I turned off Google Buzz for several reasons. The most important reason is that social apps such as Buzz and Facebook aren’t compelling in any awesome way for me. It could be said that I indulge Facebook. I spend less than an hour ‘there’ in a given week. It is not the best way, using the internet, to communicate with me. Basically, I can take it or leave it. Although reconnecting with old friends has been rewarding, real connection makes demands Facebook doesn’t support.

On the other hand, I like Facebook’s gallery feature, and, I like the feature that allows for publicizing blog posts, (where the feed automatically posts slugs from blog postings across my two personal blogs, and netdynam. Facebook would add more value if I leveraged it more in that direction. But, I do not.

So, Google Buzz, doesn’t trip my undeveloped social app triggers at all. It’s more intrusive in being tied into gmail, and, as it happened, I was forced to deprecate gmail its HTML interface because–in the aftermath of Buzz’s rollout, I discovered add-on java broke Gmail’s java as far as its advanced interface goes on OSX Tiger. between Tiger’s awful java implementation and Google’s hellish support, I was stuck.

I’m on Myspace-Musicians too. (Kamelmauz) Ugh.

A netydnam colleague emailed an interesting article from The New York Review of Books,

In the World of Facebook, by Charles Petersen; reviewing two books, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (by Ben Mezrich) Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (by Julia Angwin).

The article’s second paragraph:

What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

If I wanted to look up the author, Charles Peterson, on Facebook, I would be unable to do so. His name is too common. It’s interesting: if you have a unique name you’re much more accessible on Facebook.

The article is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety. Still, here’s a Netdynamics-worthy clip:

But Facebook doesn’t want to simply branch out onto a few more Web pages; the site hopes, in a somewhat sinister but potentially very useful (and profitable) way, to begin following us around the entire Web. This is the ambition of “Facebook Connect,” a special service that members may activate, and that has enabled many popular Web sites, such as Netflix, YouTube, and the Huffington Post, to tie activity elsewhere on the Internet back to Facebook profiles. If you leave a response on a Huffington Post story, for instance, it can, via Facebook Connect, automatically be shared with your friends on Facebook; subsequent responses by Facebook friends could eventually appear both on your Facebook page and on the original Huffington Post story.

If Facebook Connect is widely adopted—and the service has been quite successful so far, with Yahoo and even MySpace signing up—we may begin to see changes to many of our basic assumptions about the Internet. Once a commenter knows that a vitriolic statement will be shared with a large and personal social circle—appearing more like a letter to a small-town newspaper than an anonymous outburst—the typically venomous atmosphere of online comments, for example, may well diminish.

‘Aggression‘ mitigation? Sure. It would be hard to conceptualize a Facebook driven by users identified by handles or nicks. Meanwhile, Buzz uses your address book–at the least. I haven’t investigated Buzz of course, yet I recognize it’s a slightly different experiment.

excerpt

The Psychology of the Blog: Public or Private?

A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006a) report concludes thatthe most popular topic among bloggers is “me.” Speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity all provide the base for blogging. Yet the blur between private (“me”) andpublic (everyone who is—hopefully—reading about me and writing to me and linking to me) are truly the most interesting psychological features of blogging. Millerand Shepherd (2004) point out that blogs invite “the peculiar intersection of thepublic and private,” in a way that can often be contradictory (par. 1). According tothe authors, the genre of blogs appeared in “the cultural moment . . . that has shiftedthe boundary between the public and the private and the relationship between mediated and unmediated experience” (par. 16). Badger (2004) makes the same point,stressing that although “the first person narrative [of Weblogs] . . . can make usfeel that we are partaking in a one-on-one exchange” (par. 5), blogging also promotes a high level of self-exposure to the audience often large and largely unknownto the author. The cornerstones of Internet communication—speed, reach, anonymity,and interactivity—promote and facilitate such a dichotomous character of blogs. Miller and Shepherd observe that on Weblogs “people are sharing unprecedentedamounts of personal information with total strangers, potentially millions of them,”concluding that “the technology of the internet makes it easier than ever for anyoneto be either a voyeur or an exhibitionist—or both” (par. 16).

The character of blogs as simultaneously private and public enables the formationof both individual and group identities. Through extensive narratives and oftenhighly personal descriptions of day-to-day activities, and through the use of images,a blogger reveals and creates—intentionally or not—his or her unique online identity. Through the use of blogroll, links, and comment features, and through development of communal norms (see Wei, 2004), the blogger reveals and creates his or hergroup identity. In the same manner, a specific blog community often emerges. For example, The Julie/Julia blog, which was one of the most popular blogs with morethan 7,000 hits per day, depicted both the daily activities of the author, Julie Powell,and experiences of the Julie/Julia blog readership, enabling thus formation of a blog community (see Blanchard, 2004).

Being at the same time private and public, individual and collective, Weblogs invoke the notion of a contradictory genre and activity, with “you,” “me” and everyonein between being brought into a single, semiprivate or semipublic space and experi-ence. However, this notion of contradiction can be understood as stemming from ten-dency to perceive blogs as objects rather than events. When perceived as writtenobjects, Weblogs do give the impression of ambiguity. Who is the author of this writ-ten object, one might ask. Is it the blogger, the audience, or both? Why would a per-son want to create a private written object, day after day, and then offer it for publicscrutiny? Finally, why would the audience want to scrutinize, day after day, a privatewritten object of an unknown person? Seen in this way, blogs invoke, almost automatically, the ideas of voyeurism and exhibitionism. When observed as communicative events, though, Weblogs give a different impression.

