My Presentation

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Abstract

My project is to further explore the space between virtual and the real. The idea is to capture moments of information as it grows and or collides through discovery and experience. My experience is just as much a part of the concept as collecting the experiences of others in attempt to identify some shared use or value of the virtual space Second Life.

This is a documentation of an attempt to demonstrate shared experiences and uses of virtual space. Be it as a social aid in identity building or a pallet for possible objects that can enter the real world.

My questions is how does the virtual inform the actual? How do we play at possibility in order to have experiences that our physical selves could not have? How does experience become information and further effect the world we live in and the way we shape it?

In the spirit of freeing information in ways that we see it happen in the virtual worlds, my presentation will attempt let information remain free using the format of autoethnography and hypertext in the form of an oral presentation. Rather than force the findings into a format, I will instead follow and document the information as it occurs so that we can see the evolution of an idea and leave the possibility of conclusions open.

An interactive gossip game: Tracking popular culture - Who cares about what and why

I think it would be interesting to create a site with limited information so that it is easy to trace the transitions of the information.

The website would consist of the 5 top news articles of that week all based on different sorts of topics Politics, Fashion, Celebrities, World News, Sports. Then connect these articles to a network of people with profiles so that we can see who they are and possibly better determine why they might be interested in the information they are selecting.

The point of the site would be to gossip, to pass the information on to other people who they think would be interested in knowing these particular bits of information. One precurser would be that, in order to pass the information the sender has to comment on it adding their opinions and thoughts on the situation. This way you can trace how and idea about information becomes influenced as it passes through social networks.

Does the reaction to the information grow into something?
What cultural indications are apparent in looking at reactions to information and how it is processed?

Because you are letting the information move randomly based on human interest you will be able to see initial reactions to information and the same information as it is passed on. Hopefully the same people who are on the receiving end of information will also participate and initiate the passing of information. In which case you can see how a specific person reacts and takes in information while also seeing how they pass on information.

The entire world exists only in order to be televised.

Reading Notes:

In reference to cybernetic theory Shaviro points out that, “networks are self generating, self organizing, self sustaining systems.” (P.10)

Then he shows a relation between this idea and the algebra of need; “Total need guarantees total participation; and total participation means total subjection.”(11)

The point made about there being no panopticon in this day and age but rather surveillance that is not placed in one specific location or by one specific viewer is fascinating to me.

The argument is made that the cameras are not their to catch people doing wrong but rather to deter it. Just by the mere presence of surveillance we are regulating ourselves into better behavior.

Earlier in the reading Shapiro says that television persuades and cajoles us into doing the work of policing ourselves. It creates dialogue and participation.

Reading Response:

All of these ideas make me think about the state of society, as we know it today. In many of the conversations I have had with peers in the past few years several people have expressed the sentiment to me that they feel like their lives are being watched, that their lives are leading to something climactic or straight out that their life should be a television show.

Many people seem to have this sense that their life is worthy of examination or discourse be it through television or participation in online networks. I think that’s really what websites like facebook and myspace are about. And in a sense we begin to live our lives as if we were stars of our own production. While it wasn’t mentioned in the reading these are examples that came to mind in reading this analysis of new media networks.

Many people say that myspace is addictive. Shaviro hits it on the nose in his algebra of need, the need really going two ways. Our need to constantly reference who we are and our identities through who we know, what we listen to, what we read, what our interest are etc. and the networks need to exist which is always based on advertisements and essentially the system of a capitalistic free market.

Shaviro is right in saying that these mediums are inescapable. I have gone through periods of no longer wanting to participate in “the media” so to speak. What ends up happening is you become a social leper. When you extract yourself from the media network you extract yourself from the human network because we have come to the conclusion that this is how we will interact with each other in a general sense.

I had an uncomfortable moment this week where I was on a date and the guy I was out with was making references to pop culture left and right. Out of the 20-30 names that were dropped I think I knew about 5 of them. Interestingly enough in the context of dating or courtship, a basic human interaction since forever, I now need to know certain kinds of information to connect with someone and possibly someday find a mate, to in fact self generate myself (i.e. procreate).

