Week 5: Web 2.0

Some key terms we will discuss during this session:
hypertext
hypermedia
web 2.0
network as platform

Required Readings: Tim O'Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?” Michael Wesch, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,”




Q1. How have new media technologies resulted in a more participatory media culture? Give examples of
audience participation and contrast with other theories of the role of the audience. You may refer with examples from your experience at work and at home as you respond to this question.
Q2. How does the shortened character usage (140) of Twitter affect narrative?
Q3. Can Facebook status updates be considered a new form of narrative? Why? Examples?
Q4. What would you say is the greatest impact of web 2.0 technologies on publishing?
Q5. Web 2.0 denotes a shift from “passive use” to “active participation.” If web 2.0 does away with roles of the producer, consumer and end user, where is the text? What is the product? Who is the author?

The History of Podcasts

Ok, not quite the history of podcasts but I thought in light of the recent musings on the creative endeavour of designing and producing your (first) podcasts, you would all appreciate this:

Image via Rick Vaicius.

Occupy Publishing

There's been a bit of discussion on Google+ (John Baez - Jan 30, 2012) on the future of costly scientific journals. As print fades into history, there is no reason why scientists cannot have a system where their so-called pre-publications (e.g. on arXiv.org, a current source for many of these) can be reviewed, and with revisions acceptable to a peer community be qualified as being designated as published.

Proposal: arXiv.org continues as it is and some group createsarXiv-Review.org (completely independent of arXiv.org) that accomplishes the intended goal of reviewing the articles ofarXiv.org. When an article on arXiv.org gets a pass from thearXiv-Review.org scientific peer community, it's designated aspublished.

(The problem, as has been pointed out, is for some group to actually go and create arXiv-Review.org.)

What would be the result? A free and open article submission and access system as it exists now (arXiv.org) and a independent review system (arXiv-Review.org).



Update (2012-02-02): Looks like the site has been created.

networksolutions.com/whois-search/arXiv-Review.org:
Domain Name: ARXIV-REVIEW.ORG
Created On: 02-Feb-2012 03:35:26 UTC

(There's also a Google+ Page: +ArXiv Review)

The first step is to provide a Primer and Goals and Mission Statement for the site (along the lines of arXiv.org/help/primer).


Here is a start:

arXiv-Review.org 

arXiv-Review is an openly accessible, moderated forum for commenting on and reviewing arXiv.org articles. (For information about arXiv, see arXiv.org/help/primer). To provide for this, each article submitted to arXiv can potentially have a review thread in arXiv-Review for comments and reviews. 

Each review thread in arXiv-Review is identified by following the same reference scheme described inarxiv.org/help/faq/references. For example, corresponding to arXiv:math/9910001v1 <http://arXiv.org/abs/math/9910001v1> is a potential review thread arXiv-Review:math/9910001v1 <http://arXiv-Review.org/rev/math/9910001v1>.

Browsing arXiv-Review is open to everyone (the "readers"). Those who comment on and review articles (the "reviewers") must register on arXiv-Review. In addition, a reviewer may be a member of a select "board" (TBD) on arXiv-Review (and this identification will indicated). 

arXiv-Review system for evaluating arXiv articles: TBD.

arXiv-Review sponsors and operators: TBD!



Notes
1. See also: Proposal for A New Publishing Model in Computer Science, Yann LeCun.
2. Elsevier's Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke - Forbes. Remarks on Google+: John Baez - Feb 1, 2012 


From Occupy Publishing.

Cruisin' on a textual afternoon

I found the Aarseth reading a tough go, and was frankly baffled by some of the distinctions drawn - e.g. between text and script. (My graphic design background is probably tripping me up here, as these terms are used differently than in literary theory, apparently.) However, in the end I found that Aarseth had given me a framework for looking at the many issues around nonlinearity, multilinearity, and dynamic text. (Please forgive my possible misuse of these terms!)

