beginning of class free-write on 4/27/09

I would argue that blogs only bring on the decay of the old system of mass media, the one dominated by television news, newspapers, and radio. I do not think that blogs replace mass media because I think of blogs as mass media. The blogosphere is, after all, massive and it is media. However, because of the ability of people to create their own news in the sense of reporting on things themselves, and giving their own bias to that news, I find that the older forms of mass media are becoming irrelevant. Essentially, it is easier and more fun for a person to read an article about a news event that is written by someone who shares the reader's point of view. Often, the mass media news only reflects very general political or cultural biases and doesn't report on a lot of things that certain people strongly care about. Therefore, it is easier and more useful for a person to find a blog that is written by someone who shares their views and writes about news items that matter to the particular reader. I would say that this is why blogs are replacing the old form of mass media.

Web 2.0

This week I read "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse" by Geert Lovink (online) + "The Machine is Us/ing Us" + "Social Sematics in a Networked Space." Mostly, I was influenced by "The Machine is Us/ing Us," because of the demonstrative manner it had in showing it's content. The video was about web 2.0 and it was viewed by me on web 2.0, it being a youtube video. The video got me thinking, as I'm sure it intended, about the nature of what the internet could become in the future. Furthering these thoughts was "Social Semantics in a Networked Space." The authors' Italian is better than their English, I'm sure, but the points they made were fairly well thought out. Chiefly, the idea of the separation of message and information. The authors describe the message as "how something is written" and the information as "what is written." This to me goes hand in hand with the separation of form and content as discussed in the youtube video mentioned above. In the video, it was demonstrated that the content of a website is programmed independently of form such that the content can seemlessly linked or inserted anywhere. Essentially, the content in this case would be the information, "what is said." This means that the form is the message. If this is the case, then in web 2.0 we are losing the message, the context as it were, and simply seeing the information. This could mean that internet culture and internet communications become contextless. Essentially, the internet would be a place where context has no meaning, or it has every meaning, such that in a communication with a person that the messenger has only internet contact with, information is completely free to flow: free of societally constructed contexts. On the internet, what is considered socially awkward? Is there anything? The beauty of this is that the internet makes the freedom of information truly free. A person can ask anyone at any time anything and can get an answer that is true.

technotext

My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Kathryn Hayles as well as Writing Machines also by N. Kathryn Hayles provided a good read and an especially meaningful one because I used the computer to read them. This allowed me to understand better what they were describing in the text in terms of linkages between the meaning of the text and the medium that the text is in. For example, I had to read both of the books in the hard copy first because not every page was available for free online. This kind of limitation, as well as the mode of scrolling through the pages enabled for much faster jumping between pages and one could actually see any two pages simultaneously. Therefore, it transformed both books into hypertexts, where in their hard copy, they are simply regular old texts. The conditions for them to qualify as hypertext, according to Writing Machines were satisfied and that made understanding these conditions quite simple. However, I particularly loved the Anipoems by Ana Maria Uribe and The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans. The Anipoems almost all made me laugh because they were so basic but each one was like a puzzle such that at first it was hard to understand. When one is expecting to see centaurs but a screen full of the letter “h” appears, it is difficult to interpret what the letter “h” has to do with centaurs. Essentially, instead of looking at the letter and seeing its shape, I read it. It brought the realization that I am truly programmed, without thinking, to associate that particular shape with a meaning or an idea: the sound that “h” makes in English. Therefore, it took me just a few seconds to realize that the “h” really does look like a centaur and the fact that there were many on the page made it look like a herd of centaurs. This realization also made looking at the Host of Halfties, Shoal of Mermaids, and Flock of Angles a lot easier to comprehend. Where these anipoems truly shine, however, is in their poetic value. They are whimsical and humorous and convey a sense of wonder at the internet and at digital animating of text and how seemingly limitless it is. Further, they are very fitting in terms of what could be considered “internet culture.” They are very sarcastic, creative, and light-hearted and these are all qualities that I associate with internet culture. The Dreamlife of Letters is another great example of internet culture and the creative possibilities associated with digital texts. Alphabetizing the words of a text by another author and then presenting them in this manner draws equal attention to the words themselves as well as the individual letters. Further, because of the digital medium of the text, the letters and words are able to move, even if not interacting directly with the watcher, and thus convey in motion the meaning of both the letter and word.

Book Arts

Reading both Writing Machines by N. Kathryn Hayles and Johanna Drucker's Century of Artist Books was quite eye opening to me because it made me think immediately of William Blake, whose internet archive was the other link on the assignment website. I had first encountered Blake in high school and loved his style of poetry and it’s similarity to early English romanticism such as Wordsworth. To me, the illustrations had always seemed archaic, as if that was a common thing in books in that day; at least, that was my assumption. What I always believed to be unique about it was that William Blake was the one doing both the writing and the illustrating. However, in reading Drucker’s book, I see that the genre is exactly that, a separate genre of artist’s books that has not gone away. Looking at Blake’s work through the lens of an artist book provides some great fresh insights into his composition and style. Now, instead of looking at the illustrations as just some funny pictures that Blake drew in the margins, I see them more as paintings and read them as conscious of the medium that they are in, one of the defining characteristics of an artist book. For example, Object 3 in the The Song of Los, one of my favorite works by Blake, shows signs that the words were written onto the page at the same time that the illustrations were drawn. It seems that the illustrations at the top of the page were made first and then Blake began writing and composing the text. Of course, I realize that he could have come up with the text first and separately, but what is important here is that he took into account the illustrations on the page, and then wrote around them, at least for that first stanza. In a sense, it could be said that he was “painting” the words onto the page, that is, they are themselves an illustration. William Blake was not really writing a book as much as making a piece of art and taking into account the media that he had: the page, the text, and the paintings he came up with as illustrations. Truly, the work is beautiful in itself and could be taken as a series of paintings, a series of individual objects, which is how the online archive presents it. Object 1 of The Song of Los, for example, is just a painting and quite a fantastic one at that, but that’s exactly how it could stand. The single “object” could be a stand-alone painting entitled The Song of Los. Every subsequent object has writing on it but also could stand alone because the writing is perfectly autonomous with only loose ties to any of the other objects. Certainly, this is evidence of Blake strongly taking into account his medium and the final product itself being conscious of the fact that it is a “book.”

