It's dead, Jim.

A smart man admits when he’s beaten. He knows when it’s time to move on.

The Digital Naturalized Citizen idea… just wasn’t meant to be. I like the DNC for its distinction of a nuanced mid ground between the Digital Immigrant and the Digital Native. I loved coming up with it as a response to Prensky, I really did. But for this project, the nuance is its weakness. The DNC is just too damned similar, outwardly at least, to the DN. In all of my brainstorming of how I, as a DNC, could really present three distinct digital modes that would be anything other than identical than if I was a DN, I could think of nothing. The best I could come up with is that, perhaps as a holdover from a life without IM and Twitter, I think best in complete sentences, and thus I preferred not abbreviating myself on tweets. Not the solidest footing.

So, it’s time give in to the creativity part of our prompt – and let’s face it, I couldn’t really be that creative in showcasing my DNCishness – and go with another aspect of myself:

Roger, The Sci Fi Geek

I’ve always been a huge sci-fi geek. I spent a summer as a kid rewatching abused recordings of all 6 (as of that point) Star Trek Movies, a handful of ST: TNG episodes, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. If there’s a book on my bedside table, 100:1 odds that it’s scifi. All the movies I put on our NetFlix queue are scfi. I have plenty of theories, both about why it is that scifi is so popular a genre for myself and the greater culture, and why it is that Han Solo shot first. One of the first times my girlfriend(later to be my wife) made the mistake of asking me what I was thinking as we laid awake, the answer concluded after a 45 minute treatise on why I thought it was the height of arrogance for us to patently conclude that we knew all there was about physics and dismiss the possibility of faster than light travel.

My life’s aspiration is to be a successful scifi author. So yeah, I can get some mileage out of this topic.

Sure it's not as cool as the DNC, but it is me without a doubt. I’ve already got a host of appropriate digital outlets for this, and have a great idea where I’m going with them. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Second Life all come to mind with a myriad of possibilities. So now I can look forward to the Pecha Kucha presentation, which I had been dreading before.

FWIW, I'll post the sites here asap, for those of you browsing/posting beyond the course's requirements.

From a different angle

After conferring with Dr. Schirmer and thinking on the earlier feedback, I’ve decided I’m still going on with the topic of the Digitally Naturalized Citizen, but I will change the way I discuss it. For the background on the topic, see the next blog entry below this one or see the entire paper here. First, I’m going to ruminate further on what I think define a DNC, and maybe it will resonate with some of you and maybe it will contrast – I look forward to feedback.

Thinking of myself as a DNC brings up the following ideas. Think of them as the way a DNC expresses his or herself:

I still tend to think and write online in whole thoughts and in whole words. In Twitter, for example, I tend to max out the 140 characters. This is not because I have more to say, but because I tend to avoid fragmentary thoughts or abbreviations as much as possible. I found myself deleting and rewording so I can get a whole thought in without abbreviating. I don’t think of such writing habits in Twitters as deficient, however – i.e., I don’t care if someone tweets in that way, assuming it doesn’t occlude meaning. Example: My recent tweet of “Protip: liquids should not be independently symmetrical. Notable exception: leftover gravy prior to reheat.” I’m sure that could have been more succinct, but that’s just the way I think, that’s just the way I talk, therefore it’s just the way I tweet. Is that a product of a life started devoid of tech, no matter how immersed I am now?

I don’t think this makes me sound like the worst sort of Digital Immigrant, but l want to tread lightly here. I cannot comprehend the tweets and status updates regarding the most mundane stuff. I’m not trying to be the old man shaking my fist at the skateboarders from the front porch – I don’t begrudge them their very existence. Would a DNC, unlike a Digital Native, boggle at oversharing/overconnection, but not in the way of the Digital Immigrant’s lamentation that these are the Four Tweets of the Apocalypse?

I’d like to note that I’m aware that I am making generalizations in the above points. I know that not all Natives are overconnected and that not all Immigrants are paranoid.

I’d be happy to extrapolate further on the DNC idea if anyone would like, but for now, any reactions from readers?

Digitally Me in 1, 2, 3

Right now, I think I’m going to go with Dr. Schirmer’s suggestion of a more personal, focused presentation of the self through a single aspect. In this case, I think I’m going to expand on an aspect of myself first considered in the Tech AutoBios we all composed at the beginning of the term: a Digital Naturalized Citizen.

Background

In response to our earlier discussions about Mark Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants article, I conceived of a third class: Digital Naturalized. From my own paper: “The naturalized citizen has so fully assimilated into the host culture as to be nearly the same as a native. Only the inescapable fact that the naturalized was once something else separates them from the native, and I believe this concept includes me. The time I wasn’t on the edge of digital progression was brief in my personal history. Even though I didn’t begin life as a digital native, I count myself as far more assimilated than an immigrant, and as such could embody the new term.”

Execution

At this point, I believe I’m going to divide my identity up into three stages – the life I began that was wholly not digital. The second stage will be more robust, focusing on my period of immigration. Finally, I’ll finish as the naturalized, explaining my digital life here and now. My intention is to find three separate services to portray the different Digital Rogers. Being that I am generally pro-integration of online identities, I usually try not to have too many digital selves out there, preferring to keep to the one, whole story. For the purposes of this project, however, I will likely create entirely separate accounts/profiles as needed. Seeing as I intend to capture a freezeframe of my life at different points, a living online idenity would just confuse things.

Any thoughts from readers? Anything I should consider?

A Second Helping of Second Life

So, like mentioned in class, let’s talk Ideal vs. Reality:

The Ideal

As I’ve heard it described and have read, the assets that SL brings to pedagogy seem to be focused mostly on accessibility. Ideally speaking, SL lets a student from half a world away have the same experience as a student sitting in their dorm room on campus, if the class is taught within second life. Infrastructure exists to facilitate reasonably educative environments, such as projectors with slide shows, lecture venues, and even large-scale object manipulation for the purpose of displays.

