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Ceridwen's Older Transmissions

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 8 months ago

 

5/10/07 - Goodbye?

I'm sure I'll be adding things here as my project comes along, but this is probably my last chance to get in touch with everyone. Just wanted to say that I have my own wiki here that I'm using as a personal website. I've added a lot of content, specifically to the Books and Videos sections. I encourage ALL OF YOU to view the Animal Videos section. If you eat meat or use mascara or shampoo or hand soap, or own a leather wallet, you need to see the videos. Consider me an activist :) Anyway, I love to debate and if you'd like to watch the videos and talk to me about them, shoot me a message! I'd like to stay in contact with the class as much as possible, because I feel like we've got a good rhythm going on here. Hope everyone has a beautiful and peaceful summer.


5/10/07 - alright, here

are the links. I compiled a very simple page with segments from everyone's blogs about the wiki here: InitialThoughts. I then did my own summary of how we (I) feel about it after the class here: And After

Jessie: I don't know where to put all of that within the links you have for the Wiki on Wiki project, but I know it applies. Maybe you want to decide where they go?

I need to find food, but perhaps later today I'll get to remixing all of those blogs into a meta-blog about wiki-phobia and wiki-euphoria.

 

Great work! I planned on compiling these segments today, but you did it before I even had a chance! Now time to repeat a clearly over-used cliche: great minds think a like lol. I'll add them to the Wiki on Wiki project links. What do you think of the project thus far? Do you think that it has any truly significant gaps? Thanks! ~Young Jessie


5/10/07 - Final project information

At Mobius' behest, it looks like my final project has extended into a longer project on logos philosophy and the wiki (Mobius, we should meet...when and where?). Rather than abandon the Wiki on Wiki project which I was working on, today I'll be scurrying around all of your wikis and collecting quotes related to wiki use, and compiling them on one page. It should be an interesting glimpse into the student perspective on using the wiki in education. If anyone has anything specific they'd like to contribute, I'm going to post a link to the page I create as soon as I get everything organized. As far as the logos philosophy etc. goes, I'll most likely post what I'm working on here on the wiki, so if you're interested keep checking back here to see what happens.


5/4/2007 - Getting Closer

Here is another really horrific final paper for you to browse, should you so choose. Now I just have to take three final exams in one day, and finish the project for this class.

Also, I know everyone is busy but could you please send me/post here your thoughts about the wiki? Barring your response, I guess I'll just start hunting through everyone's pages for anything they said about using a wiki for the course. Hope you don't mind :)

 

also, took a break from work and studying and did this.... The password is "tigers!" (without quotes) if you feel like messing with it. As far as formatting goes, I had a few questions...

1) how do I get the recent changes to show up in the sidebar?

2) how do I get the password to show up when you click "edit page"?

3) who knows where an html editor is that will allow me to play with colors etc without knowing code very well?

thanks!


5/2/2007 - it's the end of the world as we know it...

...or at least the semester. If anyone is interested in reading my take on the sublime in romantic literature, check it out here (a pdf). Now that that's done, I've just got two final papers, two finals, and the final project for this class left.

I'm questioning, though, the educational value of assigning a final paper to be due three days prior to a final exam (thank you, four out of five professors...). It seems to me that one massive regurgitative effort is more than enough to produce something worthy of grading. Then again, I also see nothing wrong with using footnotes rather than MLA parenthetical citation, and I think final exams are worthless as a tool for measuring the progress of a student.

All complaining aside, I've been tossing some ideas around for the final project for this class and my major stumbling block is that there seems to be no real exigency fo the project. After all, a wiki is relatively self-explanatory, so why create something which attempts to explain it? To that end, I'm going to change the focus, though not the main idea, of my project. Rather than simply write about using the wiki in education, I'll write for an intended audience of instructors not familiar with the wiki and its benefits. My main problem with this, however, is that many people, including Mobius, have already written that essay and done it better than I can. I only hope that the "student perspective" will lend an interesting tilt to it and keep it from being obsolete.

Mobius also mentioned using the whole wiki as a final project, but my ideas in this area are so scattered I don't think I can manage it. Any advice?

