January 17, 2006

S-L-O-P, that's the way I spell sloppy...sloppy!



danah boyd posted a short reflection on what she's calling "sloppy speech acts," where she thinks about the various effects that IMing has had on her speech:

And then i started thinking about how sloppy my speech has been lately. I speak like i IM on my Sidekick - short, curt, coded... My speech has gotten super sloppy in recent years and i use my hands even more when i'm talking. I use whatever word comes to mind even if it doesn't fit well and i speak through impressions rather than using sound bites. I realize that my writing has gotten sloppier too and i find it far far far more painful to write now than before. I'm not particularly proud of either of these manifestations.

I'm not a big IMer--even though I have Sidekick envy, I lack the desire to overcome the massive inertia keeping me from joining the mobile (r)evolution. But I have noticed the shift, and even talked about it a time or two, in my own writing habits over the past couple of years of active blogging.

If there is a conventional wisdom about the relationship between blogging and writing, my sense is that it runs something like this: it's hard to get students to write, students don't improve their writing unless they write, and so anything that gets them writing earlier is bound to get them writing better. There's more to it than that, of course, but for me, that's the basic syllogism behind a great deal of technology and writing scholarship. For myself, I'd add that blogging can/should/may have the effect of getting students to think differently about writing, and in all sorts of ways that I find to be improvements over the default positions of most of us.

If there is a weakness in this line of reasoning for me, it's the baseline assumption that we all share the same threshold for putting pen to paper or finger to key. We have a tendency to assume that the world hates to write with roughly the same intensity, and it's that aversion that we must overcome as writing instructors. Fair enough, and perhaps even true most of the time. Certainly I don't walk into a classroom expecting to find a roomful of graphophiles. Heck, most of us could probably say the same about walking into department meetings. And even in the odd case that we could, it would be silly to imagine that everyone loves to write in the same way.

One of the differences that I've been thinking about with respect to danah's entry is this question of threshold, because I think that there are two specific features of it that vary widely from person to person: I think that each of us has hir own threshold for writing in general, and each of us juggles various thresholds from medium to medium and/or audience to audience. There are people whom I'd call on the phone and talk to for an hour before I'd return an email that asked for a one-line answer. There are people who only receive emails from me. And so on.

Lately, I've been having some trouble picking up my academic writing again, trouble that I haven't really experienced here. One answer to this concern is to say that blogging is interfering with my more strictly academic work, but that's not quite right. Closer to the truth is that, for a long time, my writing practice was pretty much monovocal (or maybe bivocal). I wrote emails to friends and colleagues (which I didn't think of as writing per se) and I wrote articles, presentations, etc., to a fairly general audience of my academic peers. Now, I like writing, and I like it enough such that my threshold for doing that work was never especially high. As a blogger, though, my threshold for writing has dropped even further--I never would have dreamed that I could write on a daily basis (or semi-daily, at least) for as long as I've maintained this space.

The trouble I've run into is that the thresholds for these two practices are themselves different. It's easier for me to throw up a post (obviously) than it is to work on an article, and once I cross the blog threshold and write, typically I do something else when I'm done. So blogging does in some ways "interfere," but really only in the sense that I feel like "I've written" when I'm done, and enough so that I end up starting over again to work up to the threshold for academic prose.

Well, that, and also that I find myself wanting to end articles simply by saying "That is all."

No grand conclusions here. I'm just thinking through some of these things myself, but I wonder if we spend too much of our attention on the notion that blogs will help us overcome resistance to writing and not enough on how it changes the practices of those (of us) whose resistance isn't as acute.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:39 PM | Comments (5)

September 05, 2005

Feral hypertexts?

I can't guarantee to you that my reason for linking to this entry over at Jill's has anything behind it other than the fact that I like the word "feral."

Okay, there's a little more to it than that. First of all, I almost always find that Jill and I are on the same screen when it comes to things like:

Perhaps it is more useful to think about new kinds of textuality as more akin to performances than to the texts produced in the 19th century.

