"The iPad is a magic electronic babysitter that creates instant peace in the household."
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/a-parents-struggle-with-a-childs-ipad-addiction/?src=me&ref=homepage
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Jeffrey's Midterm
Using Guru Meditation I am continuously reminded of N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman. In particular I think of the passage, "The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction." This app foregrounds our subjectivity in a disembodied yogi. We are the floating yogi. More than just an avatar that we control in this game he (she, it, ?) is the digital representation of our heightened consciousness. It is meant to be a visual presentation of our ability to be mindfulness. Later in the same section of Hayles she cites deLeuze and Guattari and their concept of a "body without organs" which brings to mind Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs. Guru Meditation is our meditating agent that desires our conscious engagement with a meditative state. It demands its form of meditation in order to function. Otherwise it is simply a figure sitting in a dark place. There is no way of forcing the app to show us what it will do when we obey it's needs, namely sitting still and quiet, except to comply.
Guru Meditation also fits the article "What is an app?" perfectly. Of course Bogost both wrote the article and "wrote" the app so it would stand to reason that they would coincide. Using the Guru Meditation app I think about the dictionary definition that Bogost alters to fit the actual app and not just the word. It is hard to imagine what the not-slanged and not-shortened version of this application would be, but it is easy to see how it has slanged and shortened the practice of meditation. It seems very apropos of the zen buddhist practice of running meditation. In his information section on the app Bogost imagines people using it on the bus or in a crowded place and engaging in mediation on the fly. Whereas meditation has traditionally been a practice of becoming and then remaining still, Guru Meditation condenses this. It demands immediate stillness and then encourages you to best your previous records for focus.
I am above all else frustrated by this app. I see meditation as something that you cannot do wrong. Guru Meditation on the other hand demands strict adherence to its way of being. I find myself not letting go and becoming still but increasing in agitation until I give up. In fact during today's experience with it I felt, for the first time, that it actually did reflect my mindfulness at the end. Something went awry and my app entered a sort of schizophrenic loop between the opening screen, the all black screen with the figure, and the guru on his mat. It cycled through this repeatedly while buzzing a static tone. I thought "yes, this is in fact a reflection of my state of relaxation." A constant attempt to enter a meditative state that is constantly being drawn back out to general awareness only to attempt to dive back in, with the same results each time.
I have an app called Gilt. It is an iPad app for an online clothing store that sells designer clothing and goods at discounted prices. It also has a section, Jetsetter, in which it is possible to book lavish hotel accommodations at high end resorts around the world. I find it fascinating because it is an app designed to improve upon the experience of shopping a website which in turn was designed to improve upon or at least simulate and/or replace the experience of shopping in a store.
Removing the website from the equation however it is curious to see what has happened. The app is on the third level of the simulacra. It is very really founded on the model and aims at total control. It maintains the "cart" of the real store and the "departments" to separate goods but it offers the user a seemingly all seeing and all accessible interface to them. It is founded on a concept of shopping to which there is no original. Even the department store, were there to be a brick and mortar Gilt somewhere, is founded on a fallacious idea of the marketplace. In fact the fact that Gilt does not exist as an actual place is indicative of the level of simulacra on which this app operates. It is meant to be a representation of a thing that does not exist in reality. It is a cybernetic game in which users shop a store that is not real. However, the experience of shopping Gilt influences our concept of how we shop in reality. We want the real world to reflect our ability to have unbridled access to goods like we do online. In a very real sense the experience of shopping online recreates an ideal for which there is no origin. It is a "desperate rehallucinating of the past" in which the "real" experience of shopping can never surpass the model because this real was "only the pretext for the model."
On the other hand these images of goods are indicative of the first order of simulacra. The photographs are signifiers of the actual goods. They grasp toward reality and the real object.
Guru Meditation also fits the article "What is an app?" perfectly. Of course Bogost both wrote the article and "wrote" the app so it would stand to reason that they would coincide. Using the Guru Meditation app I think about the dictionary definition that Bogost alters to fit the actual app and not just the word. It is hard to imagine what the not-slanged and not-shortened version of this application would be, but it is easy to see how it has slanged and shortened the practice of meditation. It seems very apropos of the zen buddhist practice of running meditation. In his information section on the app Bogost imagines people using it on the bus or in a crowded place and engaging in mediation on the fly. Whereas meditation has traditionally been a practice of becoming and then remaining still, Guru Meditation condenses this. It demands immediate stillness and then encourages you to best your previous records for focus.
I am above all else frustrated by this app. I see meditation as something that you cannot do wrong. Guru Meditation on the other hand demands strict adherence to its way of being. I find myself not letting go and becoming still but increasing in agitation until I give up. In fact during today's experience with it I felt, for the first time, that it actually did reflect my mindfulness at the end. Something went awry and my app entered a sort of schizophrenic loop between the opening screen, the all black screen with the figure, and the guru on his mat. It cycled through this repeatedly while buzzing a static tone. I thought "yes, this is in fact a reflection of my state of relaxation." A constant attempt to enter a meditative state that is constantly being drawn back out to general awareness only to attempt to dive back in, with the same results each time.
I have an app called Gilt. It is an iPad app for an online clothing store that sells designer clothing and goods at discounted prices. It also has a section, Jetsetter, in which it is possible to book lavish hotel accommodations at high end resorts around the world. I find it fascinating because it is an app designed to improve upon the experience of shopping a website which in turn was designed to improve upon or at least simulate and/or replace the experience of shopping in a store.
Removing the website from the equation however it is curious to see what has happened. The app is on the third level of the simulacra. It is very really founded on the model and aims at total control. It maintains the "cart" of the real store and the "departments" to separate goods but it offers the user a seemingly all seeing and all accessible interface to them. It is founded on a concept of shopping to which there is no original. Even the department store, were there to be a brick and mortar Gilt somewhere, is founded on a fallacious idea of the marketplace. In fact the fact that Gilt does not exist as an actual place is indicative of the level of simulacra on which this app operates. It is meant to be a representation of a thing that does not exist in reality. It is a cybernetic game in which users shop a store that is not real. However, the experience of shopping Gilt influences our concept of how we shop in reality. We want the real world to reflect our ability to have unbridled access to goods like we do online. In a very real sense the experience of shopping online recreates an ideal for which there is no origin. It is a "desperate rehallucinating of the past" in which the "real" experience of shopping can never surpass the model because this real was "only the pretext for the model."
On the other hand these images of goods are indicative of the first order of simulacra. The photographs are signifiers of the actual goods. They grasp toward reality and the real object.
Holly Combs Midterm Pt. 2
Barthes has 7 conditions explaining what "Text" is to him, and I'm going to go through each one, looking at the Facebook app on my iPad in order to see where it falls on the plain of "work" and "text."
1.) Text is not a defined object, cannot be separated from work, a "methodological field" vs. something concrete, held in the language vs. held in the hand
Okay, so Facebook is definitely not a concrete object. It is held entirely in computer code language and whatever language users choose to post on their profiles. If Facebook is a text, I would not know how to go about separating it from the "work" because I'm unsure what the work could possibly be. Perhaps, if someone compiled a book entirely of Facebook statuses or Facebook notes, that would be a work, whereas Facebook would go on existing as a text.
2.) Text does not stop w/ (good) literature, not a hierarchy, cannot be classified, always paradoxical, limits rules of enunciation
It kind of makes me giggle thinking that "good" literature has any place in Facebook, and yet it must. Of the millions of people who use Facebook, some of them must be influenced by "good" literature and must post ideas founded somewhere in "good" literature. Actually, there are millions of Facebook profiles dedicated solely to "good" literature. For example, I am a fan of the David Foster Wallace page on Facebook and a fan of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. After the billions of misspelled and slanged statuses that people regularly post, I don't think that anyone would argue that Facebook stops at (good) literature. And yet, there is nothing hierarchical about the posts on Facebook. Is Robert Bell's Facebook better than mine because he has 900 friends and I only have 50? No, there is no hierarchical advantage to having more friends. Is Robert Bell's Facebook better than mine because his statuses contain well-thought out ideas communicated in multi-syllabic words and mine usually only contain the lyrics to a song I'm listening to? No, again no hierarchical value. Like many digital mediums that exist today, the text that is Facebook cannot be classified in in its entirety according to literary genre. However, the app store does easily classify the Facebook app as a "social" or "social networking" app.
3.) Text structured but decentered, no closure, serial movement of dislocations, overlappings, variations
Currently Facebook has no center and no closure. I thought at first, the "center" might be the profile screen or the homepage, but then, I realized that screen is different for every person who logs on. As of now, there is no "closure" or end to Facebook in sight. Sure, the sight may close down someday, but when that happens, it won't be the same as the closure provided by a work. If Facebook stops running, there will be nothing to look back on, no closing the cover of the book, the way that their is with a work. As for the notion of serial movement, I think this is one of the places that the term text is most applicable to Facebook. Facebook is ever-changing because people are constantly posting new ideas, information, etc. on their profiles, and new profiles are being created all the time. There may be 4 different Facebook pages for the same band or event or even the same person, and the information that people post may in some ways overlap.
4.)Text is plural/has plurality of meaning, it is like a cloth, the text can be itself only in its difference
For every user, the Facebook homescreen looks different because they are connected to different people, pages, and events. The Facebook experience differs from person to person, though some experiences may be similar. Depending on who you are, who you're friends with, what pages you follow, and when you log on, the Facebook experience can be completely altered.
5.) The text has no father figure, text=network, no respect owed to the author, author can only visit the text as a guest
As I previously mentioned, the Apple App Store, classifies Facebook as a "social networking" tool. By definition, Facebook is a network. It is a web of profiles linked together by comments, likes, pokes, messages, and other posts. Perhaps Mark Zukerberg is the founder of Facebook, but his control over what people post on Facebook is limited at this point. This is not to say that it is totally absent. Facebook gatekeepers do exist in order to ensure that users do not post anything "offensive" on their profiles.
6.) Work=object of consumption, text=activity, something to be played with
Facebooking is definitely an activity. It is a verb; it is something that people do. Users spend hours logged into Facebook chatting with their friends, updating their profiles, and posting things on friends walls. But isn't Facebook an object of consumption as well? Why this social networking site over any of the other ones? And while users are Facebooking, aren't they also taking in their friends' profiles and taking in the ads on the side of the screen?
7.) Work=pleasure of consumption, cannot be rewritten; text=inseparable from enjoyment, achieves transparency of social relations, all language circulates freely
I'm not sure where Facebook falls in the topic of enjoyment, as most Facebook users claim to hate the site while spending hours on it. However, visiting Facebook is a choice, and I'm going to argue that people would not freely choose to get on Facebook if they did not somehow feel that life would be less enjoyable if they did not have a profile. Obviously, social relations are transparent on Facebook. When I log in, my homepage shows me who has recently become friends with who and what my friends have posted on each other's walls. Also, all of my friends and their comments to me are displayed on my profile for anyone to see.
After this exercise, I feel that Facebook does not fit neatly into Barthes' critical framework in terms of his distinction between "work" and "text." Though, the Facebook app seems to be more controlled and tangible than Barthes' "text," it seems to be more text than work due to its classification as network which is constantly changing and which creates different experiences from user to user.
1.) Text is not a defined object, cannot be separated from work, a "methodological field" vs. something concrete, held in the language vs. held in the hand
Okay, so Facebook is definitely not a concrete object. It is held entirely in computer code language and whatever language users choose to post on their profiles. If Facebook is a text, I would not know how to go about separating it from the "work" because I'm unsure what the work could possibly be. Perhaps, if someone compiled a book entirely of Facebook statuses or Facebook notes, that would be a work, whereas Facebook would go on existing as a text.
2.) Text does not stop w/ (good) literature, not a hierarchy, cannot be classified, always paradoxical, limits rules of enunciation
It kind of makes me giggle thinking that "good" literature has any place in Facebook, and yet it must. Of the millions of people who use Facebook, some of them must be influenced by "good" literature and must post ideas founded somewhere in "good" literature. Actually, there are millions of Facebook profiles dedicated solely to "good" literature. For example, I am a fan of the David Foster Wallace page on Facebook and a fan of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. After the billions of misspelled and slanged statuses that people regularly post, I don't think that anyone would argue that Facebook stops at (good) literature. And yet, there is nothing hierarchical about the posts on Facebook. Is Robert Bell's Facebook better than mine because he has 900 friends and I only have 50? No, there is no hierarchical advantage to having more friends. Is Robert Bell's Facebook better than mine because his statuses contain well-thought out ideas communicated in multi-syllabic words and mine usually only contain the lyrics to a song I'm listening to? No, again no hierarchical value. Like many digital mediums that exist today, the text that is Facebook cannot be classified in in its entirety according to literary genre. However, the app store does easily classify the Facebook app as a "social" or "social networking" app.
3.) Text structured but decentered, no closure, serial movement of dislocations, overlappings, variations
Currently Facebook has no center and no closure. I thought at first, the "center" might be the profile screen or the homepage, but then, I realized that screen is different for every person who logs on. As of now, there is no "closure" or end to Facebook in sight. Sure, the sight may close down someday, but when that happens, it won't be the same as the closure provided by a work. If Facebook stops running, there will be nothing to look back on, no closing the cover of the book, the way that their is with a work. As for the notion of serial movement, I think this is one of the places that the term text is most applicable to Facebook. Facebook is ever-changing because people are constantly posting new ideas, information, etc. on their profiles, and new profiles are being created all the time. There may be 4 different Facebook pages for the same band or event or even the same person, and the information that people post may in some ways overlap.
4.)Text is plural/has plurality of meaning, it is like a cloth, the text can be itself only in its difference
For every user, the Facebook homescreen looks different because they are connected to different people, pages, and events. The Facebook experience differs from person to person, though some experiences may be similar. Depending on who you are, who you're friends with, what pages you follow, and when you log on, the Facebook experience can be completely altered.
5.) The text has no father figure, text=network, no respect owed to the author, author can only visit the text as a guest
As I previously mentioned, the Apple App Store, classifies Facebook as a "social networking" tool. By definition, Facebook is a network. It is a web of profiles linked together by comments, likes, pokes, messages, and other posts. Perhaps Mark Zukerberg is the founder of Facebook, but his control over what people post on Facebook is limited at this point. This is not to say that it is totally absent. Facebook gatekeepers do exist in order to ensure that users do not post anything "offensive" on their profiles.
6.) Work=object of consumption, text=activity, something to be played with
Facebooking is definitely an activity. It is a verb; it is something that people do. Users spend hours logged into Facebook chatting with their friends, updating their profiles, and posting things on friends walls. But isn't Facebook an object of consumption as well? Why this social networking site over any of the other ones? And while users are Facebooking, aren't they also taking in their friends' profiles and taking in the ads on the side of the screen?
7.) Work=pleasure of consumption, cannot be rewritten; text=inseparable from enjoyment, achieves transparency of social relations, all language circulates freely
I'm not sure where Facebook falls in the topic of enjoyment, as most Facebook users claim to hate the site while spending hours on it. However, visiting Facebook is a choice, and I'm going to argue that people would not freely choose to get on Facebook if they did not somehow feel that life would be less enjoyable if they did not have a profile. Obviously, social relations are transparent on Facebook. When I log in, my homepage shows me who has recently become friends with who and what my friends have posted on each other's walls. Also, all of my friends and their comments to me are displayed on my profile for anyone to see.
After this exercise, I feel that Facebook does not fit neatly into Barthes' critical framework in terms of his distinction between "work" and "text." Though, the Facebook app seems to be more controlled and tangible than Barthes' "text," it seems to be more text than work due to its classification as network which is constantly changing and which creates different experiences from user to user.