Harumph.

Hello Cerdiwen, Thank you for the kind words about our project!! We're glad you are enjoying what we have thus far! The sounds present us with many remix oppurtunities, so hopefully we'll keep playing around and adding to it, so stop back again! BigYellowPeep, Call Me Ishamel, PrincessPizza.


4/27/2007 - A cry for help

Regarding the final project, I'm focusing on how the wiki works in an educational setting. If anyone wouldn't mind sharing their thoughts on how using the wiki has changed your experience of the course (for better or for worse) please let me know! I have my own perspective and a pile of research, but that's not even half of the story. If you'd rather email me than post it here, I'm available at either lvk104@psu.edu or Lauren@resourcetec.com .

I also had an idea that I might like to implement if anyone is interested in helping me with it. I'm currently doing my final project in the Wiki on Wiki group. I think it'd be wonderful if we could turn a section of that project into a large database of links to other classes taking place in a wiki setting. In other words, a page with links to courses all over the country that are using wikis. This could increase the cross-linking and analyzing taking place in the Praxis wiki, if it could be done. Any takers? I suspect we'd need to get Mobius to direct us to a few sites and then search from there, but it could have interesting results.

I've taken a liking to the wiki and its capabilities (though that may not be obvious from my number of posts). I was working on a paper last week and almost turned one of the words into a link; then I realized this was a paper I was supposed to print out and hand in. Also, I wrote about the wiki for a co-editor internship I applied for. They wanted to know how I would handle a group of writers, so I discussed the benefits of collaborative writing. The reviewers seemed pretty amicable to the idea (and I got the internship). -loadstool


4/23/2007 - "Was Timothy Leary Right?" (Time magazine article)

No, but new research on psychedelic drugs shows promise for their therapeutic use.

by John Cloud

Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time?

 

The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the '50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the '70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies, just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author, Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin what will be the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s.

 

Psychedelics chemically alter the way your brain takes in information and may cause you to lose control of typical thought patterns. The theory motivating the recent research is that if your thoughts are depressed or obsessive, the drugs may reveal a path through them. For Leary and his circle--which influenced millions of Americans to experiment with drugs--psychedelics' seemingly boundless possibilities led to terrible recklessness. There's a jaw-dropping passage in last year's authoritative Leary biography by Robert Greenfield in which Leary and two friends ingest an astonishing 31 psilocybin pills in Leary's kitchen while his 13-year-old daughter has a pajama party upstairs. Stupefied, one of the friends climbs into the girl's bed and has to be pulled from the room.

 

A half-century later, scientists hope to unstitch psychedelic research from their forebears' excesses. Even as the Clinical Psychiatry paper trumpets psilocybin's potential for "powerful insights," it also urges caution. The paper suggests psilocybin only for severe OCD patients who have failed standard therapies and, as a last resort, may face brain surgery. Similarly, subjects can't take part in the Ecstasy trials unless their illness has continued after ordinary treatment.

 

Antidrug warriors may argue that the research will lend the drugs an aura of respectability, prompting a new round of recreational use. That's possible, but today we have no priestly Leary figure spewing vertiginous pro-drug proclamations. Instead we have a Leary for a less naive age: Richard Doblin. Also a Harvard guy--his Ph.D. is in public policy--Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986 to help scientists get funding and approval to study the drugs. (Doblin, 53, says he was too shy for the '60s, but he was inspired by the work of psychologist Stanislav Grof, who authored a 1975 book about promising LSD research--research that ended with antidrug crackdowns.) Doblin has painstakingly worked with intensely skeptical federal authorities to win necessary permissions. MAPS helped launch all four of the current Ecstasy studies, a process that took two decades. It's the antithesis of Leary's approach.

 

All drugs have benefits and risks, but in psychedelics we have been tempted to see only one or the other. Not anymore.

 

(Cloud, John. "Was Timothy Leary Right?" TIME 30 Apr. 2007: 64-65.)

(also available at the TIME web site)


4/20/2007 - Final Project wrestling, notes from yesterday

I'm finding that the hardest thing about writing about using a wiki in an educational setting is not a lack of things to say...it's finding something to say that's remotely original! I've been compiling a veritable heap of sources which deal with using the wiki for classes, many of which say basically the same thing. These, however, are some of the better ones:

\"Using wiki in education\" (mentions Penn State ENGL 15 courses!)

