What caught my eye in the NYT article is that some people are concerned about Comcast doing this. They feel like Comcast is acting like Big Brother. According to the article, 20 year-old Brandon Dilbeck blogged about his dislike of ads on Comcast’s programming guide. A Comcast representative found the post (Google blog alert perhaps?), and responded to him via email.

[…]

But to air your concerns publicly and have someone from the company read it? If you’re concerned someone would actually read your post, then don’t blog. I’m actually surprised this 20 year old was concerned. The Gen Y folks are supposed to be pretty open about everything in their lives.

I’ve actually written a little about this before, in a paper on revisions of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in contemporary SF/action cinema ( Equilibrium , The Matrix trilogy, Aeon Flux, etc.) and how this documents a nostalgia for the possibility of resistance afforded by Totalitarianism (in contrast to the smeared and distributed power network created by multinational capital). I identified the same problem seen in the above post (w/r/t Comcast): people are willing to perform a public lack of concern about privacy as long as there aren’t reminders of how public this information actually is. I was talking about the arrival of the news feed on Facebook and how this made a lot of people freak out about the fact that this information was being made public.

I suppose I could say that I’m beyond such concerns and, as an objective observer of the socius, this amuses me, but that isn’t the case. I’ve also received tweets from the Comcast twitter people (thanking me for nice things I said) and I was also recently followed by the State College Police Department on Twitter (which freaked me out). Why, though? Obviously, everything I say on the Internet is published. There are very few things I say online that I’m embarrassed by and I’m certainly not doing anything illegal. Yet I wasn’t comfortable with the State College Police following me on Twitter.

I talked about this article from the Collegian about Twitter and the police in class the other day and had trouble convincing my students that this was a problem. Everyone could see that Facebook is a really easy way to get in trouble, but everyone loves to put up photos of themselves drinking beer (although, their recent class party had Bacardi 151) despite the fact that they are 18. Had I not liked my students so much this semester, I would have put up some of the pictures I was talking about (they all friended me on Facebook). Even threatening to do this, though, they didn’t seem to see a problem.

Maybe we actually are getting beyond this problem that I observed a few years ago and that shows up in the NYT article. If I can’t explain to a room full of 18 year-olds why there is a problem with them giving away embarrassing information on the Internet for all to read, maybe we are moving out of this anxiety after all.

At the same time, it could be that my students will all have their chains yanked soon enough. Either way, this still doesn’t get at why people are so willing to publish personal details of their lives in what amounts to a distributed many-to-many system of surveillance. The best thesis my class and I could come up with is that we do it because it’s there. Which doesn’t seem like a good reason, at all.

Image Credit: Big Brother Congestion – IMG_3280 by jeroen020

The thing is, though, I live in an information ecology that doesn’t normally value this style of thought. Instead, the English Department continues to value the long, complex, linear narratives that dominated our cultural mind before television and that Carr says are passing away. Frankly, I don’t think this is really how the story goes: television clearly killed the book and, as Carr also points out, people are reading more, now, than they were 20 years ago. This fact troubles a lot of people (again, Carr says that this reading is a new and different kind of reading that removes a lot of the contemplation of linear text consumption), but I see it as positive. Also, when I make this claim about text and English Studies’ relationship with it, I don’t just mean on a profound level: I’m interested in how many of colleagues’ eyes glaze over when I start excitedly babbling about RSS readers and Twitter. On some fundamental level English Studies has never understood the Internet.

As weird (I was going to say bad) as the new patterns of reading appear (at least to old school, linear authors like Carr and myself), I think the fact that people are reading again, at all, is a really positive and exciting thing. Clar Shirky’s ideas about television are true. It is a waste of time. I think blogging and rssing, though, aren’t wastes, as such. The number of new ideas I’ve been exposed to this week is greater than what I could have gotten from the three books (although, reading Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus makes that almost an untrue claim, but that has more to do with what I read). The problem comes in figuring out how to synthesize this information. Sure, I’ve fired off a lot of pithy (in my mind) “tweets” about this stuff on Twitter, but does that really count? Also, I’ve posted about some of it on this blog (and could do a better job, I would imagine), but these media don’t count as work in the information ecology of a graduate-level English department. We still highly value linearity.
This dichotomy between what I feel and what I do is starting to become a crisis: as I gear up to write a long, linear book that somehow synthesizes my interests in science fiction, rhetoric, and technical communication at the twilight of the current age of mankind, I wonder: “Why?” Can a textual form that everyone seems to think is outmoded capture what it means to suddenly think in parallel (as Carr claims the Internet has done)? If not, what would such a form look like? The answer isn’t hypertext, as people like Jay D. Bolter have talked about it, as that form is largely a joke and an attempt to wield old forms onto the new logic of the Internet.

