Day of DH

Today for Day of DH I thought it worthwhile to write an actual blog post for the first time in many months.  Like others who have switched over to short format postings on platforms such as Twitter, most of my blogging activities have been suspended in recent years, although I still write for DML Central and a few other places.  Since becoming Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at UC San Diego during a time of devoting myself largely to conventional print publications, it has been difficult to find time for even one posting despite having written over a thousand such entries in previous years.

Of course, blogging has been important for expressing solidarity with a distinctive kind of digital politics, even if -- as Geert Lovink points out -- so often that politics only merits a "zero comments" response.  On Wednesday, Lovink presented a talk about "Wikileaks beyond Julian Assange" at UC Irvine, which raised a number of interesting questions about how anonymity and celebrity function as part of particular algorithmic rhetorics.  The talk also reminded me why I continue to argue for more "hacktivism" in the digital humanities, as I do so here in the Debates in the Digital Humanities collection.

Lovink noted that Wikileaks was made possible by the confluence of the decreasing costs of maintaining a megabyte of data and the increasing strength of technologies for anonymous encryption, such as those documented by Andy Greenberg in This Machine Kills Secrets.  However, Lovink argued that Assange had fallen prey to the "hacker as hero as trap," and that photo ops with Lady Gaga Issue detracted from online advocacy desperately needed for the pending court case against famed Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning.   Although Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler may make the argument for leniency publicly in "The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case," what Lovink calls the "global fallout" of this particularly Wikileaks case, primarily involving the release of diplomatic cables, has been featured in news coverage in India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries.  (To understand the narrative of stakeholders, Lovink recommended Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower from the BBC.)

Like any Internet meme Wikileaks has spawned many imitators.  As Lovink observed, websites with leaked documents now range from the Al Jazeera-sponsored The Palestine Papers to Porn Wikleaks, which is devoted to providing the real names of actors in adult films located from an HIV/AIDS testing database, to the GuttenPlag Wiki that locates plagiarized passages in the dissertations of German political leaders.   Some links are now defunct among Lovink's list of copycats, such as the now defunct Murdoch Leaks website.  Yet, as Lovink also pointed out, the work of Wikleaks continues with The Syria Files, even after the defection of Daniel Domscheit-Berg.  Wikileaks also clearly inspired The Afghanistan Papers, Balkan Leaks, and Global Leaks.

Although Lovink appreciated the aesthetic gesture of works like "Delivery for Mr. Assange," he was concerned that the narrative of the cyber-outlaw obfuscated the work of coalition building and the importance of how Wikileaks once functioned in a larger ecology of free software and online activism.  For example the temporary allegiance between Wikileaks and Anonymous,  Lovink argued, indicated that tensions between journalism (the supposed mission of Wikileaks) and activism (the supposed mission of Anonymous) and that leaking information and mining information to leak could involve two very different kinds of user practices.

Having taught a course on Digital Journalism, I know that major news stories often depend on affiliations with media organizations that are well-financed enough to fund lawsuits that force information to be released.  With media conglomeration and free culture norms weakening newspapers and broadcast news, investigative journalism is rapidly becoming defunded, so anonymous submission of leaked material becomes the only way to break big stories.

What does this have to do with the digital humanities?  Large corpora of documents that are not carefully curated -- such as those on leak sites -- invite intrepid digital humanists to do creative data mining, and

In Simple Packages

MediaArtHistories looks like an relatively unremarkable Blogspot blog, but it's a great site for new books, calls for papers, and general geekdom related to media archeology and old media/new media cryptohistories, in addition to a place for promoting the MIT Press book Media Art Histories. I've added it to the blogroll at right and would recommend it to VP readers looking for less policy wonkdom and more wonder.

The Belly of the Beast

Redmond, Washington is probably best known in digital studies circles as the corporate home of proprietary software giant Microsoft, although companies like Boeing and Nintendo are also important in the region. Unlike Seattle, where this photograph was shot, the urban landscape of Redmond seems made up of mini-malls, industrial parks, and planned communities. We did stroll around one noteworthy Microsoft complex, which was meticulously landscaped around an artificial river and seemed more architecturally purposeful than the rest with its orientation around a two-story chalet style eatery.

My host, Professor Michael Aristidou (pictured above) teaches courses on fuzzy logic and quaternions at DigiPen, which had invited me to I give a talk about "games with publics." Quarternions are apparently non-commutative sets of numbers that are particularly useful for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations, which can be very important in computer animation and produce superior results in comparison to better known methods, such as matrices and vectors. Particularly now that procedural animation has become so important for lifelike effects and other kinds of interactive content, such as Crayon Physics, with which my household is currently obsessed, it's strange to see that even lay people with better than average numeracy have so little knowledge of these kinds of mathematical operations.

I went through a talk about game design and player subversion that emphasized five kinds of game audiences.

1) collaboration audiences (games, which can be single player as well as multiplayer -- that reward cooperation as well as competition in a reputation economy that is internal to the game)

2) elaboration audiences (games that inspire machinima, mods, and the production of new digital media in a reputation economy that may be external to the game)

3) opportunistic audiences (games that encourage users to share information about the game world, walk-throughs, cheat codes, etc.)

4) regulatory audiences (games that shock or awe legislators or members of the mainstream media who often condemn or laud games they have never played)

5) mixed reality audiences (games that lead to situated action in real-life cities or other public places and encourage exploration of the player's identity rather than that of a fictional character)

The slides for my talk are here, and the links to clips and websites I showed are here.