It doesn't hurt that I'm currently working my belated way through Craig Saper's Networked Art, which makes a similar point. Or that I'm right at a point in my manuscript revisions where I need to elaborate on this idea. No, none of that hurts.

Second, I like that Jill's wrestling with what seems to be a pretty counter-intuitive pair of ideas: feral hypertexts are ones that are out of control, and she's discussing in this entry the prospect of developing critical editions for such texts, critical editions being one of the ways that academia exerts control upon a text. I'd say more about how she works in and out of this paradox, but then, that would spoil the surprise, wouldn't it?

Third, I really really am fond of the word "feral."

That's all for the moment. I still have to throw up my review of the Brothers Grimm, but I'm thinking maybe that'll keep until the morrow.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2005

He being brand new

You would think, given how little I tend to appreciate the Chronicle's effort to scare up attention when it comes to technology, that I might be thrilled to see an article (Michael Bugeja's "Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain") that appears to take a more generous approach to matters technological. And you would be right, to an extent. You would have to set aside, temporarily, the allusion that the title of the article summons up for me, an allusion to a particular Seinfeld episode.

A larger issue for me, I suppose, is that there's something about this essay that feels a little off. At first, I thought it was the degree to which the piece itself, about the virtues of self-promotion, is itself engaged in a great deal of self-promotion, touting the author's own work, his colleagues, his websites, etc. I'm a little turned off by the paternalism implicit in statements like "I'm responsible for the academic fates of some eight assistant professors hoping to earn tenure," I suppose, or the offer to turn a related domain over to Tim Berners-Lee.

My broader issue is that there's something subtly crass (if that's not an oxymoron) in the way this process is described here. I don't necessarily disagree with many of the points that Bugeja makes, but the whole process feels backwards to me. Instead of thinking about how the net might challenge the processes by which academia operates, what's offered is a description of how the net can extend the system and/or exploit it for as long as our colleagues remain unaware of how it works. Some of my regular reads (Chris Anderson, David Weinberger, Hugh MacLeod, et al.) are doing exactly what Bugeja advocates, but they're not doing it to promote sales of already-completed books--they invite us to participate in the shaping of those books.

I think this is my point, and my sticking point, with the language of branding to describe the transmedia strategy offered by this essay. The people who are using the net in genuinely innovative ways are using it to change the ways books are written (not to mention challenging the value of "books" in the first place--see Lessig & Gilmor, for example), while this feels to me more like an attempt to preserve a print economy. Here are a couple of the reasons that Hugh writes that branding is dead:

"Branding" is backwards looking. It's all about capturing past associations. It's never about what the business could become, but protecting what came before.

"Branding" is all about articulating top-down, hierarchal control of the conversation. "This is what it means." It's EGOlogy, not ECOlogy.

Come to think of it, these two points pretty much capture the sum total of my unease with this article. I think I'll just stop here.

[via Becky, Steve, & John]

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:54 PM | Comments (2)

June 02, 2005

I am woman

I don't know if this qualifies as a late night confession, but I must admit that, in the past year or so, I've become much more of a Bravo watcher. A big part of it is their tendency to air multiple episodes of the West Wing on a daily basis, not to mention the occasional marathon. I haven't really gotten into their "Moms and Dads" series of shows, mostly because that stuff just sends me into a rage.

Lately, and often during Monday's Memorial Day WW Marathon, they've been advertising the heck out of a concert special that they aired tonight, a show by the Dan Band:

Imagine a guy sporting a gas station attendant's shirt, a backward baseball cap and sneakers strutting and swaggering around the stage, flush with attitude as he pours his soul into painfully earnest and oddly appealing covers of "Total Eclipse of the Heart," "Ring My Bell," "Muskrat Love," Janet Jackson's "Nasty" and Britney Spears' "Slave 4 U." That's [Dan] Finnerty, who adds to the lyrics a healthy number of self-created expletives for emphasis (lots of "fuck" and "shit" and "muthafucker" to confirm just how emotionally connected to this music he is). It leads here to a demented encore serenading a "sweat-rag girl" (don't ask) onstage in a show-stopping rendition of "I've Never Been to Me."

