"When I Was One, I Learned to Smell for Explosives"

This blog began six years ago, when it was dedicated to analyzing the rhetoric of e-government, e-learning, and e-business and the inherent contradictions between digital regulation and digital content-creation from which institutional public relations must suffer. The daily stories here eventually formed the material for a scholarly monograph and then contributed to the creation of another book that is in process. But in the last several months the coverage has been much more sporadic, as its once diligent author adjusted to a new post directing the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College in UC San Diego and cranked out a number of articles more obviously valuable to her c.v.

However, since the very first postings of Virtualpolitik were devoted to mocking the awfulness of government websites under the Bush administration, it only seems appropriate to come out of hiatus by giving some column space to the stunning news that the CIA has a revamped official website that includes a YouTube channel and a Flickr stream. Over the years, the CIA's website has been a particularly spectacular example of good reasons for misgivings about the virtual state, like many secret agencies forced by the Internet to put forward a public face. It began with a fun-filled offering of virtual paper dolls to get tykes excited about both espionage and dress-up. Soon it featured a loveable mascot, Ginger the adorable blue cartoon bear.

In the past the CIA website was so consistently terrible that it won one of my coveted Foley awards in 2006, the "prizes" that I give for the worst examples of official online communication every year. Although it was spared such recognition in 2007, 2008, and 2009, it continued to be a regular runner-up in my mind.

Now that it is 2011, the CIA's revamped version certainly seems to merit a full return to the Foley hall of fame, since it manages to ignore almost every one of my "12 Don'ts."

Sure, you can find CIA Factbooks and Freedom of Information Act documents if you browse the site's "library," but the navigation largely directs citizens to whitewashed institutional advertising rather than serious resources for civic research.

The site includes a dreary Flickr stream of all the bad official photo ops on the director's calendar. Particularly dismal is the CIA YouTube video embedded below, which stars "Bradley" the bomb-sniffing dog, who is voiced by a perky, high-pitched voice actress imitating a pre-pubescent girl. This YouTube canine obviously cast in an attempt to get the views normally devoted to pet antics tells an incoherent version of his life story, which starts with a rushed mention of being raised by Puppies Behind Bars, before launching into an industrial tour of the Langley facility.



Thanks to Jeff Brazil for the link.

Of Whistle-Blowers and Figureheads

This week the face of Mark Zuckerberg is beginning to grace newsstands on the TIME cover for the 2010 Person of the Year. Yet many have questioned the choice of someone with relatively little policy influence, even if the supporting article describes Zuckerberg being visited by FBI chief Mueller in his Silicon Valley offices.

In particular, supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julia Assange are deluging the news magazine's website with complaints that their hero (or anti-hero), the infamous high-profile Australian-born whistle-blower known for leaking diplomatic cables from the U.S. government, is being snubbed by the mainstream press.

To TIME's credit, they did grant Assange the honor of being a chief "runner-up" to Zuckerberg's coverboy status. However, in the article that acknowledges Assange's influence, the introductory rhetoric is striking.

On Dec. 9, 2006, an unsolicited e-mail arrived for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower of Vietnam War renown. The return address said only "WikiLeaks," and the signature at bottom, "WL." In the orotund prose of a manifesto, the message invited Ellsberg to become the public face of a project "to place a new star in the firmament of man." Ellsberg knew nothing of the group, which had yet to make its debut. Nor had he heard of its leader, a then 35-year-old Australian named Julian Assange, best known in his own circles as a teenage hacker turned "cypherpunk" — a prolific coder with visions of technology as a tool for political change.

The audacity of the e-mail kept Ellsberg reading. WikiLeaks aimed at nothing less than the decline and fall of oppression by organized exposure of its secrets. "Governance by conspiracy and fear," the author wrote, depended on concealment. "We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention." So fanciful did the proposal appear that Ellsberg saw only two ways to read it, he told TIME: as either "a little ploy by the CIA or NSA to draw in leaks" or "a very naive venture to think that they can really get away with it." Ellsberg made no reply.

The reader of TIME meets Assange as a stealthy and anonymous e-mail writer meriting some screen attention but no reply. In contrast, Zuckerberg is introduced as a corporate CEO leading a large meeting. In the Zuckerberg article we are told that his success and that of his company Facebook represents the fact that both the Sixties and the anonymous and subversive hacker ethic that supposedly grew out of that decade are over and that Internet culture has moved on to embrace bourgeois values and corporate consumerism. In contrast, the Assange piece begins with a quintessential Vietnam-era whistle-blower and his introduction to his cyberpunk hacker successor.