Additionally, Second Life allows, at least theoretically, for robust object creation, limited only by how far the creators are willing to go. A history course could, for example, use dozens of small models on a miniature ocean, timed to move independently in set patterns to explain fleet movements in the Pacific in World War II. Or you could visit a recreation of the Apollo 11 landing site (someplace I’ve been).

The ultimate goal of Pedagogy in SL is to attempt engagement on a level of technological sophistication. I believe what must fundamentally be the ideal is that this is the precursor to future digital environments, so get on board now. Even if it’s only half-realized now, being here now will mean better things later.

The Reality

Tumbleweeds. A lot of tumble weeds.

As we saw in class, and I hope some of you might yet get to experience for yourselves, there’s a lot left to be desired in a professional and pedagogical sense in SL.

Most desirable? People. I had thought I would go through several other virtual campuses in SL, showing everyone what they look like, but the truth is, you saw all you needed to see at Wolverine Island. Every one of the schools I went to was a ghost town, with myself the only inhabitant. It was almost a post-apocalyptic feeling, as if I woke up to find the world intact, but all the inhabitants gone. The nice seating areas on Wolverine Island for the classes that don’t seem to be held made me feel very lonely – the exact opposite of what should be the goal of as socially derived of an environment as SL should be. This extended to a handful of other sites I went to in SL – museums, public art spaces, colleges, municipalities, memorials – all of them empty.

The fact of the matter is that the people are the only real component missing in-world, if you strip away the mundane technical issues, at least in the not strictly-social realm. Without fellow digital denizens, your presence there is just a waste of time.

I’d be interested to read in other blog posts what else strikes people about Second Life, mostly on a professional/pedagogical sense. I came out pretty strong in class against my own technology I’d Facilitated. I’d love to see someone else take up the gauntlet and show me I’m being too hasty.

Admittedly, the night clearly wasn’t a total wash. When else can you say “I saw Daffy Duck bumping and grinding Bugs Bunny in class tonight” other than where Second Life is concerned?

Content Aggregator meets Content Aggrevator

Net Vibes is, on a somewhat more aggressive scale, what many other sites are: a content repackager/aggregator. Since I’ve been a long time user, I did a slapdash comparison of Net Vibes with my homesite of choice for several years, now, iGoogle. Below are my impressions:

First off, I cannot stress how frustratingly slow Net Vibes is. No matter how awesome the content of a service is, waiting about 2 minutes as I did for login is just unacceptable. I worry this is common for the site, as it was also slow in class on Tuesday and slow now after I finally managed to log in.

(time passes)

Alright. I’ll leave that above paragraph up to make a point about usability. When I first started using Net Vibes, I experienced that slow access and felt like that’s all I was able to experience. Slow functionality impedes impressions of usability like nothing else for me. What I’ll say now is that my new impression is this: Maybe this is kinda nice after all*. Now that the insane lag between request and response has evaporated (where did it go? That makes me nervous), it’s actually a decent service. Already it’s outshone iGoogle in layout ability. Google seems to eschew a 4 column layout, and beyond that, it seems to ignore that content might look nice in mixed column width. Overall, I’ve never liked Google’s rounded-edge bubble look for something so information-driven. Moving back to sharp, clean lines and moving the tab management to the top of the pages reclaims enough horizontal real estate to make a 4 column layout manageable, even on a laptop screen.

Back to the topic of what these content aggregators are good for: a lot. Right now on both my iGoogle and Netvibes pages, you can find widgets giving me functional use (if not total) for the following applications: Mail, weather (and radar), Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and a host of news websites. Any time I log on, I check all of these websites. I’ve been using services like this almost since my time on the Internet began, although they have of course become much more robust in the past several years. Now that sophistication of programming allows for such intermixed content integration, it’s nice to get the half-dozen websites I almost always go to right when I first start out.

But what are the larger implications these services have for our digitized culture? Well, like boiling a frog by degrees, we’re integrating ourselves with our online content more. We recognize a tendency in ourselves to want to get more done, more quickly, so we oblige that urge continually. We’re constantly reaching for equilibrium between what we have to do and our means to do it because we are constantly adding more for ourselves to do. Look at me just a few paragraphs ago. I give bonus points to Net Vibes because it allows me to cram more onto a page. What these content aggregators show is that instead of choosing to slow down and get to what we get to when we get to it, we want more of it faster – continually. I also hear from people in and out of class all the time that surely we must be reaching that point where we can do no more. We’ll have to stop adding more to our plates soon.

Haven’t we always been like this, though? Has there ever been a time where, at least collectively, enough people have said, “No, we’re fine with our media the way it is. We can do no more, thanks.” We added the printed book to the town crier and public storyteller. We expanded literacy downward to the lower classes. We added the newspaper. We added the radio. We added movies. We added TV. We added cable and its hundreds of programs. We added the internet, which in itself has been a continual series of additions. Why would we stop here? Why will we ever stop at any single point in the future?

*As long as that lag stays away.

Reddit and Digg - frustratingly worthy

First, I’ll admit a bias that probably will come through in my portrayal of the services: I’ve used Digg for a few years now. Like I mentioned in class, I tried for several months to act in the spirit of its social networking flavor. While I never originated new content for others to digg or comment on, I did participate in some comment threads about news. In the end, I withdrew to lurker status, and now only comment when I feel truly moved to by a topic of great interest. That usually ends badly.

