[influence of new media]

[facebook and job-hunting politics]

According to Toni Bowers at Tech Republic, hiring managers are increasingly discovering the need to address "casual" communication (texts, e-mails) from potential job candidates. She notes:

"While text-messaging lingo might be completely natural to these young people — indeed, for some it’s the only way they communicate — they fail to notice that those in positions of authority (who tend to be older) find such methods of communication disrespectful."

Funnily enough in today's column, Bowers tells us about hiring managers who do the opposite, they actually send out friend invitations to potential employees....The job candidate in question explains:

"To be honest, my face is in no book, I have no space, I’m neither linked in, nor linked out. I just don’t have any interest in social networking."

Akward position? There are 20 comments so far that say so.

[the semantics of the web]

In an interview published yesterday in IT World, the creator of the web talks about how he envisions the future of the semantic web. Here is a sample of the interview, the full text is here.

Berners-Lee: (Laughs) No, I don't do that. I think about real technology. I didn't invent the term "Web 3.0." The Web is constantly developing. If you want to see what's happening that I am interested in now, there are several technologies laced together. In Web 2.0 there are some technologies like JavaScript and others that are all standards that came out of allowing people to do things. Most standards are coming out now that will have a good push towards the mobile Web initiative, which is the use of the Web on lots of different devices.
In the future we will have the Semantic Web that will allow a whole lot of other things. One of the powerful things about networking technology like the Internet or the Web or the Semantic Web, one of the characteristics of such a technology is that the things we've just done with it far surpass the imagination of the people who invented them. Take for example the inventors of TCP/IP, the original protocols for communication between computers over the Internet, created by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974.
When I invented the Web, I thought of it as an infrastructure; I designed the Web as a foundation for many things. With Web 2.0, social networks and all kinds of things happen on top of it. When the Semantic Web arrives in the next few years, things will be using it in a way we cannot know yet. So, in a way, it's foolish to try to imagine what Web 4.0 will be like when we still don't know what will be done with 3.0.
For Web 3.0 to succeed, the people who are studying it at this moment will have ideas which will enable the new technology. They will design fantastic things just like people with Web 2.0 are designing fantastic things right now. People working with the Semantic Web will make much more powerful things. We can't imagine what they will do. But we have to build the Web to be an infrastructure. It shall never be used for particularized purposes but just to be a foundation for future developments.

[bits and bytes: a conversation with chris joseph]

I interviewed Chris Joseph for Furtherfield.org:

Chris Joseph is Digital Writer in Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is a writer and artist who has produced solo and collaborative work since 2002 as babel.

His past work includes Inanimate Alice,



an award-winning series of multimedia stories produced with novelist Kate Pullinger; The Breathing Wall, a groundbreaking digital novel that responds to the reader's breathing rate (also with Kate Pullinger); and Animalamina, an A-Z of interactive multimedia poetry for children. He is editor of the post-dada magazine and network 391.org.

Jess: Babel has been extremely active and has maintained a web presence since the late 90s but only recently, with your new post as digital writer in residence, have you begun a blog under your *real* name. What motivated this addition to your internet profile and how is it different from your other sites?

Chris: I’ve been using the babel name since around 1997, when the Babel Encyclopedia first went live, as (amongst other reasons) a way to distinguish my commercial daytime activities from my ‘artistic’ ones. Very happily as digital writer in residence there is no need to make any such distinction! But it is more than that... babel is (or was) an online identity, and this residency has large offline requirements, so it always made sense to me revert back to my ‘real’ name, as you put it!

The blog was a requirement of the residency post, and initially I resisted as I really didn’t want to add to the mass of superfluous texts out there. Eventually I settled on making it a site that might be of use to other UK-based digital writers, where they can find out about relevant events, calls for submissions, and other flotsam and jetsam of possible interest. It may change over the course of the residency, but that’s pretty much what it is for now. I also try to break up the text entries with creative posts – flash movies, sound files etc.

Jess: Although initially you say beginning your blog was a proviso of your new role how is it modifying or transforming how you work? Especially since you note that you “try to break up the text” with “creative posts” (suggesting that words in themselves are not substantially creative on their own)?

Chris: Ha ha, would I ever dare suggest such a thing? The majority of my blog postings so far have been calls for submissions, so these particular words in themselves are not particularly creative, rather informative. It's nice to break up these texts with more creative posts. Completely coincidentally I was invited to post on remix_runran, and the posts there provide exactly the kind of thing I wanted to break up the informative texts on my blog.

Whether the blog is transforming how I work... aside from the remix_runran pieces, which are designed specifically for a blog format, I don't think so - at least not yet. There is a project in the works that may change this, but I can't say much more about it yet.

