This will probably be too late to help most in the class, but I was looking for Enzensberger analysis and bibliographic info on the Internet. The Wikipedia entry was basically useless in its current incarnation. But I found this link helpful.
Here’s a quote from Ex Libris:
Students sometimes seem to have a kind of magical view of the net, without a great deal of understanding of the information landscape on it and beyond it. The invisible net (and the visible library) remain largely invisible to them, because they appear to believe everything they need to know is available for free with a simple Google search — and, if they don’t find it there, that it doesn’t exist at all.
My guess, though, is that, if absolutely forced to think about it, they’d readily admit this is not the case.(more)
So I’m going to have to disagree with Liz very strongly about whether or not you have to be someone who calls psychics at 900 numbers to have some difficulty getting the most out of the Internet.
The Internet is a great opportunity for the world to think about information literacy some more. For example, discussions in the media talking about Wikipedia’s verifiability have taught the world a lot of Library and Information Science 101. For example: just because someone prints or asserts something, whethere it be on television, in the paper or on the Web, that doesn’t make it true; however, there are certain hallmarks of good journalism (etc) that help us to know when a source is likely to be legit. Siegenthaler apparently doesn’t know enough about information literacy to understand that some articles at Wikipedia are good ones and some aren’t so much. He simply assumed that one bad apple meant the whole tree of them was spoiled.
I agree with Liz that access has increased and continues to, thank goodness, although certain information only comes for a price, as the article above from Ex Libris helps us to think about once we read the whole thing. Also there are certain segments of the population for which access is growing less quickly than others. Some who can’t afford Internet access don’t have sufficient resources to deal with that lack, either.
As I mentioned before on Liz’s blog, of course the Internet is good. We just need to be critical thinkers about just how good it is, and whether or not it is evenly good to everyone.
(PS: I hate to rain on everyone’s parade. I feel sometimes like it’s always me who has to bring the downer information. But we need nuance!)
Deleuze, Guattari and Nelson are thinking about some of the same conundrums (which incidentally, I believe, still plague us to some extent): there are questions of learning and education, comingled with a distrust of The Man.
Deleuze and Guattari’s book* is a propagator of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, something that Nelson also encouraged, in a sense, in the ways we look at software, especially that of an educational nature. All three authors demand of the written word, of the software, of all the objects really, a flexibility, the ability to move and shift and change with the people who experience these things. Nelson’s view of these movements was, I believe, more linear than D&G’s, but some would argue that hypertext became in its development more non-linear than the book.
The basic idea in both cases, though, could probably be found in Wikipedia, where, if the prose is accurate and well-written enough, and if the editors have placed enough links to other articles and outside information, you can move to an area of learning and thought that you may never have been exposed to before from an article that contains ideas with which you were already familiar. And, during editing of Wikipedia, the lines of flight move. The runways of Air Knowledge shift. It can sometimes be a bit like Stretchtext.
The primary difference in what is actually in the texts is that Deleuze and Guattari were not interested in thinking about things like graphics or “fantics” like Nelson was — though if we can expand their work to include the Internet, could we not expand it to include non-text objects as well? For example, reused images and sounds in art, such as sampling and found objects work — these deterritorialize and reterritorialize too, don’t they?
…of people, things and ideas that should be eaten by alligators. (We’re trying to drum up commenting!)
We think that this is enough for now. But we hope to make this a continuing series. (Claire might illustrate)
the Sheep Poetry Generator. The article that it links to isn’t to be missed, either.
Unfortunately, the SNL video at YouTube that Fking blog linked to is now gone. Here’s why.
So, which is better? “Yours for the Telling” or “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems”?
I don’t like “Yours for the Telling” at all. It’s structurally lacking in that some of the stories it tells don’t have any middle. (They will say, here are some vegetables; do you want to know what happens next? No? The end!) I certainly don’t like stories about common vegetables that can cutely talk. And I don’t like the word choice and diction of the author. (I mean, “billy-cans”?) I don’t like that he contradicts himself at times — do the vegetables dream, or don’t they? I do think it’s interesting that he pretends to give us options that we don’t actually have – not ever telling us the content of the dream, for example – because, on an intellectual level, I can appreciate the way he manipulates our emotions. Of course, that doesn’t mean I have to like the piece. But I respect that aspect of it.
And that leaves “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems,” which I like, some of the time. Some of the sonnets are jagged and don’t seem to go together, and others fit perfectly. So overall I find its diction better than “Yours for the Telling.” I enjoy the profusion of allusions, which add to the complexity. And of course no talking vegetables is a plus. Like “Yours for the Telling,” the author emotionally manipulates us, making us feel that we are authors ourselves because of our abilities to combine his lines, though we’re not really the authors. And that’s a neat trick too.
My favorite lines from “A Hundred Thousand Billions Poems” felt directed toward the reader, and gave me confidence in my ability to “correctly” arrange the author’s lines. This gave me a sense of comraderie and teamwork with the author, even as they lightly mocked and pointed out that I was really all alone in making my choices. The lines were all on one same page, grouped together:
Bard I adore your endless monologue
Ventriloquists be blowed you strike me dumb
Soliloquies predict great things old chum
One more thing. I’m not going to go into “artistic merit.” Of course in my mind art is something I like and things that I don’t like are trash. Vegetables that cry out “Eeky-Peeky!” like in “Yours for the Telling” are trash. (That explains Liz’s feelings towards the Olsen twins, by the way.) If we pretend to have the definitive answer about what makes something art, we’re quite the snobs.
Okay, now this next bit doesn’t count as the paper, and is behind the cut. (more…)
Hey look! I present to you the Eagle Fire Dinosaur Comics Randomizer. There’s also a thread discussing the results and showing some especially good examples here.
And here’s mine (click thumbnail to view)
I would show you the Garfield Randomizer too, but it appears to have been taken over by an apocalyptic amount of lawyers. But if you want to find out whether or not you’ve got epilepsy, go ahead and click on that link. :)
Less toward our own points for class, there’s always the thought of contemplating Garfield strips where Garfield’s thought bubbles have been edited out. All I can say is: poor Jon.
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. — Wired News
Okay, so now I have to ask — could a computer (either today or eventually) ever do this task better than we do? It certainly would save a lot of heartbreak. My personal opinion is, if we can get the computer to understand, algorythmically, what sarcasm is (and I still have my doubts sometimes, but Turing says why not), then presumably the computer should do better because it wouldn’t be emotionally involved.
They have been quibbling about it a little at the forums for Kingdom of Loathing. The thread is here.
Someone there has declared KoL a “Massively Singleplayer ORPG.” What do you think?
By the way, I also hope to make a few points about Pandora and last.fm at a later point. I’m out of patience because I’ve been doing IS all day. Basically, there’s things I didn’t get to in class because a) I didn’t want to be the one to drag us way off track with a line of conversation based on a small quibble and b) I had to look at Pandora again to make sure the point I wanted to make was really valid (it had been a while since I’d gone, LIS in class).