A Washington Post article about it

an ASCILITE 2004 paper (tons of information there)

 

I should note that at the bottom of the article from the last link, I'm instructed to cite the page as such:

"Augar, N., Raitman, R. & Zhou, W. (2004). Teaching and learning online with wikis. In R. Atkinson, C. Mc Beath, D. Jonas-Dwyer & R. Phillips (Eds), Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference (pp. 95-104). Perth, 5-8 December. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html "

 

In the end, though, I think I'll take Mobius' advice from much earlier on and work on discussing how the wiki has changed - and potentially will further change - concepts of authorship. Much of the writing, however, will likely be descriptions of personal experience. My goal is ultimately to link it to the Wiki on Wiki project in some meaningful way.

 

Regarding class yesterday: First, I'd like to commend Provisional Idiot on his presentation yesterday. I'm usually horrible at math, but everything you said was very clear. Perhaps that's because I can easily follow logic and explanations in a general sense, just not the actual manipulation of numbers. Anyway, since so many people missed class, I figured I'd post an abbreviation of the notes I took so if we discuss it on Tuesday you won't be too lost :)

 

4/19/2007

1) PGP according to PI

2) Wiki is the medium is the message

Class notes:

 

Encryption…making a code harder by using more complicated mathematics

 

Code to prove that an=b and bx=a (i.e to scramble and then easily unscramble a code)

Theory: Factoring a 20 digit integer is more difficult than finding two prime numbers (a typical code) In other words:

"The basic mathematical phenomenon that powers the RSA codes is the fact that multiplications are like omelets:

It is easier to do a multiplication than to undo it.

For example, it is easy to check that 193 and 223 are prime numbers and to compute their product, 43,039. It is considerably more difficult, given the number 43,039 and no other information, to discover that it factors as 193 times 223. Try to factor 42,881." (from PI link)

 

After that point, I got a bit lost with the numbers, but the basic principle is this: if I want to send something over the internet and have it be readable by only one person, I should take the following steps.

1) put my message into a basic letters-to-numbers code (A=1, B=2, etc. etc.)

2) have the reciever pick two extremely large prime numbers and multiply them

3) that person sends two numbers to me...maybe PI can refresh my memory as to what they're called?

4) I use those numbers to make my message (now in numerical form) incredibly difficult to decode by manipulating all of the numbers in it. In other words, I take a relatively simple code and make it something that would take forever to crack, unless you're the person who picked the numbers in the first place and so knows exactly what they are.

 

And that, in a nutshell, is Public Key Encryption according to Ceridwen. (no guarantees of accuracy!!)

 

A small note: I think that when Mobius asked you to look at my blog, he was referring to the section called "Shooting, in real time (edited from yesterday)" from 4/17/07. Unless, of course, he wishes to discuss my recent last.fm plays in class on Tuesday...I'm also not sure if he meant for you to notice what I said, or the fact that I said it at all.


4/18/2007 - More fun than the last one...sort of...

Screenshots of shamantaclaus's pet project.

 

In response to NoResponseAngel's response (also posted on her page):

 

While I'm sure it could come across that way, I didn't mean to "bash" the media. I've considered going into journalism myself, and I feel that reporters and journalists are a crucial element of our society. They help keep us informed, as well as "keeping people honest" by holding them accountable for their actions. HOWEVER, I feel that often the focus of journalism moves too easily from detailing a story to chasing profits. I understand that they're in competition, but it seems that many of the ideas of ethics taught in college classes on journalism are abandoned. This is especially prevalent with companies like CNN and FOX, which are owned by larger corporations who's primary focus is entertainment, not journalism. And why, when there were probably thousands of other shootings across the globe, did we focus on this one? One, it was huge, and it hit close to home. But two, because it's something large media corporations can sell. Stay tuned for the latest...after these messages. BUY A DODGE. USE AOL. PAY US TO DO YOUR TAXES. Still no new information, folks, but stay tuned.