I’m partly thinking about exploring these issues in my English 015 class this summer, but I’m not even sure what this new kind of thinking will mean in a composition classroom. I think one thing I’m going to do is talk about how to read linearly (which is something that we seem to be forgetting as a culture) as well as how to write in parallel. I plan on using Twemes to get the students on Twitter and talking about class. I have some new media texts to present, so we’ll see if this can help resolve some of these issues, but, frankly, I worry about the future of this field, in general.
We claim in composition studies that we are teaching our students to write, but what good does it do to teach a model of writing that no longer matches the information ecology that exists outside of our insular world? Further, how do we teach composition as a discipline that is behind the times, in terms of the cutting edge of text? I don’t necessarily have the answers for these questions and I don’t think that as a discipline we will understand the forms these answers must take for a long time, but I think we need to at least try to keep a few steps ahead of our students. I think this approach should be implemented, as our society is still going through a shift in the way it deals with these information technologies: despite that most of my students have Facebook accounts, I’ve never had any who (to my knowledge) blog (I’ve only had a few freshmen who even knew what blogging was). These changes are not yet complete, but if we don’t want to get left by the wayside, I think we should start thinking about what composition means in the era of the 140 character “tweet.”

Image Credit: Sunset in Criação Velha, Pico Island Azores by Ulrich Thumult.

As I was reading Wolfe’s novel, I saw some stuff on some blogs that
relates: in this post on Digital Inspiration,
there’s a discussion of whether or not the failure of
Spresent and
Slideaware represents the beginning of the
end of Web2.0. I don’t think we can make that claim so quickly, and,
probably, such claims are a result of the cave-in that resulted in the
end of Web1.0 (why does no one ever talk about that?). What
interested me about this post is the question of what would actually
constitute the end of Web2.0.

What we see in the case of Spresent and Slideaware is the natural
weeding-out process that occurs with any new economic sector. That
said, this post on Thomas Hawk’s blog
got me thinking about the things that could actually end the Web2.0
boom. As we know, Web2.0 is characterized by openness, the ability to
serialize data in XML and move it around the web. Clever Web2.0
business models leverage this openness in novel ways to try and make a
buck. As Hawks writes about FriendFeed,
however:

Now when companies like Twitter and Flickr start seeing a new site coming out that is essentially using the benevolence of the Web 2.0ish “open API” to essentially pull views from their own properties you might think that they’d be concerned. And maybe they are or maybe they aren’t. At least publicly they can’t say that they don’t like this because being Web 2.0ish is all about being “open” and grumbling about someone pulling views from your site with your open API would sound somehow unsportsmanlike.

This “grumbling”, I think, could be the end of Web2.0. To get back to
Limbo, one of the major theses of the novel is the psychological
inability of pacifism to work. Wolfe argues that man is not a natural
font of goodness and, as such, movements that attempt to deny the
violent cannot hope to succeed and, often, in the name of peace breed
even more war. This summary is a simplification of a rather nuanced
argument, but it will have to suffice. At one point in the novel, he
presents the Assassination Clause that makes up part of the new US
charter (the book takes place after WWIII):

Every person who offers himself as a candidate for public office automatically takes oath never to encourage or countenance or condone the manufacture of arms or their distribution; never to make hostile utterances about other nations or peoples; _never to carry out the functions of his office with any degree of secrecy, or enter into diplomatic negotiations or agreements which are not fully open_; never to obtain information of any sort through the use of confidential agents; never to employ bodyguards or take any steps toward the securing of his personal safety; never to suggest, under any circumstances whatsoever, that the foregoing commitments must be suspended because of a state “crisis” or “emergency”; never to adopt or even advocate a strategy of defensism, political or personal, no matter what “external” threat appears to exist. If during his tenure of office he engages in any of the illegal acts enumerated above, or even suggest that such acts are called for by a “new” situation, this shall be construed by the citizenry as an invitation to assassinate said public official in the public interest… (emphasis added)

