The Chipped Looking Glass

Laid to Rest

2003-12-08T08:38:00.000-05:00

Doing this weblog has been a great experience for me. Before this course, my opinion of blogs was skeptical at best, but now I see and understand their value. The major step that I took was realizing that blogs were not used just for individuals to muse about their daily lives. There is great potential for using blogs as an intellectual tool, and this lies in the great flexibility that they give to writing. A blog is a place where anything can be written, at any time, and from any place. The internet allows for material to be spread around the world rapidly. These traits embody the fact that blogger’s slogan, “Push-button publishing for the people,” is indeed appropriate.

Writing regularly in this course has prevented me from intellectual stagnation; it is certainly a health thing to regularly think critically and assess issues. Because I have taken to blogging so naturally, I have started my own weblog.

During the course of writing this blog, I had a rocky start, and eventually settled into a mindset of weblogging that worked for me. Toward the middle of the semester, I found it easier to find something in a topic to address, and the writing came more easily.

When I wrote about Walter Benjamin’s Storytelling, I found that I successfully applied his thoughts to modern-day blogging, even though his writing was thick with vocabulary and awkward due to its age. Many of my classmates complained about the difficulty of the reading, but I was not discouraged. I spent extra time with Storytelling, taking notes, and picking my way through his arguments until I could distill them into undertandable thoughts. My argument that what he writes about new media of publishing applies to weblogs may be a tenuous link, but I think that I did a good job in making my point by using examples from his writing and comparing those to blogging.

My post about the High Museum of Art embodies a post where I knew what topic I wanted to examine, and tackled successfully, despite the difficulty of traveling to the museum, and traveling back to campus before being able to organize my thoughts and post. I found this entry so easy because some aspects of the high museum stuck out at me as peculiar, and the reading beforehand about trends in museum style applied well to what I saw there.

One entry that was hard for me to write was this one about Tara McPherson’s Reload. Whenever I begin to talk or write about the internet, my ideas become a hectic, disjointed mash. In this post, I wander into mentioning a weblog author that I read and enjoy, but is mostly unrelated to the issue at hand. I also share a personal experience of my own with using the web that could be considered, at best, vaguely on topic.

My post about etopia is one in which I did a good job expressing an argument concisely and lucidly. The topic is one that in which I have a seemingly endless supply of opinions, and I was able to borrow an idea from a previous post and develop it farther in this one.

Concluding this blog is going to be a big change for me, because it has been such an intense part of my life for this semester. A blog is a great thing to have, and a good place for intelligent discourse when nobody wants to listen. This course has opened my eyes to the wonders of weblogs, and I will continue to use my personal blog in the future. This will probably be the last post to this blog, and the posts on disaster.bungled.net will likely become more academic because I will not be blogging as coursework anymore.

It has been a fun and wild ride, but now it is time to lay this blog to rest.

The failed revolution

2003-11-19T10:40:00.000-05:00

In etopia, William Mitchell describes his vision of how the world will change when telecommuting becomes popular and information systems pervade our lives. Although he writes in 2000, Mitchell fails to take into account the possibility that perhaps technology has matured past the point where a telecommuting boom was possible, and that it will never happen.

Employers will always want to see their workers from day to day, and the cubicle dweller paradigm is incompatible with telecommuting. Without even the necessity of looking busy, it will be hard for employers to keep some workers on task. Furthermore, many professions simply cannot be practiced from afar; it would be difficult for a construction worker to simply dial in from home. For these reasons, the fraction of the workforce that can effectively telecommute will never exceed a few percent. William Mitchell’s claims about how cities and suburbs will transmute rely on the assumption that a large fraction can and will telecommute. If even 20% of people in most cities begin telecommuting, it will not result in a change in the urban status quo. More likely those telecommuters will simply be required to adapt to their situation.

If the internet was going to cause as large a change in the world as Mitchell suggests, it would have already happened by the year 2000.

The living internet - Now, now!

2003-11-10T10:18:00.000-05:00

Tara McPherson's Reload analyzes the potential that the web has for furthering consumerism and the role in society for which it is destined. What strikes me first about the article is that the web has been quite commonplace for over ten years, yet articles are still being produced (Reload was written in 2002) that consider the internet a developing thing, and discuss what it will eventually become. Trust me, kids, the internet is already everything that it will ever be. It is a chaotic, hectic, and unruly place, where power and fame are distributed in an almost post-apocalyptic way. Somehow, Google has come to power in the last few years, and sooner or later, some other web superpower will surpass Google's presence.

