Jenkins
Convergence is aobut people interacting with media, not technology – Intro
Old and new industries are still trying to adjust to each others methods 9
Content can go through different channels 11
Old media dont disappear, just adjust to the new 14
Media change is not technology change. 15
Lives occur on multiple platforms 17
Convergence is top-down and bottom-up 18
Convergence/collective intelligence/participation are Jenkins’ focus 22
Collective intelligence is the ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of its members. 27
Knowledge culture no one knows everything, everyone knows something 27
Knowledge communites are essential to the task of restoring democratic citizenship (community developers use the same concept when trying to rebuild communities) 29
Democratic knowledge construction 29
Logic of spoiling 36
Spoiling is adversarial 44
American Idol “first convergence killer app” 58
Affective economies 61 understanding emotion behind consumer decision making 62
Advertising w/contetn providers should focus less on content than who, where and why 68
Brands connect through emotion and through a variety of channels 70
Brand communities online intensifies connections 79
Gossip – shared secrets – social ties 84
Networks build upon synergies within entertainment programs – morning shows, chatrooms, (TWOP etc) 86
Integration of adv and content causes sponsors to become dependent on the clarity of process/integrity 89-90
the audience examines the product to find evidence of sponsor interference 90
Transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms 97
Transmedia franchises work to attract multiple constituencies by pitching the content somewhat differently for each media 98
Hidden messages to find cause the audience to delve more deeply..; 102 (easily overdone and can backfire)
Extended storytelling has economic motives 109
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Virilio
Fourth estate is outside of the law.
Does not have any independent critics
Camera changes experience to one person’s view. 9
TV = presence and immediacy 10
speed guarantees the secret and value of all information. Liberating teh media therefore means not only annihilating the duration of the information of the image and its path — but with these all that endures or persists. 33
industrial mediatization makes everything subservient to the interpersonal lihguistic exchange. 60
luxury gaze refuse to choose 72
state of shock will evacuate all judgement 74
Hollywood = industrialization of perception 79
current progress in transport and transmission exacerbates the pathology of movement betweenhere and there and between being there and no longer being there. 85
information is the last dimension of space-time-matter 141
states of historical time, energetic and informational 143
propensity = force 149
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Maffesoli cont
Sociality v the social
(masses) rather chaotic, indeterminate mass, which isin a quasi-international way has as its sole project it perdurabilty in existence. 57
territorial andproxemic that determines the life of our societies and anything which appeals to local knowledge and no longer to a protective and universal truth 57
puissance is glue (like custom?) 58 cause and effect of societal symbolism 58
sociality transcends institutions 60
power deals with management of life, puissance assumes the mantel of survival. 63
puisssance transcends individuals or specific factions 63
individual histories instead of history explains the perdurabilty of societies 64
identity is a floating and relative condition (weber) 65
economy v ecology 69 economy (reason, project activity) ecology (organic, holistic,)
secondary groups may signal the end of “civilization, but they also show the new form. 70
Tribalism
experiencing the other is the basis of the community, even if it leads to conflict. 73
tactile relationship – a relationship to the emptiness 73
supple intersection of circles whos articulation takes the shape of sociality 77
thread of reciprocity where the intersection of actions, situations, and affects forms a whole 81
alternative values from the logic of the network == affective warmth 87
secrecy is both federalizing and equalitive. 92???
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Project
I am attempting to do a final project using language to teach people how to create databases. This is a long term interest of mine that may or may not fit into the project’s parameters. SQL (Standard Query Language) is the computer language that all databases use, in some form or another, to search. It is one of the easier computer languages to learn and generally a skill that almost anyone can use to make everything from academic research to Google searches better. Most of my academic life has been spent making software easier to use, and information easier to find and navigate.
I started grad school in 1994, when the Internet began to become popular and my first publication out of grad school was explaining how the internet search tools worked. Then we used the metaphors of print. (Yahoo! = Table of Contents and AltaVista, HotBot (this was before Google) etc. = a back of the book index. ) Print metaphors made these more accessible to people who had a fear of technology and believed it was impossible to understand these issues without an understanding of math. Algorithms, Boolean etc.
Even today, many people do not have an understanding of how these things work. Most people do not care since most of the time these things are handled behind the scenes and the information they get handles the request most of the time. Even so, I believe that computing in general and databases specifically would be improved if more people could learn them using language skills which are more prevalent than math skills.
