Home is Where the Logo Is

Like many who follow digital culture, I am interested in the design aesthetic of the so-called "Google doodles" that often grace the home page of the giant search engine's website. Many different occasions have been commemorated by the one-time Google doodles, from International Women's Day to the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. (My UCSD colleague Lev Manovich has created a visualization of their logo "stylespace" here.)

This weekend all around the world -- with the exception of China -- the Google doodle commemorates the 75th birthday of Muppet creator Jim Henson. The launch of the Henson doodle is also an event of considerable personal significance in our household, because the current Google doodle was created by my husband of twenty years, Mel Horan. Those who follow this blog might know that Mel created the innovative web series Garbage Island back in 2000, designed the "Free Culture" scout patch that was picked up on Boing Boing, and is known to occasionally blog his daily hand-drawn lunchbags for our son Felix's own brand at Brown Bag Dad. A video about the creation of the Doodle, which involved two months of intense work between the two corporations, shows some of the stakeholders involved in the process and includes an interview with Mel.



In recent years Google has attempted to move away from its famed white design aesthetic of extreme minimalism to doodles that encourage more interaction, more sharing, and more remixing of Google's brand identity on social media sites. Perhaps the Les Paul doodle, which was used to strum everything from Happy Birthday to Lady Gaga, was the most notable example of this online strategy. Of course, these efforts also showcase the engineering feats of Google programmers, since millions of users could easily overtask their servers with mouseovers and mouse clicks with a poorly designed interface. The Henson doodle, which uses digital puppetry with a 3-D CGI design, is putting HTML5 to the test today.

Those interested in more casual interactions with their screens might interact with the logo for mere minutes or seconds before entering their search terms. An article in PC magazine explains the principle, but the interface was meant to be intuitive to those who want to bring the characters to life.

This Google doodle was also designed to appeal to two distinct classes of more devoted computer users: those searching for cheat codes and those interested in making music video mashups.

Soon a "secrets revealed" video appeared on YouTube, which showed how to make the first animated "o" in Google lose his glasses, although a more satisfyingly humorous "secret" involves manipulating the mouse so that the final "e" devours the "l," as the video below shows. I won't reveal any more secrets here, however, and would suggest instead a visit to the comments of this page at BeatWeek to understand my reasoning for reticence.



As an article in TIME notes, "puppet karaoke" is another emergent phenomenon of today's doodle. Using either real-time puppeteering, as those involved in dance parties in Star Wars Galaxies do or more advanced digital editing machinima techniques, users can create short films in which the five characters play either speaking or singing roles. TIME points its readers to the example below that has the characters lip synching to the Black Eyed Peas.



Given the Henson's company's alliance with Disney, known for its policing of copyright in the Sad Kermit case, this acceptance of the existence of user-generated content created by what Henry Jenkins has called "participatory culture" may be worthy of note. Although the Henson doodle is already off the main page for Google France, one can still join the "list of mashups" being curated on the web.

When the Sheen Is Off

As someone who has written about web generators and mash-ups, I have to say something about the latest series of Internet memes involving rehab-refusing actor Charlie Sheen and his wild statements in recent transgressive public appearances. In the mash-up category, we have Cats Quote Charlie Sheen and online quizzes about "Whose Line Is It Anyway: Gaddafi/Sheen," as well as a YouTube video in which Sheen serves as Gaddafi's translator.

The Charlie Sheen Random Quote Generator is also making the virtual rounds. You can even have a quote generating widget as a Wordpress plugin.

The Attackers and the Bystanders

In "Stars and Sewers," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd points to misogynistic Internet comments posted about the brutal gang rape of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Egypt's Tahrir Square, comments that appeared on Twitter, in blogs, and anonymously on Yahoo! For Doyd, this abusive online verbiage serves as more support for Nicholas Carr's high-profile anti-Internet argument that networked computer technology is "rewiring" our brains. Dowd also cites a number of other social media skeptics in rapid fire succession: Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, with whom she ends her editorial.

“I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?”

In "Adding insult to Lara Logan's injury," once controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte, whom I write about in the chapter on blogs and Photoshop in the Virtualpolitik book, focuses on a cast of conservatives in the blogosphere.

