Category Archives: Research

"Appropriate " use of Facebook and similar sites

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In a recent talk, Danah Boyd said that she doesn’t use these social networking sites the way teenagers do, nor should she. Now the first point is inarguable, but the second struck me as rather odd. I don’t see that there is any “should” about it. I mean, call me immature, but while yes, I am studying Facebook and will write about that, I’m also having quite a lot of fun with it.

I spend time sending my friends “drinks,” “throwing sheep” at them, plus messaging, sending links, videos, etc. Not to mention playing that goofy vampire/zombie/werewolf/slayer game. In fact, if it weren’t for my enjoyment of this new channel for social play, I don’t think I’d bother with it at all, though a number of professional and activist groups now have a presence there. That would feel too much like work, and I work all the time anyway.

I’m also trying to explore Second Life, but I find that I’m not very interested in exploring because while the world itself is interesting, since no one I know is there, I’d rather spend my time in virtual locales where I can talk to my friends. Does that make me immature? Is that an inappropriate attitude for a scholar? Well, I don’t think so and given who else is on Facebook and using just as playfully as I, I’m pretty confident in my position.

We’ll see what happens when I stand up and say this in front of a bunch of other scholars at SLSA this week…

Book Project Update

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So I guess I do have a book project; it’s official. –By that I mean that I’m applying for grants to fund the research. So far I’ve applied to be nominated for an NEH Summer stipend; every campus gets to nominate only two, so I have to be selected for nomination before I can even contact the NEH.

Here’s what I said :

Since the mid 90s growing numbers of cultural institutions and post-secondary educational programs devoted to “new media” (as defined by Manuel Castells) have emerged. However, there has been little organized study of their function or of their creation of knowledge about new media and of new media texts themselves. Certain cities, projects, people, or organizations have been studied in isolation by pioneers in the field such as Howard Rheingold, Geert Lovink, and Ned Rossiter, but so far no comprehensive studies have appeared. I intend to continue a study of the new media dispositif in the Netherlands over the next three years. During the award period I intend to make my second visit to the Netherlands to conduct interviews and site visits. I aim by the end of the period to have completed a book proposal that includes 1-2 chapters.
Recent work by Frank Kessler (unpublished seminar paper) suggests that Foucault’s notion of the dispositif may be a fruitful concept to use in understanding the new media scene. Foucault first defined his use of this term in 1977 as follows: “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements (interview 1977).”
Of particular value will be a better understanding of how different philosophies, goals, and choices of new media institutions shape the work they produce and their place with local, regional, and national communities. Foucault went on to say that a dispositif arose in response to an urgent need and this will be another important question to explore: to what need does the new media dispositif respond?
The Netherlands offers a unique opportunity to extend our understanding of the complex relations among the constituents of the new media landscape. According to Peter van den Besselaar, The Netherlands has been on the forefront of both research and cultural production in new media since 1993 when the Digital City was founded in Amsterdam and because since then substantial resources have been invested in education, musea, and other cultural organizations devoted to the creation and study of new media(“The rise and decline of the great Amsterdam digital city,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 67). Thus it now represents a comparatively mature context to study offering at least as complex a dispositif as many geographically larger countries.
I plan to make repeated trips to the Netherlands of about two weeks each over the next few years. In each trip I will conduct new interviews and site visits, and also follow up with previous interviewees to learn the outcomes of plans they have shared during earlier contacts. I have been in touch with my current contacts who are pleased for me to continue my investigations, and I have begun contacting additional groups. Of particular interest is that all of these groups are taking some position on the development of a “creative class;” a debate that is at least several years ahead of a similar transformation in the US, and seems a good predictor of what may happen here, so I certainly will track its development.
Further, because the country is geographically compact, but diverse in both human and organizational populations, many different opportunities for interviews and site visits can be carried out in a reasonable time and at reasonable cost. Additional advantages are being able to carry out all of the research in English, and, because of prior acquaintance with some of people involved, easy access to many institutions and people central to the creation and study of new media in the Netherlands. Ultimately this research will lead to a better understanding of how new media dispostifs work, and yield a better idea of how certain organizational or personal strategies contribute to the evolution of the cultural and educational institutions involved, over time. My preliminary work with these groups and the individuals involved in them has convinced me that a more comprehensive study in the Netherlands would produce a valuable new understanding of how a variety of factors shape the new media dispositif, not just in the Netherlands but in general.