Most database instruction is geared toward computer efficiency and spend way more time explaining how to make searches run faster than making searching accessible. This is very important for computer programmers, but not all that useful for most people who need use them.
Database instruction spends chapters on datatypes, (what kind of data fits in what kind of field, ie number, text, hypertext) while never really discussing how to create tables or how people build queries. Both pieces of information are important, but considering the available computing power, it is much more important to ensure ease of use than speed.
Whether I can fit this into the project parameters is still a bit up in the air. I need to have the concepts we have discussed in class direct the project. It is relatively simple to use signifiers in this project. Sentence structure = table structure, sql query as a sentence etc., I am still working on the other concepts. Theoretically, I could make it a Mystory, but in addition to being a cop out, it is more than a reach to make it relevant.
Database as media is a possibility, but again, I think it is a reach. There may be something in Ulmer’s pedagogy discussions, but I havent had a chance to reread them yet.
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Tribes
Introduction
Ambience
Not a distillation of concepts – leave that to the bean counters 2
Maintain a holistic perspective: a constant reversibility uniting the (social and natural) whole with the various elements (mileux and persons) of which it is constituted. 2
Durkheim’s ‘social divine’ 4
Rather than trying to fool ourselves into thinking we can see, explain and exhaust an object, we must be content to describe its shape, its movements, hesitations accomplishments and various convulsions. 5
Fundamental paradox: the constant interplay between the growing massification and the development of micro-groups, which I shall call ‘tribes.’ 6
Social Sociality
Mechanical Structure Complex or organic structure
Modernity Post Modernity
Political economic organization Masses
Individuals(function) Persons (role)
Contractual Groups Affectual tribes
Cultural, productive, religious, sexual, ideological domains
Emotional Community
Social figurations beyond individualism 9
We can recognize the idea of the persona,the changeable mask which blends inot a variety of scenes and situations whose only value resides in a the fact that they are played out by the many. 10
Aesthetic paradigm – fellow feeling,
Persona only fulfils in relation to others 10
Beyond dichotomy – myth in which I am an active participant. 10
Rational era = individuation and separation
Empathetic era = lack of differentiation – neo tribalism 11
Permanency and instability are the two poles in which the emotional will navigate. 12
Impersonal nature of proxemics 12
Popular beliefs, chit-chat, world views etc constitute the solidarity of the community’s existence. 13
View from without , view from within, = history, collective memory. 13
Binary logic of separation is not applicable since those opposing forces combine to create life 14
History promotes a moral/political while space favors an aesthetics and exudes an ethics. 15
Emotional community is unstable, open etc while demanding conformity from its members 15
Groupism is different from herdism since members of groups try to contribute while members of the herd hide. 15
Forms 16
Proximity and sharing of territory birth the communal idea and its ethical corollary. 16
Community exhausts itself in creation and the ritual serves as evidence and guarantees the continuation of the group. 17
The collective sensibility which issues from the aesthetic form results in the ethical connection 18
Dionysiac form caricatures the exit from the self 19
Flow of words, goods and sex are the 3 anthropological pivots around which social life generally turns. 19
(Ritual?) is the ethic that holds together the elements of a given whole. 20
Custom – collection of common usages to allow a social entity to recognize itself. – the unspoken, the residue underground centrality of social puissance 21
Transsubjective – (subjective and objective) 22
Neighborhood – part of the collective imagination, overlaps functionality with symbolic weight, intersection of ordinary moments, situations, spaces and individuals 22 Metaphor for constant interplay of the customary stereotype and the founding archtype. 23
Friendship chains 23
Flow of food and drink – Eucharist 25
Doxas – collective frameworks of memory 25
Contemporary media – presents images of everyday life – public discourse 26
Myths serve mainly to nourish gossip and conversation 26
Belonging to the larger group, getting out of oneself 26
Part of the social given (communication mode prominent) into which each of us fits and leads to an organic sense of commitment between individuals – tribalism 27
Underground Puissance
Will to live – Puissance
Entering a tactile period where proxemics predominates 31
Dionysian – spiritual, dionysiac – sensual 32
Social perdurability – ability of the masses to resist 34
Throng can be seen as an expression of the puissance 35
Attachment to power and attachment to nature connected to religion 36
Underground centrality 37
Secret behavior is the basis of social perdurablity 37
Crown is hollow and vacuity itself and contains the puissance 38
Social divine – aggregate force as any basis of society (religion) 38
Obvious dehumanization of urban life??? 42
Giving birth to the groupings for exchange of passion and feelings. 42
Puissance is against power even if it can only advance in disguise to avoid being crushed by power. 47
Politics is a game that the mass is aloof from 47
Mythical affirmation that the masses are the source of power. 48
Derision, irony laughter are underground strategies which undermine the process of normalization … which are the goals of the external power. 50
Distrust of politicians by the masses not like us 53
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Ulmer cont’d
Experiment
This chapter hit home with the discussion of hypermedia and writing logic differences. In 1996 I could read a novel a night and wrote a book. By 2001, I only wrote short pieces designed to distill a concept into one or two pages or, god-forbid, bullet points, and the only thing I read in one sitting now is Harry Potter.
