My problem with cyborgs
I know I'm about to get slaughtered on this post, but i really can't see the creation of "cyborgs" as this great shift toward equality. From what I understand in the Haraway piece, cyborgs can help us break the tyranny of Western dichotomies, right? I disagree. I can't see how we're ever going to break free from the constraints of the linguistic structure that sets up and allows for the dichotomies. Identities are shifting, sure, but their shifting from one thing to another. Hybrids simply take old things and sew them together.
Think about the T-1000 in The Terminator 2. He had the potential to change into anything, but could actually only shift into something he had *touched.* I think that's very telling.
I'm starting to think of major structural/identity shifts as something akin to Stephen Jay Gould's concept of evolution. I know I'm dumbing it down, but from what I understand, Gould thinks that a whole bunch of change occurs all at once due to radical environmental stress, out of which some modifications stick and move forward.
I think the same thing happens to our cultural structure. A radical event happens, such as the invention of the printing press, or the Internet, which sets the stage for change. So far, so good, and I doubt the left would disagree with me so much. However, I seriously doubt they'd agree with this: Whatever change happens occurs in spite of our best efforts, and is quite possibly accidental.
Sure, the printing press allowed for people to more easily disseminate ideas and increased literacy, thus setting the stage for the Enlightenment. But I think we only understand the mechanism in hindsight. I think it just kind of happened. As McLuhan would say, the medium changed things, not the message. I'm not entirely sure how much control we have over what "cyberculture" will do to us, and if we're thinking we're in control, we may do ourselves harm.
The thing about cyberculture that really bothers me (as you can see in previous posts) is that we're essentially at the mercy of programmers. Those who know, understand, and can manipulate the code are the ones in control. Computer code is the new Latin (or French, depending on your epoch.) And there, probably accidentally, is where I think the next major structural shift will come from. It's probably already happening, but we won't know the results for the next fifty years or so.
Where does this leave us? I have no idea. But I think, if I want to stay true to the stuff I just typed, maybe I should go back and start studying Pong.
See y'all in class.
NPR pieces
I just listened to the NPR things. I was reminded of something Ryan said last week, that we only have room in our brain for around 30 close people. Once our 'noggin starts getting crowded, we start kicking things out, I guess. Apparently, our brain isn't the limitless supercomputer we thought it was.
I find it interesting that we choose acting in a virtual world over something important to survival. Don't we experience pain so we know when something bad is happening to our bodies? I wonder what makes the brain short-circuit the survival mechanism to give over processing power to something pleasurable?
I also wonder how this fits in to the "only depressed people overuse the internet" idea. People stay in a virtuall world to avoid the pain of the real world? OK, that's overly simplistic (and trite) but still, there seems to be something there.
Finally, is anyone out there bother by the fact that in a virtual world we need not really fear a potentially benevelont God, but instead fear the all-to-human programmers?
BTW - Second Life: http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2005/07/secondlife/
Second Life, Part Deux
Funny that you mention Second Life. I noticed that the other day when I was trolling through the apple site and thought the same thing. It's a free community now, and somehow, there is an exchange rate for currency earned in the game. I'm not entirely sure how it works, other than that the programmer is a god within an environment of many gods.
Somebody other than me should check this thing out. From what I understand, it's free to download as well as play. Sadly, I cannot run it on my year-old computer. What is this world coming to?
Second Life
I got this from Rocketboom. Remember what Ryan was talking about last week, how it would be cool to have an online house you can invite people to? Second Life does just that. I haven't gotten a chance to play because it costs money, but basically you can create business in this world, make friends, live in your community. It's like the sims but you're playing with real people. Here's the link to the Web site
http://secondlife.com/ For information about it go to
http://www.idealworldmovie.com/
Reporters Without Borders on Blogging. This is really neat!
A friend of mine sent this link to me from Reporters Without Borders. Supposedly, it has helped dissenters in China get their messages out.
Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissindents
Something else
Has anyone ever heard of Machinima? I remember reading about it a few months ago. It's where you take a game, such as Unreal Tournament of The Sims, and use it to create animated movies. Check it out @machinima.com, it might be fodder for discussion as well as a springboard for critique.
What happens when game narratives are translated into other kinds of narrative? With Tomb Raider, could always see Lara Croft onscreen, so in the translation, there are certain visual techniques that could be used to connect the game and the film. However, what about something like Doom? There is a film of this coming out. Does there necessarily have to be first-person shots in the film?
I'm sure there will be, but what I want to know is this: Does there have to be these first-person, POV shots for the film to be satisfying for those who have played the game?
Also, regarding Ms. Pacman: Anyone remember the cartoon for the game? Or the Pac-Man Cereal? If kids are eating the ghost/marshmallows and sugar-pop dots, does that make them Pac-Man? What if they eat the pac-man marshmallow? Does that make them ghosts?