It was high-larious. If you have the chance, I highly recommend catching a re-air, and I'm sure there'll be plenty (Bravo's not overflowing with programming). Anyhow, the one thing that I didn't see mentioned in the reviews I've found was that the concert is chock full of mashups (imagine Morrisette's "You Oughtta Know" laced with a bit of "Que Sera Sera" and New Edition's "Cool it Now."). Maybe over at Crooked Timber, somebody mentioned that the problem with mashups is that once you get past the novelty, all you're left with is bad music. This may be bad music, but it's a hell of a lot of fun regardless. And while I don't know that I'll ever feel like listening to Night at the HipHopera or Revolved over and over, I'm actually thinking about shelling out either for the CD or the DVD of the concert. And the July concert dates are tempting, too...

Fun stuff. That is all. Oh, and "I Am Woman" was the name of the special.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2005

The Trent that feeds

(Tip: GZombie)

I can't really say that I've ever been a particular fan of Nine Inch Nails or Trent Reznor, save for the fact that I always thought his name was vaguely cool. I have a passing familiarity with some of the music, but otherwise, I haven't spared NIN much attention. That's about to change. Reznor has decided to release a track from his upcoming album in GarageBand format, with the idea of giving fans "the ability to tinker around with my tracks - to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what's there." That's from the readme file that comes with the download. Here's a little more:

What I'm giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for "the hand that feeds" in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into. I imported and converted the tracks into AppleLoop format so the size would be reasonable and the tempo flexible. So... Drag the file over to your hard disk and double click it. Hit the space bar. Listen. Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me into a woman. Replay the guitar. Anything you'd like.

I downloaded the file, and anticipate at least a few hours of unbridled GarageBand fun. If I have the chance and/or put together something interesting, I'll post it here. For the moment, though, Reznor has my "Utterly Cool!" vote for the month of April.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:20 AM | Comments (1)

April 04, 2005

Booles rush in

I expect that this will be a less playful version of Jeff's entry. Sorry about that.

Back in the day, back when Lingua Franca was still printing issues, they did a series of special turn-of-the-mill essays. One of these was a top-20 list, a list of those people in the academy who were doing innovative work with technology. I didn't see this list until a year or so later, in part I suppose because no one in my "field," computers and writing, was talking about it. And no one in the field was talking about it, in part, because no one in the field was represented on it. There were people from a broad range of disciplines on that list--not just tech ones--but despite the fact that my field had (at the time) an almost-20-year history of work with technology, despite an annual conference, despite a journal, despite a semi-professional organization, despite all of that, there wasn't a single member of that field represented on that list.

It was kind of depressing. But more depressing was the fact that there really wasn't anyone in my field who deserved to be there, myself included.

Flash forward to the present. Today, there's a "View" called "Hypertext 101" appearing over at Inside Higher Ed, which represents pretty conventional thinking in my field. I could snark up and down, believe me, but I'm going to restrict myself to two main points:

First, there is not a single thing I see there that couldn't have been written 7 or 8 years ago, and in fact, was being written then. With the possible exception of the "web in a can" reference (and the mistaken assignment of Blogger to the same category as Blackboard and WebCT), there is nothing new here. The examples with which this article closes? Using HTML editors to design web pages.

Second, and somewhat relatedly, I present to you a version of "net research" that was feeling its age back in the days of Gopher and Lynx:

However, research on the net means much more than typing a few words in to Google.  

A more sophisticated approach to teaching students how to do Internet research involves showing students some of the ways online searches use Boolean logic, and this is simply accomplished by visiting the Google Guide.

Ah yes. Research on the net means typing a few words into Google as well as Boolean operators. That's the ticket. I don't know what it is about this ridiculous field I'm in, but for some reason, every handbook we write testifies that Boolean operators are some sort of magic bullet for research. That, somehow, Boolean operators and a "credibility checklist" will actually result in research.