Not the least of Assange's achievements is a technological one. WikiLeaks brought to life what one of its early advisers described as "a recurring idea in hacker culture — a digital safe haven that is anonymous, massively collaborative and highly resistant to attack or penetration by intelligence services." Redundant hardware and Web servers span international borders. Participants in its design say WikiLeaks has made novel use of an alphabet soup of existing geek tools, such as mutually anonymous file sharing, decoy ciphering to flood eavesdroppers with empty data, and encryption of files in transit and in storage.

Although Assange and WikiLeaks are all over the newspapers, not a lot has been printed about WikiLeaks in the academic literature yet, since publishing cycles at university presses often lag far behind current events. I wrote about WikiLeaks in the chapter on whistle-blowers in the Virtualpolitik book, and for a long time since then I have argued that the dialectic between the disembodied evidence of a site like WikiLeaks and the embodied testimony of the eyewitness, epitomized by Witness, both function in Internet discourses about human rights, global justice, and civil society in the transnational domains of cyberspace.

Other websites obscure the ethos of the whistle-blower to protect the anonymity of sources that provide whistle-blowing documents and emphasize collective intelligence over individual credibility. However, the multiple authorship structure that such sites often deploy poses risks in representing a number of personal agendas and rhetorical motivations simultaneously. Furthermore, online disclosure of some kinds of whistleblowing documents—such as the contents of secret police files from the Stasi in the former East Germany—is not considered to be feasible because of significant privacy concerns about disclosure; victims or unrelated parties could have highly confidential personal information revealed on the Internet.

For example, the website Wikileaks was temporarily closed down by a judge’s order after it published records that seemed to indicate that a bank in the Cayman Islands was involved in possible tax evasion and money laundering. A representative from the bank complained to the news media of possible “harm from the widespread dissemination of private and confidential banking information, including account numbers, personal identification numbers, account transactions and history, and account balances,” which could cause “identity theft and electronic theft of account balances” after a “disgruntled employee” posted the documents.35 However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was ultimately successful in a legal challenge to the judge’s shutdown of the entire site via the internet service provider that was hosting the Wikileaks.org domain, which an editorial in the New York Times compared to “shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.”36 Other documents on the multilingual and multinational Wikileaks site include official information about U.S. federal guidelines for the treatment of detainees in terrorism cases, materials about corruption in Kenya and Bermuda, and the numbering systems used for NATO equipment. 37 The site interface used the familiar tabs of “article,” “discussion,” and “history” from Wikipedia, along with a tab for “view source.”

Soon after Wikileaks was launched in December 2006, it inspired a watchdog group
that often wrote critically about the site and the hundreds of thousands of documents
that it published online. WikiLeak.org characterized itself as a “discussion blog about
the ethical and technical issues” of the Wikileaks project. This site apparently maintained a certain amount of critical distance from its object of study, because it described itself as “not yet affiliated with the secretive and media manipulative” wiki for “mass document leaking.”38 However, during the legal troubles that Wikileaks faced and its highly publicized forced blackout in the United States, the once-critical WikiLeak.org blog listed the domain names of mirror sites for the whistle-blowing original to help visitors find documents, relevant articles, and position papers that the Wikileaks.org had site made available.

Since writing these paragraphs for a book that appeared in May 2009, obviously a lot has changed in the public profile of WikiLeaks. A visit to the site shows Assange's face on the banner, while before its masthead emphasized the site's lack of a figurehead. Then again, we now see Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale's visage pleading for support on almost entry we open. Compare Wale's upturned face and hopeful expression to Assange's conspiratorial gaze.

Live on the Air

Today I appeared live on the Kojo Nnamdi show for a one-hour session on "Fear and Loathing of Government 2.0," which you can listen to here.

Nnamdi actually has a long record of covering stories about the rhetorics of e-government. Nnamdi has done segments on information technology and the military, government e-mail and transparency, e-diplomacy initiatives, data programs to transform government, obstacles to open government, information control, and Tim O'Reilly's vision of "government 2.0."

You can also read the transcript of Nnamdi's interview with White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips here.

Neural Nets

Yay! A nice review of the Virtualpolitik book in Neural, which is available in both English and Italian. This is my second review of the book in the Italian press, but it looks like Italian university libraries have yet to buy a copy, according to WorldCat.

