Code Puce

Having written about the rhetoric of various parodies of the Homeland Security threat assessment color spectrum, I had to say something about this the Bad Actor Alert. It is also worth noting that the threat level itself, which was once prominently placed on so many government websites, has now been relegated below "traveler's redress" and "career opportunities" for the bureau.

Twitter Quake

A local radio broadcast, "Caltech earthquake rumor shakes Twittersphere," shows how a rumor that "Caltech was sending employees and students home because seismologists were predicting a major earthquake was about to hit the Southland" could by magnified by dissemination on the popular social network site Facebook. Commentators pointed out that there were two significant factors to the story: 1) the fact that many local Twitter and Facebook users weren't exposed to the story might expose the weaknesses of these distributed platforms as a means for risk communication and 2) the fact that Internet fact-checking practices are as central to user behavior as uncritical message forwarding might indicate that the Internet may be as important for checking rumor as for spreading it.

The Ministry of Distraction

Watching ads on television, at first I thought that I must have somehow misheard the pitch for the government website Distraction.gov. Although the Obama administration has been associated with a plethora of new domain names not related to government agencies, they have mostly had positive connotations that support the image of the authority of the state like AStrongMiddleClass.gov or MakingHomeAffordable.gov.

Now Distraction.gov offers official warnings against vehicular multitasking with ubiquitous communication technologies complete with a PSA against talking and texting while driving.

Update: Ironically, the New York Times points out in this article that government employees like paramedics or police officers are some of the worst offenders when it comes to using high-tech gadgets as they drive.

Clear and Present Danger

An interesting post from Ian Bogost that questions some of the assumptions of the information aesthetics crowd. Since this is one of the ten trends that I've been following in digital humanities initiatives, I'll certainly be thinking about it as I revise the piece for the LEA almanac.

Political Spooktacle

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. It comes the day after my birthday, so as a child my birthday parties always had ghoulish themes, and as a punk rock teenager celebrating Halloween was associated with the best of the Los Angeles music scene, West Hollywood costume contests, and festivities for Dia de los Muertos.

But, thanks to the Christian right, it would be difficult to tell that the nation was celebrating Halloween from government websites. Even though the Obamas have two Trick or Treat aged youngsters, you wouldn't know it from the White House website.

There were a few exceptions, however. The Library of Congress could acknowledge the holiday as part of American folklore. Other government agencies used the scare tactics of the holiday as an opportunity for risk communication. The Centers for Disease Control has put out some Halloween Safety Tips on its website, and you can even send out seasonal e-cards about Halloween heath with the Halloween Germ Monster. The Consumer Protect Safety Commission has some information about Halloween Safety as well.

Only the NASA website seem to revel in the subversiveness of the holiday and its association with lunar beauty and interplanetary travel. Visitors to their website can enjoy Spooky Space Sounds as well.

Slumber Land

As "Experts Puzzle over How Flight Overshot Airport" in the case of the Northwest flight to Minneapolis that lost contact with airport traffic controllers after Denver and traveled one hundred fifty miles past its destination before communication was resumed in Wisconsin. Many believe that the pilots fell asleep, and from IT safety expert Markku Häkkinen, who has done research on auditory warning systems in airplanes, I learned that having pilots nod off is more common than many travelers would like to believe.

In a posting called "Siren's Song," I described some of Häkkinen's work, but over dinner at the ISCRAM conference I learned that he has also compiled studies about sound systems for waking up pilots. The challenge for companies like Alertness Solutions, of course, is how to create a wake-up signal that encourages alertness rather than sense-overwhelming confusion. And, obviously, an alarm loud enough to be heard in the cabin might panic passengers. Besides, as Häkkinen points out, sometimes we actually tune out alarms in the higher volume ranges. Apparently, according to Häkkinen, some researchers are experimenting with having the voice of a loved one be programmed into the cockpit, should a wake-up call be needed.

Update: CNN reports that the "stray jet's pilots were on laptops," which may intensify current debates about balancing responsibilities to passengers with access to ubiquitous computing technologies in a complex attention economy that has already been at issue in train and metro transportation. Now the New York Times says that an impromptu tutorial about the scheduling system being implemented after the Northwest-Delta merger on a laptop was to blame.

