OLPC's "green machine"

I tried to keep this short, as I’m sure everyone’s crazy busy with finals.  Have fun debating Dvorak in the comments!

Nicholas Negroponte interview with Riz Khan

• Give One, Get One—Every time someone bought a Green Machine, one would be donated to a child in another country.
• Wanted to connect children around the world—felt that the industry would never create a low-cost laptop itself
• Figures that children will be able to immediately pick up the skills necessary to work the computers
• Doesn’t want people to think of it as giving children laptops, but an education.  “An inoculation against ignorance”
• Thinks that kids who go online are more engaged and more interesting off-line—will allow more interaction
• Laptops are child-friendly:  they convert into a games machine, works in the sunlight, low-power (with a hand crank), have antenna technology that creates a network
• The hope is that the teacher/student relationship will improve when students can teach the teachers
• Open source community helped them to localize the tech, including keyboards for each country
• Give one get one—wants people to fund other people.  Faster than waiting for countries to announce funding

Map of internet use by country

One Laptop, One Child Doesn’t Change the World

John Dvorak

Note:  I might be the only one, but when I click the link it takes me to an article with the correct title, but a completely unrelated story.  I did some googling and found a copy of it here (or at least what I’m hoping is a copy).

• The OLPC program lets people feel like they’re doing something helpful, but really doesn’t do much.
• Since so many people are living in poverty, he views it as a “let them eat cake” solution
• Characterizes the internet as “spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist propaganda, Nazi propaganda, exhortations, movie clips of cats playing the piano, advertising, advertising, and more advertising”, conveniently ignoring… basically everything else.
• Notes that laptops aren’t much good without a classroom (which is debatable) and literacy (which is actually a pretty good point)
• Takes to task the notion that once kids in Africa have laptops, the digital divide will be fixed

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the “movie clips of cats playing piano” that Dvorak was so dismissive of… Play him off, Keyboard Cat!

Give me rice, but give me a laptop too

Bill Thompson

• Things have not gone as well as initially hoped for with the laptops:  they cost more to make than expected, not very many governments are buying into the program, and Microsoft and Intel keep trying to ruin things
• Feels that Dvorak’s critique of OLPC is overly simplistic and potentially damaging, as he has so much influence
• Access to the internet will make it easier for developing nations to get other necessary goods and services
• Agrees that there are and will be problems with the program, but that’s no reason not to try

Internet Traffic Map

Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation:  Prospects for Political Solidarity After the Internet

Catherine Frost

• Likens the role of the internet to the role of print in the spread of nationalism in Anderson’s Imagined Communities
• In order to have a postnationalist society, we must have a common political culture.  Some think that the internet can help spread this sense of global solidarity.  Frost addresses why this is problematic in four ways:
  • Conceptions of Community:  there are limits to the ability to create communities on the internet.  First of all, the relative ease of anonymity means that it is hard to build solidarity with others, since identities are ever-changing.  Anonymity also encourages deviant behavior.  The internet is thus unlikely to establish the mutual trust necessary to build a common political culture.
  • Systems of Meaning:  In the building of nationalisms, a shared system of meaning (usually a religion) is necessary.  This doesn’t really happen on the internet, largely because there are no boundaries.  While there is the potential for a collective to exist, the increasing commercialization on the internet makes this unlikely.
  • Political Engagement:  While the internet has let some people engage in more political discussion, there’s still that pesky digital divide.  It therefore does not qualify as a new public sphere.  Also, useful political discussion requires sacrifice and mature discussion.  Obviously, anonymous online identities aren’t all that effective in this realm.
  • Social Inclusivity:  While cohesive networks might not evolve on the internet, it could widen social divides between those who have access and those who don’t, making a tighter-knit political community of the disadvantaged.  Um, yay?
  • Conclusions:  An internet-led postnational community is unlikely.  If social change does occur, it’s likely to happen through those who don’t have as much access, not the new media elites.

... I don't even know.

Recommended Reading

OLPC XO-2 cancelled

There were plans to make a dual-screen e-book/netbook, but now they’re making a tablet instead.  OLPC was going to be basically the only company making the e-book/netbook thing, but are now going for something more traditional.  Honestly, I don’t really even understand the concept.  But it’s dead now, anyway.

Also, while they’ve fulfilled all their orders and are doing all right, sales have not been amazing.  But not horrible either.Similar Posts:

• Access is only the beginning (7) | Gabriel Mugar
• Bookers Facebook fans weigh in (8) | Gabriel Mugar
• Accessing the Mashup (2) | Gabriel Mugar

This is it – this will be the last brief in the semester.

Wiki Marathon

For week I would like you to work on the wiki and make sure the structure and content of the wiki together with your contribution pages reflects the hard personal and collective work you’ve been doing. I want you guys to do more work earlier and not wait for the last moment on this as collaboration is hard and the process should be given some time to take shape and materialize. Please make sure you make most of your contributions by Saturday and devote Sunday-Tuesday to edit, structure and further substantiate the collective work of the class.

Next week’s reading will focus on the potential (?) of Postnationalism presented by the networked public sphere and on the digital divide through the case study of the OLPC.

Required Reading:

• Nicolas Negroponte, “Interview with Riz Khan” Al-Jazeera October 2007
  

  Click here to view the embedded video.

  (by the way, Riz’s show is recommended in general)
• One Laptop per Child Doesn’t Change the World / John C. Dvorak
• Give me rice, but give me a laptop too / Bill Thompson
• Frost, Catherine “Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation: Prospects for Political Solidarity After the Internet” (a pdf will be emailed to you, please do not share, sorry)
• Sara’s summary + your comment

Recommended Reading:

• (optional, just to get a more updated note on the OLPC) OLPC XO-2 cancelled: tablet will be developed next / Jack Schofield, Guardian (Nov 4th, 09)
• The OLPC wikipedia page, kept pretty updated with the project’s history and current state.

Sara:

• Read the essay & articles and view the presentation
• Optionally Highlight and annotate the reading to help its accessibility for the rest of you.
• Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday 4pm, ideally running some threads between them.
• Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class.
• Think of questions to lead off the discussion
• Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.

Similar Posts:

• Building communities or creating a divide?: The Digital Divide and Postnationalism (11) | Sara Hardwick
• Concluding the 4th travelogue and this evolutionary step (0) | Mushon
• Representation, Simulation, Fun & filthy rich media (0) | Mushon

“Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.”

“The Detroit of higher learning.”

Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) - Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel

In a NY Times editorial, Columbia professor Mark Taylor said that universities are becoming obsolete because they:
- produce a product for which there is no market (teaching positions)
- develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields /publication in journals)
- rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)

This “industrial model” of education goes back to Kant, who said universities need to “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

This is a problem because…

Kids These Days (are Thinking Differently)

“But young people who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet.”

They’re used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What’s more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what’s going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

The professors who remain relevant will have to:

collaboration

1. Abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one.
2. They should encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor’s store of information.
3. They need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university.
4. They need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

How Learning Should Be: Discovery / Context

Seymour Papert, one of the world’s foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn put it: “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”

John Seely Brown – learning should be like learning language, “based on social context,” in which individuals are “highly motivated to engage in learning this new, amazingly complex system”

“once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you’re learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…”

“Learning starts as you leave the classroom, when you start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is in conversation that you start to internalize what some piece of information meant to you.”

Keeping Universities Relevant with Digital Interactive Courses

“If all that the big universities have to offer to students are lectures that you can get online for free — from other professors — why pay the tuition fees? If universities want to survive the arrival of free university-level education online, they need to change the way professors and students interact on campus.”

Example: MIT offers free courses online (OpenCourseWare)

If universities want to stay relevant, they need to offer more interactive classes.

“Today the tools on the Net make it a great way to teach and free up the teacher to design the learning experience and converse with the students on an individual and more meaningful basis.”

One technique is just-in-time teaching: ‘warm-up questions, written by the students, are due a few hours before class, giving the teacher an opportunity to adjust the lesson “just in time,” so that classroom time can be focused on the parts of the assignments that students struggled with.’

According to the 1997 Educom review article “>”From theory to implementation: The Mediated Learning approach to computer-mediated instruction, learning and assessment” by Warren Baker, Thomas Hale, and Bernard R. Gifford:
“students who use well-crafted computer-mediated instruction … generally achieve higher scores on summary examinations, learn their lessons in less time, like their classes more, and develop more positive attitudes towards the subject matter they’re learning”

Challenging the Credentialing System

One argument for Universities is that they provide a credentialling system – as proof of hard workers’ discipline (and weeding out inferior students). Presumably, “those who graduate — better still with distinction — have a credential, to get the most desirable jobs or entrance to graduate programs. They have proven they have a degree of discipline and that they’re prepared to play by the rules.”

But, Tapscott writes, if large, lecture-based universities are proven to inferior to smaller schools with new, more interactive programs, then this model will change – because credentials are based on effectiveness.

Improving the Campus Experience

Is there a point to going to a University if lectures are available for free online? The campus can provide an opportunity for interaction, enhancing learning (going back to Brown’s point above… and Sunstein’s points below).

“The experience has shown MIT that the real value of what they offer is not the lecture per se, but rather the whole package — the content tied to the human learning experience on campus, plus the certification. Universities, in other words, cannot survive on lectures alone.

Videotaping lectures can free up intellectual capital — on the part of both professors and students — to spend their on-campus time thinking and inquiring and challenging each other, rather than just absorbing information.”

Global Academy

Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron: “Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending?”

“…Universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence… choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world’s greatest minds in their area of interest — either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online.”

Why not?

“New paradigms cause dislocation, disruption, confusion, uncertainty. They are nearly always received with coolness or hostility. Vested interests fight change. And leaders of old paradigms are often the last to embrace the new.”

- “The problem is funds,” one president said. “We just don’t have the money to reinvent the model of pedagogy.”
- “Models of learning that go back decades are hard to change.”
- “I think the problem is the faculty — their average age is 57 and they’re teaching in a ‘post-Gutenberg’ mode.” (or even pre-Gutenberg)

As Proenza says, “There are a lot of sacred cows,” he said. Why, for example, are universities judged by the number of students they exclude, or by how much they spend? Why aren’t they judged by how well they teach, and at what price?”

Conclusion

Students need to be agents of change: ‘If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials universities award, their position as centers of learning and research, and as campuses where young people get a chance to “grow up.”‘

Tapscott calls for a revolutionary, new educational system based on interactive communication.

Sunstein – “Personalized Education and Personalized News”

“Is the power of personalization a wonderful development? For institutions of higher education? For democracy? Should we celebrate complete freedom of choice with respect to the content of education and the content of news” Personalization is the power to “filter” what you see, but education should be “prescribed’ (chosen in advance) for students.

The big question is the “extent to which students should be allowed to exclude what they dislike and include what they like.”

“…institutions of higher learning, like democracy itself, require something other than free, or publicly unrestricted, individual choices” because…

1. “…people should be exposed to materials they would not have chosen in advance. Unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating, are central to education, democracy, and even to freedom itself.
2. “Many or most citizens… should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, members of a heterogeneous society will have a difficult time addressing social problems, since people will find it increasingly hard to understand one another.”

People have always had some amount of choice in their education/media content. But the internet dramatically increases “individual control over content.” Correspondingly, the power of general-interest intermediaries – the newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters, and educational administrations” has decreased. This is a problem because traditional media allow you to be exposed to content you might not normally choose.

“A well-designed campus will ensure such [chance/unwanted] encounters, as students meet people engaged in very different activities and concerned with very different issues.” This allows students to “discover topics that can alter interests/attentions” or change their lives. “One risk with a system of perfect individual control is that it can reduce the importance of the ‘public sphere’ and of common spaces in general.”

Constitutional Principle of Free Speech

“Public Forum Doctrine” adopted by the Supreme Court says streets and parks must be kept open to the public for expressive activity. This implies a belief that governments are obliged to allow speech to occur freely in public.

1. Ensures speakers can have access to a wide array of people
2. Allows speakers to have general access to specific people/institutions with whom they have a complaint
3. Increases the likelihood that citizens will be exposed to a wide variety of people or views

While the internet breaks monopoly of general-interest intermediaries (such as newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters, educational administrations) on public forums, the traditional intermediaries do “expose people to a wide range of topics and views at the same time they provide shared experiences for a heterogeneous public.”

Wider Choices = More Exclusion

“Selecting can produce narrowness, not breadth. The wider range of choices is likely, in many cases, to mean that people will try to find material that makes them feel comfortable or that is created by and for people like themselves.”

This leads to group polarization. “After deliberating with one another, people in a group are likely to move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which they were previously inclined, as indicated by the median of their predeliberation judgments.”

