English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

In an execptionally short essay (2 pages) Geoffrey Batchen, who teaches the history of photography at U. New Mexico posits that there is a critical difference between analogue and digital photography that I think is extremely interesting when considering rhetoric and truth claims.

Some quotes:
"Let's Begin with a basic proposition: what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). And let's test it against another: this embodied type of vision is what is at stake in the current shift from photographic to electronic media." Essentially, a photograph exists because an object existed, light touched that object then touched chemicals on paper and left an imprint of, not the idea of the object, but of the object's physical presence. (See also Andre Bazin's The Ontology of the Photographic Image and Walter Benjamin's, well, lots of Benjamin).

Great story today at CNN on mindreading machines:

"Mindreading scientists predict behavior" http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/03/05/mindreaders.ap/index.html

Here are some of the stunning revelations:

"The fact that we can determine what intention a person is holding in their mind pushes the level of our understanding of subjective thought to a whole new level," said Dr. Paul Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not connected to the study.

[. . .] Tanja Steinbach, a 21-year-old student in Leipzig who participated in the experiment, found it a bit spooky but wasn't overly concerned about the civil liberties implications.

"It's really weird," she said. "But since I know they're only able to do this if they have certain machines, I'm not worried that everybody else on the street can read my mind."

What's next? Hey, let's invent a sure-fire technique not only to read motive, but to actually bend someone's will. Using words alone, make people do things that they wouldn't normally do without some urging. Manufacture desire! Now that is a scary thought if it should ever come to pass.

For fun and experimentation, see you can make an ebook in one hour. Follow these steps to make a PDF ebook with all the right components.

1. Get your content. To to Project Gutenberg, pick out a book, then download or copy and paste the book body (including frontmatter). It's best to create a .txt version, for easy of import at the next step.

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

2. Download the attachments to this post. There are templates for Adobe InDesign files (cover and interior) and two PDF files that show what the template looks like as a PDF file.

Here's a good article on Second Life for y'all:

January 25, 2007
Second life
Double the pleasure, double the fun? Second Life is changing how people interact online.
Story and photos by Jim Walker, Illustration by Amanda Goehelrt

http://www.intakeweekly.com/articles/8/026252-4708-160.html

Here's a link to a talk given by Neil Postman. If you've never read him, he's a whip smart kinda guy, and has a lot of interesting points of media criticism. Here's his abbreviated take on information overload. You'll find it much more pessimistic than Lanham-- I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

http://www.frostbytes.com/~jimf/informing.html

Considering our conversation on Thursday surrounding the production of texts and the analysis of texts (and that they be imperative to keep as conjoined twins, each allowing and reflecting on the other as we navigate new production/reception technology), The Economics of Attention seemed particularly key.  I am deeply interested in the way that the author (and I am not done with the reading yet, thus refer in this post to the first chapter) notes that in an economy based on information the more you give the more you get.  Stated in those simple terms (I need simple terms sometimes [possibly too much information floating around to have the attention to decode less simplistic statements]) the way we interact with digital information is profoundly…connective.  Even as I am isolated in my apartment, hanging out with my cat, the information that I partake of and reprocess into a personalized context, then repost into the network makes me part of a complex explosion of knowing.  In Neal Stephenson’s novel Diamond Age he offers a vision of a biological super computer in which the thoughts and data of the people, the way they consume and process information, is passed (via body fluid in a grand orgy… I love novels) and accumulated into a master narrative (or attempted master narrative).  The goal of this super human computing machine is to break the code of the internet, to be able to trace the untraceable, to discover the code that would allow all information to emerge—direct lines of thought to be traced.  Like looking for cause and effect in a vast and complex ecosystem.  Lahnam reminds me that I am part of a very living and rhetorical ecosystem that is emerging, and has been in the process of emerging for thousands of years.  Technology is disallowing the boundaries placed on rhetoric, production and reception by economics (at least for those who are privileged enough to be able to partake of the technology, which leads us down an angry rant about privilege that I am not going to give into to today).  I am going to ask my 106 students to read most of this first chapter.  I am fascinated to see what they do with the metaphor of attention when combined with why the university exists, and why they are consumers of the university.  Is the university giving them the tools to not only be consumers but savvy producers and consumers within an information based society, and will it give them the framework to incorporate all of the available information into a world view that helps them (or doesn’t drive them mad).     

Here's another fun YouTube video called "Introducing the Book." Nice presentation of the challenges of usability!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek

Addendum: Read the story behind this video at Inside Higher Ed: A Lesson in Viral Video

I watched an excellent video this morning by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas. It's a great example of a good and (perhaps) manageable multimedia project.

Web 2.0 . . . The Machine is Us/ing Us

"Rhetorics" sneaks in, which I was glad to see. What does the VR squad think?

Considering visual rhetoric and technology, its amazing how much technology we use to augment our eyes (which are already pretty cool) to do something more or better.  We use glasses to correct a bunch of eye “issues,” we have binoculars and telescopes and microscopes and magnifying lenses—all to make our poor eyes be able to see what they never really had any intention of seeing (according to ‘nature’ (not sure about this statement about nature…)).  Doing a little bit off reading, eye glasses proper didn’t come about until around 1268 and 1289, but people have been using glass bowls of water, pieces of glass and stone for a while to magnify things.  How did nature let so many people get away with if-y vision for so long?  Was eye sight better before the time of books and computers and T.V.? 

Can we call the scrapbooking fad a type of "technology"? The vast amount of tools and colors and papers littering Hobby Lobby suggests to me that technology is a relative term. Scrapbooking is the Web 2.0 of photo albums.
Scrapbooking normalizes and formalizes the American experience visually, encoding and decoding memory in the same way that newspapers regulate and contain public events via column space and AP regulations. Scrapbooking allows the users a sense of mastery over memory (that elusive faculty that disappears with age, can be not only lost, but modified as time passes) through a new kind of iconography. Although commodification of the process has allowed for seemingly endless design possibilities, users are limited by not only artisitic ability, but by the commodification itself. Companies that make scrapbooking materials limit how the users can describe (and thus remember) their own experiences: the trinkets and stickers become simulacra, more real than the event itself. The pompoms used to *represent* cheerleading end up defining for the cheerleader what his/her experience should have been. Baudrillard differentiates representation and simuluation in that "representation" assumes there is still an original out there somewhere (Simulacra 6). The fictions my mother is creating about me in her scrabooks are taking precedence over whatever the hell actually happened.