Signs and Design

Virtualpolitik friend Kurt Anderson has put together an online multimedia essay for the New York Times called "Better Signs of Trouble" that deals with one of my favorite topics in the Virtualpolitik book: the Homeland Security threat alert system. As a self-confessed "data nerd" Anderson asks several designers to come up with a better system. Many graphic artists responded with light-hearted witticism, but they still acknowledged that exploiting the capacities of mobile devices might be important, especially in a text message and smart phone world. Anderson's favorites, however, got at the nature of how risk itself is communicated to argue that risk should either be visualized as a graph with many data points or seen as a binary system with only caution and alert settings.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

I wasn't on campus for today's campus shooter scare that was captured in exchanges on Twitter that included UC Irvine's own Twitter stream and publicized quite efficiently to those with mobile devices via the campus's ZotAlert system, which sends notices to its 20,000 subscribers about potential on-campus threats. You can see some of the Twitter messages here.

As the Orange County Register reports in "Weapon report at UCI turns out to be a false alarm" the university sent a "text message to students warning of man dressed in camouflage, possibly carrying rifle" who turned out to be a recreational player of mock combat games, much like laser tag or paintball gun enthusiasts. The newspaper also reported about how Twitter caused the news to spread more rapidly. The campus also issued a situation update, although many complained that the main university website went down during the crisis.

Update: A message from the Chancellor points out that the incident led to a thousand new subscribers signing up for the ZotAlert system.

See this blog posting from pilgrimsteps for more about the "twexperiment."

Message about a Bottle

This week I received the following e-mail that contains a number of compelling appeals to fear and to authority and his circulated virally for a few years through people's inboxes.

from Johns-Hopkins Medical Center

Bottled water in your car is very dangerous! On the Ellen show, Sheryl Crow said this is what caused her breast cancer. It has been identified as the most common cause of the high levels of dioxin in breast cancer tissue.

Sheryl Crow's oncologist told her: women should not drink bottled water that has been left in a car. The heat reacts with the chemicals in the plastic of the bottle which releases dioxin into the water. Dioxin is a toxin increasingly found in breast cancer tissue. So please be careful and do not drink bottled water that has been l left in a car. Pass this on to all the women in your life

This information is the kind we need to know that just might save us! Use a stainless steel canteen or a glass bottle instead of plastic!

LET EVERYONE WHO HAS A WIFE / GIRLFRIEND / DAUGHTER KNOW PLEASE!

This information is also being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
No plastic containers in microwave.
No water bottles in freezer
No plastic wrap in microwave.

A dioxin chemical causes cancer, especially breast cancer.

Dioxins are highly poisonous to the cells of our bodies. Don't freeze your plastic bottles with water in them as this releases dioxins from the plastic. Recently, Edward Fujimoto, Wellness Program Manager at Castle Hospital , was on a TV program to explain this health hazard. He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us. He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave using plastic containers... This especially applies to foods that contain fat. He said that the combination of fat, high heat, and plastic releases dioxin into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body... Instead, he recommends using glass, such as Corning Ware, Pyrex or ceramic containers for heating food.. You get the same results, only without the dioxin. So such things as TV dinners, instant ramen and soups, etc., should be removed from the container and heated in something else. Paper isn't bad but you don't know what is in the paper. It's just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc.

He reminded us that a while ago some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons...

Also, he pointed out that plastic wrap, such as Saran wrap, is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be cooked in the microwave. As the food is nuked, the high heat causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food. Cover food with a paper towel instead..

This is an article that should be sent To anyone important in Your life!

Snopes.com characterizes it as a mixture of the true and false, while About.com's urban legends dismisses it as simply false. What I find interesting is how it uses colloquial language and links to both celebrity culture and established institutions of medical expertise to make its argument.

Spreading Like the Plague

In the same month, USA Today also covered the possible connection between containing outbreaks of disease (or at least the panics about them) and microblogging in an item on "Pandemics in the age of Twitter," which draws two morals from the story of how the CDC is using updates on social networks.

- The brash new world of social networking has changed the government's challenges during threatened pandemics. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and similar sites can be powerful connectors for the good, but they can also unleash weapons of mass misinformation. Public relations professionals say government and business communications plans carefully constructed during the avian flu threat in 2005-2006 were obsolete when this latest pandemic threat arrived.

"It is hard to believe, but three years made a world of difference in communications," said Bill Pendergast, a senior vice president at public relations giant Fleishman-Hillard.