Hired Hands

Like Jane Fountain, I am very interested in online forms on government websites as an expression of the Weberian bureaucracy of the "virtual state." So I couldn't resist applying for a job in the Obama administration, specifically in the Department of Education, even though I have little intention of leaving my present position as Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course, to see how candidates for non-career appointments for the positions that aren't covered in newspaper headlines are categorized and vetted. (Click to enlarge.)


It's interesting to see the wide range of degree backgrounds that they imagine successful candidates as having, although "rhetoric" is not a viable choice (although "creative writing" in which I actually hold a degree is).

Management experience, private sector experience, government experience, and non-profit experience were all given drop-down menus, although candidates had few opportunities to write in answers that might explain the applicability of their qualifications. Ironically, I didn't see "community organizer," a profession that Obama made famous, among the choices.
t

What I find particularly interesting is the e-mails that I am now receiving from John Podesta hawking the offerings at Change.gov. So it appears that the Obama administration -- much like the Obama campaign -- is still using its websites to harvest e-mail addresses for automated messages and form letters.

(I feel that I need a new category for my blog entries on my various human subjects ventures that I have recorded here, in which -- unlike my academic work -- I am the sole experimental subject. The "experiment" tag could cover my experiments with being a poll worker, a CIA and army recruit, and other alternate identities. Of course, this is a growing genre on the web, as the popularity of personal tests of expertise or stamina -- like the "Monkey Chow Diaries" -- shows.

Wake Me Up When Dot Virtualpolitik is Available

Perhaps some of the biggest digital rhetoric news this month came in the form of this announcement from ICANN that a number of new URL extensions would be allowed by the Internet's regulatory agency, including heavily lobbied for addresses for European cities, such as .berlin and .paris. Since university librarians often spend time teaching students how to think critically about a website's provenance by using the .org, .com, or .edu extensions as guideposts, the new regulations may make online literacy efforts somewhat more complex. Me, I'm going to start agitating for .supercalifragilisticexpealidocious and .antidisestablishmentarianism, since brevity is apparently no longer important to ICANN planners.

Although the agency has been housed in my local Southern California area for many years, as this photo of their Marina Del Rey facility shows, recent meetings have been taking place in locations abroad, and representatives have taken pains to acknowledge concerns about technical support for languages other than English. To encourage subtitling of their official videos, they even use the dotSUB distributed translation service to solicit user-generated content in other tongues.

On the pages about public participation on ICANN site, you can learn about "domain tasting" (which is okay) and "domain squatting" (which is bad). Unfortunately, readers can also see that the site will no longer publish complaints about the .pk registry of Pakistan, in a move that some may see as a quashing of protest or normative claims.

The Great Thing about the Internet Is That You Can Still Type with Your Foot in Your Mouth

Regular readers of this blog know that I am fascinated with official apologies on the websites of lawmakers, government agencies, or universities. Of course, sometimes the web page of an office-holder just disappears when a scandal breaks, but often a certain amount of rhetorically interesting digital ephemera is generated by an crisis of confidence.

In most cases the mea culpa is a terse statement. For example, Senator David Vitter recently had to apologize to his constituents on his official website for having his telephone records connected to those of a prominent D.C. Madam. In the case of Congressman Mark Foley, he pulled all his congressional web content soon after the public revelation that he had made incriminating sexual advances to minors on the Internet.

Strangely, Senator Larry Craig seems unable to keep it short in apologizing, after pleading guilty to lewd behavior in an airport men's rest room. His "protesting too much" includes an explanation that he may have touched the undercover officer's foot in the next stall because of a "wide stance" involved in his bodily excretions. Talk about TMI! The information overload encompasses the police report that features the undercover officer noting how the senator's proximity allowed him to gaze into his "blue eyes. There's also a YouTube video that shows Craig's compulsion to make overdetermined causal claims and seemingly extraneous denials in an earlier sex scandal involving federal legislators. (Listen for the copyright reference at the end.)

Although his official press statement kept it short and sweet, the home page on his senatorial site contained a positively garrulous series of denials. For example, the shorter statement does not deny being gay while the longer statement is an emphatic denial and a description of prior persecution by a press obsessed with outing him. I have reproduced Craig's message in its entirety below. Just try to keep track of all the things that Craig is apologizing for, none of which is the actual incident, of course.

