic critique, but two problems seems to be the expected increase in bureaucracy and loss of control over arts/cultural policy. Clearly though I need to get more detail on what the new system will be and why people don't like it.

William and I also talked quite a bit about how new media is developing and I was flattered that he wanted to know who I thought were important voices and which I thought were important centers, both institutional and national. I mentioned Worm and Piet Zwart MDMA because I think they continue to do really innovative things, and I think Vienna is or will be important. In the US I find it much harder to estimate this because everything is so spread out and incoherent. I don't know of any cities with really strong new media scenes. Boston has some, NYC has some, San Francisco, maybe Austin. But none of these is organized the way they are in Europe because there is just so much less public funding for any art.

Finally we talked about whether or not the new media scene had any cultural specificity, and whether fan culture, to which we were drawing some parallels, has any. While he could see the point I was making about how national context my change how people can participate in new media, William feels (in spite of the fragmentation) that it is a global discourse. I think this is true to a degree, but that it can't be assumed. If one is studying the field, one has to check the extent to which discourse is local, national or global. For example, I can say that William certainly participates in a global discourse, because he travels constantly, publishes internationally, and works with other scholars who do the same. But this is hardly true of everyone I've interviewed. Most of them cannot travel so much, they may read international journals, but maybe don't publish on that level so much, and most of their work may take place at one school or in one city. Just being on the nettime mailing list or even a bunch of people connecting on Facebook doesn't make it a global field, at least not so far. I think that in fact the way scholars and artists participate in the new media field is quite variable--maybe I have to steal Mirko's concept of heterogenous participation and Kate Hayles' idea about emerging complexity to discuss this. Or maybe I just need to read Eric von Hippel on democratizing innovation. And he has this paper on actor network theory and user innovations...

One of the most challenging things lately in these interviews is that I begin to hear contradictory things and yet haven't spoken to enough people to judge very well what is a more accurate picture. Or maybe in fact there is no one accurate picture.

Interview with William Uricchio

2008-07-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

So as in the last trips, I am doing interviews. The first was with William Uricchio, (and here's his page at Utrecht) from Utrecht University, and also MIT. In fact I knew William in the context of superhero comics long before I knew his new media work, but the latter turns out to be the thing bringing us together. We talked for quite a while; a recurring idea was the extent to which different cstituencies of the new media scene are fragmented, not communicating or working together. For example, academics ad hackers are not so much in touch anymore, or journalists and artists, unless they are journalists specifically covering art. This can be problematic in terms of knowledge production because people in these different field repeat the same research and come up with the same ideas over and over. Not that that's bad in itself, but just a waste of time and also leading to quite boring repetition in scholarly papers. --And this last seems harder to avoid than I would have thought, but lately I have found as well that so much work is produced that it's hard to keep track publications across disciplines on any one topic, especially since different terms are used in each discipline.

Anyway, back to William. He has been a professor at Utrecht University in the Media Studies group --which seems to have two or more different sets of pages-- and also teaches at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies department, which is where we first met. We talked about how he got into this field, and it was as a media historian. He takes a really long view of media history and had some thought-provoking ideas about when the history of new media starts, especially if you actually mean the history of virtuality, or digitization, etc. For awhile he was chair of the department at UU, but now that he essentially has one and a half jobs (seems almost full-time at both though) he doesn't have to deal with that. --But now he's co-director of CMS! He still is thinking about the future of the department and mentioned several challenges facing schools in the Netherlands right now. One is that the Hogeschool system (they are sort of professional schools) and the University system are being unified so that Universities and Hogeschools in every city are being pushed together. this creates all kinds of difficulties because the systems are very different and I would guess that in any case, being told to work together doesn't please anyone. I was surprised to learn that while Hogeschools can restrict their admissions and class sizes, Universities cannot.

Further, and I'm not sure if this is related to the above plan, media studies programs all over the country are jockeying for position--so for example, UU is starting to focus on games and locative media, while the media studies program at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is trying to combine with informatics--but not clear yet whether that will suceed. This reminds me strangely of what happens in California; each branch of the UC and CSU system has to be sure they don't replicate programs at another branch and we are all supposed to be finding ways of being distinct. It that certain things at UU make it harder for them to distinguish themselves, one is that their students aren't held to high enough standards--I've heard this a from a few people now--and also, in the Dutch system, it seems that people can be tenured more quickly in the US and that once they are, their departments have no leverage if they don't keep up their work. But it's hard to tell exactly how things work because there are so many different grades of faculty, and many universities are changing their systems. I get the sense though that William is frustrated with the department at the moment.

This might also be connected with what I guess have so far been unsuccessful effort to for some kind of national-level organization of new media scholars in the Netherlands. It seems everyne agrees there should be one, but no one agrees on how it should be organized and discussion devolves into everyone just trying to claim turf. Talking about this problem, which I have also heard about from some others as well, lead of course to discussing funding. I'll save that for the next post though.

Bath Toy for Worm

2008-07-02T06:40:00.001-07:00

Bath Toy for Worm
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Interrupting my conference coverage to try catching up some of the other stuff I've been doing. This piece of art by Florentijn Hofman is out in front of Worm (about which I've written quite a lot already). I love the duck, but also I was interested to hear from Hajo that because Worm had some connection to the artist, they were able to have the piece anchored there for a few weeks at a much lower cost than was usually charged.

There are so many ways that social networks impact these scenes!

Emerging Themes

2008-07-02T05:23:00.000-07:00

So here I am, we are in the last paper session before the wrap-up and I'm still trying to come up with some thoughts about emerging themes. Hampered a bit by the fact that rather than reading the proceedings yesterday after dinner, instead I stayed late at the dinner talking to David Krebs and enjoying the warm evening. But here are some things I notice keep coming up:

collective memory
failure of offline/online and real/virtual distinctions
persistent lack of quanititative data
most differences among users seem to have disappeared, except for age, and among the FLOSS community, still huge gender differences.

Data collection is especially tough because companies don't give away the data, and user surveys have all kinds of limitations. It seems the best way for a number of platforms is to design an application users would like to add for somereason that also collects data on them for the researcher.

Distinctions --all agree we need finer distinctions, but little agreement on what they should be, especially when ontological issues start coming in, or questions of whether or how online actions are carried into offline life. (to reiterate that stupid distinction!)

Collective memory is quite interesting because it's so overtly influenced by the platform being used and in what way things are archived or not. So for example, messages can be reviewed later, but battled can't (unless they were deliberately filmed.)

Disappearing distinctions --I was quite encouraged to hear from several speakers that use of technology seems more equal now except for age, and even around age, the issue is not so much using tech or not, but the manner of use. However, the gender issue in FLOSS communities is troubling because even though those communities are small, they represent an important measure of participation in creation. If women continue absent, then the tech developments will remain slanted toward what interests and works well for men, and the cycle continues.

Pausing now to hear a talk about blogging and identity.

Live from IFIP WG 9.5

2008-07-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Can't write too much at the moment because I will be speaking myself in 27 minutes. :-)

Some quite interesting talks here, but I am surprised (pleasantly) how broadly representative the panelists are. The conference is small--only one track of three speakers per panel for a total of 8 speakers including me! --Not counting discussants and the conference organizer, but still quite small. It leads to very interesting discussions between talks and I expect dinner will be quite nice that way as well. At least I hope so!

Some themes are emerging, but I'll wait until I have a chance to digest the ideas a bit more and read the proceedings before I comment on that. I did not get my revisions done in time to be included, but now both the slides and paper or online at Scribd. I was especially interested in David Kreps' talk and hopefully will find his stuff in the reader.

One trend though, to whet your appetites--agreement that the virtual/real or online/offline dichotomies are unsatisfactory ways to undersatnd any of this stuff. Finally!

Back in the Netherlands

2008-06-26T01:27:00.000-07:00

So now I am again visiting the Netherlands for the research and talks I mentioned earlier. I have been at the University of Twente visiting the Information Systems and Change Management (IS & CM) department, which is where I gave my talk, yesterday. It is quite interesting because when Elfi invited me I at first wasn't sure how my research on Facebook would be relevant to the work she and her colleagues are doing, but actually, there is a surprising amount of overlap in the questions we are investigating. So the talk went well and also helped me to further refine my thinking about how participation in Facebook is affecting professional, in this case specifically scholarly communities.

A couple of points on that:

Communication on Facebook leads to a greater feeling of co-presence (basically the feeling of being with someone) and it assuges the discomfort of asence (the feeling that we exist only in the process of communication, so we are always flickering in and out of existance). So, when academics get to know each other via Facebook, they may connect more quickly and more solidly--though this of course depends on how they use it, which leads to the next point.
This increased connection seems linked to a more playful use of Facebook in which people allow the border between the personal/casual and the professional/formal to blur. Of course that makes sense; if we think someone is being more casual and personal, we feel we are seeing a more authentic self, that we know them better. In fact, slightly inappropriate behavior adds to this because we assume it is less calculated. I mean, who would behave in a way that was professionally inappropriate on purpose? (Of course this could be equally calculated, but I think most people don't imagine others treat every online action as if it were a move in a game of chess).
But even if someone is not deliberately offering an image that is somehow distorted, distortion is inevitable because no one can put every detail that might be observed by somone physically proximal into a facebook page (or into a blog, or homepage, or what have you). So people always must choose what to include.
Possibly Facebook feel more authentic though (and maybe it actually is) because when someone is addressing several different audiences--close friends, family, colleagues, other communities to which she belongs, she cannot address all of them at once. So some actions or posts or status updates are aimed more at one group or another, but everyone may see them. So it may be that Facebook does offer a more rounded or more integrated picture. But as privacy controls improve and as more people use them to filter the content the present to each group, this complete picture maybe be fragmented--hard to predict.

So those are some of the ideas I am thinking about, and now the question is how to gather data on them, since most facebook profiles are closed to non-friends, but I can hardly make any claims based only on what I see my own friends doing.

So, back to the visit; I had two very nice dinners, first at De Kater, where I had some amazing salmon stuffed with shrimp, and the next night at Sam Sam, where I had duck breast that was quite good too. While at Sam Sam I also tried a drink that combined beer and Sprite, and that was a little weird, but ok.