During a Tuesday online webinar on pandemic communications, Pendergast added, "If the Obama presidential campaign was the first Web 2.0 campaign, this may be the first Web 2.0 global health issue."

- Second, even as faith in government's ability to get it right has been shaken (Hurricane Katrina, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) many still turn to government for dependable information. The CDC's performance so far is likely to boost confidence in the government's ability to handle pandemics, and its use of social networks has been a big part of its strategy.

However, the reporter also passes on concern about how the niche audiences and rapid-fire communication styles of Twitter can magnify misinformation about methods of transmission.

Health crisis communications expert Mark Senak said the CDC "exhibited a good deal of savvy in employing digital media during the crisis."

Senak, a senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard who was a top communications consultant during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, praised the CDC's updates on Twitter, although he said the CDC could have posted more factual videos on YouTube.

Speaking during Fleishman-Hillard's webinar, Senak said he was "surprised not only by the level of misinformation" on Twitter, but was "astonished at the sheer volume of people who were talking about whether or not they should eat pork."

He said that made him realize that communicators must recalibrate from broadcasting to "nichecasting."

Intentionally or not, Senak described the pandemic-related challenges facing communicators as the same ones facing health care professionals. The social networks are a new and viral strain of an old condition, one with the ability to jump from one person's online network to another's with the click of a mouse, and to expand exponentially as it is transmitted.

"We are talking about segmented messages that go to a particular node that then pass it along," Senak said. "If there is one thing that has changed since 2006, it is the speed of information along these nodes."

I have been following the staccato rhythm of the Twitter feed for CDC Emergency for a while, which not only tracks the number of cases, states affected, and websites with advice for the current flu outbreak (with hashtags for both #swineflu and #h1n1) but also gives tips for other kinds of public health risks, such as tornadoes or carbon monoxide poisoning.

Nothing Says National Security Like the Muppets

I've written before about the use of branded cartoon characters on government websites and the ways that this rhetorical strategy shortchanges the information literacy of our children. Perhaps the most ludicrous use of online dumbing down has taken place at the Ready.gov kids website produced by the Department of Homeland Security, which made the symbol of fun-filled family safety a pride of mountain lions. (This is an odd choice to Southern Californians who know that mountain lions in the foothills will sometimes snack on a particularly tasty mountain biker and that, since they are lion-sized at all, these encounters can be genuinely terrifying.

Just when I thought that they couldn't make the DHS site for children any worse or any more remote from the school reports that are more likely to bring them to a government website, they showed me that vapid anthropomorphic entertainments were only the beginning. I was raised on Sesame Street, as were my kids, but I feel that the Sesame Street-themed Let's Get Ready is particularly inappropriate in pushing commercial content on a government website by littering the page with trademark legalese and copyright symbols. Children who follow the link to the main site are treated to a lengthy FBI warning on the very first embedded video against copying what would normally be information about public safety in the public domain.

Cool Under Pressure

Government websites now provide more multimedia resources, although they also continue to provide traditional print reports that document incidents, disasters, new policies, publications from fact-finding committee, and other bureaucratic forms of public rhetoric. First the Coat Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board released video of the dramatic footage of the recent plane landing in the Hudson River without fatalities. Now the FAA has released the audio files that record the calm, businesslike exchanges that the pilot carried on with aircraft controller even as a deadly disaster loomed. The neutrality of the voice that frames the file and authenticates the contents is also an example of the affect-free professional decorum associated with aviation and its public rhetoric.

Big Trouble in Little Cyberspace

I have a colleague currently suffering with a case of "PPP," otherwise known as the "penis posting problem," which occasionally afflicts those who use wikis as a course management tool, when students abuse their login privileges to display phallic images that show that the teacher's authority is being tested. It has even happened to critical luminaries in digital scholarship, such as Alan Liu, who once had an outbreak of PPP related to an animated gif of a looping male crotch that zoomed through its infinite pelvic regress from a link on a class wiki page.

Since most students regard the prospect of their futures carefully, sometimes excessively so, this kind of juvenile territory marking by students who challenge an institution's authority is probably the least of the potential problems raised by calls for electronic portfolios, where students have the ability to archive work from their college experience and create a public profile for potential employers and admissions officers at graduate and professional schools.

