Loud in the Library

UCLA Student Alexandra Wallace is all over Facebook today, but not for all the reasons that the buxom co-ed who created an anti-Asian YouTube video might desire. Despite the recentness of the hullaballoo over the weekend, coverage of Wallace's three-minute rant on "Asians in the Library" now ranges from the local LA Weekly blog to the global Daily Mail. The racism of her comments about diverse campuses and her insensitivity toward tsunami victims were particularly egregious. The video was such a black eye for UCLA that the chancellor of the campus has already issued both a text press release and a video statement at "Chancellor Block appalled by student video disparaging Asians."

Although the original video has already been pulled down, it has been mirrored and reposted in a number of places, including here. Asian male students have posted responses like White Girls in the Library and this spoof that emphasize both Wallace's foolishness and their own interest in interracial sexual dynamics on campus. Wallace has apparently complained of losing her privacy now that she has been named, and ad feminem attacks like this text-based video probably explain the Chancellor's call for civility in response.

Of course, like all viral videos, it has already been autotuned and dance remixed. What surprises me is that little has been said about the fact that the UCLA library also played a role in another YouTube controversy when a student of color was tasered on cell phone camera by campus police.

(Thanks to my wonderful CAT 125 students Nikita Shah and Jonathan Hu for their insights on the controversy. I now have 200+ people keeping me current on Virtualpolitik.)

Update: One of the most watched videos thus far is this one that mocks Wallace with declarations that "we grow our food!" and "there's a reason that you outsource your jobs!" Also worthy of note is this response from a self-described "gay Asian Jew" at my own institution, UC San Diego. And, yes, the dance remixes will be unstoppable, as this example demonstrates.

More Updates: This video of a digital one-man band song to Wallace has already earned hundreds of thousands of views. It points people back to the original video, the crooner's a capella Mario song and Britney covery, and an iTunes version of his serenade available for purchase.

Waiting for Elijah

In many traditions there is a some version of maintaining "a seat for Elijah" in which an absent person is included in activities of social communion even if not physically present. Internet rituals involving missing people often have this element of anticipation of the person rejoining the others at the table. Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education has reported on how "friends and colleagues search for missing scholar Philip Agre." Internet policy research is a relatively small world, and -- although I don't know him personally -- he has often had a place nearby my name, whether on book catalogs or course syllabi. Colleagues are also sending plaintive messages to Friends of Phil Agre hoping that it is merely his concern for his own privacy that has caused him to go missing.

Pins and Needles

Yesterday I attended one of the sessions at UCLA's Mobile Media series, a talk by web artist Jonathan Harris.

The slides in Harris's talk contained words and phrases like OPINIONS, BELIEFS, VIBRATIONS, OUR DIGITAL CRISIS, NO TRUE ESCAPE, WORLD BUILDERS, SIMPLICITY, LANGUAGE, SPECIAL EFFECTS, IDEAS, ACTING ALONE, IMITATION, REPUTATION, IRONY, and SCIENCE + SPIRITUALITY that were spelled out in leaves, pine needles, or dirt to represent his reflections about technology and digital participation seen from the perspective of his Oregon cabin. Harris mentioned a range of possible icons for work that addressed what he saw as fundamental questions: Frank Lloyd Wright, Donald Judd, and Andrei Tarkovsky, who was mentioned several times. (My favorite Tarkovsky clip is below, starting on the middle of the YouTube timeline.)



Harris expressed his concern that too often designers missed the fact that "mystery is an ally if you are making stuff," and that the "vibrations" that make up the sounds, images, and colors of an artist's palette had become -- in the era of digital social networks -- about a "volume of communication" and a "number of relationships" that had become too difficult to manage. Not only was the intensity of such Internet vibrations increasing, Harris also argued that they were becoming "more homogeneous."

Harris also had harsh words for our "mania with social networks," which he asserted reinforced sameness and were "making us stupid." He forecast that if the forces of "compression and velocity" continued unchecked, people would be reduced to transmitting "monosyllabic grunts" on the Internet. He said that his general message to people from "journalism, publishing, and radio," which were "collapsing," was that they should have "patience," since it is not their business to "make tools to get their stories out," but he worried that the Web's tendency to be "good at breadth" and "bad at depth" might keep the trajectory headed toward crisis rather than encourage users to "bounce to something earlier."

So he also counseled his audience of design students to think about being "world builders" and "deciding what the digital world will look like." He argued that this would involve thinking critically about "simplicity," which he argued shouldn't be confused with what he called its "fashionable idea" incarnation as John Maeda-style minimalism. Rather Harris insisted that designers should reject the "prudish," "fascist," or "hardass" character of minimalism in order to embrace "organicism" as a more appropriate approach that is guided by nature and its regulations of complexity.

(Disclaimer: I actually like the wit and political engagement of Maeda's work, and I don't agree that his information design is as soulless as Harris implies.)