This is research that elementary school children are capable of doing. This is not "innovative" or "critical" thinking about research, or technology. This is the 5-paragraph theme of net research, an outmoded formula for gathering information that lacks any sort of nuance and actually discourages critical thought.

This is embarrassing.

Okay, a third point. Call it the bonus round. We are well past the point where it is kosher, in any venue, to issue these bland, pointless "calls for thinking critically." Put up. Give me some examples of the kind of innovation that you're calling for. Here's a few, completely off the top of my head: Will Richardson is doing more at the primary level than most college instructors are willing or capable of doing at the college level. And he's looking at the ways that weblogs, wikis, & the read/write web are challenging a model of schooling that's grounded in the narrowness of print literacy. Why not look at his work? How about EPIC 2014 as a new model for the argumentative essay? How about John Udell's study of the emerging professionalism and credibility at Wikipedia? How about, how about, how about?

Bottom line: it's not time to start thinking about technology. If you haven't started yet, it's time to catch up. If you don't know how to put together a QuickTime movie, you're behind. If you haven't futzed around with sound tools, you're behind. If you're still thinking about how to do web pages, you're behind. If you don't "get" blogs and wikis, you're behind. If you don't think that the Grokster case has anything to do with you, you're behind. And I could keep on going. There is nothing wrong with writing an essay, a view, a site, whatever, addressing those who are (by now) late adopters, but why in the world would exhortations to think critically about technology have any effect on those people when they've been hearing the same song for years now? The net is changing education, journalism, politics, science, culture, etc etc etc. If you're not keeping track of those changes, you're behind. Pure and simple.

Let me close with a passage that John Holbo cites over at his new blog The Valve. (By the way, if you don't know who Holbo is, you're behind.) Anyhow, it's from Lionel Trilling, and I've just been itching to use it:

From the democratic point of view, we must say that in a true democracy nothing should be done for the people. The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them.

"Hypertext 101" counters with this:

Computer technology has swiftly become our key writing tool but it’s too easy to imagine everyone “gets it.”

And hence the essay. But I work in a field which is frozen in this moment, the moment of assuming not only that "not everyone gets it," but also that "no one gets it." And this assumption frees many of the people in my field from ever having to really "get it" themselves. Instead, they can simply call for us to try harder to "get it."

Fact is, it's not "easy" to imagine the audience that Trilling describes. It means being willing to be ignored, which is hard. It means trading academic microfame or microcelebrity for the sake of good, meaningful, productive work. For years and years now, we've defined our work in my field as primarily pedagogical, and there's a real questionable ethic at play here, because I believe that behind that definition lurks the arrogance that Trilling describes. In other words, we've believed it easier to define the primary audience as students, the archetype in my field for an audience defined "by its limitations." So what happens when Will Richardson's students come to our classes, having learned by age 10 not only how to do Boolean searches but having been blogging, both in and outside of formal schooling, for upwards of 10 years. What are we going to have to say to them that they didn't know before they got to our classrooms?

What we need to start doing, right now, is to conceive of an audience capable of understanding what it is we have to say. We're already that audience, and sooner rather than later, our students will be, too. We need to start writing articles that take for granted the "critical thinking" that this essay calls for.

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:11 PM | Comments (14)

July 02, 2004

practice v research

Just a couple of quick notes, while I'm on a brief break from the manuscript...

Nancy White posts over at M2M about the relationship between practice and research when it comes to social software. She's riffing on some comments of danah's which in turn responded to some of Liz's remarks in her blog research post there. It's been interesting to me to watch the M2M conversation unfold in parallel with Liz's conversation with Elijah, who posts the emails at his blog, and continues the conversation at M2M. Got all that? Heh. It's probably easier to just read M2M than to try and follow my winding attempt at a summary here...

Anyhow, Nancy's post (and a remark she made in the comment section to another) got me thinking a bit. She casts this discussion in terms of distance, arguing (rightly, I think) that we need to give up some critical distance and actually use/practice/experience different media before we can speak with any kind of authority or credibility about it. And even then, extrapolating from that experience to speak about the medium itself is a pretty dicey proposition. (i've got a riff on this very issue in the manuscript...)