Although organizations like the Conference on College Composition and Communication have attempted to articulate common principles and practices for using portfolios in the context of writing instruction and philanthropic organizations promoting "integrative learning," such as the Carnegie Foundation, would like to see cumulative approaches in education given more stature, students, faculty, administrators, corporate employers, educational policy experts, privacy advocates, and politicians concerned with institutional accountability may all have different ideas about what an ideal electronic portfolio for a college student should be.

E-portfolio expert Kathleen Yancey participated in a colloquy called "A Rose is (not) a Rose is (not) a Rose: Diversity in Electronic Portfolio Aims, Models, and Outcomes" and a series of meetings at U.C. Irvine today. She argued that stakeholders often have very differing agendas for why they would want to see work digitally archived, and far too often they leave out opportunities for the author to provide critical reflection and the social component of peer feedback on the process.

At U.C. Irvine, faculty and staff are considering the K-20 Minnesota model, after the state signed an agreement with developers there. I plan to take part in one of the pilot programs this year with the participation of students who have won Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program prizes in the freshman year. (See here and here for past winners.)

To demonstrate the range of possible genres, she provided four models to stimulate discussion among the working group: 1) Career Portfolio: Math, 2) English Education Program Portfolio, 3) Self-Designed Major: Bio, Psych, Health and Illness, and 4) LSU Communication Certificate Portfolio: Architecture. She noted that a range of purposes could be served depending on the central definition emphasized among collection, selection, reflection, projection, development, diversity, communication, and evaluation.

She also argued that it was important to understand the Realpolitik of university culture and accept that some merely want a data collection system. She encouraged realism about the importance of branding in these kinds of efforts as well. And she tried to break stereotypes that students were necessarily visual learners, even though she considered concept mapping important, particularly if students were to represent how their different learning experiences fit together and design a web navigation system that reproduces those linkages.

Perhaps some of her most interesting observations about the topic had to do with how such portfolios function in medical education in conjunction with what is called "critical incident theory," a term that originated in aviation when stakeholders reinvented the genre of the traditional accident report. The field of risk communication often gets little attention from those who think about how discourse functions in the academy, but in real world settings collective deliberation about preventability and what is constituted as normal can be extremely important in everything from finance to foreign policy.

Happy Landing

The website of the U.S. Coast Guard is rarely of much interest to the public, but the dramatic landing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River is drawing visitors to the site to see video that shows the actual moment in which the plane went into the drink. Unlike other visual materials posted on the website, such as this image of a missing-at-sea search pattern below, the arresting airplane images have also been republished on the websites of several news organizations, including the New York Times.
The Times has also been soliciting photos from its own readers, which are displayed here, and is apparently using the same strategy to document the inauguration next week.

Searches on the website Flickr for images of the improvised landing show a range of content relevant to the event, from professional photographers intending to peddle their wares to spontaneous snaps shot by amateurs from the ferries who came to rescue the passengers on the wings of the plane and emergency rafts.

Although he may not be a user of social network sites himself, Captain C. B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who is also part of Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, already has many Facebook friends expressing their admiration for his piloting skills, which resulted in not a single death from the accident.

Shaken Not Stirred

Yesterday, at 10AM, millions of Southern Californians, including my two children, participated in The Great Southern California ShakeOut, a truly massively multiplayer disaster simulation in which the puppet masters were geologists at the USGS and regional emergency response planners. (The USGS created a number of videos of aerial view simulations showing the effects of a 7.8 earthquake in various local communities. To those with a YouTube attention span, they don't look very scary at first, but just wait until about seventy seconds in.) The ShakeOut website also solicits user-generated content from participants, including photos and stories from the events of the day. Although the official site has yet to post this content, ShakeOut photos are already turning up in places like Flickr. The ShakeOut Site is also promoting After Shock, a "massively collaborative earthquake simulation," and an online serious game, Beat the Quake.

In Beat the Quake, the player decides how to secure over a dozen household objects by choosing from a multiple choice menu. Once all the decisions are made the room animates with movement and object-smashing chaos takes over. (I aimed for a score of zero for maximum comic effect.) In the paper "The Birth of the Virtual Clinic," I argue that such computer-only games that represent crises in public health or safety serve a rhetorical purpose that involves the dissemination of expert knowledge without engaging in the kind of community role-playing activities that had shaped the training of a previous generation of emergency first responders. In many ways, the Great ShakeOut de-emphasized representing the emergency on the screen or in 3-D virtual space, although -- like many of the alternate reality games praised by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture for their participatory ethos -- computational technologies were essential for coordinating activities.