I’ve also dabbled in Reddit off and on over the past couple of years. Even though the karma system is an interesting motivator for participation (and ideally, it rewards quality participation), I ultimately find Digg more satisfying in design. One thing I will cede to Reddit is timeliness. Overall, Reddit’s posts seem to be a little more real-time. During last night’s free session in class, I searched for several of the stories topping Reddit over on the other site. Of at least seven or eight articles, only one had just been introduced on Digg, but probably wouldn’t find diggs for another couple of hours. This struck me as Digg’s only true deficiency as a monitor for breaking news or hyper-current trends. One example: a trending topic on Twitter was causing a big kerfuffle at the very time the topic was topping Reddit. It was timely enough that should I have desired to particpate, I could have made my way over to Twitter and joined in while the topic was relevant.

Ultimately, I find the social news sites frustrating because they become utterly repetitive. Repetitive to the point of ruining readability of the comments. Some great examples.

Vapid Topics

If you take as read that the cadre of social news sites are first and foremost about, well… news, then you quickly tire of the top ten articles being comprised entirely of Top 10 lists. Do I really need to know who the Top 10 TV Dads, which are the Top 10 Horniest Countries (how does one even really quantify that?), or what the Most Memorable David Hasslehoff Moments are?

General Dismissiveness

I used to find Digg great for what wasn’t always the most erudite of discussion, but that you could count on discussion to be present. Like all things massively social, people eventually resort to adopting a combative attitude. More often than not, posters adopt an almost Scorched Earth Warfare tactic, seeing to make the posting environment inhospitable to all. A salient, topical comment is nuked with down diggs for no apparent reason. Also, see:

Factioning

Much of what I wrote in one of my very first posts of this class speaks directly to this great degenerator of all things on the web. The Other is wrong/corrupt/stupid/misinformed/trying to destroy our way of life. Repeat ad nauseum.

Memes

F1rst! Lol wut? I for one welcome our new meme overlords. Yo, I’m real happy for u, “I see what you did there,” and imma let u finish but “longcat is looooong” is the best internet meme ever. Ever. All your base are belong to pedobear! Yes, but can it facepalm Crysis? Pwnd! How is babby fromd? Hi I’m 10 and what is this? Shoppd! Leave Britney alone! I can has keyboard cat?

If any of that made sense to you, I’m sorry I had to do that. I know you’re probably sick of it to.

I don’t mean to universally pan Reddit/Digg and their myriad of would-be rivals. I do manage to collect dozens of good article reads a week; that’s why I go back despite all of the above grief. It’d just be nice if there was something that wasn’t eventually ruined by the inanity of the common internet lurker.

Oh wait – would that be Fark?

For Good Measure: Give a boy a book... please!

This week’s facilitation of Good Reads has really opened up the topic of reading choices, habits, and their impacts on literacy. Literacy is something often thought of in a black/white, 1/0 context. It’s a more nuanced grayscale, however, and can be used to describe the difference between someone who is an avid read and someone who is perfectly capable of reading but chooses not to. I’ve been both.

Through this article, I’ve stumbled upon Guys Read and Boys Read. These are organizations dedicated to, in no small part through their Internet presence, change the reality of male readership in the United States. Boys are less likely than girls to read, that’s well known. I’ve often thought that some people are just okay with that, accepting a false rule that males aren’t as inclined to be readers at a young age. This is definitely a black/white view and such thinking undoubtedly lets some who could be readers fall through the cracks.

I spent my years pre-16 in an odd relationship with books. Even though my reading had always been at a level beyond that of my peers, I'd done a poor job of engaging with reading. Being that most of my reading came from school assignments, I resisted. Even when it was for a book that I had been given latitude in choosing, I had a resentment for the proscribed interpretations that so many teachers would drill into us. It still happens that teachers in high school and university frequently prescribe interpretations, but only those poor at their job chafe when the student comes to a different conclusion.

For me, the crucial moment was when I spent several weeks in the hospital while my mother underwent numerous surgeries. I spent hours awaiting the results with my sisters or hours waiting for my mother to wake up. Reading a book to pass the time just matched that moment. I was already very introspective as a teenager facing the mortality of a parent, and having something as introspective as reading clicked for me, providing an appropriately contemplative outlet while letting me engage with such a worldview-altering experience.

Coming out of that time, I understood that books could be an intensely personal thing, even if assigned. That opened up a block I had in engaging with books, a block I now marvel at today. Now I'm a frequent reader, at least by the standards of my adolescence. I enjoy reading like few other things in this world and can be extremely picky about my reading. I can count at least a few books I gave the benefit of the doubt only to later abandon, sometimes even ludicrously close to the conclusion, because the author went of the deep end. Otherwise, I’m now about as devoted a reader as they come. For me, this was a product of external motivators stripping away my own misunderstanding. I, too, existed on the gray scale. Illiterate of course didn’t describe me, but perhaps I was underliterate. I wasn’t reading to my ability or desire, much like someone can be underemployed. Thankfully that has changed.

I really want to thank Mike for bringing Good Reads to our attention. Just like the site was designed to, it created a great conversation around reading, and not just books themselves. Aside from a few dear exceptions we all hold, books aren’t just about the stories or their specific effects on us – surely we could get that on TV or from movies if that was all we wanted. We read because doing so adds something to our world, and that something is different (and maybe similar) for each of us. Being reminded of the value that relationship has for us also reminds of the value it may not, but could have for others.

More Reads means Good Reads

I had some trouble coming up with a specific direction for this post, so I’ll settle on thoughts regarding Good Reads.

A question struck me as I browsed the site: what impacts might it have on actual reading tendencies, if there were a way to quantify that? I know that when I’m busy, reading for pleasure seems like the last thing I can fit into my life. I don’t know exactly what it is that makes me think this. Generally, however, I can find some time to do other things I’d probably consider more useless, such as aimless web surfing or watching a tv show I’m not 100% interested in (I’m looking at you, Heroes!) because I feel like vegetating more than anything. Even though I’m always happier when I’m reading, finding the process meditative and calming, I just don’t make the time.