As far as using the web as a profitable medium for business, there is a failed concept called micropayments. The way micropayments work is that content on the internet would be priced small amounts (say, a penny or two for an article) and would be billed to the user automagically upon following a link and verifying the charge. Again, micropayments have failed on the world wide web, for a simple reason, which is elucidated very well by "maddog" McGlichey, who links to other articles about the issue.

Reload uses the interactivity of the web to explain why it is so woven into our lives. The internet, by itself, is a vaguely structured supply of information, and only by routing themselves on a path through it, does it take the linear form of other media. The practice of shaping the abstract internet into a concrete experience, and the feel of rendering the webpages from incomprehensible code on one's own machine gives the internet its liveness. Tara makes the point that this liveness is what makes the web fun to use, and is the experience that companies would have to capture and perfect if they intend to make the internet profitable.

Traditional web browsers tend to be limiting in their interface, making it difficult to fluently follow multiple traces through the internet. I use Safari, which supplies me with a convenient tabbed inteface, allowing my 'trail' through the internet to branch and fork within one browser window. However, the ultimate tendency is for most branches to be cut, or converge together back into one path, and branch again. Although Safari affords me a wider path through the web, it is still a mostly linear experience.

Vision, Cameras, Action!

2003-11-02T23:47:00.000-05:00

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes notes that photography can never be evaluated independently of the subject of the photograph. In no context is it possible to take a picture that is not of something. What he fails to take into account is that painting, often considered the precursor art to photography, is the same way. It would be difficult to find a painting that truly had no subject. Roland makes no mention of this in his writing.

A good observation that Roland makes is that there are three actions that go into the process of photography - taking photographs, being in them, and looking at them. Often when we think of photography we limit ourselves to thinking of photos in a gallery or personal photos without taking into account the entire experience and process that is photography. It is good to have this reminder that there is more thant his to photography. Barthes admits that he has no knowledge of photography as the picture taker, but describes his experiences in the other two roles.

With the invention of chemical photography, the second major method of observing light was born (Roland uses a classification slightly different from mine, in which painting is an intermediate between simple vision and photography). Now, digital photography and CCD capturing devices have produced a third means of recording light. These three methods and their uses are of great interest to astronomers, who must record images of the sky in order to study the object contained therein. In Barthes’ time, however, the utility of photography as a recording mechanism in the sciences had barely been pondered through. As time progressed, those opinions in Camera Lucida would have certainly evolved.

Remember the past, welcome the future

2003-10-30T23:29:00.000-05:00

The American Memory Project is an attempt to preserve artwork from America’s past digitally. The collection now contains over 7 million items, including books, journals, sheet music, movies, photos, and even sound recordings. Among the included works are some of the earliest movies made, reaching back as far as the 1920’s. These movies are black and white, silent, and of poor quality. The lack of focus is a result of primitive capturing devices, as well as the inevitable degredation of film over time.

The movies themselves are interesting explorations into what comes as a result of testing the limits of a new technology. The early movies, produced by Thomas Edison, make use of reversing and distorting time as a technique, and begin to show an interest in what can be done through movement of the camera, as seen in the panorama of a prison. In “Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show,” a movie-goer believes that what he sees in the movie is really occuring, and is fooled into attempting to interact with the movie. In that film, we can see the investigation of the capabilities of cinema.

Another point worthy of being raised is that even this early in moviemaking, society wondered about the possibilities of interacting with a movie, something that did not become a technological possibility until the boom of personal computers, at least 60 years later.

High Art and my Independence

2003-10-20T00:46:00.000-04:00

I recently paid a visit to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and observed how the 3rd and 4th floors are laid out, which provided an interesting contrast.