Sunstein says “…the likely result of personalization is that groups with distinctive identities will increasingly engage in within-group discussion” or balkanization.

This harms the educational experience itself (which involves exposure to many different viewpoints), AND it endangers democracy by degrading the wide experiences one receives in an education.

1. “ A good system of education should counteract this risk [group polarization] by exposing people to a wide variety of perspectives.” … “Education is not an ordinary commodity, in part because it should shape preferences and values, not merely cater to them.”
2. “A well-functioning democracy and a well-functioning system of higher education require that people be exposed to unanticipated, unchosen encounters and that people share a range of common experiences.”

Sunstein’s Talk at the University of Michigan’s 18th Annual Davis Market Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Free Expression

In this talk, Sunstein mainly elaborated on points made in his article… here are some of the things he brings up to support his point about the necessity of directed education, shared experiences and democracy.

3 Studies

Sunstein tapped the Rockies for his experiment.

1. Sunstein and other researchers performed an experiment with groups in Colorado Springs (mainly Republican) and Boulder (mainly Democrat). Before the experiment started, the participants were asked questions designed to gauge how strongly they felt about certain polarizing political issues. Then they were allowed time to deliberate on those issues with other participants in their group (the members of each group had the same political leaning). After deliberation, the average group viewpoint on the political issues was more extreme than those of the individual viewpoints measured before deliberation. Additionally, individual views measured after deliberation became more extreme.

The research shows that within ideologically uniform groups, internal diversity is squelched and diversion from the median becomes much more dramatic.

2. US Courts of Appeals have 3 members and they can be 3 Republican appointees (RRR), 3 Democratic appointees (DDD), RRD, or DDR. A study of the outcome of labor law cases showed that RRR or DDD decisions were more extreme than the decisions of mixed courts (RRD or DDR). At the same time, in mixed courts the dissenting decision was far less ideologically extreme.

3. In a study of 1000 Texan jury-eligible people, participants were asked to rank corporate misconduct cases from 1-6 on their moral severity and then to assign a dollar amount to how much the company should pay to make up for it.

While moral judgments were strikingly uniform across the board, the dollar amounts were very unpredictable.

In a second step for the experiment, the participants were given the chance to deliberate about their moral judgments and dollar amounts… after deliberation, moral judgments became more extreme (whether extremely severe or extremely lenient). At the same time, the dollar amounts for each case increased (whether the moral judgment moved up or down).

All three studies showed examples of group polarization, where after deliberation with like-minded people, viewpoints grow more extreme.

Social Architecture

Sunstein theorizes two kinds of freedom enabled by social architectures:

1. Control – characterized by self-sorting and convenience
2. Serendipity – characterized by unanticipated, unchosen encounters or shared experiences with others

He favors serendipity – saying shared experiences are the foundation of liberal democracy and academic freedom. He goes on to review what he says in the article about the Public Forum Doctrine and remarks upon Jane Jacobs’s work on American Cities, showing the “criticalness” of public spaces for creating unimaginable, unexpected encounters… which lead to tolerance.

While cities nowadays are lacking those locations, television, newspapers, and universities are picking up the slack – providing opportunities for people to learn things they wouldn’t normally be interested in or changing their minds about critical issues.

He says that this:
1. Provides social glue to a diverse population (by creating a shared information source)
2. Allows people to encounter diverse topics even if they wouldn’t normally see them.

As a technological analogue… Political blogging allows like-minded groups to stick together… and links to unlike-minded people usually point out “the contemptuous or ridiculous nature” of those other sites.

In groups, people try to present themselves as a certain type of person – not a moderate or boring person. Brain scan studies show that when people’s views are corroborated with another, they:

1. like the other person better, and
2. like themselves better too.

The polarization machine / echo chamber effect impairs education literally and impairs the type of education required by democracy.

Importance of a Free and Widely-Read Press

1. No nation every with a democratically elected government and a free press has ever experienced a famine.
2. A famine is a measure of how governments respond to food scarcity.
3. Pressure provided by a free press requires the government to do something under these conditions.

Sunstein says this shows the importance of the ability of information to flow from one person to another – people can’t be “cocooned” and receptive only to info they like – there needs to be a permeable membrane.

Cell Membranes are semipermeable. I know this because of general education requirements. Directed education at work!

Educational institutions need to protect against group polarization and provide space for serendipity and work against self-sorting – not just for the sake of learning but also for interpersonal understanding.

Technology!

1. Allows for new kinds of public spaces with unrealized possibilities and deliberative forums.
2. But we need to recognize the importance of respectful links between blogs – a “civic tip of the hat” to other viewpoints.

Points brought up in question and answer session:
1. Polarization isn’t always bad (sometimes the “center is lousy” – i.e. Nazis).
2. Large scale polarization is possible, it is not just represented small group behavior.Similar Posts:

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• Alternate Reality Games As Education Tools (1) | Franklin
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The New Media Embed Program (a manual)

This one is a group assignment. And by group I mean the whole class. We are going to write a manual for the new media researcher, based on the experiences and themes we have gathered in this class, all in wiki format. I have deliberately not structured the wiki as I want to see how will you guys work together to make the structure emerge from the group activity. What we can expect to have in a manual like this might be (just suggestions, you are welcomed to come up with other ideas):

• Topics we discussed through readings: trust, community, CBPP, open source, social software, network theory, interface, fun, the long tail, representation/simulation, control, remix culture, game theory, copyright laws, net neutrality…
• Topics we discussed in class: mash-ups, twitter, religion, Google Wave, Facebook activism, music business, crowdsourcing…
• Do’s and Don’t for conducting a networked research, posting, commenting, tagging, podcasting, vodcasting, screencasting, interviewing, using rich media, embedding yourself in a media environment, choosing a starting destination…
• Best practices for travelogues
• Recap of key travelogues conducted through the semester.
• What does “New Media” or “Digital Media” stand for anyway?
• You name it…

To get started:

• Log in with your username/password from the blog (if you’re not already logged-in, check under the ‘Personal tools’ sidebar)
• Learn the MediaWiki syntax (if you don’t already know it)
• To start a new page simply write its name after the tdm/wiki/index.php/_______ and then, when it says the page does not exist yet, edit it to bring it to life.
• Make sure to link between the pages using this syntax [[Page_Name]] or link to external links (including our blog) using [http://www.somesite.com the text you want to be linked]
• When saving, write what was the content of your change, so we can easily track it
• Use the talk pages to coordinate when it makes sense.
• Track changes through the new sidebar on the blog or through RSS feeds.
• Enjoy…

Some Tips:

• We need structure, try to work on the main page to formalize the architecture of the travelogue
• Feel free to link to currently non-existing pages like that: [[Trust]] if you think it makes sense for someone (maybe even you, but not necessarily you) to write them, and then for someone else to help edit it.
• Work on pages together, start something, make some subheadings that you think should be filled by someone, invite them to help you, even comment on their posts with something like: “Hey Gordita, I started this page on our wiki about Twitter and I thought you might have a lot to add to it” – that way the wiki will collaboratively evolve.
• Check out the History pages to see what edits have been made on a page.

