Webb’s Media

Though the Prologue to Manovich’s Language for New Media is a little abstract, it contextualizes “new media” within a historical context. The Man With a Movie Camera, the film that Manovich deconstructs, was made in 1929. Manovich uses still images from the film to frame the underlying characteristics of new media. Though he recognizes the contributions and aspirations of filmmakers like Vertov to fracture existing relationships between audience and film, Manovich does not consider film per se to be a “new media.”

Though I am aware there are semantic reasons for referring to “new media,” it is a messy term. The most inherent aspect of what makes it “new” has nothing to do with time per se. The idea of hypertext, for example, is not “new” exactly. Engelbart, the father of HCI, was conceptualizing how hypertext would function in the late 1960s. “The Mother of all Demos” was conducted in 1968 and should look very familiar to anyone familiar with how computers process data.

The shift from traditional media forms to “new” or digital media has fractured the transmission model of communication, especially in terms of mass communication. Now end-users (aka, digital citizens) have choices about what they want to “consume,” as well as when, with whom, and for how long.

But consumption really isn’t the most interesting part. With digital media, we all have the option to play along too. Ben notes the significance of video games as complex environments. In addition, we all have access to mix, mashup, and redistribute textual, visual, or video content. We can instantly share information via wikis, blogs, twitter, SMS to any number of people from our closest friends to a global community. Though we have this capability, how many of us actually take advantage of the possibilities though?

One important aspect of effective design, I believe, is giving users a clear choice. On my Mac, when I install software updates, the above demonstrates the choices given to me. What if I am in the middle of something? I am provided with only two options, both of which amount to the same result–I have to stop what I am doing to accommodate the software updates. Whenever a user is given choices, the choices should result in different outcomes (to avoid redundancy) and should take into account assumptions a user will make. In this case, a logical assumption is that if I don’t want to restart, my other option would be to wait until later to restart. By providing that option, the designer can minimize potential user error.

If you are wondering, no I have not ever pressed either button and accidentally restarted or shut down. But every time I have encountered this message, I have wondered how it passed usability testing.

One of the most pervasive interactive, dynamic media forms is the blog. Last week in class, everyone set up blogs here on wordpress, and we explored some other essential “Web 2.0″ tools including del.icio.us and technorati.

While blogging may seem like just a simple journaling exercise, it can be very, very different. Notice I say “can.” Not everyone starts blogging with the idea of developing a conversation with other bloggers and with visitors to the blog–but in the course of this semester we will explore blogs with this ultimate goal in mind. This creates both exciting opportunities and a need for caution. You have an audience, and the whole idea of blogging is that you would cultivate and interact with your audience. In fact, audience may not be the appropriate word for the readership of a blog. A popular blog facilitates an involved community of readers.

One of the most effective ways to get a better sense of what is involved in blogging is to read what others have written about it. In On Becoming A Good Blogger, Shai Collins offers helpful insight in this regard. Twenty Tips for Good Blogging also gives important perspective to effective blogging habits.

Posting openly online does leave potential for misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or sometimes just plain malicious behavior. It can be disconcerting at first when someone comments on your words or critiques your words. This will get easier over time. Keep in mind too that with trackbacks in blogs, if you post a critique of someone else’s writing on your own blog, the original author will often easily find it. For this reason, when you are referring to the writings of others, it is best to keep a constructive tone to the writing.

It doesn’t happen often, but there are times when blogging can result in vicious personal attacks. One such example was a widely denounced personal attack on Kathy Sierra. At the time of those attacks, a movement developed for a blogger code of conduct.

You may already be aware that computer-mediated communication can be more unclear because of the lack of verbal cues inherent in face-to-face communication paired with the ease of rapid response, which can result in an escalation of emotion very quickly. As we continue to explore new media over the course of this semester, this will be important to remember.

One of the requirements I gave in the list of three blogs to link to this week was to locate an academic blog. Though it would be great if members of the class were to identify purely academic blogs, I mostly wanted to push people towards locating blogs where people were writing intellectually stimulating commentary. I have no problem with blogs that focus on more the matters of daily life, and in fact I enjoy them, and believe they serve a social purpose. However, for a college course, I would hope that are striving to locate a specific type of content from the midst of all kinds of information that we can find online.

In no particular order:

apophenia: danah boyd comments on her research in the areas of social networking and other new media phenomena, particularly, I believe, from a sociological perspective.

Confessions of an Aca-fan: Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, among numerous other books, writes about new media and convergence, particularly fan culture and transmedia development.

jill/txt:  Jill Walker Rettberg comments on online storytelling, among other topics.

theory.is.the.reason:  Kevin Lim writes about social technology.

grand text auto: A group blog, whereby several new media artists–Mary Flanagan, Michael Matea, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin– comment on the intersection of art and new media.

Greg starts out this blogging endeavor with a post about reading. There are a number of ideas mingled in the post from computer technology making information more readily available to the fact that there is so much information out there. “And,” says Greg, “it’s because there is so much to do on a computer that people are straying away from books and other print media.”