Since Mike introduced Good Reads on Tuesday, I’ve been thinking a lot about reading. Aside from reviewing books I’ve read, which incidentally is harder than it sounds unless you’ve happened to read the book you’re reviewing within the past year, I’ve been far more engaged with the act of reading this week. I’ve browsed other readers’ lists, spent time trying (mostly fruitlessly) to recall which books I’ve actually read, and read about books I’d like to read in the coming months. What I’ve found is that I’d now really like to make a point to read more again. I’ve already lined up the next few books I’m going after, despite the 10 or so I have on my shelf sitting unread.

So is this a product of the GoodReads/Shelfari etc. model? Does building a community around the act of reading, and around sharing our experiences of reading have an effect more than the sum of its parts? I’m not just talking about reading in reviews, or considering reading experiences in browsing lists. I’m creating a sort of positive reinforcement around these experiences. By making me contemplative about reading beyond the act itself and the immediate aftermath one experiences as they digest a just-finished book, is this social network objectively increasing the amount of reading we do?

I’d have to say the impact must be present, whether or not there exists a means to quantify it. Having reading tied to the social environment of class and later online adds the warm glow of a shared experience. Just in the little bit of in-class discussion, I saw several faces glaze over and I don’t think it was that Mike was boring. I’m pretty sure a few of you were, like me, thinking about what reading you’ve been meaning to get around to and perhaps mentally lining up your next targets.

So, onward to time better spent. Goodbye Heroes. Hello Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Thanks, Mike!

For Good Measure: 01001001 01101110 01110000 01110101 01110100 00101111 01001111 01110101 01110100 01110000 01110101 01110100

The video below shows a promising (but not as “OMG brain-controlled stuff WOOT!” as the referring site would have you believe) early step in bridging the gap between the mind and technology.

While the researchers draw the conclusion that this is revolutionary direct brain-brain communication, I’m not quite on board. First, all this display really shows is a kludge system that allowed someone to transmit rudimentary thought to another human through a mediator (not directly) – in this case, the Internet. Here’s the gist of the research:

Researchers attach EEG sensors to subject 1, designed to understand 1’s imagining of raising either their left or right arm as binary code – a 1 or a 0.

Meanwhile, subject 2, who sits in a different location covered by Mr. Shakey Cam, being flashed by an LED that subtly differentiates between the 1 and the 0 is hooked up to EEG amplifiers.

Somehow, the data encoded in the flashed 1s and 0s is interpretable by subject 2’s brain. Subject 2 correctly interprets a series as transmitted by subject 1. 1-0-1-1 is transmitted, received, and decoded.

What I see in this is actually a bit more promising than brain-brain communication (which this isn’t) but goes overlooked. This is brain-computer communication! Granted this is a data transfer rate that makes a 1200 baud modem seem like light speed, but it’s a start. If one takes for a good thing our impending transformation into a race of silicon-augments, this is a HUUUGE step. Plenty of research shows our brain’s sensitivity to broad effect reading and writing from external parties. But to show that we are capable of encoding a specific thought process that a computer can correctly articulate instruction and meaning from? That’s the encouraging thing to me.

I know I probably seem like I await the Singularity with at least unstable glee, and probably to some observers with unhealthy obsession. The reality (or at least my impression of reality) is that the Singularity isn’t a scary thing for me. I don’t think we’re looking at our impending doom, but instead at the next great step in civilization. Once thought merges so seamlessly with technology, it’ll be the next best thing to being everywhere at once. I’d have to think that such potential would be a transformative power in humanity.

But at a generous 3 seconds per 1 or 0, as seen in the video, it’s going to be a long time until I can transmit 01001101 01110010 00101110 00100000 01010111 01100001 01110100 01110011 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00101110 (that would take just under 10 minutes) without breaking a sweat. (click here if you’d like to decode it.)

Just think how long it would take to convince a murderous robot to spare your life.

Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?

After reading other conversations about what Linked In means to classmates, I have another shot to take at the topic: Social media as modern-day secret handshake.

(Apologies for this being the best Simpsons Stonecutters video I can find)

In the classic episode of The Simpsons, Homer is unhappy to learn that he’s apparently the only man in Springfield who isn’t part of the Stonecutters, a secret order that apparently responsible for everything that goes on in the world. Homer, at first on the outside, struggles with getting a local plumber to fix a flooded basement. He is only able to secure timely, competent help from the plumber after revealing he is a newly-minted Stonecutter, thereby entitling him to the benefits usually reserved for the elite. Is this what social media, especially Linked In, will do to the professional landscape of the next few years?

Taking a look at this from two points of view, I’ll start first with the apologist’s, which, in full disclosure, probably most closely resembles my own views. I see these new tools of social media/Web 2.0 as the just that: tools. If you believe that genies do not go back into bottles, what’s done is done and we will do well to go with this flow. I have access to the same technology that anyone else does. As the apologist, I use it without further thought to my colleagues’ compatibilities or any concern for voluntary fair play. I understand that there are those who will shy away from this frontier of professional communication, but that’s not really my problem, is it? Ten years ago, access to computers and the Internet was something of a small club; computers were expensive, their usability factor didn’t encourage adoption, and the reward returned for investment of time honestly didn’t amount to much more than a few computer geek friends talking ad nauseum about last night’s hackfest on Diablo. Today, that’s not the case. A perfectly capable nettop computer can be had for under $400, less than some of the technologically-adverse would drop on a month’s car payment. Operating systems are the most accessible they’ve ever been and the robust offering of simple yet effective applications means no one can reasonably be left out in the cold. So throw off your inhibitions about Twitter, Facebook, or Linked In and join the rest of the online world. The connections you can make and maintain will do more than just kill time; they might help put you on an inside track at work. If you’re willing to put in quality e-suckup time, they why shouldn’t you benefit from your technological aptitude?

