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.