[cross-disciplinary multimodal art]

Marlena Novak’s work is a cross-disciplinary hybrid including HD video, animatography, interactive time-based media, digital photography, and encaustic painting (BFA, Carnegie-Mellon; MFA, Northwestern) with solo exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, Amsterdam, Enschede and the U.S. Her encaustic-painting technique was the subject of a documentary presented on PBS and she was invited to teach a course in this medium at the Amsterdam Institute for Painting in 1996.


Read more about Marlena Novak here: http://www.creativityandcognition.com/gallery/mnovak/mnovak.htm

[digital arts and culture conference: cfp]

The biannual Digital Arts & Culture conference takes place in California in December 2009 (http://dac09.uci.edu)

The abstract submission deadline = May 1st

This time the conference is organised around themes, here is a very interesting one:

"Theme: The Present and Future of Humanist Inquiry in the Digital Field
What contributions may literary, poetic, and aesthetic idioms of humanist inquiry -- traditionally associated with problems of lyrical expression, narrativity, linguistic subjectivity, and authorial and readerly agencies -- continue to offer to the analysis of medial practices and systems in the era of mobile, distributed, and social media? The crux of this question, we
propose, lies in the specifically historical purchase of humanist method: its ability to (re)situate new symbolic practices in complex and nuanced relation to prior traditions and atavisms of expressive language and action -- in contrast to the reductively progressivist, de-historicizing impulses of much of contemporary digitalism.

This theme welcomes exemplary close readings (literary-theoretical, formalist, narratological, ludological, etc.) of electronic literature and poetry, single- and multiple-player computer games, social media, and hard and soft medial apparatuses of the digital field. Especially encouraged are such close readings which also make general claims regarding the significance of humanist investigations of digital arts and cultures."





More info at:
http://dac09.uci.edu/call.html

[interdisciplinary research & digital culture]

An interesting position for someone with a ph.d in digital culture or with wider experience in recent developments in cultural studies. It's only for a year but seems as though there's possibility for renewal:

Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in Digital Culture

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute

Faculty of Arts, Law, and Social Sciences

Ref: 6109

Based in Cambridge

Fixed term contract for one year in the first instance

£29,704 - £34,435 p.a.

Join us as we enter an exciting new phase of our development. Our ambition is to be recognised as a truly 21st century university, fully relevant to the changing needs of students, staff and employers. With our energy, enthusiasm and ambition matched by our friendliness and approachability, Anglia Ruskin University is a great place to be.

You will join the interdisciplinary team of the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute, a project housed within the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences. The Institute involves colleagues working in media theory, humanities computing, digital music and video, fine arts, video games, serious gaming and digital text, yet also has an important scientific contribution from colleagues involved with design and technology, audio engineering and computer design and animation.

The Interdisciplinary Fellow in Digital Culture is expected to take a key role in the Institute's activities. You must be familiar with state-of-the-art experimental, theoretical and practical issues in cultural theory, arts and the emerging sciences of digital culture. You are expected to have advanced IT skills and a knowledge of the field(s) of interactivity in sound and/or digital image would be an advantage. The Fellow will typically engage in personal research and publishing in the field of digital culture and collaborative research initiatives that bring together the different strands of the Research Institute.

The project commences in March 2009, or as soon as possible thereafter.
For further information please contact Prof Eugene Giddens, on 0845 196 2965 or eugene.giddens@anglia.ac.uk

Closing Date: 06 March 2009 (12 noon)

It is anticipated interviews will take place on 20 March 2009

CVs will only be accepted if accompanied by a completed University Application form.

Further details are available from telephone 0845 196 4740 (24 hours). E-mail jobs@anglia.ac.uk or visit on-line at www.anglia.ac.uk/hr/jobs

We value diversity at Anglia Ruskin University and welcome applications from all sections of the community.

[phd position: social media]

PhD Position in Sociality and Social Media

University of Amsterdam

(Noord-Holland), hours per week

Job description
We are seeking an individual who is excited about engaging in multidisciplinary approaches to studying information, communication and related technologies in a social context. The appointee will be expected to conduct research on sociality and social media; the research should lead to international journal publications and a PhD thesis. The research can combine multiple methods of investigation, qualitative as well as quantitative. The candidate will be supervised by Prof. Rik Maes and Dr Ard Huizing, who have extensive experience in guiding doctorate students' research, and can provide guidance in a wide range of research methods as well as access to a large set of local and multinational organizations.

