Cooke Blog

Make your own mind maps with Mindomo.

After a brief break (tending to family as well as other academic and creative pursuits), I’m hitting the books again to read Manuel Castells’ updated version of The Rise of the Network Society. My dissertation studies glean a lot from Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model, so whenever I hear the words “network,” “hub,” or “node,” I perk up. So over the next several weeks, I will be reading a chapter each week from Castells’ rather massive volume. This is actually the first of three that he’s written in his larger work The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. I’m only sticking to Volume One; too much is tugging at me to take it any further this summer.

As this latest edition includes an updated preface to the 2000 edition, there are just under 60 pages of introduction, plus a 26-page prologue. Granted, this isn’t the brilliant analysis or encapsulation I’m sure readers were hoping for, but I point it out because so far, I think his sense of pacing is a little lacking– even though his research is obviously vast and deep. Because he is not prone to succinctness, coupled primarily with the fact that I am looking at hubs and nodes (etc) in my dissertation ideas, the overview of chapter 1 which basically covers (in the minutest of detail) how we have technologically got to where we are today (or rather in 2000) was not useful for my purposes. I would recommend it though for teachers of New Media to get their students to read as it really does include EVERY aspect of the growth of technological inter-connectivity, the Internet, the Web, and even the developments of the Genome Project. Furthermore, there were actually moments where I not only perked up, but dare I say it I even felt a quickening of the heart.

For instance, Castells’ observations concerning clusters is very useful to me. I’ve read in other tomes such as Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Steven Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation that in spite of the somewhat foregrounding of technological advancement in the discussion of society and social media, the fact remains that movements, information and the sharing and critique of information still remain solidly in the control of human beings.

More to come, but that’s all for now.

Image of kitty in quicksand, thanks to http://www.giantbomb.com/quicksand/92-1648/

As the semester winds down, I’m unfortunately finding I am as well. Our final project is not the only one on my plate at the moment, so I’ve spent the last week spreading myself across other projects that have temporarily taken my attention away from the final media piece. I felt OK with this situation, as I have been able to create a JavaScript file that does the very bare bones of what I wanted to achieve in my media piece. It may not have all the bells and whistles I had originally imagined, but it does work. I’m still thinking about what more I might want to do with it. As I will be submitting it next week, hopefully next week’s version will be better than this week’s.

BTW…

Looking over the class wiki, I plan to create a PDF out of it for future reference. I think everyone did a great job at encapsulating their canonical and new texts and I can see how engaging with this material in different ways has strengthened the inner matrix of concepts in my mind.

To be honest, the week has been such a whirlwind, one thing I can say is that a brief excursion to the Boston Public Library on a beautiful April day was a nice diversion while we were in Boston. It was a thrill to walk through the hallowed halls of their reading room, and feel the intelligence of the quietly reading scholars radiating into the vast, open space.

Boston Public Library Reading Room, from http://www.boston.com

Along with creating a presentation for the PCA/ACA conference in Boston, I’ve been working on my wiki page on Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus in the past week. Now that a draft has been completed, and my PCA presentation on generating audiences online using pedagogical strategies is over, the only other thing I’ve been working on in class is my final project.

Last week, I took a free online course in JavaScript, which seemed helpful. We’ll see how far I get this week, now that the wiki page is basically done and I can devote a little more time to the generator.

Now that we’re really seeing the class wiki fill up on the course web page, I’m a little apprehensive that it might disappear. There is one other wiki that I have regularly found useful over the time in my program and that was from Kevin DePew’s Instructional Design and Pedagogy course. I am glad he built it off of the university webpage because another wiki that was built under the university umbrella for another teacher’s course as since disappeared.

That is one of the risks with creating scholarly references in a digital environment. Even now. All it takes is an ill-timed hacker to butt into a server or an account and everything could be blown away. Including this blog!

That is one thing I think of as I look at the journals we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with over the past few weeks. At the same time I’m thankful for being introduced to some of them, I am also leery of their permanence. That goes hand in hand with why some institutions do not regard new media scholarship (defined as scholarly argumentation that takes place in a digital format and availing itself of the affordances of being digital), as equal to traditional, linear, written scholarship. A lot can be lost in the twinkling of an eye. I think it’s a good idea to offer scholarship in multiple formats. A lot of work, but at least the knowledge will be less likely to be lost.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.

"Hang in there, baby," Image from http://www.kuodesign.com/klog/1975/index.html

This is how I feel right about now as we make the final push toward the end of the semester over the next three weeks .

This next week will be the worst for me as I prep for the PCA/ACA conference around our classwork, my job and a boatload of driving between DC, NY, and Boston.