It was clear that my date was disappointed in that fact that I wasn’t impressed with all the people he knows because I was not participating in that network and our connection suffered because of it. I now feel like, if I ever go out with him again I should prep myself by watching ESPN for an hour, or listening to the Wendy Williams gossip radio show before we interact again.

Pop references aren’t the only networks out there but the idea is it seems like information now is a key element in how we relate to one another even in the most basic is natural ways. Everything is mediated.

Reading Response Four

Both of these readings get at the idea that we are complex beings who need more complex modes of communication otherwise we are just lying to ourselves or at least not getting to the full nature of things as they actually are. The reality is we are complicated and so is everything else. To simplify only blinds us to what more there is out the to understand.

“The boundaries between genres and disciplines keep people dumb and inflexible and make them careerist of the imagination. You can’t let other people decide what is important to write or think about. Other people are wrong. This is a good rule of thumb. (But also keep in mind that you are someone else’s “other people.”)

“Language must be teased into displaying its entire madcap lavish beauty. If you let it be serviceable then it will only serve you, never master you, and you will only write what you already know, which is not much.”

- Shelly Jackson

The Jackson reading seemed to make more of an argument for why common modes don’t work, where they fail and how Hypertext as a solution can help us gain stronger and pos sibyl more honest understandings of ourselves and the context in which we live. I liked her take on things but found her argument limited in her tactic of comparing the way things are and how much better they will be with the use of hypertext as a better way of understanding. The chapter over all left me wanting to know, how hypertext works. Theoretically though, the argument is strong the ideas sound right, but I’d like to see evidence that is actually is. In some ways it seems like gaining and understanding of hypertext through comparison shallows the focus a bit to one way of understanding it. It leaves me wonder how you would defend hypertext as an entity in and of itself. I think that Jackson would argue that nothing is in and of itself, but for some reason I still feel that that us an argument that needs to be stated.

Much like the autoethnography piece, Jackson employ her own tactics in the text itself by focusing on relationships, in this case the disjuncture between established modes of communication and perception and the possibilities that hypertext proposes. In this sense I was won over by the idea of hypertext in the way that I was engaged with the reading more so than with a basic academic text, I found it entertaining yet enlightening and felt as if I were have a conversation more so than reading a text.

Where Jackson left questions Hillis seemed to fill them in. His discussion on middle voice and middle ground speak to this notion that there are spaces and points of connection that are hard to define; yet we still find ways to get at them.

Middle Voice: reveals a subjectivity that that seemingly emanates from a time or space situated between the author and the characters he or she crafts. There is a lack of acknowledgement of either author or character causing the reader to identify with what is being said more.

Free indirect discourse allows an author to attempt to give voice to what is at the threshold of imagination as oppose to what dare not be said. In this sense it may speak more of the ineffable and constitute a nascent effort on the part of the author to symbolize or actualize that, which is still virtual, incipient, not fully thought.

Middle Ground: lies between an embodied user this side of the screen and any other individual she or he may connect with through its use.

As a virtual spatial strategy, telepresence relies on and promotes a flexible theory of subjectivity also evident in the novel’s middle voice; telepresence is neither fully here nor fully there, yet both at once.

The concepts mention above are actually existing examples of the kinds of ideas that Jackson talks about in her article. Hillis really gets at the heart of it fore me in a more substantial way though. In a sense I’d love to grasp the notion of hypertext more fully but the reality is I have been trained to learn in this particular way and breaking from that feels like I’m missing something.

When Jackson talks about the boundaries of our bodies and alludes to the notion that we exceed our physical barrier in a sense. She actually says, “Hypertext is the banished body – It’s not opinions I’m interested in, but relationships, juxtapositions, apparitions and interpolations.”

So okay that’s nice, but what exactly does that mean? Hillis presents the avatar as an actual thing that we have created that exemplifies this notion that Jackson speaks of. With an avatar and multiple avatars we can exercise our multiple selves (our complexities) in a virtual space.

Telepresence, as mentioned earlier is also a subject in Jackson piece. She says, “In the no-place of hypertext, there’s finally room to move around, like an orifice I can fit my whole body into, instead of just my finger or my pen.” Telepresence happens in virtual space, a space of partial imagination and partial reality yet infinite and no placed anywhere physically.