He also argued that "language" was a major category for design, as a "system for expressing ideas," which could include photography and dance as well as Java and Flash. At this point he acknowledged the presence of audience member Casey Reas, co-creator of the language Processing. He argued that earlier Internet projects of his, such as We Feel Fine, might have been too much like "going to the opera" and not enough like "playing Beatle songs" at home to elevate one's mood. (His newest story-generation project, cowbird, is being done in "basic HTML and Javascript.)

However, he did concede that there could be value is some "special effects," such as "motion," "interaction," "physics," or "layering." But he argued that web interface creation should be less like "fashion design" and more like the zen of sword making.

At the point in his presentation where he talked with the slide with the word "ideas" spelled out, he claimed that ideas were not like "memories stored in the brain" and that brains were more like radio receivers than hard drives.

In closing, he said that he was not a big fan of "irony" and was similarly skeptical about imitation. His final 1-2-3 dictum had to do with having a 1) universal concept that was 2) executed with as much simplicity as possible and 3) contained an element of play, nostalgia, or beauty that humanized the work.

During the question and answer session, he explained how the Whale Hunt had been a defining moment in his career and how he would still choose his laptop over his sketchbook and pen and paper.

Those in the mood to look back at the "web evolution" that Harris deplores can check out the Internet Archaeology site, which shows screenshots of social network sites becoming more complex with each iteration.

Bureaucracy Can Be Beautiful

The libertarian ideologies that are not so latent in Michael Hiltzik's "The Internet is proof that government doesn't bungle everything" offer a remarkably facile look at the government's involvement with digital communication that emphasizes the conventional myths of the founding fathers of ARPAnet and the local UCLA connection.

Although the article does point out that the early Internet's failure to attract investors as a private start-up did shape some of its subsequent history, it ignores the legacy of those like Vannevar Bush who worked closely with the military-industrial complex and the weirder aspects of the rhetoric of J.C.R. Licklider who is praised in the article as one of what Peter Lunenfeld has called "The Patriarchs."

Forty years on, that remarkable paper reads like a work of clairvoyance. "In a few years," it began, "men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face." It forecast that the network would provide some services for which you'd "subscribe on a regular basis," like investment advice, and others that you would "call for when you need them," like dictionaries and encyclopedias. Communicating online, it concluded, "will be as natural an extension of individual work as face-to-face communication is now." Sound familiar?

Certainly, Licklider "foresaw its development into a public utility," but -- as the last chapter of the Virtualpolitik book describes -- he also hobbled the nascent network by tying it to the gendered office norms of Cold War culture in which women type but men don't.

Thanks to Lisa Moricoli Latham for the link.

Days of Reckoning

UCLA has just released "A Bad Night at Powell Library," the official account of a story covered last year on Virtualpolitik. It describes the results of an investigation into the tasering of UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad by campus police, which was captured on video by cellular telephones and then distributed throughout the world by YouTube. As someone who has written articles about the physical space of scholarly libraries (and their rules of inclusion and exclusion, which may also have ramifications for the construction of digital archives), it was a story I gravitated toward. Not only have I presented at conferences with librarians, but also as a graduate student I have studied at the same library at which the incident took place.

My Dinner with Quandary

Last week we were having dinner in the Hollywood Hills at another couple's house, and after enjoying a tasty meal that featured some of our host's glorious home-made meatballs, the subject of the Internet and the future of the Industry came up. Now, for reasons I won't go into, an inordinate number of our friends make their livings as writers for film and television, so this is not such an unusual topic for after-supper conversation.

One of the problems that professional writers for both the large and small screen are currently grappling with is media consolidation, which significantly erodes their bargaining power as a group of specialized professionals, but the other looming threat to their livelihood is the consumption habits of the digital generation themselves as viewers and their general unwillingness as an audience to pay outright for content, even if their parents are still content to shell out for those video store late fees and write that monthly check to their local cable company, like other oldsters. If the digital generation consumes the standard Hollywood fare, the fear is that they will do so without paying through participating in common file-sharing practices or logging onto shadowy offshore websites.

Or, even worse, the entire market may continue to shrink as audiences reject the value of dramatic or comedic expertise entirely and opt to turn their eyeballs to the all-volunteer entertainment galaxy that is proliferating among amateur dramaturges online. Reality TV -- which has already taken over much of the broadcast spectrum -- could become the norm into the Nth dimension, and the "participatory culture" celebrated by Henry Jenkins could put the entire membership of the WGA on the unemployment rolls. (Even I will confess to liking Project Runway, on which I'll be giving a paper in April, and The Amazing Race before reality TV "professionals" like Rob and Amber cut in.)

As the kids were sent downstairs to play anti-social videogames, and the cigars and champagne came out, my friend actually asked me point-blank what professional writers should be doing to survive in this new infotainment economy.