I’m not complaining; this is just part of what I’m processing this week. It’s all good.

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, Part 3

The Shirky book is definitely different than I expected. Shirky concentrates on the possibilities of aggregating global free time to the personal, communal, public and civic good. However, he never really addresses what the response should be when there are groups out there that gather around ignoble causes, such as anarchy or crime. I am convinced that trafficking and slavery have increased simply because the like-minded can find each other, organize and coordinate their efforts just as easily as the more civic-minded.

Shirky’s book focuses primarily on groups that are interested in pursuing more useful goals and tasks, such as carpooling (pickuppal.com), meeting like-minded (meetup.com), archiving knowledge (Wikipedia), creating the Apache system or creating software for particular civic purposes (Ushahidi). I suppose when you’re trying to present the beneficial possibilities, as did Thomas L. Friedman in The World is Flat, Shirky decided that it wasn’t the purpose of the book to put the skids on the underbelly of these advancements. He could be leaving room for someone else to complete that part of the picture, or leave room for a sequel (although I doubt the latter).

The closest Shirky comes to addressing possible dangers, concerns couchsurfing.com, a service that offers free travel accommodation in private homes all around the world (165). Of course, traveling women who stay in the homes of strange men are subject to incredible risks. However, Shirky seems to think the way the couch surfing community is structured minimizes these risks.

Shirky contrasts the safety of  “couch surfing” against a tragic “artistic” experiment of trust entitled “Brides on Tour.” This blog entry does a good job at explaining the “Brides on Tour” tragedy: http://www.madsilence.wordpress.com/tag/brides-on-tour/

Shirky concludes where “Brides on Tour” went wrong was that “an oddly and ostentatiously dressed woman, hitchhiking alone, in a foreign country–what was she thinking? …Between the artists and the couch surfers, the artists were taking the bigger risk, and they were taking it because they believed, wrongly, that human motivations are basically benign… Couchsurfing.com helps travelers find hosts and vice versa, but the site also includes host profiles, a reputation system like eBay’s for hosts, and lots of advice about safety, particularly for female travelers” (168).

Although couchsurfing.com sounds better than just going out on the road alone and meeting people along the way, I still don’t know that couch surfing offers a 100% fool-proof system to make me feel completely comfortable with it.

You be the judge.

Interview with Daniel Hoffer, co-creator of couchsurfing.com

An interesting video on a couch surfer’s musing on how to establish trust between strangers.

New Media Project

Prompt that comes up when you click on the Acronym Generator.

The answer that comes up when you enter something it doesn't understand.

As for the new media project, I’ve still got my eye on creating the framework for an expandable acronym generator. In essence this is really a type of dictionary, where people enter letters and an explanation pops up.

Currently, I know how to create an if/else statement for each acronym if it’s typed in one particular case. I can enter case and acronym as separate lines in the code.

However, I realize this isn’t the most efficient, tight code it could be. I’d like to get the loop through one list of acronyms. I’d also like it to be not important if someone types in either upper or lower case letter.

At least at this point, something pops up when a user answers the alert prompt that comes up when you click on the words Acronym Generator. I’m also happy that I have a generic “not in our database” response if someone enters something not in the system. I’d also like to add a “mailto” option so if anything is missing, people can click right from the same page to tell the administrators that something is missing.

Works Cited

Friedman, T.L. (2005). The World is Flat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.

Baudrilliard

Sarah Spangler and Suzanne Sink start their wiki page with an excellent explanation of their approach to Baudrilliard’s ideas, tying them to the key concepts we’ve been studying. Their initial segments on illusion and simulation are very helpful as they boil down these ideas from Baudrilliard’s rather dense and obtuse writing style.

Particularly useful to me was the summation of the stages of simulation. It led me to think of the pinnacle (or rather, nadir) of the concept of simulation: BBC’s The Teletubbies. There are few cultural products I hate more than The Teletubbies, as my main problem with the show is that nothing on it bears even a remote resemblance to reality. I’m just not sure what it’s teaching.

Image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/bbcworldwide/worldwidestories/pressreleases/2010/07_july/ty-me_for_teletubbies.shtml

For that reason, this week’s “representative image” is going to be given to them. Maybe Teletubbies are the post-final fifth stage of simulation: After the “final stage,” not only is there no connection of signs to reality, the society attempts to teach its children to accept meaningless signs as soon as they can place their children in front of a television. This may seem a bit harsh, and a bit over-simplistic, but to connect the idea of Boudrilliard’s fourthstage of simulation to the Teletubbies is actually a very useful mnemomic to contextualize Boudrilliard’s idea of the stages of simulation.