 

Aside from all of that, I have a serious problem with reporters hounding victims and their families, when those people need to be given time to reflect and grieve and heal. The student who shot the cell phone video of the shootings that was playing all over the place was being interviewed, and said that the media attention was awful and distressing. And now we play the blame game...the man who actually killed people is dead, so we search for a scapegoat. Blame the police, blame the university, just don't blame society in general. And for god's sake don't just let things go. Nancy Grace and Anderson Cooper and the Cafferty guy want stronger laws now...what, thought police? I think therefore I am criminal? I really do think it's disgusting that a tragedy which touches us all is now a source of profit. THAT is what I was trying to say.


4/17/2007 - Shooting, in real time (edited from yesterday)

I modified my original blog to reflect more sensitivity, which it was sorely lacking. I hope that my edits show those who were offended that by no means do I not care about the shootings at Virginia Tech. It merely triggered a chain of speculation on my part about the way we operate in society with the technology available.

 

Note: I don't mean to be callous and turn a tragedy into a point of speculation about communication and technology and information, but I can't help but go over this...

 

Apparently, there are students huddled in classrooms writing essays about the shootings at Virginia Tech, which are being posted online...and were being posted as it was happening. We've moved well beyond cameras beaming images of events unfolding through news stations and across the globe, and into an age of active participators/victims/bystanders sharing events with the entire world as they unfold. One more filter broken down, one step closer to experiencing what they're experiencing. I can't help but notice both the benefits and hazards of this kind of immediate information.

 

My first thought upon turning on CNN yesterday morning was that the news station seemed to have no idea what was going on. The graphic was of the state of Virginia with a dot where the university is, and the caption and repeated line was "Gunman on the loose." No word on whether or not actual shots were fired, no word on any casualties...in other words, nothing to accurately and thoughtfully report. As information trickled into the station, they broadcast interviews with students on cell phones. The calls were emotional and heartwrenching to listen to, they consequently made for incredibly "good" television. What was amazing to me was that these students, who were on campus and in classroom buildings, were getting their information from the school web site. Turning to the computer to tell them what was happening not fifty yards away.

 

So, is the computer (the internet, the vast array of methods of communicating via the internet in "real time", the internet-enabled cell phone, etc) bringing us closer or further from "actual" events? (And is either preferable to the other?)

 

On one side, we have a screen between us and the world outside of it. We check current temperatures on weatherbug rather than step outside and check for ourselves. We choose to email rather than speak to a friend...perhaps to avoid the riggors of face-to-face conversation and perhaps out of laziness. When I want information, I don't go out into the "real" world and get a book from the library, I first attempt to find it online. All this serves to push us further and further into our own world, our own apartment, our own screen.

 

But at the same time it draws us out, via information not otherwise available. Perhaps without myspace.com I wouldn't communicate with half of the people I now speak to on a regular basis. Without this wiki our course could easily stagnate and become unremarkable. Without CNN, NYTimes, FOX, etc. etc. I wouldn't have known yesterday that the death toll at Virginia Tech was 21...22...32...which was it?

 

And there's the complication. With so much information being broadcast right now, is there any check for real accuracy? Is there any way to know if an essay is from a student at Virginia Tech, writing about her experience listening to gunshots next door, or an employee of (insert major news corporation here) writing something that will get good headlines? It's dishonest, but it's not unheard of. And ultimately, do most consumers truly care? I think we'd all say that we want "truth" in reporting, but hardly anyone can really define their concept of truth. Additionally, if you told them that they couldn't watch CNN Headline News anymore, that they'd have to wait until the weekend and watch PBS do an hour-long review of the week or read the Sunday New York Times, I think truth would fall to the wayside and immediacy would be shown to be the most important factor.

 

Ultimately, though, I have to pose the question: who cares? Certainly the students, faculty, staff, and families associated with the university. But as for me, in State College, Pennsylvania, what about this incident will affect my life? Here I need to say that I cried today about the incident. I cried for those killed, for the senseless nature of the killing, and for the families and friends of the victims. Upon hearing a few of the tales of heroism on the part of several students and professors, I was even more saddened at the loss of life. I have sent emails to friends in the area and at the university expressing my deepest condolences, and my mind has been on those affected since I first heard what was happening. However, in the end I still went to class, are chocolate, played with my cat, and did my laundry. It had no direct impact on my day-to-day life. So really, why did I need to know about it as it was happening (and before there was any clear chain of events or list of those killed)?