Human relationships are increasingly mediated by social media such as social networking sites, micro-blogging services and social recommendation sites. Such new media are said to host new forms of group interaction and togetherness. Appealing to the human tendency to bind oneself with others and thus to form and join groups to engage in interdependent relationships, they afford sociality. In turn, the design and usage of social media are continually re-created and reshaped by participants or members translating, enacting and modifying these technologies to suit their various contexts. This project will explore the co-constitutive interplay between sociality and social media, and the implications of this interplay for design and design theory. Theoretical lenses are provided by those who theorize such notions as ‘object-centred sociality' or ‘the materialization of the subject', which are mainly being developed in social theory, social studies of technology and, increasingly, organization theory. The particular research questions will be framed in line with the interests of the PhD candidate.

Requirements
Required education/skills:

• Master's degree in one of the social sciences (e.g. Information or Communication Science, Management or Business Studies, Sociology or Anthropology)
• Interest (and preferably experience) in field research
  Demonstrated mastery of both written and spoken English
• Determination to complete a PhD degree within four years

Job type: Research / Advising
Workfield(s):
- Research trainees, non-tenured lecturers, researchers(Scientific discipline: Economics)

Organization
University of Amsterdam
The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a university with an internationally acclaimed profile, located at the heart of the Dutch capital. As well as a world center for business and research, Amsterdam is a hub of cultural and media activities. The University of Amsterdam is a member of the League of European Research Universities.

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) at the University of Amsterdam conducts international research and provides academic courses in information management/systems, accounting, finance, management, organization behaviour, strategy and marketing, economics, and econometrics. The Amsterdam Business School and the Amsterdam School of Economics form part of the FEB.

The Amsterdam Business School's Information Management section is seeking an outstanding individual to fill a PhD student position in the area of sociality and social media.

Conditions of employment
Employment basis: Temporary for specified period
Duration of the contract: see below
Additional conditions of employment:
The appointment will initially be for 1.5 year, to be extended to a total of 4 years upon excellent performance (an evaluation will be held after 8 and 14 months). The salary will be in accordance with the university's regulations for academic personnel, and will range from €2042 (first year) up to a maximum of €2612 (final year) gross per month. The collective employment agreement of the Dutch universities will be applicable. The PhD thesis should be finalized within four years. In this period, the candidate will be expected to do some teaching (20% of the time).

Additional Information
Additional information about the vacancy can be obtained from:

Dr Huizing
Telephone number: 31-20-525-4356
E-mail address: im-phd@uva.nl

Or additional information can be obtained through one of the following links:

• About the organization (http://www.uva.nl/start.cfm/la=en/th=main)
• About the function (http://www.uva.nl/vacatures/vacatures.cfm/0F65D8D6-1321-B0BE-A48F280DF33B0D21)
• Amsterdam Business School (http://www.abs.uva.nl/abshome/home.cfm)
• Information Management section (http://primavera.fee.uva.nl/)

Application
You can apply for this job before 06-04-2009 (dd-mm-yyyy) by sending your application to:

Roetersstraat 11
1018 WB Amsterdam

E-mail: applications-feb@uva.nl

When applying for this job always mention the vacancynumber AT 09-5006.

[reading flabuert's a simple heart]

A little while ago I mentioned that Andy had let me raid his office library (such fun!) and one of the many books that I nabbed was Flaubert's Three Tales.

"A Simple Heart" focuses on Félicité, a "maidservant" who "did all the cooking and the housework, the sewing, the washing, and the ironing. She could bridle a horse, fatten poultry, and churn butter, and she remained faithful toher mistress, who was by no means an easy person to get on with." I am immediately sad for Félicité. On the third page we learn that her father dies when she was young and then her mother died leaving her sisters to look after her. When they followed their own paths (suggesting none of them were concerned or even really aware of Félicité), they left a farmer to take Félicité in. This new life meant perpetual cold - physical and emotional. After this awful experience, Félicité finds a job at a different farm where her new employers are kind to her even if the other help aren't. At this time she meets a man, falls in love, and then has her heart broken. Needing a change, Félicité finds a position with Madame Aubain where she gets "installed" like furniture in the house and also finds herself taking care of Paul and Virginie. When those around her leave or die, Félicité turns to religion (or rather, her interpretation of religion) as a panacea for her pain. The narrative begins by suggesting an unfolding future: "for half a century the women of Pont-l'Évêque envided Mme Aubain her maidservant Félicité." This is interesting because the way that Félicité is described, she is not "becoming," she is a woman already "installed" and "fixed." So dedicated and loyal, she seems complete in the same way that she ensures all her tasks are. Throughout the story there seem to be opportunities where we might begin to see a blossoming Félicité. She would "keep on kissing" the two children (present continuous) until Madame told her to stop. Emotion also seems to be a barrier to becoming, Félicité is "eaten up inside" and that prevents her from taking up hobbies or work that might otherwise involve her thoughts. Emotion is also detrimental to Virginie who originally becomes quite ill because of a fright. Later on she must refrain from playing the pain because "the slightest emotion upset her." At the end of the narrative, Félicité, who we have come to know as a loyal, selfless and hard working but "wooden" and who on her death bed remains finicky about tidiness, nonetheless experiences a deeply multimodal passing. Dying of pneumonia, Félicité smells the "mystical" scent of incense. We see her closer her eyes, we hear her slowing heart, we feel the fountain drying. Finally in death she can be loyal to herself and immerse herself in sensory perception.