In this long list of demands, one of the key terms of the
Assassination Clause is a call for openness in governance. I’m
thinking about this openness, though, in the context I discussed
above: Web2.0. While the Internet doesn’t have anything has harsh as
the Assassination Clause (which fails miserably, in Wolfe’s novel,
anyway), there is still, at the moment, a successfully managed open
society. I think, following Hawk’s observation of how sites like
FriendFeed pull views away from sites like Twitter by allowing users
to manage their data even more effectively (although, I would depute
this, I think FriendFeed is kind of useless), that the end of Web2.0
will probably be when many of these companies realize that the very
openness that defined them as New and Different is ultimately messing
with their bottom line. Of course, when this happens, the whole thing
will probably come crashing down, given how many sites in the “Web2.0
Rainbow” operate on content created elsewhere. For instance, if
Twitter suddenly closes its API, how many other sites get screwed?

Of course, we’ve seen this sort of thing happen before in computing.
I’m thinking that the post Web2.0 Internet, if it comes about, will
probably look a lot like the Mac/PC split in the 90s, in which you
have two (although probably more in this version of the Internet)
platforms that integrate well and work well together but don’t operate
between one another in any way, shape, or form.

I recognized that this is one of the reasons that I’ve moved all my
email to Gmail. I had been using Thunderbird to read my mail, but I
became increasingly aware that in the messaging, calendaring world, I
had to either get on the Apple bandwagon or the Google bandwagon,
because of iPhone compatibility. Mozilla was getting squeezed out of
my work flow (although, I still use Firefox because, well, because
Apple hasn’t figure out a way to force me not to, yet). This is
probably a bad example, but I hope it gets my point across: the vision
of life put forward by Apple (in its lifestyle management approach to
branding) could, increasingly, become the norm of Web2.0, if companies
ever give up on their noble pacifist ideals of openness and start,
once again, marching off to war.

Anyway, this is just one of the many ideas that reading Limbo has
generated. I highly recommend the novel. Also, in case nothing else
i’ve said convinced you, Wolfe was Trotsky’s bodyguard in Mexico City
(apparently, the icepicking happened on his night off).

Image Credit: “Limbo Snowman” by Jim Carson

e). Rather than role my own theme, as I’m lazy, I’m
using a theme called Barthelme. As you
can see, though, looking at that screenshot, this blog doesn’t look much
like the original. I wasn’t happy with Barthelme’s kind of blah colors
(and I started hating that left-aligned sidebar in a moment of web
design iconoclasm), so I thought I’d make “some minor tweaks” to the
style sheet.

In case you’ve never used it, Wordpress’s Theme Editor leaves a lot to
be desired (it’s no VIM, that’s for sure). I got
tired of loading and reloading the page to see if the CSS looked nice or
not. Then, I remembered that Fireburg lets you edit CSS properties on
the fly. Wow. Let me just say that I never realized how groovy this
program can be. I ended up recoding the entire site’s CSS in Firebug
and then loading the changes that work into the file itself. A much
easier way to work out the intricacies of a complex web job. I’m still
not happy about the design of the site (I don’t like the fact that the
way the CSS is done feels like a kludge).

The larger thinking, though, that drives this site is the realization
that form and content really are separate things when it comes to
technical communication. This bifurcation is something I’ve stressed in
my teaching and its something I’m going to make a much bigger deal about
in future iterations of my techcomm class (more on that in the future, I
would imagine). I think this divide between form and content is
becoming in vogue (or back into vogue) thanks to the advent of Web2.0
and the need to scrape content from other sites. Unfortunately, the
thinking on form and content (I want to hyphenate it) is, in technical
communications, still on the form is content model of document design.