Jess: You’ve lived in Canada and the U.K., how do the different environments affect your creations?

Chris: Profoundly. The different cultural influences and language you are exposed to in (French) Canada are obviously important, but so are the extremes of Canadian weather, which I find cause very particular creative rhythms (for me, winter=creative hibernation, summer=play and procrastination). There are other practical differences: up until very recently, the Arts were very well supported in Canada, and the financial cost of achieving a good quality of life is much lower, which makes it a great place to be an artist or writer. However the quality of life is almost too good, in some ways... the greater friction in UK society is somehow more inspirational. Perhaps that’s because I was born here.

Jess: The remix_runran creations you’re doing for Randy Adams seem incredibly tactile. I’m thinking particularly of la cicciolisa. The words which flash all over the Mona Lisa obscuring both her from viewers and us from her, except, very intermittently, do words disappear from in front of her eyes; not often enough for me as I find myself attempting to snatch the words away with my mouse. Of course ciccio means chubby in Italian (interestingly you did not use the female form, “ciccia”) but perhaps this reference alludes to the filling out you’ve accomplished with this flash piece. In fact, Randy describes you as someone who “fleshes the invisible words.” Design here seems more than an effort to render something smooth and sexy. What role do you see design playing in this piece and in others for remix_runran?

Chris: The text that appears in this piece was taken and remixed from a previous post on remix_runran by Ted Warnell titled ‘Porno Italiano’. The Porno Italiano text was itself taken from a spam comment on Geof Huth’s blog ‘dbqp: visualizing poetics’ - I really liked the notion of using and reusing spam in this way. So La Cicciolisa is a textual and thematic remix of Porno Italiano, the title and visual being a mashup of those two icons of Italian culture, La Cicciolina and Mona Lisa: the words that deface Mona reveal La Cicciolina, or perhaps vice versa.

Jess: Being a digital writer in residence it is logical (more or less) that you create digital works however most of your (published) creations seem to live online. Do the internet and its possibilities for “real-time” and communication influence how and what you create?

Chris: Actually the great majority of my creations are offline, awaiting (perhaps forever) their call to online service :)
The possibilities you mention are certainly exciting, and I have explored them in pieces such as Online/Offline [ http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/oo/ ] or more recently Universal Wish [http://www.391.org/40 ], but they probably haven't influenced what I create as much as the basic ability to distribute work online. Online distribution (for me) generally necessitates creating within certain file size/download time boundaries, or adapting works to attempt to reach non-English speaking audiences. Of course the ability to meet and communicate with collaborators online has been a big influence on how I create."

Jess: Moving from the online environment to offline work, I’m thinking here specifically about your Electromagnetic Radiation Soundmap on display in the IoCT, how is this installation different from works of yours that are created for the internet? What different considerations do you take into account?

Chris: I've found offline installation pieces are much easier in the sense that you (normally) have much greater control over - or at least understanding of - how the piece will be experienced, who the expected viewing audience are, and how much time they will have to spend viewing your piece. No more of those pesky platform or bandwidth considerations!

I think each installation piece has its own particular set of considerations, but clearly the immediate physical environment in which the piece is displayed is a key issue. The Soundmap is displayed on a touchscreen in the IOCT, which is a very pleasant state-of-the-art environment: the main consideration here was that it has lot of time-limited visitors, so the intention of the piece and how to interact with it had to be very clear.

A distant version of this Soundmap will be a mobile 'augmented reality' installation. This will be less concerned with the particular IOCT audience and environment, and more with the variety of physical features that the soundmap will overlay, and the physical movement and safety of the viewer in a non-bounded 'live' environment. The idea of a mobile installation is somewhat oxymoronic, but some of the same considerations of a fixed installation will be relevant, such as the intended audience and the time they will have available to experience the piece.

Jess: What kind of dialogue does the sound in the Electromagnetic Radiation Soundmap enact with its users? What does sound offer this piece that text and image do differently?

Chris: This is something I am still trying to understand... the best answer I can give at the moment is that one side of the 'dialogue' is about revealing the unsensed - at least, for most people, unseen, unheard and unfelt. The sound is a simple translation of particular geographical and environmental features (electromagnetic radiation and the way it manifests in a specific space), so in these sounds could act in a similar way to a textual or image location marker: it is a 'map' of sounds, though without those additional textual and image markers we have no simple way (so far) to use these sounds for practical navigation through the space.

The other side of the dialogue - how the listener responds to these sounds - is determined primarily by how much they know about electromagnetic radiation and perhaps sound in general, so this is much more variable than the equivalent textual or image knowledge might be. For many people it seems to act as a prompt to find out more, which was certainly one of my intentions.