This reminds me alot of a conversation I engage my students in whenever I teach research writing. We talk about whether it's easier to work with a topic you know well or one you don't. At first glance, I think it's easier to work from what you know, but then that ignores the bad teachers out there (I've had a few, and tried not to be one), people who know their material cold but don't know how to communicate it to people without that same experience. Sometimes, it's more effective to work with an unfamiliar subject, that the questions you ask as a researcher are likely to be the same questions your audience will have, you don't take specialized language for granted, etc.

Nancy's comment to the conversation, about providing a bridge between practitioners and academics, made me think about this, bc I think there are really two bridges there. As someone who's both practitioner and academic, I find myself trying not to take academic habits of thought for granted when I post here, but I also find myself doing the same with practitioner habits when I talk to other academics about what I'm doing. As Alex has talked about, those of us techademics who blog are the tip of a big, slow academic iceberg.

Speaking for myself, of course, I feel oddly suspended between these two audiences, bridging sometimes more in one direction, sometimes more in the other. Like Nancy, I've got little patience for "my toys are better than your toys" kinds of contests, but as someone whose "official" writing is often for an audience that hasn't seen any of the toys before, I can't dismiss those kinds of discussions out of hand. That being said, there are right ways and wrong ways to hold them, of course.

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:46 AM | Comments (2)

June 21, 2004

Preserve, Archive, Disseminate

The only other session I caught at MEA last week was one of the plenaries, about the future of digital literature. Marjorie Luesebrink gave a brief talk as part of the plenary, and in it, she mentioned the efforts of the Electronic Literature Organization's PAD project.

Their first manifesto is now available, called Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature, and it was written by Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Among their recommendations are writing for open systems instead of closed ones, working cross-system as best as possible, using valid code, etc. It's certainly worth a gander if you're involved with new media in any way. As Marjorie mentioned during her talk, we've already reached a point where some early examples of e-literature are becoming more and more difficult to view, due to proprietary systems, software/hardware versions, etc.

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:30 AM | Comments (4)

June 15, 2004

Mecology

Nothing profound to be found here this evening. I have this bad habit of winding my legs around chairs when I'm sitting and typing, and since I re-aggravated my knee yesterday, I've tried to avoid chairs (as opposed, say, to couches and beds) when possible for a stretch. Tonight I'm in the office, facing the daunting prospect of de-bunkering about three years worth of accumulated stuff. Since I'll be on leave in the fall, and since office space in the SU WP is at a premium, I'll be office-less during that time. I've already filled five boxes, with little visible effect.

But it's gotten me to thinking. This summer is the first in almost ten years that I won't be teaching a course, and this fall will be the first extended stretch in even longer that I haven't had access to office space. And so I've been thinking lately about how important (& implicitly so) it's been to me to have separate home/office spaces. I organize my email partly via the fact that I have both home and office access. I came in to the office tonight to work, knowing that if I had the NBA finals on TV, I wouldn't. So I'm catching an ESPN radio stream, and able to do other stuff. My office gives me immediate access to a sizable library. I'll bring home books to work from, but my office is my base. Not this fall, though.

For me, this connects to a bunch of stuff that I'd been thinking about this weekend. I've been feeling a little bit of a disjunct between the writing I'm doing for my book, and the writing I do here. Part of it is topic-based, certainly, but part of it is the kind of writing that I can do on cgbvb. I don't really want the overlap, frankly, for reasons I'm still thinking through.

Maybe more on this later. What it boils down to, though, is what I've come to think of as my personal media ecology, the various ways that I manage and organize my space, time, resources, memory, information, etc. I'm just bumping up lately against the fact that mycology is going to have to change soon...