* I’m expecting each of you to make at least 35 edits this week, or in other words, make sure you edit so much that you stop counting. This wiki is what we leave behind this class and will be what you take with you from it.

Required Reading:

• The Impending Demise of the University by Don Tapscott
• MyUniversity.com? Personalized Education and Personalized News by Cass Sunstein
• Melissa’s summary + your comment on it

Recommended Viewing:

• My University.com, My Government.com: Is the Internet Really a Blessing for Democracy? presentation by Cass Sunstein
  (you can play it in the background, it’s not very visual)

For Melissa:

• Read the articles and view/listen to the presentations
• Optionally Highlight and annotate the reading to help its accessibility for the rest of you.
• Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday 4pm, ideally running some threads between them.
• Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class.
• Think of questions to lead off the discussion
• Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.

Similar Posts:

• Concluding the 4th travelogue and this evolutionary step (0) | Mushon
• Wave Hello! (3) | sava
• Hi Class! (1) | Mushon

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Still trying hard to post this.. (4) | ms. viola swamp
• The Meta Mashup (4) | Gabriel Mugar
• ““Everything that come around go 3-6-0, longtitude and latitude, it’s all in the attitude…” (3) | H-Man

Originally, I was going to write a conclusion about comics, but I figured if you’ve been reading my posts you already know what I’ve been writing, so why repeat it? Instead I was going to talk about my experiences with Pixton, which have been slightly OK at best. As someone who can’t draw and doesn’t have time to play around in MS Paint (which I don’t even have), Pixton seemed like a dream. Pre-made templates that I can mess around with. Although most people who make Pixton comics are more creative than me and probably get the most out of Pixton, they are still using images that belong to Pixton, so whatever they create ultimately belongs to Pixton as well. This bothers me. It makes sense, but I’m still kind of angry about it. All of the comics I’ve made for this project aren’t mine!!! I gave up the rights to my work in exchange for aesthetics and convenience.

The other thing that bothered me was when you go to publish your comic, two options are automatically checked: you allow to have your comic remixed by other pixton users, and you allow for the content of your comic to be used in Pixton merchandise. You have to manually uncheck them if you don’t agree with either. The first option is actually kind of cool, Pixton is allowing it’s users to play around with things others have made, but does this mean Pixton employees can do the same for advertising purposes? If I would’ve allowed for my work to be remixed, would Mr. Tweeters and Sparkles have been used in a comic promoting Pixton’s newest features? The second option outright pisses me off, because not only do the comics not belong to you, but if you don’t read closely enough before publishing your comic, Pixton can make money off of something you (mostly) created. The least they can do is not have these options automatically checked when you go to publish your comic.

I’d like to say that if I would’ve decided to do this again, I would create my own comics from scratch, but Pixton’s convenience is definitely appealing, even if it does mean I’ll never own what I make on their site.

Also, regarding webcomics, check out Brad Neely’s YouTube channel, which is sort of like a video/comic hybrid. A new twist on webcomics, as well as hilarious:

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Webcomics and Art Online: Is Comic Book Guy already out of a job? (7) | Elisa Verna
• AAWL 2 (12) | Elisa Verna
• Comics About Comics, pt. 1 (5) | Elisa Verna

• Monetizing Internet TV – a view from the frontlines (4) | Anu
• The Web and the Real World Vol. 3 (3) | Jason
• Brand-created Content: Finding its legs (3) | Anu

But I still haven’t answered the big question: “is the internet making us funnier?”.

Well?

If we’re only talking about quantity and speed, then sure. Online, we can easily create and share humor, and we can do it really really quickly!

But qualitatively funnier? In the real world? Maybe I could begin to answer this question if I had hours and months and years to do a content analysis of sitcoms or movies or standup comedy or books over the decades.

But honestly, I think the answer is no. When it comes down to it, people are still making the same kind of jokes, they’re just finding new ways to share and comment upon them. I think this video from the Library of Congress makes my point.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Guys! People have been messing with cats since at least the 1880s! Which is when this video was made. Seriously.

I’d also like to mention: while there’s a ton of stuff that’s funny out there on the internet, there’s a lot of content that really, really isn’t. In some simplistic way, wouldn’t funny and unfunny create a counterbalance to one another?

Anyway, in an effort to create make something funnier, by building upon something that’s already out there, and then distribute it far and wide using, check out this hilarious video uploaded onto youtube, a source of networked comedy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Networking Humor (4) | Melissa_A
• Make Me Laugh, Internet (10) | Melissa_A
• Bridging the Gap – Using Humor to Build On- and Off-line Relationships (8) | Melissa_A

Click here to view the embedded video.

After the jump, some follow up questions and answers I received from her last night, (too late to put into my video…sorry for so much text!).

Q: Did you read the Whole Earth Catalogue/Review before you joined the WELL? If so, how do you think it relates to the countercultural theme?

A: Yes, I read it, though I was not a subscriber. If you talk to more members or even just read some of the posts you can see that a lot of us never really grew out of that sixties movement. After the seventies ended and most of the communes closed down, the WELL became another place we could come together while still living our “straight” lives.

Q: From your personal experience, can you see how the WELL has served as an influencer of other online communities?

A: It might be difficult to imagine now because it’s so insular and online has evolved so much, but when the WELL first started it was really out of this world. Usenet and Arpanet existed (and were much more expensive), but being able to communicate with people through a modem miles and miles away was still a new concept to most people. I think it really showed how relationships online could transfer to offline, and it helped show how the internet really could be used as a social utility.

Q: Do you think your time spent online on the WELL has hindered or limited your experience at all “in real life?”

A: Haha. It’s definitely something I’ve thought about, but I think it’s only helped it. I feel like I’ve gained a lot, including real life knowledge and real life friends from the WELL. Many of the relationships I’ve formed from the WELL are very deep, and it’s definitely helped with networking in my professional career. I see it as just another outlet for socialization – instead of maybe going to a bar or a meeting, I’ll go to the WELL.