I particularly appreciated Aarseth's point that "electronic text . . . is still a text" and that the divide between electronic and paper is not as meaningful as the divide between linearity and nonlinearity - what Aarseth refers to as "topology". Aarseth's other variates: dynamics, determinability, transiency, maneuverability, and user-functionality are all useful to me when I look at a nonlinear text.

As an example, when I view/read Cruisin', I can see that the text is dynamic and transient, but not particularly maneuverable. I can also see that as the reader/listener I don't have a role-playing function, but I do have a configurative function in that I can affect the size and speed of the display of text. Jarett raised the issue of gaming environments in another post. Gaming has the potential to lead the reader/participant into all four of the user-functionalities: explorative, role-playing, configurative, and poetic. No wonder gamers find their environments so rich and compelling.

I found myself really fascinated by the concept of the I Ching, with its non-linear form that allows readers/users to be "agents" of the text. Aarseth's statement that "the understanding (beyond trivial) of a nonlinear text can never be a consummate understanding . . . it cannot be read, only glimpsed and guessed at" rings as true for many new media texts as it does for the I Ching.

Taking Nothing for Granted

 Well, it’s reassuring that someone as smart as Aarseth complains of being “dead sure that important things were being whispered just beyond my hearing” (p. 772) while “riding the link stream” (p. 771). As I scramble to find information on Moodle and in the ebrary, I console myself that you’re not being paranoid if people are actually talking about you. I know I’m missing information and spending way too much time trying to locate the landmarks that I’ve been told exist but cannot find. I could relate to the Jackson quote in Laccetti’s work, where she says that "hypertext does not provide so much courtly guidance across the intellectual terrain, but catapults you from spot to spot." Broken links abound this week, including the one to week four’s lecture notes on PowerPoint - NMN Lecture 4: Narrative Theory and Temporality.

The “intertwingling” of animation, streaming video, motion, layering, and text/textons etc. is truly, as Marsh says, literary performance. Is it the death of text as we know it?

Not only the death of text as we know it, but what about the poor recipient of this richness? Are we a reader/spectator/participant/agent of the text/eyes in the path of the text/witness/narrator-narratee or an intertwingling of all of the above in a sort of death of a singular identity? We journey into a world where to be literate, we must be transliterate. We become a cybernetic user/reader/narrator/critic/gamer and those who used to write and illustrate their writings with sketches in the margins will use images and video and music and textual juxtapositions to create their works.

I wonder, too, if time based narrative wasn’t always a bit of a fiction? When there is a paper book that I like, I often dip into its narrative stream randomly and re-read bits of the story. We impose our own timelines and organization onto any information around us, whether it’s using a music cue to turn our attention back to a TV program or scanning the headlines and jumping to the comic section on a Sunday morning. Maybe it has always been about “perpetually unfinished textuality” as Landow said (Laccetti, 2008).  

When I talk to clients, one of the most important pieces of information they can give me is who they believe is in their audience and that question arose for me as I read this week. It’s a good question for the creators of literary performance. They’re on the edges of usability, but what they do is instructive for the journeyman writer, too. I’m working with a design firm on a website for a charity I volunteer at. Thinking about the information as different narrative streams is helpful when thinking about the users of the site, who may not always keep two things in mind at the same time. So if I want them to donate (Please!), keeping elements and reminders of the mission on the same page as the info on how to give will be useful. As Aarseth said about MUDS, information on the web is “like constantly meandering rivers, developing new courses that cross and re-cross each other and are filled with all sorts of peculiar flotsam and jetsam” (p. 776).

Björk brings non-linearity to the text of music

Icelandic musician and artist Björk has released her latest album Biophilia as an iPad app. Every song, and the album itself, has levels of interactivity integrated into the music, text, sound and visualizations. Users are able to interrupt, distort or add to the songs as they play. While much of our reading has focused on using hypertext to distort the linearity of text, this application allows for the distortion of the linearity of music - seemingly a first for a world-wide popular and successful professional musician.

Bjork describes the project well in terms of how it uses hypertext to allow for interaction. "Much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch, such as the one phenomena that is said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound," she says on the front page of her website Bjork.com. "With Biophilia comes a restless curiousity, an urge to investigate and discover the illusive places where we meet nature. So too can we use technology to make visible much of what is not visible in our natural world."