Uncreative writing

Reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing was at first very difficult because he immediately jumps into the thick of things and starts explaining the philosophy behind his art without every really saying what his art is until the reader is half way through the description of the philosophy. However, after I had figured out that what he does is write out works by other authors, as well as other forms of uncreative writing, I began to understand what he meant when he described his process as that of turning himself into a machine. In his description “the idea,” he states that all creativity must be purged from the system and this created a very interesting metaphor in my mind: that of a computer running a programming. Essentially, one has an idea, that is, a preset of rules by which to process input. The input comes in the way of a book or, in Goldsmith’s case, a newspaper from one day. Then, one simply retypes the text according to that rule, even if the rule is to not alter or change anything at all. This creates in a person an interesting condition because it truly is the most dehumanizing thing: to turn one’s intelligence off and become the opposite of what could be called artificial intelligence. Essentially, what could be considered as the thing that makes us human disappears and we are left with being an organic computer. On the other hand, perhaps the creativity in uncreative writing lies before the writing, in the formulation of the programming that one is going to employ to process the input, the set of rules through which to write. In that sense, the writing is only truly untainted by creativity if the rules are thought up before the input source is chosen. In other words, if one comes up with a set of rules and then goes out at random to search for an input. When I set out to complete my uncreative writing assignment, I decided that I would simply type the letters and words and not truly pay attention to the layout of the page, only the spacing of the letters and words themselves. I then, at random came across the Wikipedia page for “Islamofascism.” This was interesting because I don’t truly know anything about Islamofascism. After completing the assignment, I still know as much about Islamofascism as I did before the assignment. This makes me think that in retyping something such as this article, I am focused much more on keeping to the programming than paying attention to the article. Essentially, I am not paying attention to what I am reading, but instead I am paying attention to how I rewrite it. Therefore, I think I have succeeded in doing this assignment properly in that I did not think, only process. I successfully turned myself into an organic computer.

Texting ideas

I recently had a bit of a revelation in terms of the implications of texting to modern American society. I had previously always believed that the gloom-and-doom sociologists who were saying that texting was the death of the English language, as well as modern Western society, were simply full of it. However, I had an interesting experience while dining at Southside a few days ago. I had just finished eating, when I got up to take my dishes to the dish depository and turning my head I noticed three female students in the booth behind me. What caught my attention was that they were all just sitting there and not talking. Now, I understand that in some circles it is good manners and considered polite to simply eat one’s lunch and not talk at the table. However, these particular students were not observing polite table manners. Instead, they were not talking because two of them were texting and the third was simply sitting there with her cell phone on the table. I began to think about it and I realized that I had not heard a continuous conversation coming from that booth the entire time I was eating, only the occasional word or phrase. This brings me to one conclusion: that texting had almost completely eliminated the desire for face-to-face speech between these students in their “down time.” Essentially, this group of girls was completely content to carry on communications with what amounts to a web of friends through their cell phones. This web of people is continuously in contact, sending messages back and forth to many other people within that web, and for one single person to stay in this social network, as it were, they had to continuously engage in these little one-liner messages back and forth otherwise they wouldn’t be savvy to the newest information inside this network and would simply fall out of the web. I think that humans are inherently a social creature and that staying in contact with each other is the only way to maintain a society. Therefore, people within a society have an inherent need to stay within that society. There is in fact a term used for people who do not participate in this behavior: antisocial; this is considered a disorder in psychological terms. Getting back to the point, however, people are in need of social contact and cellular phones, in particular texting with cellular phones, enable people maintain a higher level of social contact. The problem arises with the fact that text messages are very short because of the character limit and therefore cannot convey a lot of information like a deep thought. The second problem is that there is an amount of time spent waiting on the text that one receives as a reply. This means that it is very difficult to convey a long deep thought over the course of several messages because it comes off as disjointed, awkward, and very difficult to tie together. Subsequently, texting is very suited and, in fact funnels one into, making short, flarfy one-liners back and forth between people just to maintain contact. However, because this is the kind of communication that people get used to, they are then fairly incapable of keeping up long, deep, face-to-face conversations with people. Instead, even in a face-to-face situation such as eating lunch together, this group of students communicated to each other in speech just as they would with texting: in short, concise, humorous one-liners with long spaces in between replies such that no continuous conversation was happening. This has very interesting implications in terms of the ability of this and future generations to communicate deep, meaningful thoughts. As a result, those gloom-and-doom sociologists don’t seem so loony anymore.

Flarf in class freewrite

I choose the second topic to write about. I will take the word "lol" as a prime example of a Flarfy word. The word "lol" came about on the internet, it is a product of online communications, of chatting over the internet. In this way, it is precisely like Flarf in that it is the direct product of the internet. The meaning of the word has taken on many abstractions from the original "laugh out loud." Now, like many words in the English language, its meaning is dependent on context. However, because it is an online term, and context can only be determined by vocabulary, "lol" creates a context, it immediately triggers in the receiver a set of emotions.