To understand more fully this feature of blogs as communicative events, let us recallthat blogs are commonly interpreted as online diaries. Regardless of its content, a blog is always a record, a (reverse) chronological trace of one’s activities, experiences,and/or thoughts. Blogs, therefore, enable temporal structuring of a person’s activities,experiences, and/or thoughts, which is the function of traditional diaries. As Harris(1995) pointed out, “The diary is not just an adventitious by-product of writing, but ahighly significant application of it,” the one that “produces evidence that is not memory-dependent” (p. 43). Diaries, thus, enable integration of one’s past and presentexperiences, which is the need deeply rooted in human psychology. Weblogs havethe same role. Even when the blogger’s online identity is fake—as in the case of aKansas housewife posting as a fictional cancer patient Kaycee Nicole, and/or in thecase of a Serbian blogger posting as the ex and late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic—the blog integrates a person’s (fictional or real) experiences in a chronological narrative. That is what blogging is about. Unlike personal Web presentations,structured around “the essence of me,” blogs are structured around “the process ofme.” Unlike chatting, pointed toward “hear me out at this moment,” blogging ispointed toward “hear me out throughout time.” Blogging, thus, is a twofold communicative event. On one hand, it is the event of “writing oneself” through continuous recording of past and present experiences, just as in the case of traditional diaries.Harris also notes that “the diary [as event] tends to be overlooked by theorists who assume that communication is essentially a process of linking two or more individuals. Indeed,” as Harris concludes, “the notion of a single individual being both a sender and receiver of the same message is sometimes regarded as problematic or paradoxical” (p. 38). On the other hand, blogging is the event of “rewriting oneself”through interaction with the audience. Unlike writing a traditional diary, blogging isa process of linking two or more individuals.

This is why blogs are both private and public. This is why blogs cannot be either private or public. And this is why blogs are online diaries, that is, both a technology and a genre of computer-mediated communication. Just as other social phenomena that have gone digital, the phenomenon of writing oneself through chronological narratives incorporates both an old human need—the need for temporal structuring andintegrating of past and present experiences—and a new way of doing that—relying onspeed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity of Internet communication. “The fact is that once again, as in the past, the introduction of new technologies has extended theboundaries of writing. What lags behind is our conceptualization of the change”(Harris, 1995, p. 41).

Dreamlines, a web art generator by Leonardo Solaas.

Leonardo Solaas is a programmer. His focus point is on using Java as a platform, the web browser as an interface, and, data processing routines as, in effect, painter’s brushes. However my weak attempt at description defers to the artist’s own words,

“The thing is, now I spend most of my day in front of my loyal laptop, working as freelance developer & interface designer for the most interesting clients I manage to find, and going about my own experiments and ideas when I can get to that.

This site intends to be a hub for several kinds of traces left behind by my so-called ‘artistic’ practice, plus related pursuits. I’m not sure what all this ‘new media art’ thing is all about, but for me is a convenient playground where I can mash up all sorts of interests with relative freedom.”

This excerpt, from his short first person bio is tagged accordingly:

autnomous agents-blog-castellano-data visualization-design-digital image-drupal-experiment-flash-generative-hand -made-internet-me on myself-multiplicity-particle system-physical-processing-social-teaching-text-theory-workshop>

(Inspires me to think about what tags I’d apply to me.) Anyway…these tags cover a lot of ground.

Being fascinated with how computing power and user interaction can be used to create stuff, I fell right into Leonardo’s Dreamlines.

Like it is with other generators, the role I play is that of an Initiator. And, as it also is with the best of those generators, the Initiator also has to be a ‘chef of time;’ (inasmuch as I’ve learned to be patient and wait for resonant results.) What initiator/time chef waits for are rewarding moments in the stream of serendipitous visual mixing. The process is for me akin to music-making, yet the process isn’t anywhere as demanding.

I’ve noted over at Explorations blog,

Mechanical Kitsch, or New Frontier? further brief reflections about several of the issues raised by the ‘generator medium.’

Here’s several captures from mixes I initiated.

Title: Semiotics

Title: Found It

Then, it occurred to me I could try an experiment. My hypothesis was simple: if I captured the visual mix as it unfolded, how well might it coincide with some of my music? The main thing though was that I wasn’t going do anything but slap the two pieces together, so the experiment was seeking to hit rather than miss. This is different than editing music to expressly fit the visual.

I’ve posted the result over at noguts noglory studios. 21 minutes of abstract flow. (You can always turn down the audio!)

Quark

When I transferred the result using iMovie to a DVD and played it on the big HD screen, I was amazed at how good it looked.

There’s a sort of “future creativity” lurking in the seams of generativity, person-code, shallow manipulation, and, the immensity of the raw data archive.

Anyway…

Well, good ol’ Language of Blogs is emphasizing ol as in: not updated since October.

It’s an outcome, right? But, there’s no easy way to know the back story.

Irony! Here is a blog about blogging and its velocity quotient is on the home page 9 posts in 26 months. No navigation to the archive is provided at the bottom. Oh, but there in the sidebar are pointers to the rest of its (sorry?) history. Okay, 2 more posts. 11 posts in 31 months.

Interesting content; extremely low velocity–then in blog terms it drops off the cliff ‘it’ created.

Begging the question of whether a reader of the book should wax in post-modern mode and fold in the evidence of the inert blog into a consideration of the book.

Of course, the author may have come to an untimely end! I note some comment spam (to Japanese sex sites) so even a brief forensics is suggestive of somebody walking far away.

And this strikes me as both weird and par for the course.

* It took my web hoster almost ten days to fess up that an Apache security update was the force behind thrashing three Wordpress installations.