This type of installation seems to be right in line with the notion of stereographic plurality discussed by Marsch. He says, "creative hypermedia installations combine at least two (for now) modes of sense experience: sight and sound" (paragraph 10). While I enjoyed Ankerson and Sapnar's Cruising and it does elicit a sense of stereographic plurality, I'm not sure whether it qualifies as non-linear. Espen Aarseth says, "A nonlinear text is a work that does not present its scriptions in one fixed sentence, whether temporal or spatial. Instead, through cybernetic agency (the user[s], the text, or both), an arbitrary sequence emerges" (p. 767). While there are many ways to play with how the user experiences Cruising, I would suggest that no manipulation results in an alternative sequencing.

Here are some videos that help illustrate what is being done by Bjork in Biophilia:

My introduction to nonlinear novels

In my undergrad, I was introduced to postmodern art and literature during an English class. After reviewing classics such as Heartof Darkness and best-sellers such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, my professor described a novel that was composed of a set of loose pages contained in a box. Readers could begin reading the non-linear novel by picking up any page and could shuffle them into a new order at any point. This unstructured narrative struck a chord for me. How could you read a book like that? Would you be able to understand it? Was it written differently because of its format? I was instantly intrigued.

Although I regularly skip to the final chapter of a book to learn what happens, I still return to the section and continue reading, secure in my knowledge that my favourite characters would survive. But to start a story in the middle and then try to piece it together piece-by-piece seemed like an interesting challenge. Sadly, I lost the name of the novel. 

Now that I’m learning more about nonlinear writing, I searched out the book he mentioned. As far as I can tell, the book was Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta. Composition No. 1 is written on 150 pages that are three-quarters filled with text. As noted on this article “Maybe You Should Start Again” from 3:AM Magazine, “each page is both in a sense complete in itself and part of a larger narrative that unfolds differently for each reader depending on the order of the pages,” (p. 1). The author explains that The Unfortunates where the random nature of the middle portions replicate the fragmentary nature of memory and make little difference what order they are read.

Cruisin' fast or slow...

I have viewed/listened to/read both Cruise and These Waves of Girls.  

Cruising  seems more linear to me as there is a beginning to the poem and it follows a straight path. I was engaged by the multi-modality of the presentation – by the music and by the fact that I could alter the speed of the text and the size of the images with the mouse.  By the time I had it figured out, (because I wanted to read the text at the same time she was saying the words) it was part way done so at the end I waited to see what would happen and eventually it started again.

The voice of the narrator was also captivating and I could see the teenagers hanging out in the parking lot.  Maybe because when I was growing up we lived in a house on one of the main ‘drags’  in a small town. We used to sit on the front porch and watch the same cars go back and forth.  Out of sight, I imagine many did ‘hook up’ and talk in one of the town parking lots.

In fact, reading this particular piece of writing in this manner probably caught my attention much more than if I had read the poem in a magazine or book.  The feelings she was trying to capture of this moment of time in a small town teen’s life were conveyed with the combination of her voice, the music and the black and while scrolling images.  

The multi-modality also helps tell the story. If you chose to speed up the images and the text, there is another message here about time and how fast it moves – something you don’t realize when you are a teen who had not left the borders of the town yet.

I found These Waves of Girls was multi-linear. It engages the reader who must help determine the story path by selecting which hyperlink to follow.  As I made more choices and read more selections, I began to get a sense of the story line and was able to put what I was reading into context. It made me work a little more to get to that point and I can see how that might be more engaging for some.  It made reading the story ‘more interesting’.

I realize also I am a chronological thinker…what comes first, comes first, then second etc. I am not sure how long I would stay with a story like this or want to read too many like it.  It does require patience from the reader, but I admit it held a level of intrigue, as in, I wonder where this link will take me?

Digital Literacy and Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQXiZHiwGbE

OMG. You have to watch this. Sheldon and Amy's first attempt at podcasting. We are not alone.