Gated Communities

As though it weren't enough for the Internet to be the primary vehicle of child molesters and terrorists, apparently it is also the superhighway of evil drug traffickers, who are after our kids as well. Or so I learn from the new tutorials on "E-monitoring" from Parents. The Anti-Drug. The fact that parents are being encouraged to buy proprietary software programs and pursue parenting strategies analogous to the surveillance culture of authoritarian regimes, such as China and Iran should be concerning to those who want their children to grow up to be citizens who make the right choices freely. (You can see the research coming out of the OpenNet Initiative for more on why Internet censorship is both self-defeating and a sign of the total failure of a system of governance.)

My vote for the scariest sentence in this website was this one: "While technology offers many positive things, like connectedness and information, those same attributes, if misused, can also be quite harmful." What about those of us who don't accept the idea that informing the young is harmful? Apparently, we are sadly deluded about how "hooked" our kids are on these new technologies. Most bizarre, perhaps, on the E-monitoring site was the link to current "street lingo" from the White House Office of National Drug Policy.

Then again, perhaps communication technology needs to be demonized now that public service announcements like "Pete's Couch" have abandoned scare tactics with regard to actual recreational drug use. Of course, there are already several video send-ups of the "Pete's Couch" spot on YouTube.

When it comes to technology tutorials for parents like this one, it is worth keeping in mind that research by danah boyd on teen computing seems to suggest that something more is at work in the use of instant messaging, mobile communications, and social networking sites by the young than the fastest way to the creepy dealer down the street. She suggests that this behavior is also a logical reaction to parental authority from over-scheduled kids whose sociality has been radically constrained by a society based fundamentally on stranger danger. With playdates and even home schooling, young people searching for social contact that isn't an extension of family relationships go to the Internet to seek out less homogeneous and more diverse forms of community.

One of the statistics that is supposed to be most alarming to parents is this one: 14% of teens have a live face-t0-face meeting with someone they've met online. "Gulp. Scary," we are supposed to say. But I have a teen. He's used the global reach of the Internet to learn about interests that might otherwise be too esoteric for kids in his immediate social circle. For example, he found a teen rugby club with an international group of adults -- including some articulate feminists -- promoting participation in the sport. He also located a DJ academy where he could learn about scratch and mix techniques in a multicultural and multigenerational environment of collaboration around the craft. So -- yes -- he's even met adults through the Internet . . . people otherwise known as coaches and teachers. You can see some of the suspect characters my kid has met in the photo above, where he's spinning vinyl for winning one of the three top mix prizes.

Here's what I hear about the surveillance alternative. A neighbor dad tells me about another dad who is carefully monitoring and cataloguing all the porn that his son watches. Does he use it as an opportunity for dialogue? No. Does he use the technology to further parent-child communication? No. Poor pathetic guy. I learned more about my kid's attitudes about video sex and violence from watching nine minutes of the hilarious "My Trip to Liberty City" and talking about it afterwards.

Old School

Today I attended the first graduation of my son from DJ school at Scratch Academy, where he was the youngest student in an extremely multicultural, multiracial, multinational, and even multigenerational class in which young women represented at least half -- if not more -- of the enrolled students. Of course, there are certain fraternal rites in this social group. They take on new names and only call each other by their DJ appellations. I took a sample lesson and was surprised to see how much of the instruction was actually like an elementary computer programming class: the emphasis was on not learning bad habits and explaining the basic, structural principles of musical combination, essentially the algorithmic components of the mix. The center is run by Executive Director DJ Hapa, who also DJs on the morning news.

Given that the digital music revolution allows for such efficiency in distribution and precision in presentation, it's funny that my kid still loves vinyl, as I did at his age. It's also sad that members of this incredibly rich, urban culture, which has done so much to revitalize the decrepit recording industry, are still treated as what Kembrew McLeod and Ben Franzen call "Copyright Criminals."

Attention Getting

On Monday I went to see DJ Danger Mouse at the Hammer Museum. Danger Mouse is the stage name of Brian Burton, who came to the attention of copyright scholars like Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan after he created "The Grey Album," which combined the Beatle's classic with a cappela music by Jay-Z. Those who argue for digital rights see the cease-and-desist orders that Burton received as a sign of repression from oligarchical interests unwilling to allow the distribution of intellectual property in a free culture.

Burton talked a lot about the relationship between mixing digital samples and creating film and the role of the auteur in the studio. Burton might not be conceptualizing the relationship between new media and traditional cinema with the same language as Lev Manovich, but there were definitely intersections in how they imagined communities of practice.

Burton got the biggest applause not for defending fair use of copyrighted material, but when he described his "love-hate" relationship with the Internet. He criticized members of the digital generation for lacking the habits of attention needed to sustain meaningful listening experiences, particularly when it came to appreciating an entire record album as a coherent work of art.

The reaction to Burton's comments about "attention" from his audience made me wonder whether or not I should revisit Richard Lanham's new work, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2006). When it arrived in my mailbox, I initially found it quite disappointing: full of cultural stereotypes that have been contested by many who study the engrossing characteristics of highly-situated digital experiences, such as James Paul Gee.

Except for a chapter on "What's Next for Text" that showed that Lanham was capable of "thinking with type" (as Ellen Lupton says) in interesting ways, I found the overall argument unpersuasive. Yet Lanham is the author of one of my top-ten favorite digital rhetoric books of all time, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (University of Chicago Press, 1996), so perhaps I'll give his latest offering another try.