Shirky

Clay Shirky, from http://transformingfreedom.org/files/imagecache/thumb/images/ClayShirky_PopTech.png

Continuing my reading of Cognitive Surplus, which originally starts with a comparison of the pervasive use of television to the increase of gin use in 1720’s London (it makes sense, but I’ll save the description for my wiki entry on the class website), Shirky’s bottom line of the book states that if given the means, the right motives and opportunities, the cognitive surplus of billions of hours of the global free time of earth’s inhabitants could be collected, aggregated and utilized for previously unheard of collaboration and social change. Although, I can’t help think that his ideas lean toward the utopian, the examples he uses serve well to back up his thesis that this sort of phenomenon is not only possible, it’s already happening.

This week’s reading finished out the chapter on Means and went into Motive and Opportunity, and ended into the chapter on Culture.

In the chapter on Opportunity, Shirky recounts a bad example of getting the public to participate in People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list of 1998. A character on Howard Stern, “Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf” actually won the poll much to People Magazine’s surprise. Shirky cites the following as a possible reason:

“If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it”…”However, if you only pretend to offer an outlet for those motivations, while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt” (95).

In an era of reality television, audience voting, blogging and amateur Youtube videos, that is a word to the wise. Indeed, the results of the poll must have been a black eye to People Magazine as not only can’t you find the full list on their website all these years later, they didn’t opt to publish Hank on the cover of their magazine. However, they seemed eager to publish the announcement of Hank’s death three years later.

My Final New Media Project Proposal: An Acronym Generator

Rhetorical Situation

• To inform employees of currently used acronyms within the organization
• I am currently working where acronyms are myriad and because I am new to the company, I know this would be useful
• After the class, I hope to merge my efforts with another group that also has a generator, but is incomplete

Technologies/Applications/Languages:

• Originally, I wanted to try this project in Ruby, but unfortunately, because our web browser is older (and we’re only allowed one version of Internet Explorer), Ruby doesn’t behave properly in our browser.
• I will be working with Javascript, as I know it works with our browser.
• I took a Fortran class back in the early 1980s and I know a little about ActionScript 2 (in Flash), but I have never programmed anything from scratch before. Even though this seems like a fairly straight-forward program (the user enters an acronym, the program finds it and displays it), I’ve never worked in Javascript before and trying to generate a program from scratch is definitely out of my comfort zone. I know the concepts of if/then statements and looping, but I’ll be using what I’ve learned from tutorials on Lynda.com, educator.com and a website accessible from work called e-learningcenter.com to help me get through this.

Theories/key concepts informing my process: Information, interactivity, interface

• Information: Having information at the ready for just-in-time access
• Interactivity: Creating something that needs input from the user before it can generate an answer
• Interface: Creating a point of interaction between user and computer
• Remediation: This project remediates a dictionary, an archive, a librarian.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.

I found another resource for a free Javascript course to get further along with my New Media project.

Technology guru Clay Shirky Photograph: Suki Dhanda, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/15/this-much-i-know-clay-shirky-technology

I’ve started the new book assignment this week. I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: How Technologies Make Consumers into your Collaborators. The reason I wished to read this book is it touches on themes that I am encountering in my studies as I approach my dissertation and a paper I’m presenting for the upcoming PCA/ACA conference in Boston (in less than three weeks). The idea of taking advantage of the affordances of a networked society is central to my paper which discusses how new media have changed how businesses operate, in particular the industry of broadcasting, and how industries have had to respond to these changes.

I wasn’t familiar with his last book, Here Comes Everybody, so I thought I’d start not only with reading the Cognitive Surplus book, but also by looking at where Shirky has come from so I can see the trajectory of his work. Fortunately for me, there was no lack of his lectures on Youtube. Here’s a shorter one (only 21 minutes long):

Clay Shirky — Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organising without Organisations
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSJCcDiD-zw)

“Here comes Everybody” definitely speaks to the recent “Occupy” movements and the organized public outcry regarding the shooting of Treyvon Martin.

Looking at Another Class Wiki Page

I looked at Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media class wiki page, created by Jennifer Buckner and Susanne Nobles. It’s funny how so many of the issues brought up in one book overlap in others we’ve read. McLuhan’s idea of “make happen agents vs. “make aware agents” really feeds into Shirky’s claims that new media are allowing connections that will affect (and already have affected) social structures.