Midterm
Part one:
While playing the guru meditation app, I was very quickly frustrated. First I was stuck on a dark screen with the weird, blobby guru telling me I was too loud every time I sniffled. Then when I finally got to some scenery, I guess I wasn't still enough for the picky little guru because he sent me back to square one 3 times. It was only at the very end of the seven minutes that I even got the clock to start. The entire time I felt this bizarre anger towards the little guru. I was trying to interact with him, trying to follow the rules of his game; but he was essentially ignoring me. Instead I was left beating on his door begging him to start floating so I would at least have something to look at.
It was, admittedly, a pretty annoying 7 minutes. I wasn't relaxed at all. I definitely feel more 'meditated' reading a book than trying to please the guru with my balance skills. At the same time, I kept thinking about Marc Prensky's article on digital natives and digital immigrants. Which one of them would enjoy this game? Is it one that involves deep attention or hyper attention? Does it even involve attention? In his article, Prensky discusses the differences between legacy content and future content in the educational system. Which one does guru fit into? Should i even be trying to label it as either of these?
I just can't figure out where to situate this app. Is it an app made modern but calling back to the deep attention of the past? Or is it a modern game just trying to be original? Is it even a modern game? I guess by the standards that it involves a touch screen and sound sensitivity it is modern, but the idea for this app was born with some of the very first video games. The fact that it's a meditation app is only an homage to the very old meditation board.
Perhaps Bathes has an explanation for my lack of definitiveness. In 'The Death of the Author,' he talks about how the "explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it" and says that "once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." I know that, in literature, we have not seen the death of the author. But maybe Barthes was right. Maybe the death of the author has come to us in the form of the app. We don't know who is behind these things. I don't even know who made the app I'm using now and it's never really troubled me. I can interact with this app or my weather.com app without worry or concern about who is behind it. But the more that I think About, the more I begin to feel like my iPad is full of anonymous people.
All of these apps can be read as texts. But these these texts are different from books, magazines or movies. We have experienced, through the iPad and other things like it, the "birth of the reader," as Barthes calls it. There is literally no interaction with any sort of authorship in the app world. There is no call for it. So what about guru makes me feel unsettled? Why doesn't feel like guru needs an author?
Perhaps it is because guru really does call back to an older time. But what would the author for an app be like anyway? Has there ever been an instance where there was an 'author' for an app? Maybe I'm even more of a digital immigrant than I thought.
Part two:
The app I find most fascinating (I'm serious) is the app store. I go there every day. I like to see what apps are in, what apps are out, what apps are free, what new, unnecessary thing I can do next on my iPad. It feels like a really bizarre version of going to Forever 21. There's so much for so little and it's so overwhelming how many options I have. So looking at Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Science Fiction," what order of the simulacra is this app? Is it natural? Well, no. I really don't think the app store is naturally occurring. I believe that the app store is simulacra of the second order. It is "productive, productivist, founded on energy.". There is nothing new, original, or beyond ordinary about the app store. While it "corresponds science fiction," in that it is truly a manifestation of the immense bounds technology has taken, it is not among the complete other and beyond that the third order identifies with. Perhaps the apps themselves are members of the third order, but the app store is simply the iPad version of any normal store. It's format is not original.
Perhaps if the app store featured some really awesome way for me to enter in all of my interests and it would tell me apps that I like. As it is, I search for "PDF reader" in the search bar and that's about as good as it gets. It doesn't even do suggested apps, which amazon or barnes and noble will do for books, movies, etc. The app store is merely a "mechanical robot machine," as Baudrillard characterizes the second order. It does not have any sort of momentum or original power. It is simply the iPad version of Forever 21, complete with a sales rack.
While playing the guru meditation app, I was very quickly frustrated. First I was stuck on a dark screen with the weird, blobby guru telling me I was too loud every time I sniffled. Then when I finally got to some scenery, I guess I wasn't still enough for the picky little guru because he sent me back to square one 3 times. It was only at the very end of the seven minutes that I even got the clock to start. The entire time I felt this bizarre anger towards the little guru. I was trying to interact with him, trying to follow the rules of his game; but he was essentially ignoring me. Instead I was left beating on his door begging him to start floating so I would at least have something to look at.
It was, admittedly, a pretty annoying 7 minutes. I wasn't relaxed at all. I definitely feel more 'meditated' reading a book than trying to please the guru with my balance skills. At the same time, I kept thinking about Marc Prensky's article on digital natives and digital immigrants. Which one of them would enjoy this game? Is it one that involves deep attention or hyper attention? Does it even involve attention? In his article, Prensky discusses the differences between legacy content and future content in the educational system. Which one does guru fit into? Should i even be trying to label it as either of these?
I just can't figure out where to situate this app. Is it an app made modern but calling back to the deep attention of the past? Or is it a modern game just trying to be original? Is it even a modern game? I guess by the standards that it involves a touch screen and sound sensitivity it is modern, but the idea for this app was born with some of the very first video games. The fact that it's a meditation app is only an homage to the very old meditation board.
Perhaps Bathes has an explanation for my lack of definitiveness. In 'The Death of the Author,' he talks about how the "explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it" and says that "once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." I know that, in literature, we have not seen the death of the author. But maybe Barthes was right. Maybe the death of the author has come to us in the form of the app. We don't know who is behind these things. I don't even know who made the app I'm using now and it's never really troubled me. I can interact with this app or my weather.com app without worry or concern about who is behind it. But the more that I think About, the more I begin to feel like my iPad is full of anonymous people.
All of these apps can be read as texts. But these these texts are different from books, magazines or movies. We have experienced, through the iPad and other things like it, the "birth of the reader," as Barthes calls it. There is literally no interaction with any sort of authorship in the app world. There is no call for it. So what about guru makes me feel unsettled? Why doesn't feel like guru needs an author?
Perhaps it is because guru really does call back to an older time. But what would the author for an app be like anyway? Has there ever been an instance where there was an 'author' for an app? Maybe I'm even more of a digital immigrant than I thought.
Part two:
The app I find most fascinating (I'm serious) is the app store. I go there every day. I like to see what apps are in, what apps are out, what apps are free, what new, unnecessary thing I can do next on my iPad. It feels like a really bizarre version of going to Forever 21. There's so much for so little and it's so overwhelming how many options I have. So looking at Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Science Fiction," what order of the simulacra is this app? Is it natural? Well, no. I really don't think the app store is naturally occurring. I believe that the app store is simulacra of the second order. It is "productive, productivist, founded on energy.". There is nothing new, original, or beyond ordinary about the app store. While it "corresponds science fiction," in that it is truly a manifestation of the immense bounds technology has taken, it is not among the complete other and beyond that the third order identifies with. Perhaps the apps themselves are members of the third order, but the app store is simply the iPad version of any normal store. It's format is not original.
Perhaps if the app store featured some really awesome way for me to enter in all of my interests and it would tell me apps that I like. As it is, I search for "PDF reader" in the search bar and that's about as good as it gets. It doesn't even do suggested apps, which amazon or barnes and noble will do for books, movies, etc. The app store is merely a "mechanical robot machine," as Baudrillard characterizes the second order. It does not have any sort of momentum or original power. It is simply the iPad version of Forever 21, complete with a sales rack.
Amelie's Midterm
(posted for Amelie by proxy)
Part I
An interesting assumption which would seem to be implicit in the creation of the Guru Meditation app would be that the spiritual (or transcendent) experience of meditation is one which requires translation. The existence of Guru Meditation as an app implies that our culture, which, as Prensky points out, has become increasingly geared towards the digital native (with education, an institution widely assumed to be among the most liberal, being one of the institutions which has had the most difficulty adjusting), is no longer capable of a self-contained and ideally unaided activity such as meditation without a prosthetic device which exists to monitor us and tell us if we are "meditating correctly". The developer claims that the app removes one from the cell phone, because one cannot simultaneously play guru meditation and check one's text messages, but what the app ultimately achieves is reinforcement of the idea of virtuality discussed in How We Became Posthuman.
In the app information, the developer explains that Guru Meditation was not first conceived as an app which would "keep score" or "track your progress", ideas which seem antithetical to the traditional conception of meditation as an entirely self-contained activity; however, even before virtuality had achieved its current state of technical advancement, Guru Meditation did not merely function as a calming graphic pattern, such as the color-changing nightlight I had when I was small. Rather, it existed to provide feedback, to make meditation into something you could "win"--in using Guru Meditation, one asks a machine for spiritual validation which it cannot possibly give, given the limitations of the hardware. This phenomenon is not limited to Guru Meditation--Wii Fit cannot actually tell whether you are running or rhythmically shaking a controller, nor can it tell you if your posture is incorrect when you do push-ups. It can only tell you what it knows--that you are putting such-and-such an amount of weight on a balance board, or shaking the controller at such-and-such a rate. But because I, as a so-called digital native, have become so finely attuned to the concept of virtuality--the machine sees all--I shift my weight to acquiesce to the demands of the on-screen instructor, even when I believe that it has very little to do with the actual point of the excercise. Similarly, while playing Guru Meditation I was continually seized with a desire to meditate the way I do in yoga class--lotus position, thumb and index finger together, three remaining fingers extended, gaze drifting gently toward the tip of my nose--but I was being monitored, and these were not the rules of the game. Interestingly, it might be easier to "succeed" at Guru Meditation not by meditating but by focusing on the little guy on my screen--in fact, I'm almost certain I'd receive more positive feedback. But there's something troubling about my reliance on mechanated virtual feedback, the way I have invested a part of my ego in the machine's verdict.
Part II
Baudrillard defines the third order of simulacra as "Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game - total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control." To me, nothing fits this description quite so neatly as Google Maps and its corresponding app.
A founding principle of Google Maps is that the space in which we operate is limited, and it can be known, at least on a representational level, through a pantographic shift. First there was the fantastic, the maps labelled with "here be dragons"; this was followed by an overwhelming sense of wonder as the enormity of space became evident, and it loomed overhead more enormous and miraculous than any dragon could possibly have been--and this was the realm of Baudrillard's second order of simulacra, a distinctly modernist idea of endless expansion, limitless possibilty. In many ways these worldviews still persist--we build larger and more elaborate telescopes, still, and we survey starstuff with something of the old fascination--but most "progress" currently occurs on the front of the third order of simulacra, that of Google Maps.
Google Maps' concern is not expansion. Google Maps does not strive to cover the largest possible area--it is concerned with "total operationality", and aims to represent the space in which we operate on a daily basis. It is not an outward expansion but an increase in informational density which concerns Google Maps. Information must be collected on as small a scale as possible--the goal, after all, is to be able to zoom in. Every street must be labelled, every building and its purpose must be documented. "We can no longer imagine any other universe", because Google has mapped ours so perfectly. In a world which is so pantographically manipulable, there are no dragons anymore.
Part I
An interesting assumption which would seem to be implicit in the creation of the Guru Meditation app would be that the spiritual (or transcendent) experience of meditation is one which requires translation. The existence of Guru Meditation as an app implies that our culture, which, as Prensky points out, has become increasingly geared towards the digital native (with education, an institution widely assumed to be among the most liberal, being one of the institutions which has had the most difficulty adjusting), is no longer capable of a self-contained and ideally unaided activity such as meditation without a prosthetic device which exists to monitor us and tell us if we are "meditating correctly". The developer claims that the app removes one from the cell phone, because one cannot simultaneously play guru meditation and check one's text messages, but what the app ultimately achieves is reinforcement of the idea of virtuality discussed in How We Became Posthuman.
In the app information, the developer explains that Guru Meditation was not first conceived as an app which would "keep score" or "track your progress", ideas which seem antithetical to the traditional conception of meditation as an entirely self-contained activity; however, even before virtuality had achieved its current state of technical advancement, Guru Meditation did not merely function as a calming graphic pattern, such as the color-changing nightlight I had when I was small. Rather, it existed to provide feedback, to make meditation into something you could "win"--in using Guru Meditation, one asks a machine for spiritual validation which it cannot possibly give, given the limitations of the hardware. This phenomenon is not limited to Guru Meditation--Wii Fit cannot actually tell whether you are running or rhythmically shaking a controller, nor can it tell you if your posture is incorrect when you do push-ups. It can only tell you what it knows--that you are putting such-and-such an amount of weight on a balance board, or shaking the controller at such-and-such a rate. But because I, as a so-called digital native, have become so finely attuned to the concept of virtuality--the machine sees all--I shift my weight to acquiesce to the demands of the on-screen instructor, even when I believe that it has very little to do with the actual point of the excercise. Similarly, while playing Guru Meditation I was continually seized with a desire to meditate the way I do in yoga class--lotus position, thumb and index finger together, three remaining fingers extended, gaze drifting gently toward the tip of my nose--but I was being monitored, and these were not the rules of the game. Interestingly, it might be easier to "succeed" at Guru Meditation not by meditating but by focusing on the little guy on my screen--in fact, I'm almost certain I'd receive more positive feedback. But there's something troubling about my reliance on mechanated virtual feedback, the way I have invested a part of my ego in the machine's verdict.
Part II
Baudrillard defines the third order of simulacra as "Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game - total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control." To me, nothing fits this description quite so neatly as Google Maps and its corresponding app.
A founding principle of Google Maps is that the space in which we operate is limited, and it can be known, at least on a representational level, through a pantographic shift. First there was the fantastic, the maps labelled with "here be dragons"; this was followed by an overwhelming sense of wonder as the enormity of space became evident, and it loomed overhead more enormous and miraculous than any dragon could possibly have been--and this was the realm of Baudrillard's second order of simulacra, a distinctly modernist idea of endless expansion, limitless possibilty. In many ways these worldviews still persist--we build larger and more elaborate telescopes, still, and we survey starstuff with something of the old fascination--but most "progress" currently occurs on the front of the third order of simulacra, that of Google Maps.
Google Maps' concern is not expansion. Google Maps does not strive to cover the largest possible area--it is concerned with "total operationality", and aims to represent the space in which we operate on a daily basis. It is not an outward expansion but an increase in informational density which concerns Google Maps. Information must be collected on as small a scale as possible--the goal, after all, is to be able to zoom in. Every street must be labelled, every building and its purpose must be documented. "We can no longer imagine any other universe", because Google has mapped ours so perfectly. In a world which is so pantographically manipulable, there are no dragons anymore.
(edited by Amelie for clarity [read: typos])
Midterm
Part One:
Can computers think? It seems a pertinent question to ask while playing Guru Meditation on the iPad. The iPad, in this particular case, acts as a mediator between the player and the App; it seems to safe to say that some people may believe that the Guru Meditation App forces the iPad to "think," but this is not the case. A slight jerk of the hand, and the little green bar--so tantalizing to the player because it is infinitely unattainable--disappears completely. The App thus believes that the player has lost his concentration. But this is cannot be further from the truth.
Searle, in his article "Can Computers Think?", argues that in order for a computer--a machine--to think, it must have the knowledge as to why something occurs. He uses the example of computer programmers creating a program in which the computer simulates understanding Chinese symbols; the computer is able to answer questions with Chinese symbols because it searches through its databases for a relevant and "appropriate" answer. However, the computer does not "think," it simply rattles off the information that has been programmed for it. Searle describes the computer as having "syntax, but not semantics" (671). In short, the computer can respond with Chinese symbols because that is what it has been programmed to do, but it cannot formulate a conversation or comprehend what it has said--in a way, the Chinese symbols experiment demonstrates that while a computer can perform to exceedingly high standards, it is not able to explain the *why*.