"First, please let me apologize to my family, friends, staff, and fellow Idahoans for the cloud placed over Idaho. I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport. I regret my decision to plead guilty and the sadness that decision has brought to my wife, family, friends, staff, and fellow Idahoans. For that I apologize.

"In June, I overreacted and made a poor decision. While I was not involved in any inappropriate conduct at the Minneapolis airport or anywhere else, I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in the hope of making it go away. I did not seek any counsel, either from an attorney, staff, friends, or family. That was a mistake, and I deeply regret it. Because of that, I have now retained counsel and I am asking my counsel to review this matter and to advise me on how to proceed.

"For a moment, I want to put my state of mind into context on June 11. For 8 months leading up to June, my family and I had been relentlessly and viciously harassed by the Idaho Statesman. If you’ve seen today’s paper, you know why. Let me be clear: I am not gay and never have been.

"Still, without a shred of truth or evidence to the contrary, the Statesman has engaged in this witch hunt. In pleading guilty, I overreacted in Minneapolis, because of the stress of the Idaho Statesman’s investigation and the rumors it has fueled around Idaho. Again, that overreaction was a mistake, and I apologize for my misjudgment. Furthermore, I should not have kept this arrest to myself, and should have told my family and friends about it. I wasn’t eager to share this failure, but I should have done so anyway.

"I love my wife, family, friends, staff, and Idaho. I love serving Idaho in Congress. Over the years, I have accomplished a lot for Idaho, and I hope Idahoans will allow me to continue to do that. There are still goals I would like to accomplish, and I believe I can still be an effective leader for Idaho. Next month, I will announce, as planned, whether or not I will seek reelection.

"As an elected official, I fully realize that my life is open for public criticism and scrutiny, and I take full responsibility for the mistake in judgment I made in attempting to handle this matter myself.

"It is clear, though, that through my actions I have brought a cloud over Idaho. For that, I ask the people of Idaho for their forgiveness.

"As I mentioned earlier, I have now retained counsel to examine this matter and I will make no further comment."

Along with apologizing for pleading guilty and not telling anyone, including legal counsel, it seems that Craig is also apologizing for the following intangibles: sadness, cloud-bringing, and overreaction due to stress and rumors. At least he's not apologizing for his "wide stance."

Thanks to Paul Simms, for pointing out the most unsavory details associated with this story.

Personally, I'd Rather Have a Chocolate on My Pillow

From one of our foreign correspondents. Click to enlarge.

Brand Confusion

I won't be linking to their URL because I don't want this rival VirtualPolitik site to be going any higher in the page rankings, but I did think it was interesting to discover that there was a sound-alike website that offers Internet political consulting for Mexican candidates running for office. Of course, as a Southern Californian who lives a few hours from the international border, I'm very interested in Mexican campaigns, particularly those that use U.S. public relations firms that also handle social marketing, risk communication, or public diplomacy accounts.

Although I'm certainly not the one providing them, apparently the "servicios" of this Virtualpolitik wannabe include the following consulting areas:

Diseño de sites
Blogs
Newsletters
Videocasts
Podcasts
Calendarios de actividades
Encuestas de opinión
Foros de discusión
Fundraisers en linea
Coordinación de eventos
Sistemas de membresía de ciudadanos comprometidos
Uso de sistemas de comunidades virtuales como YouTube

Do not be confused by imitators! The common sense advice available here on Virtualpolitik is always free and designed to foster citizen participation.

TMI

I often think of Peter Lyman's research when I hear the phrase "TMI" or "too much information" in response to someone's overly graphic description of embodied experience, as in the girlfriend who says "I really have to pee" or the colleague who describes noiselessly passing gas in some social situation or the fellow traveller who feels compelled to explain a dietary restriction more fully. The acronym describes a strange concatenation of the grossly physical with the analytically virtual. I was surprised recently to have to explain what the letters meant to my teenager and intrigued to see that he immediately found many uses for the term.

This week's obituary for Lyman in The Los Angeles Times only dealt with a small fraction of Lyman's research, which could be encapsulated in the sound bite "information overload." As one of his collaborators Mimi Ito pointed out in her own touching obituary, Lyman's seminal work on "How Much Information?" actually addressed a number of competing interests to be negotiated in the era of big data that entailed really coming to terms with the orders of magnitude involved in our contemporary digital culture of distributed networks and exponentially expanding storage. Ito also pointed out a necessary labor required by new practices of mourning among scholars of digital culture: updating the Wikipedia entry of the deceased for posterity.