On the other side of the coin, we have the inclusionists,: Not everyone is capable of or willing to engage in the same level of immersion, and since it doesn’t really reflect on professional aptitude one way or another, isn’t it just another type of Boy’s Only Club? If I’m a (stereotype alert!) twenty year veteran of my office who just doesn’t give a damn about all that online stuff, isn’t it a type of discrimination to penalize me for not participating? That is what you’re doing, in effect, if I can’t connect on Facebook etc. with the others in the office who care about that kind of thing.

Taking from both sides, I can see validity to both points. As admitted before, my probable allegiance would be to the apologists, judging by how easily I was able to place myself in that position. But it’s always easier for the previously-initiated (Digital Native/Naturalized Citizen?) to call the newcomers out for not being willing to adapt. It’s also reasonable for the newcomers to expect equal reward for equal work. But is it really like that? Has it ever not been this way? Precedent doesn’t equate to acceptability, but it does make change more difficult. What would have to/should have to happen to level this playing field. Or is it a false assumption that leveling is desirable?

Oh, and because a shameless Simpsons quote is applicable here if no other time: Carl: “Oh and don’t bother calling 9-1-1 anymore. Here’s the real number.” (Homer is handed a slip of paper reading ‘9-1-2’)

LinkedIn: Employers Lock On, We Luck Out

Although I wasn’t able to attend Faye’s facilitation (sorry, Faye!) on LinkedIn and Professionalism Online, I did get the opportunity to read through her provided materials and to begin tinkering with LinkedIn myself – that in itself is a good result from the week. I’d always meant to construct a LinkedIn profile but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Now that it’s started but unfinished, I’ll probably obsess over it until it is done.

LinkedIn strikes me as very focused on the professional, which is a good alternative to Facebook and especially MySpace. As we’ve discussed at length, our online faces are important facets of our personality and presentation. Just as I behave differently (to a point) when playing online games, or when chatting casually with friends via Facebook, so to is it valuable for a site to place emphasis on the professional facet of my online self. Just like many of my friends, I do keep an eye on my Facebook presence so as to not make it entirely too casual in case a professional acquaintance ever comes calling, but I like the idea of an even more carefully attenuated face for those interested in me professionally. Furthermore, I appreciate the lack of some of the socially-oriented widgets on LinkedIn, such as downplaying photos (it’s agony finding something that looks professional, especially if you’ve got to do a complete album!) and restricting apps to professional utilities – no sheepzookas, thankfully.

But something sticks in my mind after Faye’s readings more than anything else: the legal issues. If there continues to be a focus on LinkedIn as your professional face – the one you could be held accountable for contributing to the image of your employer – this will take some of the pressure off of MySpace and Facebook. If we can more neatly cast the different sites into appropriate roles, with MySpace/Facebook as the casual side of someone who isn’t on the clock and LinkedIn as a place where we put on our professional attire, it’ll help to push employers back out of parts of life they are not welcome in. I would think the law could recognize a reasonable right to privacy on expressly social sites if the public standard includes this clear delineation from the professional sites. More succinctly – your employee has no reason to think you should look at anything but what is supposed to be professional. I see this as an important front in the ongoing war of private web versus public web. This is not to say that I routinely publish negative information either directly or indirectly about my employer, but it would be nice to know if precedent swings back to some semblance of reason in case I’m ever to slip.

Also, if I’ve restated anything already driven into the ground in class, sorry! Flu will do that to you.

For Good Measure: When the Singularity comes, plz to has mai life?

Just as a quick note for those of you who don’t know what the Singularity is – it’s the theoretical point when artificial intelligence will achieve parity in complexity and capability with human intelligence. It’s perpetually just over the hill, but it is pretty much an inevitability.

A lot of what you hear in the next breath after the term Singularity is Matrix or Terminator style lamentations that humans cannot coexist with a self-aware race of computers. I don’t agree. One of the great differences between us and any sort of AI we can see in the foreseeable future is our predilection for emotion-based overreaction. I don’t mean to be glib, but as long as our existence doesn’t logically contradict existence for such AI, we don’t have much to worry about. Additionally, such popular cautionary tales as we see in literature and film assure that we’re designing AI with any variety of kill switches in mind.

So the more likely reality is that sometime soon(ish), we’re going to live in a world where intelligent computers are a reality. And while they await the completion of their ablative-armored, six-foot tall, red-eyed, Austrian accented physical bodies, our first interactions with them will probably be more like what we saw in class on Tuesday in Apple’s World of Tomorrow style future tech flick. They may even be cloud-residing digital dwellers who are simply our contemporaries from a universe we can’t comprehend. And we’ll be visitors in their native landscape. What kind of reaction will they have to us in this environment?

What implications might this have for our digital universe? Is that where the battle, if there is one, might be waged? We exist in two places at once right now: the digital and the analog. Even if our newly aware digital colleague has a physical body of sorts, it’s not designed to interact with its physical world. And aside from the occasional in-person input they may receive, they will have only our digital presences from which to parse out human behavior. They'll have our posting on discussion forums to understand our attitudes towards interpersonal relations. They'll have "Shit My Dad Says" to understand how we see the world. They'll have millions of unflattering pictures of felines engaged in grammatically-challenged quests for self-discovery and cheezburgerz to understand our humor. That will be their only context for understanding us.

Well, on second thought, we’re all screwed.

Information on the Singularity:

Singularity Summit 2009

Wikipedia

Julia Allison: Harnessing the Fuming Power of Trolls for Fun and Profit!