Am I Flu?

The New York Times reports in "Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread" that the company's flu trends website indicates that search behavior is often an indicator of outbreaks of disease.

What Me Worry?

As an example of risk communication, this University of California website about the Governor's Executive Order does not necessarily do the work of allaying the fears of its potential audience of state employees, who may be worrying about the fact that "Governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order implementing a number of measures to reduce the state’s cash obligations until a state budget is approved," which include "the reduction of state employees’ salaries to the federal minimum wage and the suspension of state contracts." Those who work for the state with mortgage payments, insurance premiums, and utility bills due at the beginning of the month, may not take much comfort in the mass e-mails from university administrators that are posted to the site. The vagaries of official prose generally are inappropriate for stakeholders who want definite information and step-by-step advice. Moreover, uncertainties included in messages that say things like "they do not expect the majority of current salaries to be affected by the governor’s order" probably make rhetorical matters worse.

Why Is the Government Website Always the Last to Know?

USAMRIID is facing a major scandal after the FBI finally seems to have located a likely culprit in the anthrax attacks of 2001 that killed five people. Court documents from the Department of Justice focus on suspect Bruce Ivins with little mention of the previous misidentification of Steven Hatfill as a likely perpetrator.

Yet the newsroom still says nothing about its own employees' involvement in the case. Instead, the site highlights a promotional film with bad digital effects that emphasize projections of the imagery on floating screens and hovering rectangular solids.

Safety First

Variations of this "Safety at Work" PowerPoint have been widely disseminated via e-mail. By the time it reached my inbox this week, it had been translated into an English-French bilingual edition that featured seventeen places of seemingly "award-winning" photographs of supposedly humorously dangerous workplace practices shot around the world that depicted a variety of trades.

Electronic office humor may seem a relatively minor genre in a serious study of digital rhetoric, but it is an important part of the social media practices of many in the labor/management dynamic in play around the world. Those studying the e-mail exchanges around the crash of the space shuttle Columbia even had to include some of this kind of office humor in their official report.

The Gory Details

Although official "Safety Alert" mass e-mails from the University of California used to be brief and cryptic compositions with very little information about the details of crimes on campus, these missives now use a different rhetoric that presents complex narratives of the events that occurred, complete with times, places, persons, and even emotional affects, as this official sample demonstrates.

On Thursday, May 29, 2008, a female UCI student was waiting out in front of Langson Library late in the afternoon when she was approached by a young man. He introduced himself as "Danny", a student from another (unknown) school. Danny and the UCI student talked in front of Langson Library for two hours. Danny then suggested they visit the Anteater Pub to eat or drink and they walked over to the Pub at 7:30pm.

While at the Anteater Pub, they continued talking and consumed several beers each (no food). At 9:30pm, the female student was tired and told Danny she had to go home; Danny offered her a ride and she accepted. They walked to Danny's car in Parking Lot #1. Danny's car is only described as silver in color (no further description). Danny drove the female student out of Parking Lot #1 and made a hasty turn into Parking Lot 3-A (adjacent to the Merage School of Business and across from the Social Science Parking Structure). The parking lot was empty. The female objected and asked why he had turned into the empty parking lot; Danny told the victim he wanted to talk some more.

Once parked in Lot 3-A, the student and Danny talked for another hour or so. Danny then unzipped the victim's jeans and reached in, touching her pubic area several times; no penetration occurred. The victim verbally resisted and Danny stopped. Danny then put his hand into the victim's shirt, grabbing her breasts. Fearing for her safety, the victim fled the silver car and ran away toward Langson Library at 11pm. Danny started following the victim on foot for 100 yards, calling to her to stop; Danny returned to in his car and left the area. The victim made good her escape and arrived at Langson Library.

The victim was upset over the incident, and did not immediately seek police assistance. She sat outside Langson Library for two hours before being spotted by others who notified police at 1am. The victim provided the below suspect description; she was not injured.

Although I support providing these more elaborated narratives of alleged sexual assaults, in the interest of feminist consciousness-raising as well as law enforcement, I also worry that the novelistic level of detail in this version may encourage Internet "spoilers" to be skeptical of the account and indulge in victim-blaming, so that information excess spurs disputing the authority of a given source almost as much as information paucity can.