Silly to mention the food in the middle, but it was very good.... Anyway, I met a lot of nice people in the IS & CM department who are all working on interesting stuff. I won't put all the individual links in with the names; they can be found through the department page linked above. But I enjoyed speaking at length with Bjorn Kijl, Michel Ehrenhard, Romana Aziz, Roland Muller, and of course Elfi. Also I had a very interesting talk with the head of the department, Jos van Hillegersberg, and I spoke a lot with Celeste Wilderom who was also hosting me at her house. Everyone has statements about their research on their homepages, though I'm not sure it's all up to date, but anyway, some of them are looking at social networks in ways that relate to my work with Facebook, and some lokk at organizational change and communication, among other things. That actually has some connections to my other project on the institutionalization of new media in the Netherlands. I am looking at new media groups rather than business, but many of the issues are similar, particularly because now ICTs have such a strong effect on everything.

Staying with Celeste was a treat--she has a very nice house! But also, it was my first time to stay in in a family house and so I went with her to drop off her daughters at school and got to see a bit of Dutch family life. This post has grown quite long now, so I will end it here. I about an hour I go to the train station to make my journey back to Rotterdam. Hopefully when I return I can get my stupid chipcard sorted out (I managed to foul it up again) and I will have a chance to upload some pictures. --So the posts here will get a bit out of sequence as I back up to add those.

New Media with Dutch Characteristics. Or Female. Or?

2008-06-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm reading a book for which I will be writing a review any day now... Anyway, it's called Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights, anthology that looks at how women use computer technology and ICTs in Scandinavian countries. The editors, Jenny Sunden (no website I could find?!) and Malin Sveningsson Elm argue that most books on ICTs, new media, etc, have been American/Anglo-centric in presenting the experiences and practices of users in the US and UK as universal, rather than framing those experiences and practices in a national context.

I absolutely agree with this, and in fact this belief is a reason for my own decision to focus on just one country for my own projects. And, now that this book has been published, I can now just refer to the very convincing argument they make about the need for research that considers national context, rather than assuming what is true in one Western country will be true in others. Thank you Drs. Sunden and Sveningsson Elm for so effectively constructing a step in the rhetorical ladder! :-)

Talk at University of Twente

2008-05-29T17:52:00.001-07:00

Now it's official; I will give a talk at University of Twente on June 25th. Here's the blurb:

A preliminary report on how scholars perceive their social network/audience on Facebook, and what effect the risk of and real border-crossing or transgressive behavior has for them personally and professionally with their colleagues. --So in other words shifting the focus the what students are doing or how they perceive us to what we scholars are doing and how we perceive each other. I make a rhetorical analysis of gestures that are exchanged between users, and in particular discuss how these gestures may help create a feeling of presence.

My own experience suggests that while perhaps there is some risk to the behavior encouraged by Facebook, there is also considerable personal and professional benefit to engaging in the prescribed playful actions of Facebook applications. They seem to encourage connections that are emotionally more intimate and stronger, which offers both personal and professional advantages. People with whom we have multi-valent relationships online may also become people with whom we might collaborate on research, or organize conference panels, or at least go to for advice when visiting their home countries/cities.

Thus I ultimately argue that along with the playful air pervading Facebook, there can also be a feeling of risk, and that users sharing experiences that give rise to this tension actually strengthen their social and professional bonds. In academic circles there aren't many venues where play and risk are valued or even possible, which may explain why Facebook has been so attractive to many of us who by rights (as trained critical thinkers) ought to be the most resistant to its charms.

So basically people get a sneak preview of the talk I will give the following week in Germany at IFIP WG 9.5 and preliminary thoughts on the paper I'm preparing for IR 9.0

"The Highly Coveted Desktop Structural Achievement Award 2007-08"

2008-05-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Here is the text of the speech with which I was honored for my creation of truly marvelous chaos:

I confess to aspiring for this award for several years and those of you who know me and have witnessed the temple of bureaucratic agglutination that I’ve created in L195D can bear out this aspiration. When Jim Payne popped in on me last week to discuss these awards, he mentioned the superior condition of my office, and I thought my position was secure.

But then we wandered around campus a bit, and we discovered a singular effort that puts to shame my own meager and sophomoric efforts.

Several distinguishing features clearly separate this office from the rest of the pack. The empty wrappers of food and water bottles. The stacks and scattered detritus of scholarly work and the assessment of student performance. The bag of drawings clearly encrusted with what appears to be mud.

This office represents the highest example of what we can achieve given the proper inspiration, and desire, and temperament, and equipment. What makes it so is not merely all of these details, but its comprehensive vision, its theory and practice of chaos so profound, so deeply and thoroughly considered, so assiduously studied and carefully elaborated in all its possibilities.

You may see this stunning effort in L195N. I am humbled, and I bow to its greater glory.

Please join me then in congratulating my colleague in English, and this year’s winner of the distinguished Desktop Structural Achievement Award, Dr. Kim De Vries.

I must thank Dr. Scott Davis for so generously allowing me to publish his speech. He did make a good effort, but I think was unwilling to sacrifice his own or his students' ability to walk into his office! ;-)

Long Distance

2008-05-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

I can remember back in 1999 or so I was first making friends online, and at the time people around me expressed surprise that I would really count any of these online acquaintances as friends. And of course not all them were or became friends, but some did. Now, almost 10 years later I am still friends with some of them, even close friends. Along the way people really stopped asking if net friends were real friends, and I have many many friends now whom I mostly connect with online--scholars lead an itinerant life, or at least I do.

But of course it's not exactly the same.

There are people I see almost every day or every week in my immediate locale whom I consider friends, a few of them close friends. But even those that are not so intimate emotionally I know quite well in other ways just because I see them often. So I know what they typically eat, or whether they prefer coffee or tea, what kinds of clothes they like to wear, whether they are morning people or night owls--and this is all without explicit discussion. I just observe it.

I know these things about some of my online friends too, but only if we talk about it. I don't know about others, but when I am taking time to email, or IM, or chat, I don't usually spend time on these little details unless for some reason they become important as part of a larger point. But even as I write this I experience the same problem of what I would describe vs what might be observed--there are some people, a few, with whom I am in such close contact that even though we are only connected via skype or email, these details come through. But when describing our daily lives through an online medium, we all make choices about what to leave in or out. These choices create some picture of us for readers that really is only a thin slice of our lives, so in some ways our online friends almost inevitably have a distorted picture.

This is not to say people we see in person don't have pictures of us that are distorted in other ways, but I think the distortions may be less exaggerated because a broader range of information is available. Online we have mainly text, maybe some pictures or videos, and almost all of that is chosen by the author (leaving aside for now the issue of involuntary publishing that afflicts people with highly public identities). So it seems to me that this may serve to concentrate the distortions.

But does this actually matter? I don't know. As I said, some of my online friendships started 10 years ago and those that have lasted always lead to meeting in person at least occasionally. So maybe this is really no different from the largely epistolary relationships that were common before the telephone, or before rapid travel became fairly accessible to large numbers of people. But having both kinds of friendships does sometimes make me feel in an uncomfortable way that there is some kind of disjunction between those with whom I feel closest and those whom I might guess have the widest range of information. Are those closest friends closest to the "me" that I think of as "me"? I suppose the question has always been there, but now technology makes me really notice it often. Damn computers and ICTs. ;-)

Award-winning Chaos

2008-05-22T21:51:00.001-07:00

Award-winning Chaos
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

So my college (humanities and social sciences) had the end-of-term meeting and awards ceremony.

The recent (and ongoing) stress of budget cuts, and the just-this-week-resolved stress of the Retention/Promotion/Tenure (RPT) process has left people pretty punchy, so while most of the awards were quite serious, a few were NOT. --And really everyone was giggling through almost the whole event, without having had even one "adult beverage."

I was honored to have my efforts recognized in winning the Desktop Structural Achievement Award, conferred every year on the faculty member who, well, I think the picture says it all. --Taken immediately after the ceremony and, I must say, after earlier this week cleaning up a little. (seriously).

Of course I's prefer it to be neater, but I find that when I am working really hard, I naturally generate some kind of chaotic field. At least that's my story. And honestly I may agree that neat people are just too lazy to look for things. ;-)

I will reassure any future hosts that I never treat other people's spaces this way! As soon as I can I will post the text of the speech honoring my achievement, and a picture of the trophy, which is enormous!

Birches in the Pines 2007

2008-05-20T22:36:00.001-07:00

Birches in the Pines 2007
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

And here is the cabin itself, still standing 101 years later. My great great grandfather was an engineer, and this house fits together so tightly that even after all these years, it has hardly shifted. Amazing compared to the way things are built lately.

The window on the second floor looks out from the little room in the attic where I slept as a teenager, finally entitled to my own space. I was the only one who didn't care if a bat or two swooped in. :-)

Lovewell's Pond

2008-05-20T22:32:00.001-07:00

Lovell's Pond 2007
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

The semester winds down and soon we will leave for the northeast, for our camp on Lovewell's Pond. My mother's family built a place their in 1906 and we still go there every summer. Very little has changed; we still pump drinking water by hand from the well, and bathe in the pond. We still listen to the bullfrogs on hot summer evenings.

Starting with my great great grandfather, one of the builders, daily logs have been kept of the weather and the events of each day. So when I say "we still..." in fact I know it for sure. How many people know what their great great grandparents did every day, in detail?

I guess they're keeping me another year

2008-05-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

So I've finally got the word from the powers on high that I have been retained in my job next year. Now I just have to make it through the actual tenure review in Spring 09... And even though the issue has been been debated across disciplines for decades now, still there is little recognition of work done outside traditional venues. --So, this blog counts for nothing, the rhetorically themed wiki I've created with students is not worthy of recognition, the monthly articles for a webzine, (but I think that's just because it's popular and not scholarly). And when I say they don't count, I mean they are not mentioned in the various letters at various levels that make recommendations about retention and tenure. Why after all this time have we not figured this out? Or maybe it's just my school? --Well, it must be more than just my school, because in 2006 the MLA issued a report finding that half of all US colleges and universities have trouble with this issue, and the current issue of Kairos takes the criticism even further.