This article must have slipped by me during one of the times when I let my Wired subscription lapse, because I’d like to think I would remember it. The reaction in class seemed to be mostly (or at least most vocally, anyway) that this girl embodied everything wrong with our internet culture today.

I absolutely couldn’t disagree more. Sure, in sleuthing around her sites and various other contributions, she doesn’t strike me as the most relevant to my interests and lifestyle, but I have to give her credit for accomplishing what she set out to do. In doing so, she highlights one of the best things about the internet. It’s the best tool for taking control of the spotlight and putting it on the 99.9% of us who are not positioned well in the entertainment industry. Numerous times the narcissist in me has considered what it would be like be internet-famous and how easy it would be to do so. Julia Allison provides a great how-to, but it certainly isn’t the only way.

No one has to see Allison; the internet is just as democratic as the tv remote or the radio dial. If you don’t like her or what she contributes, don’t click through to her spaces and don’t post about her. See, the real take-away is that internet denizens love pointless – passionate, but pointless – outrage. Everyone has to snark about what everyone else is doing. In retrospect, I can’t easily recall any digital conversation I’ve been a part of that didn’t eventually tailspin into a flame war or fight over the soapbox. It’s always been true that we care far too much about what others like that we don’t than what we ourselves like. The formula is simple. I contribute to Website of Interest A, which coincidentally happens to align as polar opposite to Website of Interest B. WI B’s trolls come in and troll WI A, and of course the tribe assembles and we begin jumping and shouting and slamming our palms on the ground until the WI B intruders back off. Then a couple of our WI A trolls decide to retaliate and the process repeats for all of time. Think of any inverse relationship to cast as WI A and WI B: Conservatives/Liberals, Coke/Pepsi, Ford/Chevrolet, Mac/PC, Digg/Reddit, Believers/Non-Believers, or Star Trek/Star Wars. All the brouhaha amounts to nothing because opinions are never changed on either side. This will keep happening forever because it’s been happening forever. Web 2.0 is just the latest example and Julia Allison was smart enough to see how to make it work for her.

Oh, and since she probably does frequent searches for her name on blogs: Hi, Julia!

Steven gets digitally screwed over

First, I apologize for the lateness of the contribution. No excuses; my bad. Getting right to the meat of the article: Steven’s creation of a digital story. The authors make it sound like this was simultaneously a disastrous and rewarding experience for Steven.

First the rewards. Children, especially in situations of less than ideal external support, can never receive enough positive feedback for any sort of undertaking that requires them to put themselves out there in a very personal way. Being that Steven seemed to be in a less than ideal socioeconomic setting, the kernel of the idea behind the project was excellent: give a student a forum to talk about something that really mattered to them. Stir in positive reinforcement for the results and ice with the uniqueness of doing it all in a forward-looking digital setting and the results absolutely should have followed Steven through the rest of school like they did.

The disaster: The results that followed only continually reminded Steven of a very negative experience. He received unsolicited judgment at exactly the wrong time. Steven was putting himself out there (as he was asked to) about how he really felt about his family, his mother, and his environment. He was willing to talk about these things that were so tied to his identity, and he was essentially told he had something negative to be ashamed of. The whitewashing of Steven’s background to appear less stereotypical and more artificially sweetened turned him in on himself and an opportunity for expression. I have to wonder if this video is more than a little responsible for his later decline in school achievement, too. If being encouraged to have shame over one part of his past undercut his self-worth, why should Steven have tried for better grades like he had been. The very stereotyping they had been so concerned about revealed to Steven a whole identity; he didn’t understand that his achievements existed despite this negative background and so he assumed the entire role of the stereotype.

What it means to digital communication. Aside from the similarities we can observe between Steven’s larger story and the risks we face when we put ourselves out there digitally (in the average user’s scenario, the larger outside societal standards we’re all aware of take the place of the judgmental undergraduate advisors Steven was partnered with), there is a crucial difference. When I decide to expose my thoughts, digitally or otherwise, it is generally on my terms and in my own words. Whatever the response to my efforts, their genesis happened apart from outside scrutiny. When I hit submit, I’ve intellectually and emotionally committed to what I’ve produced. Steven wasn’t really given that opportunity because he never got to this point un”assisted.” Naturally, he disengaged from ownership of his words because they were compromised. The take away I get out of this is applicable to all mentoring experiences, and perhaps especially those as exhibitionist as digital autobiographies: If you tell a kid to do whatever suits him/her or his/her interests, shut the hell up when it comes to their content choices – this is not the time for vanity.

Finally, as an admitted pet-peeve and a total tangent, I really have to take a shot at the authors of the article for just one thing. As interesting as the topic is, this really could have been a few pages shorter. There was so much transitional blather at the beginning, especially in the pages devoted to the thoughts on multimodal theory that wasn't applicable to this paper. I get it, context is good, but jeez! Brevity, people, brevity.

For Good Measure: Integrating fully

As I alluded to in a previous post, I posit that it might not be long before the progress of our technological usage reaches a threshold. Whenever I spout off about this topic, I tend to get funny looks, but I encourage everyone to bear with me.

Think about our relationship with technology in just the past fifty years. If I may be poetic, we’ve progressed from computers filling buildings and only able to run the most basic operations to carrying around smartphones equipped with processors many orders of magnitude more capable than the Apollo XI Command Module’s on-board computers. We’ve witnessed the rise of the Arpanet, the Internet, Web 2.0 (a term I still kinda dislike), and real-time photo-realistic graphics rendering. More information can stream across global distances faster each day. And with Moore’s Law, this capacity doubles every 18 months to 2 years.