Abstract:

Blogs and Wikis have not been with us for long, but have made a huge impact
on society.  Wikipedia is the best known exemplar of the wiki, a
collaborative site that leads to a single text claimed by no-one; blogs, or
web-logs, have exploded into the mainstream through novelisations, film
adaptations and have gathered huge followings. Blogs and wikis also serve
to provide a coherent basis for a discourse analysis of specific web
language.

What makes these forms distinctive as genres, and what ramifications does
the technology have on the language?  Myers looks at how blogs and wikis:

*allow for easier than ever publication

*can claim to challenge institutional hierarchies

*provide alternate perspectives on events

*exemplify globalization

*challenge demarcations between the personal and the public

*construct new communities and more

Drawing on a wide range of popular blogs and wikis, the book works
alongside an author blog – http://thelanguageofblogs.typepad.com/ – that
contains regularly updated links, references and a glossary.  An essential
textbook for upper level undergraduates on linguistics and language studies
courses, it elucidates, informs and offers insights into a major new type
of discourse. This coursebook includes a companion website for student and
lecturer use.

it’s the blog on “the language of blogs” which appears to be a very good resource, with a lot of links to recent work on blog research, other blogs related to online research, and posts of relevance to our own interest. i think i might need to comment on some of those posts….

Having read resources offered by Frank, I’d like to elevate one. Clay Shirkey: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. April 23, 2008.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

[]

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Questions about how people use time, these days, may be framed (and analyzed,) within the rubric of behavioral economics. (I can’t do this myself, like Mr. Shirkey, I’m only able to offer phenomenological intuitions.) Still, I bring the frame of ‘time investment’ up because I suppose a finely differentiated analysis of how people actually deploy their time, with various internet utilities comprising part of the picture, would enrich intuitions.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, a music fan can acquire more music (mp3s) than this fan can expect to deal with in the old sense of ‘dealing.’ This is true for other resources, such as ebooks, articles, movies, software; is true for any ‘object of potential interest’ discovered in the web, (or candy shop,) of intended and unintended distribution.

Time deployment exists in various contexts. These contexts can be described too. (I’m fairly sure Shirkey’s idealization doesn’t wash, were it to be suffer the details.) I wonder if cognitive surplus is accompanied in specific cases with its own surplus-derived stress?

What would constitute a robust conceptual ecology with respect to the factors of time investment and anticipation of benefit? Each of these is a very broad brush. For example how would time spent commenting on blog posts be accounted for were some benefit to figure into the account?

Another feature–these days–I term, truncation. Twitter exemplifies this, yet, also there are the short form messages tacked to Facebook walls, terse emails, blog and forum comments, abbreviated annotations of various sorts, and, of course, text messages.

I reckon truncation is not the result of having too much time.

I’ve recently read these four books dealing with different aspects of the web 2.0 world, the common thread through all of them being that they each either touch on or concentrate on the place of blogging in the current netspace. It’s difficult to compare them in terms of content and reliability, because they each have something to offer in terms of content, however my own point of view and personal areas of interest render at least two of them worthy of steering the gentle reader well clear of.

It is these two which I will deal with first.



Levinson’s New New Media published last year is certainly up-to-date, and offers descriptions of several commonly recognized ‘districts’ in the Web 2.0 world: Blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and Podcasting, as well as discussing social implications of these new new media, and illustrating his line of thought by taking us through his view of the 2008 US election qua new new media. He justifies his choice of the doubled term of the title in the first chapter, arguing that new media (such as email) has been around for some time, but the Web 2.0 stuff is newer new media (such as wikipedia), stuff which has hardly been mentioned in studies of online media published as recently as 2008.

Levinson describes his various areas of new new media in a chatty lucid way, taking readers through these media districts by describing how and when they were formed, what they do, and the questions that we have all asked ourselves about them – as if we are somewhat ignorant of what it all means. He manages to lay it out simply and concisely much as a good teacher might do. He gives examples of types of blogs, ways of using YouTube, potted histories of twitterati, and so on, and most chapters will cite lavishly his own internet web-based experiences via his own blog as a tv program reviewer and aficionado – as well as citing any publication of his own that has any relevance whatsoever to what he is writing about. This is reflected in the References section at the end of the book, of which five whole pages (out of 24) are taken up with publications under the name of Levinson, Paul.

While Levinson’s book provides a worthwhile overview of the scope and conundrums of the web 2.0 world, giving the occasional gems of wisdom and useful advice, peppered with anecdotes and examples relating to Levinson’s own work and experiences which can begin to pall after just three chapters of this relentless self-promotion, Stephen D. Cooper’s Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers as the Fifth Estate, became positively nauseating after even the second chapter.

Cooper’s book concentrates on news, reporting, and blogging sites related to jounalism. He addresses the vexed question over the relationship between bloggers and the mainstream or traditional news outlets, and discusses the benefits of professional journalism and the future of commercial news reporting. He proposes a typology of news ‘genres’ in the blogosphere, together with a short description  of the ways that these genres operate to critique news gathering. It is worth summarising the typology here:

-Accuracy: bloggers operate as fact-checking facilities

-Framing: bloggers act to contextualise or dispute the way a piece is presented

-Agenda-Setting/Gatekeeping: bloggers act to question the news agenda and set alternatives

-Journalistic Practices: bloggers actually gather, write, edit and correct news

The next several chapters address these four areas of blogger activity by providing us with blow-by-blow accounts, complete with quotations, of examples of blogs and bloggers who concerned themselves with these aspects of the news media. Unfortunately, it did not take me long into reading the book for me to gather that Cooper has a slightly right-leaning agenda which coloured his report of news blogging history for me, and rendered what already seemed interminable recounting into somewhat sour reading. I admit that I was not motivated to complete reading the book, and skipped several pages as I went through, hoping to get past the screeds of historical ‘evidence’ and reach the point of his argument. For this reason I cannot recommend the book, unless one is gathering details about events on news blogs or researching the ways that the right hope to seem even-handed in their discussion of internet media behaviour.