I'm coming to realize that in a variety of ways US scholarship on new media and ICTs may be slipping, and it's still not being consistently recognized by our own institutions really aggravates the problem by creating disincentives for scholars to experiment with non-traditional ways to publish their work and participate in disciplinary conversations.

But of course I never take the easy route, so I don't know I'm even talking about this; it won't really change anything I'm doing!

Summer Research

2008-05-18T14:44:00.000-07:00

So I am once again traveling to the Netherlands to do some research, scraping away at these interviews, as many as I can cram into about ten days without going insane. I leave on 23 June and go directly to University of Twente where I will meet Elfi Ettinger in person (one of my IR 9.0 panelists) and possibly speak in their seminar series. I hope to also meet not only her immediate colleagues, but some people from other departments who work on new media and ICT stuff, but I only will be there for about 24 hours, so we'll see.

After that I head to Rotterdam and start interviewing; I plan to speak again to Hajo Doorn (from Worm) and Alex Adriaansens (from V2_) about the state of arts funding, and finally I will interview Brenno de Winter, who who had the flu in January when I was originally planning it. Then I go to Germany to speak at the IFIP WG 9.5 --part one of scholars on Facebook--and then back to Rotterdam and more interviews. I will speak with all of De Geuzen, with Sher Doruff, Erna Kotkamp, and Marianne van den Boomen, and Jaromil. And last but far from least, I will formally interview Florian and Mirko.

I may fit in a few more interviews, depending on how well I can schedule these so that for example, I see all the Utrecht people on one day, all the Amsterdam people on one day, etc. Otherwise the travel time will probably prevent me from adding anyone else. Plus I have to allow time to write up--I learned that in January when I didn't really have enough time to make sufficient notes here in the blog.

While all this is going on, I have to also finish a book chapter and work on my paper for IR 9.0 because the full papers are supposed to be turned in at the end of August. I think that for panels we have to get some papers in by the deadline, but maybe not all. As the organizer though, I feel I have to be one of those papers that gets in on time...

More soon, including a very protracted but increasingly useful and interesting email conversation I'm having with Aymeric Mansoux from goto10.org.

Unplugged

2008-05-04T23:07:00.000-07:00

So yeah, spent all last Thursday and some of Friday wrapping that up. Yesterday I gardened--so glad to be in a place where I feel like investing some gardening energy. In Massachusetts I left a trail of gardens behind me, but not here. Coming out here, I was of course busy, but no one gardens much in Turlock and it was just disheartening to plant anything when I knew my landlord would actually get rid of it after I left, in order to return the property to the cookie cutter appearance standard in that neighborhood. So I was really happy to begin planting again, to figure out the irrigation, to start thinking about what I want it to look like later, even if we end up going elsewhere.

Today we went up to Big Trees state park to see, you guessed it, the giant trees. The girls were pretty impressed, but aren't old enough to appreciate anything 1400 years old. We also had lunch at a Microbrew and stopped at a local vineyard on the way back, the Twisted Oak Winery. This was a pretty wacky place which had rubber chickens all over (hanging from trees on the drive up, for example) and humorous roads signs as well. The wine was really quite good though, good enough that we signed up to get two bottles shipped to us every two months. --The price is discounted and we get to buy some stuff not available to the general public. I tasted one of these exclusives today, a grenache, and it was amazing, so I had to sign up.

Nice to get out of the house which still is cluttered with yet-to-be-unpacked boxes. On the other hand, what I really want to to have time (and a second car) to wander alone. Oh well. Maybe in June, when school is over.

And if you are wondering why this totally random post is in my research blog, it's because I'm about to write something in response to a discussion on the AIR list (AoIR, or Association of Internet Researchers) about unplugging or getting AFC. So this is what I was doing, and I will be referring to it later.

Fun with NEH online submission forms

2008-05-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

Submission is the right word for it, that's for sure! You must fill in these pdfs exactly the right way, with attachments in exactly the right order, without going over the unspecified-but-definitely-there character count in the text boxes, you must get lucky while uploading to grants.gov, and of course you must save everything every 2 minutes because Adobe will crash over and over and lose the unsaved form contents.

But in the end I got it in...would you believe the total time estimate for preparing the application was 15 hours? Who are they kidding.

Anyway, this is most of the narrative:

Institutionalization of New Media: Analysis of the Dutch Context

Research and Contribution

With the introduction of the Internet and WWW in the 1990s, scholars, artists and activists began a critical engagement with technology. These early adopters were a loose collection of individuals that came out of more traditional fields including philosophy, literature, film studies, sociology, computer science. Some also came from outside of the academy; journalists, politicians, artists, activists and business people and have participated in the evolving discourse community as well. This diverse group was united by their shared observation of and concern with the effects of technology on their respective fields and their work has shaped the field we now know as new media. Now what began as a very open area of study is becoming institutionalized; a canon of critical theory is being established, and gate-keeping mechanisms are beginning to appear, along with the other apparatus typical of an academic discipline such as journals, conferences, degree programs and so on. Increasingly, questions are being raised about this institutionalization process and how it will affect our understanding of new media and its impact on our culture (Lovink, Rossiter, Zielinski).

While early scholarship on new media came from the aforementioned traditional disciplines, recently institutionalization has been driven by former members of the early adopter networks entering academia. This is to say that rather than only following a traditional scholarly route through the academy before becoming professors themselves, many people who first work and create with new media are now entering the academy, with or without formal credentials, and are shaping the discourse about the cultural effects of new media. What began as almost a folk practice now has been recognized by the academy. The line between creator and scholar/critic has been in some ways blurred and in others sharpened, but the process of these changes remains unexamined.

Through this project I expect to answer the following questions: 1) What is the relation between institutionalization and the people, physical things, and symbols in the networks that gave rise to new media? 2) How are institutions constructed that critically reflect on emerging technologies? 3) How are the social networks of participants reflected in and shaping institutional networks? 4) How is the fluid knowledge shared between participants becoming crystallized, being canonized, such that some groups are included or excluded? 5) And finally, what do we gain and lose in knowledge production through this process? I propose exploring the human archive embodied in the actor-network of individuals and groups currently working on new media.

The Netherlands is the best starting point as it is where some of the first university programs in new media began, and thanks to early and extensive government funding, a wide array of other cultural institutions have developed simultaneously. The Dutch context was originally characterized by heterogonous networks of people, things and symbols that were ad hoc and informal, but now all of these disparate elements contribute to the establishment of formal knowledge, specialization, and the construction of a canon. These activities are a clear sign of institutionalization, which also inevitably involves the development of gate-keeping processes. However, while institutionalization is taking place, the Dutch cooperative polder model still shapes socio-economic relations and allows for the continued emergence of new voices and new groups. Thus the whole spectrum of development is available for study.

Preliminary insight into the institutionalization of new media have been studied in isolation by pioneers such as Geert Lovink (Dark Fiber, Zero Comments), but no comprehensive studies have yet appeared. I intend a rhetorical analysis of the cultural discourse on new media in Europe which I will approach as a dispositif. While Foucault applied this concept to historical archives, I will engage with current participants through interviews and observations.
Methods and Work Plan

I am requesting support to complete the necessary observations and interviews which I aim to carry out during 2009-2010, making visits each year during the summer and winter. During a sabbatical I expect to begin in 2011, I will complete the compilation, authoring a book and website.

Methods and Work Plan

For this study I have already begun observing a variety of groups and interviewing their staff, including:

De Waag Society for Old and New Media
V2_Institute for the Unstable Media
Worm Rotterdam
De Geuzen Foundation for Multi-visual Research
The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts

Further visits to these institutions have been arranged for the award period, along with observations I have arranged at other cultural institutions and at numerous Dutch MA and PhD programs in New Media. Based on a survey of which programs have been actively publishing, seeking PhD candidates, participating in and holding conferences, I have established a list of schools hosting well-regarded programs studying and educating about new media, including:

Delft University of Technology Eindhoven University of Technology
Leiden University Piet Zwart Institute Radboud University Nijmegen
University of Amsterdam University of Maastricht
University of Twente University of Utrecht

This project will combine analysis of institutional documents with interviews and observations. At cultural institutions I will interview curators, project managers, directors and when possible artists/authors. At academic institutions I will interview faculty, administrators, and students. In particular, I will examine the basic degree structures, course content, reading lists, and assignments. When possible, sample student work will be studied as well. These interviews and observations will reveal informants' history in the field and the interconnections between various factors such as experience, age, gender, ethnicity, location, education and so forth. At both cultural and academic institutions, I will observe events organized around new media which often reveal places where institutional and social networks are parallel and where they are unaligned.

That is all--at least all the plugged in activities. Except finishing a Sequential Tart interview with Paweł and the teaching assignments for next Fall and Spring. And just about finishing an article. I have one more to write by the end of June!

Open source women back each other up program

2008-04-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Open source women back each other up program is not really a techy program, but rather:

1. a program I completely and utterly support because in the US at least it is really needed.

2. an interesting example of how the meaning of a techy concept, open source, is being contested. Or rather, how it's metaphorical meaning is being contested. And I agree with one person who comments on the whole thing, the guy who came up with the "open source boobs" phrase should have been saying public domain. Jackass.

--And this is what started the whole tempest to begin with.

And while I will say like everyone else, this response of course is parody; I find it really really tempting sometimes.

The science fiction community--more fun than a barrel of weasels. Or ferrets. yeah.

More about Facebook

2008-04-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

Since I am speaking at two different conferences about the way people participate in Facebook, I have been (believe it or not) reading about Facebook, about relationships online, about what motivates participation, and so on.

here are a few things I've noticed:

Though it was noted at least 5 months ago that many faculty are now using social networks and that 25-34 year-olds is the fastest growing segment of users, no one seems to be looking at how or why they use FB. Some articles have been written about faculty disclosing too much online, but so far I have found nothing else.
Almost every academic study (and there are many) concentrates on either how kids/teens use FB, class, racial or ethnic differences in who uses FB, how to use FB to teach, or how to use it to make money.
There are lots of non-academic slideshows and articles comparing FB and MySpace about how to make money or seduce women with FB. --I mention this because my search efforts are hampered by these kinds of documents cluttering the web.