Finally, what about the Pac-Man game where people actually became the Pac-Man, eating virtual dots on a real world overlay by walking through them? Again, specifics are fuzzy, but I think some kind of VR glasses were used.
Stuff I think about before class.
Anyone else get the impression that nobody really knows what's going on in the game world?
Using games to report the news
After reading Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed, I started looking all over the Web for news sites that used games to report certain news events. The closest I came was with sites that created great non-linear stories that allowed the user to pick and choose how he wanted to experience the story.
Frasca argues that videogames are not trivial, but rather, they can be educational. However, he says, not all narratives should be turned into games. The story of Anne Frank, for example, would be a terrible game since the users ability to play the game well would be a determining factor in the life or death of Frank. But the non-linear approach where the user decides where he wants to take the story and how he wants it to develop will ultimately create a more engaged and educated news consumer.
Here are a few examples I found:
Washingtonpost.com"Eyes on the War" is the story of 24 journalists who photographed the American invasion of Iraq. The narrative comprises photos with voiceover by the photojournalist. The user can pick who he wants to view in a little menu on the right. This story is not as flexible as most, but the user still has the chance to pick and choose which photojournalist's story he wants to hear and see.
Eyes on the War The New York Times"Asia's Deadly Waves" is a non-linear, interactive story that dealt with the December 2004 tsunami. The story opens with a map of Asia. As you click on different locations, a narrative about population and what happened there appears along with an option to view a slideshow. Also, at the top, there is a menu listing different countries with photos from each one.
Asia's Deadly Waves PBS"From Brooklyn to Pristina" is so cool! The story takes the surfer from Murfreesbro, Tennessee, where a gun is
LEGALLY purchased, to Kosovo, where that same weapon is used in guerrilla warefare. The story also takes the form of a world map, and user clicks different destinations on the map to see how the gun gets from the U.S. to Kosovo. Text, video and photos are used to tell this story.
From Brooklyn to Pristina
games and ludology
If you know anything about me, you know that I don’t play games. Perhaps it was my early start in ballet school when I was 6 that led me to never take part in organized sports or have the time at home after school to play video games. I vaguely remember playing Atari with my friends Rose and Adrianna, but Pac-Man, Kaboom!, and Space Invaders seem so straightforward and innocent compared to The Sims or any of the other games discussed in First Person. Maybe I don’t like rules, although ballet and folk dancing have their own techniques to master, but I’m sure that might be the reason I also liked the Ludology chapter. The intro to this section simply states that these researchers “want to work toward an understanding of new media text on its own terms rather than as a reflection of the already understood.” They want their own discipline to emerge and why shouldn’t it? Isn’t that shiny newness what we like about technology in the first place? And if games are the new entertainment, and cyberdramas the new novels, why shouldn’t we create new theories rather than rely upon others? Of course, that might be me being lazy, antitheoretical, and ahistorical, but because I don’t play games, I don’t know what narratives they might spin or what agency, immersion, or transformation that can occur when sitting on a couch. I don’t mean that to sound as snooty as it does and while I understand remediation as much as the next person, I really like the distinctions Murkku Eskelinen’s makes among the following:
A sequence of events enacted constitutes a drama, a sequence of events taking place a performance, a sequence of events recounted a narrative, and perhaps a sequence of events produced by manipulating equipment and following formal rules constitutes a game (37, emphasis mine).
I could problematize these distinctions, though, and ask can we not consider the act of writing a “game” with its own equipment and formal rules, but I am at work and need to ponder on this a bit more before class. See you soon!
Something I thought you folks might be interested in.
Facade, the interactive one-act play that Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern built, is available at www.interactivestory.net. Sadly, it is not yet available for Mac. However, I've seen a version of it up and running, and, while the idea holds promise, the reality falls far short of what I think he's trying to do.
It seems to do exactly what he warns against. The interface is awkward, due to the constraints of the keyboard and mouse. The story-arcs, upon replay, become repetitive. The whole thing feels very forced, and the AI engine simply can't keep up with the ambiguity of everyday language. I know that he addresses the difficulty in the text, but that doesn't change the fact that his program suffers from the very problems that he outlines.
Also, I'm unable to get the Myth/Structure thread that ran through last week's readings out of my head. I'm not so sure I follow Mateas' argument. These structures that he complains about seem to be the very thing that we like about games. If we really wanted open-ended ambiguity, if we preferred that over structures, then why play games? Or read books, or watch films?
Insofar as agency is concerned, do we really want to be in total control? I don't think so. I think we like to trick ourselves into thinking we're all-powerful psuedo-gods, but we do so knowing that, ultimately, we're not really responsible for our actions. Our ability to act is really already pre-determined by the programmers, and I believe that this back-of-our-mind knowledge of a lack of true agency may be part of a game's appeal.
Also, I think something very similar happens in the cinema, but that's just me. It's been a long while since I visited Aristotle, so if I'm misreading anything, please let me know.
late blogger
OK i had bookmarked the wrong link for our course site and kept wondering where everyone's posts were. Oops!