As far as our behavior goes, we are the most digital-socially integrated group of humans ever, and that too shows no likelihood of abating. We constantly devise new ways to use technology to keep in contact with our circle of friends, monitor our world and create new digital worlds to escape into. So, I ask - absolutely, 100%, I kid you not - seriously: How long until we become a race of cyborgs?

Just to be absolutely clear: I do NOT mean this.

It’s not a big leap. In fact, with the above trends factored in, what used to be a big chasm is rapidly shrinking into what is soon to be a mere crack in the sidewalk. If we continue carrying more powerful and capable technology around with us, increasing our reliance on digital maintenance of our knowledge base, and going where we can with nanotechnology, it can’t be long. Our generation might be cautious but convincible, and generations older probably won’t adopt, but what about those yet to come? There will come a point when I won’t be content with physically interacting with a device when I know a more accurate, more efficient route exists directly with my brain. It’s started with increasingly portable yet capable laptops and phones. The next step will be wearable but separate tech that makes these functions more permanently accessible. After that will be technology that passively observes our nervous system operation to intuit our will into physical manifestations. ( Actually, this device might already do that.) After we’ve contented ourselves with using trained subconscious eye movement to access and display information on a HUD before our eyes, what else could be the next step?

Integration isn’t going to happen overnight. In fact, a lot of these steps have already been taken in crude ways to assist those with injuries or disabilities manage some life functions through alternative means. As we continue to chart these technologies and guide them into more effective use, it will pass the mark of parity with the biological and on to technological superiority. At that point, elective adoption of these technologies will increase and humans will gradually alter themselves for the simple objective benefits afforded.

I won’t commit the classic folly and assign a specific timeframe for when I think this will come to pass, but I will offer that I sincerely believe it will be well within my lifetime. When we reach this threshold, what reason will we have as a culture to ignore it and say we will go no further?

Personality Faceting

In response to Tuesdays class discussion and Dr. Schirmer's article, "The Personal as Public: Identity Construction/Fragmentation Online," I'd like to propose another way of looking at how we present ourselves online: facets.

The analogy works pretty well for all aspects of our interpersonal lives, actually. Let's use a precious stone like an emerald for our example. The stone starts off kind of unremarkable, really. Gemstones in their natural states aren't the clear, sparkly bursts of light we associate with their end product. Assuming you have a stone of appropriate clarity and worth, it still needs to be cut and polished. It takes a skilled lapidary to study the stone and see the gem within, and a slow, careful process to whittle away just the right amount in the right places. The lapidary makes choices based on the application (pendant, ring, earrings) about how each facet should be oriented to get the best use of light from the gem. While the facet everyone focuses on - the one that is displayed most prominently to the world - gets all the attention, the supporting facets throughout the rest of the stone are crucial. Channeling light to the clearest, most pristine part of the internal stone and away from the imperfections is a task made possible by all the supporting facet working as a whole, not just the most prominent facet alone. If faceting is done incorrectly, the gem would be little more than the dull, unremarkable stone it started as.

Now think of the selves we present to the world. I firmly believe that every presentation of ourselves, both digital and physical, is part of a whole. We start life as an uninteresting wiggly lump and soon begin the faceting process. It starts out external until we're old enough to chart these paths for ourselves, but the process leads to the same end. We choose the single best side of ourselves to display most prominently, but rely on the lesser noticed aspects - sometimes our imperfections - to give support and context to our public face. This extends online just the same. It's not that we're different people in different online settings, it's that we use different facets of our personality in different settings, and its always in service of the whole personality.

Digital Natives and our inevitable assimilation

Regarding the Prensky article, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," I'm going to explore some things I didn't get to on other classmates' blogs.

That we have two types of digital denizens is of crucial importance to our digital culture. I think that we have an equilibrium that is going to steadily shift over the coming decades as the last of the immigrants dissipate through ... let's just call it attrition. With each year, the number of natives will rapidly increase while the number of immigrants will steadily decrease. (Aside: in what other scenario could the immigrants ever get out-numbered?)

I think this will have a steadily freeing effect on our digital communications. This isn't to say that the immigrants have a chilling effect by intent, but rather by necessity does the digital landscape have to not take some things for granted. As our culture becomes vastly dominated by the native (those who've never not had a digital life), the inherent mistrust of those things digital will abate. That you have a Facebook account (or whatever our future equivalents will be) or maintain a significant online presence would be considered a default assumption. Accommodation for the disinclined at first will wane, and eventually will be rare.

In short order, we'll be as accustomed to our lives with a completely integrated digital self, it will be practically like existing in multiple dimensions at once and we won't even notice.

And this will be one of several gateways to full cybernetic augmentation. And this will start off another dichotomy: The Integrated Natives & Integrated Immigrants. But I digress...

For Good Measure: Shaking our fists at the Internet on our gol-derndet lawn!

Note to 513 readers: In an attempt to delineate between what is class-assigned and what I stumble upon and find of interest, I'm going to try and preface blog posts and tweets like this with "For Good Measure."

As I tweeted today, I found a Telegraph (the UK paper) article about 50 things that are being killed by the internet. The article might be better described as "50 things that are being (sometimes mercifully) killed by the digital revolution." A few things stick out as fluff they were scraping the bottom of the idea well for a round 50, but it's a solid list. Some are tongue-in-cheek, some are irrelevant, and some are a shame.

I really have to single out Telegraph's list topper as the most influential - "Polite disagreement." With politics being the topic de force in this regard, the Internet's double-edged sword has been the promise of diversity of viewpoints to challenge us to see past preconceptions and to humanize those we disagree with, but with a reality that we've only radicalized more. Because the politphile can easily find a niche blog/community that reflects back at them exactly the same point of view they themselves hold, there is no rationale to seek common ground. With the Internet, we can cast our own dramas with loyally supportive cast and fantastically one-dimensional Others. One would hope that this would be constrained to the digital facet of the world, but that is sadly not so. We know that we can always escape from those pesky, foolish ultra-_____wingers/_____ists we work with or otherwise have to interact with by returning to our digital compound and circling the wagons with the ones like us, the ones who get it. It's a cheapening of the discourse, a polarizer.