The reason I shifted to thinking about content and form separately is
that by dividing form and content, the importance of design is easier to
teach to people who’ve never really thought about the shape of the
things around them. I tell my students that, in technical
communications, the content should be the focus of their documents:
everything else (grammar, form, paper quality, etc.) exists to
accentuate the content. If you fail at design or spelling, your ideas
won’t come across easily.

Partly the form is content paradigm seems to derive from Marshall
McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message,” but I don’t think my
stance on the division between form and content is actually annulled by
McLuhan’s understanding of media: form, for me, is not the same thing as
media. My exploration of Firebug really drives this point home. By
mucking around with the CSS properties inside my browser, I changed the
look and feel of my website (to create a design that I think is more in
keeping with the image I’m trying to convey in my content). These
changes are changes to form, but they are not changes to content, and
they certainly aren’t changes to the medium. Ultimately, for me medium
dictates form and content, as separate entities. Moreover, form and
content must be thought of as separate yet connected. It seems to me
that the two concepts are related, but in the technical communications
classroom, in order to introduce the importance of design, the two must
be presented as separate (and, to me, the separation makes more sense,
anyway).

Image Credit: “empty red cart 2” by pbo31.

I follow around 12 twitter feeds. Most of them are my friends, but I also get the BBC news, BoingBoing, and ESPN News. I have my Twitter account piped to my Jabber account, which means I get “tweets” as they happen. Consequently, I am now afraid of “missing something” if I’m away from the computer for more than a few minutes. The same thing happens with my Google Reader account: I find myself a prisoner of my information.

This seems like a common critique of Web2.0 and that’s not really my point here. While I get technology news piped directly to me in a number of places, a lot of tweets are things like getting groceries or going to the bathroom Similarly, I follow laughingsquid and interspersed with interesting tidbits about the Internet and what not, I get accounts of him buying coffee.

I think the thing I learned from my previous Twitter experience (last summer) and previous experience on this blog is that it isn’t enough to write about what you’re doing: I’m not going to follow a Twitter feed of someone I know that features accounts of them cooking or going to the
movies. Twitter seems to demand, as a price, that I listen to mundane details of the lives people whom I don’t know in order to be on the absolute bleeding edge of information.

Moreover, for me, I find that blogging (micro or otherwise) about the mundane details of my life is singularly unsatisfying: why should anyone care what I’m doing? Why do I even think enough of myself to write it down? I suppose that the simple explanation for reports of the trip to
the Kwik-E-Mart (or whatever) lie in the fact that because the technology allows us to publicly document the mundanity of our lives, we must.

At the same time, I’ve been noticing lately that I’d like an easy way to index my thinking about various informational / social trends. I keep losing information with regard to the shape of my dissertation and I’m finding that wiki isn’t a solution: I can’t edit it everywhere and, even if I could, it’s something I have to think about.

As I’ve said, I have Twitter hooked up to a Jabber account, and I’ve noticed that I’m more inclined to post whatever pops into my head (ideas and what not) now that I can just send an IM to Twitter whenever (and wherever) I want. Noticing this made me think that such an “anywhere, anytime” approach would give a better document of my thoughts and ideas about things at a given time.

As such I’m going to treat this blog as a way to document thoughts that won’t fit into a 140 character Twitter “tweet” (I really find it hard to seriously consider the implications of something called a “tweet”).

Happy Hunting.

Image Credit: Ode to Twitter: words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe by Thomas Hawk

Since I stopped having one, I’ve become very curious about other people’s daily schedules. Whatever can they be working at from the moment they wake up? How can they bear having something to do from right after breakfast? How can they spin round all day long like fluid in a washbasin, until they reach the orifice of sleep? They tap away at the touch screens of their lives, on which is perpetually displayed a hysterical daily round, and, from time to time, the ecstatic daily round of empty time (13)

Oops. Baudrillard goes on to talk about the difference between boredom as acceleration and boredom as lack-of-movement, a theme that seems to spread throughout the entire work (it’s odd that a collection of fragmentary writings can still have themes running through it). Anyway, given my own boredom, it got me thinking. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all, but, at the moment, my schedule says I’m late for a meeting, so I really must be going.

Image Source: “TIME” by Fabiola Medeiros