I am a "third back-up"

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No, I’m not talking about computers. A friend’s wife is expecting a baby and they already have a little girl who is about 18 months old, so when the baby comes, I am 3rd in line to watch the little girl. –of the three of us on the list, my own kids are youngest, so I guess that makes me least eligible, or something like that. My own require the most attention, this actually means, which I hope is a function of age. Anyway, my friend is quite anxious because if his wife needs a C-section, she won’t be able to lift either baby for about 10 days, my friend works full-time, and their families are far away. He asked “what will we do?” And I said, “you call me, and M, and S, and T, (other friends) and you ask for help, of course.” Parents know that you have to help other parents because you have to be able to trust others will help you, and it’s the right thing anyway.

–I’m also thinking about how no one ever flames parents for asking newbie questions, which we all have done, in spite of reading all the manuals and guides obsessively. The first thing parents learn is that infants are full of buggy software, installing new apps never goes as planned, predicting up or down-time is impossible, and the documentation never seems to cover your exact problem, the error messages are well nigh unintelligible (voice recognition training takes forever). Even input and output are pretty unreliable.

Really, after kids, computers are an f-ing cakewalk.

I bring all this up because it occurred to me that in all the discussion of how communities work, and why some people will help others with computer stuff for free, or put effort into communities for free, this is one model I’ve never heard mentioned. That is, I think just about anyone who has had children understands that sometimes you have to just ask for help without knowing if you’ll ever be able to repay it, and sometimes you offer help without worrying about being repaid. Both cases require swallowing your pride, I’d say. Maybe that’s why it’s not discussed, because people are so firm in believing that net culture is all about reputation. (I assume it’s not lack of experience, because net/computer/whatever scholars can’t all be childless!) And people think the web is all about impatience; but regardless of anything else, parenting requires incredible patience for years on end, with consistently insufficient sleep.

Also, thinking about intellectual property, our children represent perhaps the only group to whom most of us will give money, time, energy, and maybe most important, ideas, without the least concern about who gets the credit. Maybe this last sounds silly, but it’s rather novel for an academic who lives and prospers on the strength of her ideas (or doesn’t).

Well, I think the failure to consider parenting as a useful behavioral model might represent a blindspot in the research. Not sure yet; now that I’ve thought of the possibility, I have to watch and see if it seems to be borne out. (so to speak. *g*)

The transformation of Literary and Media Studies

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Finally I have a chance to finish my report on Katherine Hayles; I’m sure you must all be relieved, waiting with baited breath as you were. Or weren’t you? tsk tsk. Well, I will finish it for my own satisfaction then.

After laying out her argument for human-computer interaction being an example of intermediation, or emergent complexity (or at least having the potential to so be) Hayles then claimed that “consciousness is not the expression of a coherent unified self, but is the narrative that sutures together a fragmented collection of multiple agents working simultaneously.” Based on my own fairly extensive research in neuroscience, I can say that this is indeed what is believed, and has been believed for since around 1997 at least. She cites Daniel Dennet.

Some E-lit takes a form that enacts this view: for example Slipping Glimpse by Stephanie Strickland, work by Cynthia Lawson, and by Jaramillo.

Hermeneutics alone can’t do the bridgework needed for E-lit (I know of one friend who might disagree…) and this has led to a profound transformation of traditional disciplines under the pressure of electronic media. Here we ran out of time, so unfortunately rather than elaborating on the above examples or explaining further about this transformation, Hayles said only that Literary and Media studies should be part of this conversation, rather than being shunted aside by new fields or by the sciences themselves.

And lastly a plug for the new E-Lit Anthology.

Of course there were a few questions, but the most interesting was from Samuel Weber who asked if meaning had to equal unity–what about the 7 types of ambiguity, for example, and isn’t hermeneutics all about interpreting? (refering to here early point that meaning depends on the device doing the interpretation). Hayles answered that there has been a shift in (or an expansion of) “interpretation” from high level cognition to machine interpretation. She then quoted Emo Phillips: “I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ, but then I thought about who was telling me this.”

It was a funny response, but I don’t think Weber is so easily answered as all that, and while ultimately I could imagine possibly agreeing with Hayles, I really need to hear or read more about the latter stages of her argument.

Overall this was a good talk in the clarity of explanation and competence of its delivery, but I really wish we had gotten farther than just laying the groundwork because of course it’s her last claims about hermeneutics and the transformation of the disciplines that really need to be argued, rather than just explained. Better yet if she had a paper out somewhere that went into more detail. But so far she doesn’t, that I could find, and I checked. If anyone knows of one, please tell me!