As such, the same can be said for the Guru Meditation App. The App does not "think," but only performs. It acts solely on the motions of the player's hands. Perhaps the player has managed to wipe his brain of any and all thoughts--which, according the App's Inspiration page, that is what the App is intended for--but perhaps he has naturally shaky hands? Guru Meditation would promptly end the player's attempt and make him start over again. Much like the computer with the Chinese symbols, Guru Meditation only understands the programming, but does not take into account the why's or how's or any of the other issues that may play a hand in the game.
The Guru Meditation App also functions as a reproduction of the reality of meditating. In Benjamin's "The Work of Art," he explains that art is always being reproduced throughout the centuries. Although Benjamin speaks of films and statues or the like in his article, meditating is simply a different form of art, one which applies to his argument. The process of reproduction takes away from the original and loses its uniqueness. That is not to say that the reproduction, of say, the statue of Venus, is not as appealing, but there is something to say about the original--to use Benjamin's vocabulary, the original is "natural." As such, Guru Meditation is a reproduction of actually meditating; it is a simulation (a program) that creates the illusion of peace because in reality, the player is much more focused with not moving his hands than losing focus completely.
Part Two:
The Kindle App, and the e-books that can be then bought from Amazon, is a form of the third order of Baudrillard's simulacra. The third order of the simulacra, in short, is the hyperreal, it is the "simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game--total operationality, hyperreality, and total control" (1). Perhaps it may help to back up a little: if Kindle (or, let us be more specific, the e-book) is the third simulacra then that means that the printed book must then be of the second order--the model, the imitation of the "natural" (the first order).
But what is the "natural?" Baudrillard describes the "natural" to be, in a way, God, or at least a person's imitation of it. In this particular case, we can perhaps substitute "Author" for "God." The second order, the printed book, seeks to make a Utopia of the Author (unless we are speaking of Barthes, who claims that we should separate authorship from reading completely). It is the "real" model, meaning that one can find a book in a bookstore or a grocery mart. It has been mass-produced and is therefore a reproduction. However, the third simulacra takes the simulation a step further, a simulacra of a simulacra, if you will. For a simpler example, let us look at the infamous bagel vs. mini-bagel scenario. The bagel has been mass-produced, it has become the "ideal" in both shape and form (i.e the printed book has become the ideal because it is what a person recognizes); however, the mini-bagel is not a replication of the standard bagel, but rather a hyperreal version of it, a new version. The same can be said for the e-book.
The e-book is intangible; it exists solely in an alternate plane. The App displays the e-book to appear as the printed book might--it simulates turning pages and text against the back screen, but it is not a printed book. This can be seen in the simplest of manners: locations rather than page numbers, changes in font, the mere fact that a reader can purchase a book and have it in his library in under ten seconds. Moreover, the concept of the "library" is also changed, formatted to appear as a real bookcase might (if all the books faced forward, that is). The Kindle's library is a simulation, an imitation, of a real library; and Amazon's Kindle Store is also a simulation, an imitation, a simulacra, of Barnes&Noble or Borders or any other bookstore. The e-book (and the Kindle App as a result) is the mini-bagel: it is passed forward as a simulation of the printed book (the standard bagel), when in fact, it should instead be viewed entirely as its own entity.
In addition, the e-book can also be viewed as the third order of the simulacra in a different light. Baudrillard explains that science fiction (the third order) has altered and changed over the years because the discovery of Earth has already been completed--in fiction then, one must push past that and create other worlds to show a way of "otherworldliness." The same can be said for the Kindle App, and also, the e-book. Since the sixteenth-century, the printed book has been tweaked and altered and praised; for 600 years, it has been the way in which people read. However, Baudrillard would claim that the progression to the e-book and online reading has been done in much the same way that science fiction has moved to alternate universes. We have used (and perhaps abused) the printed book, the model of the "natural," and we have now moved onto the hyperreal, or, the third simulacra. As such, the Kindle App and its subsequent parts (the e-book) is a simulacra of the printed book/bookstore, the production.
Can computers think? It seems a pertinent question to ask while playing Guru Meditation on the iPad. The iPad, in this particular case, acts as a mediator between the player and the App; it seems to safe to say that some people may believe that the Guru Meditation App forces the iPad to "think," but this is not the case. A slight jerk of the hand, and the little green bar--so tantalizing to the player because it is infinitely unattainable--disappears completely. The App thus believes that the player has lost his concentration. But this is cannot be further from the truth.
Searle, in his article "Can Computers Think?", argues that in order for a computer--a machine--to think, it must have the knowledge as to why something occurs. He uses the example of computer programmers creating a program in which the computer simulates understanding Chinese symbols; the computer is able to answer questions with Chinese symbols because it searches through its databases for a relevant and "appropriate" answer. However, the computer does not "think," it simply rattles off the information that has been programmed for it. Searle describes the computer as having "syntax, but not semantics" (671). In short, the computer can respond with Chinese symbols because that is what it has been programmed to do, but it cannot formulate a conversation or comprehend what it has said--in a way, the Chinese symbols experiment demonstrates that while a computer can perform to exceedingly high standards, it is not able to explain the *why*.
As such, the same can be said for the Guru Meditation App. The App does not "think," but only performs. It acts solely on the motions of the player's hands. Perhaps the player has managed to wipe his brain of any and all thoughts--which, according the App's Inspiration page, that is what the App is intended for--but perhaps he has naturally shaky hands? Guru Meditation would promptly end the player's attempt and make him start over again. Much like the computer with the Chinese symbols, Guru Meditation only understands the programming, but does not take into account the why's or how's or any of the other issues that may play a hand in the game.
The Guru Meditation App also functions as a reproduction of the reality of meditating. In Benjamin's "The Work of Art," he explains that art is always being reproduced throughout the centuries. Although Benjamin speaks of films and statues or the like in his article, meditating is simply a different form of art, one which applies to his argument. The process of reproduction takes away from the original and loses its uniqueness. That is not to say that the reproduction, of say, the statue of Venus, is not as appealing, but there is something to say about the original--to use Benjamin's vocabulary, the original is "natural." As such, Guru Meditation is a reproduction of actually meditating; it is a simulation (a program) that creates the illusion of peace because in reality, the player is much more focused with not moving his hands than losing focus completely.
Part Two:
The Kindle App, and the e-books that can be then bought from Amazon, is a form of the third order of Baudrillard's simulacra. The third order of the simulacra, in short, is the hyperreal, it is the "simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game--total operationality, hyperreality, and total control" (1). Perhaps it may help to back up a little: if Kindle (or, let us be more specific, the e-book) is the third simulacra then that means that the printed book must then be of the second order--the model, the imitation of the "natural" (the first order).
But what is the "natural?" Baudrillard describes the "natural" to be, in a way, God, or at least a person's imitation of it. In this particular case, we can perhaps substitute "Author" for "God." The second order, the printed book, seeks to make a Utopia of the Author (unless we are speaking of Barthes, who claims that we should separate authorship from reading completely). It is the "real" model, meaning that one can find a book in a bookstore or a grocery mart. It has been mass-produced and is therefore a reproduction. However, the third simulacra takes the simulation a step further, a simulacra of a simulacra, if you will. For a simpler example, let us look at the infamous bagel vs. mini-bagel scenario. The bagel has been mass-produced, it has become the "ideal" in both shape and form (i.e the printed book has become the ideal because it is what a person recognizes); however, the mini-bagel is not a replication of the standard bagel, but rather a hyperreal version of it, a new version. The same can be said for the e-book.
The e-book is intangible; it exists solely in an alternate plane. The App displays the e-book to appear as the printed book might--it simulates turning pages and text against the back screen, but it is not a printed book. This can be seen in the simplest of manners: locations rather than page numbers, changes in font, the mere fact that a reader can purchase a book and have it in his library in under ten seconds. Moreover, the concept of the "library" is also changed, formatted to appear as a real bookcase might (if all the books faced forward, that is). The Kindle's library is a simulation, an imitation, of a real library; and Amazon's Kindle Store is also a simulation, an imitation, a simulacra, of Barnes&Noble or Borders or any other bookstore. The e-book (and the Kindle App as a result) is the mini-bagel: it is passed forward as a simulation of the printed book (the standard bagel), when in fact, it should instead be viewed entirely as its own entity.
In addition, the e-book can also be viewed as the third order of the simulacra in a different light. Baudrillard explains that science fiction (the third order) has altered and changed over the years because the discovery of Earth has already been completed--in fiction then, one must push past that and create other worlds to show a way of "otherworldliness." The same can be said for the Kindle App, and also, the e-book. Since the sixteenth-century, the printed book has been tweaked and altered and praised; for 600 years, it has been the way in which people read. However, Baudrillard would claim that the progression to the e-book and online reading has been done in much the same way that science fiction has moved to alternate universes. We have used (and perhaps abused) the printed book, the model of the "natural," and we have now moved onto the hyperreal, or, the third simulacra. As such, the Kindle App and its subsequent parts (the e-book) is a simulacra of the printed book/bookstore, the production.
Midterm
Guru Meditation and Estrangement
In his blog post, "What is an app?," Ian Bogost gives a critical analysis of this new apple-generated phenomenon. Saying that the complete software-suite experience is being replaced by the divided experience of individual apps, he says: "the days of the software system are giving way to a new era of individual units, each purpose-built for a specific function... Or just as often, for no function at all." what does this mean, that there is no function to the app? Certainly the "Pages" app fulfills (however unsatisfyingly) the word-processor function, and Keynote makes Powerpoints look older than they ever looked. Yet Bogost may be onto something here. The perfect app to examine in light of this quotation is the Guru Meditation (GM).
Ostensibly a meditation app, GM leaves many of its users confused, dazed, or indifferent. It consists in holding the iPhone (or any iThing) in a specific way, sitting still so that a small pixelated guru may float in the air for as long a time as possible. The graphics in the app as austere at best, recalling the earliest days of the atari system, further increasing one's non-excitement for the app. That is, we are used to apps with good graphics(especially game apps), but this app goes the opposite way, purposefully. The creator of the app writes: "An earnest meditation game would have to reject graphical sensuality in favor of simplicity and austerity." So now we see: the game looks to challenge our expectations that we may further enter in a meditative state, by providing the graphical palate that is analogous in the game world to the austere background of a silent, undecorated room. But is that all it does?
The GM forces you to be still, and if possible, silent. And suddenly you realize: here you are, looking at an iPad for an indefinite period of time. To an outsider, you look dumb, if not worse. This is similar to how I felt when I "played" with the app during the seven minutes in class. I looked around me and saw fifteen stupid students doing a stupid thing. That's what it at first seemed like. Then I realized that most of the developed world is in this kind of state for long periods of their days: staring lazily at a computer while they perform a function that, as the GM aims, gets to be invisible with repeated use (think about how one gets used to the words on the keyboard).
This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's analysis of the film actor in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." he says that the film actor, when performing, is estranged from his public, yet, in a metaphorical sense, "with" them: "while he stands before the apparatus, the screen actor knows that in the end he is confronting the public." This strange feeling is akin to one seeing oneself in the mirror, Benjamin explains. Communicating to an audience of potentially millions of people, the actor feels desperately alone.
And I think this is the inadvertent effect of the Guru Meditation app, because it reminds us of the fact that, at a most basic level, we spend most of our days staring at a screen, alone, communicating with the world, precisely by snatching the world away from us and leaving us with a meaningless pixelated guru.
And thus this app paradoxically points at perhaps not the uselessness of apps that Bogost referred to earlier, but certainly at the consequences of the estrangement from the world that occurs when the human can access it from a device in his hands.
Am I saying that this is negative? Not necessarily; but we must consider that in Japan, there is a special term for people who literally do not leave their homes because they are totally plugged in to the cyber-world--people who are horrified of actually confronting other people, much like the fat people in Pixar's Wall-E. The term is hikikomori, which means "withdrawal."
Thus, in its uselessness, the uselessness that Bogost pointed at, the GM points us to the loneliness at Benjamin described in his essay some fifty years ago. What should be our reaction?
I'm not exactly sure, but we should be cautious.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barthes and the Gateway App
Some apps perform the function of being gateways to other sources. The NPR app gives you access to radio bits given throughout the day. The WWOZ app gives you straight access to the WWOZ radio waves, and the NY Times Editor's Choice app gives you a selection of the "best" or most important articles in a given day. It is at this very literal level that these apps resist definition, or, as Roland Barthes said, "cannot be thought of as defined objects." He further explains this by saying that the text must be thought of as "an activity, a production." Rather than a concrete thing that "occupies book-space," the text is a "methodological field." This gives way to an interpretation of text as event and not as substance. And indeed, these Gateway apps, like the NY times app, share this quality at a very literal level. Depending on when you click on the NY Times app, the words that you see on the IPad's screen (or field) change--the product of "the Editor's" decision to show you one thing rather than another. The Gateway app, like the text, is always changing. Not only in the sense expained above, but also in the fact that it is constantly being updated (a quality that all apps share). It is thus that this kind of app is always "without closure"---again, in a very literal way.
Let us return to Barthes's notion of the "methodological field." This is a very tricky, elusive concept, by its very definition--that is, Barthes picked this term because he was precisely trying to point at the text's elusiveness in contrast with the work's concrete quality. I propose that the iPad's screen can serve as an analogy to the elusiveness of the text. Moreover, it can serve as an analogy to the mobility, the constant movement, of the human mind. The mind is fragile and ephemeral, and precisely one of the functions of writing is to preserve memory, that the mind may not completely erase an experience. But the iPad is quick to forget. The NY Times app field lives strictly in the now of the news, only reporting what is current. And the NY Times app does not have an archive where you can access last week's or even yesterday's article; it lives strictly in the now that the "editor" gives you. And this makes the iPad, when performing the NY Times app, an analogy for the mind.
In his blog post, "What is an app?," Ian Bogost gives a critical analysis of this new apple-generated phenomenon. Saying that the complete software-suite experience is being replaced by the divided experience of individual apps, he says: "the days of the software system are giving way to a new era of individual units, each purpose-built for a specific function... Or just as often, for no function at all." what does this mean, that there is no function to the app? Certainly the "Pages" app fulfills (however unsatisfyingly) the word-processor function, and Keynote makes Powerpoints look older than they ever looked. Yet Bogost may be onto something here. The perfect app to examine in light of this quotation is the Guru Meditation (GM).
Ostensibly a meditation app, GM leaves many of its users confused, dazed, or indifferent. It consists in holding the iPhone (or any iThing) in a specific way, sitting still so that a small pixelated guru may float in the air for as long a time as possible. The graphics in the app as austere at best, recalling the earliest days of the atari system, further increasing one's non-excitement for the app. That is, we are used to apps with good graphics(especially game apps), but this app goes the opposite way, purposefully. The creator of the app writes: "An earnest meditation game would have to reject graphical sensuality in favor of simplicity and austerity." So now we see: the game looks to challenge our expectations that we may further enter in a meditative state, by providing the graphical palate that is analogous in the game world to the austere background of a silent, undecorated room. But is that all it does?
The GM forces you to be still, and if possible, silent. And suddenly you realize: here you are, looking at an iPad for an indefinite period of time. To an outsider, you look dumb, if not worse. This is similar to how I felt when I "played" with the app during the seven minutes in class. I looked around me and saw fifteen stupid students doing a stupid thing. That's what it at first seemed like. Then I realized that most of the developed world is in this kind of state for long periods of their days: staring lazily at a computer while they perform a function that, as the GM aims, gets to be invisible with repeated use (think about how one gets used to the words on the keyboard).
This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's analysis of the film actor in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." he says that the film actor, when performing, is estranged from his public, yet, in a metaphorical sense, "with" them: "while he stands before the apparatus, the screen actor knows that in the end he is confronting the public." This strange feeling is akin to one seeing oneself in the mirror, Benjamin explains. Communicating to an audience of potentially millions of people, the actor feels desperately alone.
And I think this is the inadvertent effect of the Guru Meditation app, because it reminds us of the fact that, at a most basic level, we spend most of our days staring at a screen, alone, communicating with the world, precisely by snatching the world away from us and leaving us with a meaningless pixelated guru.
And thus this app paradoxically points at perhaps not the uselessness of apps that Bogost referred to earlier, but certainly at the consequences of the estrangement from the world that occurs when the human can access it from a device in his hands.
Am I saying that this is negative? Not necessarily; but we must consider that in Japan, there is a special term for people who literally do not leave their homes because they are totally plugged in to the cyber-world--people who are horrified of actually confronting other people, much like the fat people in Pixar's Wall-E. The term is hikikomori, which means "withdrawal."
Thus, in its uselessness, the uselessness that Bogost pointed at, the GM points us to the loneliness at Benjamin described in his essay some fifty years ago. What should be our reaction?
I'm not exactly sure, but we should be cautious.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barthes and the Gateway App
Some apps perform the function of being gateways to other sources. The NPR app gives you access to radio bits given throughout the day. The WWOZ app gives you straight access to the WWOZ radio waves, and the NY Times Editor's Choice app gives you a selection of the "best" or most important articles in a given day. It is at this very literal level that these apps resist definition, or, as Roland Barthes said, "cannot be thought of as defined objects." He further explains this by saying that the text must be thought of as "an activity, a production." Rather than a concrete thing that "occupies book-space," the text is a "methodological field." This gives way to an interpretation of text as event and not as substance. And indeed, these Gateway apps, like the NY times app, share this quality at a very literal level. Depending on when you click on the NY Times app, the words that you see on the IPad's screen (or field) change--the product of "the Editor's" decision to show you one thing rather than another. The Gateway app, like the text, is always changing. Not only in the sense expained above, but also in the fact that it is constantly being updated (a quality that all apps share). It is thus that this kind of app is always "without closure"---again, in a very literal way.
Let us return to Barthes's notion of the "methodological field." This is a very tricky, elusive concept, by its very definition--that is, Barthes picked this term because he was precisely trying to point at the text's elusiveness in contrast with the work's concrete quality. I propose that the iPad's screen can serve as an analogy to the elusiveness of the text. Moreover, it can serve as an analogy to the mobility, the constant movement, of the human mind. The mind is fragile and ephemeral, and precisely one of the functions of writing is to preserve memory, that the mind may not completely erase an experience. But the iPad is quick to forget. The NY Times app field lives strictly in the now of the news, only reporting what is current. And the NY Times app does not have an archive where you can access last week's or even yesterday's article; it lives strictly in the now that the "editor" gives you. And this makes the iPad, when performing the NY Times app, an analogy for the mind.
Midterm
Guru Meditation and Estrangement
In his blog post, "What is an app?," Ian Bogost gives a critical analysis of this new apple-generated phenomenon. Saying that the complete software-suite experience is being replaced by the divided experience of individual apps, he says: "the days of the software system are giving way to a new era of individual units, each purpose-built for a specific function... Or just as often, for no function at all." what does this mean, that there is no function to the app? Certainly the "Pages" app fulfills (however unsatisfyingly) the word-processor function, and Keynote makes Powerpoints look older than they ever looked. Yet Bogost may be onto something here. The perfect app to examine in light of this quotation is the Guru Meditation (GM).
Ostensibly a meditation app, GM leaves many of its users confused, dazed, or indifferent. It consists in holding the iPhone (or any iThing) in a specific way, sitting still so that a small pixelated guru may float in the air for as long a time as possible. The graphics in the app as austere at best, recalling the earliest days of the atari system, further increasing one's non-excitement for the app. That is, we are used to apps with good graphics(especially game apps), but this app goes the opposite way, purposefully. The creator of the app writes: "An earnest meditation game would have to reject graphical sensuality in favor of simplicity and austerity." So now we see: the game looks to challenge our expectations that we may further enter in a meditative state, by providing the graphical palate that is analogous in the game world to the austere background of a silent, undecorated room. But is that all it does?
The GM forces you to be still, and if possible, silent. And suddenly you realize: here you are, looking at an iPad for an indefinite period of time. To an outsider, you look dumb, if not worse. This is similar to how I felt when I "played" with the app during the seven minutes in class. I looked around me and saw fifteen stupid students doing a stupid thing. That's what it at first seemed like. Then I realized that most of the developed world is in this kind of state for long periods of their days: staring lazily at a computer while they perform a function that, as the GM aims, gets to be invisible with repeated use (think about how one gets used to the words on the keyboard).
This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's analysis of the film actor in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." he says that the film actor, when performing, is estranged from his public, yet, in a metaphorical sense, "with" them: "while he stands before the apparatus, the screen actor knows that in the end he is confronting the public." This strange feeling is akin to one seeing oneself in the mirror, Benjamin explains. Communicating to an audience of potentially millions of people, the actor feels desperately alone.
And I think this is the inadvertent effect of the Guru Meditation app, because it reminds us of the fact that, at a most basic level, we spend most of our days staring at a screen, alone, communicating with the world, precisely by snatching the world away from us and leaving us with a meaningless pixelated guru.
And thus this app paradoxically points at perhaps not the uselessness of apps that Bogost referred to earlier, but certainly at the consequences of the estrangement from the world that occurs when the human can access it from a device in his hands.
Am I saying that this is negative? Not necessarily; but we must consider that in Japan, there is a special term for people who literally do not leave their homes because they are totally plugged in to the cyber-world--people who are horrified of actually confronting other people, much like the fat people in Pixar's Wall-E. The term is hikikomori, which means "withdrawal."
Thus, in its uselessness, the uselessness that Bogost pointed at, the GM points us to the loneliness at Benjamin described in his essay some fifty years ago. What should be our reaction?
I'm not exactly sure, but we should be cautious.
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Barthes and the Gateway App
Some apps perform the function of being gateways to other sources. The NPR app gives you access to radio bits given throughout the day. The WWOZ app gives you straight access to the WWOZ radio waves, and the NY Times Editor's Choice app gives you a selection of the "best" or most important articles in a given day. It is at this very literal level that these apps resist definition, or, as Roland Barthes said, "cannot be thought of as defined objects." He further explains this by saying that the text must be thought of as "an activity, a production;" rather than a concrete thing that "occupies book-space," a "methodological field." This gives way to an interpretation of text as event and not as substance. And indeed, these Gateway apps, like the NY times app, share this quality at a very literal level. Depending on when you click on the NY Times app, the words that you see on the IPad's screen (or field) change--the product of "the Editor's" decision to show you one thing rather than another. The Gateway app, like the text, is always changing. Not only in the sense expained above, but also in the fact that it is constantly being updated (a quality that all apps share). It is thus that this kind of app is always "without closure"---again, in a very literal way.
Let us return to Barthes's notion of the "methodological field." This is a very tricky, elusive concept, by its very definition--that is, Barthes picked this term because he was precisely trying to point at the text's elusiveness in contrast with the work's concrete quality. I propose that the iPad's screen can serve as an analogy to the elusiveness of the text. Moreover, it can serve as an analogy to the mobility, the constant movement, of the human mind. The mind is fragile and ephemeral, and precisely one of the functions of writing is to preserve memory, that the mind may not completely erase an experience. But the iPad is quick to forget. The NY Times app field lives strictly in the now of the news, only reporting what is current. And the NY Times app does not have an archive where you can access last week's or even yesterday's article; it lives strictly in the now that the "editor" gives you. And this makes the iPad, when performing the NY Times app, an analogy for the mind.
So is the NY Times app a text? If we follow the words of Barthes, then it most certainly can be construed as one.
In his blog post, "What is an app?," Ian Bogost gives a critical analysis of this new apple-generated phenomenon. Saying that the complete software-suite experience is being replaced by the divided experience of individual apps, he says: "the days of the software system are giving way to a new era of individual units, each purpose-built for a specific function... Or just as often, for no function at all." what does this mean, that there is no function to the app? Certainly the "Pages" app fulfills (however unsatisfyingly) the word-processor function, and Keynote makes Powerpoints look older than they ever looked. Yet Bogost may be onto something here. The perfect app to examine in light of this quotation is the Guru Meditation (GM).
Ostensibly a meditation app, GM leaves many of its users confused, dazed, or indifferent. It consists in holding the iPhone (or any iThing) in a specific way, sitting still so that a small pixelated guru may float in the air for as long a time as possible. The graphics in the app as austere at best, recalling the earliest days of the atari system, further increasing one's non-excitement for the app. That is, we are used to apps with good graphics(especially game apps), but this app goes the opposite way, purposefully. The creator of the app writes: "An earnest meditation game would have to reject graphical sensuality in favor of simplicity and austerity." So now we see: the game looks to challenge our expectations that we may further enter in a meditative state, by providing the graphical palate that is analogous in the game world to the austere background of a silent, undecorated room. But is that all it does?
The GM forces you to be still, and if possible, silent. And suddenly you realize: here you are, looking at an iPad for an indefinite period of time. To an outsider, you look dumb, if not worse. This is similar to how I felt when I "played" with the app during the seven minutes in class. I looked around me and saw fifteen stupid students doing a stupid thing. That's what it at first seemed like. Then I realized that most of the developed world is in this kind of state for long periods of their days: staring lazily at a computer while they perform a function that, as the GM aims, gets to be invisible with repeated use (think about how one gets used to the words on the keyboard).
This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's analysis of the film actor in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." he says that the film actor, when performing, is estranged from his public, yet, in a metaphorical sense, "with" them: "while he stands before the apparatus, the screen actor knows that in the end he is confronting the public." This strange feeling is akin to one seeing oneself in the mirror, Benjamin explains. Communicating to an audience of potentially millions of people, the actor feels desperately alone.
And I think this is the inadvertent effect of the Guru Meditation app, because it reminds us of the fact that, at a most basic level, we spend most of our days staring at a screen, alone, communicating with the world, precisely by snatching the world away from us and leaving us with a meaningless pixelated guru.
And thus this app paradoxically points at perhaps not the uselessness of apps that Bogost referred to earlier, but certainly at the consequences of the estrangement from the world that occurs when the human can access it from a device in his hands.
Am I saying that this is negative? Not necessarily; but we must consider that in Japan, there is a special term for people who literally do not leave their homes because they are totally plugged in to the cyber-world--people who are horrified of actually confronting other people, much like the fat people in Pixar's Wall-E. The term is hikikomori, which means "withdrawal."
Thus, in its uselessness, the uselessness that Bogost pointed at, the GM points us to the loneliness at Benjamin described in his essay some fifty years ago. What should be our reaction?
I'm not exactly sure, but we should be cautious.
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Barthes and the Gateway App
Some apps perform the function of being gateways to other sources. The NPR app gives you access to radio bits given throughout the day. The WWOZ app gives you straight access to the WWOZ radio waves, and the NY Times Editor's Choice app gives you a selection of the "best" or most important articles in a given day. It is at this very literal level that these apps resist definition, or, as Roland Barthes said, "cannot be thought of as defined objects." He further explains this by saying that the text must be thought of as "an activity, a production;" rather than a concrete thing that "occupies book-space," a "methodological field." This gives way to an interpretation of text as event and not as substance. And indeed, these Gateway apps, like the NY times app, share this quality at a very literal level. Depending on when you click on the NY Times app, the words that you see on the IPad's screen (or field) change--the product of "the Editor's" decision to show you one thing rather than another. The Gateway app, like the text, is always changing. Not only in the sense expained above, but also in the fact that it is constantly being updated (a quality that all apps share). It is thus that this kind of app is always "without closure"---again, in a very literal way.
Let us return to Barthes's notion of the "methodological field." This is a very tricky, elusive concept, by its very definition--that is, Barthes picked this term because he was precisely trying to point at the text's elusiveness in contrast with the work's concrete quality. I propose that the iPad's screen can serve as an analogy to the elusiveness of the text. Moreover, it can serve as an analogy to the mobility, the constant movement, of the human mind. The mind is fragile and ephemeral, and precisely one of the functions of writing is to preserve memory, that the mind may not completely erase an experience. But the iPad is quick to forget. The NY Times app field lives strictly in the now of the news, only reporting what is current. And the NY Times app does not have an archive where you can access last week's or even yesterday's article; it lives strictly in the now that the "editor" gives you. And this makes the iPad, when performing the NY Times app, an analogy for the mind.
So is the NY Times app a text? If we follow the words of Barthes, then it most certainly can be construed as one.
Cait Emma Midterm Examination
Part 1:
Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation app exemplifies the ideological changes and cultural shifts that our society is undergoing. It is a prime example of how the way we think, understand, and relate to the world is now through the lens of new media and technology. The Guru Meditation app shows this lens as it is an activity which reinvents an "original" activity many already participate in. Meditation, with all of it's stereotypical associations, is more or less an activity done without the assistance of technology. However, with Bogost's app the act of meditation is transformed out of it's traditional box (as we see it) and inverts it as completely dependent on technology - by the use of the iPad. This simulation, like many others is being integrated into our daily lives or at the very least must start.
The Guru Meditation app is intriguing because it begs us to question what else should we start integrating into technology. It asks us to experience technology in many more formats than just for the use of Facebook or Twitter. Instead it offers our already technological society one step further into the media ether.
Educational activities, like that of the meditation activity, is slowly but surely becoming more integrated into technology each year. Students in the education system are using search engines and online forums in order to gain information that once was found through library stacks. They have started using this technology as a way to gain information faster and relatively much more up to date. Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg's "The Future of Learning in a Digital Age" explores the ways in which institutions have to keep up with the technological society governing them. If children's methods of learning are changing, methods of teaching need to as well. With that said, why are the education systems hesitant to embrace such use of technology?
This is due in part to deeply rooted associations and ideologies of how certain activities should be practiced. If Guru Meditation app breaks associations it can still be productivity practiced as "original" meditation is practiced. Therefore, technological meditation does not have to be seen as a loss of something, but a gaining of something different within the experience. Learning must do this as well by us allowing technology the ability to create a different experience. Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants Part I and II" shows this problem with change through the eyes of generational gaps. Digital Natives are already soaked in the technological ether, but the Digital Immigrants are not. This gap between generations creates a friction within the technological experience. The main problem with this friction is that it creates a power struggle. The Digital Immigrants are older generations who have been, up until this point, governing our Western society (our American society). They are the ones who are in the position to teach, govern, and control, but when technology is dominating society in a type of hyper-power out of the realm of understanding of the Digital Immigrants then thats when you get resentment towards technological learning and activities like Guru Meditation.
Part 2:
Using the iPad, many if not all apps, are a simulation of other or "original" experiences. Target has an app for the experience of shopping, the Kindle has an app for the experience of reading, but one of the app experiences that I find the most interesting and ironic is the Facebook app.
Jean Baudrillard's article, "Simulacrea and Science Fiction" states that simulacra consists of the natural, the productive, and the simulation. Socializing online does just this. Facebook, as a online social network, is a simulation of the face to face experience that society attributes to childhood development on through adulthood relationships. Therefore when this physical experience is transformed into a virtual realty it takes on different forms.
Facebook categorizes experiences with socializing into neat outlets by searching, tagging, poking, like, and/or the coined term "friending." So when the Facebook app is downloaded, it is taking an already simulated experience and compounding it farther into an almost hyper-simulacra - a simulacra of a simulacra.
The Facebook app is simple and clean. It's coded with the staple light, navy blue and white Facebook colors. It offers the same features of the Facebook website with the ability to write on friend's walls, upload pictures, and even participate in Facebook chat. So why do we need it? It isn't necessarily more "productive" than the Facebook website. It certainly isnt any more or less "natural" than the Facebook website. However, from a Baudrillardian view, the Facebook app is a new simulation of a social experience we are already participating in. Although it may not be necessary, our culture like them because these types of simulations are in fact stimulating. So once more, we like to be stimulated by simulations.
The controversy with such simulacrea is that it started to erode the expectations of points of origin, which in this argument would be face to face socializing. Baudrillard states, "It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real...". That said, a set reality is no longer grounded, nor is it further in Baudrillard's article, necessary to maintain. What is socially appreciated is the constant influx of more stimulation. Therefore social interaction does not exist on a stable grounding, but rather on a new expectation of constant representation and fresh simulation like the Facebook app.
Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation app exemplifies the ideological changes and cultural shifts that our society is undergoing. It is a prime example of how the way we think, understand, and relate to the world is now through the lens of new media and technology. The Guru Meditation app shows this lens as it is an activity which reinvents an "original" activity many already participate in. Meditation, with all of it's stereotypical associations, is more or less an activity done without the assistance of technology. However, with Bogost's app the act of meditation is transformed out of it's traditional box (as we see it) and inverts it as completely dependent on technology - by the use of the iPad. This simulation, like many others is being integrated into our daily lives or at the very least must start.
The Guru Meditation app is intriguing because it begs us to question what else should we start integrating into technology. It asks us to experience technology in many more formats than just for the use of Facebook or Twitter. Instead it offers our already technological society one step further into the media ether.
Educational activities, like that of the meditation activity, is slowly but surely becoming more integrated into technology each year. Students in the education system are using search engines and online forums in order to gain information that once was found through library stacks. They have started using this technology as a way to gain information faster and relatively much more up to date. Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg's "The Future of Learning in a Digital Age" explores the ways in which institutions have to keep up with the technological society governing them. If children's methods of learning are changing, methods of teaching need to as well. With that said, why are the education systems hesitant to embrace such use of technology?
This is due in part to deeply rooted associations and ideologies of how certain activities should be practiced. If Guru Meditation app breaks associations it can still be productivity practiced as "original" meditation is practiced. Therefore, technological meditation does not have to be seen as a loss of something, but a gaining of something different within the experience. Learning must do this as well by us allowing technology the ability to create a different experience. Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants Part I and II" shows this problem with change through the eyes of generational gaps. Digital Natives are already soaked in the technological ether, but the Digital Immigrants are not. This gap between generations creates a friction within the technological experience. The main problem with this friction is that it creates a power struggle. The Digital Immigrants are older generations who have been, up until this point, governing our Western society (our American society). They are the ones who are in the position to teach, govern, and control, but when technology is dominating society in a type of hyper-power out of the realm of understanding of the Digital Immigrants then thats when you get resentment towards technological learning and activities like Guru Meditation.
Part 2:
Using the iPad, many if not all apps, are a simulation of other or "original" experiences. Target has an app for the experience of shopping, the Kindle has an app for the experience of reading, but one of the app experiences that I find the most interesting and ironic is the Facebook app.
Jean Baudrillard's article, "Simulacrea and Science Fiction" states that simulacra consists of the natural, the productive, and the simulation. Socializing online does just this. Facebook, as a online social network, is a simulation of the face to face experience that society attributes to childhood development on through adulthood relationships. Therefore when this physical experience is transformed into a virtual realty it takes on different forms.
Facebook categorizes experiences with socializing into neat outlets by searching, tagging, poking, like, and/or the coined term "friending." So when the Facebook app is downloaded, it is taking an already simulated experience and compounding it farther into an almost hyper-simulacra - a simulacra of a simulacra.
The Facebook app is simple and clean. It's coded with the staple light, navy blue and white Facebook colors. It offers the same features of the Facebook website with the ability to write on friend's walls, upload pictures, and even participate in Facebook chat. So why do we need it? It isn't necessarily more "productive" than the Facebook website. It certainly isnt any more or less "natural" than the Facebook website. However, from a Baudrillardian view, the Facebook app is a new simulation of a social experience we are already participating in. Although it may not be necessary, our culture like them because these types of simulations are in fact stimulating. So once more, we like to be stimulated by simulations.
The controversy with such simulacrea is that it started to erode the expectations of points of origin, which in this argument would be face to face socializing. Baudrillard states, "It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real...". That said, a set reality is no longer grounded, nor is it further in Baudrillard's article, necessary to maintain. What is socially appreciated is the constant influx of more stimulation. Therefore social interaction does not exist on a stable grounding, but rather on a new expectation of constant representation and fresh simulation like the Facebook app.
Holly Combs Midterm pt. 1
After I first downloaded the Guru Meditation app, like many, I was skeptical of its effectiveness in real life meditation. Sure, it was a cute idea, using your iPhone or iPad to help you relax. It even made sense in some ways: people often treat their iPhones, iPads, and iPods as extensions of themselves and yet simeltaneously feel burdened by the constant technological pull that they experience when Facebook alerts and text messages beckon. Though, while using Guru Meditation, today's consumer can meditate with his or her Apple product in hand. This way, the technology becomes more like an extension of the human, a device required for meditation (considered by some to be something that should be a "pure" experience devoid of technological hubub, as many pointed out in class discussion), but at the same time, it can put a stop to the need to face text messages, phone calls, emails, Facebook updates, and Tweets because with Guru Meditation the medium through which we receive all of these updates is used to deliver us a break from the constant updates. When someone uses their iPhone to meditate, this means that they cannot be mediating with his/her iPhone in his/her pocket, vibrating everytime someone tries to contact him/her.
As Katherine Hayles puts it in the passage we read from How We Became Posthuman, as humanity shifts towards what she refers to as "posthuman" there becomes "no difference betweeen bodily existence and computer simulation...no difference robot teleology and human goals." If we have truly become posthuman, then there is no difference between using the body to achieve meditation and using the Guru Meditation app. Thus, it only makes sense that some users have come to regard their Apple products as extensions of themselves.
However, some still remain unconvinced of the magic of the app. In the post we read by Ian Bogost he refers to apps as a little more than "sweet nothings," comparing them to Tictacs and Ke$ha. Perhaps the best point that he makes in his post is the notion of "latertasking." Perhaps it is impossible to take apps such as Guru Meditation seriously because when using the app for meditation, one can easily snap out of meditation and log onto Twitter at his/her leisure. Though users may seem to be engrossed in Guru Meditation while staring at their iPads, Twitter, Facebook, and Angry Birds are always calling. Perhaps the "ease and comfort" of the app defy the very essence of meditation, which is meant to help people reach a deep state of relaxation. According to Bogost, "deep meaning seeps out of every unit [of the app]." While I feel that this accusation is unfair and slightly vague, I admit that I, too, have reservations about apps like Guru Meditation. While I tend to agree with the statement that "the human form--including human desire and all its external representations may be changing radically and thus must be reinvisioned," I still find myself unable to take apps such as Guru Meditation seriously. Perhaps this is because I am one of the few iPad users who feels that she would have no trouble surviving without an iPad. I am not comfortable regarding the iPad as an extension of myself; therefore, I am not comfortable using it to meditate.
As Katherine Hayles puts it in the passage we read from How We Became Posthuman, as humanity shifts towards what she refers to as "posthuman" there becomes "no difference betweeen bodily existence and computer simulation...no difference robot teleology and human goals." If we have truly become posthuman, then there is no difference between using the body to achieve meditation and using the Guru Meditation app. Thus, it only makes sense that some users have come to regard their Apple products as extensions of themselves.
However, some still remain unconvinced of the magic of the app. In the post we read by Ian Bogost he refers to apps as a little more than "sweet nothings," comparing them to Tictacs and Ke$ha. Perhaps the best point that he makes in his post is the notion of "latertasking." Perhaps it is impossible to take apps such as Guru Meditation seriously because when using the app for meditation, one can easily snap out of meditation and log onto Twitter at his/her leisure. Though users may seem to be engrossed in Guru Meditation while staring at their iPads, Twitter, Facebook, and Angry Birds are always calling. Perhaps the "ease and comfort" of the app defy the very essence of meditation, which is meant to help people reach a deep state of relaxation. According to Bogost, "deep meaning seeps out of every unit [of the app]." While I feel that this accusation is unfair and slightly vague, I admit that I, too, have reservations about apps like Guru Meditation. While I tend to agree with the statement that "the human form--including human desire and all its external representations may be changing radically and thus must be reinvisioned," I still find myself unable to take apps such as Guru Meditation seriously. Perhaps this is because I am one of the few iPad users who feels that she would have no trouble surviving without an iPad. I am not comfortable regarding the iPad as an extension of myself; therefore, I am not comfortable using it to meditate.
Midterm, Chris Langer
Midterm Part one
I had never really tried the guru meditation before today and it was relieving I think is the word to use. When I closed my eyes and paid no attention to the screen or the device whatsoever, I continued with the meditation without fail, but when I began to look at the device more closely, trying to work my way through the aesthetics and what this could possibly relate to, my guru fell. I felt like Baker, when he first forgot about the medium that book was in and finally embraced the action and experience for what it was. This allowed him to penetrate the technological features of his medium, in his case, the kindle and mine, Guru Meditation, and become entangled in the world of meditation. No longer was it an IPad, but merely a medium for meditating. Just as "grey became a nice color" for Baker, I appreciated the app for what it was. Embracing the iPad into the meditation world gave new meaning to technology. Technology can penetrate the ancient field of meditation and allow one to come to terms with an inner calm.
In Benjamin's Info aesthetics, he describes new media as requiring a computer to experience it. New media was just forced upon me in the form of meditation, something that in class we have argued and struggled with as something that shouldn't be allowed within the world of technology. What Benjamin is trying to tell us is that this shift towards the informational age is inevitable and we are moving quickly towards it, if not already there. This medium of the iPad, which at any moment could pop up with a push notification from a flurry of apps, contributed to a calm, seven minutes (broken up into sets of three minutes when I got distracted by the clouds). Our new cultural age utilizes technology basically at every medium and it is impossible to escape it at times. Bogost describes the feeling of meditating upon a smart device as a "providence" of escaping the world of tweets and emails, while still utilizing the same medium. What we tend to forget as consumers is that this is not only a communication/multimedia tool, IPads can be used as educational and spiritual tools as well. The iPad can plug us in to the digital, but also sweep us away from the digital world. I'm not sure if while being in Guru Meditation all push notifications are disable, but if they are, it is the perfect sanctuary, where we feel comfortable as digital natives with this high tech device while also harkening back to a serene time of meditation. Meditation is reproducible, as a work of art, in the sense that although we lose the distance to the "original" product of meditation, a simulated copy of mediation provides us with the same comfort, just in a medium we can fully penetrate.
Part Two
Searching for an app to write about, I clicked upon Google Earth. At first I saw the whole world from space, then slowly my world spun as the app was zeroing in on the last place I was exploring. It turned out to be my home in Saint Louis, with everything serene and beautiful. One odd feature though: my car was parked outside of it, the same car that is parked in the Freret parking garage right now.
Google earth prides itself on being a real simulation of every part of the world right now at this instant.
I'll try to take on Baudrillard with this app. He argues that " it is no longer possible to fabricate the real from the unreal." Other sites I would take as real, not simulated fabrications, because Google Earth promises the "real." But what I see is pure simulation, pure fabrication based upon the real, a hyper reality where imagination is gone. It is a "simulacra of simulation, founded on information" from Google satellites. There is no imaginary anymore. The distance between imagination and the real has been abolished and only the simulation of the real remains.
Baudrillard speaks of science fiction as dead, without an imaginary, which now must focus on revitalizing the "so called real world" that we think we experience. All of these apps and devices are part of this experiment. Google earth attempts to bring us back to what it was like to discover a new place, find a new world, and be truly inspired by the awe of it. But what it is really doing is simulating what we already know as unreal, the map. Google earth took the second order of simulacra, the productivist map, which was mass produced through industrial society in order to bring the real world to the people, and manipulate it into a hyper real idea, where we can now "re discover" the world, as if we are the true explorers. We can see what explorers see by participating in these " fragments of universal simulation that have become for us the so called real world." We are always "already in this other world," stuck within the simulation. We cannot escape the four month old satellite images of Google, we are forced to accept it as real. Up till now, this is as close to a true view of the world our IPad can give us.
Baudrillard states that "only the last order (the operational) can truly interest us." Maps do not interest our generation, we want the real, or the simulation of that real, the hyper real. This science fiction is the only thing that draws us in, because we no longer have the imagination, we merely want to see what used to be the real. We want Google to bring us back to reality, but all it can offer is the hyper reality of the third order simulacra.
I had never really tried the guru meditation before today and it was relieving I think is the word to use. When I closed my eyes and paid no attention to the screen or the device whatsoever, I continued with the meditation without fail, but when I began to look at the device more closely, trying to work my way through the aesthetics and what this could possibly relate to, my guru fell. I felt like Baker, when he first forgot about the medium that book was in and finally embraced the action and experience for what it was. This allowed him to penetrate the technological features of his medium, in his case, the kindle and mine, Guru Meditation, and become entangled in the world of meditation. No longer was it an IPad, but merely a medium for meditating. Just as "grey became a nice color" for Baker, I appreciated the app for what it was. Embracing the iPad into the meditation world gave new meaning to technology. Technology can penetrate the ancient field of meditation and allow one to come to terms with an inner calm.
In Benjamin's Info aesthetics, he describes new media as requiring a computer to experience it. New media was just forced upon me in the form of meditation, something that in class we have argued and struggled with as something that shouldn't be allowed within the world of technology. What Benjamin is trying to tell us is that this shift towards the informational age is inevitable and we are moving quickly towards it, if not already there. This medium of the iPad, which at any moment could pop up with a push notification from a flurry of apps, contributed to a calm, seven minutes (broken up into sets of three minutes when I got distracted by the clouds). Our new cultural age utilizes technology basically at every medium and it is impossible to escape it at times. Bogost describes the feeling of meditating upon a smart device as a "providence" of escaping the world of tweets and emails, while still utilizing the same medium. What we tend to forget as consumers is that this is not only a communication/multimedia tool, IPads can be used as educational and spiritual tools as well. The iPad can plug us in to the digital, but also sweep us away from the digital world. I'm not sure if while being in Guru Meditation all push notifications are disable, but if they are, it is the perfect sanctuary, where we feel comfortable as digital natives with this high tech device while also harkening back to a serene time of meditation. Meditation is reproducible, as a work of art, in the sense that although we lose the distance to the "original" product of meditation, a simulated copy of mediation provides us with the same comfort, just in a medium we can fully penetrate.
Part Two
Searching for an app to write about, I clicked upon Google Earth. At first I saw the whole world from space, then slowly my world spun as the app was zeroing in on the last place I was exploring. It turned out to be my home in Saint Louis, with everything serene and beautiful. One odd feature though: my car was parked outside of it, the same car that is parked in the Freret parking garage right now.
Google earth prides itself on being a real simulation of every part of the world right now at this instant.
I'll try to take on Baudrillard with this app. He argues that " it is no longer possible to fabricate the real from the unreal." Other sites I would take as real, not simulated fabrications, because Google Earth promises the "real." But what I see is pure simulation, pure fabrication based upon the real, a hyper reality where imagination is gone. It is a "simulacra of simulation, founded on information" from Google satellites. There is no imaginary anymore. The distance between imagination and the real has been abolished and only the simulation of the real remains.
Baudrillard speaks of science fiction as dead, without an imaginary, which now must focus on revitalizing the "so called real world" that we think we experience. All of these apps and devices are part of this experiment. Google earth attempts to bring us back to what it was like to discover a new place, find a new world, and be truly inspired by the awe of it. But what it is really doing is simulating what we already know as unreal, the map. Google earth took the second order of simulacra, the productivist map, which was mass produced through industrial society in order to bring the real world to the people, and manipulate it into a hyper real idea, where we can now "re discover" the world, as if we are the true explorers. We can see what explorers see by participating in these " fragments of universal simulation that have become for us the so called real world." We are always "already in this other world," stuck within the simulation. We cannot escape the four month old satellite images of Google, we are forced to accept it as real. Up till now, this is as close to a true view of the world our IPad can give us.
Baudrillard states that "only the last order (the operational) can truly interest us." Maps do not interest our generation, we want the real, or the simulation of that real, the hyper real. This science fiction is the only thing that draws us in, because we no longer have the imagination, we merely want to see what used to be the real. We want Google to bring us back to reality, but all it can offer is the hyper reality of the third order simulacra.
Midterm post
Guru Meditation
While using Guru Meditation (for the first time, in a serious way) I could not let myself relax enough to not care about the little floating man. Is he falling? Am I holding it right? What the hell am I doing? However, Guru Meditation describes itself as being a videogame that interacts with the user through a lack of rather than an abundance of interaction. What? All I could think about was how I was trying to meditate before a midterm on an iPad. I could not separate the ipad from my meditation, because even the lack of interaction recalls a need for interaction with the ipad in order to "play." The game aspect of the meditation and the way I processed my ability to meditate was wrapped up in this device, this information machine of sorts, the ipad. "Info-aesthetics" is not just a way to approach the ipad itself, but also the app and the way I was affected by the meditation as I played; the form preceded the information. When I read "the policeman's beard," I was so wrapped up in the fact that a computer wrote a book that I could not simply read it as I would a book, but rather I focused on the form and not the information. Perhaps the policeman's beard is an exception, as the form has a great deal to do with the information, you could even say that the form is the information rather than the writing itself, but the form plays a different role when applied to guru meditation. I could not let go of the fact of the app or the ipad as I played, and therefore my meditation was of a different sort. I eventually did try to forget that I was using the ipad to meditate, and tried to meditate as I would normally. Lo and behold, the man didn't fall. But what was more interesting was that if he had, it wouldn't have mattered because I was trying to meditate so hard that I forced myself to ignore the form and instead focus on the information, i.e. the meditation. With the policeman's beard, I would have just taken the writing as I would any other book if I didn't have the information to influence how I percieved the form. So the policeman's beard is the foil of guru meditation, in a way. One of the ways guru meditation is described on its page of the app store is the ideal meditation for one who "can't break away from the itouch or iphone." In this case, the form works as the the access to information rather than just the precursor to it, the ipad can become a form of meditation if you can only forget the form.
Stumbleupon and Simulacra
The stumbleupon app is the absolute form of the third order of simulacra, in a way that is clear even in the name of the program. It takes your interests and seeks out things on the internet that may excite you, randomly appearing by a click of the "stumble" button. In the second order, one has this kind of interaction by merely existing and functioning in the world and actually stumbling upon things that interest you; in the first order, the idea of "stumbling upon" something interesting doesn't even have an idea, it just happens. But this "stumbleupon" is the hyper-real in its most extreme-- it takes "total operationality" to new heights, being able to summon an interesting idea or web page at the click of the "stumble," and the way it uses your input of interests and learns from what you "like" to fully excercise its "aim of control" over what it will let you see. "The process will, rather, be the opposite; it will be to put decentered situations, models of situations in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life." Instead of stumbling upon something interesting outside four walls, or within them, interesting because it may not be something we could ever concieve of being interested in, we can now feed a program our interests and simulate that feeling of discovering something new and amazing without ever having to risk interacting with it in the outside world, we can have that discovery instantaneously, and we can have it for cheap. But the problem is that it is cheap. It is simulated, it is "reconstituted... down to disquietingly strange details," and because of it, we can no longer go back to that feeling of discovery as we would in either the first or second orders. First stumbleupon was a computer software to be downloaded and used, but now we can stumble upon something virtually on an ipad, wherever we go! We no longer even have to risk having the discovery feeling we would if we were to step out onto the world because now we have a portable virtual realm with which we can further immerse ourselves in. So we must simply do, go forth or stay wherever you are, and Stumbleupon something amazing, on a screen only, free download at the app store!
Josh: Midterm
In "Introduction to Info-Aesthetics" Manovich states, "if you want to know if something is 'new media' or not, simply ask if you require a computer to experience it." However, he later qualifies, " the adoption of digital and networked computers in almost all cultural areas was to continue, and therefore in a few years the distinction I was able to maintain in 'The Language of New Media' between 'new media' and other cultural practices would become less and less useful." This would seem to suggest a collapse of "old media" into "new media;" mankind's progression into the future continues unabated.
However, Guru Meditation instead suggests Hayle's, "feedback loop that [runs] between technologies and perceptions, artifacts and ideas." As I attempted to find a meditative state under the layers of glass and brushed steel it instead flattened. I realized there were not layers but instead elements, which cannot and have never existed independently, of the "mesh."(Morton) We move beyond the divides of the digital or the analog, which can exist only in "resonation"(Massumi) with each other.
Furthermore, this resonation manifests itself beyond digital and analog. Guru Meditation demonstrates the resonation of Capitalism and Marxism, Consumerism and Essentialism, Spirituality and Humanism. These ideas cannot be divided of separated; they rely on each other completely. They are not binary opposites but pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which never ends and whose picture we can never see, if it exists at all.
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iBooks is the Apple e-book reader. It comes pre-packaged with the iPad and media is distributed for it through a section of the App Store. Its library is not as large as the Kindle's and works that overlap between the two are often more expensive in the iBook format. However, Apple continues to develop this product and consumers continue to purchase; where the iBook app succeeds is in its interface.
The first thing that one notices is the bookcase; it has shelves which are “wood,” you can see knots, grooves, rings. Your books are propped up on these shelves and when you touch one it zooms toward you and the cover peels back to reveal the text. Around the text we see evidence of other pages and beyond these the cover and binding of the book. When you progress the pages “turn” in an illusion of three-dimensional space; you ge the impression that each of these pages exists somewhere other than in the RAM allocated to the program.
This is the third order of the simulacra; “[it] no longer [constitutes] the imaginary in relation to the real, [it is itself] an anticipation of the real.” The bookcase is not a reprodcution of an “actual” bookcase, it is an actual bookcase; “real” bookcases are its “alibi,” justifying its aesthetics while performing the same function. iBooks, and its model of the now Utopic “real,” is a “map [that] covers the whole territory;” “the principle of reality disappears,” because the model has become our reality.
However, Guru Meditation instead suggests Hayle's, "feedback loop that [runs] between technologies and perceptions, artifacts and ideas." As I attempted to find a meditative state under the layers of glass and brushed steel it instead flattened. I realized there were not layers but instead elements, which cannot and have never existed independently, of the "mesh."(Morton) We move beyond the divides of the digital or the analog, which can exist only in "resonation"(Massumi) with each other.
Furthermore, this resonation manifests itself beyond digital and analog. Guru Meditation demonstrates the resonation of Capitalism and Marxism, Consumerism and Essentialism, Spirituality and Humanism. These ideas cannot be divided of separated; they rely on each other completely. They are not binary opposites but pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which never ends and whose picture we can never see, if it exists at all.
------------------------------------------------------------------
iBooks is the Apple e-book reader. It comes pre-packaged with the iPad and media is distributed for it through a section of the App Store. Its library is not as large as the Kindle's and works that overlap between the two are often more expensive in the iBook format. However, Apple continues to develop this product and consumers continue to purchase; where the iBook app succeeds is in its interface.
The first thing that one notices is the bookcase; it has shelves which are “wood,” you can see knots, grooves, rings. Your books are propped up on these shelves and when you touch one it zooms toward you and the cover peels back to reveal the text. Around the text we see evidence of other pages and beyond these the cover and binding of the book. When you progress the pages “turn” in an illusion of three-dimensional space; you ge the impression that each of these pages exists somewhere other than in the RAM allocated to the program.
This is the third order of the simulacra; “[it] no longer [constitutes] the imaginary in relation to the real, [it is itself] an anticipation of the real.” The bookcase is not a reprodcution of an “actual” bookcase, it is an actual bookcase; “real” bookcases are its “alibi,” justifying its aesthetics while performing the same function. iBooks, and its model of the now Utopic “real,” is a “map [that] covers the whole territory;” “the principle of reality disappears,” because the model has become our reality.
Midterm, or the iPad is fairly disgusting
1. The screen is cold and clammy beneath my thumbs, and the little floating pixelated Bodhisattva keeps falling to the ground. The iPad demands attention; in the first two or three minutes, I closed my eyes and let the iPad become an extension of my body and upon opening my eyes I found that I had 'lost' guru meditation 19 seconds in. No record worth saving, according to the finished screen. Therein, I believe, lies the tension present in the Guru Meditation app. Is it allowing you to work through the iPad, so to speak, using it as a channel of concentration to achieve a sort of meditative state? Or is it in fact making you even more aware of your presence, sitting in a humid room holding a tiny computer and spending your brainpower focusing on a throwback Atari program? I wonder whether the answer to that question lies in whether or not Prensky would consider us 'digital natives' or 'digital immigrants' (or perhaps which we consider ourselves). There is a certain self-awareness about technology for a digital immigrant that a digital native will not even stop and consider. The digital native, so Prensky says, has been raised on the internet, cellphones, and television. It is more common to be in the presence of a computer or television than not. There is no need for a suspension of disbelief for the digital native. Therefore, the ridiculousness of the situation may be reversed; meditation through an app may be the most natural thing in the world, and the digital immigrants 'real' meditation feels pointless and silly.
2. tChessPro is the most highly recommended chess app I could find, according to various technology and dedicated iPad gaming blogs. I wanted a decent chess program. It seemed like a perfect match. What I didn't expect was how strange the mundaneness of the app would be; it, I believe, is participating heavily in Baudrillard's second order of the simulacra and serves as a hyperreal version of chess. First, and most amusingly, you are allowed to change the look of the board and pieces. It can be a simple grid with flat shapes (much like the boards that they use to show audiences moves in live matches), or a futuristic, sleek board with cloudy glass pieces, or a wooden board with 'natural' wood pieces. The program is taking what we expect of chess, the mundaneness and commonplace of a basic chessboard and pieces, and transplanted it into an electronic device that in and of itself is mass produced; a very real and grounded (as opposed to science fiction) version of Baudrillard's 'living room in space’ of the second order.
I find myself playing it less and less, however. Though I originally bought it to use as a fancy tic-tac-toe to play against someone else on a plane or car trip, I quickly realized that it includes a computer opponent. A computer opponent that is frankly unbeatable for one of my amateur status. I wonder if this doesn't function in the third order, a counterpart to the hologram space chess in Star Wars and an easy accessible, purely virtual version of the chess computers that rocked the world during the cold war. (And as an aside, one wonders how long until Watson can be downloaded as an app?)
2. tChessPro is the most highly recommended chess app I could find, according to various technology and dedicated iPad gaming blogs. I wanted a decent chess program. It seemed like a perfect match. What I didn't expect was how strange the mundaneness of the app would be; it, I believe, is participating heavily in Baudrillard's second order of the simulacra and serves as a hyperreal version of chess. First, and most amusingly, you are allowed to change the look of the board and pieces. It can be a simple grid with flat shapes (much like the boards that they use to show audiences moves in live matches), or a futuristic, sleek board with cloudy glass pieces, or a wooden board with 'natural' wood pieces. The program is taking what we expect of chess, the mundaneness and commonplace of a basic chessboard and pieces, and transplanted it into an electronic device that in and of itself is mass produced; a very real and grounded (as opposed to science fiction) version of Baudrillard's 'living room in space’ of the second order.
I find myself playing it less and less, however. Though I originally bought it to use as a fancy tic-tac-toe to play against someone else on a plane or car trip, I quickly realized that it includes a computer opponent. A computer opponent that is frankly unbeatable for one of my amateur status. I wonder if this doesn't function in the third order, a counterpart to the hologram space chess in Star Wars and an easy accessible, purely virtual version of the chess computers that rocked the world during the cold war. (And as an aside, one wonders how long until Watson can be downloaded as an app?)
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Didn't we ask Apple for this?
Ok, so I wasn't able to vocalize my thoughts on this today during class so I figure I'll just let it out here. We are all getting so angry (maybe not angry, but disturbed and not sure how to handle it) with Apple and "apps" and all of these programs that are essentially what makes our Ipads and Iphones so accessible, simple, and easy to handle for everyone. Isn't that how Apple gained its popularity and fame? Everyone was way too confused by the other computer operating systems and wanted something simple, small, and easier to manipulate for the average person: this is where their market was. Now, they have just taken that idea and ran with it penetrating every technology available.
If consumers wanted Apple to be simple in the first place, why are we as consumers so disturbed when they dumb it down in apps and pretty aesthetics? Shouldn't we just praise them for being simple? If we wanted a more complicated system, or wanted to know and interact with all the ins and outs of installing and uninstalling on the computer we should just go back to our old Windows. This is what draws me to Apple products and apps: they make it easy for me. I don't have to do anything that is too challenging with my computer. If something happens, they will take it and fix it for free. Better yet, I can't fuck my computer up more by trying to fix it myself, they have to do it unless we have the ambition to jailbreak our Ipads or penetrate the computers more deeply.
I don't know, I just feel like we are an extremely small sample of people that are actually disturbed and worried about how simple the app is and how it is trying to simulate everyday actions (like Guru Meditation) that should be more complicated. Consumers wanted simplicity so that they could move into the Digital Native section of society and not be left behind and Apple gave them that. Essentially, Apple rid itself all of this complicated computer nonsense and made themselves extremely attractive to a Digital Immigrant. Am I wrong in this?
If consumers wanted Apple to be simple in the first place, why are we as consumers so disturbed when they dumb it down in apps and pretty aesthetics? Shouldn't we just praise them for being simple? If we wanted a more complicated system, or wanted to know and interact with all the ins and outs of installing and uninstalling on the computer we should just go back to our old Windows. This is what draws me to Apple products and apps: they make it easy for me. I don't have to do anything that is too challenging with my computer. If something happens, they will take it and fix it for free. Better yet, I can't fuck my computer up more by trying to fix it myself, they have to do it unless we have the ambition to jailbreak our Ipads or penetrate the computers more deeply.
I don't know, I just feel like we are an extremely small sample of people that are actually disturbed and worried about how simple the app is and how it is trying to simulate everyday actions (like Guru Meditation) that should be more complicated. Consumers wanted simplicity so that they could move into the Digital Native section of society and not be left behind and Apple gave them that. Essentially, Apple rid itself all of this complicated computer nonsense and made themselves extremely attractive to a Digital Immigrant. Am I wrong in this?
speaker at tulane
http://college.tulane.edu/ntclecture.html
author on digital humanities at tulane tomorrow night at seven.
author on digital humanities at tulane tomorrow night at seven.
A strange ramble
After listening to the heated class discussions over a bagel this past week, I almost feel bad for bringing up something that has proven to bring in much stronger opinions. But that's an almost. As I was reading Ian Bogost's blog post assigned for tomorrow, I couldn't help but notice that he was, in fact, the actual creator of the Guru Meditation app. I decided to read into this further. I thought it was really strange that a man who had designed an app was having an in-depth and slightly disgruntled discussion as to what an app actually is. I began to search around to see how this app had been received by the public. More often than not, it was some old Amiga fan wanting it for nostalgic purposes.
I found one review where Bogost said that he had a student completely zone out on Guru for over 20 minutes. I couldn't help but begin to bring this back to the ideas of deep attention and hyperattention we discussed at the beginning of the year. I know that digital natives are criticized as having no sense of deep attention, but perhaps the Guru app has its merits as a manifestation of the fact that such attention still exists. Or maybe that student was just really tired and prone to zoning out that day.
My favorite quote of Bogost's about the app is:
"The iPhone offers a unique opportunity for a true relaxation game, since it makes such constant demands on our attention—telephone, email, text messages, Twitter, etc. Guru Meditation for iPhone literally makes it impossible to pursue other activities while playing. As such, it offers a convenient secondary commentary on the often overwhelming values of "connection" that today's portable communication devices embrace."
Am I really supposed to believe that it is only through Guru that I will be cut off from all my other apps and digital callings? And why is that such a bad thing? Why is it so bad to be cut off from the noise of the world? I don't even have a lot of noise from the world. I text my boyfriend every now and then, I get a call from my mom, I have a friend call me for lunch. Maybe it's different for all the "grown-ups" in New York walking around looking angry in their suits doing God knows what on their smart phones, but couldn't this whole I-need-to-get-away-from-technology thing just be a reactionary phase? I think that we need to decide: do we love the technology or do we reject it. I don't see any one my age saying "I need to take a vacation from my technology." I don't even see my own mother saying that, she's actually the one (not me or my 16 year old brother) that has the iPhone.
I don't have a problem with the Guru app. I don't think it's God's gift to the iPad user who for some reason would want to forget the machine they spent an inordinate amount of money on. Perhaps I have this utopian vision in my head where books and people and technology all live happily ever after. I can keep my books, I can use technology when I need it. Even if we can't find the happy balance with Guru, perhaps we can find the happy balance with technology?
I realize that this was kind of a rambling post, but these are just some thoughts I've had floating around for a while. I mean, sure, all this new technology is startling, but is it really enough that people are already using it to work against itself? Do we really already need anti-apps? Do we really need sites like wired.com claiming over and over again at the web is dead? The book isn't dead, the web isn't dead, and even though my cell phone is significantly smaller and more awesome than the originals that my parents had, I don't really think it's trying to take over my life. We created the technology, shouldn't we be in control of how we use it? This has me thinking about the orders of the simulacra. Is the idea that our technology controls us (instead of the other way around) a part of the simulacra? I think it is, but any ideas as to what order?
This video is just for amusement purposes: I guess The Edge is way ahead of us in finding his zen balance with technology. Just start at about 6:55 and the part I'm talking about only goes for about 30-45 seconds.
I found one review where Bogost said that he had a student completely zone out on Guru for over 20 minutes. I couldn't help but begin to bring this back to the ideas of deep attention and hyperattention we discussed at the beginning of the year. I know that digital natives are criticized as having no sense of deep attention, but perhaps the Guru app has its merits as a manifestation of the fact that such attention still exists. Or maybe that student was just really tired and prone to zoning out that day.
My favorite quote of Bogost's about the app is:
"The iPhone offers a unique opportunity for a true relaxation game, since it makes such constant demands on our attention—telephone, email, text messages, Twitter, etc. Guru Meditation for iPhone literally makes it impossible to pursue other activities while playing. As such, it offers a convenient secondary commentary on the often overwhelming values of "connection" that today's portable communication devices embrace."
Am I really supposed to believe that it is only through Guru that I will be cut off from all my other apps and digital callings? And why is that such a bad thing? Why is it so bad to be cut off from the noise of the world? I don't even have a lot of noise from the world. I text my boyfriend every now and then, I get a call from my mom, I have a friend call me for lunch. Maybe it's different for all the "grown-ups" in New York walking around looking angry in their suits doing God knows what on their smart phones, but couldn't this whole I-need-to-get-away-from-technology thing just be a reactionary phase? I think that we need to decide: do we love the technology or do we reject it. I don't see any one my age saying "I need to take a vacation from my technology." I don't even see my own mother saying that, she's actually the one (not me or my 16 year old brother) that has the iPhone.
I don't have a problem with the Guru app. I don't think it's God's gift to the iPad user who for some reason would want to forget the machine they spent an inordinate amount of money on. Perhaps I have this utopian vision in my head where books and people and technology all live happily ever after. I can keep my books, I can use technology when I need it. Even if we can't find the happy balance with Guru, perhaps we can find the happy balance with technology?
I realize that this was kind of a rambling post, but these are just some thoughts I've had floating around for a while. I mean, sure, all this new technology is startling, but is it really enough that people are already using it to work against itself? Do we really already need anti-apps? Do we really need sites like wired.com claiming over and over again at the web is dead? The book isn't dead, the web isn't dead, and even though my cell phone is significantly smaller and more awesome than the originals that my parents had, I don't really think it's trying to take over my life. We created the technology, shouldn't we be in control of how we use it? This has me thinking about the orders of the simulacra. Is the idea that our technology controls us (instead of the other way around) a part of the simulacra? I think it is, but any ideas as to what order?
This video is just for amusement purposes: I guess The Edge is way ahead of us in finding his zen balance with technology. Just start at about 6:55 and the part I'm talking about only goes for about 30-45 seconds.
Monday, February 21, 2011
A Simulation of a Simulation of Something that Didn't Happen = JAIL!
Here is where the hyper-real is taking us--to jail.
http://hypervocal.com/news/2011/youtube-musician-evan-emory-faces-20-years-in-prison-for-clever-editing/
http://hypervocal.com/news/2011/youtube-musician-evan-emory-faces-20-years-in-prison-for-clever-editing/
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Baudrillard is Not even Wrong
Baudrillard's writing is so obscure and makes such logical leaps that it is not even wrong because its position is not that clear in the first place. For example, he defines the second order of "simulacra" as:
Maybe it's because I don't have a graduate education. But wait--even though Barthes was difficult for me, I was able to get something out of it (even though I feel he could've written his argument much more succinctly-- for example, this website reduces his essay to seven propositions). And I have managed to be able to read Heidegger, Sartre, and Kant before. Yes, it's difficult, but once I've gotten to the core of their terminology, I've been able to read them. But with Baudrillard, I don't even have that. Just a big cannon that shoots esoteric terms that hope to mean something.
So why did I decide to write this post? Because when I was reading Baudrillard, I was struggling with the terms, and did what I did with Barthes: looked him up in Wikipedia to see if they explained his ideas there. One heading talked about criticisms of Baudrillard. And can you imagine my relief when I read this:
And then I found this quote by a critic of Baudrillard, Dennis Dutton:
simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materializationSo here we have a splash of terms that are esoteric-sounding, and these terms are all piled up on top of one another, as if at some point the pile is going to make sense. Either that or Baudrillard is trying to sound smart. Or maybe he's a bad writer. Or maybe he's been badly translated. Either way, I am not really sure what I could get out of this. I feel like the computer that wrote "The Policeman's Beard" could write this.
by the machine and in the whole system of production - a Promethean aim of a
continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire
belongs to the Utopias related to this order of simulacra);
Maybe it's because I don't have a graduate education. But wait--even though Barthes was difficult for me, I was able to get something out of it (even though I feel he could've written his argument much more succinctly-- for example, this website reduces his essay to seven propositions). And I have managed to be able to read Heidegger, Sartre, and Kant before. Yes, it's difficult, but once I've gotten to the core of their terminology, I've been able to read them. But with Baudrillard, I don't even have that. Just a big cannon that shoots esoteric terms that hope to mean something.
So why did I decide to write this post? Because when I was reading Baudrillard, I was struggling with the terms, and did what I did with Barthes: looked him up in Wikipedia to see if they explained his ideas there. One heading talked about criticisms of Baudrillard. And can you imagine my relief when I read this:
He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims...
And then I found this quote by a critic of Baudrillard, Dennis Dutton:
Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.
It was then that I breathed a sigh of relief.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Note on Reading the Page
Since we were talking about "the activity of reading" (I put quotes not for irony but to emphasize the particularity of the activity), I want to write down some notes on something I just noticed about the way I read different texts--I mean, um, works? Books? Things-that-are-read? Anywho:
So I've been reading a lot of graphic novels lately. Now, the "graphic storytelling" medium is very synthetic and... for lack of a better word, strange. On a very basic level, there's the speech bubbles with the dialogue, and a picture demonstrating the action taking place. Then different panels show a certain progression. Now depending on how experimental/avant-garde the comic is, this rule may vary and get more complex (just as reading gets more complex with "House of Leaves"), but the basics are still the same. So the way the eye travels (traverses!) through the page depends on which element is given more emphasis--nevertheless, there is a constant back-and-forth, an oscillation between image and text. And because I've been reading graphic novels for so long, I've become used to this oscillation. It is part of the pleasure of reading a graphic novel, but now it's as if I've "crossed a threshold" so to speak. I "get" it. I "make it go." I see how dynamic the graphic storytelling text can be, the relationship between the reader and it, etc.
So if I read "through" them now, why am I writing about it? Why have I *noticed* it?
Today I picked up a book (a -non-graphic- novel) that my girlfriend gave me for valentine's day and, strangely enough, my eyes, as if by instinct, started navigating away from the words, the way they do when I read graphic stuff, as if expecting an image to emerge from the text of the novel. I caught myself doing this various times: the eyes detouring from the words to an image that wasn't there.
So reading is about developing conventions and in doing so creating certain expectations in the reading mind, expectations with which authors (!) play and which readers themselves play with. So here my eyes had the expectation of seeing an image when in fact they didn't need to look for an image. But what if there was one? How would my George Pelecanos novel read if it was made into image-word panels? In the same way, the weird e-poem that Tim Welsh presented to us played with our expectations as readers.
And there it was: different kinds of reading.
I don't know if this has anything to do with our discussion, but if it does, I just wanted to put this thought down somewhere. But as for you guys: what do you think? How does the "thingness" of a text--the formal conventions--affect the way it reaches us--or rather, the way we reach it?
So I've been reading a lot of graphic novels lately. Now, the "graphic storytelling" medium is very synthetic and... for lack of a better word, strange. On a very basic level, there's the speech bubbles with the dialogue, and a picture demonstrating the action taking place. Then different panels show a certain progression. Now depending on how experimental/avant-garde the comic is, this rule may vary and get more complex (just as reading gets more complex with "House of Leaves"), but the basics are still the same. So the way the eye travels (traverses!) through the page depends on which element is given more emphasis--nevertheless, there is a constant back-and-forth, an oscillation between image and text. And because I've been reading graphic novels for so long, I've become used to this oscillation. It is part of the pleasure of reading a graphic novel, but now it's as if I've "crossed a threshold" so to speak. I "get" it. I "make it go." I see how dynamic the graphic storytelling text can be, the relationship between the reader and it, etc.
So if I read "through" them now, why am I writing about it? Why have I *noticed* it?
Today I picked up a book (a -non-graphic- novel) that my girlfriend gave me for valentine's day and, strangely enough, my eyes, as if by instinct, started navigating away from the words, the way they do when I read graphic stuff, as if expecting an image to emerge from the text of the novel. I caught myself doing this various times: the eyes detouring from the words to an image that wasn't there.
So reading is about developing conventions and in doing so creating certain expectations in the reading mind, expectations with which authors (!) play and which readers themselves play with. So here my eyes had the expectation of seeing an image when in fact they didn't need to look for an image. But what if there was one? How would my George Pelecanos novel read if it was made into image-word panels? In the same way, the weird e-poem that Tim Welsh presented to us played with our expectations as readers.
And there it was: different kinds of reading.
I don't know if this has anything to do with our discussion, but if it does, I just wanted to put this thought down somewhere. But as for you guys: what do you think? How does the "thingness" of a text--the formal conventions--affect the way it reaches us--or rather, the way we reach it?
Spring Syllabus revision
ENGL A394
Spring 2011
Meets in Bobet 341 (Cotton Club) TR 9:30 - 10:45am
In this class we will continue to investigate the theoretical dimensions of the digital humanities. Over the course of this semester we will discuss several current theories of new media, and we will also read several literary texts in order to explore how narratives experiment with questions of new media. We will continue to practice reading, writing, and learning on our Apple iPads, with the goal of bringing the contents of the course to bear on this cultural object and the debates that are staged around personal technology in everyday life.
Instructors:
Robert Bell
Office: Bobet 115
Office Hours: MW 10:30-11:30; T 8:30-9:15; and by appointment
rcbell@loyno.edu
865.3094
Christopher Schaberg
email: christopherschaberg@gmail.com
Office: Bobet 325
Office hours: Wednesdays 10:30-12:30, Thursdays 2:00-3:00, & by appointment
schaberg@loyno.edu
Janelle A. Schwartz
Office: Bobet 320
Office Hours: T 12:30-1:30pm; W 2:00-3:00pm; and by appointment
jschwart@loyno.edu
865.2479
Grade Breakdown:
Participation 20%
Scribing 20%
Midterm 20%
Final exam 20%
Final project 20% [final project proposals = 5% of overall final project grade]
Attendance:
Attendance is crucial to the success of this course. Thus, we expect that you will not only make every effort to come to every class, but that you will come prepared and ready to participate. Should you miss class, it is your responsibility to obtain notes and/or assignments from the day(s) you were absent. Please note: once you acquire absences exceeding 1 week of class (i.e. more than 2 class meetings), we will lower the final grade half a letter grade by every absence.
Disability Services:
If you have a disability and wish to receive accommodations, please contact Sarah Mead Smith, Director of Disability Services at 504- 855-2990. If you wish to receive test accommodations (e.g., extended test time), you will need to give the course instructor an official Accommodation Form from Disability Services. The Office of Disability Services is located in Monroe Hall 405.
Emergency Procedures:
* In the event that there is an interruption to our course due to the cancellation of classes by the university as a result of an emergency, we will continue our course on Blackboard within 48 hours after cancellation.
* All students are required to sign on to Blackboard and to keep up with course assignments within 48 hours of evacuation and routinely check for announcements and course materials associated with each class. Class handouts will be posted under “course materials”.
* Students should be familiar with their responsibilities during emergencies, including pre-evacuation and post-evacuation for hurricanes. This information is available on the Academic Affairs web site: http://academicaffairs.loyno.edu/students-emergency-responsibilities
Additional emergency-planning information is also available here: http://academicaffairs.loyno.edu/emergency-planning
Calendar
(Readings with "Bb" will be made available in PDF on Blackboard)
week 1
Jan 11 Class introduction: protocol for the seminar [Scribing sign up]
Jan 13 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Prologue & Ch. 1 -- Kindle, free)
week 2
Jan 18 Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (e-book -- Kindle, free)
Jan 20 Current Scholarship in the Digital Humanities (reading tba, Bb)
week 3
Jan 25 Current Scholarship in the Digital Humanities (reading tba, Bb)
Jan 27 Lev Manovich, “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics” (Bb)
week 4
Feb 1 Current Scholarship in the Digital Humanities (reading tba, Bb)
Feb 3 Nicholson Baker, “A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?” (Bb)
week 5
Feb 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Bb)
Feb 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
[hand out final project prompt]
week 6
Feb 15 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (Bb)
Feb 17 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction” (Bb)
week 7
Feb 22 Ian Bogost, "What is an App?" http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_an_app.shtml#
Feb 24 midterm exam
week 8
Mar 1 Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (hard copy available at the bookstore)
Mar 3 Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
[project proposals due]
week 9
mardi GRAS holiday
week 10
Mar 15 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Intro & chs. 1-3) (e-book or at the bookstore in hard copy)
Mar 17 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (ch. 4 - 5)
week 11
Mar 22 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (chs. 6 - 9)
Mar 24 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (hard copy at the bookstore)
week 12
Mar 29 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (chs. 1, 5, 7 - 9) (e-book)
Mar 31 Kelly, What Technology Wants (chs. 12 - 14)
week 13
Apr 5 R. A. Montgomery, Project UFO (Choose Your Own Adventure #27) (hard & e-book)
Apr 7 Konrath and Kilborn, Banana Hammock - A Harry McGlade Mystery (A “Write Your Own Damn Story” Adventure) (e-book)
week 14
Apr 12 William Gibson, Neuromancer (hard copy or e-book)
Apr 14 William Gibson, Neuromancer
week 15
Spring break
week 16
Apr 26 Class presentations
Apr 28 Class presentations
week 17
May 3 wrap up
final exam Thursday, May 12 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.
This syllabus is a malleable document. You are responsible for keeping up with any changes made to it over the semester.
Reading (w/) the Digital Human
Spring 2011
Meets in Bobet 341 (Cotton Club) TR 9:30 - 10:45am
In this class we will continue to investigate the theoretical dimensions of the digital humanities. Over the course of this semester we will discuss several current theories of new media, and we will also read several literary texts in order to explore how narratives experiment with questions of new media. We will continue to practice reading, writing, and learning on our Apple iPads, with the goal of bringing the contents of the course to bear on this cultural object and the debates that are staged around personal technology in everyday life.
Instructors:
Robert Bell
Office: Bobet 115
Office Hours: MW 10:30-11:30; T 8:30-9:15; and by appointment
rcbell@loyno.edu
865.3094
Christopher Schaberg
email: christopherschaberg@gmail.com
Office: Bobet 325
Office hours: Wednesdays 10:30-12:30, Thursdays 2:00-3:00, & by appointment
schaberg@loyno.edu
Janelle A. Schwartz
Office: Bobet 320
Office Hours: T 12:30-1:30pm; W 2:00-3:00pm; and by appointment
jschwart@loyno.edu
865.2479
Grade Breakdown:
Participation 20%
Scribing 20%
Midterm 20%
Final exam 20%
Final project 20% [final project proposals = 5% of overall final project grade]
Attendance:
Attendance is crucial to the success of this course. Thus, we expect that you will not only make every effort to come to every class, but that you will come prepared and ready to participate. Should you miss class, it is your responsibility to obtain notes and/or assignments from the day(s) you were absent. Please note: once you acquire absences exceeding 1 week of class (i.e. more than 2 class meetings), we will lower the final grade half a letter grade by every absence.
Disability Services:
If you have a disability and wish to receive accommodations, please contact Sarah Mead Smith, Director of Disability Services at 504- 855-2990. If you wish to receive test accommodations (e.g., extended test time), you will need to give the course instructor an official Accommodation Form from Disability Services. The Office of Disability Services is located in Monroe Hall 405.
Emergency Procedures:
* In the event that there is an interruption to our course due to the cancellation of classes by the university as a result of an emergency, we will continue our course on Blackboard within 48 hours after cancellation.
* All students are required to sign on to Blackboard and to keep up with course assignments within 48 hours of evacuation and routinely check for announcements and course materials associated with each class. Class handouts will be posted under “course materials”.
* Students should be familiar with their responsibilities during emergencies, including pre-evacuation and post-evacuation for hurricanes. This information is available on the Academic Affairs web site: http://academicaffairs.loyno.edu/students-emergency-responsibilities
Additional emergency-planning information is also available here: http://academicaffairs.loyno.edu/emergency-planning
Calendar
(Readings with "Bb" will be made available in PDF on Blackboard)
week 1
Jan 11 Class introduction: protocol for the seminar [Scribing sign up]
Jan 13 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Prologue & Ch. 1 -- Kindle, free)
week 2
Jan 18 Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (e-book -- Kindle, free)
Jan 20 Current Scholarship in the Digital Humanities (reading tba, Bb)
week 3
Jan 25 Current Scholarship in the Digital Humanities (reading tba, Bb)
Jan 27 Lev Manovich, “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics” (Bb)
week 4
Feb 1 Current Scholarship in the Digital Humanities (reading tba, Bb)
Feb 3 Nicholson Baker, “A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?” (Bb)
week 5
Feb 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Bb)
Feb 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
[hand out final project prompt]
week 6
Feb 15 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (Bb)
Feb 17 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction” (Bb)
week 7
Feb 22 Ian Bogost, "What is an App?" http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_an_app.shtml#
Feb 24 midterm exam
week 8
Mar 1 Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (hard copy available at the bookstore)
Mar 3 Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
[project proposals due]
week 9
mardi GRAS holiday
week 10
Mar 15 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Intro & chs. 1-3) (e-book or at the bookstore in hard copy)
Mar 17 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (ch. 4 - 5)
week 11
Mar 22 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (chs. 6 - 9)
Mar 24 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (hard copy at the bookstore)
week 12
Mar 29 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (chs. 1, 5, 7 - 9) (e-book)
Mar 31 Kelly, What Technology Wants (chs. 12 - 14)
week 13
Apr 5 R. A. Montgomery, Project UFO (Choose Your Own Adventure #27) (hard & e-book)
Apr 7 Konrath and Kilborn, Banana Hammock - A Harry McGlade Mystery (A “Write Your Own Damn Story” Adventure) (e-book)
week 14
Apr 12 William Gibson, Neuromancer (hard copy or e-book)
Apr 14 William Gibson, Neuromancer
week 15
Spring break
week 16
Apr 26 Class presentations
Apr 28 Class presentations
week 17
May 3 wrap up
final exam Thursday, May 12 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.
This syllabus is a malleable document. You are responsible for keeping up with any changes made to it over the semester.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Barthes is Difficult
Hey Digitalers,
I'm on the third page of the Roland Barthes article, "From Work to Text," and am finding it difficult to read. At first I thought the "text" was some sort of abstract category from which the physical "thingness" of a book was separated, but as the article went on, I started to get the impression that there was some hierarchy going on--are all things written works, but not all works texts? I am only saying this (a) to ask if anyone else does have an idea of what the text says so that he/she may explain to me, and to put it out there that I'm having trouble with this work.
I'm on the third page of the Roland Barthes article, "From Work to Text," and am finding it difficult to read. At first I thought the "text" was some sort of abstract category from which the physical "thingness" of a book was separated, but as the article went on, I started to get the impression that there was some hierarchy going on--are all things written works, but not all works texts? I am only saying this (a) to ask if anyone else does have an idea of what the text says so that he/she may explain to me, and to put it out there that I'm having trouble with this work.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
War in Video Games
I've been thinking a lot about the intersection two conversations we had on Thursday - video games as mass produced art and war as the ultimate mechanical and technological reproduction. The first person shooter is a comsumer item touting an ability to recreate the experience of war from the safety of one's couch. There has been much debate on the tastefulness of this fact, but I want to highlight the sheer weirdness of this idea: often times these games are judged on their immersive experience; for example, in Killzone 3, a new science fiction first person shooter, one of the major positives in reviewing was that it felt more real thanks to the 'heft and swing of the weapons.' (Killzone 3 review - IGN). This is strange in itself - future weapons feeling more real while one is using joysticks? People like the ability to destroy the environment and experience more brutal kills. (Caveat - I enjoy these games as much as the next person and rarely feel particularly guilty about it, any more than reading Starship Troopers (though no necessarily agreeing with the politics!). Your faceless avatar (one assumes that he represents you, especially since they rarely talk in-game) also can absorb a certain amount of bullets before dying, but never less than 10 or so. Anything less is unfair.
I believe the strangest video games are shooters set during World War 2 - a past event which perhaps exemplifies war as mass production. The villains are invariably German or Japanese soldiers being gunned down en masse by a lone American soldier, using perfectly functioning virtual recreations of historical weapons. I remember in particular the last level of Call of Duty - World at War, a game whose innovation was the inclusion of levels set on the Eastern Front. The player is a faceless private in the Russian army storming the Riechstag in Berlin, killing hundreds of Wermacht and SS soldiers (who, besides the uniforms, have remarkably similar 20-something faces). Here lies a strange disconnection with history, though. While it is true that the Russian Army took the Reichstag, the Germans were almost all the irregulars of the Wermacht; all the 20 and 30 year olds had been killed long ago, leaving only those younger than 16 and older than 50 fighting. Your character ought to be gunning down children and grandparents.
Furthermore, as your character hoists the hammer and sickle on the roof, he receives a fatal wound; the last moments of the game are his vision fading as your allies cheer around you. I would almost say it is an undercutting of Soviet propaganda and the glory of war, but there is little to suggest it a true undercutting. But these games are based off of a strange pleasure of gunning down Nazis, some of the only 'safe' historical villains. These games are a disconnection of history and reality, but at the same time are through their medium supposed to bring us closer to the 'history' of our grandparents by putting a remarkably accurate virtual version of the M1 Garand into the hands of children.
Games are weird.
I believe the strangest video games are shooters set during World War 2 - a past event which perhaps exemplifies war as mass production. The villains are invariably German or Japanese soldiers being gunned down en masse by a lone American soldier, using perfectly functioning virtual recreations of historical weapons. I remember in particular the last level of Call of Duty - World at War, a game whose innovation was the inclusion of levels set on the Eastern Front. The player is a faceless private in the Russian army storming the Riechstag in Berlin, killing hundreds of Wermacht and SS soldiers (who, besides the uniforms, have remarkably similar 20-something faces). Here lies a strange disconnection with history, though. While it is true that the Russian Army took the Reichstag, the Germans were almost all the irregulars of the Wermacht; all the 20 and 30 year olds had been killed long ago, leaving only those younger than 16 and older than 50 fighting. Your character ought to be gunning down children and grandparents.
Furthermore, as your character hoists the hammer and sickle on the roof, he receives a fatal wound; the last moments of the game are his vision fading as your allies cheer around you. I would almost say it is an undercutting of Soviet propaganda and the glory of war, but there is little to suggest it a true undercutting. But these games are based off of a strange pleasure of gunning down Nazis, some of the only 'safe' historical villains. These games are a disconnection of history and reality, but at the same time are through their medium supposed to bring us closer to the 'history' of our grandparents by putting a remarkably accurate virtual version of the M1 Garand into the hands of children.
Games are weird.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Collaborative Scribing Redux
For the second part of this class we would like to experiment with weekly collaborative writing assignments. This will entail each group or cluster of writers to explore themes or questions encountered over the week’s worth of reading. As a demonstration, this post will be a collaborative post: I’m starting it, and then my colleagues will comment on it & revise it as they see fit, as we fine-tune our vision for this part of the course.
The goal, in part, is to perform some of the ‘posthuman’ implications we have been discussing in the class. Collaborative writing is an importantly difficult task to take on as humanists. We don’t do nearly enough of it; we often don’t know how to do it. So this assignment (collaborative scribing) is intended to give you experience doing something that is hard and unpredictable—but that can also result in fascinating and productive breakthroughs.
Here’s how I’m envisioning it: each group will have the entire week to write one post, question it, rewrite it, flesh it out, comment on it, and respond to comments. On each Sunday evening that week’s scribing will be complete (obviously it can still develop, but that’s when the post will be officially ‘graded’), and the next group will begin a new post on Monday. (I’ve pushed the first scribe assignment to week 4, so that we have time to orient ourselves as to how WordPress works.)
The scribe groups and dates are as follows:
Chris, Elle, Rolando: week 4 (Feb 1 & 3), week 10 (Mar 15 & 17)
Jonas, Andrew, Terra: week 5 (Feb 8 & 10), week 11 (Mar 22 & 24)
Joshua, Kalee, Cait: week 6 (Feb 15 & 17), week 12 (Mar 29 & 31)
Holly, Amalie, Jeffrey, Maria: week 8 (Mar 1 & 3) , week 13 (Apr 5 & 7)
*Weeks 7 and 14 will be collaboratively written by Bell, Schaberg, & Schwartz
Final Project
Final Project
Because we continue to be confronted by the “new tools” of digital media, as Cathy Davidson suggests on her HASTAC blog (as one example), our pedagogical approaches must continue to evolve as well. Using new technologies with old pedagogy could be ineffective, if not damaging to classroom innovation. With this in mind...
Think back to the “individual” classes you attended by our job candidates near the start of this semester. If you had one, 30-minute block with which to teach your peers and your professors something about digital media and the iPad, what would it be?
For this project, you have been broken into groups (the same as your scribing groups):
April 12
Joshua, Kalee, Cait
Holly, Amelie, Jeffrey, Maria
April 14
Chris, Elle, Rolando
Jonas, Andrew, Terra
Together in your respective group, devise a single lesson that centers on one specific topic: through this topic, you are to unpack the implications and applications of digital media. This is purposefully “open” with regard to the topic you choose, with the goal of highlighting your own individual insights and concerns about how the iPad may or may not be applied to studies of digital media. You should also utilize the theoretical readings you have encountered in this class to bolster your lesson.
You are responsible for teaching a 30-minute class on your chosen topic, with the “lesson” being fully immersed in digital media (e.g. on the iPad, utilizing youtube or other media sources, cloud computing, blogging, etc. etc.). In other words, we expect that the lesson itself will be largely, if not entirely, presented using digital media. (*Note: practice your presentations ahead of time, to avoid the pesky nuisance of “technological failure”!)
Also, on the day of your presentation, you will need to turn in a 1- to 2-page, group authored pedagogical rationale and theoretical basis for your presentation. (You may submit this in hard or soft copy.)
Mar 3 -- project ideas due
April 26 and 28 -- project presentations (see dates above)
Because we continue to be confronted by the “new tools” of digital media, as Cathy Davidson suggests on her HASTAC blog (as one example), our pedagogical approaches must continue to evolve as well. Using new technologies with old pedagogy could be ineffective, if not damaging to classroom innovation. With this in mind...
Think back to the “individual” classes you attended by our job candidates near the start of this semester. If you had one, 30-minute block with which to teach your peers and your professors something about digital media and the iPad, what would it be?
For this project, you have been broken into groups (the same as your scribing groups):
April 12
Joshua, Kalee, Cait
Holly, Amelie, Jeffrey, Maria
April 14
Chris, Elle, Rolando
Jonas, Andrew, Terra
Together in your respective group, devise a single lesson that centers on one specific topic: through this topic, you are to unpack the implications and applications of digital media. This is purposefully “open” with regard to the topic you choose, with the goal of highlighting your own individual insights and concerns about how the iPad may or may not be applied to studies of digital media. You should also utilize the theoretical readings you have encountered in this class to bolster your lesson.
You are responsible for teaching a 30-minute class on your chosen topic, with the “lesson” being fully immersed in digital media (e.g. on the iPad, utilizing youtube or other media sources, cloud computing, blogging, etc. etc.). In other words, we expect that the lesson itself will be largely, if not entirely, presented using digital media. (*Note: practice your presentations ahead of time, to avoid the pesky nuisance of “technological failure”!)
Also, on the day of your presentation, you will need to turn in a 1- to 2-page, group authored pedagogical rationale and theoretical basis for your presentation. (You may submit this in hard or soft copy.)
Mar 3 -- project ideas due
April 26 and 28 -- project presentations (see dates above)
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