Popular rightwing bloggers Debbie Schlussel, Robert Stacy McCain, and Sister Toldja were among those who immediately used the attack to reinforce their anti-Muslim, anti-revolution arguments. But the real cause of sex crime is power, and its abuse, and that is a problem in all the nations on this planet.

Meanwhile, anti-Republican journalist Nir Rosen has been apologizing for Tweets that maligned Logan's character in "How 480 characters unraveled my career." From a rhetorical perspective, it is interesting to note that Rosen drops in a reference to WikiLeaks in explaining his lapse into Internet cynicism.

With 480 characters I undid a long career defending the weak and victims of injustice. There is no excuse for what I wrote. At the time, I did not know that the attack against Lara Logan was so severe, or included apparent sexual violence. Even so, any violence against anyone is wrong. I've apologized, lost my job, and humiliated myself and my family. But I, at least, don't want to go down looking like a sexist pig. I am not. I am a staunch supporter of women's rights, gay rights and the rights of the weak anywhere in the world. . . . So why did I write it? It was a disgusting comment born from dark humor I have developed working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Lebanon -- and a need to provoke people. I have a few think tank friends on Twitter, and we often banter about the morality of WikiLeaks, counterinsurgency and other issues. When I first heard the news about Logan, I assumed she was roughed up like every other journalist -- which is still bad -- but I was jokingly trying to provoke one of my think tank friends on Twitter, thoughtlessly, of course, and terribly insensitively. Stupidly, I didn't think the banter between myself and a couple of other guys would amount to anything.

Now, Twitter is no place for nuance, which is why I should have stuck to long-form journalism.

Logan's own journalistic practices have had a complex relationship to social media. As I write in this article, the cell phone footage that she used in her reporting on the Iraq war caused her story on the Battle of Haifa Street to be rejected for broadcast; subsequently Logan complained about having been exiled to the station's webcast as a result.

I might suggest to Dowd that online comments left last year on a 60 Minutes story done by Logan about Green Berets who shot two boys accidentally provide an example of much more substantive counter-discourse and civic engagement. Even if the tone of some of those postings was caustic and cynical, viewers were able to question the powers that be

To the Victor

The digital rhetoric surrounding the victory of artificial intelligence in a match against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter seems to benefit both the corporate sponsor, IBM, and a last-century television gameshow that is now hoping to promote its various digital brands, which range from a Wii game for at-home family entertainment to an iPhone app for would-be contestants on the run.

The heavily hyped "man-machine" competition designed to garner ratings and media attention seems to have had its desired effect. It even has merited its own TED talk to narrowcast to the digerati, and the company is declaring broadly that "humans win" in presenting its own teary online drama about the computer scientists behind the scene.

Certainly the technical challenges faced by the IBM team grappling with the rule systems of human language and knowledge representation made former victories by IBM computers against human chess champions seem like relatively simple feats by comparison. Based on the company's triumph on the game show, their corporate public relations is now promoting the machine's efficacy in fields like health care, although those who remember the computer's bungled answers might not yet be ready to place their lives in its care.

In a statement, longtime Virtualpolitik friend and former Jeopardy winner Jerome Vered doesn't give as much credit to the technology as he does to the way that the game itself is structured as a competition between self-interested agents that unfolds according to the logic of an individual game.

Note also that "Watson" is not named for Sherlock Holmes' famous sidekick in solving crimes, but for the father-son successive IBM heads "both named Watson," as Peter Lunenfeld tells us in his "genealogy of digital visionaries" in The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine.

The Fifth Dimension

Web developers have been expressing their excitement about HTML 5 for a while now and the possibility of creating interactive content easily without proprietary programs like Flash. Now the New York Times warns that this "New Web Code Draws Concern Over Privacy Risks" in a story that is now among its most e-mailed.

Most Web users are familiar with so-called cookies, which make it possible, for example, to log on to Web sites without having to retype user names and passwords, or to keep track of items placed in virtual shopping carts before they are bought.

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data. That could include a user’s location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

The new Web language “gives trackers one more bucket to put tracking information into,” said Hakon Wium Lie, the chief technology officer at Opera, a browser company.