[employment - lecturer in internet studies]

This sounds like a great post for all you internet researchers:

Lecturer, Internet Studies
REF: 4511
Closing: Monday, 24 November, 2008

Documents: Position Description Application Advice (Before applying for this position, please view the Application Advice document mentioned above) Apply Now
Location
School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Faculty of Humanities
Bentley
Position Details
Academic, Full Time
Salary: $70,846 - $84,132, Level ALB
Conditions of Employment: "Employment at Curtin is governed by either an Individual Transitional Employment Agreement (ITEA) or a Certified Agreement. The University reserves the right to offer a position under an Individual Transitional Employment Agreement only"
Description Summary
(Full-Time, Fixed term – 3 years) This position will involve teaching, research and research supervision in the broad field of Internet Studies. It has a particular emphasis on the use of the Internet for communications and the relationship of the Internet with other media. The successful applicant will require a PhD in a field of research relevant to Internet Studies, be an active researcher while focusing on the Internet and being an experienced university educator. Benefits and Remuneration The salary ranges presented are those which are contained within the University’s Certified Agreements. An individual may negotiate an alternative salary arrangement under an Individual Transitional Employment Agreement (ITEA). Employee benefits include up to 17 percent employer superannuation contribution, study assistance, a comprehensive salary packaging program, and flexible and family friendly work practices in a cosmopolitan community at a convenient location. Eligibility Applicants must meet all essential criteria to be considered for the position. Successful applicants must be eligible to work in Australia for the duration of the appointment. Contact Further information about the position can be obtained by contacting Associate Professor Matthew Allen (Head of Department, Internet Studies), on telephone +61 8 9266 3511 or via e-mail at m.allen@curtin.edu.au. To submit an application, please click on the Apply Now button. Alternatively, post your application to: Ms Angela Glazbrook Deputy School Administrator School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts Faculty of Humanities Curtin University of Technology A.Glazbrook@curtin.edu.au +61 8 9266 2509 Valuing Diversity and Affirmative Action Applications are invited from women and men who share the University’s values, ethics, international outlook, value diversity and have an informed respect for indigenous people. Curtin University reserves the right at its sole discretion to withdraw from the recruitment process, not to make an appointment, or to appoint by invitation, at anytime. Closing Date: 5pm on Monday 24 November, 2008

[transdisciplinarity and communication]

A little while ago I tweeted that I was working on a transdisciplinarity check list (things to read, watch and listen to) as a way of mapping the field and setting the scene for a conference I'm going to run and a journal I'm going to start (no prob!). Christy Dena, transmodiologist extraordinaire, saw my tweet for help, tweeted back and wrote a blog entry with loads of links and information on transdisciplinarity. Interestingly:

"there are (at least) two very different implementations of transdisciplinarity in the methodological realm: one that argues it should be about collaboration between academia & non-academia to address world-scale problems, and another that argues it is a conceptual approach that can be applied to anything, by an individual or group."

I prefer the idea that connections can be made between any kind of group rather than making an initial separation between "academic" and "non-academic." I'll be following the Nicolescu and Dena school of thought.

Have a look at Christy's post here.

[employment opportunity - Kairos is hiring]

Kairos - An online academic open-access peer-reviewed journal that focuses on digital and multimodal practises and pedagogy. They're hiring a Praxis section assistant editor(s) and a Reviews section assistant editor(s).

Get applications in by Friday, September 19, 2008. Interviews are scheduled for soon after. The start dates is November, 2008.