In the final chapter there were some interesting discussions, one of which concerned what was termed the ‘spiral of silence’, a version of what sounded to me like Lyotard’s idea of the differend. In essence, the spiral of silence refers to the idea that when people compare their opinions with those of the mass media, and theirs differ considerably, they are likely to refrain from saying anything lest they be ostracised. The idea of media bias was another bugbear discussed in this final chapter, with Cooper coming out in favour of the idea that news should be fair and balanced.

Jill Walker Rettberg’s Blogging was almost a warm bath in comparison to the previous two. In fact, I completed Rettberg’s book before starting the other two, and was able to read it cover to cover in almost one sitting. This speaks to its lucid writing style, clear direction and interesting perspectives on the world of blogging. It does not claim to be the last word, but performs a useful summary of how blogs operate in the Web 2.0 arena. She first defines three basic loosely-bounded categories of blogging: personal blogs, filter blogs and topic-driven blogs. Each of these categories seem to overlap and some blogs might conceivably cover all three categories. Yet they provide a useful first sieve through which to describe the content, appearance, and interpersonal motivations of blogs in general. Each chapter deals with a different sphere of the blogging world – such as “Blogs, Communities and Networks”, “Citizen Journalists?”, “Blogs as Narratives”, and “Blogging Brands” – outlining and summarising the main areas of research interest in each. It’s a good first primer on the geography of the blogosphere, offering several links to further information for the researcher and interested reader.

The final book of the four, CyberChiefs: Autonomy and Authority in online tribes by Mathieu O’Neil, was the most interesting and engaging of the group. Its main idea was that despite claims that groups online could act and interact co-operatively and democratically, in practice this was difficult to maintain, and in fact might even be so contradictory as to be counter-productive. After carefully outlining and presenting his thesis regarding the different types of authority wielded both on and offline – sovereign authority, charismatic authority and index authority – he goes on to describe four online ‘tribes’ using these terms. Each tribe is selected for their differences in terms of their content, history and ideology: primitivism.com, Debian, DailyKos, and Wikipedia. He describes their method of governance and recounts an instance of conflict in each one, showing that no matter what their stated objectives are, there will always be events that disturb these objectives of mutual co-operation.

This book has so much to offer for me, it is difficult to decide what aspects to mention in a short review such as this. A couple of quotations from the book will have to suffice for gaining flavour of its main concerns:

“…online, there can be no autonomy without authority. Far from being anti-authoritarian entities, in a decentralised network, autonomous tribes require authority to perform basic functions: defining what they embrace, and what they reject; what information is relevant and irrelevant; which pronouncement is trusted or distrusted; who is included or excluded.” (p.33)

“Norms develop best in a small and static community because they derive whatever legitimacy they have from group endorsement, and because internalisation of rules takes time.” (p.81)

“ The autonomy of workers in post-Fordist teams and the autonomy of consumers of social networking devices and platforms can only develop along avenues devised by senior management.” (p.176)

“…the brute reality of network dynamics is that some nodes get all the attention. Neither illegitimate forms of power such as archaic force nor legitimate ones such as charismatic authority are democratic, as their source lies not in fair deliberation but in the reification of network dynamics or the importation of offline advantage.” (p.188)

The book concludes with a statement regarding O’Neil’s idea of the ideal direction of the collectivist principles of the internet, which would result in a debate ‘to formulate strategies to extend direct popular control over more aspects of existence…’ even though, as O’Neil himself would acknowledge, without the benefit of access to information and expertise crucial to decision-making, direct popular control is likely to result in a less sustainable way of living. And so the contradictions of autonomy with authority remain. A recommended book for those interested in the notions of control, power, dominance, authority, democracy, economics, management, and network dynamics online.

after all this time, i’ve just signed up to flickr. so far i am having a lot of fun. hmmm. it is simple and easy to use, and has a lot of features i want to use for organising photos.

this shot was taken as we were speeding back to catch the ferry to return to the mainland on our last day on kangaroo island. i had to hop out of the car and quickly take the shot, so i used the IXUS. it performs OK in most circumstances i think.

it’s one of my favourite shots – mainly because the composition works, and the grass looks good. also, i did not notice those two stones when i took the shot originally, but now i think they make the picture.

i used picasa to gather a few related shots into an ‘album’, and exported the album contents to the desktop so i could easily upload them. the export facility, by default, makes the images smaller, so a lot of the information is lost, but i’ll try out a non-reduced image shortly just to see whether any difference in quality is noticeable.

“I can see this thing being marketed to adults.”

[future iPads] “…less of a giant iPhone for old people.”

Well…somebody’s kid; publishing their review–574 views and counting.

Another millenial’s view.

Comment. Them younger peeps want me some robust gadgets and they want it all now! 

iPad will be a big hit. However, as an Apple user for 25+ years, and as a casual observer of Apple, I know enough to wait for the second generation to arrive. This will happen in 12-18 months. I haven’t checked out the full specs, so I’m hoping that its flash drive storage can be augmented via USB. The only other requirement for me personally would be that it can display Adobe Acrobat. This would allow me to read scholarly papers while horizontal. I don’t know why Apple hasn’t licensed Adobe Flash, although I could go and find out. Maybe some combination of dollars and security figure into this odd deficit.  

iPad connotation?

The scene used here has been redeployed many times in other parodies. Still, this works for me and is headed to viral heights.

Whereas the following video has already made rounds years ago.

“As if nobody’s reading’?: the imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK”

David Brake. (2009) PhD thesis, London School of Economics.

Abstract

This thesis examines the understandings and meanings of personal blogging from the perspective of blog authors. The theoretical framework draws on a symbolic interactionist perspective, focusing on how meaning is constructed through blogging practices, supplemented by theories of mediation and critical technology studies. The principal evidence in this study is derived from an analysis of in-depth interviews with bloggers selected to maximise their diversity based on the results of an initial survey. This is supplemented by an analysis of personal blogging’s technical contexts [what i've been wont to call 'affordances' -el] and of various societal influences that appear to influence blogging practices. Bloggers were found to have limited interest in gathering information about their readers, appearing to rely instead on an assumption that readers are sympathetic. Although personal blogging practices have been framed as being a form of radically free expression, they were also shown to be subject to potential biases including social norms [that's us! - el] and the technical characteristics of blogging services ['affordances' again]. Blogs provide a persistent record of a blogger’s practice, but the bloggers in this study did not generally read their archives or expect others to do so, nor did they retrospectively edit their archives to maintain a consistent self-presentation. The empirical results provide a basis for developing a theoretical perspective to account for blogging practices. This emphasises firstly that a blogger’s construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on an informed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation [sounds as if he has been reading us all this time?]. Secondly, blogging practices include a variety of envisaged audience relationships, and some blogging practices appear to be primarily self-directed with potential audiences playing a marginal role [and, i feel we may be framed here again]. Blogging’s technical characteristics and the social norms surrounding blogging practices appear to enable and reinforce this unanticipated lack of engagement with audiences [indeed]. This perspective contrasts with studies of computer mediated communication that suggest bloggers would monitor their audiences and present themselves strategically to ensure interactions are successful in their terms. The study also points the way towards several avenues for further research including a more in-depth consideration of the neglected structural factors (both social and technical) which potentially influence blogging practices, and an examination of social network site use practices using a similar analytical approach

well, i’m convinced that the work will be worth reading, and very interested in what david proposes.

available with this link

discussion is invited on the blog at: http://groupblog.workasone.net/archives/00389.html

‘Materiality’ here pertains to the discrete object which is the tactile and separate artefact having printed text and diagrams on the surface of separate pages. It is distinct from the published or written or graphic work which can be saved in a file in a computer. Although laptops and computer hardware in general are artefacts and material objects that can be transported, their affordances lie in the amount or quantity of files and texts which can be stored on the one hard drive. At the time of writing these are still somewhat heavy and unwieldy so that they are difficult to read in bed or put in one’s pocket for example. However, even with advances in technology that allow small lightweight personal readers such as Kindle to be manufactured and thus easily transported, there are still differences in the affordances of each modality that lend the book and paper magazine their continuing allure.

Now we have the prospect of Apple releasing their iSlate, a small transportable mobile phone enhanced reader – and one might also guess (hope) further enhanced with the capabilities that Han earlier introduced, that is to say, touch screen interfacing.

Here’s one of the latest rumour milling-abouts from Wired: [btw, sorry, but the taped interview is in french - the article tho is in english]

However, there will still be a market for the traditional book methinks. That is because people like me actually prefer books over reading or looking at the same things on a screen. Recently I had a discussion with Frank on why my preferences are for the hard copy over the word on the screen, and how it is that I plump for materiality, and this motivated my attempt here to clarify my preferences in this way. Of course, each modality has its own affordances, and there is precious little that can be argued for or against either in terms of objective differences. But, as a starting point, I have proposed a set of categories for discussing these differences.

In this sense, then, the “Materiality” of the printed page affords ease of:

-Transportability

-Scannability

-Inscriptability

-Eye-easability

Transportability

As stated earlier, nothing beats the ease of slipping a book into one’s pocket or bag. I generally go about with a notebook and pencil in order to jot things down when travelling. These items weigh much less than a laptop, and since I can only afford one laptop, there will not be a special miniature one purchased especially for fitting into a handbag or shoulder-bag for many, including myself. The loss of a book is sad, but generally they are easily replace-able. Not so easy to replace the laptop – or the enhanced mobile phone either for that matter – and certainly the more one transports things hither and yon, the higher the possibility for loss. Weight and wieldy-ness issues also means that books win hands down in a lying down position, and thus there are plenty of books stacked up bedside, but no laptop.

Scannability

This affordance pertains to the ease with which one can scan through a whole book, or the leaves thereof. All of the pages of the whole book are there in one place and the position of various sections may be remembered or marked for ease of retrieval. One is able to flip through the book and scan for various elements, such as chapter headings, diagrams, plates, and so on. One is quickly able to see a page at a time in toto, and this affordance is one of the most useful pertaining to the materiality of books – as distinct from the need to scroll, by whatever means, to take in all the words on a page. Jumping from one page to another is also possible on the screen, but this is not the same as being able to flip through the book and recognise the page number or know how far along or back the searched-for feature appears in the book itself. Search facilities notwithstanding, a book can be searched by visual means which is sometimes more profitable than using a computational engine.

Inscriptability

By ‘inscriptability’ I refer to the ability one has to write directly into the leaves of a book. With PDF files, one is able to insert comments on the fly or make editing comments below the text on the screen, but these need to be ‘inserted’ by means of directions to the software and typing in the comments. The ease of finding comments is also differently arranged. Once inscribed, a visual search can be performed on the book with ease. This is not the same with a computerised file, due to the affordances related to scannability mentioned above.