Now, on the rare occasions when I'm urged to give my opinion about emergent media, it is usually in regard to higher education or to government institutions, two subjects that I actually know something about by virtue of my service to the University of California and my research in the field of digital rhetoric. When it comes to entertainment, however, I'm just about the least likely person around to be able to predict the likes and dislikes of mainstream America. I still pull TV signals out of the air with a coat hanger on my set, and the only shows I watch have to do with politics and famous historical rhetoricians. When I go to the movies, it is most often a foreign film that I can walk to in my boho neighborhood. And, if it isn't a NASA astronaut, I have no idea who the people on the covers of People are.

But I do know the basics of how to hack my iPod to play clips that I find on the web. And I watch more YouTube than anyone in my age or education bracket that I know. (In fact, I bought my most recent cellular plan for my mobile phone expressly for this purpose.) And I do have screen names on a number of social networking sites and MMOs. So I might not be the stupidest choice for a semi-knowledgeable informant when it comes to these new electronic genres.

So here's my list of possible strategies, suitable for a memo to a Hollywood bigwig, that tries to answer my friends' basic question about what's a nice scriptwriter to do now that the world is going digital.

Approach One: Go Gentle into that Good Night

Give up. Content yourself with being cool and retro and potentially ironic, like silent films or organ music or film strips or ditto machines. After all, the hip thing to do at Burning Man is to make drive-ins, so you could just show film festivals of your old work to whacked-out half-naked mud-covered teeny boppers and feel good about yourself until it was time for your appearance in the montage of dead Oscar winners. Then again, you could be a sensible capitalist and invest in companies that produce search engines, plug and play social media platforms, non-DRM technologies, more intuitive interfaces, ubiquitous computing devices, and semantic web services. (Remember, usability matters to consumers, whether you are talking about the Sony PS3 or the Microsoft Zune.) Or flip a coin and chance putting it all in Microsoft, on the hunch that Windows Vista might really succeed in its most evil plans.

Approach Two: Put Heads on Pikes

Get tough on those lousy punks! Although you are still merely labor, join up with management in the entertainment industry in hunting down and prosecuting scofflaw file-sharers. It won't do anything to affect demand, of course, so the War on Piracy is probably as efficacious -- and expensive -- as the War on Drugs that you may well have ducked bullets from in your own youth. Nonetheless, it might be a really fun power trip to be on for a while; even better than writing an episode of 24. You can cheer for the use of new gee-whiz automated bots that troll the Internet for distinctive audio or video signatures, like the software that busted this dead pianist. (More of the damning evidence against her is here.). You can enlist your local boy scout troop. You could even make content that tricks those outlaws into revealing much more than their IP addresses when they unwittingly log on.

Of course, there are still all these people who are watching interesting, non-infringing stuff on YouTube, like some of my favorites. Furthermore, as users gravitate toward Constitutionally protected forms of expression like parody, you might find it a difficult fight to win in court, even with Congress in its current regulatory mood.

Approach Three: Make Shrinky Dinks

Appropriately, next month's Wired magazine has a cover story on "Bite-Size Entertainment: Explore the New World of One Minute Media," which is all about what is essentially the micropayments option, in which entertainment is pared down to the puny size that penny-wise consumers remain willing to pay for . . . or at least sit still for as they multitask. (My favorite fun fact in the article is that 39 percent of all respondents among college students write that they IM while writing papers.) The image on the cover explains the basic premise: a bag of chips that is labeled "Try! Snack Culture! Tasty Bits o' Fun! Now with MINIMOVIES! SONG SNIPS! MICROGAMES! & MORE!" But it also dishes some of my own favorite pop culture delicacies, such as PostSecret and or customized slogans on t-shirts as indicative of this trend. Even with a DVD rental costing less than a venti latte, who wouldn't pay ten cents for a few minutes of best bits?

Approach Four: Turn Everything Into an Ad

Why do you want to make stories about Rick and Elsa when you can write scripts about the forbidden love between the Taco Bell Chihuahua and Betty Crocker? Or -- better yet -- can you say product placement? Payments for those highly visible consumer commodities soon may be topping the box office for some films. Furthermore, choosy upscale consumers can't TiVo through a brand name product featured on the set, since it's not actually part of the commercial air time. Already ostentatiously visible products are turning up in supposedly home-made YouTube videos, and certainly the sale of Mentos isn't hurt by spontaneous fan behaviors. Unfortunately they won't need writers to put these products into the story, since digital technology can do that work in post-production.

Approach Five: Understand that the Search is the Message

What's really valuable about new forms of Internet search technology, websites that allow personal files -- even family photographs and home movies -- to be stored and organized on remote sites, and online social networking services is the intimate data about consumers that can be gleaned. Even without supposedly identifiable information, search behaviors can tell marketers a lot about individual consumers. But with those identifiers willingly supplied, there is much more that a marketer can do with the data. From talking to my own teen, I know that he is remarkably willing to give up private information in exchange for access to "free" content. As a recent article in New York Magazine explains, we may be approaching "The End of Privacy: The Kids, the Internet, and the Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock 'n' Roll. (When I looked at it, I thought of the famed recent UNC Pit Break-Up -- which was advertised on Facebook and publicized on YouTube -- was a fake, but we might not be that far from an ethos of stadium-style coverage of young people's most intimate moments, even if this particular episode was Internet theater.)