But I have found some very interesting stuff about online relationships from Jonathan Marshall who has published about a concept he calls 'asence' including this one in Fibreculture. In brief, he argues that particpants in online communities experience asence, which he explains:

In offline societies, it is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or not. Presence and status are acknowledged by others making, at the least, eye contact or grunts in a person’s direction, or by their pointedly ignoring that person. Identity is reinforced by reaction. People are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and of their reactions to each other. Online this is usually not the case. It is possible for a person to be present without others being aware of them: there is no marker of existence beyond the act of communication itself. “Asence” is the term I have coined to express this almost ontological uncertainty, or suspension of being between presence and absence.

Marshall goes on to argue that in an effort to overcome asence, participants will exaggerate gender characteristics and may also use romance and even netsex to reinforce intimacy. He developed these ideas from studying the Cybermind mailing list, but I think asence could explain certain behaviors I've noticed on Facebook. --more details on that soon.

Two other useful possibilities involved Fluxus and the theory that humans have evolved to be 'infovores' --love that term! But I'll save those for the next entries...

And by the way, apparently Twitter addicts are 61.3% more likely to visit Barcamp.org than the average internet user. --Not directly related to anything, but it caught my eye. ;-)

My friends still rock

2008-04-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

So seems like everyone is doing really cool stuff lately.

Lokman's research was actually mentioned in the Huffington Post, and even better (much better) it's now official that he will a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard next year while he finishes his dissertation. And I knew him when he was a lowly student of computer science at the University of Utrecht. :-) Back then he was not so professional and only had a personal blog (though even that looks rather pro these days) and the Wong Kar Wai site. Sigh--they grow up so fast. Ok, I was a lowly student then too, but still...

Next, Mirko, while finishing his dissertation, teaching, writing an article for a book he's helping to organize, has also put together a kickass presentation for this event at Utrecht U. where he teaches and is doing his PhD in the New Media and Digital Culture program. I am gnashing my teeth with admiration and envy. Anyway, I think he'll post the presentation somewhere soon or it will be archived and then I'll add the link here.

I, on the other hand, am just waiting to find out whether the rejection email, or the "dear author" email I received is the accurate reflection of reality. More on that later. Or not. ;-)

nothing like reading back over your dissertation...

2008-04-04T22:46:00.000-07:00

To inspire at best that oh-so-pleasant feeling of wanting to sink through the floor. Since I decided to reformat my dissertation and put it online for free, I found it really was not possible to do that without actually reading any of it again. And boy was that fun. Yeah.

I think some of the individual chapters might be ok by themselves, but the literacy narrative in the intro. bleah. And the whole thing seems incoherent. But I suppose there's something salutary about reading back over it, just like getting plenty of fiber or something.

--let me interrupt for a minute to say that I found what seems like a cool app. on Facebook called Touchgraph Photos, and I cannot get the damned thing working. (And yes, I have checked the forum and so on.) So tiresome.

Anyway, I probably won't do much with the diss right now because I have too many other things to worry about and work on. (which should be obvious from my procrastinating with Facebook apps) But once I do, dear readers, I will of course link it from here. Maybe. If I can stand the embarrassment. :P

A funny thing I found today...

2008-04-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

My dissertation is available online at ProQuest, linked from a slick page in the UMass Amherst (Where I did my graduate work) library. At first I thought this was kind of cool, until I found that a) they are charging people $41 for an unbound paper copy, and b) they are using a really low quality scan of the bound version in the library! Now this pisses me off on so many levels. First, here I am constantly scrounging for travel money, and someone may be profiting from my diss. without my even knowing. Second, if they had actually asked me, I could have provided a nice digital copy. Third, and most importantly, I am really annoyed not to have been asked or notified, since I am the copyright holder.

So I am going to put the whole damned thing up on Scribd for free, though frankly I find it embarrassing to put something out I wrote so long ago and wasn't so thrilled with even at the time. I think I will also send a sharp letter to the UMass Library which seems to be responsible for all this.

More good news

2008-03-31T21:44:00.000-07:00

So now both of the panels I proposed to IR 9.0 have been accepted, which means that one of my book projects can really go forward--a collection of these papers and a few more I will invite from some other people I know who work on this stuff and who might be interested. Fingers crossed that I can get everything done when it need to be done!

MLA is a go

2008-03-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

So I will be speaking at MLA. I'm not even sure what to think of that; I'm so used to thinking of the MLA convention as just a necessary evil for job-seekers and search committees, it seems weird to think of it as an actual academic meeting. But I'm really looking forward to it, --it's not till late next December, so it's silly to even think too much about it now since I have two other conferences and three papers to prepare between now and then. Here's the abstract and as usual, thanks to the usual suspects for feedback and editing help.

And what I really have to figure out are my travel plans for the summer; flights are horribly expensive. The dollar's turning almost into play-money doesn't help either, but if it's still in the tank by late June I'll just have to sponge of my friends in the Netherlands. --If any of you are reading, start saving up now to feed the starving American. ;-)

Where the hell are my slides?

2008-03-29T20:14:00.001-07:00

Where the hell are my slides?
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Here I am, about to lead off my panel with a presentation entitled "let's Pretend," which covers the first stage of my research on Facebook. I argue that the risk of transgression that is built into Facebook, and in particular into certain applications and into the way users appropriate those applications in order to communicate in ways other than intended, foster a playful atmosphere and make the site more attractive.

I look so serious because I have had my laptop for only a couple of days and I can't remember where the hell I put the presentation slides. :P Lucky you; they can now be found here. [Thanks to Scribd, which is the easiest site I've seen for sharing files of all kinds--not like GoogleDocs for editing, just for sharing, plus with some social network and archiving kind of stuff built in. It seems cool.]

It was a good panel though and felt more coherent than many of the other internet/web/new media panels. And we had discussion that ran over the break and into the next panel which was rude of us, but also signals a good panel. ;-)

Internet or Digital Culture?

2008-03-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

After attending a number of panels and the "birds-of-a-feather" meeting for people interested in Internet and Digital Culture, I was puzzled to see what difference there was between either category, apart from merely organizational. For this year's PCA/ACA conference, the call for the Digital Culture Area was focused on the "mainstreams/undercurrents", and so on, while the Internet Culture Area was open to anything. And both areas were plagued by incoherence in panels, though the Digital Culture Area seemed to have better luck on this. During the B0F meeting we talked about how more coherence might be achieved, but people seemed reluctant to ask authors to choose keywords, but some were willing to support panel calls. Privately I heard many people (not just in this area) agree that the real trouble was that paper quality is often so spotty at the PCA/ACA. I'm afraid I have to agree; it's a fun conference, but it does feel like almost anyone can get in.

I say this in part because I've heard so many presenters reveal it's their first conference ever, and the presentations lean heavily toward "hey, I found this, isn't it cool?" Theory is rarely mentioned, nor is most work contextualized in terms of other scholarship. I noticed this especially when I went to a panel in the Composition/Rhetoric Area that was all about New Media in the classroom. (Or so the panel title claimed). What I found was a number of papers rehashing concern about computers in the writing classroom, but without taking up specifics or referencing recent work about blogs or wikis, or about the easy ways to bring media in--cell-phone cameras, for example, or using del.icio.us to help students learn about researching online.

So seeing all this led me to submit an abstract to next year's MLA convention for a roundtable organized by Henry Turner called "What in the World is New Media." I feel scholarship on this continues to be ridiculously fragmented and this is caused in part by the continued segregation of New Media studies to specialized departments and curricula. So I'll post my abstract in a few days.

Fun at the PCA

2008-03-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Well, a quick update on the conference and I'll write more later. Before attending anything I met up with David Silver who runs the RCCS and we share coffee and what turned out to be my nearest thing to lunch.

David's even nicer (and much taller :-) )in person than online and it was a very pleasant chat out in the sun, in a little park near the Moscone Center. We talked a little about our projects and about the state of research on new media/ICT/Internet and Digital culture--how ever you want to call it. We agreed that work in the US is more fragmented than in Europe, and the lack of much public funding has given it a very different tone. More on that later.

Then I went to the conference where of course I trawled through the book exhibit, went to few panels than planned, drank too much coffee, and met some interesting people. As I said, details to come, but now once more into the breach!

Research news, conferences, etc.

2008-03-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

So let's see; I just got accepted to IFIP WG 9.5 International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities, which is the 1st and 2nd of July, 2008 at Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany. I'm glad of that; I hear the group and the people involved are well regarded and there is a book planned, so that may guarantee me another chapter by the time my tenure review rolls around. I guess the nearest big city is Hamburg--I've never been anywhere in Germany yet, so actually anywhere will be interesting! I think it's within reach, by train, of Rotterdam, so I can fit it into my other research pretty easily.

This summer I plan to interview Florian, Mirko, Brenno; some museum folk, and see if I can volunteer at Worm, make a site visit to U. Utrecht, U. Twente, and follow up on the email interviews I'm conducting already. --Of course I talk about new media and tech stuff with Florian, Mirko and Brenno anyway, but I need to do formal interviews to make sure that I get some comparable answers among all of them. Oh yeah, I also want to talk to the women at Gender Changers.

And, ~~if my panel proposals get~~ since at least one panel proposal has been accepted to IR 9.0, I need to work on that some. And there's the SFRA Europe plan.....oy veh. Overbooked again.

Katynka Martinez

2008-03-15T19:43:00.001-07:00

Katynka Martinez
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Katynka gave a really interesting talk about a project in which high school students made their own versions of the Pac Man game that reflected their own neighborhoods and experience. One was called El Imigrante in which Carlos Jesus Imigrante is pursued around town by minutemen. If they catch him he's deported, if he wins he gets a green card.