Or as Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum in California, said: “HTML 5 opens Pandora’s box of tracking in the Internet.

It explains that the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C is conducting workshops on the issue, but offers little substantive on the policy front. Instead much of the story was devoted to "Everycookie" creator Samy Kamkar rather than to the complexities of technical specifications and the group deliberations of the W3C. Again, the lone hacker seems to make a better story.

Game Day

Today, Google featured an homage to the classic videogame arcade game Pac-Man and celebrated its thirtieth birthday today with a simulator available from its main search engine portal.

A news story called "Pac Man 30th Anniversary: Meet the Gurus Behind Insert Coin" features self-congratulation from the emulators designers, but I personally found game play sluggish and the cramped vertical space unpleasant.




It's noteworthy, however, that the game is not created in Flash, unlike many similar online games. As The Guardian points out "as Apple, Google and Adobe war with each other over the importance of Adobe's Flash system," it is interesting to note that "the doodle is written entirely in HTML, CSS and Javascript - Flash isn't required. That means it works on iPhones too..." This assertion was qualified with a later note that noted that "the sound is in Flash - so that doesn't work on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad."

Ethics Test

In the Virtualpolitik book I write quite a bit about the genre of online tutorials and the not-so-subtle messages that they send to their workers about labor, time clocks, and the meaning of compliance. As an example of digital rhetoric, in the past I have argued that they could foster counterproductive behaviors like cheating and provide a poor delivery method for important information about subjects like sexual harassment and office ethics. This year I was pleasantly surprised when I went to the UC Learning Center and saw that they had given up on goofy cartoons or stock photos and distracting clock dials and instead focused on a more productive (although not terribly sophisticated form) of what Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric."

My Funny Valentine

What to say about the official GOP Valentine to send out to friends, loved ones, and political cronies? Commentary from Bag News Notes is here.

Roll-Over Beethoven

Rollovers and sliders that show women both with and without makeup represent a special case for online interactivity. Whether it is Sarah Palin or a model in the New York Times, computer users can virtually undress them.

With a Finger on the Button

When I think of "the button" singular, I tend to think of a launch device for a nuclear missile, but game designers are undertaking the one-button challenge this year for the upcoming GDC, as the Kokoromi Collective explains.

Gestural controls, multi-touch surfaces, musical instruments, voice recognition—even brain control. Games are moving beyond the iconic hand-held controller, and into the future. But is the secret to good games found in high-tech interfaces? Kokoromi proposes that game developers can still find beauty in absolute simplicity. On March 10th, Gamma 4 will unveil brand-new games that use JUST ONE BUTTON.

Gamma 4 invites software developers to push the limits of gameplay with a single input. Game developers, media, and industry luminaries from around the world, will join the general public to view and play the Gamma 4 games at at a party that bridges the end of the Independent Games Summit and the start of the main GDC. Following the event, all the games will be playable in a dedicated booth on the GDC Expo floor. Game creators whose games are selected for presentation at Gamma 4 will also be awarded free GDC All-Access passes.

THE RULES

* Use a single button as your player input, in a unique or experimental way. Be creative.
* The game must be pick up and play.
* The gameplay cannot rely on audio information, since there will not be audio output provided during the event. Non-essential audio is permitted.
* Your game can support any number of players up to 4.
* The game cannot rely on an internet or LAN connection (there will not be connectivity provided during the event).
* The total gameplay session must be no longer than 5 minutes, including any intros, instructions, or credits.
* The official controller is the Xbox360 controller. Player input must be assigned identically to the A,B,X, and Y buttons, and can use only the standard functionality (press, tap, hold, etc) of that button type (no triggers, bumpers, directional sticks, etc).
* Games running either on Windows or MacOSX are accepted.
* The maximum game resolution is 1024×768.
* The submission deadline is Jan 31, 11:59pm pacific time. Submission instructions to follow in mid January.