In other words, the challenge may be to create content that is primarily designed to reveal information about the audience member rather than about the character onscreen. Suppose there is a consumer, who may well have uploaded pictures that show who in the family has hair that is graying or who has put on a few extra pounds and thus is in need of a specific consumer commodity, but the mega-corporations won't be able to target their pitches appropriately without the necessary metadata about who is who in the pictures. Perhaps having your tagging done by Mechanical Turks, even in the Third World, may still be prohibitively expensive. So how do you get the consumer to give you that information online? Luckily, despite all the publicity about fakesters, most people are remarkably forthcoming and represent their Internet personae relatively accurately, even though they may shave off a few years. But perhaps you can get them to reveal even more about themselves by tracking the choices that they make in watching an Internet story, particularly when personality profiling is such a lucrative industry, although I'd still liken it to nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences with self-fulfilling prophecies like phrenology.

Approach Six: Make the Scripts in Videogames Not Suck

Of course, the money to be made writing for videogames is nothing compared to a six-figure studio paycheck, but it is a growing entertainment industry that is desperately in need of better characters, stories, and jokes. Of course, good, post-cinematic story-telling will probably have to start with independent game developers, and they are facing new technological hurtles of their own with the looming prospect of de facto lock-out from Microsoft Vista and a lack of support for new controllers like the Wii.

Approach Seven: Make Interactive Art and/or Literature of Some Value to the General Public

A lot of cool game-based or interactive technology for lyric, dramatic, or comic expression that universities are developing is only getting used by the military. What if Hollywood actually teamed up with the ivory tower instead of shot anti-intellectual surface to air missiles at it? They are doing it at the Institute of Creative Technologies and some other places around the country, but the general public is still not included.

Nothing prevents a relatively intelligent person from learning enough code to communicate on a software development team. Even your faithful reporter is taking a class that includes learning some action script from this Flash teacher. Of course, if numbers scare you, you can do a lot of story-telling even with relatively low-tech approaches. You can even be nominated for awards just using the protocols of an off-the-shelf commercial product. Look at the controversial one-time Slamdance finalist Danny LeDonne's work on Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

Unfortunately, a lot of this work doesn't actually need writers. For example, this week I am majorly digging the work being done at Northwestern, particularly News at Seven, which creates automated evening news shows with game characters and data from online news and the blogosphere. (More about this later.)

Approach Eight: Write Stories that Are Site-Specific

Ubiquitous computing opens up enormous entertainment possibilities, particularly now that cell phones have so many capabilities for staging group interactions in physical landscapes. You may not want to tell your story against the backdrop of a wedding or Bar Mitzvah, but there are still plenty of opportunities to tell stories in shopping malls and theme parks and build on work being done by people like Jonathan and Casey Ackley.

Approach Nine: Write Transmedia Stories

Hollywood has run on a closed shop model for a long time, and perhaps it is no accident that they call their professional associations "guilds," given the protective medieval environment of apprenticeship that still surrounds the process. Crossing into print or combining forces with other one-to-many forms of traditional media may be one chance at survival.

Approach Ten: Join a Campaign

With an election coming up, progressive parties and candidates probably need your skills most. Politics needs better stories, characters, and jokes to engage the public. And participatory democracy could be the place to start.

Then again, now that the Oscars have a Thank You Webcam, and the Emmys are giving prizes for Interactive Media, perhaps the moguls already know all this.

Space Invaders

This evening the Experiential Technologies Center at UCLA held a talk with Paul Dourish in their series of talks about computer augmented environments. Dourish is one of my colleagues at UCI and spoke about "rethinking information and space in ubicomp." Dourish, the author of Where the Action Is, spoke about three ways in which ubiquitous computing could be conceived: 1) mobility, 2) computer-augmented worlds, and 3) a reconfigured relationship between people, activities, and spaces. Dourish argued against the generally held Western perception that space was a natural category experienced through individual encounters; rather he claimed that space was always socially constructed and informational. He also used the theories of Michel de Certeau about the opposition between the "strategies" of planners and the "tactics" of users to illustrate projects in urban spaces from the aesthetic journeys of passengers on the London Underground to the movements of tagged sex offenders in San Diego County. As someone who has attended conferences in the bleak UK city of Sheffield, I particularly enjoyed learning about the field tests of the clever alternate reality game Can You See Me Now? there.

The Postmodern As Prologue

Today's MLA session on postmodernism featured some heavy hitters about the cultural impact of digital technology in conjunction with some historical perspective on the postmodern, postmodernity, and postmodernism. First up to bat was Amy J. Elias, who provided a concise overview of "Postmodernity, Antifoundationalism, and Dialogical Value." Second at the plate, was Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, who promised a "manifesto" that argued that the transition "from objectivication to linguistification" has implications for government institutions and that the idea that systems were plural and contingent allowed for a recognition of the function of differentiation, whether you were talking about office politics, tea ceremony, or the Pentagon.