The 4th floor of the museum contains a temporary exhibit, “Ansel Adams and His Legacy With a Matter of Time: Edward Hopper.” Ansel Adams was a photographer who pictured natural landscapes, at first in black and white, and later with color, and Edward Hopper created paintings, mostly of morning scenes, with a mix of natural and manmade items included. Presumably, art scholars believe Hopper’s work to be born of the legacy of Adams, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

The 4th floor is arranged in a distinctly linear fashion, which leads the viewer on an actively guided tour chronologically through first Adams’ work, followed by Hopper’s. This is a natural setup for an exhibit whose purpose is to show the relationship of these two artists through time. The passageways in the museum resemble the body of a snake, laid out in rough S-curves with narrow connections between rooms, forcing a viewer to see each room in its entirety before continuing. At the end, naturally, is a gift shop specialized for selling prints and albums of the work of these two artists. I walked through the exhibit in reverse, then forward, which allowed me to observe how the museum was laid out in a way not specifically intended. An amusing side effect of this process was that my journey began with the rather unexpected Cha-Ching of the gift shop register immediately after beginning.

The 3rd floor of the museum was refreshingly different. This portion of the permanent collection consists of works by American artists, which seemed mostly to come from the 18th and 19th centuries. The layout of this floor is reminiscent of tangled spaghetti, consisting of numerous intertwined pathways, dead-ends, and alcoves. Each small section has a slightly different genre or time period of art, and by wandering around, it is not hard to see everything.

Overall, I preferred to walk loosely around the 3rd floor than follow the 4th floor in either direction. Choosing my own path and letting my eyes guide me was more satisfying and left me feeling as if I had created my own museum experience, rather than simply consumed a prefabricated package.

Balance in Film

2003-10-10T10:26:00.000-04:00

For the evaluative argument, I plan to examine the short film Balance. Balance is a nearly-silent short claymation film by German directors Christof and Wolfgang Lauenstein, and won the 1989 Oscar for best Animated Short Film. The premise of the movie is that several people are on a platform that tips when unbalanced, so must be careful with their weight distribution. Into this mix, a desirable music box is thrown, and the conflict that ensues is amusing and allegorically reflects human nature. The unexpectedly and ironic ending is a great clincher, setting in stone the film's message about human greed.

In my argument, I will convince the mainstream movie fanatic that Balance is an excellent movie to see as a first introduction to independent and short films. Although Balance is not an edge-of-your-seat thriller and has no million dollar special effects, viewers will take home an important lesson about humanity, and another lesson about movies: a movie does not need to be fun to be great.

Ever since seeing balance in the summer of 2002, I have been intrigued by its implications in the realm of interactivity, predestination, and free choice, as well as being impressed by the depth of its message. I have actually desired to express my thoughts about Balance in writing, so this assignment is a good opportunity for me to explore a topic that I enjoy.

Memory: milon and photos

2003-10-03T10:07:00.000-04:00

This entry will be somewhat split; I want to first say a thing or two about Milon’s Memory, then get into the topic of photography as memory.

One major difference between Milon’s Memory and mainstream blogs is that the topic of most blogs is somehow relevant in the same timeframe as the post itself. Personal blogs post about recent events in the life in the individual, political blogs post in response to news items, and editorial blogs post regarding issues that are currently on the public agenda. Milon’s memory breaks this mold, because although the postings are arranged chronologically by their publication, their topics are not in any way related chronologically. At the most, it could be said that each post is chronologically bound to the time at which memories occur to Bernard Lane, although this is a stretch. As a consequence of this observation, I intend to form two results. Firstly, Milon’s Memory does not fit my personal (and mercurial) definition of a blog, and is instead a different form of a website. Along with this result, my definition of a blog is evolving to include a tendency toward responses that are applicable to the present.

Moving on to photography and memory, there are two important viewpoints on the issue. The first is that photography (and perhaps recording technology in general) can enhance memory, making up for the shortfalls of the human mind. The other perspective is that photography is a destroyer of memory, that we trick ourselves into relying solely on pictures to construct our own comprehension of what we witness.

Personally, I have never been a very big taker or photos, and am not thrilled to be in them either. The pictures I take are almost exclusively digital, and their purpose is usually to share an experience with people who were not able to be present. I find little enjoyment in repeatedly looking at a picture of something familiar. A photo is a very bland representation of an occurrence, and paging through old ones is akin to endlessly rereading a very familiar book.

As an amusing side-note, I have a cousin who supplements her income by taking professional digital photos at weddings.

A Concomitant Causal Argument

2003-09-25T22:01:00.000-04:00

MSNBC News published an article on August 25 attributing a spike in gasoline prices to the blackout that affected much of the northeast. The magnitude of the price spike was the largest recorded in 50 years, consisting of a 15.53 cent increase over the two weeks that ended August 22. The power outage occurred on August 8, the day before the start of those two weeks. The gas prices used in the survey are a national average of self service regular unleaded fuel.