The equipment of memory has changed my thought processes. Whether this is from moving from writing to hypermedia, or my job, or just plain aging is completely up in the air.
linear vs associative logic – 36 Are hierarchical relationships among words still relevant.
chorography – trying to capture a more subjective dimension of spaciality in specific rather than generic terms 39
Heuretics “It is not a recipe, but an evocation of the attitudes and strategies of a specific practice” 41
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Ulmer
Grammatology
Dissemination of a cultural invention – 4
Invention
CATTt 9
Hyper Media
hypermedia = target 17
difference in “logics” is the point of departure 18
knowing may leave people unaffected 19
Derrida v Bolter I am not sure computer science has ended the battle over signs. 32
Concept of hypermedia has informed information retrieval for decades. Are there differences between a human indexing a book and automatic indexing of a page? 27
“non-books” 30
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Lyotard
The first time I read this book was for my master’s thesis. At the time, I was focused on the representation of information and knowledge since that was the topic of the paper and my interest. At that time hypertext was the dominant “new” concept in information retrieval. It was so new that the implications for information retrieval were viewed as predominantly negative; not to mention the implications for thinking and narrative forms. Tim Berners Lee was among the very few who evangelized the form. He created the scripting language and protocol to further the connection among minds and allow serendipitous discovery instead of the much more structured classification systems created for print and journal indexes.
Instead of external creations of records to represent complete work like journal citations, book records etc.; the works themselves “contained” other works through links and references.
The database no longer contained representations of works, but the actual works, in a variety of formats for anyone with internet access to view and interpret as they saw fit. People no longer need access to libraries and experts to learn about things, they have access and can create their own narratives.
I am not sure that “the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.” is as relevant. The web has made more information available to more people than ever and transparency is ascendant for the moment. The text of the torture investigation is available in PDF from the Justice Department’s web site. Constant news stories discuss technological ingenuity in getting around government’s attempted restriction of technology in more outwardly restrictive countries like Iran and China. The “noise” is extreme and I lack the background to understand exactly what Lyotard meant by the statement, but it does seem that governments and corporations are losing control of information as often as they are wrestling it back.
Information ownership and dissemination is as commodified as he says, at the same time it is more transparent, at least in access to the information. The information landscape seems to be plethora of ideas, effluvia, pointless information that becomes a cultural touchstone of small groups of people. (My current favorite is http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays If postmodernism is “incredulity” toward the metanarrative, we have that.
The question of the knower and learner are more complex than I know how to address, but the roles have changed. The users of information and the suppliers do have a relationship but the commodifiers are not as powerful as they were.
The Firefox browser, LINUX operating system, Public Library of Science, GNU licensing, Wikipedia are all examples of structures to keep information and knowledge as close to free as possible. US copyright law, digital media ownership lawsuits and attempts to provide better internet service to partners have all failed to keep the information away from users. Journalism has opened to the masses with blogs and comment sections. Blogs have broken stories that more mainstream media do not believe useful. The attorney general scandal was broken by a blog. Smaller and louder groups of people can control discourse and political debate merely by being relentless and rude like the death panel discussion and the indefatigable people arguing about bike laws on the Tribune message boards.
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McLuhan
Medium as message. Discussion about content and its (ir)relevance. I am probably taking this too literally. (a problem of mine). Technology’s influence on culture. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson talks about writing for an audience, twitter, facebook etc. influencing writing styles for younger people.
hot vs cold – participatory vs.presentation, – a single? sense.
Equilibrium and technology adaption is new to me and helps to explain some trends. “What I am saying that media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves.” 53
“Translation is thus, ‘a spelling out’ of forms of knowing.” 56
Information movement across cultures impacts cultural and organizational change. Media determine the change patterns and speed.
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