The next slugger was N. Katherine Hayles, author of the excellent How We Became Posthuman and My Mother Was a Computer. Hayles is an important digital theorist, so I was a bit disappointed to see that so much of the argument of her otherwise very cogent paper concerned a comparison of two technological elites, international currency traders dealing with "virtual capital" and composers of digital literature artworks, who may have more of a sense of the protocols at work in complex algorithms than many Americans who have little knowledge of the black box operations running undecipherably on their computers. Given that the rest of the talks were concerned with dialogue, the public sphere, and the creative commons, I would have liked to have seen more reflection about the civic implications of Hayles' reading of "experiences of virtuality in everyday life" when human and computer cognition are intertwined.

Last out of the dugout was Mark Poster, writer of Information Please, which I had actually read on the plane out to Philadelphia. I didn't agree with all of his arguments about the "media unconscious" and the withering away of the virtual state, but it was an ambitious book with a lot of philosophical context about informationalism, albeit one that opened with the same Bert/Bin Laden example that Henry Jenkins recently ran with at the front of Convergence Culture. I thought that the fifth chapter about the rhetoric surrounding identity theft and the fourth chapter about the political philosophy involved in the construction of the "netizen" were particularly useful for media theory, and I plan to use some of his work about the desire to control the media experiences of the young in Virtualpolitik.

Today, Poster argued that the modern period was an historical anomaly when it came to the proprietary ownership of intellectual property and that the postmodern has, as Frederic Jameson has argued, a special relationship with technology. I liked that Poster picked two very politically engaged examples as his exemplars: 1) the fact that audiobooks from public libraries are restricted to a single user at a time, despite technology that easily enables simultaneous use of the same digital artifact and 2) the story of the speech of UCLA Marxist Robert Brenner being broadcast to an Iranian audience via a webcast of his telephonic reading of the text, although Poster didn't have much time to address its implications.

Intelligent Design It Yourself

2006 was really the year of digital rhetoric, in which highly portable text, image, audio, or video files were rapidly disseminated to the public at large through distributed computer networks, so that that computer-generated artifacts often reached unintended audiences and were used for unintended rhetorical purposes.

Apparently what is true of politics is also true of the sciences. At a Christmas party tonight, I had an interesting conversation with Professor Mark Morris of UCLA, who expressed dismay that a digital photograph he took of a nebula at the center of our galaxy ended up used as evidence of the intentionality of the creator on an intelligent design blog.

It's interesting to see how this intelligent design blog uses YouTube, Flash animation contests, and other common gimmicks of participatory online culture.

UCLA Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Yesterday, The Los Angeles Times covered the massive security breach involving the confidential computer data of UCLA students, faculty, and staff in "UCLA data breach among worst of its kind." According to the form letter being used for notification purposes, hackers also had information about parents whose progeny applied for financial aid.

For years, I've been interested in the mea culpa genre as it appears in pages on university websites, but the official UCLA website about possible identity theft offers no specific apologies anywhere in its text intended for potential victims. At best, there is a lukewarm expression that "UCLA greatly regrets the concern and inconvenience caused by this illegal activity." We are told that they take their "responsibility to safeguard personal data very seriously" and that "data security is one of the most important responsibilities" they have to the campus community, but they never actually address neglecting that stated responsibility for over a year in which intruders had access to the data.

(I was cross-registered at UCLA during graduate school, but hopefully my data isn't included among the 800,000 people affected.)

The Anarchist in the Library

Here in Los Angeles, cameras in mobile phones combined with the video sharing capacities of YouTube have publicized a number of high profile cases of police brutality. (A search on YouTube with the keywords "police brutality" brings up hundreds of videos from all around the world.)

This latest case was actually posted on the Wired Campus blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's hard to watch as twenty-three-year-old Mostafa Tabatabainejad is repeatedly tasered for being in the UCLA library without an ID after 11PM.



Details are here from the LA Times.

Update: Since the footage appeared on YouTube, there have already been a number of remixes and classic YouTube first-person webcam commentary pieces (like this, this, and this).

UCLA's Iranian Student Group and the Muslim Students Association have been organizing large campus and street protests, but these organizations have not yet updated their websites with information or commentary about the incident. The best coverage is probably at The Daily Bruin. This blog posting includes an eyewitness account.

Sideshow

Today I was at the huge SIGGRAPH international annual convention on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies, wandering around as an uncommitted flaneur beholding digital wonders. Unfortunately, due to fatigue after a long drive to Dartmouth to see the very interesting work being done at the Virtual Terrorism Response Academy yesterday, I missed the SIGGRAPH Fashion Show. There's a lot to take in and many ways that a cultural critic could analyze it; both Erkki Huhtamo and Lev Manovich have commented on SIGGRAPH's spectacles in the past.