My concluding thoughts: As I mentioned last week, this travelogue was like time traveling – I feel like my exploration into the WELL helped contextualize the early days of the internet. It’s easy for us (especially those of us in our 20’s who have pretty much grown up online) to accept the internet’s existence, but we don’t often question where it came from, or how it has grown. While it may not be the digital utopia it was set out to be, I do think the WELL is one of the stronger examples of how, with the right mix of people and the right amount of enthusiasm, online communities can foster positive relationships and increase personal knowledge.

To end it, here’s some awesome footage of a 1989 WELL party I found on youtube (which I highly encourage at least skimming).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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• Bridging the Gap – Using Humor to Build On- and Off-line Relationships (8) | Melissa_A
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Brand-createdContent

related link:

milkquarious rock opera

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There it is folks. Hope you guys enjoyed my vodcasts, i have to say it was a pleasure recording them!

Linx

NY Times Jay-Z Article

Breaking Down The Madonna Deal

Tension Between CEO and Chairman of Livenation

ONE,

H.Similar Posts:

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Crystallized DNA

Mapping and studying DNA is elucidating evolution. Enriquez calls it a “River out of Eden” because DNA is a history of the last billion years. Therefore understanding DNA will change medicine and archeology.

Example: White Europeans diverged from Africans because they were exposed to the plague. Those that survived had a mutation on their CCR5 gene. Through the study of DNA, scientists found this mutation developed 700 years ago, and as a result, Africans are more susceptible to the rapid spread of AIDS.

NEW ZOO OF LIFE

A new zoo of life is discovered through mapping our own genetic history and exploring new terrains on earth:
-There are ten trillion, trillion prochlorococcus–the most abundant species on the planet that we didn’t know existed before a few years ago.
-Our genome is more efficient than some simple amoeba. Humans have approximately 3.2 billion base pairs in our cells whereas this specific amoeba has 620 billion base pairs.
- The Ferroplasma eats iron and lives in an environment like battery acid. It secretes sulfuric acid. It is an ‘archaea’ or an ‘ancient one’ that could survive when the earth was just melted core. He suggests that as we discover life in harsher climates that there is growing evidence for life beyond our planet.
- Thiomargarita namibiensis is a bacteria visible to the human eye that is the size of a period(.) It utilizes sulfates and nitrates to get its energy and is found off the coast of Namibia in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean.

According to the speaker, we are paying attention to “stuff” (Bush and the war) that is temporal. Life isn’t. Whether or not our nation or our species survive, these bacteria will.

EXPERIMENTING WITH THE CODE

Geneticists have begun experimenting with endangered species in order to save them. Scientists take cells from adult animals and put them in a cow’s egg. They “reprogram it” and the cow gives birth to another species.

They are close to closing gene gaps in deteriorated DNA and pull a full string of DNA together

Sounds Familiar...

The speaker effuses that we will be able to take the tree of life and collapse it back. Maybe we will give birth to the primordial ooze.

In 1995 scientists sequenced the DNA of a bacterium. The price is going down to sequence organizes DNA. The first human cost 5 million, 3 million second time and he predicts that soon it will only cost a few thousand dollars. Maybe we will have our own personalized genomes on CDs.

He compares A, T, C, and Gs to 1s and 0s of binary code. (Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine are the nucleotide bases that make up the structure of DNA.) Once you have the source code you can make changes to it.

Example: Cliff Tabin’s Lab at Harvard Medical School is reprogramming chicken embryos to grow more wings. Each cell can be programmed to express different body functions. Right now lizards regenerate, but humans don’t. If we keep stem cell research and genomics going, we can learn how this works. During the time of this talk, the Bush administration had passed some sever restrictions on the research with embryonic stem cells. We will be able to stop undifferentiated cells–aka cancer.

We can make very small changes in the gene code and get drastically different outcomes.

We can test for all kinds of genetic information and for 60,000 conditions. While this brings up issues of privacy and insurability, it allows scientists to go after diseases.  Knowing what genes are causing the disease allows them to know what treatments will and will not work

Who Controls This Growing Information In Our Fragmented World?

Knowledge of genetics is growing on a log scale. The data is free, but only a very small select population is paying attention. Everyone is focused on the war and on Bush and not on ‘life.’

In a knowledge society the difference between the richest and poorest is 427 to 1 as compared to an agricultural society that is 5 to 1. One third of the global population is producing only 5 percent of the wealth because they don’t understand this change. Literacy in language, computers, and in life code makes the difference. The nations that produce “life” will be those that rise and countries that continually treat their citizens as serfs and fail to educate them will fall.

He discusses that we know how the capacity to build great empires because of the fragmentation of the world. When UN 1950 was founded there were approximately 50 nations now there are about 192.

Then they play him off the stage for time reasons before he can tell us the secrete of using our knowledge of life and code to build a better tomorrow with our children… Darn!

Gary Wolf, March 24, 2008
“Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity”
WIRED Magazine

This article features Ray Kurzweil an inventor, author, and poster boy for the Singularity movement. He and his ideas are the topics for two upcoming movies this year.

Ray Kurzweil

Inventor of: Kurzweil reading machine, algorithms that made Lexis-Nexis possible, speech recognition software that developed robot customer service agents, FatKat an automated program that makes decision in the financial markets.

Despite his successes as a young genius, his genetic history is checkered. His father and grandfather died of heart disease before they were sixty. At age 35, Kurzweil was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes and high cholesterol.  Through a restrictive diet he has overcome his diabetes and cholesterol.

Yum!

At 61 He takes 180-210 vitamins/mineral supplements per day and goes to a clinic run by Terry Grossman—leading longevity physicians—once a week to receive longevity treatments. Grossman charges $6,000 per appointment. Two met in 1999 and became partners who continually give Kurzweil new age treatments to extend his life. After all, it would be a shame to die just before the singularity occurred.

The Singularity

“The singularity is near. The continued opportunity to alleviate human distress is one key motivation for continuing technological advancement”

It is a term from cosmology that signifies a border in spacetime, like the edge of a black hole, where the normal laws of measurement do not apply.  Mathematician John von Neumann used the term in the 1950s, to discuss the accelerating pace of technological development that “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.”

The idea was expanded upon by Vernor Vinge in 1993 who put the idea on a time table and guessed that within 30 years, superhuman intelligent machines would arise and “take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors.”

