A look at the Baudrilliard wiki page, Cognitive Surplus Pt. 2, Final Project Proposal

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.