Eye-easability

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly is eye-easability. Everyone knows that editing can be done much more efficiently with hard copy. Typos and other mistakes one did not notice on the screen become glaringly obvious on the printed page. This is likely to do with dpi, or pixels per square (inch/centimetre). In this regard, the printed page again wins out, and this at least can be measured and compared – the screen’s resolution is no match for that of the page, and thus, reading is easier and the eye does not become as tired as quickly when reading a book or printed matter. When Apple produces a back-lit reading tablet that not only is lightweight, can be read-writable and have as a high a resolution as a printed page, then my preferences may change and books relegated to museums along the way.

via Gizmodo

The Geek Freaks – Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become.

By Michael Agger SLATE Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010

In Lanier’s eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn’t expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That’s not a crazy idea, but it’s just Lanier’s hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today’s theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.

There’s also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn’t found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: “We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it’s accessed.” Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don’t see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.

Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn’t want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It’s time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.

Lanier appeared on PBS’s News Hour this week. My immediate impression was that he doesn’t have very developed television chops. In fact, I could personally relate to his rambling style and to his brave attempt to dare being expansive in the old medium. Lanier strikes a paradoxical position. On one hand he achieved one of the most public profiles of all those who could be said to represent the first wave of post-Mosaic web celebrity. (Howard Rheingold, Larry Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Meg Whitman, Sherry Turkle, and many many others achieved his kind of celebrity.) On the other hand, his pushing back against the ‘wild west’ of the internet is reactionary, is maybe even naive.

Mass behavior may be the most difficult-to-grasp impetus for internet trends. Being a social psychological phenomena, such behavior may especially befuddle the code warriors and technologists. That the behavioral and monetary costs have tended to depart from each other, with the former typified by how much time a user invests, while the latter in many examples approaches zero, do not constitute anything able to be put back in the box.

Take the example of music. The biggest challenge for the “sociopathic” consumer is managing their time, whereas the cost of content–in the world’s biggest record store–is already realized to be zero, free. Yet, at the same time, advertising space is utilized by, for example, global Fortune 100 companies in the form of pop-up and widgetized ads splashed at the very sites where the sociopathic takings are occurring.

Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?

Emily Parker, New York Times, November 5, 2009 | src

excerpt:

Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.

our red back spider in the web next to the toilet

and now the promised lyrics to the famous song – unfortunately there is no recorded version on the internet that i could find:

Redback on the toilet seat

There was a redback on the toilet seat, 


When I was there last night. 


I didn’t see him in the dark, 


But boy I felt his bite. 


I jumped up high into the air, 


And when I hit the ground. 


That crafty redback spider, 


Wasn’t nowhere to be found. 



I rushed into the missus, 


Told her just where I’d been bit. 


And she grabbed my cutthroat razor, 


And I nearly took a fit. 


I said ‘Forget what’s on your mind, 


And call a doctor please. 


For I’ve got a feeling that your cure, 


Is worse than the disease.’ 



There was a redback on the toilet seat, 


When I was there last night. 


I didn’t see him in the dark, 


But boy I felt his bite. 


And now I’m here in hospital, 


A sad and sorry plight. 


And I curse the redback spider, 


On the toilet seat last night. 



I can’t lie down,

I cant’ sit up I don’t know what to do. 


The nurses think it’s funny

but that’s not my point of view. 


I tell you it’s embarrassing

and that’s to say the least, 


For I’m too sick to eat a bite, 


While the spider had a feast. 



And when I get back home again,

I’ll tell you what I’ll do. 


I’ll make that Redback suffer

for the pain I’m going through. 


I’ve had so many needles,

I’m looking like a sieve. 


I promise you that redback

hasn’t very long to live.

There was a redback on the toilet seat, 


When I was there last night. 


I didn’t see him in the dark, 


But boy I felt his bite. 


And now I’m here in hospital, 


A sad and sorry plight. 


And I curse that redback spider, 


On the toilet seat last night.

Wordpress 2.9 has been released; coming to a Netdynam2.0 blog near you.

Eldon asked, “hedgehog or fox?”. Fox.

Good example—and everyday for me is per force an ‘example’—occurred in the comments here to Downward Causation. Exposed to a quasi-foundational assertion, I wondered if it were wholly true. Meanwhile, I’m already digging to find if the assertion is actually controversial.

By the way, back in 1996, when I created my first personal web site, the Berlin quote was on offer. The original concept is given by Archilochus,

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

As a puer-intuitive, (per the Analytic Psychology,) I might benefit from more single-mindedness. However, it is a core bias of mine that I am skeptical, an anti-foundationalist, and a domain savvy relativist. Foxy.

it’s a peculiarly australian failing, what robin boyd (1960: The Australian Ugliness) called “aboraphobia”. or, as the old aussie motto (sardonically) says: “If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t, chop it down”. two doors up, we have a vacant lot. when we moved here in 2005,  there was an old stone double villa, built about 1870. after it was sold to notable local developers, there was consternation about the house being demolished and also the trees being cut down in the back yard. i have detailed the story of the trees elsewhere…

the old houses of adelaide are constructed of what they call ‘bluestone’, it is some sort of shale or slate. they are quite cool inside as the walls are so thick. originally they came with wide verandahs on the front to shade that side of the house, and to allow sitting and sheltering from sun and rain.