McLuhan’s view of media is that it is creating a passive audience that is fascinated with gazing at itself sort of like Narcissus. This view could be said of 20th Century media, but according to Shirky, that phenomenon occurred simply because technologies such as television and radio were “imbalanced”—these media allowed for communication to go OUT but no one had an opportunity to respond to it directly, so they didn’t try. This of course would change in the 21st Century when the same technologies purchased for consumption could also be used for producing and sharing the users’ own communications.

Jennifer and Susanne did a great job encapsulating a lot of material in their entry and liked their choice of pictures and the video of McLuhan (whom I had never seen speak before). The video they linked to of McLuhan’s response to a question about media’s effect on the future of education was very interesting, although I admit a bit abstract. His ideas of how everything boils down to “the file” and that people will no longer be compelled to go TO an office to work was quite prophetic.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.

Image from http://www.kriesi.at/archives/50-websites-that-make-amazing-use-of-javascript

This rhetorical analysis of a JavaScript web site initially began with the wiki page created by the JavaScript team in our class. However, when I looked at their examples and found that I couldn’t even look at any of the Chrome Experiments without Google Chrome on my computer, I wondered what the point was of creating “experiments” not all browsers could appreciate. I then decided to Google the words “Javascript websites.” Up came a very encouraging result entitled, 50 Sites that Make Amazing Use of JavaScript.

What I found somewhat disappointing is that the majority of the fifty sites, as beautiful as they were, were created for designers, marketers or developers. The reason I felt disappointment is it would appear that the bells and whistles of JavaScript seems to be only possible by people who really know graphic design, marketing and/or programming. That may be an assumption, but if JavaScript were more intuitive and easy to work with, wouldn’t more people be using it to these “amazing” ends?

My personal goal for this analysis was more humble than that. I wanted to find a web site that employed JavaScript for simpler features instead of the amazing ones.

Of course, one way to complete such a rhetorical analysis is to consider traditional rhetorical processes regarding the intended audience, the structure of argumentation, supportive reasoning, evidence of persuasion and the way in which the author appeals to the audience’s values, emotions, etc. That is a standard approach toward rhetorical analysis. However, I had found another analytical model which I’ve used in other courses which includes these ideas, but rearranges them. The model comes from Deborah Cameron’s book, Working with Spoken Discourse, and I do not see why her approach could not apply to new media and even the code on a webpage. The following paragraph and acronym description comes from a paper I wrote which employed her method to a different context:

Cameron’s model notates and categorizes speech-related communicative activities for the purpose of creating an ethnographic portrait surrounding these activities. To this end, Cameron breaks a communicative event into three classifications—speech situations (the purposes for the speech activities) (55), speech events (smaller units of a situation) and speech acts (the smallest units, each having a specific task it is trying to achieve) (55). Next, Cameron offers a matrix of classifying field information using the acronym S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G (56):

• S—Setting, where the speech event is held in time and space;
• P—Participants, speaker(s), audience(s), “eavesdropper(s);”
• E—Ends, the purpose for the speech events;
• A—Act Sequence, what speech acts make up the speech events and how they are ordered;
• K—Key, tone or manner of the speech event,
• I—Instrumentalities, channels, technologies, tools, languages selected from participant repertoires;
• N—Norms of Interaction, the rules that one needs to know to communicate in an appropriate way, and
• G—Genres, what pre-existing forms of communication informs this speech event. (Cooke)

Image of marmarco.com main page, http://www.marmarco.com.

As you can see, Cameron’s acronym includes concepts from all of the canons of the rhetorical process. Therefore, this paper will apply her framework to a website for an edgy housewares shop in London by the name of Mar Mar Co. I personally know the man who owns this shop, and not surprisingly, he is also a graphic designer. However, his style is very simple and he has always leaned toward clean lines in his design sensibility. Because of its simplicity, I decided to use his website for this rhetorical analysis which uses JavaScript in less assertive ways than on the 50 Sites that Make Amazing Use of JavaScript.

One of the pages of items for sale. Highlighted areas show how images change to show alternative sizes and colors.

This image is the same page with some images swapped. When an images is selected (for instance the Danish Wool Blanket, highlighted with the red box ), the page changes to detailed information.

Detailed information of Danish Wool Blanket

Classification of Info on Mar Mar Co web site

I think the use of JavaScript to make a smooth, dissolved transition to their website as well as to swap out of images on each page indicates a very intentional design sense: The developers of this website could have made it more flashy, but have chosen to keep it simple and let the items speak for themselves.

Works Cited

Cameron, D. (2001). “Situations and Events: The Ethnography of Speaking.” Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage. 53-67.

Cooke, D. (2011). ‘Mornington Crescent’ and the Guise of Gameplay: An Ethnographic Analysis.Unpublished class paper for ENGL 805. 2011.