The article uses a causal argument to convince readers that the power outage was indeed the cause of the price increase. Good Reasons refers to this type of causal argument as concomitant variation. Because two relatively static entities, power coverage and gas prices, varied wildly at the same time and place, one is possibly a result of the other, and it makes little sense that a jump in gas prices would spurn a massive power outage.

This method is effective because the reader cannot dispute the fact that the two events are chronologically linked, and people generally want to find reasons for change in the world around them, so they are willing to accept the claims made by MSNBC.

Another more solid link between the two events is that several major oil refineries were rendered temporarily inoperative by the power loss, which tipped the supply - demand balance of the petroleum economy.

This article is a good example of how to utilize a concomitant variation type of causal argument, and benefits from the science of macroeconomics which has established that large scale disasters will create a supply shortage of related resources in and around the affected area.

An Iraqi Storyteller

2003-09-18T21:35:00.000-04:00

With a narrative weblog, such as Riverbend, the style of argument is remarkably similar to other editorial blogs. The basic idea is to present a news or factual item, quoting or including the parts that most instill the desired opinion, then drive the point home with a well crafted remark. The core attribute that differentiates narrative blogs from others is that in narrative blogging, the factual part of the arguments is taken directly (or almost directly) from the personal experience of the author. Doing this in place of quoting news sources, for example, requires that the credibility of the author be more firmly established, so that their words carry weight of their own, rather that capitalizing on the credibility of others.

In Riverbend, this credibility is established only through the claim that the author is a resident of Iraq, witnessing events and conditions. The issue of whether this claim can be proven is a technical issue beyond my desire for comprehension.

The particular goal of Riverbend is to present a viewpoint on the war on terror and raise sympathy among non Iraqis. The author argues that the connection between Iraq and terrorism or WMDs is none more than a fairy tale. Riverbend shows how American soldiers continue to mistreat Iraqis, and from the standpoint of the victim, the actions of the troops are portrayed as a form of terror. Too often we focus on the troops in Iraq and the goals (or lack thereof) of our presence in the middle east, and lose sight of those who are affected adversely by American influence.

Because each argument is introduced through a story, it is sometimes necessary to read through something of a backstory that is only slightly relevant to the topic on hand.

The Weblog of the future

2003-09-07T20:20:00.000-04:00

In his piece, Storytelling, Walter Benjamin argues that the art of storytelling is dead and being replaced with its inferior counterpart, novelism. Benjamin presents several reasons why he prefers oral stories to novels, and the central theme of these arguments is that the form of a novel is both determined and constrained due to the use of a book as its medium. Whereas a storyteller might adapt a tale to the concerns and desires of a specific audience, a published novel appears identical to every reader. Having a story contained in a physical object allows the attention of the reader to become lax, whereas a listener hearing an orated story would be determined to recall the story well enough to retell it. By reading a novel in isolation from the author, whatever channels of communication might exist in addition to the words on the page are eliminated. Overall, Benjamin believes that novels disconnect the story from the people in a negative way.

Many of the characteristics of novels mentioned apply as well to weblogs, and, by extension, to similar venues of the emerging alternative press. Both novels and blogs were made possible and popular by new technologies which furthermore became accessible and affordable to many citizens. In this respect, blogs do an even better job than novels of putting a pen into any hands willing to wield it. Another trait of weblogs that Benjamin addresses is their permanence. An archive stretching back to the beginning of a blog’s existence and convenient linking ability removes any burden from the reader to remember and reproduce what is written to a blog.

In addition, some of the points Benjamin makes about novels help to illustrate how blogs are a radical reversal of traditional media channels. Whereas novels (and published written work in general) disconnect the reader from the author, weblogs can create very strong linkages between the author and reader. The mercurial nature of blogs helps a reader to feel connected in time to the author, and the versatility of the internet for content delivery allows the reader to feel spatially close to the author.

Although Benjamin's arguments are valid, his opposition to the inevitable change in the world of writing was a futile attempt to stall a future that he felt did not suit him. In the same way, it is inevitable that weblogs will become a powerful and pervasive tool in politics, debate, and journalism.

Response and Responsibility

2003-09-03T07:35:00.000-04:00

In considering the issue of blogging ethics, one forms a mental conception of exactly what a blog is. A humbling number of blogs exist, and it would be quite an unjust assertion to insist that blogs in general can be grouped into any single collective. The obvious answer, then, to a question regarding the responsibility of a blogger toward their audience, is that the blogger, or author, as the case may be, decides their own role, guides their own pen, and forms their own ethics of publishing.

Today’s technology has given the average Joe the tools to make his voice loud, for free and in public, but only Joe has what it takes to make his voice heard. Only if Joe blogs, and blogs well, with an academic conscience and journalistic integrity, will he be able to make any sort of impact on the internet as a whole. By examining this scenario, we can see that it is not a crime for a weblog to frivolously rearrange itself or spread rumor and propaganda. But what becomes clear from reading weblogs, examining the comments that readers leave, and cross referencing between entries on the same subject is that the quality of a blog directly determines its success as a venue for the propagation of speech. No standard of ethics should, or could, ever be required by any sort of blogging authority, but in order for a blog to succeed in reaching the masses, it must adhere to certain guidelines.

Rebecca Blood has done a wonderful job in elucidating these concerns, in her piece, but I find myself driven to differ with her on some issues. I dislike the use of HTML’s strikethrough feature, for it detracts from the appearance of professionalism and can be confusing. Furthermore, certain forms of strikethrough are considered deprecated by the World Wide Web Consortium. Changes to posts should be made only as additional paragraphs added to the beginning or end of a post, and clearly marked as so.

True Heroes: defenders of education

2003-08-29T10:35:00.000-04:00

The focus of Joanne Jacobs’ blog is education, and considers the entire spectrum of education, ranging from the developmental effects of childcare, to concerns about the quality of a college education. This blog is of great interest to me, and elucidates very well my opinions of how education must be improved. Her arguments are made primarily through quoting and linking to other news sources and editorials. By not engaging in much persuasion of her own, Jacobs avoids any risk of having her credibility challenged. To call her incredible would be do doubt the authority of every source she incorporates. Jacobs’ ethos is further established by her past experience as a journalist for the San Jose Mercury News. Over her years of research and months of active blogging, she has earned a reputation for an honest portrayal of the facts.

The focus of Jacobs’ argument is that the worth of America’s educational system is rapidly degrading, and indeed has degraded to a frightening point. Her inclusion of articles highlighting the plight of school systems has the goal of promoting education as one of the top priorities in everybody’s mind. The pathos of the argument reaches deep into students as they read. I catch myself shamefully thinking “at least that isn’t me,” then realize that it could someday be me, or could have been me. The illusion that the problems in education are remote has been shattered. For many parents, no doubt, Joanne’s blog inspires a fanatical fear that their children may not realize their entire potential. The desire to protect one’s offspring is the oldest and simplest human emotion, and Jacobs connects with that.

Joanne’s style of presenting her arguments is very passive - she merely states the facts and interjects a brief comment here and there. She feeds a segment to the reader, then immediately puts into words the suspicion that lingered just out of reach in the mind of the reader. This method is very reinforcing to those who share her opinions, but would seem a bit farfetched to those who oppose Jacobs’ stance from the beginning.

A bit of a life story

2003-08-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

Before I begin anything else, it might be helpful to know a bit about who I am, so here we are. I was born and grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, until the age of 14, when the EPA transferred my father, and consequentially the family, to Chapel Hill, NC. Although I would have preferred to stay in Michigan, the move came conveniently before the start of my High School career; it's always easier to take one's tumult in large single doses.

The aforementioned High School career took place in two installments: two years at East Chapel Hill High School, a typical suburban public school, and two years at The NC School of Science and Math, known affectionately as S&M. The decision to attend NCSSM was the first time in my life when I felt a sense of purpose -- it was my first experience being truly alive.

The academic experience at NCSSM was both challenging and rewarding, and I did my best to amplify both of these attributes. Stimulated by an internal desire to overcome challenges, I shaped myself into an excellent student, and one of the school's academic leaders, especially in the subject of Physics.

Learning Math or Science has never been a challenge for me, and I have been able to effortlessly master new material, even while taking what were considered to be the three hardest courses at NCSSM concurrently. I hope to pursue as many advanced options as possible while at Georgia Tech, and wish to finally tackle academic hurdles that stretch my abilities.

So leaf subsides to leaf,
So begins my collegiate career.