Assignment 3 - Transliteracy, Time, Etc.,

It's a little ironic that a trans-illiterate like me -- I bring a basic inability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media, or, at least, I can't trying to do so hit a deadline -- tried to use the lens of  transliteracy to see an aspect of my final project a little more clearly.

There is a section of Eliot's Little Gidding that has never left me. That's not because I understand it, but, rather, because I, as a communications student,  would like to.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.


This point of intersection across time where communication happens has always attracted me. And, so, it was a bit of water in the desert when I started reading that transliteracy is "not just about computer-based materials, but about all communication types across time and culture" (Thomas et al., December 2007, p. 3). 


I admit that I am taking from the concept of transliteracy only what I can understand, and, perhaps, am warping it for my purposes, but I believe that the intersection of time past and time present is what my final project (the Duckett Cookie Monster episode) is all about.

References

CTV News Edmonton. November 19, 2010. "Stephen Duckett's Cookie Exchange with Edmonton media." YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DxeCK5Ne_Q

Lessig, L. 2008. Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: The Penguin Press.


Thomas, S., Joseph, C., Laccetti, J., Mason, B., Mills, S., Perril, S., & Pullinger, K. December 2007. Transliteracy: Crossing divides. In First Monday 12 (3), pp. 1-18. 

Assignment 2, Part 1

Collective Action: A long, long time ago


In its January, 2011 edition, Newsweek published online a list of dying cities in the United States, a survey based, in part, on census figures that showed which urban centres were most quickly losing their young people to economic possibilities elsewhere. The original article

The article pointed out that “Michigan dominates much of this list, with several cities experiencing significant decline in population as the state suffered high unemployment rates and above average foreclosures in recent years due mainly to the collapse of the auto industry.” Over the period of 2000-2009, for instance, Grand Rapids suffered a 2.1 per cent population drop, and, most significantly, a 2.2 per cent popluation decline in the under-18 cohort.

For that, Grand Rapids landed the 10th position in the Newsweek poll. Predictably, the ranking drew fire from the usual political and economic leaders, typical of which was an online letter sent by the mayor:  http://therapidian.org/dear-newsweek.

Unpredictably, a pair of 22-year-old Grand Rapidians from the local video-music-production set, Rob Bliss and Scott Erickson, fired up their imaginations and produced what Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert would call the greatest music video ever made.

It was the Grand Rapids LipDub, a reported one-shot, eight-minute plus tour of Grand Rapids featuring about 5,000 people lip syncing to Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a song, like the city, you may think you know.

At this writing, its main YouTube page had drawn 4,602,287 views. It is a visual feast of marching bands, parades, pillow fights, weddings, football practices, cheerleaders, exploding bridges, acoustic guitars, helicopter aerials and a closing shot that celebrates text. Try to watch it without shaking your head in amazement at the exuberance and collective effort asked for and delivered. You can’t.

Erickson, who was still 18 years away from being born when “American Pie” was released, told WGVU’s West Michigan Week current affairs television broadcast that “the Grand Rapids lip dub video is a memorial and testament to how open and wonderful the community of Grand Rapids is. Not just its inhabitants, but its local government.” And, speaking of his creative partner, that “Rob wanted a song with a lot of visual imagery. To paraphrase what he tells people, it has very colourful lyrics, it is an all-American song, and it communicates a lot of cool ideas that he wanted to draw from.”

In this space, I would like to briefly venture out and make some tentative observations about what is going on, other than the the actual lip dub, in the lip dub video.

1.  Collective Action. In his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky (2008) explains that new technology, including YouTube, enables new kinds of group-forming: “The core idea is the same: we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations” (pp. 20-21).

It is worth remembering that Bliss and Erickson did not write a letter or take their displeasure about the Newsweek article to Newsweek or WGVU or the Chicago Sun-Times. They went to YouTube.

And they went to YouTube with an example of what Shirky has in mind when he distinguishes collective action from collaborative production, cooperation and sharing (the mayor’s letter, for instance), elements of which are also visible in the LipDip effort and anti-Newsweek effort. Collective action, Shirky says, is the most difficult kind of group effort to achieve because it demands that “a group of people...commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.”

In historical terms, a potluck dinner or a barn raising is collaborative production (the members work together to create something), while a union or government engages in collective action, action that is undertaken in the name of the members to change something out in the world, often in opposition to other groups committed to different outcomes. (p. 51)

Shirky’s scaffolding helps us build an understanding of how the LipDub project, aimed at changing the impression of Grand Rapids left by the Newsweek ranking, is more than just cool or neat or worth liking, but is, rather, an example of collective action.