I picked up and held the creepy little_one, fished for virtual fish with a fishing pole that tugged with their activity, played hopscotch across glowing squares in the MOVE project at UCLA, shouted at the eerily responsive oily magnetic sculpture by Sachiko Kodama, loitered about with the vest-wearing unspoken_boston_siggraph people with glowing LED messages like "This is Crap" and "I Want to Fart," and waved my red/green paddle in the huge Electronic Theater to manipulate the massively multiplayer Etch-a-Sketch.

I'm always interested in the difference between when technology prevents representation and when ideology prevents it. Now that human social, rhetorical, and political interactions are being modeled in virtual space, it is interesting to observe the constraints on what can be depicted caused by the limitations of the available algorithms.

I also stopped by the Open Source Pavilion at SIGGRAPH, which claimed a substantial chunk of exhibit real estate on the convention center floor despite the looming presence of corporate giants in the neighborhood.

SIGGRAPH is a remarkable organization, which continues to manage to negotiate the tension between the open exchange of information about digital technology represented by the organization’s sponsorship of courses, academic papers, training opportunities, and poster sessions and the understandable stinginess about proprietary knowledge associated with the corporate partners on whom SIGGRAPH depends for large-scale support.

There were a number of interesting panels today. Apparently at the “So You Want to Create Content: Licenses, Copyrights, and Other Things to Think About” the big idea was trademark, which certainly put a chill down my free culture spine. I attended the “Ethics in Image Manipulation” panel, which raised important questions about the moral responsibility of artists who alter images used in photojournalism and video news. I spoke to several people who worked on erasing the other civil rights activists from near the podium of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” for an Alcatel commercial, who said that there were passionate discussions at Industrial Light and Magic over right and wrong while it was being done.

Now that E3 will cease to be in its present form, it will be interesting to see if SIGGRAPH becomes a venue for more promotion of splashy digital entertainment or if it takes the death of E3 to be a bellwether for an overextended big-budget business model.

Double Vision

I continue to learn about how virtual reality devices are being used in cognitive therapy, physical therapy, and even pain management. As previously noted in this blog, virtual reality devices have a communitarian dimension, because they can be used to treat social phobias, such as the fear of speaking in public or interacting with others in informal social situations like parties. But VR also is used in many other clinical situations, some of which have import for creating a more inclusive basis for accommodating a greater range of citizens.

Because computer generated imagery offers a richer testing model than traditional paper and pencil exercises, it offers an invaluable aid to brain researchers. Certianly, exposure to specific and consistent forms of multi-sensory or three-dimensional stimuli improves neurological mapping. Although spatial puzzle problems have been used to problematic ends by researchers studying gender difference, such as in the case of the famous toy-stacking experiment, such puzzles have great potential to improve scientists' understanding of brain injury and recovery.

VR technology has been used for physical therapy as well. For example, wheelchair users with "visual neglect" can learn to drive more safely after negotiating virtual courses. But VR also offers the possibility of creating transformative environments for the physically handicapped. The Laboratory for Innovation in Rehabilitation Technology (LIRT) can place disabled people in virtual mountain vistas or at the center of virtual soccer fields during their physical therapy, where they can interact with virtual birds or virtual balls during the therapy session.

Finally, VR offers distracting sensory information that can assist with pain management. For young test subjects, a virtual reality scuba game provided by the Believe in Tomorrow National Children's Foundation is apparently a great improvement over merely squeezing a rubber ball during painful hospital procedures. Hunter Hoffman was an important pioneer in this field of research, and according to a recent NPR story on such clinical use of video games, Ben Sawyer of Games for Health has been a significant popularizer of these technologies. Even the media artist Rebecca Allen of UCLA has contributed to this effort to reduce pain by immersing the patient in vivid and interactive technologies.

Because I was born with a rare ocular condition known as Brown's syndrome, I actually had 3-D therapy as a child during the nineteen seventies. I still remember the experience well. After each one of several eye surgeries, I went for weekly "eye exercises" to an office full of machines equipped with viewers. I would spend the time tracing images or doing other hand-eye coordination tasks that were designed to improve my spatial abilities and discourage the double-vision or mono-vision from which I periodically suffered. Being good behaviorists, the assistants gave us Starburst candies if we performed well on the day's tasks. Such vision therapy is apparently still practiced today. I wonder if both my persistent interest and my persistent skepticism about virtual reality technology can be traced to those early experiences with incipient 3-D.

Although I've abandoned eye exercises and now wear a prism in my glasses, my eyes still don't quite track together. Thus I was unable to fully appreciate the Magic Eye craze of the nineties, and the old-time stereoscopes that nostalgia buffs treasure don't work on me. However, those who have good binocular vision might enjoy this 3-D stereoscopic cell phone apparatus from Japan!

Is "Official Carnival" an Oxymoron?

I recently saw the show on Carnival at the Fowler Museum, which got me thinking about how this annual celebration in Catholic countries during the period leading up to Lent might relate to the "official culture" that I usually study.