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2004

Blogging @ MEA

Mission accomplished! Despite what was barely a nap this morning, I managed to scrape myself together and made the drive to Rochester this afternoon for the Media Ecology Association conference. And as promised, I had the pleasure of attending a plenary-quality panel on blogging: Liz Lawley, Alex Halavais, Sbastien Paquet, Clay Shirky, and Jill Walker. And here's my rundown...it's long, and there are places where I'm projecting, I think, but I trust you'll indulge me...

Liz Lawley chaired the panel, and opened with a brief discussion of the definitional problems that weblog research encounters:

Liz talked about these as quasi-themes, and while the panelists didn't directly address them per se, it wasn't difficult to see connections among these opening remarks and the talks (e.g., Paquet on narrow centralization, Walker on the MeFi-cation of Straight Outta Compton, etc.).

Alex Halavais spoke first, and took a little more than his fair share of time, I suppose, for a couple of reasons. There were some audience questions for one thing, but in the context of the panel, Alex's talk also provided a nice frame for the other speakers, each of whom (if I recall correctly) referred to some of the points he raised. He began by explaining that he was less interested in what blogs are right now than in what they might become, particularly as they stand to transform the academy. An audience member asked for a baseline definition of a blog, and the 2nd, more unconventional answer Alex offered was to suggest that we should be thinking at the level of community or network rather than individual blogs. I liked that.

The blogging "revolution" has yet to occur in the academy, and if I understood this correctly, Alex introduced a distinction between blogging as a potentially academic activity and blogging as an activity carried on by a handful of academics. I think he implied that to get to the former, we need to start looking more closely at the latter. He presented the results from his recent study of academic bloggers, and then discussed several archetypes for academic bloggers (teacher, memex, public intellectual, institutional critic, & diarist).

He had to zip through the later portion of his talk, but his interest is in the symbiosis of academic conferences and weblogging, seeing both as spaces for both the exchange of ideas as well as the creation & maintenance of our social networks. Both, he argued, provide a gateway or bridge between individual and collective intelligence. He closed on a note of optimism, urging us to get blogging, to experiment, and to learn from our successes and failures.

Next up was Sbastien Paquet, who began by noting two crucial characteristics of weblogs. First, that the basic unit is not the book, article, or even page, but the post. Weblogs are comprised of many small pieces. Second, weblogs allow for informal interaction in wide open spaces [this dovetailed with a point that Liz raised during Alex's talk as well--namely that one of the things that differentiates weblogs from lists or BBs is the openness and the serendipity of contact].

Seb's talk focused on what I would describe as the organizational structure of the academy. The academy, he argued, is optimized for specialists--there are central organizations, journals, presses, programs, etc., and while the threshold for reaching the center is perhaps high, it is not difficult for specialists to locate themselves or to find like minds.

However, this is a problem for those researchers who aren't specialists: issue-oriented researchers who pursue their topic of inquiry across multiple methodologies or disciplines; synthesists who draw on multiple disciplines and put ideas together; boundary spanners who attempt to draw ideas from one field into another; and originals/visionaries, whose ideas simply defy easy categorization within disciplines. For these kinds of thinkers, finding an audience for their work can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Seb contrasted the centralized, high-threshold model of finding one's audience with what weblogs allow a writer. Weblogs can help a researcher generate conversations, even if they begin very small. They allow an audience to develop over time [as opposed, say, to a professional journal that only accepts articles likely to appeal to a majority of its readership...]. And each member of a blog's audience is him or herself a writer with an audience, which allows trust networks to expand, FOAF-style. Finally, the fact that this network carries material traces in the forms of links, comments, trackbacks, et al, allows a researcher to maintain far closer contact with an audience.

He closed with a visualization/mapping of the growth of an individual's audience/network, and finished by reasserting the value that weblogs possess for building collaborative, dialogic networks.