Kurzweil argues that “while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant.” AIs will first be add-ons to human intelligence to extend our bodies and minds to defeat death and disease and immortalize us.

Kurzweil thinks exponentially and not linearly, and his ideas about technological development work on a exponential scale. Exponential change is difficult to differentiate from a linear regression at the beginning of the scale. This idea is evident in Moore’s law—the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months.

Moore's Law

He believes that while our current computers and inventions don’t work perfectly, the fact that we are making robots and computers that mimic human behavior is proof that the world is about to change in major was because of exponential development.

“Computers will soon be smarter than humans. Nobody has to die.”

Grossman and singularitairans show how immortality will arrive in stages:
1. Anti-aging therapies and changes in lifestyle will allow people to reach the 125-year limit to our natural lifespans
2. Biological science will find some of the underlying causes of ageing and allow us to surpass that limit
3.  Computers will model human consciousness and we can download our personalities into “nonbiological substrates”

Romana is the inventor’s intelligent computer alter ego who he hopes to become when the singularity happens. Unfortunately Romana loses a turing test because she is too clever and doesn’t have limited intelligence like a human. Kurzweil thinks that human emotion is the most complex of all human behaviors, but happiness should not be the goal of our lives. It should be expanding our knowledge.

Unfortunately for Kurzweil he lives a lonely existence because most of his followers are hedging their bets and don’t completely buy into the idea of immortality. But he predicts by 2030s most of our internal organs will be replaced by machines/robots. And that 2045 the singularity will happen.

Criticisms of The Singularity
-Hard to conceptualize defeating death
-Moore’s law’s viability is being called into question- our technological growth maybe slowing already.
-There are other forms of intelligence that super-intelligent computers can be modeled off of other than human
-We maybe limiting ourselves and incapably of “radical self-improvement” because we will reinforce the fact that the brain has certain technical limitations because of its structure.

“Every day he stays alive brings him closer to this climax in intelligence, and to the time when Ramona will be real. Kurzweil is a technical person, but his goal is not technical in this respect. Yes, he wants to become a robot. But the robots of his dreams are complex, funny, loving machines. They are as human as he hopes to be.”

Nicholas Ruiz III
Review of Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia

-Human beings narrate their own existence.  But we are now editing ourselves via our internal code–DNA.  The literary extrapolation of life past our own existence has become a study of technology.  Many societies have yet to grasp fully this change because of capital, but with globalization they will eventually gain access to the “technological implementation of the code.”

-What we have yet to fully engage with as a society is that our beings are the ‘new media.’ Biomedia is the recontextualization of the human being with technology that creates a new understanding of how biology functions.

-Mediated by capital, the code of life (i.e. DNA) and the code of technologies are merging (technology and biology are merging in new ways for those with money).

-We encode our DNA in our genome in biocomputing hardware/software.  This digital map of ourselves is then decoded to understand human possibilities and to “digitally edit flesh” to optimize the existing substrate—i.e. our bodies.

-While our societies used to make a distinction between body and soul, this separation has been lost in modern society. We are unable to find the soul; we feel as if we have lost it.  Biomedia suggests that we have lost nothing other than the concept.

-The genetic code will be collapsed into digital code giving us “the Code.” The boundaries between bodies of silicon (computers) and DNA bodies will blur.

-DNA is information, DNA is a program. It has computational power. It is a mechanism.

-Biomedia needs to be defined so we can ground our discussions of bioethics in the culture of biomedia. How we narrate our human condition in terms of our bodies is also important to understand along with categories of understanding like the presumptive terms “natural,” “technical,” and “real.”

WRAPPING IT ALL UP

-Everything is happening in the near future with an explosion of technological and biomedical advancement that will surpass our wildest dreams!!! Is this necessarily a good thing? Both authors present a rosey picture without much down side to genetic manipulation and transhumanism.

Eek! You will be assimilated.

-Kurzweil’s arguments are based on idealized computers, not real world ones that function on imperfect software. Read Lanier’s response to Kruzweil’s singularity theory and others like it.

-Kurzweil has been accused of ‘New Age Spiritualism’ or as a ‘Geek searching for God’ with the quest for AI, but Thacker claims that Biomedia will lead to an understanding that the Soul is a farce.

-They have been able to generate tissue to build new tracheas and are learning how to regenerate ‘wings,’ but how quickly will mainstream medicine take to adapt this? Will it just be as Thacker claims a change that is mainly available to those with capital?

-Thacker claims we need to understand Biomedia before we understand bioethics, but where is the moral ground in all of these papers and articles?

-DNA=Code.  We are bio computers. What makes us human?

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PICS OR GTFO!

So, my little app is coming along. Thank you in advance to everyone who’ll be testing it out on their phones once it’s been published. I still have a few more kinks to work out, but I should be “going live” with it on Friday (and my Beta Testers will receive an e-mail with detailed instructions once it’s ready).

In the meanwhile, I made a vid demo-ing the app as it works now on my phone. Also, there’s a companion website on my server where you can see how the data’s been used and tracked as our experiment chugs along. (I’ll update you guys with a link in my later concluding posts.)

The vid…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cheers!
Harlo

P.S. I’m totally not a designer, so the app might look kind of garish to some. I plan on submitting this app to a big contest– if someone would like to help me out with design once I get a bit past my beta phase, please let me know!!!

P.P.S. Gabriel once asked my why I didn’t consider applying to the ITP: Truthfully, I could never ever get in, because I have horrible aesthetic direction— It’s like a congenital deficiency! I’ll stick to critical theory any day; that’s my art!Similar Posts:

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T4 – Final week:

I realize it is holiday weekend, so let’s focus on the concluding post. Either way, each of you please comment 4 times this week on your friend’s posts (including the ones posted only 15 mins ago).

Cleanup:

Since the class will be done in three weeks from now, I want us to do some preparation work towards the final assignment:

• Click on your author link on our sidebar to review all of your past posts.
• Make sure that every post is assigned the right category (1-travelogue, 2-travelogue, fyi…)
• Make sure you are using tags to describe the themes your travelogue deals with (privacy, journalis, uncanny valey, wow gold farming, economics…) feel free to use several tags on any post. Try to use tags that have been used before, this will help us make the tag cloud more representative of what we’ve been doing this semester.
• I am adding a ‘related posts’ plugin which will do some networking based on the tags that you use, probably between your own posts but possibly between yours and others.