Professor Prose

I've written about the UC System-Wide online sexual harassment tutorial several times before, first in this blog and then in the Virtualpolitik book, as an example of what Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric." Gone are the cartoon characters of the earliest iteration, although characters in the scenarios continue to have silly names to go along with their departmental or institutional identities. The emphasis in the version of the tutorial that I took this week emphasized the case law involving sexual harassment with more ____ v. _____ cases summarized than opportunities for role playing. Links on the tutorial often went to PDF files of policy statements from the University of California.

The programming of the actual software showed little progress four years hence. Pages were slow loading, curly quotes were rendered as nonsense, and icons sometimes automatically downloaded into one's image editing software. As if that weren't enough those who completed their certificate and wanted to check that the system had registered it online might accidentally restart the tutorial from the very beginning and thus seem to cancel their scores.

ROTFL Rehab

Other news outlets have been covering institutional responses from public health organizations about so-called "Internet addiction" as clinics for those who supposedly suffer from the disorder are now being treated in the United States as well as abroad. Now TIME magazine has joined in with a news item called "A New Recovery Center for the Woes of Warcraft." Of course, like many feminists, I am skeptical of systems of knowledge that essentialize or biologize cultural phenomena, although I will grant that I have certainly known people with pre-existing obsessive tendencies who have developed pathological relationships of attraction to their online lives that may be exacerbated by our always-on culture.

What I found strange about the center is its emphasis on rural rehab in which city dwellers get unplugged in order to get better.

He is given a regular schedule, with outdoor activities (including carpentry projects or caring for chickens and goats) plotted throughout the day, plus chores and meals. Rae says the program is designed to mimic what life will be like once patients return home — downtime is built into the routine, so people can learn to cope with boredom.

How can "what life will be like once patients return home" involve functioning without computational media, unless the therapists plan to send their charges home in a time machine? I also think it is worth noting that therapy sessions literally take place inside a treehouse, given how the metaphor of the "creepy treehouse" has been applied to so many digital learning efforts.

To see the digital rhetoric of the ReStart center for Internet addiction, you should go -- where else -- to the Internet to check out their online appeals.

Side Winder

One of the tech columnists at rival Yahoo is expressing skepticism about the new Google SideWiki feature, which allows users to comment on any webpage, even if the site owner has blocked or has disallowed comments.

Of course, it also isn't the first web annotation system, as the writer observes:

I remember vividly a similar plan from a company (the name of which is now lost to the web) that let users leave Post-It style notes on any web page they visited, a sort of digital graffiti that let them tag pages, telling the proprietor and others exactly what they thought of the content.

It wasn't a hit. At the time -- circa 2000 -- the software faced an immense backlash from observers who felt that the software was devaluing the appearance of the web (at best) and infringed on other people's copyrights (at worst). Some felt it was the equivalent of picketing in front of a retail store.

For those who value the civility engendered by moderated comments, this sanction of what could be treated as a kind of web graffiti certainly still raises concerns. As a veteran of "stickie" services like Diigo, I will grant that I prefer the aesthetic of the sidebar's framing mechanism to cluttered adhesions on the content itself, but I'm not sure that DesignMeme is right to celebrate just yet.

Note, however, that RISD's dean John Maeda has used SideWiki and is featured in the promo video above.

TechCrunch provides more history of the idea here.

Captcha or Gotcha

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on unusual collaborations being formed around so called "captcha" technologies that can do double duty by aiming to screen out non-human spambots while also on capitalizing on free labor from human agents. "Google Says Gotcha to ReCaptcha, the Word-Puzzle Company"explains how reCAPTCHA started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. (The acronym means Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.) Now Google has purchased the company, presumably for use in its massive book digitization effort, so that those who authenticate their Google blog comments and other social media postings will also be aiding in correcting the character recognition capacities of digital scanning technologies. Of course, using free labor in service of two different sides of a corporate business plan may make sense for the company's bottom line, but what it means for what Siva Vaidhyanathan has called "The Googlization of Everything" should be the question the Chronicle is asking. Another aspect of the story that seems to be missing is the credit that reCAPTCHA gives to the open source community by acknowledging that "reCAPTCHA is mostly powered by open source software" and offering thanks to "all open source developers for creating tools that help in developing applications such as ours."