Clay Shirky's talk was called "Weblogs as Universal Solvent," because of the way that they have dissolved language, disciplinary, geographical, and institutional barriers to action and collaboration. He began by identifying three "Deep Forces" that he sees at play in the emergence of weblogs: "Surprised by Simplicity" -- weblogs represented a turn from the colossal bloatware of the late 90s, and allowed the creation of robust, dynamic sites based on a few basic principles and a minimal, technical threshold; "Atomization & Recombination" -- blogs work at the micro-level of the post, and make it possible to combine the atoms in a variety of ways; "Coordination Replaces Organization" -- activity is not "organized" from the top-down, but begun from the bottom and eventually distributed laterally.

Clay identified what he described as a framing problem. Computer-mediated communication provided an umbrella in the 90s, under which was gathered publishing, computer-supported collaborative work, and online communities. But this umbrella didn't account for offline groups, despite the fact that they were practically inseparable from these other elements. Social software as a frame doesn't aspire to the level of generality that CMC did, and it has taken elements of CSCW and both on and offline communities to provide a focal point for research, conversation, collaboration, etc. As recently as two years ago, Googling "social software" would have produced perhaps one out of 10 links that actually led to a site that used the phrase with its current meaning. Nowadays, the top 50 all point to such sites. [an aside: I took Clay to be talking about shifting the terms of discussion from "what" to "how"--that it matters less what social software actually is than how it has allowed the Many2Many crew and others to work together.]

Intervening at the level of a working group rather than theory or philosophy allowed the M2M group to gather together what Clay described as "Heterogenous Literature," materials that included articles that had resonance for the group, RIT courseware, the work coming out of the HP labs, ethnographic observations, etc. Clay had other examples of groups (literally Dream Teams of experts on various topics) emerging out of shared interests and concerns as well, groups that couldn't have happened in any way outside the blogosphere.

He closed by briefly outlining the benefits and drawbacks of this kind of collaborative action. The good? The development of alternative, unofficial theoretical units [think Bill Readings at the end of University in Ruins--this is a connection I may write about over the next day or so] allows action without requiring loads of organization or bureaucracy. Groups can develop across disciplines, and they can gather resonant texts/ideas without having to endorse entire disciplinary structures (Clay called this source-insensitivity). And the end result of this is a new unit of collaboration, one that is extremely flexible and productive.

As of yet, though, the interfaces themselves are still geared towards individuals, and so there's a sense of "parallel play" rather than actual collaboration. Conversations can become diffuse and difficult to track, collect, or reference, which can slow things down. Finally, there are etiquette issues as well--informal conversations, writ public, can sometimes turn into posturing.

Clay's final note was that group blogs are going to become vitally important for the academy over the next 18 months. I don't know if that'll prove to be the case or not, but it's certainly got me thinking (and hoping).

Jill had the final slot, and little time, so her remarks were abbreviated. Although she framed her talk as a story, it was easy to see how she could have tied it into each of the other talks. She focused on two "events" in the blogosphere: 1. The Straight Outta Compton story from Feb/Mar 2002 (boy meets girl, boy kisses girl, boy blogs about girl's lack of kissing skill, girl Googles boy, girl reads blog, girl breaks up with boy, girl tells journalist friend, friend writes story about boy, MetaFilter finds story and turns it into a huge netmeme) and 2. Henry Jenkins' "cockroach" comment in the MIT Technology Review which ended up biting him in the butt.

She didn't have a lot of time to offer exposition, but both stories were examples of the way that weblog audiences can spiral out of control very quickly (from the author's perspective, anyway) as well as the way that the traditional buffers between author and reader simply don't apply to blogs. For me, it was a nice circle back to the definitional problems that Liz raised. As I mentioned to Jill afterwards, I would have liked to give them an extra hour, both so she could have a full slot, and so we could have had some audience interaction.

In all, it was a really good panel. I don't know that there was much that I hadn't heard before, but then, I've been reading their work for the last year, so that's to be expected. Each paper provoked connections for me with stuff I've been thinking about, and that's all I want from a panel. I managed to overcome my painful shy long enough to chat a bit with Jill and Alex, and I got to see a top-notch crew of folk whose work I enjoy. Not bad for an afternoon's work.