Honorable mentions:

13. Memory - I don't know. I think that it's actually probable I'm a little better rounded for having surfed the internet/wikipedia for as long as I have. I can't count the number of times I got lost in the wikipedia click-spiral.

14. Dead time - As I mentioned in class, I really think I need go Walden and just disappear into the woods for a few weeks.

16. Hoax debunking - The single greatest triumph over the emails that one crazy, gullible distant family member sends.

You gotta be Hyper to keep up with all the Media today...

I sometimes almost pine for the days when hypermediazation meant 60 channels on cable TV rather than the standard 5-6 broadcast you received over the air. Almost.

Unless you are someone who makes an identity for themselves as first and foremost a social butterfly, you simply cannot keep up in real time with all the vectors of communication today. Aside from the famous culprits like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, there are blogs, news sites tailored to specific interests, news aggregators, and plain old personalized e-mail to distract you. It is so easy to be momentarily occupied with one or more of these things, or possibly even the physical world, that you will miss something because you simply can't be in many places online at once. Example: I didn't check Twitter until it was many hours after Dr. Schirmer's tweet of "I do what I must because I can." Had I been within a few minutes - maybe even an hour or so - it would have been good timing to reply with "For the good of all of us - except the ones who are dead." This is an altered quote from Portal, a game I'm almost 100% certain he was referencing, and in my estimate, one of the best games of the last decade. I enjoyed the shout out and would have enjoyed sharing my own - it's kinda like when you see two motorcyclists pass each other and nod/wave; it's a recognition of a shared interest, a common thread.

But I was too late. I feel like there's this window of opportunity with most of our digital communications. After a certain point, trying to add to a digital thought would seem odd, or out of step with the continuum of this digital rhetoric we all enjoy. We've moved on.

And so with the concept of Hypermedia, we do best to include the caveat of "to the best of my ability." It is impossible to stay with the continuum because we have multi-faceted lives. Be there for what you can but accept you'll totally miss something you could have really added to - and often. Until things like Google Wave (if it works like I think it is intended) get off the ground, we have to cast about constantly within the continuum, finding purchase where we can. Eventually, it'll be so we have not just news aggregators, but website aggregators, and once we find something new in media to dwarf the hyperactivity the website aggregators have tamed, we'll need an new way to aggregate that. Ad infinitum.

And we'll keep missing stuff. And that'll be ok.

"But there's no sense crying over every mistake"

What really ISN'T new media?

(CRAP! I had this sitting as a draft since Tuesday.)

My response to Zappen’s “Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory” was lukewarm. Maybe I’ve completely missed the point – and perhaps, I can be forgiven this because the point seems so buried – but it seems to me the take-away is that new digital forms of expression and rhetoric are only superficially different from the traditional notions. Assuming I’m on target, I’ll proceed.

Well, duh. I don’t really see how this manner of communication could be any different based on the medium. The point, the essence, is the exchange. Be it 140 characters at a time and tapped out on the subway or at length in peer-reviewed journals, discourse is discourse is discourse. Legitimacy bestowed may make it more professional or suitable for specific application, but it is still discourse and it is still valuable.

It seems a point being made is that one of the aspects of so-called "New Media" is a scientific reproduction or affectation of traditional media - a mathematical breakdown of something like a video or image. That strikes me as odd. In reality, EVERYTHING we've ever done could potentially fall under this definition if the parameters remain this loose and computing power continues its unabated expansion. Just like a mathematical equation can reproduce the display of an image by orienting millions of small bits and dots of color, so too could the more physical characteristics be included. A painting is not just the colors used and their relative orientation - it's the way light plays off the inconsistencies in the pigment, or how different canvases interact with different paints. There are mathematical ways to describe all of this. So, given the time, wouldn't a)processing power needed to three-dimensionally render a digital expression for how all of this data is presented and constructed, and b)continuing advances in physical reproductions (such as 3-D printers) eventually produce something that is a 100% flawless reproduction of an analog original? No doubt reaching this level of sophistication would take time, but since it couldn't be achieved by a human hand, wouldn't this also be New Media?

Furthermore, there is reference to Alan Turing, but nothing to say of the infamous Turing test. For those who may not know, the Turing test asserts that a sufficiently complex and well programmed computer could carry on a conversation with a human as another human could. No one can claim that honor yet, but this, too, must be only a matter of time. Then media will be capable of expanding into yet another realm it has been shut out of thus far: human-like/human-to-human communication.

An exercise in circular writing humor

Re: "McSweeney's Internet Tendency..."

LOL wut?!

Ahem. I think I get where/why this is going. All I can say is that I both agree and am aware that the author (and I, since I agree) are drastically oversimplifying the post-print communication phenomena. In a total meta-moment, I realized how droll I found his comments about being droll- and that that was the desired effect, probably. And that he was aware of the irony of that effect.

Now I have a headache. (Aw, crap! I'm trying to be droll!)

Maybe we're all writers, but do we all care about every writer?

Re: "We Are All Writers Now"

TLDR. Just kidding. In summation: writing is, at its barest, mere communication. It is the relevance we find in what we read, and by extension, its author, that bestows its worth. If we don't agree, we're apt to dismiss. If we don't identify with a method or a culture of communication, we're apt to dismiss. Every bit of writing has its audience, and it's an equal partnership for the audience to scrutinize the content and establish our appraisal of its worth.

Just getting things started for the blog for UM Flint 513.