2. New Media As Metamedia. Lev Manovich, in the article “New Media from Borges to HTML,” argues that by the 1980s (we observe that this was the decade of the birth of Bliss and and Erickson) there was a recognition that culture had become “more concerned with reworking already existing content, idioms and style, rather than genially creating new ones.” Bliss, although a musician himself, did not write a new song for Grand Rapids, Michigan. Erickson did not produce a new, chamber of commerce style video celebrating the architecture of Grand Rapids. What they devised and created was a collective action video that employed a widely known folk-pop song, developing a new narrative for both it and Grand Rapids in the process.

3. The Media Mind. These guys know what they are doing. In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live And Die In Viral Culture, Bill Wasik, who introduced the mob project to the world, makes us consider that “the relevant actors of so-called consumer-generated media...are every bit as savvy, as ambitious, and as calculating as aspiring culture-makers have ever been.” (11)

In the WGVU interview, Erickson reveals that the idea for the LipDub came first as a frame that had not connection to Newsweek. Only later, once the Newsweek article appeared, did the content get added. Erickson says: “In November of 2010, Rob and I were talking and he said, ‘I kinda wanna do one of those lipdub videos, downtown, with the whole community. And this was actually before the Newsweek article came out. And I was kinda like, okay.”

The Grand Rapids LipDub was an effect waiting for a spark.

Erickson himself makes Wasik’s point in the middle of a paean to the spirit of cooperation in Grand Rapids (the fire department actually recommended the pyrotechnician, Captain Boom!) when he provides some unsolicited autobiography.

In the WGVU interview he says:  “You have to remember, Rob and I are both 22. We are looking forward to our 23rd birthdays this year. And we’re very ambitious [emphasis added] and progressive, I think, in what we want to do professionally. But, at the end of the day, we’re kids who like to blow things up.”

Besides the column of fireworks on the bridge, what they have blown up in the Grand Rapids LipDub video have included old ideas of what collective action looks like.

References

Heartwell, G. K. (2011, January 25). “Dear Newsweek: An open letter from Mayor George K. Heartwell.” The Rapidian [online magazine].

Shirky, C. 2008. Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New    York: Penguin.

“The Grand Rapids LipDub.” (2011, May 26). YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI

“West Michigan Week: LipDub Producer Interview on WGVU.” (2012, February 19). YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0GCgo8tve0

Manovich, L. (2003). New media from Borges to HTML. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. (Eds), The new media reader (pp. 13-25). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Wasik, B. 2009. And then there’s this: How stories live and die in viral culture. New York: Penguin

Assignment 2, part 3

Smart Mobs: Roads Scholarship

For my third smart mob text, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. I at more at home with the arts and the news and the sociology and political science of it all than I am with science, so I went out looking for some science I didn’t really understand. And I found it.

MobEyes: Smart Mobs For Urban Monitoring With A Vehicular Sensor Network is a paper by Uichin Lee et al., that proposes the installation of recording and diffusion software in automobiles, which, thereby, become mobile nodes in a network of data sharing and harvesting.

The authors, who are from UCLA and the University of Bologna, view such a network as possible only because of the ubiquity of mobile wireless devices such as cellphones, PDAs and wi-fi laptops. “Not only do such devices enrich our daily activities, but also create an environment such that epidemics of cooperation can thrive.” (52)

This talk of cooperation echoes Rheingold’s simple defintion of smart mobs as “people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other.” (xii). The diffusion of mobile devices, says Rheingold, “ will help people coordinate actions with others around the world -- and, perhaps more importantly, with people nearby. Groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power, new ways to organize their interactions... . Tomorrow’s fortunes will be made by businesses that find a way to profit from these changes, and yesterday’s fortunes are already being lost by businesses that don’t understand them.” (xii-xiii)

Not surprisingly, the authors trace their inspiration back to Rheingold, who they credit as being the first to name these kinds of cooperated activities as smart mobs, “where people with shared interests/goals can pervasively and seamlessly collaborate using wireless mobile devices.” (52)

As I understand the proposal, MobEyes transmitting and receiving senors would be installed in public and private vehicles that would broadcast packets of information comprised of sensed data, including atmospheric pollution, road conditions, congestion, and licence plate information speed and location, to be analyzed by a central police agency as part of a larger vehicular sensor network that also includes existing surveillance cameras.