I never had the opportunity to meet Lyman formally, although our paths may have crossed in the same Berkeley think tank on higher education. However, his work has been incredibly important for my own research on the rhetoric of the virtual state, particularly his essay "Information Superhighways, Virtual Communities, and Digital Libraries: Information Society Metaphors as Political Rhetoric," which I would strongly recommend as a solid overview of the recent history of public rhetoric about the Internet. It's a governmental rhetoric of public works that I argue has been sadly supplanted by our current legislative rhetoric about criminality associated with everyday digital activities, such as file-sharing, the use of social networking sites, and videogame play.

Update: This eulogy from danah boyd is also worthwhile reading.

Revenge of the Nerds

It's a good time to talk about the political importance of having well-staffed and well-stocked archives from government and other nonprofit sectors at a time when for-profit corporations with proprietary software are being entrusted with the nation's information infrastructure. This week, as the American Library Association holds its annual conference, Siva Vaidhyanathan is cautioning against uncritically celebrating Amazon.com's expansion into the digital library business, as it follows Yahoo and Google into what they hope will be a lucrative sector of the information economy.

Three recent case studies illustrate the role that archives can have for government policy and the public sphere: the National Archives, the independent National Security Archive, and the archives at the National War College.

Today, the National Security Archive is announcing the release of what it calls "The CIA Family Jewels" or the most embarrassing gaffes and illegal exploits in the history of the highly secretive agency after fifteen years of document requests.

Those following the news are also learning more about the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, as it battles with Vice President Dick Cheney who after years of claiming Executive privilege now insists that he is not part of the Executive Branch in order to avoid complying with archiving procedures and security protocols that are the norm for other government agencies.

Finally, Conrad Crane, a military historian, was probably best known for being the head of the archives at the National War College until he co-authored the now-famous monograph Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario. Crane's book predicted many of the preventable disasters that were to happen in Iraq from looted museums to sectarian death squads. NPR has done a series of stories about Crane's work including this wonderful program on "The Center for Lessons Learned" from This American Life. (I like how the show also tells how information-savvy colonels were forced to be copyright violators by asking that pages in books in the Columbia library about the British colonial experience in Iraq at the turn of the last century be scanned and e-mailed to officers in the military theater.)

Update: According to a front-page article in The Washington Post, "CIA Releases Files on Past Misdeeds," it is the members of the CIA themselves who call the information released by the National Security Archives "The Family Jewels." According to the Post, this collection of "assassination plans, illegal wiretaps and hunts for spies at political conventions" was segregated from other documents during the Watergate era for its "flap potential" should the "delicate" information be exposed. Also included in the pages of CIA hijinks: some unauthorized testing of human subjects with drugs that had strange effects on mice.

The Advent of the Virtual State

Before I get to reporting on the MacArthur Foundation event in Second Life yesterday, I feel that I need to say something about the burgeoning virtual presence of the State Department. This flickr set shows the offices of the State Department in Second Life. (Thanks to Andy Sternberg for the pointer to these pics.)

The State Department also has its own YouTube channel. As the film about Daniel and Marianne Pearl, A Mighty Heart, begins its theatrical run, viewers are also tuning in to a much-watched three-part series about the case that shows U.S. regional security officer Randall Bennett who was based in Karachi, Pakistan and who explains his official warnings to the journalist shortly before he disappeared. The second video addresses the rhetorical appeal of the kidnappers' bait-and-switch techniques. Although it is also informed by personal touches, the final video is a much more conventional piece of institutional rhetoric about the investigation and capture of members of the terrorist cell. Note that the official admits to detaining a suspect's family in an attempt to flush him out. Strangely, this official seems to be giving a stamp of approval on the Hollywood product that represents the events that he narrates as a witness. The celebrity consciousness of the closing notes about looking forward to the premiere are particularly disquieting, given the governmental authority of the site.

There's Nothing Like Radio for Showing Off a Videogame

Today Virtualpolitik comrade Ian Bogost appeared on NPR's "Talk of the Nation. You can listen to the conversation at the link for "New Video Games Entertain and Educate." As far as disembodied voices go, I think he did an admirable job fielding questions, although there was certainly a representational challenge involved in describing a genre through auditory means that is largely visual and kinesthetic in nature.

Most obviously, Bogost argued that serious games were expanding potential cultural membership and enriching the possibilities of play. Callers also shared their experiences of having children try out careers as humanitarians or understanding their own medical treatment better in an emergency room. Predictably, he was asked by the show's host -- yet again -- about Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which I think has been somewhat overexposed in panels and conferences this year.

Of course, Bogost has also written about his Howard Dean game in several contexts, but I was happy to hear him say something new about the distinction between politicking and politics that he has come to understand after the development process. I also liked the way that he framed the political in participatory terms and disputed the relevance of conventional tropes of partisan identity positioning or currencies of ideological value. Bogost argues that politics is actually about "boring" details and the way that complex systems operate in relationship to U.S. citizens in venues such as health care, airport security, and food safety.

As someone with family members whose lived experiences with disability, class discrimination, sexuality, and labor politics don't match the Republican platforms in which they profess belief, I think he may be on to something about the political disconnect between practices and ideologies in contemporary policy and politics. It's a contradiction that is also described by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas?. The question is: will these red staters play games that let them question the rules operating on complex problems? Or will such games only be played by liberal elites like those who read The New York Times, where Bogost's work is being featured in the editorial section.

The Terrible Twos and the Trusting Threes

Today, Virtualpolitik celebrates its second birthday. Two years and 681 postings later, I'm sort of dumbfounded to be coming upon this anniversary.

It's been an exciting year. I gave awards! I even got an award! I went multimedia! Best of all, in July, I joined the Sivacracy blogging team.

I know there's been a lot of press about how blogging is supposedly a huge distraction from scholarship to be avoided by the impressionable young. But I 'm not sure that that's necessarily true for everyone. Despite my natural sloth, which makes me inclined to spend all day watching YouTube and playing Tetris on my cell phone, somehow I managed to have a really productive year. In academic speak, I published four peer-reviewed single authored papers and two jointly authored ones. I also gave something like thirteen talks. And I finally sent off my book manuscript about the virtual state and its discontents for review! As if that weren't enough, I've enjoyed planning for the next cycle of the Humanities Core Course with humanist visionary Julia Lupton. Stay tuned for more on her Design Alliance.

But now I realize that, as I'm entering my third year, I'll need to learn all the things that any toddler would, as I educate myself about the social practices of blogging. For example, as a lone blogger, I think I have a tendency toward parallel play, and sometimes I'll admit that I have difficulty sharing links with others. And I still throw tantrums about really bad web design and game development, particularly when it is paid for by the taxpayer for a federal agency. But I'm learning to put my toys away when I'm done with them by organizing my posts and putting my metadata in the right place, so I think there's hope for more maturity to come.

A Map Bigger than the Territory

I was going to call this entry "Darfur for Dummies," but I thought better of it after actually having dinner with Dennis J. King of the U.S. State Department. King faced tough questions from the largely European audience at ISCRAM about the granularity of his data visualizations from the U.S. government's Humanitarian Information Unit that represent situations on the ground in Darfur, the Horn of Africa, and potentially other sites of large-scale crisis around the world. At the conference, King demonstrated how his program converts Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into visual images in order to make complicated humanitarian problems more comprehensible to policy makers and grassroots activists, while also preserving the user's ability to disseminate large data sets with the actual numbers still preserved in spreadsheet form.

As readers of this blog may know, there have been a number of attempts to make the crisis in Darfur more visible to mainstream America by using digital media, from the online game Darfur is Dying to the new Darfur initiative at Google Earth. As someone who studies digital discourse, I wondered if it was advisable to base a government-sanctioned interface on a proprietary, closed-source software package and how much King would be able to capitalize on existing social media practices when the thing being shared was a spreadsheet, a file rarely disseminated outside business settings that doesn't have much of a reputation for generating Internet sociality (unlike songs, videos, photos, or blog entries). And I tend to agree with King's European critics, that the current administration relies on overly simple representations of information, as I've argued here before.

That said, it turns out that the self-effacing King has played a part in a number of interesting examples of digital rhetoric playing out on the world stage. For example, King had a role in helping the United Nations create its official website in 1997, which is still preserved here in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Bad Rap

I love both YouTube and online banking, so why do I hate this TurboTax rap so much? Perhaps because I've never really gotten over the musical badness of Vanilla Ice or perhaps because TurboTax has thwarted popular free government-sponsored online tax programs for the poor. Happy tax day, everyone. Don't forget to file.

Update: Apparently electronic filers with TurboTax had a bad surprise this year, as a software slowdown created late filing for many returns.