Jess: As you’re playing a role in the digital arts as creator and facilitator (http://www.ioctsalon.com/) what might your view of a “history” of new media work look like and where would you situate yourself?

Chris: Trying to give a clear account of the history of new media work is like trying to keep hold of two dozen slippery eels: just when you have one in your grasp, six others wriggle loose. Those eels represent photography, animation, film, video art, electronic sound, programming, audience participation, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and Fluxus, to name just a few.... I wouldn't want to explicitly situate myself anywhere within these fascinating but messy histories. However of particular interest to me is the history of aleatory art and writing, as exemplified by the Dadaists and later Burroughs, Metzger and Cage.

Jess: If early outlooks of the internet might be broadly classified as utopian what would you suggest is a key theme for today’s conception of how technology can influence art (in general)?

Chris: I can't speak to wider (public) conceptions, but my own conception of how (electronic) technology can influence art is still broadly utopian, though there will always be important contrary opinions: for example, issues regarding who has access to the technology, and the environmental impact of these technologies during their creation, use and disposal.

[Does storytelling change in context of new forms of media?]

A perenial question answered by Sue Thomas and Scott Lloyd DeWitt in this interview by Katie Haegele:

Reading a novel delivered in installments to your e-mail inbox is different from flipping through a book as you curl up in bed.
Animated hypertext poems that dance across your computer screen do a kind of storytelling different from poems that sit still on a page.

The reading experience is different for print versus digital, no doubt about that.

But what about the writing experience? Is literary writing for digital media different in a way that matters? This is a question I keep returning to as I interview a variety of digital writers for this column. Does good, old-fashioned storytelling really change just because it is distributed in new forms of media?

I asked Sue Thomas, professor of new media at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, what she thought. In conjunction with Kate Pullinger, author of the multimedia graphic novel Inanimate Alice, Thomas devised a master of arts program in creative writing and new media that is taught online.

"Good, old-fashioned storytelling was oral, and storytellers often changed their stories according to context and circumstance," Thomas said. "You only have to look at how simple fairy tales and urban legends evolve whilst still often keeping the core of the narrative intact to realize that they need a fluid environment to stay alive and fresh. Multimedia prevents the stagnation of fixed type and maintains a much longer tradition, stretching way back beyond the last 500 years."

As director of the digital media project at the Department of English at Ohio State University, Scott Lloyd DeWitt says he wants to "expand notions of literacy" rather than abandon print for something new.

"We are giving students the opportunity to produce a variety of digital media texts. Along the way, we ask them to think about the affordances of these media and make choices about using them according to their rhetorical goals: Who is your audience? What sense of ethos are you trying to establish? Where do you imagine this text appearing?"

In other words, the same questions writers have always asked.

Robert Coover, the T.B. Stowell Adjunct Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, is a prominent novelist who realized in the late '80s that "the digital revolution was real and immediate; I wanted my students to be wholly aware of what was happening and comfortable with it."

Today he leads the groundbreaking Cave Writing Workshop, a spatial hypertext writing workshop in immersive virtual reality he dreamed up in 2002.

Electronic-writing workshops are in many ways similar to traditional writing workshops, Coover said: Students are given a project they present to the class for critique. But Cave Writing is unique. Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot-square room with high-resolution stereo graphics shown on three walls and the floor. Students do not simply "write a story" - they create 360-degree multimedia projects incorporating images, sound, art and text. Imagine standing in the middle of this room as a multimedia narrative is projected all around you, and you've got the "immersive" part of the equation.

Coover, who wrote an essay titled "The End of Books" for the New York Times Book Review in 1992, says new literary forms don't emerge simply because the artist wants them to.

"Art forms are partly made by audiences," he said, "and if the reading public was in the process of moving from page to screen, then young writers had to understand that and know how to live and write in the new world. . . . E-writing is a very collaborative genre, often involving writers, artists, composers, and computer programmers."

That made me think that the image of the writer suffering over her masterpiece in solitude might soon become out of date - which wasn't a bad thought at all.



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To experience "Inanimate Alice," go to http://www.inanimatealice.com/

For more on Robert Coover's Cave Writing Workshops, go to http://www.cascv.brown.edu/cavewriting/workshop.html

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Katie Haegele (katie@thelalatheory.com) is a writer who lives in Montgomery County. She just bought a pin from the independent publishing resource Fall of Autumn that says "My zine has a MySpace," because hers does.

Thanks to Chris for the heads up.

Update: Thanks to Ian for pointing me to PurpleCar's post on this interview. She makes an excellent point: "As writers, we want the reader to feel immersed in our fiction world. Is adding music and images "cheating?" By no means will digitalit wipe away traditional literature, just as the written word hasn't erased oral traditions."