(Interestingly, the nouns and pronouns used to describe interaction between data-transmitting vehicles echo those of the human world. “Encounters,” the authors write [emphasis added], “occur when two nodes exhange summaries, that is, when they are within their radio ranges and have a new summary packet to advertise.” (54)

We are asked to imagine MobEyes at work after a terrorist attack in which the criminals have released in an urban environment poisonous chemicals, and then fled in a vehicle. We are asked to assume that other vehicles are equipped with cameras and chemical sensors. “They continuously generate a huge amount of sensed data store and process them locally, and produce short summaries periodically or in an event-driven way, for example, when chemical
readings overcome specified thresholds” (53).


The reader is left to imagine other uses of the MobEyes protocol, and we can easily submit that vehicles equipped with speed sensors could record speeding vehicles more extensively than existing radar traps and photo-radar locations would qualify as an additional use.

And that returns us to the cautionary note that Rheingold hits in all of his smart rob writings. Indeed, something significant is happening with the rapid adoption of multimedia communication. The positives are easy to see. In the case of MobEyes being adopted, police would have more information in real time, and drivers may be persuaded, when a neighbouring vehicle also doubles as a police vehicle, to regulate their speed. Here, Rheingold is a good guide:

Perhaps the most important question about the future of augmenting collective action through the use of the Internet and mobile communication is the degree to which trustworthy and accurate information can be distinguished and screened from misleading, false, missourced information. (237)

To me, this returns the smart mob discussion to ancient questions of what you can trust.


References

Lee, U., Zhou, B., Gerla, M., Magistretti, E., Bellavista, P., & Corradi, A. (October 2006). MobEyes: Smart mobs for a urban monitoring with a vehicular sensor network.” IEEE Wireless Communications, 52-57.

Rheingold, H. (2008). Mobile media and political collective action. In J. E. Katz (Ed.), Handbook of mobile communication studies (pp. 225-237). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rheingold, H. (2003). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

Kony 2012, 597, Lippmann, etc

One of the exhibits I am going to look at for Assignment 2 is the smart mob at work in the movement, called Kony 2012,  that is blazing through the younger set.  (One of the side benefits of this course is how much more I have to talk to my teenaged sons about!) And I wanted to share it myself and start to think out loud about it.

For those who don't know, Joseph Kony is, as a leader of a guerrilla army in Uganda, infamous and notorious for alleged crimes against humanity. But he is not yet famous. And that's what Kony 2012 aims to change. 

Using some of social media best practices, the group has styled its tactics after of a U.S. political campaign's, as it marches toward an April 20th day of international action. If you've got 30 minutes, watch the video! 

Writing in 1921 in Public Opinion, journalist and scholar Walter Lippmann could see the changing contours of the world of communication, even though smart mobs and collective intelligence were phenomena of the future. He tells us world wide press services, photography and moving pictures are "key inventions...for bringing the unseen world into the field of judgment" (177).

I am out of my depth on this  (and haven't finished the book, and am not convinced Lippmann would have been among the utopians of our age)  but this is a crucial development because it attacks an ancient assumption that Lippmann calls "of the utmost consequence." 

And that is that men could give little attention to public questions, and that the attention available would have to be confined to matters close at hand. 

"For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political ideas," he writes. 

I sense that there are some tentative conclusions to reach looking at Kony 2012 with the help of Walter Lippmann. 

It took about a day to get the video 1.8 million views on YouTube, so something is happening. And about to happen.

Sources:

Lippmann, W. (2010). Public opinion. BN Publishing.

The Artist (and The Editor)!

The popularity of The Artist and Hugo in this year's crop of Oscar-nominated films struck me in a new way, thanks to the lens provided by Shillingsburg in From Gutenberg to Google. That book is slow going for me, but some of what he argues sticks. And, while he talks about books and print, I sense that much of his analysis can be transferred to cinema. 

"...I am declaring that new texts cannot be identical to old texts nor fully represent them and that an editor's responsibility is to be as self-aware as possible about the effects of editorial intervention and to be as explicit and articulate as possible about those effects..." (pp.19-20) 

These words, this sensibility echoed when I read  "Is Cinema Facing a Digital Dark Age?", an article from the star.com that found me this morning.

The argument, from Paola Cherchi Usai (learn more about him in this YT video ), is that the process of digitally preserving classic silent picture era films -- a seemingly noble aim that also escapes from the cost of traditional photomechanical methods -- actually betrays the original work of art. 

This is a good example, or, at least, one that I can understand, of the seen and unseen ways that technology may intrude on a text, altering it in the very act of preserving it. 

What's your type?

While we're considering Gutenberg and Google and textuality and whether it's the end of books or what is the end of books, maybe we should let the books speak for themselves?! You may have already seen this, but it's fun! Have a nice weekend.....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYcSrIkVpzM