Alchemical Musings

April 7th I heard Lev Manovich talk at Pratt. I am a big fan of Manovich’s written work, and the Language of New Media was instrumental in my analysis of tagging.

Friday night Manovich showed us ideas in progress, and bravely admitted that they were not completely formed. He talked about describing the evolution of media in evolutionary terms. As in, the next logical progression after getting all our media digitized (i.e., simulating physical processes w/in the digital environment) is the breeding and hybridization of the media. He is claiming that some of what we are now seeing in ‘moving graphics’ or ‘design cinema’ is actually a new form of media, distinct from what came before it. And he is interested in identifying the trunks and branches of this media evolution.

Plaid Itsu was a film he used as an example of a completely new form. Whereas multimedia was the assembly of multiple forms of media adjacent to each other, metamedia is the combination of these forms into a new unified whole. He pointed out the live action photography, combined with traditional design aesthetics, combined with graphics, etc etc. Not sure I bought it, but it was an interesting assertion.

The best question from the audience alluded to a longstanding disconnect between media and communication theorists. Manovich is looking exclusively at the end product of the media being created, and not examining the cultural and social conditions that lead to its creation. There may be mileage from this rarefied approach, as some patterns are discernible, but it does seem to be lacking the depth to explain the creative dynamics and underlying motivations.

After the talk, I began to this relate his line of reasoning to Arthur Young’s theory of process:

The Theory of Evolutionary Process as a Unifying Paradigm
Theory of Process Poster (too bad this isn’t really visible online)

Which I first became exposed to through the work of the Meru Foundation:
letter matrix

It seems to me that the evolutionary forces that Manovich is documenting conform to the trans-disciplinary evolutionary process that Young articulated. For what its worth, the hybridization of media that Manovich claims we failed to predict, was foretold back in this book on the MIT Media Lab, published in 1988.

Filed by jonah at 11:34 pm under aesthetics,epistemology,fire
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Today I presented last year’s bioport Part II paper to the 2nd annual Cultural Studies conference at Teachers College.

Permanent Records: Personal, Cultural, and Social Implications of Pervasive Omniscient Surveillance

I think the distilled version of this model if far more digestible and accessible than the papers.

One of my co-panelists is doing some really interesting work with urban
youth in the bronx, and gathering incredible interview materials about
the perceptions of surveillance by these youth, and their forms of
resistance. These stories might help convey the violence of a
surveillance society.

The conference format was a bit disappointing. I can barely believe academics still read their papers to each other at conferences – there are so many things that Open Source does right, including, knowing how to throw a great conference. Even the variety of presentation formats is an idea that needs to spread – BOFs, lighting talks, presentations and posters all create different spaces and dynamics for interactions between participants. The traditional model is so intimidating that it seems like many people are discouraged from participating.

More importantly, the social justice issues and governance models that are being explored by F/OSS projects are really important for the Cultural/Critical studies folks to be considering. It is also shocking how disconnected they are from the freeculture movement, and its theoretical roots. Arguably, the freeculture movement is a shadow struggle, mirroring the struggles for sustainability, and against globalization and the logic of capitalism being conducted in the physical world. But, it may also represent the actual ground on which that struggle is being conducted.

Filed by jonah at 1:13 am under air,fire,metaphysics
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In his post Social agency and the intersection of communities and networks, Ulises Mejias expounds on the differences between communities and networks, and relates these concepts to the possibility of ontological nearness. The placement of communities within this continuum can be understood more clearly by the immediacy, intensity and intimacy of the interactions.

This conceptual apparatus is helpful for me to being to explain a phenomena that I have been thinking about for a while now. Part of the question can be though about as: What motivates the open source developer? Why would someone who works full time, often writing code professionally, choose to volunteer their nights and weekends to the continued production of more code?

I think this question is an important one for the educational community, since if we could identify this source of motivation, we might be able to “bottle it” and recreate it within the classroom.

My experiences with the Plone community has given me some insight into this question, and I think that the phenomena of Open Source projects would benefit from an analysis using the ideas proposed in Mejias’ draft.

While many people imagine that open source communities are purely virtual (the non-possibility of a virtual community notwithstanding) , it is important to recognize the ways in which these networks of individual developers become communities. Open Source projects typically use a variety of Social Software tools to communicate – email and mailing lists, web sites, forums, discussion boards, blogs, and irc, to name a few. They also often hold face-to-face conferences, and some projects even regularly arrange sprints (also).

Anecdotally, I found it fascinating to observe a progression in intimacy, to the point where some people’s day jobs are just what they do between conferences and sprints. It is no secret that sprints and conferences help make these communities function, cementing interactions over mailing lists and irc.

But an interesting comparison that I would like to propose, which I think can also be described according to the dimensions proposed by Schutz, is the similarity between an Open Source community and a college Fraternity.

[Disclaimer: I was never in a college fraternity, so this analysis is partially speculative]

Fraternities (and I suppose professional guilds and/or unions which they might be related to) are an example of an extended network/community which is disappearing from the modern urban reality. Some people find these kinds of connections in religious congregations, but otherwise many of us have lost the extended networks of people we know, but not intimately or closely.

Like fraternities, Open Source projects typically have a steep gender imbalance, members often go by aliases or nicknames, develop internal languages, acronyms, and lore. The “project” or “organization” becomes an independent object of importance that members become loyal to, and devote their time and resources to supporting.

Eric Raymond has written a bit on the motivations and structure of the hacker community. I have also heard alternate accounts of developer motivation, beyond status and recognition, that have to do with escape from “reality” and immersion in an environment that the developer completely controls. There are many potent sociological, ethnographic, and anthropological research questions that this touches on, many under active research (e.g. Effective work practices for Free and Open Source Software development, or wikipedia’s research pages).

In summary, I think that Mejias’ framework is very useful, but would benefit greatly from more examples which exercise the ideas. Perhaps we can work these categories into our ssa wiki.

Filed by jonah at 8:19 pm under epistemology,fire
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Today I leared that a friend of mine changes her IM handle every time she switches jobs. That’s nothing, she changes emails every time a relationship ends.

I don’t know why or when she started doing this, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

Filed by jonah at 1:08 am under fire,metaphysics
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This afternoon I attended a talk given by Bill Gates at Columbia University. The talk was a part of his university tour, probably prompted by the well documented braindrain happening at MS right now (Certain well known competitors seem to be following the strategy outlined in Good to Great – get the smartest people you can find “on the bus”, and then let them drive…).

Here are my raw notes.

I must say that this afternoon’s talk was a bizarre experience. Perhaps its all the theory stuff I have been reading lately, but I was in a very psychoanalytic, read between the lines, kind of mood, trying to pay as much attention to what he didn’t say, as to what he did.

First, he has clearly taken some lessons from Steve Jobs. He presented casually and demoed live software. One big difference – while Jobs enjoys demoing creative authoring tools, Gates spends most of his time demoing tools of consumption. He continues to treat his gadgets as receivers, not transmitters, and this is all getting a bit tiring.

Next, close to all the software contexts he described were business and work related. There was very little talk about socializing or play (save for the xbox, and socializing in that virtual space). It was eerie that when someone asked him what his greatest accomplishments were, he responded how much he loved work (and working at his foundation). All of his examples for the uses of ubiquitous computing were work/consumer related (auto tracking receipts for expense reports, shopping, collecting business cards when traveling, Location info – while in traffic (presumably while commuting)) — this is all summed up with his grand vision of the future smartphone as replacement for wallet.

Isn’t there something else the phone could replace? Could our phones become surrogate brains, man’s best friend, or personal assistants? Can’t we conjure up a better metaphor than wallets for how software will change the world? Will it do anything beyond making us better and more efficient shoppers?

The talk kept getting weirder – Gates played a video, which most of the audience thought was very funny. I will have to save my analysis for my Media and Cultural Theory class (or the comments), but it really threw me off.

Gates never mentioned Google, Firefox, or Linux. Did acknowledge the wikipedia (by name), freebsd, sendmail, and the NSCA browser. He even made two truly surprising statements regarding IP – after demoing that the new XBox 360 will connect to an IPod, an audience member asked if it would be able to play fairplay protected ACC files. Gates responded that it won’t be able to, because Apple won’t let him (Ha!), to which he added “its your music and you paid for it.” He also stated that “studios have gone overboard in protection scheme”, and ” will always have free and commercial software.”

Before the session, they passed around cards with potential questions (I am still not sure if the questioners were plants, reading these cards…).

Here were my, never asked questions:
1) Technology can bend towards good or evil. What can we do to insure that it is used for the Good? What is M$ doing to promote the use of its software for the Good.

2) In the upcoming world of omniscient surveillance, what role will M$ play in insuring individuality, privacy, and anonymity. What is M$ doing to contribute

Filed by jonah at 12:28 am under ethics,fire,metaphysics
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I have an extensive background in software architecture, design, and development. Prior to joining the center, I was the lead developer at Abstract Edge, an interactive marketing firm which serviced both non-profit and corporate clients. I was also a senior developer at MaMaMedia, a children’s educational Web site. I am an active open source contributer whose technical interests include Linux, Python, and Content Management.
[This blog was started for MSTU Social Software Affordances, and this post was written as an introduction].

Filed by jonah at 6:53 pm under fire,metaphysics
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