After some web-surfing, I discovered how "official carnival" exists on the web with civic sites hosted by local governments for Fasnacht in Basel and Carnaval in Recife and Olinda, where performances often have subversive political themes. I'll admit to being wary of Venice Carnival, which was revived in 1979 largely for the tourist trade. Since Hurricane Katrina, the City of New Orleans has actually put Mardi Gras up for Sale to the highest corporate bidder.

But there are also "virtual carnivals" with dances and parades and performances that take place in online communities. Recently my colleague Jenny Cool showed me the work of the dancers and performers at Gypsy Groove. Check out their amazing Cantina Crawl series! Marvel at the size of the performing cast in the Gypsy Groove credits that would rival the numbers of any Samba club.

Compared to the other seasonal site for ritual celebration and political spectacle, the 2006 Torino Winter Games, which is further canned on its dreary website, the Cantina Crawls may look considerably less staged.

Other groups appropriate official culture for subversive ends. Stay tuned for upcoming posts about captioning and street art.

The Elephants Are Attacking the Ivory Towers

The issue of possible political bias in the academy and academic freedom has been generating considerable attention in the blogosphere, perhaps most notably in Michael Bérubé's talk on "Academic Freedom."

I recently wrote that the threat of conservative policing from alumni in the UCLA case had been overblown by well-meaning but media illiterate faculty. In contrast, Bérubé's post focuses, quite rightfully, on what I also identified as the more substantive danger of legislative oversight. The country's network of public higher education is particularly vulnerable to these pressures. Bérubé warns that right-wing pro-"balance" lobbyists are poised to enforce populist agendas for learning on the academy. It's not so much the quashing of minority opinions by the majority that's at issue for Bérubé, as much as the denial of intellectually (and sometimes morally) complex ideas by the repressive functions of mass psychology.

Bérubé makes a clever point about how these right wing activists are using the very language of affirmative action to undermine one of its chief sites of social practice, by claiming that political conservatives are underrepresented minorities who should be admitted to the liberals' exclusive social club. Stanley Fish has similarly pointed in his article on "Academic Cross-dressing" in Harper's that the Right has appropriated other arguments from the Left, so that relativism and tolerance are now being used to question Natuaral Selection and prop up Intelligent Design.

I'm not sure Bérubé is completely correct that "academic freedom" should be treated as a natural right, alongside other Enlightenment principles, because it still assumes an oligarchy of the learned. Even if academic freedom is extended to students, librarians, and those teaching in the K-12 environment, many could be excluded who haven't made the knowledge industry their explicit avocation.

To me, the threats to academic freedom may be more subtle than we realize, and these threats may not arrive under the standard political banners of right or left. The forces challenging academic freedom may also be targeting life-long learners as well, particularly as greater restrictions are placed on citizens' use of computer networks by those in power from both political parties who are concerned about obscenity, terrorism, and copyright infringement. As was the case in the Loyalty Oath Controversy of 1949-1951, legislators from all parts of the political spectrum may cooperate to limit our intellectual liberties, particularly when the issue of national security takes center stage.

Do you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the Internet?

Like many in the UC faculty, I received my alarm e-mail notifying me that arch-conservative UCLA Profs.com was offering to pay students up to $100 to tape lectures from the "radical professors" among my blue-and-gold colleagues at UCLA. As of yesterday, the pay-for-replay offer has been withdrawn, apparently in the face of threatened litigation over intellectual property infringement, but the story has continued to garner an amazing amount of media attention, including an urgent bulletin on NPR during my morning commute.

I heartily agree with Siva Vaidhyanathan of Sivacracy.net that teaching is a public act and support the extended application of this principle into programs like the Open Courseware Initiative at MIT. Fellow sivacracy blogger Ann Bartow has also rightfully pointed out that using the intellectual property argument against the efforts of conservative alumni and mercenary students is a long-range tactical mistake, since what she considers to be corrupt means (privatizing part of the scholarly body of knowledge) contaminates potentially laudable ends (political resistance and the advocacy of unpopular opinions). But, as sage as I think the sivacracy bloggers tend to be, I still think they might be overlooking a major aspect of the case.

In my mind, this is not a story about a vast political conspiracy threatening academia (or even just Lernfreiheit vs. Lehrerfreiheit) as much as a story about media literacy and one in which U.C. faculty members don't come off particularly well. This narrative contains two major elements:

1) UNDERSTATING THE CONVENTIONAL CHARACTER OF A GENRE'S STOCK FEATURES

New genres and mixed genres on the web sow confusion. The UCLA Profs web page is now being treated as a serious alumni site, but it actually belongs to a popular class of websites that primarily serves undergraduates, with the most successful example being ratemyprofessors.com. The design sensibility of the 1-5 "power fist" designation of UCLA Profs differs from the visual branding of other ratings sites, which use graphic icons, but the layout, the length of each entry, and the general tone of the reviews is comparable. Based on my own frequent surveys, I can assert that many similar professor-rating sites also share the same basic flaw of disinhibiting users who submit a disproportionate number of unfair criticisms of faculty who are feminist, lesbian, or people of color.

Of course, when it comes to evaluations, there has to be a better way. My undergraduate alma mater always made its official evaluations available to students, which I think considerably lessens the attractions of anecdotal online reviews. I'll even acknowledge that some studies show that official evaluations can be skewed, but I would still say that making a teaching record accessible fosters better pedagogy and more inclusive discourse in academic communities.

I, personally, am morbidly fascinated with the viciousness of the virtual crowd at ratemyprofessors.com. I will even confess to once visiting the page by students rating Stanley Fish, after reading a particularly improbable New York Times editorial, "Devoid of Content," in which Fish advocates having students make up a language in their college composition classes rather than actually develop some mastery of the language they are currently assigned.

And, speaking of improbable claims, this brings me to my second criticism of the general faculty response to the UCLA case . . .

2) OVERSTATING THE AUTHORITY OF A QUESTIONABLE SOURCE

Why is it that teachers spend so much time talking about students' lack of Internet skepticism and spend so little time examining their own? It's true that in my experience an entire college classroom once believed that a stealth marketing website promoting the movie X-men was a credible source for researching human cloning. But it's also true that my fellow instructors have fallen for self-righteous campaigns against Bonsai Kitten and diatribes against the Unreal Tournament Bible Based Maps and other parodic bandwagons for the credulous.

Despite the organization's official sounding name, the Bruin Alumni Association, I can't find evidence that anyone other than twenty-four-year-old Bruin Alumni Association President Andrew Jones is associated with this august body (at least until he received all this media attention). As of yesterday, there didn't even seem to be a Vice President to be found. I couldn't locate content generated by the grown-up members of the "advisory board," some of whom had resigned in protest according to NPR. If anyone thinks this site was engineered by political insiders or powerful robber barons, a few clicks to Andrew's earnest face or his terribly written blog would disabuse them of this notion. To see what I mean by the kind of smog check that Jones could never pass, see librarian Susan Beck's now classic "Evaluation Criteria for 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.'"

I'm still amazed that this epistolary volley discharged like the newest computer virus hysteria and ricocheted through hundreds of academic departments, and no one paused before pumping the forward button. Reuters and CNN fastened upon the website thanks to multiple e-mails stacked up in faculty inboxes and not to the efforts of Mr. Jones himself. I might even guess that the site would never have been found by the public at large if it weren't for one of the named professors googling him or herself one night.

Ignored, the story would have gone nowhere. Validated, it may become an issue for a larger and more critical constituency: the taxpayers who support the U.C. system. Particularly at a time when digital rhetoric and the distributed discourses of the public sphere are being co-opted by vested interests in Public Diplomacy, Social Marketing, and Risk Communication, it is important to avoid crying wolf.

(To read an opposing viewpoint, see the impassioned missive posted on Inside Higher Ed that directly addresses Andrew Jones and the Bruin "group" and takes serious issue with their claims. This open letter by fellow Core Course instructor Brian Thill, "An Idea Too Dangerous to Ignore," is full of excellent arguments and reflections, even if I might argue that it is better suited to a Governor or a Chancellor than to a recently graduated Internet crank.)

Wish List

All I want for Christmas is more evocative Internet based art! Last December, I was lucky enough to see Listening Post at the Skirball Cultural Center. The installation, which previewed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, was designed by statistician Mark Hansen and sound artist Ben Rubin. Rubin was also involved in an interesting installation about the proprietary software of Diebold voting machines.

For an Internet cyborg like myself, the experience was more gratifying than prose can render. The Skirball "Listening Post" consisted of over two hundred screens that channeled words from nearly live feeds pulled from thousands of Internet chatrooms registering activity predominantly in English. The glowing patchwork of words and phrases displayed as undulating text, and periodically the visitor heard a symphony (or cacophony) of voice-synthesized readings of these screens aloud. After capturing the flotsam and jetsam of cyberspace, Hansen and Rubin used algorithmic compositions to organize the chat into "scenes" to "allow the data to speak intelligibly." The project was designed to "zoom in" and "zoom out" on specific news events and syntactical constructs of grammatical agency, like "movements" organized around the phrases "I am" or "I like." Yet these staccato sound bites could only begin to boast, mourn, announce, explain, blame, lecture, hector, and apologize before being replaced by other fragments from the Internet.

Hansen and Rubin credit composer Xenakis and his work on "political crowds" as inspiration. They also recently did an installation called Sign Language that displayed texts from online news sources, which were particularly evocative after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Hansen is currently working on "slogging" or the way that art installations, scientific projects, community initiatives, and even political states can record information from individual sensors to create a record of collective activity. I admire Hansen's work, but I still resist the idea of such a total information awareness environment. It sounds too much like the Army's "Every Soldier is a Sensor" campaign (described in this snappy promotional video).