[transdisciplinarity and academia]

With my new job starting on the 1st of August I'm getting ready by reading (and reading and reading!) about transdisciplinarity. Although my post is going to be more focused on a kind of academic transdisciplinarity and creating a context/facilitiating conversations between various disciplines, I'm interested to read/learn/hear/see how other knowledge institutes are grappling with the demand to share information while having to cross (sometimes) radically different research cultures (enter: knowledge translation theory "exchange, synthesis and ethically sound application of knowledge—within a complex system of interactions among researchers and users"). I've just come across a set of interview questions that were posed to Mark Linder (Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University) in January this year. On the blog: Critical Practice for the Next Generation, most of the questions seem to broach issues of transdisciplinarity...how is architecture transdisciplinary, should it be *more* academic or more *businessey.*

In his book, Nothing Less than Literal, Linder has this definition of transdisciplinarity:

"the exchange of concepts and techniques between established disciplines through translation and transference" and one of the interview questions asks: "What would this 'exchange of techniques between the established disciplines' look like, in a practical sense? Are you proposing that the architect take on the roles of the painter, builder, or other professional in order to widen the scope of what is currently considered the 'architects job?'"

I think it is precisely this anxiety that to be transdisciplinary one must be able to wear many hats and wear them well. I suppose this is what the students on the Creative Writing and New Media Master's course at DMU must grapple with. As authors of new media works, must they also be well versed in Flash, html, java, image design etc...? I think this mirrors the development in science from Mode 1 knowledge production and the move to Mode 2:

Mode 1 refers to the more traditional practice of science,

created within a disciplinary, primarily cognitive context” (p. 1), situated within universities, and characterized by a polarization of discovery and application. In contrast, Mode 2, also referred to as “postacademic” and “steady state” (Ziman 1994, 1996) “is created in broader transdisciplinary social and economic contexts” (p. 1), and is based on the principles of convergence and synthesis.

Of course raising the idea of Mode 1 and Mode 2 is not value-free nor does it lack an "imperializing" stance as Mode 2 seems to be the preferred system in the hierarchy (at least according to Gibbons et al. and not that I disagree either...but how to avoid hierarchies in transdisciplinary practises and is it even necessary?)

I wonder how disciplines other than architecture and science are managing issues of transdisciplinarity...

[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]

This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)


guiding research questions:

1. what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
2. what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?

There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?

Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation.

In 5 weeks of the wiki-story:
1500 registered users
over 11000 edits
75000 visitors
280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)

since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.

Different types of users:
Performer
Vandal
Gardener

• the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
• focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
• edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)

• the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
• the edits were all about her/him
• 166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)

• the gardener focuses on organizing
• made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
• made person-to-person edits (more private)

More stats:

650 pages with significant content

366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)

150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)

Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)

Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":

"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"

there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:

the reversal of normal rules of wiki
the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing

see the wikipedia entry

See Bruce's report for more indepth information and (sometimes hilarious!) examples coming tomorrow here.

[blogging and literary analysis]

Via John Timmer at Ars Technica

"The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs.

The idea borrowed from HCI studies was a simple one: perform observations of actual users as they are interfacing with their computers. The observations took the forms of usage surveys, overseen reading sessions, individual discussions, and a single group discussion. Unfortunately, given the time-intensive nature of the work, the study population was small (20 subjects), and several of them did not participate in all aspects of the study. Attempts to log browsing habits didn't work out; the survey population was either savvy enough about privacy concerns to not install the logging software, or not savvy enough to manage a functional installation.

Still, the researchers were able to generate information about how readers interact with blog material. They argue that this can be as important as having information about the blogs themselves, citing the development of reader response theory in literary criticism. As applied to blogs, they state, "the reality and meaning of a blog exists neither solely in the blog itself nor solely in the reader, but rather in the reader’s active interpretation of, and interaction with, the blog."

What they found is that reading blogs has become a habit integrated into Internet use for many people, akin to instinctively checking e-mail. Several of the blog readers described it as simply a way to pass the time, using terms like "wasting time" and "doing nothing." One of them described it in terms of addiction: "I don’t really look forward to cigarettes anymore, but it's something that happens through the course of the day that I feel like I might need to do. It just becomes habit, I guess."

Given that attitude, a few of the other findings aren't much of a surprise. For one, the temporal structure of a blog is only important due to the role it plays in where stories appear on screen. People will tend to read the top ones first, and browse deeper only if they have time—if they don't, the deeper stories generally don't get read. A product of this is that few of the blog readers felt their habits contributed to a sense of information overload.