(ps. if i've made any egregious errors here in my recap, let me know, and i'll get to fixin')

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:02 PM | Comments (4)

April 09, 2004

Demolition, man

It's probably been upwards of 10 or 15 years since I've heard the Police song "Demolition Man," but my favorite line from the song was "I'm a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom/I kill conversation as I walk into the room." I'm not sure why I latched onto it--something about the idea of killing conversation just stuck in my head.

I think about this again tonight because last night at about this time, I de-lurked on one of our professional listservs, and apparently managed to kill the conversation. Without getting into too many of the details, it was a thread on how sprawling our field has become, and how difficult it is to keep pace with everything that comes out, given so many different areas of study and venues. As you may gather, it's an interesting problem to me because it's an inevitable feature of any organization that grows beyond a particular size--the visible horizon for any single member stays relatively constant, but once the organization grows beyond that horizon, it has to respond in ways that help orient its membership to the sprawl.

Did I say I wouldn't give too many details?

Anyhow, my post offered what I thought was a fairly elegant mix of a centralizing vision combined with broadly distributed responsibility. The problem is a laughably simple one to solve, honestly, with a small change in collective behavior and a little bit of organizational leadership.

Yeah. If I were teasing myself, I'd say that they were all stunned by the profound simplicity of my proposed solution. Truth be told, though, I think the real problem, the conversation killer, was that I had a solution at all. The thread wasn't about coming together to solve a problem in our field; it was about identifying YAAH ("yet another academic hardship"), with which we could all hop on board, about which we might pat ourselves on the back, and regarding which we could commiserate. Silly me.

In this, I am a boy. My gut reaction to a discussion of a problem is to consider how that problem might be fixed. Sometimes I am sensitive enough to recognize that fixin isn't what someone is after (not always!), but I still have to stifle that gut reaction.

Even now, I know that this will probably get back to some of the people on that list, who (a) won't recognize my description of the conversation, (b) will resent me for poking fun at YAAH, and/or (c) treat my attempt to speak of our organization as an organization (as opposed to a club or community) as evidence that I'm a socially purposeless, amoral te(a)chnocrat. Don't laugh. That's a near-quote, although not a recent one. And I know that the way to "fix" those reactions is simply to delete this entry before I post it.

Who am I kidding, though? Most of them will just glide on past, and in six months or a year, the issue will come up again, and they'll run the cycle of permissible responses, and that'll be that. And who knows? Maybe I'll bring my arsenal of doom along again...

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:58 AM | Comments (5)

March 11, 2004

Hit Song Science

I just picked up Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open, and started it last night, so maybe I'm just sensitive to these sorts of stories. There's a company called Polyphonic HMI, which claims to be able to determine the hit-ness of a song:

Well, much of what attracts us to a particular song is found in the basic structure of the music. Particular rhythms, changes in key and certain melodic patterns define the psychological and very human response we all have to music.

Polyphonic HMI has developed proprietary music analysis technologies capable of identifying music preferences of a user or the whole current recorded music market and intelligently selecting music to recommend to the user or to release as a single.

If this idea sounds familiar, then maybe you've read Melissa Scott's 2000 book The Jazz, although the "science" in her book was proprietary software owned by a Hollywood studio, used to edit movies for success. Even so, the deja vu here is a little creepy. And I have to admit, I'm curious to hear Anastacia's "Left Outside Alone," which is allegedly the first song to be released after having gone through the HSS process ("Allegedly" bc, if there were others, and they weren't hits, how would we really know? Tree, forest, no one to hear it...). Mike McCready, Polyphonic HMI's CEO, sounds appropriately modest:

"Hit Song Science does not take the place of golden ears and gut instinct. Much like the x-ray machine is a tool that gives doctors objective and scientific information about the body, HSS is a tool that allows artists, producers and music industry executives the ability to see their music and their markets in ways that were previously impossible."

Much like a mixed metaphor, this faulty analogy is wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to start counting. But if you think pop music is generic now, just you wait. Just. You. Wait.

[via Metafilter]

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:56 PM | Comments (1)