Overall I get the strange sense the hypertext debates kind of happen in a vacuum where these arguments come form nowhere or no place. They do mean something, as Jackson stated and that is why I am in favor of implementing more hypertext discourse into our modes of learning BUT the way that they mean something are in there manifestations in the real world. The imaginary realm is great and a lot can be learned form it, but we do exist in a physical world where things like force and impact totally exist.

Reading Response Three

All of these readings seem to speak between tensions between certain trains of thought and understanding.

Accounting for System Behavior (Dourish):

“A clear tension exists between the traditional process-oriented view of interface design and the emerging improvisation-oriented view of interface activity, which arises particularly from sociological investigations of computer based work.”

How to make sociological insight “real” in computational design.

Context (Dourish):
HCI and
(1) The mutual relationship between physical form and activity (affects on patterns of Interaction)
(2) Computation as sensitive and responsive to its setting

The tension between the human sociological formations of context and how a computer might begin to simulate that, if it’s even possible.

What I found most useful in these readings was the break down of the different areas of theory in the social sciences.

Positivist Theories: Derived from the rational, empirical, scientific tradition, seek to reduce social phenomena to essences or simplified models to capture underlying patterns. Qualitative or mathematical in nature.

Critical Theories: The nature of human existence is a product of social and economic conditions which themselves reflect the historical distribution of power and control in society,

Phenomenological: Social facts are emergent properties of interactions, not pre-given or absolute but negotiated, contested and subject to continual processes of interpretation and reinterpretation. Turing away from the idea of a stable external world that is unproblematicaly recognized by all, and towards the idea that the world, as we perceive it, is essentially a consensus of interpretation.

This point of view can help us avoid issues like double bind theory and the many pathologies that we face personally and socially because it gives light to the many variables at play in how we build and understanding of the world around us, as well as how unfixed they are.

This comes into play more precisely in the idea of how we develop a notion of context. Context defined in this article by Schilit states:

“Context encompasses more than just the user’s location, because other things of interest are also mobile and changing. Context included lighting, noise level, network, connectivity, communication costs, communication bandwidth and even social situation.”

This situation presented here is two fold. We must first understand how we perceive and how our understanding of context is built before we can build technologies that also perceive in a useful way.

Use to Presence (Hallnas & Redstrom):

“When computer systems change from being tools for specific uses to everyday things present in our lives, we have to change focus from design for efficient use, to design for meaningful presence.”

What does it mean for a computer to disappear in a phenomenological sense?

This speaks again to the notion of how we perceive which brings the authors into a discussion of expressions and aesthetics. But once again we must first evaluate how we perceive tools that are already part of our living world. The argument stated here is that we take these things for granted and we don’t necessarily perceive them but rather except them as a part of our lives that will always be there, i.e. taking these object for granted.

All of this speaks to the ides of human complexity. We develop technology to enhance ourselves, to become super human, to move through the world with ease, but this transition forces us to better understand ourselves first. It is an interesting interplay between building from understanding. But what happens if our understanding is skewed or narrow sighted, then what are we building exactly and how is it affecting us?

Surveillance and Capture (Agre):

I really found this article enlightening in the sense that it completely focuses on technology’s effects on our sociology and the reverse. The idea that Surveillance in a social phenomena, that it is socially constructed and he also lends a moment in the article towards our critical understandings of these concepts often facilitated in literature such as Orwell.

This really makes me think about the role that the arts play in our development as far as better understanding ourselves as individuals and our role in the relationships and agreements that build social constructs. Arts provide a space to reflect on these issues and better understand them. What I’ve seen in the articles that we have read is that there is a disconnect between this understanding of ourselves in this way and the development of technology. It seems that the arts may be a way of bridging this gap.

Reading Response Two

Notes:

Autoethnography: “The researcher’s own experience a topic of investigation in its own right.”

“I start with my personal life. I pay attention to my physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions. I use what I call systematic sociological introspection and emotional recall to try to understand an experience I’ve lived through.”(737)

The affect of academic writing: The “third person passive voice gives the feeling that the work is written from nowhere written by nobody.”