Despite this casual approach to content, blog readers take a number of aspects of the content very seriously. One example of this dichotomy is that a reader that can't be bothered to search for new blogs beyond the ones he currently reads, but still engages in offline activities based on what he's seen in the ones he does read.

One key feature for most users was a sense of community. Even though blogging is an inherently one-to-many activity, most readers felt a personal connection to the author. This could foster the feeling that the reader belonged to the community even in the absence of participation, and led those who did participate via comments to agonize over their content. Only one of the study participants said they enjoyed triggering flame wars; most of the others felt their comments were a form of appreciation for the blog author, and worked hard to make them insightful and cogent.

This produced a distinction between smaller blog communities and popular, news-focused blogs. These didn't produce the same sense of belonging, and readers tended to focus more on their content than their community. That result suggests that the blogging community will always have a long tail, as readers search for smaller places where they can continue to find a sense of connection with the authors.

The study's authors kindly provided Ars with a copy. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI Conference, and is available through their website."

[reading images]

An interesting article on the reading (as in interpreting) of images and development of point of view. If the image appears alongside a narrative, people will wait to read the whole story before coming to any conclusions. If, however, the image appears with a list of information (rather than a narrative), people are quicker to form conclusions, basing their opinion more on the image rather than the verbal description. This has pedagogical and new media theory implications (among others).

"As our results indicate, pictures can have directionally opposite eVects on the impact of the verbal information they accompany, depending on whether this information is conveyed in a narrative or a list. These diVerences are largely traceable to the inXuence of pictures on the processes that individuals use to compute a judgment and the representations that are formed. When the information about a person describes a sequence of temporally related events, participants with the goal of forming an impression of the person are unlikely to compute an evaluation of the protagonist until the entire sequence is complete. Pictures provide perceptual symbols that both facilitate the formation of images of the individual events and permit the events to be perceptually linked, thereby leading a more coherent mental representation of the information to be constructed. When the information is conveyed in a list, however, participants attempt to form an evaluation of the protagonist on line by integrating the implications of the individual events as they encounter them, updating their impression as each new event is received. When pictures accompany the event descriptions, however, they appear to interfere with this integration process, resulting in a decrease in the impact of the descriptions. This interference largely occurs when pictures directly accompany the verbal information. Thus, as indicated by the supplementary data obtained in Experiment 2, presenting pictures separately from the verbal event descriptions had similar effects on participants’ evaluations regardless of the format in which the verbal material was presented.

Experiments 3 and 4 provided more direct indications of the processes and representations that underlie the judgments we observed in earlier studies. Experiment 3, for example, indicates that pictures are recognized both more quickly and more accurately when they are conveyed in a narrative than when they are conveyed in a list. Furthermore, verbal descriptions were also identified more accurately in the former condition, whereas the time required to make these identiWcations was longer. This latter effect is consistent with other evidence that when the features of information are represented in memory in a temporally related sequence, people engage in a mental search of the representation in order to identify these features, and the required time to do so is a reflection of this search.

Experiment 4 confrmed these implications and the nature of the representation formed more generally, showing that when event information is presented in a narrative
and, therefore, stored in memory as a temporally related sequence, exposure to one event description increases the speed of identifying the event that immediately follows it in the sequence. This eVect is not evident when the events are simply listed. Further results from this experiment indicate that pictures increased the time to identify statements when they were contained in a list but not when they were conveyed in a narrative. These results further strengthen the assumption that pictures interfered with the processing of the verbal information they accompanied."

"The impact of pictures on narrative- and list-based impression formation: A process interference model, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2007, Pages 352-364
Rashmi Adaval, Linda M. Isbell and Jr., Robert S. Wyer"

[thesis]

Have just printed out a draft of the entire thesis...first time I've actually seen the *whole* thing.

It's BIG.


And I've already found typos...

[zig-zag philosophy]

I'm editing my introduction to the thesis and re-reading Haraway and her notion of situated knowledges and cyberfeminism as well as going through Braidotti's Nomadic Subjects (which must be one of my favourite academic reads). Braidotti also has her own site which I check on frequently, hoping for a blog I suppose so that I might keep up with her theorising. Although no blog, I have just found her most recent article, published in Italian. In it she makes a comment about an aspect of her work which is dedicated to constructing *real* communities and discourses within and outside of her written works, all the while leaving "ample" space for others thereby provoking multiple encounters (nb. my *loose* translation). This kind of theorising that moves between other theories as well as being a political strategy is essentially "non-linear" and thus becomes a "zig-zag" philosophy.