 

What drives the need to stay in constant connection with a source of information about the incident? I think it's got something to do with the culture of immediate gratification in which we live. We'll Tivo a show (another instance of a proper noun becoming a verb...) so that we can have it when we want it. We drive through restaurants to get our food faster. We take diet pills to loose weight now, protein shakes and steroids to get muscles now, check the facebook news feed to see what our friends are doing now. Instant coffee, instant oatmeal, instant hot chocolate, instant headline news...(this, of course, calling to mind the Dane Cook bit about how in the future when we can travel from one place to another instantaneously, the line at the DMV will still take nine seconds).

 

In all of the effort to label the incident (was it "domestic terrorism"? was it "Columbine revisited"? was it "the biggest massacre in US history"?), scrutinize the response of the university and the police, and maintain a constant flow of information (who knows if it's accurate or not...), we've managed to loose sight of the tragedy itself. Where is the time for pause or reflection? Where is the time to sit and mourn the loss without the chatter from the screens telling you what to think? Perhaps we need to let Virginia Tech and it's associated families deal with the loss before the rest of the nation pounces on it.

 

Watching several of the interviews taking place today, I became disgusted. Reporters fishing for the location of the shooter's parents, hunting down more and more emotional stories. Accusing the police (accusations couched in questions, of course) of being responsible for the second spree of shootings because of their lack of adequate response to the first. (There have been arguments that students should have been notified through means other than the internet, and that the police should have done more between the first and second shootings. Such arguments are pointless, as no ammount of finger-pointing and investigation will change the outcome of the day. It is also my opinion that there is no way campus security or police could have known that another incident would take place. After a shooting on Hamilton avenue in an apartment, would the police department be expected to lock down the entire town of State College? In the words of Grahm Spanier (as stated in the most recent PSU Newswire email): "I hope the rush to judgment by the media in the early hours after the Virginia Tech tragedy evolves into a more thoughtful, long-term discussion about the realistic expectations for prevention and response.")

 

How many times can Wolf Blitzer say the body count before we turn the television off? How often can the shooter's name and status as an English major be repeated before we stop caring? With no time to analyze and let grieving take place, to complete an investigation before attempting to state the events and their cause, we're so bogged down in information that it's nearly impossible to make sense of it.

 

Maybe it's time to slow down, maybe it's not. Maybe it's just time to take into account and appreciate the fact that we are alive. Able to walk to class, read a book, cook dinner, hold hands with a loved one. With our mind constantly focused on what's next and how fast we can get it, I can't help but feel that we're loosing sight of what we have to loose, and what was taken from the students at Virginia Tech: our lives.


4/13/2007 - ...


4/11/2007 - :'(

oh no...

 

Speaking at Isaac Asimov's funeral; "'Isaac is in Heaven now.' That was the funniest thing I could have said to a crowd of Humanists. God forbid, should I pass on sometime, may all of you say that Kurt is in Heaven too."


4/3/2007 - Derrida made simple (yes, it's possible!)

It could be just my fascination with the man but it seems like everything we discussed in class had some relationship to the ideas of Jacques Derrida. Because he can be nearly impossible to read and unpack, and because doing so would take more time than anyone could sanely be expected to do on top of a normal course load and a social life, I'm going to post what I feel is probably the best reduction/explanation/outline of his ideas about speech and writing. They're from the much-maligned but ever-useful "How to Read Derrida" by Penelope Deutscher. It deals primarily with defining and teasing out what Derrida called "Deconstruction." The term is often impossible to define, and "deconstructionists" rarely claim that it can be.