In another game, neighborhood kids collect up loose change while being pursued by neighborhood drunks. If they collect enough, they can buy a toy, but if the bums get the change, they can go to the liquor store for beer.

I wish we'd had more time to talk about interpretations of the different games, and also how they engaged with games like the recent (and really racist) Border Patrol game. But it was a cools talk and it really resonated with what we know about the lives of our own students.

Also, that Border Patrol game is creepily similar to a game popular in Switzerland that Mirko reported recently. In that game, the object is to get rid of the black sheep--but the Border Patrol game is really much worse because (like in the Ethnic Cleansing game) you win by blowing away Mexicans, including women and children, and seeing the blood splatter. Sometimes I'm repelled that creativity and hatred seem not to be mutually exclusive which somehow I feel they should be. Not that this would make sense, but somehow just I think it's the way things should work.

Mikhail Alexseev

2008-03-15T16:21:00.001-07:00

Mikhail Alexseev
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

And here is Mikhail... I will have to find a better screenshot from the video or something; this really doesn't capture how dynamic his talk was. Also, we agreed after that he was wearing a great suit. Shallow but true. ;-P

Mikhail Alexseev speaking on "Russia: Challenges to the Post-Imperial Migration State"

2008-03-14T18:37:00.001-07:00

Finally things seem to have settled into some kind of groove. We have had dinner, we have had drinks, and now our first plenary has begun. I've had some time to speak with Mikhail over dinner--very pleasant fellow, and very sharp on these issues.

Some highlights-- that as the Russian empire expanded, it's diversity expanded as well, because the empire absorbed many non-Russian groups. At the time, it was not perceived as threatening because power increased with that expansion. But now, Russia is very diverse, and the empire is no longer so powerful. Finally, right now Russian birth and death rates are such that even in the best case, the need to attract and absorb about 35,000,000 immigrants to maintain the existing population levels of about 140,000,000.

Ok, that wasn't final--also, the ratio of ethnic Russians to other ethnicities inside Russia is shrinking already. Migrants are now coming from former Soviet Republics, and Russia has to deal with the spread of Islam and territorial vulnerability. And, most people when surveyed, would overwhelmingly prefer that the migrant populations were reduced.

Pictorial ethnic cleansing--kids, here is is the house of a Cossack; find the alien objects in the house and cross them out. This is a contemporary textbook aimed ad elementary school kids. (Cossacks were border guards, not quite, but almost vigilantes).

So the current context leads to quite serious tensions between ethnic Russians and other populations inside Russia, and Putin has made it very difficult for any immigrants to enter Russia, other than those from former Soviet Republics. Further, extremely high levels f latent xenophobia--well over 50% think all immigrants, legal or illegal, and their children, should be deported.

In sum:

Post-Soviet Russia changed rapidly from an empire to a global migration state, but institutions have lagged behind.
The Russian Imperial legacy, changing demographics, and migration challenge Russian identity and raise the threat of communal violence
Short-term restrictionist policies responding to these challenges have deep roots in the imperial identity and legacy, but they undermine Russia's current and future status as a great power.

Great talk!

And a settled panel schedule becomes a moving target

2008-03-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Ok, I know people have personal situations that come up, but this week we have received cancellations from about five people who just last week were saying how much they looked forward to meeting us. Grrr. But it's ok, we juggled everything, the show has gone on. But now we are having issues over the alcohol and I really don't see how we can have dinner without drinks...I mean come on, we are all grown ups, we've traveled far, worked hard to present good papers. Anyway, I will not be sad to shed the hat of conference co-chair.

And because I've been running round like a maniac trying, along with Betsy, the other chair, to settle this stuff, I've hardly had a chance to hear any of the talks. So that's a bit disappointing, though I have at least gotten to meet and chat with many of our speakers. The worst aspect is the finances--the school just doesn't have much funding to support this kind of thing; they want us to raise our profile, but that costs money!

So yeah, lots of fun...

Whoohoo, the Empire Conference has started

2008-03-13T20:11:00.000-07:00

I am glad to have had this experience, but I am so glad that in two days, it will be over! Tonight we held the opening reception, for which we slightly overestimated food and drink, but the reverse would have been worse by far.

So we have nice collection of papers and two really kick-ass keynote speakers, Mikhail Alexseev and Katynka Martinez. I'm really looking forward to meeting them both and to hearing some of the other talks as well. I also finally met Anne Paulet in person; she teaches history up at Humboldt State U. (also a branch of the CSU, for you out of town readers). She and I have corresponded quite a bit over the last months and I was getting ready for the conference, and we have hit it off very well.

Other news--I ended up sticking with a MacBook Pro, much as I admire the MB Air. the latter just gives up too many things I really need, so I will deal with lugging a 6-pounder for awhile.

More later...

I am so behind...

2008-02-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

Even though I'm not teaching as much this term, I am just buried in work. I'm co-chair a conference that takes place in two weeks and will so glad when it's over. What a headache. Plus I am trying to work on some grant proposals, sent in the two IR 9.0 proposals, and just sent off a chapter proposal. Whew. On the up side, if the conference and chapter proposals are accepted, I will have a lull on those fronts until summer at least.

Speaking of summer, I will be headed to the Netherlands again for more interviews. I've been doing some via email, but I also need to go on site to visit some of the new media programs/centers. I may also give some talks, but that's up in the air right now. Whatever else happens, I will see all my Rotterdam friends again, and finally (I hope) meet Brenno de Winter in person, plus a new acquaintance, Elfi Ettinger. Elfi is on one of the panels I put together and teaches at the University of Twente.

In spite of being so busy, I spent most of the day in a workshop about writing successful grants, except for the last two hours in which I heard Clark Buckner speak about "Autonomy, Plurality, and Play in Contemporary Art." It was a good talk, and the workshop was informative, but I'm just exhausted now. More later.

Research Update

2008-02-10T14:02:00.000-08:00

Let's see...first the bad news: didn't get the Franklin Grant. It's really competitive and I know I did the best proposal I could, so while I wish I'd gotten it, I don't feel so bad. I talked with some colleagues and the consensus seems to be that getting grants is really almost impossible until after you've published a book. I wonder if that's really true.

Of course the grant was intended to support a book project, so now the question is how to publish a book faster without having to to travel as much. I actually have good ideas about that. One is that I am already collecting a lot of great interviews via email with some of the women I've met in the Netherlands, and I'm getting so much that I think I could do a book just about their experiences, which would be cool. The other, easiest (I hope) approach is an edited volume. I'm proposing two panels for the next meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which is Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place. That conference will be held in Copenhagen next fall. So I already have 6 proposals that look really strong and I know of at least a few other people who might be interested in submitting papers/chapters. So I hope I can interest a publisher in that idea in the next few months.

If I can get one of these accepted, I could get one or both finished by next August and then have a much better shot at grants. Plus, I could then come up for promotion to full professor early. Maybe in just 3 or 4 years, instead of the usual five. And of course I'd still be working on my original book idea, which I could probably complete in about 2-3 years, depending on when I can get time and funding for the longer trips to the NL.

More on the trip

2008-01-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

After my talk at De Geuzen, I wandered around downtown a bit and then had dinner with Florian at a cheap but good Roti place near Piet Zwart's new location in the Kareldormanhoff. We are still trying to think about how to do a joint MA, but it's proving much tougher than I originally expected. I think we (the CSUStan group) will have to get our MA going, and maybe first try some simple exchanges for course credit. Also, the the CSU is under threat of major budget cuts, and so any new projects will be harder if we are all tightening our belts.

I was still really jet-lagged, so after dinner I went back to the flat and tried to answer email or read, or something, but while I had trouble sleeping I also couldn't think very well. So annoying. I should have drunk more at dinner. ;-)

Wednesday I had another interview scheduled with Hajo Doorn, director at Worm, and thanks to my jet-lag I woke up barely in time to dress and race over there. This time we talked less about Worm itself and more about how Hajo sees the Dutch new media scene and his own role in it. I was impressed at how ambivalent he felt. I say impressed because Worm seems to be doing very well and Hajo himself has gained some influence, including serving on some kind of committee or board that awards grant money for projects. I'm not sure how many people in this position would question what it meant, whether it was right, so I am impressed that Hajo does.

He made several striking comments in this vein. First, and this seems to be a shift since last summer, he thinks Worm is in a way forced to be too big now that they are successful and receive funding themselves. They have to employ a lot of people in order to comply with the requirement of receiving funding, and maybe its good that all these people have jobs, but a lot of money is now not spent directly on projects. Also, he's not even sure that their projects are always the most deserving or successful--that goes back to our earlier discussion of how success is measured. Also, based on his comments on certain other groups, I think Hajo worries that he will become disconnected from real innovative work, because he's so wrapped up in administrivia. Finally, he's not sure the project he is involved in evaluating are always so great, but who knows, maybe that's not so important either, maybe the experiment is worthwhile. I haven't met anyone else willing to be this forthright and I admire that like hell, because of course it's a risk, both personally and professionally.

We also talked about what kinds of work is most interesting right now, and what is overrated. Hajo is completely fed up with what passes for interactivity, and I agree with his critique. He gave the example of an art piece in which people step onto a platform with sensors that measure their feet and if their feet are one size, a light this color glows, and if they are that size, a different color light appears. So what? Unfortunately a lot of interactive pieces do seem to remain at this really basic level and so they very quickly become really boring. I further agree that for real, interesting interaction we would probably do better with artificial intelligence.

When I think about, for example, the web sites that are interesting, they are those that facilitate interaction with others--whether we speak of something like FaceBook, World of Warcraft, old-school MOOs, or what have you. And compare this to static texts like novels, paintings, movies. Though these don't change, they represent (I think) a density of the creator's/s' thoughts that readers or viewers can interact with over time. So, interactive new media, to succeed, has to either connect us to other people, or in someway recreate the experience of a conversation with another intelligence.

I'll have more on the conversation with Hajo later on, but I have to to catch up on other stuff--I am so behind on my entries!