At the Sound of the Tone

This voicemail message supposedly composed for Maroochydore State High School has already been revealed to be a hoax, but it offers an interesting commentary on how automation could serve as a social corrective and how the interactivity of parental involvement is actually constrained on both sides.

Thanks to Michael Thomas for the link.

About Internet Addiction

"A Self-Confessed Addict" depicts the grim life of failed college student Adam Brown who blames addiction to the MMO World of Warcraft for his struggles with campus life. This item on "Internet addiction" from the PBS show Frontline and its special series digital_nation shows a stereotypical pasty-faced low affect gamer with a laptop and a shelf of action figures. Henry Jenkins presents the counterargument at "Is It Really an Addiction?" in which he argues that depression or obsessive compulsive behavior is at the root of the social dysfunction that is being described as an addiction to the content and practices associated with new media.

In general the show is a disappointment to those who go to PBS expecting to learn something. It panders largely to pre-conceptions: items on teen exhibitionism, military serious games, virtual reality and avatars, and digital learning could as easily come from a local news show relying on B-roll from the PR pile. There are a few surprises, like the parents who decided to support their daughter in her goth modeling after having forced her to delete all her photographs earlier, but the show generally doesn't force people to rethink how they are participating by focusing on exotic others and ignoring the potential for serious political, social, and civic change.

Jenkins also appears in a segment on "Mom Vs. The Computer" that is designed to educate parents about the need to do more than prohibit their children's cultivation of online lives and that echoes many aspects of my Ten Principles for the Digital Family. During my trip to Holland I did find myself immersed in a conversation with two mothers of graduating high school seniors who felt that computer game play was interfering with their relationship with their sons. I made my arguments about trying to play games themselves, about using the systems and rules of games as conversation-starters to hear them out about their attitudes about fairness, cheating, contracts, collaboration, competition, obediance, etc., and to defer the disapproval of violence that causes so many teens not to listen.

Thanks to Ren Reynolds for the link.

Back to Africa

Virtualpolitik friend Christopher Soghoian passes along the Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator.

As someone who has written extensively about web generators as a form of political satire, both in my book and in this article, this provides a great comment about the ease of altering documents in the digital age.

For Those Who Flu Across the British Isles

As the British government tries to contain the current outbreak of swine flu, they are encouraging citizens to take part in an interactive website that allows potential patients to assess their symptoms and even arrange to pick up anti-viral drugs that the automated system deems necessary. More than a mere chatbot, the official Flu Survey from the government also offers a number of interesting information graphics, which include maps of potential areas of infection and graphs of patterns of infection. Of course, with the rules of the system this easy to deduce, it wouldn't take much for unscrupulous Britons to lie on the online forms in order to get medication that wasn't needed for stockpiling purposes, but health officials apparently think the risk of an escalating pandemic is far greater.

If Life Gives You Tomatoes . . .

Moveon.org has been encouraging its adherents to take part in The Great AIG Tomato Toss, where they can lob virtual versions of a splattery fruit and/or vegetable at the portals of the corporate insurance giant that has received multiple bail-outs from the taxpayers. Much like the many shoe-throwing online games that appeared after the shoes were hurled at George W. Bush by an enraged Iraqi journalist, this game encourages political opponents to vent their outrage harmlessly. I've written about the forms of political satire sanctioned by what I call the Internet's "theatres of cruelty" in the Virtualpolitik book. Such an ineffectual form of political resistance may give citizens some of the satisfactions of pseudo-interactivity, but without even a virtual inbox these games seem to have little hope of influencing policy.

Turning Cranks and Spinning Wheels

This afternoon I visited the current exhibit called Identity: an Exhibition of You at the California Science Center. As someone who first encountered the museum exhibitions of information representation pioneers Charles and Ray Eames at the old science museum on the same site, I am particularly attentive to how viewer interaction in the museum space is staged by their successors. I was struck by the fact that the exhibition wanted to limit interaction with a keyboard, even when it would be the input device that a viewer would naturally associate with the computer display monitor that was attached to the interface. In one case, in a module about serotonin and stress, the visitor was encouraged to turn a metal crank to stimulate elevated workplace pressure for time on task; in another, a metal wheel was supposed to cue the film of a gestating fetus.