I am not anti-book by any means. I majored in English literature as an undergraduate student myself because I love books. I move boxes of them with what seems like annual moves, and even worse my husband has art books. Do you know how heavy those books are? Another caveat, not only do we have tons of books, but my husband is a printmaker. In other words, paper-based things go on at home.  But equating with the content of books with the need to read words on a page is missing the point. The recently released Amazon Kindle is one of the steps we are making as a society towards digital distribution of the written word. Is a book less of a book if it is distributed electronically?

The message I am really getting from Greg’s post is this: The type of reading where one person engages quietly and reflectively with a text *might* best be experienced with a printed page.  There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it is not just the literary engagement with the text that is important, it is developing an attention span to engage with something that lasts more than 30 seconds.

Blogging here from iDMAa in Philadelphia, sitting in a session entitled Art in a Virtual World: A River of Second Life. Yes, the speaker has leveraged the power of SL by having a panel, of potentially interesting people to comment on this topic. This is my first time hearing the new voice application, and it’s mostly contributed to giving me a phenomenal headache. It is 2:20, we are 20 minutes in, and I have learned nothing except that bandwidth is a HUGE issue with SL.

For anyone who has cared to listen to me babble about my dissertation, one of the biggest findings was that duh! technical problems redirect goals constantly. Where breakdowns occur, the task focus shifts from the original issue to the technology and troubleshooting a problem. Though it is obvious, unless I want my students to focus on this phenomenon, that seems to be what I learn about the most when dealing with Second Life. I know cool things go on in this virtual world, I just find the evangelism for the potential often outweighs any evident pedagogical gains.

At least we ditched the crapalicious sound reverb from the first speaker. Maybe my headache can subside.

Disneyland is not, in fact, burning, but that is because Walt Disney has a contract with g-d to ensure that such calamities do not infringe on corporate profits. For this reason, conference planning is centered around Disney properties when it comes to AECT’s annual conference. This year Anaheim, next year Orlando…perfect. We have no worries of natural disaster.

Sorry, I’m a little punchy. It’s only the first full day of general sessions, but I’m already a little conferenced out.

Last night the keynote with Stephen Downes was interesting, though he seemed to get a little distracted by the technology he was integrating. I would love to see the script of the messages flashed on the screen behind him by the audience. At one point there was a discussion of whether learning was being facilitated by the visibilization of the audience’s mental narrative, but I think that was just the point. At the same time Downes was discussing learning as network, the comments/thoughts/mental impulses of the audience were being quietly shared with the entire room. It was functionally different, I think, than had a text chat been coordinated only for those with a computer. That way, the narrative is hidden, a secret thread for those with access. The way it was set up in the lecture, the entire audience is privy to the discussion. Did I learn from the use of this technology–well, that depends. Of course, we are always learning. As someone commented during the discussion, “can I turn learning off?” If my internet had been working the whole time, I would have enjoyed it more. I don’t think it’s just game-playing or gimmick, people like to be clever and like to share their thoughts, at least some of the people like this some of the time. Adding this channel to the presentation provided a multi-layered presentation, where I could choose to cognitively engage with Downes’ content or textually-verbally engage with others in the audience about the content or cognitively engage with both.

I fortuitously aggregated upon the essay Vernacular 2.0, which discusses the development of user expression as it has morphed from the 90s into the 2000s. First, her observation: “The space that we’ve researched as a new medium for the last ten years has turned into the most mass medium of them all” rings so true that it gives me pause. But the internet is not mass media as we understand that even somewhat neologistic term, given the relatively short context of “mass communication.” Thus, should a construct of mass communication whereby a few formulate and communicate messages to many be modified? Has what we call “new” media, for lack of a better term really, actually been just a new mass communication tool that has flipped all the rules of mass communication around? Maybe this is just semantics. Certainly, with the direction that “new” media has gone, with the proliferation of tools at the “common” person’s disposal, the power of mass communication is placed in the hands of a whole lot more people. Whether their message will be part of a mass communication message will depend on a number of other factors, but certainly the whole “famous to 15 people” may be true. (Although this confounds the meaning of fame and suggests it has nothing to do with mass anything but instead social distance?)
As usual, I digress. What Lialina’s Vernacular 2.0 article brought to the forefront of my thoughts is the increasingly intensified expectations for web presence today. An early assertion in the article, picking up from earlier observations about home page construction and early user expression in web environments is about the usurping from ordinary users:

“It is also clear now who owns the home with the garden and who are the gnomes grimacing on a manicured lawn in the company of plaster ducks and real flowers.” - From Vernacular 2.0

Ok, pulling that quote out of the context that abruptly requires you, the reader, to head to the essay and figure out why we’re talking about gnomes in the first place, but essentially the idea is that a home page was never analogous to a home, but to a gnome hanging out in the garden outside the home. Enter Web 2.0 interfaces: google pages, myspace, etc., and suddenly the garden gnome/traditional home page is a duck out of water among the corporatized, more standardized designs.