 

Here is Derrida's own "definition":

"The way I tried to read Plato, Aristotle, and others, is not a way of commanding, repeating, or conserving this heritage. It is an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works or does not work, to find the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within their own corpus...What is the law of this self-deconstruction, this 'auto-deconstruction'? Deconstruction is not a method or some tool that you apply to something from the outside...Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside; there is a deconstruction at work within Plato's texts, for instance. As my colleagues know, each time I study Plato I try to find some heterogeneity in his own corpus and to see how, for instance, within the Timaeus the theme of the khora is incompatible with this supposed system of Plato. So, to be true to Plato, and this is a sign of love and respect for Plato, I have to analyse the functioning and disfunctioning of his work...I would say the same for democracy..."(Derrida 1997A, 9-10)

 

 

Deutscher takes this passage as a background for teasing out Derrida's theories of speech and writing, which in turn demonstrates deconstruction.

 

"The starting point for deconstruction was the discussion of language in the history of philosophy, particularly the hierarchy of speech over writing. Speech is traditionally preferred over writing because writing seems to derive from speech. Accodring to Aristotle's On Interpretation, spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, while written words are the secondary symbols of spoken words (Derrida 1997B, 30), and therefore more removed from mental experience. Plato also valued speech over writing, because in his view it is closer to 'logos', knowledge or reason. Writing is described metaphorically by Plato as an orphaned son, at risk of being out of the proximity and control of its 'father', the author. If a speaker is asked to explain, they are present to authenticate, elaborate on or simply to bring life to their words. If we interrogate written words, they maintain, according to Plato, a most 'majestic silence'. Many linguists and philosophers have preferred to think of language primarily in terms of the spoken rather than the written.

 

For less technical reasons this preference is sometimes expressed in contemporary culture. If you are called to give evidence in court, it won't do to send a letter, nor to read out loud a statement in court. The actual presence of the speaker and their spontaneously spoken statement is required. In a 2005 retrial in Lake Charles, Louisiana of Wilbert Rideau who had been convicted in 1961 for the murder of a bank worker, stand-ins were asked to 'read the parts' of the testimony of thirteen original witnesses, many of whom had since died. It was felt that the spoken version could add 'life' and authenticity that the written discourse might lack.

 

Some arguments found in philosophers as ancient as Plato about the value of speech over writing remain with us today. In Plato's Phaedrus it is argued that written documents may appear to remedy the limitations of our memory but actually threaten it. When we rely on written aids, memory works less hard and may become feeble. Writing is described by the Greek term pharmakon...In ancient Greek, pharmakon had multiple meanings and can be translated either as 'poison' or 'remedy'. The Phaedrus asks whether writing is a remedy for bad memory or a poison to memory. Today also, we might expect that someone who knows a subject can speak spontaneously about it. We are not convinced if they only possess written notes. If they rely on such notes, we might, in agreement with the Phaedrus argument, consider that writing is a hindrance, not a help. Perhaps we too think that writing is a pharmakon: both a help and a hindrance.

 

Reading these ambivalent devaluations of writing with a deconstructive eye, we see that the Phaedrus evokes an ideal which is at apparent risk from writing (just as surrogacy apparently threatens 'natural' motherhood, and drugs apparently threaten 'natural' bodies). We must ask whether speech has ever guaranteed the knowledge, or the testimonial value, apparently threatened by writing and whether we can dislodge the mystique, and the apparent promise of speech. Returning to spoken testimony in trials, someone relating his or her evidence in person is not necessarily persuasive. Wilbert Rideau was released, despite the prosecution's attempt to re-animate the voices of those who had given evidence against him. Returning to Plato, it is possible to not fully understand facts one can recount. When it is a matter of competency, someone might speak persuasively of a knowledge they have merely learnt by rote. In other words, many of the terms through which writing is devalued - non-reliability, lack of conviction, the absence of an animate persuasiveness or indeed the absence of true knowledge - also apply to much speech. Derrida argued that speech is definable in similar terms to writing, though it is posited as primary to it. Similarly, we saw previously that 'natural' bodies are definable in terms similar to 'drugged' bodies as they both ingest artificial toxins, and 'unnatural motherhood' is definable in terms similar to natural motherhood as both are a matter of social construction and interpretation. Ther hierarchies between the terms natural and unnatural, pure and contaminated, certain and uncertain, are, on closer inspection, unstable.