"Se il discorso teorico infatti funziona in un’ economia non-lineare, in modo eterogeneo e complesso, allora anche la resistenza politica deve assumere questo stile a zig zag."

[kristeva: the woman question]

As I begin to write (or at least think about writing!) my thesis introduction I'm reflecting on the double-bind I find apparent in certain web fictions: a desire to multi-mimetically represent combined with a simultaneous recognition of its inadequacy. In her text on Colette, Kristeva sees representation (or creation) as incommensurable with any singular identity. For any identity must constantly be questioned, reworked, and repositioned:

"Is there a feminine genius, then? The genius of women from the last century has invited us not to elude the question and to consider this: concerns about the feminine have been the communitarian path that has allowed our civilization to reveal, in a new way, the incommensurability of the singular. Although it took root in sexual experience, that incommensurability of genius is realized in the risks that each person is capable of taking, by calling into question thought, language, one's time, and any identity that finds shelter in them." (Kristeva, Colette 426-427).

An interview with Kristeva (which I found thanks to the Continental Philosophy Blog)



She explains that the epistemological tradition underpinning modern linguistics presuppose a split between subject and object. This "soliditiy of consciousness" (Descartes anyone?) becomes contentious during periods of social flux which Kristeva suggests are times of creation and innovation. And this is her theory, that the subject is dynamic and its constitution (signifiance) is dynamic. An example of this dynamism in language is found in Joyce (for Kristeva) as he wants readers to "hear the rhythm of his sentences." I wonder how this might transform in the online environment. How might the rhythm of image come to bear on the signifiance of Red in Donna Leishman's fiction or on the autodiegetic narrator of Dene Grigar's Fallow Field?

[spare cycles?]

The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles

In physics, the greatest (theoretical) latent power in the universe is dark energy, waiting only for us to find a way to tap it (and to prove it actually exists; in the meantime it powers fictional superheroes). In people, the equivalent is "spare cycles"--the human potential that isn't tapped by our jobs, which for most of us is a lot of it. People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they'd rather not be. The guy playing Solitaire on his laptop at the airport? Spare cycles. Multiply it times a million.
I am at this moment, somewhat randomly, in the Salisbury (MD) regional airport. It is tiny airport like thousands of others across the country. But, like all the others, it has to meet standard TSA security standards. There is a flight (which I am on) at 2:30 pm. It is the only flight out of this airport for the past hour. There will not be another flight out of this airport for another hour. Yet we need our full TSA apparatus. That includes the local police, who are represented by a sheriff.
I'm watching him right now. He's in his room, labeled "Sheriff". Young guy. He's watching a movie on a portable DVD player. That's fine--he won't be needed for another half hour. But of course "needed" isn't quite the right word. "Required" is closer to it. He will be required by policy to stand by, gun in holster, while I take my laptop out of my nerd backpack. He may, fingers crossed, go his entire career without a terrorist going through that security checkpoint. He may indeed never unholster that gun in the line of duty.
That sheriff is watching a movie because he has spare cycles. Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It's what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They're the Soylent Green of the web.
In the next issue of Wired we've got a great story about a woman who cyberstalked the lead singer of Linkin Park. She correctly guessed the password to his cellphone account. The rest was easy. She was a technician at a secure military facility, the Sandia National Labs. When eventually confronted, she explained that her job only took her half an hour a day. The rest was spare cycles. She used them to stalk the lead singer of Linkin Park.
Web 2.0 is such a phenomena because we're underused elsewhere. Bored at work, bored at home. We've got spare cycles and they're finally finding an outlet. Tap that and you've tapped an energy source that rivals anything in human history. Solitaire Players of the World Unite!

Posted at The Long Tail

[currents in electronic literacy is ba-ack]

Currents in Electronic Literacy is back and is boasting a "new and improved Currents [...] e-journal of the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas." Sounds promising.

"We are excited to announce that Currents is moving in a new direction. The Spring 2007 issue of Currents will focus on reviews. We believe a journal based on reviews can be of much greater relevance to the field than our past models, which consisted of a few long articles supplemented by short book reviews. However, in this new model we will conceive of “reviews” more broadly. In addition to reviewing books, we are soliciting reviews of software, websites, blogs, conferences, parallel academic programs, and pedagogical practices. We hope that the new version of Currents will point out emerging trends in the field of electronic literacy.

We see ourselves as opening up a new frontier in the discipline because Currents is the first publication dedicated solely to reviewing new technologies, literatures, and "currents" in the field.