Required Reading:

• Decoding the Future with Genomics / Juan Enriquez (Video)
• Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity / Gary Wolf
• Comment on Lauren’s summery

Recommended Reading:

• Review of Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia / Nicholas Ruiz III

Lauren:

• Read the review, the article and watch the talk video.
• Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday 4pm, ideally running some threads between them.
• Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class.
• Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.

Enjoy!Similar Posts:

• Representation, Simulation, Fun & filthy rich media (0) | Mushon
• We Built this city on Google (6) | Lauren Marie
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Click here to view the embedded video.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/02/live-nation-and/

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i9f631ea10a4997bc3e00c33776e8675d

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/02/25/live-nation-ticketmaster-merger-hearing-becomes-battle-over-chicago-music-scene/

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=ajG.OB5TGseY&pos=12

ONE,

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More about Fletcher Hanks

Marvel Digital Comics

ComicsMonkey

Top Shelf ProductionsSimilar Posts:

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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a couple of points:

• digital video seems to be having a positive impact on education
• training seems to be a HUGE issue – the bad examples seem to point to lack of support for teachers
• the future will likely be more individualized  - and students will shape a lot of their learning using new technologies

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Click here to view the embedded video.

This week I used screencasting as my rich media, and went through the WELL as I’ve been participating in it.  I’ve been a member for two weeks now – it’s been an enjoyable experience, but I kind of feel like I’m time traveling. It definitely does have more of a communal feel to me than other social areas on the internet, different from something like Facebook or a general messageboard.

There are two main characteristics that have stood out to me so far:

1) The minimal, old school design and lack of advertising (made possible through paid monthly subscriptions).

2) The content of the conferences (I’d argue they’re full of intelligence and “class”), and the dedication that the members have to participating (many 20 years+).

I find myself writing posts on the WELL similar to how I would write something like a blog post for this class. I spellcheck, make sure my arguments and thoughts make sense, and make sure I’m adding to the conversation. I think about my actions way more. Maybe because I’m writing to strangers? Maybe because I’m an “outsider”/newbie as most members are at least familiar with each other (any many have been for years). It’s definitely different from how I would communicate on other online platforms. More conclusions next week.

As for my video, I think a screencast is an efficient way of seeing how the site works, but I find the dullest of all formats so far. Also I wish the picture was clearer and my video was shorter (realistically I know I probably wouldn’t watch 9 minutes of a screencast either).Similar Posts:

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• From Communes to Conferences (1) | Alison
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I have to say this: after reading, I ‘got’ what was going on, but it is so so hard to articulate it. I found myself explaining it verbally to the bf because that helped to form my thoughts on the subject. A lot of the references are really beyond me – but Wikipedia is awesome! Seriously – a lot of this would not have made sense for me had it not been for Wikipedia. How did they do it in the old days??!!

Oh, and I had various stupid stupid tech issues with just the write-up – believe it or not, I lost my file because I was writing it in TextEdit and not saving because I just usually copy it over, and then computer crashed on me and I lost most of this post and had to recreate it. Sigh. See y’all in class!

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

[and here's a preview...]

Review by: Daniel Gilfillan

Daniel Gilfillan describes the central point of the book as moving “the discussion beyond the emancipatory promise of the network to light upon the inherent systems of control and power relations that also inhabit it, and allow it to thrive”. Galloway and Thacker move away from the general viewpoint that networks are democratic and libertarian and instead call on us to view the network as having a power system that needs to be ‘exploited’ in order to break away from its controls. The authors talk of “the exploit” – a point within in a network which can be used to reframe the power structure of the network.

Gilfillan notes that the book traces the history of networks and the authors situate their theory and work based on Foucault and Deleuze, specifically Deleuze’s work on control societies and ‘dataveillance’. The authors talk about the new ‘network-network symmetry’ that exists between a datascaped network system and the control societies, which is what the current network looks like.

From my understanding of it (and this could be completely wrong!) they say that this is where ‘the exploit’ comes in – weak spots within this symmetry which can be used to develop a system of resistance called an “antiweb” and “an exceptional topology” in the form of ‘unhuman swarms’ (I wonder why they use this particular term as opposed to non-human), likened to biological and computer viruses.

In their section called ‘Nodes’, the authors go into further detail on the anatomy of this current symmetry and point out how two seemingly contradictory concepts exist together: “… how networks within control societies are able to combine these antithetical postulates of control and emergence, of how they can be simultaneously regulatory and free-flowing.” They then go on to talk about how the very nature of this network system provides for that weakness from which the exploit can be launched like a virus, then overpowering the network and repurposing it into something new and different and more in line with what users really want.

Gilfillan notes that the goal of this book is to push people away from the current view of networks and show us how there are “… vast system of controls within the varying protocols that have been put in to place to sculpt and regulate network space.” They show us how we can identify the areas “that can be exploited for the instigation of political and progressive change.” using ‘un-human’ elements – they refer to “computer viruses, emergent infectious disease, and bioterrorism” as examples to create masses of movement.

The reviewer notes that this book might be somewhat tedious to read because of the experimental style of writing, but that it is an important book in the domain of network theory, digital culture, and cyber culture.

Review by: Nathaniel Tkacz

Tkacz positions his review from a more political angle. According to him, this book “… offers “a theory of networks” founded on the claim that networks are political formations in their own right”, that networks are the main organizers of power, and most conflicts are basically networks fighting networks.

He notes that the authors then talk about topology and graph theory, and, as the earlier reviewer also pointed out, derive their theoretical basis from Foucault and Deleuze to talk about their concept called ‘protocol’. I think that this reviewer describes the concept of protocol in this context very well: “Protocol is thus both a set of rules or codes that enables, modulates, and governs a specific network (such as IP/TCP for the internet) and also a general logic of governance for all networks.” So, protocol governs this network, and, as the authors go on to describe, it can also govern different types of network and even seemingly unconnected networks.

After establishing the role of the protocol, Tkacz notes how the authors put a ‘maleficent’ light on the protocol and then go on the talk about how to challenge and modify this protocol using ‘the exploit’ by finding the holes in the network. I think the reviewer situates the concept of these ‘holes’ nicely when he says, “Hackers call these holes ‘exploits’”.” So, there is no real ‘conflict’, but the exploit uses these holes to change power structure of the network itself.