I will add more later as I took a ton of notes but a crazy work week has kept me from typing them up, but here's a lil blurb for now. And i have to say that, like Ryan, I've had kairos on the brain.
Having taken a (Creative) Nonfiction course last Spring, I could not help but think of that experience when reading a few of these works on autobiography. In that class we were assigned various prompts and did not necessarily have to write about our own lives, but the idea that Bruner states near the end of his essay couldn’t summarize my time in that class better. He writes, “I persist in thinking that autobiography is an extension of fiction, rather than the reverse, that the shape of life comes first from imagination rather than from experience” (55). This emphasis on imagination also supports the points made in Bird and Dardenne’s work on the narrative qualities of the news. While journalists may struggle to maintain his/her code of ethics when trying to write a story that still uses their imagination in a way to attract readers, a struggle nowhere better portrayed than in the film
Shattered Glass, this essay’s focus on the cultural and social factors that influence the writer’s available framework was most interesting to me, especially since I have spent the last few weeks relying upon print/online sources for coverage of Hurricane Katrina rather than televised reports. Who and what has been the focus of various television networks and the stories that have been repeated more than others prove Bird and Dardenne's point that "news stories, like myths, do not 'tell it like it is,' but rather, 'tell it like it means" (71). Of course, having had friends send me first hand accounts of their evacuation stories and tales of their returns to the city to save pets also offers me quite a different picture than what the media tends to focus on, and that is where the concept of citizen journalism--what I take B&D to call for in the "media reshaping" they mention on 82--may come in, but more on that later.
Heath's thoughts.
So, since this is a blog, I’m going to assume that the posts will be rather informal. Should this not be the case, please let me know and I’ll tidy things up a bit.
Moving on. Regarding the use of myth in the construct of identity, I kept thinking about my Friendster profile. It is, technically, autobiography. It’s me writing about me. Yet what the profile says about me is far different from the text that I wrote.
First, it says that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t mind spilling my likes and dislikes all over the Internet. Next, it says that I’m reflexively sarcastic, someone who takes very seriously the need to appear that I’m not taking things too seriously. It also says I like Sesame Street, though not overtly.
That’s not me. That’s who I want to be. A “possible self” if you will. But then again the possible self that I’m imagining myself being when I’m writing this isn’t nearly as narcissistic as the “now” self that’s actually doing the writing. At least that’s what I tell myself.
And I’m still not sure about the manipulation of myth as described in the Zapatista piece. I’m not sure if Sub-commander Marcos is really manipulating the myth in some kind of genius post-modern magic show. I have to wonder if the myths are instead manipulating us. Perhaps now we’ve got a new myth -- the postmodern myth – that’s just another institutional archetype playing with us while we think we’re playing with it.
As far as Rocketboom goes, I think the very structure of the show perpetuates myth far more than their actions. The Anchor behind a desk as authority figure, the remote correspondents, it all plays into pre-established archetypes. I think the power of myth resides in its unobtrusiveness, in our inability to see it on first glance.
Rocketboom, I think, would be more effective if it really played on its structure, using an archetype to subvert the assumptions associated with the archetype. I think the Situationists and the Culture Jammers are on to something in this respect, mythbusting from within.
In any case, these are my thoughts.
(Ed. Note. Sweet mother of pearl. I see that Ryan just posted a behemoth of a commentary that blows my little musings out of the water. Hmm. I’ll have to dig through it and post more later. Also, I don't know how to link stuff yet, so you're going to just have to look up the Situationists and Culture Jamming on your own until I can ask one of you. My Friendster identity shall simply remain my own.)
Myth, Chronicle and Story on Rocketboom
The vlog
Rocketboom does so much to perpetuate myths about the left through their construction of narrative in their daily newscasts. Bird and Dardenne argue that news “conveys an impression of endlessly repeated drama whose themes are familiar and well-understood.” (73). Just in today’s newscast, anchor Amanda Congdon and producer Andrew Barron furthered the viewpoint that the Bush administration does not care about the victims left by Hurricane Katrina. “…and to top that off, ladies and gentlemen, a never-before-seen apology from George Bush,” Congdon said. The statement precedes her almost daily request to impeach the president. Not only does Congdon further the myth that liberals care about the poor, she also furthers the myth that lefties are nothing more than bleeding hearts who care nothing about the way the law works.
Dardenne and Bird argue that in every news piece there must be a hero and a villain. Going through Rocketboom’s archive there is a pattern: The right beating down the poor, the disadvantaged and the minorities. The way they construct their narrative is not so different from the way Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Nancy Grace do. In each case, the newscasters follow a pattern: In Rocketboom’s case, it is the right’s conspiracy to destroy the poor and their total disregard for the law that dictates the way most of their stories are told.
Sources: Bird, E. and Dardenne, R. “Myth, Chronicle and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of News.”
Rocketboom