Autoethnography asks readers to “think with our story instead of about it.”

The argument seems to be that through discursive writing we are able to remain critical and find more useful forms of knowledge that can blend in with our personalized ways of knowing rather than bog us down into one particular train of thought.

Other points on autoethnography:

To show us how partial and situated our understanding of the world is
To encourage compassion and promote dialogue
To be an agent of self-understanding and ethical discussion

The three axes of autoethnography:
“Emphasis on the research process (graphy), on culture (ethnos), and on self (auto).”

Questions that arose for me:

How does this concept apply to documentary? Has this technique been implemented in documentary structure and if so what are some examples?

Something that also comes to mind is reality TV, the way that it is passed off as reality with out acknowledging authorship. An interesting model that I haven’t seen in this genre is where the subjects film themselves and each other in a real world setting. It would be interesting to see how acknowledgement of authorship would affect the content. Another huge factor in the dissemination of information regarding television and film is editing which speaks to how what’s being shown is chosen and who chooses it. This also speaks to authorship or the development of information and our hand in molding it. In the model I am thinking of it would also be interesting to see what happens if each member of the project makes there own editorial decision on how the story should be laid out for viewers, where each participants version of the experience is shown.

I also noticed a repeated mention of the connection between autoethnography as a tool in feminist text and often related to being a popular form among women. I too find this to be a completely viable form from of academic writing from which we can learn a lot but I am a woman. I wonder if the basic form of academic essay writing is still useful in a gendered sense. Perhaps men receive and disburse information in this particular way while it may be better for women to receive and disburse information in the from of autoethnography. This is just a postulation, but it there are biologic al differences in human experience that also need to be addressed when trying to reach a level of understanding amongst ourselves. Regardless we need to diversify our ways of knowing, as humans we are capable of gaining new understanding in many different ways and we should tap into all of them.

Notes from last weeks presentation: Reading Response One

These reading seem to discuss three main elements. Power, Control and technology.

In Technology we seem to have a lot of possibility for empowering ourselves as human beings as well as for social movement, development and in some cases change (for better or for worse).

The idea’s proposed in the Rheingold readings are suggestions to the possibilities that can occur through the integration of technology out of the basic computer form and into other forms that identify with and correspond to human need such as:

(The Era of Sentient Things)

Smart Things (responsive/pervasive technologies)
Wearable Computing
Web Signs (locationall information)
Intelligent Cities
Phicons (tangible bits)

He also speaks to the idea of wireless networking and its many current capabilities and possibilities:

(Wireless Quilts)

WiFi or 802.11b
Wireless Guerilla Movements
Tool Sharing
Dense Packet Radio Networks
Ad-hoc-peer to peer networks or Mesh Networks (Device driven WiFi connections)
Bluetooth

**********(Show examples of new technologies here)*************

Earthlike computer skin/ Invisible computers/ Situation aware and assistance oriented

Possibilities expressed as Pro’s

Gaining knowledge about the world you walk through and connect with groups who can benefit you.

Extending Human Capabilities

Free people by embedding the means to solve problems in the things around us

Independence (?) page 108 Sentient things

Maximizing public space with wireless networks (NYCWireless)

Netwars (168 Smart Mobs)

Possibilities Expressed as Con’s

“If the computational system is invisible as well as extensive, it becomes hard to know what is controlling what, what is connected to what, where information is flowing, how it is being used, what is broken (versus what is working correctly, but not helpfully), and what are the consequences of any given action (including simply walking into a room).”

Mark Weiser, page 87 (The Era of Sentient Things)

Who owns access to your devices, either to push information at you or to pull information from you?

Electronic Control that we are evermore subject to and unaware of (?) page 108 Sentient things

Netwars (168 Smart Mobs)

Development Smart Mobs based on anything ranging from potential match sites, communities of interest, peer-to-peer journalism, social middleware (ad-hoc)

Actual Definition: A new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication, reputation, and location awareness.