Catching up a bit

2008-01-22T20:51:00.000-08:00

So, last term got completely crazy toward the end. In addition to the stuff I usually might have to do--teach, direct the comp. program, do a little research and writing--I also have been trying to write some grant proposals, organize a conference, and chair a search committee. Oh yeah, and I had to do a job review for myself...and the computer was stolen...so yeah, totally crazy.

But, I did the job review, kept the search under control and the conference, and the grant proposals are ok, for now at least. And, I may buy a Macbook Air in a week or two... But the main thing is that I got things wrapped enough to make another trip to Rotterdam in January. The trip went really well, but I now know that 6 days on the ground is really not enough when you have 6 hour jet-lag to get over before you can function at all.

So, what did I do this time around? Well, since you ask... I spoke at De Geuzen as part of their Living Room Lecture program, about Sequential Tart and super-heroines. That was fun; there was a live audience of six people, with more online, though I think only a few were formally signed into the chat. Anyway, the video archive of the first part is online already, and also some pictures. I was pleased that I could speak comfortably in front of people who I know and whose work I respect a lot! I mean, it's one thing to address strangers, or students, but I actually care about my friends' opinions. ;-) So this was the first official event for me.

Back at Last

2008-01-17T16:06:00.001-08:00

I have been swamped for the last month with first work that had to be done absent my home computer, and then with travels and research. But Now I am catching up with it all, and with the blog. I'll post a real entry later tonight and more still this week. Look for discussion of my most recent trip to Rotterdam, my current research and grant efforts, and my uncontrollable lust for....a Macbook Air. ;-)

In a sort of mourning

2007-12-16T20:02:00.000-08:00

Sadly I report the theft of my laptop--a 2005 powerbook pro. :-( I had just about all of the data backed up, but now I can't really work at home and more than anything else, I miss my slim, silver mac. I hadn't realized the extent to which I was really sort of living in that machine. I guess I really have become post-human. Score for Katherine Hayles.

The most tiresome additional irritant is that I need a laptop for my next Rotterdam trip in early January. Since we have renter's insurance, I could replace it, but I've heard Apple will release a cool, new little 13" aluminum-cased notebook with a flash drive instead of optical, at the MacWorld Expo in mid-January. This is exactly what I've been wanting--a smaller, lighter Mac. So I don't want to buy something now, I want to wait.

If only I could find a Mac rental joint in Rotterdam.

I spend all my time on scheduling...

2007-11-29T00:23:00.000-08:00

Some of the people I've started to know on Facebook are Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx, otherwise known as Ubermorgen. We've talked about all kinds of things, from our kids, to the joys of Ikea, to what motivates our work. And we spend a lot of time sending each other drinks and throwing sheep and all the silly Facebook stuff.

So now I'm trying to arrange for them to come and speak at our school. Of course one reason is that their work is cool--I loved "Vote Auction," for example, and I think it would be great to feature such amazing reality hackers here. But also I just like them and while Facebook is fun and all, and skype is pretty good (assuming Hans gets his audio working ;-) ) still none of it beats meeting in person. So hopefully we will work something out for early spring.

Tiny update on a European meet-up

2007-11-27T20:57:00.000-08:00

So now I've been talking to Paweł about this plan, because everyone (well, ok, all three people) I spoke with from SFRA about European members said "you should ask Paweł about that." Of course I could have guessed that already, but he was away. I didn't guess that he would be the only person... but this can happen in smaller groups; if someone appears to be interested and willing to own some issue, others may assume that they can leave it all to that person. This happens to me all the time around tech-y stuff at my school. In my college (Humanities and Social Sciences, people now think of me as resident tech-head, so they refer everything about that to me.

Anyway, Paweł is also interested in helping and so far he and Sandor both agree that the Netherlands would be a good location. So I guess we will really try to make something happen there next July. :-) I was bummed that the change in venue meant a change in guests--maybe we can get Zoran Zivković to attend our gathering instead. That would be nice, since I just got a bunch of his books! I had been planning a paper about him and John Crowley and magical realism (or something like that), and I had been loathe to give it up, even when I thought I could get to the moved SFRA '08. (Before they announced the date change.)

So, more about this as it develops...

More Con. scheduling...

2007-11-26T11:29:00.000-08:00

And the San Diego Comic Con is July 24-28. Normally I wouldn't mind missing it; but Tart will be 10 years old and we plan to celebrate. And Connie Willis is a guest. I love her SF. Argh. Once I was so used to living on a shoestring that didn't know what I'd do if I had piles of money. Now I know exactly what I'd do with some; travel without worrying about whether dates and locations were all coordinated!

And now there's a chance I could attend an SF Masterclass in London from 6/20-6/22. It's tough; earlier (late June to mid July) works better for me personally, but doesn't work so well for some of the people I'm trying to work with in the NL. But we'll see.

European Science fiction meet-up

2007-11-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

Ok, so my going to SFRA 08 is not looking so good, unless I get major grant money. But we'll see. I and my partner in crime have had several discussions about investing in our own research, so maybe... In any case, I've been talking a bit to Sandor Klapcsik (who doesn't seem to have a webpage anywhere) about how to increase European participation and the sort of vicious circle that can occur because if you don't have a European event, it's hard to get people involved, but if a lot of people aren't already involved, it's hard to have an event. Because I already think that meeting in person is crucial, I am going to try organizing some kind of meeting next summer, probably in early July, so it won't conflict with SFRA. While we may have some scholarly discussion, my main hope is that people connect sufficiently that we are inspired to collaborate and more people get involved with SFRA. Maybe I'll do something like the Barcamp held recently in Rotterdam. In fact, that might be just the thing, only for two days. Maybe Worm would even be a good space, if Hajo were willing. Hmmmn. The question would be finding inexpensive housing for everyone. Rotterdam is less expensive, but hotels anywhere...ideally I'd find university dorm rooms or something like that.

Before deciding though I will talk to Paweł and see what he thinks, since he seems the resident authority on the European SF scene. --And I'll just gloat for a minute that now another scholar has joined Facebook at my instigation. Mwahahahah. How long can I resist having my vampire bite him... ;-)

Well, I'll post updates here, as plans solidify.

Embodied experience and the post-conference buzz

2007-11-18T23:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if it's true for everyone, but I notice that starting by the end of my first day at a conference and lasting for weeks after, I often have so much more energy for writing than usual, even though I've keeping long hours and maybe having drinks as well. So what accounts for that?

On one of the now numerous email lists of which I'm member, someone posted about how interacting face to face always creates some energy that flows around between people. I'm not sure if that's always true; sometimes socializing can be a bit of a strain, if for some reason it feels awkward. But on the whole, I think that's right. Whenever I go to conferences and meet even one person I really connect with, I'm energized. Once I've made these connections, I can usually solidify and sustain them through a combination of email and skype, facebook messaging (and playing) and so on. I even find these virtual contacts energizing, if I have real conversations. And lately I've experienced something of that energy even with people I've never met in person, but in those cases I also feel an even more urgent wish to meet in person.

But I think there is something about physical presence that so far can't be replicated or replaced by any virtual modes of contact. In a way it's like falling for someone in that there's a a similar feeling of immediate connection, of excitement, except it's over a different kind of prospect; an intellectual potential, rather than romantic. --Or maybe romantic too, for some people. ;-) Or maybe only I feel this way. Most academics would hesitate to admit this, even if they felt it, I think, because though even porn is starting to be accepted as a subject for study, it's still not really ok to talk about being motivated in our own work by pleasure, other than the most intellectual and abstract. I think that so many academics are suddenly not only joining Facebook but also getting really involved in it is that it allows expression of some of that same kind of pleasure that we experience when meeting in person.

Conference scheduling conflicts. Bleah.

2007-11-16T21:37:00.000-08:00

I don't travel all that much, and because of that I generally only attend conferences about intersections of tech and culture, so you'd think it would be fairly easy to avoid conflicts... but no. Having just joined the SFRA, I was happy to learn that the 2008 conference, which is held during summers, would be in Dublin because I already have plans to be on that side of the Atlantic in late June-Early July. Unfortunately, thanks to the plummeting dollar, the organizers shifted the conference to the states, to Kansas. If it was even on the East coast, I might have been able to work something out... (or if my school had anything approaching reasonable levels of support for travel).

Well, so, now I'm investigating if there are any other SF conferences that are being held in Europe during the time I plan to be there, but so far all I can find listed anywhere are conventions that don't include scholarly presentations. Sigh.

Favorite foods and identity

2007-11-13T07:50:00.000-08:00

During my visit to Portland (Maine) I enjoyed the chance to eat many of the foods that are hard to find in my little Central Valley city. I had sushi, Indian food, organic pizza and of course lobster, plus lots of different microbrew beers. Of course, Portland isn't as diverse as some cities; it's relatively small and for a long time has been rather homogenous, though that is changing. This got me thinking about my own collection of favorites foods; those associated with places I've lived or visited, and those that I've loved so well that I search them out or learn to make them wherever I go.

Food is one of the most popular identity markers; it can identify very easily and precisely an ethnic and/or geographic affiliation, but it's generally "harmless" and unlikely to draw fire the way physical description or linguistic characteristics often do. I think this is because even though it often signals a certain background, it's also a matter of taste. Anyone could develop a taste for durian (at least theoretically) or haggis, or salty licorice; or more readily perhaps, for mooncakes, dolma, pierogies... well I could go on and on and on.

And this is where (one place) identity becomes interesting. Because you can run right into the fact that on some level, people believe in the biology, even if intellectually they know race is a construct. On the one hand, people will proffer food preferences as evidence of belonging to a certain group and agree that it is some kind of evidence, but try saying that someone blonde and blue-eyed is Chinese because he/she love duck's tongue, speak both Shanghahua and Putonghua (Mandarin) and even was raised in China. Then forget it.

Or, by contrast, European countries. I could learn a language, love the food, and adopt the appropriate name and I'd blend right in, at least in many places. Apart from the legal definitions, how many years until I can call myself Dutch or Italian or Polish or whatever? Some people might say now amount of time is enough to erase the difference. Then of course you have the US and Canada (not sure about Australia or the UK) Where theoretically anyone can become Canadian (if you don't mind a process that takes years) and at least officially no one can say they aren't real Americans or Canadians no matter what they look like, like to eat or language they are able to speak. So where does that leave definitions based on physical characteristics or geographical background?