Certainly, on the one hand, the availability of these tools has given users a whole lot more robust usability. Whereas with a standard traditional web page, if the page got big, one struggled with file management underneath the surface, today it is possible to set up a CMS and create a database-driven web-site, where the user doesn’t have to concern themself with back-end data management. But I hear what Lialina is saying loud and clear, and for me it begs a larger question: what skills are necessary to move from an amateur to a specialist in “new media?” If you have students developing a home page, which is so 1995, is this a valuable skill and necessary step in the process of learning, or is it so old school as to be obsolete? My web design abilities grew up simultaneously with the medium, to an extent, so to me it has been a natural progression, but if one were to come in without that context, does the whole big world of creating art, objects, communication, etc. for the web seem overwhelming? Or does it seem touch-of-a-button easy as all the message-creator needs to do is learn to exploit existing tools? Which is it? Or can it be both?

I’m not sure how much my comments are adding to the discussion, but there is another dimension to Cool Cat Teacher’s assertion that kids need to be taught “digital citizenship” and Downes’ response. First, I believe that CCT was talking about information literacy rather than digital citizenship. Reverting to a semantical discussion may just infuriate those who already dislike the “all talk, no action” angle, but to me it is an important distinction. Furthermore, I think if there is any area that formal education is striving to integrate, it is information literacy. To me it is not shocking at all that a 7th grader would visit a website and consider it “published” and therefore reliable. On the other hand, it would seem that anyone interacting with the 7th grader over the information in the site should be equipped to question why he feels this is or is not a reliable source.

On the other hand promoting digital citizenship seems much broader and something that schools have not emphasized as much to date. Digital citizenship implies that the 7th grader is not only consuming information on the Internet, s/he is then synthesizing and creating new information and contributing to the digital body of knowledge, as it were. Am I off here?

In addition, I understand where CCT’s frustration is coming from. At the same time, that frustration seems rooted in a sense that this is a common sense issue– we just need to teach kids what is “right information” and “wrong information” and they will be edumacated. Unfortunately, at least as far as I’m concerned, there is a lot more nuance to navigating all of the information in our world. I have found that the instincts of many are that they just want to know what is true and untrue, they don’t want to have to think about it too much. However, in a world of multiple perspectives where we can all participate in the creation of information, there is not a choice about whether or not to navigate the gray areas and develop an ability to be more nuanced. Frankly, I don’t disagree with CCT’s son’s inclusion of alternate theories in regard to 9/11, but these assertions HAVE to be contextualized in the source of that information and couched in language such as “some people believe” and “though highly doubtful” or even “there is little evidence to support” to demonstrate the uncertainty of this information. Again, I’m thinking this is more about information literacy than digital citizenship. Thoughts?

“Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.” -From A Cyborg Manifesto

What are people learning when they engage in activity, interaction, and communication in Second Life? Beyond the question of whether there is a demand for learning English in SL, there is a larger question of how the tool, in this case a complex virtual world, and an understanding of a way of being within the context of the use of that tool, is an important question when we embark down this path.

What are our “historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies” when we start to engage with each other in virtual, increasingly multi-dimensional worlds? In the physical world, we have histories, individual and communal, that underlie our interactions. We have the ability to formulate abstract communications with each other, disembodied interactions, through written language. With the development of communications technologies we have been able to modify to more “bodied” exchanges, where the nuance of tone, pitch, and articulation in a voiced interaction convey more embodiment than words on a page, but less than an interaction with the whole person.

The development of information communication technology, the ability to digitize both written text and spoken information has fractured our sense of “distance” and “presence.” Whereas these were previously, at least colloquially, measures of space and time, we can be both distant and present with others across physical space and chronological time. But how is this new “enforced meaning” changing our communication? How does a shift from a visual online world (how I will loosely label our text/image-based internet) to a tactile online world (borrowing from McLuhan’s definition whereby “tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object“)?
One question in regards to teaching and learning in Second Life specifically is, how does the culture of that virtual world impacts the communicative process? Another question I would ask is how participation in a virtual world such as SL changes the participant, and is the way the participant is changed– the way they are forced to confront their identity and engage in communicative action– something that should be imposed on someone in the same manner we are all required to be participants in the physical world? What kind of disclaimer should be provided for learners who are required through coursework to join these burgeoning and wholly immersive tactile worlds?

I bring up this issue for several reasons:

1) Because much of the research and exploration of using virtual worlds such as SL for teaching and learning appears predicated on a wholly technologically deterministic approach whereby it has been created for us, so we must use it. Or from a technological utopianistic view that online we can explore these new identities in a wonderful way that doesn’t need to be critiqued. I haven’t seen a whole lot of critique of what ways of being are being introduced to students who engage in SL.

2) In the one class where the issue of SL has been brought up this semester, a student mentioned it as this “place online, where like, people live their lives and spend real money” with a tone as if to skeptically indicate that s/he had heard of this, but does such a thing really exist?

3) Capitalistic values (that whole spending real money aspect) are inherently and obviously perpetuated in the SL environment, and that may or may not be appropriate for language learning and/or other educational endeavors. Maybe, as English is the current lingua franca of business, that makes it the perfect learning environment for English.

And on that note, with #3 tying nicely back into more questions of how SL perpetuates or breaks previous historical patterns, I will break in search of lunch…