The reviewer sees three main drawbacks to the work:

1. The structure of the book itself – the experimental nature of how it is written. The reviewer notes that the book itself is written like a network with the first section being the ‘nodes’ and the second section the ‘edges’ which connect to the ‘nodes’, or as the review says, ’supposed to connect’.
2. Inconsistencies while referring to networks and other terms – The authors revert to referring to networks as centralized or decentralized after having talked about how there are so many different types of networks. Also, “the term “power” is frequently equated with centralisation”.
3. Lack of generalizability of ‘protocol’ and ‘exploit’ – the reviewer points out that the authors imply that “US Sovereignty is protocological” but then encourage us to use non-protocological methods against the government, but, these methods cannot be non-protological because they are coming from inside the network.

Despite this, the reviewer says that this book pushes the boundaries of media studies in a good way and that it “a refreshing interrogation into the discourse of networks; a discourse still rife with unfulfilled promises of wealth, freedom, and abundance — promises as empty as ever.”

Response from: Galloway and Thacker

The authors acknowledge Gifillan’s bringing up the point that the network is ‘unhuman’ but go further to explain why they say that it is. They talk about the network as supposedly being a “utopia of sharing” in which individuals believe that they are contributing to the whole and that their contribution is unique and important to the whole. But as you scale up, it ceases being about individual and becomes “beyond the human”, therefore becoming “unhuman”. And now I get why they use that term instead on non-human =)

They then talk about “the “how” of networks” and explain that their interest in protocols and biomedia was because of “something happening that was not quite the result of human technics and not quite simply the laws of nature”, which led them to see that computer and biological viruses occurred not because something in the network was broken, but because it wasn’t.

Galloway and Thacker agree that they are indebted to Foucault and Deleuze and further clarify that they draw from Foucault’s work on biopolitics and security and try and connect these concepts to their vision of networks. And their interest in Deleuze, besides control societies, lies “… in linking that essay to Deleuze’s over-arching interest in the concepts of immanence [the state of being within or not going beyond a given domain - WordNet, Princeton] and univocity [that which speaks with one voice - wikipedia]“. From this come the political questions that the authors ask – basically, what is to be done?

The authors talk about three answers to this question:

1. “agro” or the “master of the universe” attitude: this view basically says that we must make the network as robust as possible and remove all viruses and such and make the system the best system it can be. But this approach cannot plug every hole, so it is bound to fail.
2. “emo” or the “agonistic” (no, not agnostic haha) approach: the acceptance of what is, the accepting that the world will be “lost in the hands of technology”, and can only be saved by some “poetic experience”. They liken this to “young Werther” (a reference to a book by Goethe called ‘The Sorrow of Young Werther‘ about a young man who can’t bear to be without a woman he loves but he can’t bear to hurt her or husband either so the only way out is to commit suicide. SO thankful for Wikipedia!!) and also to people today who are overwhelmed by spam but still in awe of Skype. They talk about this approach as “a life of sweet drowning, awash in the crush of information.” and dismiss it as well.
3. “ludo” or the poststructuralist approach: these are the people who bring forth playful “joyful excess” from the network, creating amazingly positive and seemingly useful things.

They do not agree with any of these approaches and point out that neither of these answer the question – what is to be done? Instead they say that we should rephrase the question to “what is to be done without us?”

Because of the inability of these approaches to answer their question, the authors arrive at another question, about the “ontology of networks” – does there always have to be someone outside the network to look in and say that there is a network? This is, apparently a question that has been asked for a while and different disciplines have tried to answer it, none to the satisfaction of the authors.

Finally, the authors acknowledge that, as the reviewers point out, they have used an experimental style to write the book. They say that this is because they wanted to break from the traditional academic style of writing and to get readers to think of thought as a network – hence their book attempts to work as a network trying to present the work as nodes and edges; but they caution: “However the writing in the “edges” section does not make every connection between ideas, and the writing in the “nodes” section does not map out every approach.”

And… I’m not going to summarize their last few sentences, because they say it so well =)

Resistances crop up everywhere, though they do not always exist for us. Precisely because of this, networks deserve to be considered from an unhuman standpoint — insofar as this is possible! Or, put another way, the key is to comprehend the unhuman within the human, as immanent to the human. This is really the note on which we close the book, with a presocratic notion of the “elemental.”

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I found this week’s reading to be really relevant to my study of humor on the internet. As I mentioned last week, humor creates an in/out dichotomy – if you’re in on the joke then you’re in the community. If you’re not, well… as Lorink writes in “The Principle of Networking”:

‘Network struggle does not rely on discipline: creativity, communication and self-organized cooperation are its primary values.’ Its focus is primarily on the inside, not on the enemy. Hardt and Negri rightly note that organization becomes less a means and more an end in itself.

However. What I want to focus on this week is how enabling individuals to share humor across geographical or physical boundaries allows comedy to grow fast and big. When gets everyone involved, the joke just gets funnier.

I’m imagining the internet as a vast social network made up of users as nodes, the links between them, the flows they create as they transmit information back and forth. This is what I think what makes humor online so accessible – rather than with other media platforms which simply broadcast material, with the internet we pass it back and forth, comment on it, and manipulate it. The material gets funnier because you get to put your own stamp on it in some way or another and then share it with other people.

For example, in a recent article my old pal Scott Brown (okay, I don’t actually know him) discusses how comedians use Twitter to test out new material – testing jokes out on the “hive mind” and taking advantage of their (sometimes less-than) constructive criticism if the joke flops.

It works because networks ease communication between individuals. As Lovink writes, “Networks increase levels of informality and also pump up noise levels, caused by chit-chat…” There’s definitely a lot of noise on the web, but that’s the cost of multi-directional communication. A good example of how networks are driven by informality is discussion boards – generally comments on discussion boards feature informal language and some level of humor (not necessarily full-out jokes).

So does how the back-and-forth, in-joke culture of the Internet compare to traditional media in circulating comedy?

For one thing, with less censorship on the web than on television, websites like funnyordie.com or collegehumor.com can push cultural limits.

But mainly, even though the web allows near-instantaneous connection, it also enables viewers to wait until they’re ready to consume media. For example, going back to Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin which I posted in week 1 of this travelogue, only “one-third of people who had seen Fey’s impersonations did so on live TV; the rest saw them on DVRs or on their computers.”

The web actually allows comedy to linger for comment and consumption, which makes the joke even bigger.

So to sum up, I’ve come up with 4 features of networked humor. Check out this slideshow with illustrations of each.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Well, Is the Internet Making Us Funnier? (6) | Melissa_A
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