I got into this tangle with students at MIT once where they were talking about the assumption that most students there are Asian. This led to the following exchange:

I asked "Asian, or Asian American?"
"Well, not American. I mean, look at this class, there are actually only a few Asians. Most are American"
"But Derek is from California, not Asia. And Alex, George, Maria, and Christian are all from from Europe. How are you defining American? Do you mean white?"

And here we would have had an uncomfortable silence except the European students were insulted that they had been mistaken for Americans and were only too happy to clear that up. :-)

So what does it really mean to be from a culture or country? How many years does it take and which ones? At MLA a few years ago, everyone was arguing over who got to claim Ang Lee; Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, or the US. On a more serious note, what about Israel? What definition of that state will really hold up? What definition of any state is more than an arbitrary legal code, these days?

And here I thought I was just going to write about how settlement patterns are reflected in food and how I missed the Northeast and the wide variety of European food available there. (and Asian, but that being absent here hasn't as much to do with settlement patterns as with class, I think). But I think academics often end up in the position of not feeling really firmly bound to any single locale or identity, because we go where the graduate program or the fellowship or the job takes us. And we go to conferences all over as well. I at least have ended up with a hodgepodge accent and a similarly disparate taste in food.

--I also was quite spoiled as a grad student in Amherst, Ma. Within a 5 mile radius (all covered by bus routes) I could eat decent, and often really good, Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Mexican, Moroccan, Indian, German, Greek, Polish... I think I most miss the Moroccan and Polish food because I've had less luck finding it elsewhere than the other cuisines. Sigh. In Ma. I could get freshly made pierogies any time and now I can't even find them frozen!

Well this post is going nowhere, but I guess it had to go somewhere so I could stop thinking about it. --Assuming that writing it here acts as a form of exorcism! ;-)

I don't know if this bothers other academics(or others who move a lot) but I've always kind of liked it. I've never minded, and now might even say I enjoy being a little (or a lot) alien.

SLSA Wrap-Up First attempt

2007-11-11T21:50:00.001-08:00

I say first because I suspect I will have more to say about thoughts provoked by this conference as time goes on, but I have to start (or rather end) somewhere.

After the last plenary we all agreed there should be food and much drinking and we agreed to eat at Flatbread, the best pizza place in town. --They are a very small chain, maybe 6 places in ME, NH, and VT. Then we'd find a comfy bar and settle in, since the weather was getting nasty and no one was up for pub crawling. As we walked from the museum, it was cold, rainy and some of the party decided we need to swing by the Holiday Inn, so we did. At that point Istvan and Sherryl said they need to go right on because they were meeting people, but they didn't know the way. And here I was just stupid; I didn't take them into Holiday Inn to call a cab for them. Instead I decided to walk them over, and the others said they'd catch up soon...

Well, it was of course a longer walk than we'd expected, it started to sleet...we made it at last though and I handed Istvan and Sherryl safely to their party, and happily I ran into Anthony and Christian and crashed their plans. --And met more nice people, including Mark Marino. So I had the amazing uncured fennel sausage pizza--one of my favorites from Flatbread. But, I was rather irritated at not reconnecting with everyone else for drinks because I liked them a lot and this would be a lousy way to conclude our meeting. Finally, I managed to track down a number and find out that they were all just parked at the Holiday Inn (which I still think was just silly. ;-) ) and Christian and I decided to trek back over. So we did, and had more drinks and when the bar closed at 1am it still felt too early and rather anti-climactic, but we made our farewells and went off.

And then those of us all in the Portland Harbor Hotel (me and some of the SFRA folk) agreed to meet for brunch, which made me feel a bit better.

Brunch was delicious (lobster Florentine omelet) and we talked more, this time about what we were working on back at our respective schools, and even started talking about possible collaborations, future conferences and so on. And then I guess we still didn't want to split up because we all went to the airport together, even though our flights weren't that close. --But maybe it was just me; hard to tell when you've only just met someone.

So that's my first attempt and judge from it being such a bare-bones chronology now, I know I'll have a lot more to say later.

Brian Massumi at SLSA

2007-11-10T23:04:00.000-08:00

“Signs of Danger: The Political Ontology of Threat”

This was quite a talk. Massumi set out, step by step, the arguments used by Bush and his cronies to justify war in both Afghanistan and Iraq and every other vile act they've committed. And as was lucidly explained, the same trick was used every time: a feeling of threat was created based on what bin Laden/Hussein/terrorists would do if they could. This equation can't be denied with factual evidence because it exists always in a speculative future--no WMDs? Well they would have had them if they could have. No evidence of terrorist acts by those prisoners in Guantanamo? They would have done it if they could have.

The way Massumi described the tactics was often extremely funny, but often I felt I was laughing more in pain than amusement, especially when remembering how hard people worked against our going into Iraq and how that accomplished exactly nothing. In the end though, I hoped he would say something about how humor operated in or against this dynamic of fear, and there was even a question about that. But he didn't address possible counters, humorous or otherwise, and in a way seemed strangely distant from the whole subject.

After this talk, everything was over, the weather was foul and we tried to regroup for dinner and many drinks, as we'd been vowing to really enjoy since Thursday, leading to another sort-of adventure, but that's another story.

Finally news on my blogging chapter, and identity projects more genrally

2007-11-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

Quick burst of good news: finally I've heard from the editor of International Blogging; it's coming out from Peter Lang in 2008 and my chapter will be the conclusion. :-) A draft of the intro is here.

It's weird; I wrote this so long ago and now that it's appearing, my work has moved on in another direction, focusing much more on participation, subversive cultures, and on the institutionalization of discourse around new media. I still work on identity, just not so much national identity by itself. I look at it in other contexts, like in comics, or genre fiction, or video games. Just recently I was searching for articles on this, and found some entries in Henry Jenkins' blog that discuss comics and games and national identity in Poland, which he visited in 2006.

He goes on in later entries to also talk about Russia, Japan, and globalization, but I haven't gotten to those yet. But anyway, he mentions a series generally referred to as the "Witcher" books that sound like I might like them, but they don't seem to be out in English or maybe just not in the US. I'd really like to see what reviewers mean about the stories incorporating national characteristics. The author, Andrzej Sapkowski, seems cool; he even has links to fanfiction--one of the few words I could decipher, since the site is in Polish. But here's another page with some info in English.

Where was I? Oh yeah, identity in genre fiction. Right, so I think I will have to take that up pretty soon.

Back to SLSA -- Code Play panel

2007-11-08T18:06:00.000-08:00

Ok, backing up to talk about what I think was actually the last panel I saw. Speaking were Dene Grigar, Jamie Bono, and, well, I'll get to that later. I'll go out of order...Dene spoke about an interactive kinesthetic system she and others are developing that creates a live game space that they are trying to use in a pedagogical way. The original system was used in dance clubs (and looked really fun for that). The presentation basically described the system, but I would have liked to hear more about how they had actually tried using it. At the end, even though Paweł tried to ask about what kinds of classes or material would work with the system or not, we still didn't get much more detail. I think though that while the right design the system's application beyond obvious subjects and categories, still some kinds of knowledge and classes work better as, say, discussions, or through textual exchanges.

Jamie argued that players who searched out and used cheat codes were little different from scholars who engaged in close reading and who used esoteric textual knowledge to glean further, new, and richer knowledge of the text. That's an interesting proposition and I wish Jamie had gone through just a few examples and really traced the parallels. But as often happens to people speaking about their dissertations, the details (of user behavior in this case) overwhelmed the larger structure some, which I think led to our grilling Jamie at the reception later, wanting further explication.

The most interesting point, I think is the relation between the game authors (!) and players. Clearly those creating the games do deliberately plant easter eggs, trapdoors, and so on, and they rely on gamers to find these hidden treasures and figure out how to exploit them. But more than that, the desire for gamer to play games that contain these kinds of elements have shaped game design--really I wish Mirko had heard this talk; it's right up his alley.

Finally the talk I thought would be most interesting, about how we exist in an info-cloud and where the borders between ourselves and others lie in the all of the communities in which we participate. Now this sounded like it fit right right in with my work, so I was really looking forward to it. Well, the speaker spent the first 20 minutes defining list after list of terms that were all just for background info. Then, in the last 5 minutes or so, he raced through about 20 more slides of what looked like the heart of the talk so quickly that I couldn't even read one word. And I read pretty fast. So I was completely irritated. Thanks goodness it was the last talk (except for Massumi) and I had the reception and pleasant conversation to help revive me.

And by the way, there's a tenure-track job to fill in my department.

2007-11-08T15:23:00.001-08:00

You can read all about it here. The ad is a bit weird and apparently has not made clear how much we need someone who really knows their tech. writing and who knows something about teaching with tech, tech as a cultural object...

Of course we also mention creative writing and TESOL. Sigh. Well, look for yourself.

We interrupt this broadcast of SLSA fun...

2007-11-08T14:53:00.001-08:00

After spending the last two days "putting out fires" in the comp. program thanks to our usual scheduling nightmare, I am now even more behind, dammit. So of course I spent an hour this afternoon reading back issues of the SFRA Review newsletter. And over an hour skyping with a friend on what started as the problems in the introduction to his dissertation and which ended with a much more interesting, but perhaps not as urgent discussion of why video porn, and a lot of netporn especially, is so boring and yet still addictive to the people who watch it--which rarely includes me, but (apparently always) includes him. Also porn and participatory culture, which is also now being discussed on one of the many email lists to which I subscribe, this one for the Institute of Distributed Creativity. And if I want to write run-ons or sentence fragments, I will. grrr.

OK. So maybe more conference news tonight.

Or maybe more scheduling nightmare, since it turns out that the office that's supposed to report to us every term how many courses (minimum) each non-tenured instructor should have, which changes every term, sent us a spreadsheet so poorly designed and labeled, that we ended up using the wrong figures entirely. Which means completely redoing the schedule and recalling all the offers we just made to these teachers. I hate scheduling!