 

Plato's Phaedrus claims that speech is closer to the live, physical presence of the individual conveying ideas. Thought or ideas, knowledge or truth, is considered the 'original' position. Derrida countered that although writing might be deemed a copy of speech, speech is a kind of writing. If we define writing as the inscription of a communicated idea the mind itself can count as a psychic material in which ideas are inscribed. The Phaedrus claims that speech is actually a kind of 'psychic inscription' of ideas, that it is written in the soul of the learner. Today too, it's not uncommon to believe that facts can be mentally 'burnt' by saying them out loud, or to a friend. It seems that speaking ideas out loud registers them more thoroughly in our mind. Yet Derrida is right that we just as commonly think that speech does not, after all, guarantee immediacy with consciousness. I might find myself dissatisfied by the way that my speech communicates my ideas - my spoken words can seem to 'slip out of my control', just as my written words can. I might tell you that what I say is not quite what I meant, or I might find myself surprised by what I say. What is attributed to 'writing' must also be attributed to 'speech': in both there is some delay, some lack of satisfaction, some possible discrepancy from what is imagined as the originating idea, or consciousness.. If 'writing' is devalued as a form of communication beyond the control of the originating speaker, and a form that only imperfectly renders one's thought, then speech can also be included under this definition. Speech, from that perspective, can be considered a form of 'writing'.

 

We have arrived at one of the controversial, and apparently nonsensical views for which Derrida first became well-known in the 1970s: that speech is writing. Considering the ways writing can be devalued in relation to speech, we can see that writing and speech actually have a good deal in common. Derrida's point is to question the idealization of speech, which he thinks throws up mirages of promised immediacy, certainty and presence. The belief that Derrida prefers writing over speech is mistaken. He is suspicious only of the idealization of speech because it involves a phantom promise of the natural, the pure, the original. To direct our attention to those phantom promises Derrida offers us a complex definition of writing that can be hard to follow.

 

Derrida pursues his argument to its further point, defining 'writing' so that it refers not to writing per se, but to the reasons for its devaluation. In Plato's philosophy, writing is devalued as distant from a source, secondary, and possibly deceptive. A phantom ideal is at work here, since Derrida finds that speech is also deemed by plato on occasion as distant from a source - of thought, for example - secondary, and carrying the possibility of deception. Plato, in his argument about rote learning, admits that speech is no sure thing: that it is secondary to a thinking psyche, and it too can decieve. In Derrida's view, Plato's description of writing extends to speech, which Derrida concludes is a form of writing.

 

This is the kind of manoeuvre some have deemed deconstructive trickery or tomfoolery. Derrida invents a name to describe this 'general' writing which covers the broad field of anything to which the decaluation of 'literal' writing (words on the page) must also apply. This term is 'general' or 'generalized' or the 'general economy of' writing, or 'archi-writing', where the prefix 'archi' connotes a sense of pre-eminence and originality - at the beginning is writing, in Derrida's 'general' sense. To describe speech as a form of archi-writing, is to say that despite its phantom promise it is not immediate and embodies the possibility of deception. Derrida's real point here is that this is true of all forms of language: this fear is the original condition of language. By his expanded definition, all forms of language can be described as 'forms of writing'. But the aim of this broader definition of speech as writing is to flag this paradoxical nature. The ideal is an illusion, all language involves the risks Plato describes, which could never be expunged. Language and communication are an inherently risky business."

(Deutscher, Penelope. "How To Read Derrida." W.W. Norton and Company Ltd. London. 2005. pp. 7-12)

 

Some things to think about: how does this inform and reflect upon Lessig's "Free Culture"? How can we extrapolate Derrida's ideas from a discourse about speech and writing and apply them more broadly to issues discussed in class? How does he relate to or form a dialogue with Wilson? And, how does his concept of writing shape writing in a digital world, including programming text such as HTML or C++ (scripting)?

 

something else: I spell it "dialogue." Spell checker thinks I'm wrong...does anyone else spell it that way or am I crazy? I know it's more common in the UK, but I didn't think it was outright wrong here in the USA...