the old house, 2 doors from our place, with trees at the back, used to look like this:

house, c. 1870, next to next door

it was number 23…

No 23

after the new owners took over, they made the house “secure” by erecting locked gates, behind which they one day set about taking down the trees until the council officer could get a court order to let him in with the police – by which time the trees had been effectively removed. this is what the house looked like one year later. note the iron gates and the pathetic stump of the grevillia robusta – the other large eucalyptus leucoxylon having already been removed before intervention:

No 23 with gates and tree stump

and now, all that is left of 23 is some piles of dirt:

no house at 23 now

the developers submitted a plan to council to erect two two storey houses with a 2-car garage each, a gym, an office, an home theatre and 4 bedrooms in each, all decked out in the most modern minimalist decor. the local residents, already incensed by their high-handed tree removal activities, all wrote objections. some employed lawyers to do so on their behalf. the council rejected the proposal, but the developers appealed to the state government… who also rejected it! yay! couldnt happen to a nicer bunch of uglifiers.

-

in our case, a previous owner of our house, P’s great aunt, had removed the verandah, left the patio, removed all the trees and garden, concreted most of the backyard and added a small brick lean-to at the side. then she had painted most of the walls white – apart from the exterior stonework thank goodness.

here’s basically what our place looks like now, from the driveway:

front of our house in adelaide

inside the lean-to, the old stonework has been painted white. i asked and we tried various methods of removing the paint. sand-blasting leaves sand and also means the stones would need re-mortaring. steam leaves lots of wet on the old wooden floors, and infact was not good at removing old paint of this order. scarifying with a sanding tool was long and involved. chemical methods would have gassed us all. and we did want to use the space. here’s what it looked like – note the white-painted rough wall whch used to be the outside wall of the house on the left…

inside the lean-to all cleaned up ready to paint

and so, not liking white for walls (or for much else), and not being able to bring myself to add another layer of plain paint onto the stonework, there was only one solution. paint back the stones!

so, last year, before i took off for finland, i occupied myself with the wall.

mid-way through painting the stones back in

luckily, just outside the window, i had the originals as model. they are not painted realistically, but impressionistically! you can see the difference in the following photo with the view through the window:

inside and outside stonework

…even though i didnt manage to finish it completely before i left for finland, the Precious cat gave his seal of approval to our new sitting room…

precious occupies new territory

to conclude this long and meandering set of observations whose only thread is the work of stonemasonry and its gradual deletion from the scene – at least in its former glory – i present a rousing rock protest anthem by one of the better sydney bands of the 80s, Spy vs Spy, in a video clip that is more than 25 years old….

and, in a former life, i presented the lyrics (inscribed below) to one of my better classes in japan as a sort of verbal puzzle, then asked, after their discussion of the answers, what type of music they thought would go with these words. a ballad, they suggested. a country& western tune, another offered. they all agreed that such a song would not be common in japan…

stonemasons are becoming things of the past

now the modern age is finally taking us over at last

dont you wonder why

they’re tearing all the old houses down

can’t they see that they’re the best places around?

dont tear it down

there’s life in it yet

dont tear it down

there’s time for us yet

dont tear it down!

don’t you know that history is written there deep in the walls?

but the march of progress just wants to pour concrete over us all

craftsmanship – this stone was cut by hand

bulldozers are taking over the land, yeah

don’t tear it down…

an expressway was planning to come through our lounge

eviction notes in business coats

never renovate it just tear it down

a nation’s heritage they wanna bring down without a sound

another new town on top of the real town, yeah.

don’t tear it down…

(excerpt 1)

In the following pages,I hope to suggest that,in fact,Geertz’s notion of culture,precisely because of its emphasis on vagary and variousness, does offer a useful vantagepoint for the study of media and media technology. In particular, the model of culturalemergence on which Geertz relies can add depth to the notion of technology “affordances”in a way that yields a firmer midpoint between accounts that look to the inher-ent qualities of a communications technology and those that emphasize its social construction. Affordances are the features of a technology that make a certain actionpossible; in a useful definition,they are “properties of the world defined with respect topeople’s interaction with it”(Gaver,1991,p. 80). To provide a scaffold for this discus-sion of culture, media, and affordance, I consider the emerging genre of news-relatedblogs. It may be the case that by exaggerating the basic mutability of all media—theway their essential character can vary between places and over time—blogs and otherdigital media draw our attention back to an existential whimsy that Geertz understood quite well.

(excerpt 2)

The real power of the concept of a technological “affordance”derives,I think,from the way it hints that potential exerts its own pull. Surprisingly, this sense of the term doesn’t much color Ian Hutchby’s (2001) argument for affordance as a “third way” between technological determinism and social constructivism. For Hutchby,the point is that a technology is not a blank slate that society can interpret as it pleases. As he wrote, “Different technologies possess different affordances, and these affordances constrain the ways they can possibly be ‘written’ or ‘read’”(p. 447; emphasis in original). This narrow reading misses the added point that sometimes an affordance is an invitation—a sense present both in the everyday verb “to afford” and in the roots of affordance in cognitive psychology. As Hutchby has noted, psychologist J. J. Gibson (1986) argued that animals perceive the objects around them directly in terms of affordance; for the lizard, at a fundamental level, the rock means shelter. The idea of an action invited becomes clearest in the literature of design, where, for instance, the particular bend of a door handle is said to afford either pushing or pulling.

(excerpt 3)

One such affordance of blogging might be dubbed “many eyeballs,”after the open- source software dictum that “given enough eyeballs,all bugs are shallow.” Rather than focusing the expertise of a few professionals, the open-source community reveals the innards of its software code to as many people as possible,relying on sheer numbers to discover buried errors or solve intractable problems. In the blogosphere, both original reporting and (more often) fact checking operate under a similar principle.