More on Hayles

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Ok, so having introduced the idea of emergent complexity and it’s requirements, Hayles next started talking about analogies as pattern recognition. She reminded us of Douglas Hofstader’s claim that all “cognition is recognition.” If recognizing patterns is what leads to understanding analogies, well so what? She gave some examples first of human ability to understand analogies.

If ABC =>ABD
then WXY=>?
of course WXZ.

But then what would the next term be? everyone in the audience immediately suggested WXA, because we know that typically lettering starts over (or possibly doubles, but I guess we all assumed only three-letter combinations were allowed).

The machine comes up with:

WXZ=>XY
WXZ=>WXZZ
WXY=>WXA

So it eventually reached the same solution–Hayles didn’t say exactly how they “learned” or whether it was just random, and now I wish I’d asked… Then she gave an example of Morse code which combined digital (substituting dots and dashes for letters) with analog (using spaces to represent pauses) so that space=time. By contrast, binary code is all digital in which space (absence) must be represented by an actual term. She brought up Morse code to demonstrate that we all understood the spaces to represent spaces or pauses between words because of implicit assumptions based on homologies between Morse code and our everyday experience of speech.

The invisible assumptions we make about one medium are made visible when we change to a media that doesn’t support the homology behind the assumption.

Next she refers to Ed Fredkin’s notion that “the meaning of information is given by the process that interprets it.” By interpretation she means for example the way an MP3 player interprets digital information and interfaces with some other device to produce sound, but we can also say this about cognition. –Question, is this a metaphor, or a model? I think she means it to be a model.

We experience sensory input which activates neuronal groups that then activate maps, which activate larger cognitive structures, which eventually add up as cognition (recognize this pattern?).

If we go along with Fredkin, then we shift our emphasis from product to process (of course we did this in Comp. Theory years ago), from intentionality to consciousness, to “aboutness” as a spectrum….meaning is de-anthropomorphized. I hope I didn’t miss something important in that ellipses in my notes.

Having said all of this, humans and computers interacting meet the conditions for emergent complexity or intermediation. Certain works of E-literature foreground this as content as well as process. The evolution of E-literature also exemplifies a dynamic heterarchy (see the outline of conditions in my previous post)as we adopt new media. So the codex book was for storage and transmission of ideas; iit was a vehicle for cognitions. The computer though is an active cognitive agent–that is, it acts upon data and doesn’t just store or transmit it.

Ok, I only have one more page of notes, but it’s the most complex, so it must wait until tomorrow. At the earliest!

I leave tomorrow and while I’m mostly packed, I may need the morning to make sure everything is organized before I leave around 9:30 to get the tram, to get the train, to be at Schiphol by 11:30 for my 2pm flight. Tot ziens!

A brief interruption of the timeline…

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Before I finish reporting on Worm, I have to pause and catch up on some earlier stuff, before I forget everything, so this entry will be on Katherine Hayles’ keynote speech at the Re-mediating Literature conference that I covered very generally a few posts back.

Ok, she had a really clearly laid out talk with started with an explanation of emergent complexity and what conditions produce it. Here is an overview of her points, closely paraphrased from her slides (finally, someone who did a simple PPT presentation with no bugs):

–The universe is fundamentally computational (Wolfram)
*examples of cellular automata, fractals
–Emergence, complex behaviors arising spontaneously and unpredictably from simple computational rules
*example cute program with 24 independent agents to which various rules can be applied (I wonder if she coded that herself?)

But, digital mechanisms can’t be the whole story; digital and analog cooperate, for example in DNA strand replication, which is digital, only creates a practical or concrete result when it is expressed through protein-folding, which is an analog process. Analog is good at transferring information while digital is good at error control and both are essential in the case of DNA.

But these two processes affect each other and we see evolving complexity across levels–“dynamic heterarchies.”

Feed forward and feedback loops in dynamically interconnecting media. In other words, First level primitives interact and the results of those interactions become second level primitives, and so on. For example, the interaction of sub-atomic particles make atoms, the atoms interact to form molecules, and the molecules interact to form proteins. But, activity on any level reaches not just those right about or below, but may reach through levels as well.

Another example is pregnancy; the mother is producing the fetus, but at the same time, the fetus is re-engineering the mother. –This example really struck me because it’s really quite interesting the way developments in the fetus trigger further changes in the mother, and at the same time the fetus is reacting to changes in the environment (the mother) who mediates changes in the external environment, such as what is present in the air or the water or the food she takes in.

So intermediation has these crucial components:

–Different levels of complexity
–Different media
–Re-representation
–Heterarchical dynamics

all of which lead to emergent complexity. Damn, still 4 pages of notes left, but I will pause here. So remember, emergent complexity comes from dynamic intermediation.

at de Waag Society for Old and New Media

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Today I went to visit de Waag and met with Bart Tunnissen and Sher Doruff who are finance manager and head of the research dissemination program, respectively. This was an interesting meeting because de Waag takes a very different approach from either Piet Zwart or V2; though they conduct research they are not academic and they have a very broad target audience, and have many community connections. Though they have not been around for so very long–11 years, they have become very important in shaping the agenda for the “creative industry” in the Netherlands, in part it seems because their founder and director general, Marleen Stikker earlier created the “Digital City” in Amsterdam, and so has been a real pioneer in this area. Also, like V2_, they have established a reputation for good practice and innovation.

So where to begin, well Bart gave a brief run-through on the history, but that’s on the website so I won’t repeat it. Mostly they talked about how they go about connecting with the community, choosing projects and carrying them out, and then some about funding and those challenges. They get 6-10 proposals per week and make a first pass through them to look for those that will a)match one of the 4 domains and 6 programs they have chosen to focus on, and b) appear to have a good chance of really succeeding–I’m not sure how they measure that though, except it may mean they can create new knowledge that eventually leads to a new product heading to market.

Bringing products to market seems to be one of the bigger challenges for de Waag, because the Netherlands doesn’t have so many venture capitalist types (comparatively). –After the tech crash I’m not sure how easy it is anywhere, really. This is one way the are really different from PZI and V2_ though, in having this as a goal. But they also emphasized that you can’t start working with a partner and have profit as a goal, or why would that partner trust your intentions? Intellectual Property issues are thus a double concern for them, both in theory but also in their practice. –In fact I think this must be quite tricky and I will have to email some follow up questions because de Waag really emphasizes what they call a “user as designer” approach, so if something does eventually end up being developed for the market, then what? Who is the designer and to be blunt, who profits? I admire the approach for its Freirean quality, and I think it certainly would strengthen the commitment from community groups to a project, and strengthen ties between them and de Waag, besides of course being more educational for everyone. I appreciate though how balancing different concerns takes real skill.

Well, there is more to say, but today Remediating Lit. starts and I have to get ready for the trip to Utrecht.

Alex Adriaansen at V2_

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This afternoon I had a lengthy meeting with Alex Adriaansen, director at V2_ ; he could not have been more generous with his time or forthcoming with his views about the context for New Media studies in the Netherlands or the challenges they face. So I will note it all down before I forget!

First, V2_ has been around for 25 years and that means that by now they have established a reputation as doing interesting, edgy things and also having good practices. Alex emphasized how important it was to them to be truly interdisciplinary themselves, and this brings it’s own challenges because scientists have one way of doing things and, people concerned with business have another, and artists still another, and so on. But he felt this was something they had succeeded in working out over the years, and now these other groups respect their way of doing things.

Another characteristic of the Dutch context is the focus on projects rather than on structural funding schemes for the long term. Alex attributes this to politicians and business people tending to take a short view that always judges success by some concrete result, rather than on what is learned or on long-term possibilities. The problem for V2_, (or any organisation, because I see this in the US as well) is that you have to always follow whatever trend the funding agency is hot for, which means first that you may not be able to really follow through on ideas that need more time, and, perhaps a greater problem, you can get caught up iin the hype so that you lose your critical perspective. I’ve heard this from Florian at Piet Zwart as well, and I will be sure to check on it at De Waag tomorrow.

But Alex felt that they were navigating these challenges successfully. I think V2_ audience may be less prone to falling for hype as well, because most of their programs are aimed at the “creative class” meaning artists, designers, theoreticians, etc. Except for the DEAF Festival, they aren’t very concerned with reaching a wide audience. However, they have decided to strengthen their ties to some educational institutions. They have a pretty strong connection to Piet Zwart MDMA already, and now they are pursuing a PhD programs with some universities (he didn’t say which). I think that sounds like a great idea, and it makes me wish I had time to take on another degree!