Finally, an open bar!

2007-11-07T18:02:00.001-08:00

Finally, an open bar!
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Here are lots of thirsty conference goers...and look, Brian Massumi in the back!

This was actually a very nice reception, and I just wish we had had longer to talk before the final plenary, or that the plenary had come first--probably a better plan, given the open bar....

SLSA Saturday evening reception

2007-11-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

After the last Saturday panels, there was a nice reception at the Portland Museum of Art. I went over with Paweł and some other SFRA folks; once there we found Istvan, Sherryl, Ed Chang and everyone, actually. We continued talking to Jamie Bono about video game cheat codes...I realize now that I forgot to describe that panel. Damn, now it will be out of sequence...well, anyway.

People had another good chance to talk and I had the feeling that we had all finally been there long enough and gotten to know some people enough that really good conversations were underway--so of course it was the last evening. So, right, cheat codes. We reached something of an impasse on whether or not searching for and using cheat codes should be compared to close reading and/or digging into textual history, partly because we had never spelled out what we meant by close reading and partly because (I think) we were all rather conferenced-out and possibly a little buzzed. I think I need to ask Jamie for a copy of whatever he's actually written on this so far.

Also at this point it was clear that people had settled on who they were hanging out with at the conference--I mean, that while this probably happened by the end of the first day, I could actually see it at this reception. Because this conference was small enough that we all saw each other every day, and because most people went to most sessions, we soon recognized most of the faces. So it was pretty easy to see that the same people were together in panels or at receptions, lunches, and so on.

I find this interesting because I realized some time ago that most professional collaborations began as friendships, or at least between schoolmates, and often between people who were romantically involved. You may be thinking "what about the internet? Doesn't that make it easy to connect?" Actually, I heard a quite convincing talk at New Network Theory in which a study of scientific collaboration had found that they largely occurred between people in close proximity, or who had at least one face two face meeting that began the relationship.

So when these groups form at a conference, I'd bet that within 6 months we could spot the professional results, if we looked for them. I think the need to meet in person suggests something interesting about the importance of embodied experience. More on this after I report on Massumi.

More on SLSA -- Zippy the Pinhead and Will Eisner

2007-11-06T14:45:00.000-08:00

Saturday--another full sleight of panels though I missed the 8:30am strand thanks to the primitive business center at the Holiday Inn. Having been convinced by Paweł and the combined charm of the other SFRA-ers to join, I saved the html form to my computer, edited it, saved it to a usb drive, and figured I could print and mail it at the conference... Well, the old PC was not thrilled with my "high-speed removable storage" since it only had low-speed usb ports, and then the printer to which the computer was connected had a jam. So finally I had to email it to a woman working on the other computer which was connected to another printer... And then I had to walk 4 blocks to the post office for a stamp...

Really it was ridiculous, but by then my rare but powerful stubbornness was fully engaged and I was determined to send that damned form. Which I did, but at the cost of a whole session. Nice walk though.

So the next round I saw was themed around Cartoon Images. The first speaker, Ellen Grabiner, presented "Wild About the Box: The Disruptions of Zippy the Pinhead." This was a really good talk. Not only did Grabiner make interesting point about the way creator Bill Griffith plays with visual conventions in order to subvert our narrative and linguistic expectations in a humorous way; raise real ontological questions; and challenge visual conventions of the comix medium, but I love Zippy and she picked great, hilarious examples. Combining solid analysis with humor is no mean trick. And I think a number of the other people in the audience hadn't encountered Zippy before, and it was nice to see how much they enjoyed it.

Next was a paper by Chris Couch, "The Geometry of Emotion: Doorways in Will Eisner's Comics." I was interested to hear that Chris had been part of Kitchen Sink Press and now was teaching Comp Lit at UMass Amherst, where I did my MA and PhD. Kitchen Sink was such a cool press, not least for their support of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the once embodied Words and Pictures Museum of Northampton. (That was such a great place; I spent so much time entranced by the rotating exhibits and there that I first saw the ever-so-cool Devil Girl chocolate... anyway he quite an interesting talk, once he got going. It was a pretty straightforward analysis of window/door/portal images in Will Eisenberg's comics, which was cool (if only because comics were treated exactly like any other subject of art historical study).

My only quibble is that I didn't really see the science connection, or the code, or anything that connected this paper to SLSA. (Unless we are just going to say the portal metaphor is code enough.) But I suppose it doesn't matter too much, because it was really informative lecture on Eisner--I'll edit this later to add just a few more details on that, after I locate my notes... :P

Finally, the last presenters were talking about I don't know what--nuclear bombs, bio-art, fruit flies, mutations...they spent way too much time on the fruit flies and not nearly enough on the main point. They shall remain nameless.

SF panel 1 at SLSA

2007-11-05T18:14:00.001-08:00

SF panel 1 at SLSA
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Here we see some post-talk discussion. The panels at SLSA all lasted longer than normal, which was great when they only had 3 people on them. There was ample time for questions and since most panels had at least 8 people attending, this was actually useful.

The SF panels were quite good and since many of the interesting SF talks (like Paweł's here) were from people who were in SFRA, I have to think seriously about attending that conference.

2007-11-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

Paweł spoke about Digitized consciousness in Cyberpunk, specifically focusing on Richard Morgan's work. It was a really good close reading (for a change!) because Paweł gave a sufficient introduction the the main things we needed to know about the books to follow the argument, then managed a good balance between general claims and specific examples and explanations, and then made clear why understanding what Morgan was doing is useful. --Because Morgan reinstates the body in the Cyberpunk genre in which it has been traditionally deprecated. And, even better, we learn that one reason for Morgan's doing this is (probably) his Marxist beliefs that of course lead him to think that material circumstances, including embodiment, are of inescapable importance. The economic and political aspects of this fiction sound really cool, and after wards Paweł was raving (a little) about Morgan in the way I know I do about authors I think are just the best, so now I will have to read him for sure. (Follow up: started Woken Furies and really like it. Look for a review in Tart next month.)

The next panel I went to had papers about SciFi heavy metal; the way Shelley's Frankenstein and Huxley's Brave New World are used in debates over cloning; and about the way gadgets are used in films to represent cognition (essentially).

The heavy metal presentation was clear in the way it explained how lyrics, compositional choices, and visual style were used to communicate fears and hopes about technology, but I wish there had been a bit more explanation of the "so what" aspect. I mean,what does this tell us about ourselves, about heavy metal, about our experiences of and attitudes toward technology? Some of that came out in questions, but should have been part of the conclusion, I think.

The cloning discussion was a quite good rhetorical analysis of public debate over cloning--if I were still at MIT it would have been a perfect text for my science writing class. In particular, two important tropes were explored: the monster in society -- the mere existence of a clone will destroy us -- and society as monstrous -- cloning means we have turned into the hellish thing we feared. (And as a corollary will of course enslave and otherwise mistreat the poor clones.)

Finally, a presentation about the brain and memory being represented as a file system and video clips in many many films. Most interesting points: this represents a focus on use rather than architecture, and "gadgets are a technology of the imagination for ordering the imagination."

After this panel, there was another reception at which I hung out with Paweł, Christian, and Sherryl Vint (for who I can't find a personal website, so far) and I think this is where I also first met Istvan Csicsery-Ronay...but no, we were introduced at some point earlier...well anyway. Then we went in to see N. Katherine Hayles. Since she gave the exact same speech as when I saw her at Utrecht, I won't go over it again. Paweł and I muttered a little about that as she hit each familiar point, while trying to stay awake. --The latter got easier when they turned on air-conditioning and it got really chilly. I guess I don't really see anything wrong with it; no one else ever heard it before and it's a pretty good talk.

I was then swept up into a mob of the SFRA folks and we went for Indian food. Really good conversation with Istvan, Paweł, and Jason Ellis. Really glad to have met Istvan and had the chance to talk politics, SF, and teaching, all in the same conversation. This makes me realize how much I miss being able to do that most of the time.

Finally we washed up at the Holiday Inn bar for some drinks and more talking, and so ended the day.

SLSA 2007 -- Thursday Evening plus Friday Panels

2007-11-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

Ok, time to catch up a little. Thursday evening I went to eat with Anthony (my roomie and former colleague from MIT), Paweł (see previous post) and Christian Ulrik Andersen who was in the audience. We had a pretty good dinner and excellent beer at (I think) 3 Dollar Dewey's. Everyone was pretty tired (though I was still on CA time + much coffee) but we went back to the reception. In fact, Paweł, Christian and I, and Rut Jesus, who turned out to be studying in Copenhagen like Christian had done, closed the evening. It was a good conversation.

This conference is turning out very well in that there are so many people here who like tech and lit. and art, and SF. Why did I not know about them years ago? I'm not going to the European SLSA in Berlin 2008, and I'm not even sure I will do SLSA next fall because I only do 2-3 conferences a year now and have to be picky. So while this one was cool, I'll only go to the next if I know some friends will also go again as well. The European one could be in some ways easier because at least it's in the summer.

Anyway, Friday panels. I saw one on Alchemy which was a bit dry--too much time just reviewing images and not enough on the big picture, but at least admitted the influence of Arabic texts, which made me happy. Then a paper on Marcel Duchamp (how was this alchemical?) with an interesting discussion of the alternate identities he created. But, little discussion of how these were related to sexual identities that could not be openly revealed or to more recent instances of alternate identities, like Audacia Ray for example. I left during the last paper because I just couldn't stand to watch the speaker clutching his paper, standing in front of his own projected images...

Then I had lunch with Anthony and Christian -- really good Sushi. Paweł went to review his paper as he was speaking in the first afternoon panel. We were late getting back to SLSA, so I missed the first speaker on the SF panel I went to, but was in time to see the second speaker and Pawel.

So, Gundula Hachmann was speaking about narrative complexity used to understand theoretical insights in physics. Somehow none of the content really stuck. I think she did too much close reading and not enough connecting of detail to big picture--a really common problem it seems.

Guess I'll break this post into several entries as it just keeps growing....Stay tuned for the rest of Friday.