Forces that will determine the development of technology

Political Policies regarding access and use(FCC, internet law) page 137 Wireless Quilts
Limited space (WiFi) or better more efficient devices for sending and receiving signals
Design Decisions
Corporate priority, investments by telephone companies, commercialism
Social movement and need
Military need and warfare

**************(Shoe they live part 2 and part 4)*****************

The Cell Phone
Chapter 4

Personal Ownership comes across in two ways: reaction to loss and its incorporation as style.

Signifier
Enhancing quality of life (mechanism and gimmicks)
Actual conversation
Text/Picture Messaging

Negotiation of public and private space
Ability to communicate in a dualistic manner
An extension of the self, as tool and signifier of individuality and status

Chapter 5

Facilitating life events, prolonging relationships
Migration
Relationships
Transnational
Advantages of Intimacy and distance

Discussion:

The main discussion that these readings provoke involve enhancement of life from an individual level (cyborgs) to a logistical day to day level (smart things) to a societal level (wifi movement). There are several arguments within these readings regarding what approach we should take towards these new enhancements as far as design elements and how this will affect issues of privacy and control. Another argument was what sort of policies should be enforced to make sure these new powers or extensions of ourselves do not get out of hand.

Really what it comes down to is what should the agenda be for these new capabilities?

Who should be in charge of them, or how should they be managed?

How will access be provided to these new capabilities?

Is individual enhancement more important than societal enhancement or are they equally important?

Virtual Masturbation and Hallucinations

Unfortunately I have not been able to blogg each time I have used Second Life so far, so I will have to consolidate.

The first time I signed on to SL I found it to be unnerving. Something about having a life like avatar makes this experience different than other online community experiences. When strangers approached me I found it to be weird and actually signed off after the first 5 minutes.

The second time I signed on I forced myself to stick it out. I teleported to Cote De Azure, it became immediately clear the importance of the Linden, as far as purchasing experiences and updating ones avatar to make it look more "normal." I visited Dance Island, which was a lot of fun, but again didn’t have money to purchase a dance code.
I also took a moment to drive a car, at which point two strangers hoped in and later propositioned me for a three way. Being a novice it was unclear to me how avatars can have a sex. Please keep in mind I was wearing a raccoon/squirrel costume. Perhaps this is some sort of indication of sexual prowess. Anyways, when I asked them (it was a man and a woman) what the point of sex was in SL, they left the room.

Later through further travels I found a lux mansion with a beautiful bed and two love buttons. I pressed one to find that my avatar is capable of "loving." Unfortunately my avatar had no company at the time. I experimented with the "love" capabilities, which range up to "get freaky." Eventually I may want to find a partner to experiment with.

The next time I tried SL I got locked in a sex dungeon for a day, completely on accident. It looked like a castle on the outside, but when I got in there were crazy chains and stretchers with handcuffs and ankle cuffs. I think there was some technical error with my computer. It was extremely frustrating being locked in a room with a giant round zebra skinned couch with buttons like “ride her” and “slam her.” I signed out and signed back in a few days later and was finally able to teleport out.

I also participated in our class meeting last weekend. Up until this point the whole experience felt somewhat debaucherous and downright sinful. The professor showed us more practical and perhaps less self-indulgent uses for this program. We explored Venice Beach and viewed an art gallery with really great political art. I bought a comic book about Darfur. I also received a link to Burning Life, a replica of Burning Man it seems. That was an amazing experience with moirés that you can walk into and perceive from the inside out causing a hallucinatory effect. Unfortunately again, no one was there so I was unable to share the experience. I will definitely be revisiting that location.

My main finding thus far and part of my uneasiness about the whole experience is my inability to control my emotions as I experience this virtual space. While understanding that it is not real, logically my psyche reacts as if it were. When approached for a three-way I was literally appalled and found myself running away from the couple. Later the next day walking down the street in RL I felt an odd sense of disembodiment if you will. As if what I was viewing was not my experience. The likeness of movement on SL to real life basically trips me out. However I have found that the more I use it, the less strange it becomes. As far as the experiences and reacting to them, I have found more productive ways to experience SL, such as the art gallery. I am interested in checking out more activism on second life and seeing how those experiences would pan out I am also interested in what sexuality means in this space.