The biggest challenge Alex sees ahead for V2_ is reorganizing itself so that it can on the one hand strengthen it’s artistic focus, but on the other build on the more “practical” possibilities suggested by their research. So I look forward to seeing what happens in the next year. –Or rather the next four, as these things go in the Netherlands.

In addition to talking about V2_, we also talked about the program under development at my school, CSU Stanislaus, and the challenges we face in being rather isolated from any big cities or cultural institutions. He suggested looking at the IAMAS program in Japan; from their website, IAMAS is:

AMAS consists of two schools: the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences. The Institute is solely a graduate school (for obtaining a Masters Degree) and has one faculty and one course, namely Media Creations. There are 20 students in each year of the course. The Academy is a vocational college accepting 30 students each year who must have at least graduated from high school.

That sounds like an interesting program to investigate.

In addition to thanking Alex for his time, and for sharing of the electronic proceedings of DEAF with me, I also have to thank him for being so gracious about my being almost an hour late! On my way there I got completely loast in the tram system and every time I thought I figured it out, I went even more wrong. Finally I just took the Metro, which I seem to understand better. Lucky for me I had already purchased an OV-chipkaart, which iis a smart card for the metro, buses, and trams. My strippenkaart would never have lasted through that maze, and then I would have had to search for a shop to buy one… But anyway, all’s well that ends well.

I may edit this later if I realize I’ve forgotten something.

Reflections on New Media/Cyberculture studies

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During the first conference and in many of my conversations with people connected to Piet Zwart, the question keeps coming up about what exactly we are all doing in this field. Should we be studying the technology? The creative practices? The sociology? Thank God I’m in rhetoric–there’s nothing like a meta-field to happily encompass interests (like mine) that might generously be described as broad…maybe fragmented is more accurate…

But back to the question, why do we study these things? I think that’s the big question, and while we don’t have to have the same answer, I don’t see many people talking about the question at all. There seems to be an idea that we all have already agreed that computer tech, the internet, the web, are worth studying by definition. –Well, you could argue that anything produced by people is worth studying, certainly that’s a long-standing view of cultural studies. But I think we have to make the case a bit more clearly than that. Maybe I will make this a central question in my interviews.

Later last Friday

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So those first parallel sessions ran so late–well, the whole schedule was already running behind–that when we got down to lunch there was almost none left, and by the time it was refilled, I had about 5 minutes to eat before I had to find the session where I was speaking. But I did find it. I did have a nice if brief chat with Mirko Schäfer before/during that abbreviated lunch. He says he’ll be at the Piet Zwart graduation show; I hope we meet up there and can talk further. Anyway. My panel was ok; the other talks were interesting, and mine went fine, but we each only had 15 minutes, which is a nuisance, and our moderator didn’t cut people off, so we lost most of the time we could have used for Q & A. We still had some, but a couple of people took all of it up…

Anyway, then I had to dash in order to catch the 5:26 train back to Rotterdam, so I could be in time for the opening of the Piet Zwart MDMA first-year show at V2. Except that there was some big accident on the line right outside Rotterdam Centraal, so no trains could go through Rotterdam… Well, after scrambling around trying to figure out another route, finally it’s announced that anyone bound for Rotterdam should go to this other track…so I get that train and get to R’dam at 7:15 instead of 6:30. The show was scheduled to start at 7, so I run through the station and grab a taxi, and get there at 7:30. Luckily (for me) they are running late too, so I didn’t miss anything. –But it was strange because I thought the Dutch were so punctual!

The show was really good, an impressive demonstration of hardware hacking and in some cases reflection on the web/internet, or on our relationships with “new” media. I had the chance to speak at length with a student about to graduate, which was really informative and gave me a very good impression of the program. –Also good to see that graduating students would come to the first-year show. I will post pictures or links to others’ pictures later.

At the show I got to meet Jaromil, which was an unexpected treat. He’s a hacker/artist/activist from Amsterdam who has released a lot of free software specifically designed for media artists and also has been a teacher at Piet Zwart. We had a really good conversation about teaching; what students need or don’t. So I ended up staying until about 10 or 11, and then I was starving because I never really got any dinner during my mad dash back to R’dam. Luckily some people, including Jaromil and Florian, were going for Roti around the corner, so I went along. It was yummy, and we all talked more about US politics and political activism (or lack thereof). A bunch of the students wandered in and it was like the show was spilling into the neighborhood. Good thing I could sleep in on Saturday.

More on Saturday later. Now I need food.