(excerpt 4)

Another affordance of blogging is fixity, although a different form of it than the quality Eisenstein attributed to print. Broadcast and even print news can be fairly ephemeral; reports that don’t achieve a critical mass of attention may fade quickly from sight. For citizen as well as reporter,recovering the precise details of a proposal or the exact wording of a leader’s remarks requires some effort. News-related blogs (and Web sites generally) constitute a sort of global bulletin board on which to affix jarring or incongruent facts so they can be easily recovered, safe from the amnesiac grind of the news cycle.

(excerpt 5)

Closely related to fixity is another crucial affordance of blogs,one so obvious that it is easy to overlook:juxtaposition. News-related blogs specialize in the sort of analysis that Political Animal ran on December 19, pulling together arguments, statements, or reports from multiple sources (or from the same source at different times) and placing them side by side to tease out the implications. This sounds suspiciously like “thinking”— the kind of analysis that any good reporter would perform. But a reporter faces con- straints—meeting deadlines, appearing objective, writing for limited space, finding timely “hooks”for analysis, and so on—that don’t apply to bloggers.

(excerpt 6)

This reading focuses attention squarely on genre as the intersection of technology and society:Technology and sociocultural practice evolve together, each feeding back into the other,to constitute a genre such as “blogs”or even “news-related blogs.”Genre, in this sense of a manifest set of communicative affordances, applies as easily to tele- phone conversations or 16th-century books as it does to blogging. In each case, the genre is constrained by the affordances of the underlying technology; more to the point, though, a genre embodies what those emerging technological capabilities suggest to a particular society at a given moment, giving the technology meaning and purpose in human affairs. In this respect,genre can be considered part of the mechanism of emer- gence, giving expression to features and norms that a developing technology has just made possible—or perhaps is just on the cusp of making possible.

(excerpt 7)

Likewise, it’s tempting to look at the past decade and argue that the Internet has had a democratizing influence on news in the United States, prying open the organs of news production and making journalists more accountable to their audience. Given the characteristics of each,we want to be able to say that the outcome of their collision makes sense, even that it was inevitable. But were we clamoring for news democracy before the Web came along? If we were,are blogs what we had in mind? A technology like print or the Internet exerts a general pull on history—but only because particular genres of communication provide a crucible for technological possibility and social intent to evolve together. The paradox that Geertz wants us to understand is that embracing the particular offers a window onto the universal—and a way to talk, I think, about the influence of communications technology in human affairs. As he wrote, “Seeing heaven in a grain of sand is not a trick only poets can accomplish”(Geertz, 1973, p. 44).

The European Commission JRC, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies released a comprehensive report on social and economic implications of Social Computing [aka Web2.0, social media].

‘The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy’
(Eds.) Yves Punie, Wainer Lusoli, Clara Centeno, Gianluca Misuraca and David Broster Authors: Kirsti Ala-Mutka, David Broster, Romina Cachia, Clara Centeno, Claudio Feijóo, Alexandra Haché, Stefano Kluzer, Sven Lindmark, Wainer Lusoli, Gianluca Misuraca, Corina Pascu, Yves Punie and José A. Valverde

Report (a large .pdf document also avaliable from…)
News release

This wide report covers different thematic areas. In addition to a cross-cutting analysis across areas in
Ch1: Key findings, Future Prospects and Policy Implications

It contains thematic analysis:
Ch2: The adoption and Use of Social Computing
Ch3: Social Computing from a Business Perspective
Ch4: Social Computing and the Mobile Ecosystem
Ch5: Social Computing and Identity
Ch6: Social Computing and Learning
Ch7: Social Computing and Social Inclusion
Ch8: Social Computing and Health
Ch9: Social Computing and Governance

News Corp. Weighs an Exclusive Alliance With Bing

By TIM ARANGO and ASHLEE VANCE – November 24, 2009 – New York Times

This is not how business has been done on the World Wide Web.

Microsoft has been in early discussions with the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, about a pact to pay the News Corporation to remove links to its news content from Google’s search engine and display them exclusively on Bing, from Microsoft, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously because of the confidential negotiations.

If such an arrangement came to pass, it would be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet, and set off a fierce debate over the future of content online.

The Web’s explosive growth has been driven, in part, by the open playing field it represents for consumers and businesses. These discussions could encourage major technology and media companies to start picking sides — essentially applying the cable TV model to the Web.

A deal on a large scale would create a new set of barriers for users to navigate and would represent an enormous risk for the News Corporation or any news site. More than 65 percent of all search inquiries in the United States are made on Google, and removing links from there would lead to a big drop in traffic. Bing handles 9.9 percent of domestic searches, according to comScore.

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, said in a recent interview that Google handled about six times as many search queries as Microsoft, and that Google’s search ads generated more revenue per click. But Microsoft executives have been clear about their intentions to pursue bold measures to disrupt Google’s dominant position in the search market.

A broad deal with media companies would be Microsoft’s most drastic measure to date — one in which it would be running a high-stakes experiment against Google, which also has deep pockets.

The CATcerto is the current project of the lithuanian conductor, composer and artist Mindaugas Piečaitis. The world premiere was performed by Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra in the Klaipėda Concert Hall in Klaipėda (Lithuania) on 5th June, 2009. It gained recognition in the international media, a.o. the BBC, Lithuanian TV, Baltic TV and the First Baltic Chanel (russian).

Mindaugas Piečaitis composed and directed the Catcerto for Nora The Piano Cat™ and orchestra, where Nora, the soloist, was brought in via video..