4/3/2007 - Explanation of remix

tidbit of trivia for you: I've hacked into the system by buying into the system, and am now wiki-ing on my laptop outside of our classroom. Verizon is wonderful about allowing national wireless broadband access...if you pay for it. Garrr...

 

My explanation is posted from a link at the bottom of my Ubik Remix but I'm going to post it here as well and hope that somebody reads it and is intrigued enough to check out the actual assignment. I'm also putting in more links for ye navigators of the great wide information highway. (I would personally rather consider it an information ocean, with myself adrift but having a finesse with the operation my ship and Herr Doktor Professor Mobius's implanted knowledge of using the stars to guide me. This statement which began as quite tangential has inspired an image of the entire class setting out in little one-person sailboats, with Mobius handing us a guide and a slightly amused handshake at the docks as we depart. It also called to mind the carnival game with rubber ducks floating around a moat...perhaps we ducks have been in the moat on a fixed and designated path and Mobius wishes to toss us into the sea to forge our own way...THAT, of course, reminds me of BigYellowPeep's peep images. And with the day of peep-eating quickly approaching, I can't help but wonder what it is about those small sugary confections, their rubber bathtime counterparts, and their wild inspiration that so intrigues us. Also, has anyone ever seen a truly yellow duck? Why do we choose yellow if it's not at all like a real duck?)

 

In the interest of time, space, and my own sanity I'll just stop there and post my remix explanation :)

 

CeridwenRemix is a mash-up or cut-up of Philip K. Dick's "Ubik" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". I didn't use the whole poem, just cut bits and pieces out and modified them with Ubick-ness. You could say I took the operating system written by Ginsberg and plugged in the data written by Philip K. Dick and then added my own wetware software.

 

Howl has long been my favorite poem, and I manage to read it in a different light each time. It's the book that sits on my nightstand, and there's an extra copy in my backpack and in the glove compartment of my car. I read Howl, and I read the other poems in the City Lights copy of it, with a rather alarming regularity. So it was no surprise that when reading Ubik I started drawing connections. I chose to focus on the position of Ella Runciter...a lone soldier in the battle against Jory. Ginsberg positioned himself as a soldier (not alone, perhaps) in a battle against the destruction of everything soulful and alive and real. A battle against government intervention and invasion and consumption.

 

For Ginsberg, Carl Solomon was the emblem of the "best minds of my generation" being shoved through grinding machinery and destroyed. For Ella, Joe Chip was yet another soul being eaten by Jory. In both cases there are larger issues. For Ginsberg and Howl, the ideas of government and society and control are at stake. As are concepts of individuality and freedom and intellect. In other words, all we claim to hold dear. For Ella, though perhaps not stated, is the ethical issue of being in cold-PAC in the first place. Their souls, if we choose to call them that, are being held captive (subjective view, I know), their bodies frozen. Rather than death, they face a slow decay. And the benefit is not to them, but to those left behind. Issues of eternity and immortality and selfishness, life and death and love and loss, are hauled into the harsh light of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium.

 

I chose to select chunks of Howl to use rather than to work with the poem in its entirety for two reasons. One, to keep the resulting piece manageable and easy to read in one sitting, and two, in the spirit of a remix and in a small effort to inflict my own presence on the piece. The changes made may have been editorial rather than content-oriented, but they are my own.

 

The basic technique was this: re-read Ubik quickly, jotting down names, words, dates, etc...basically anything that jumped out of the page as significant somehow. Then, re-read Howl, hacking out parts that reminded me of situations in Ubik. Replace proper nouns, certain phrases, expressions, etc. from Howl with the list of things from Ubik and voilà! A mash-up of the two pieces. The individuality comes from my very subjective process of selection. I filtered out more than 99% of the words of the book, I'd estimate. I also filtered out about half of the lines of the poem, and replaced half of those remaining with parts of Ubik. In other words, I took the vast amounts of information in each text and boiled it down to something I feel is short, easy to read, and interesting.

 

For me it was reminiscent and representative of the task we all face each day: a seemingly (perhaps truly) infinite stream of information. Information overload! The only way to make sense of it all is to make selections, for better or for worse. We chose to concentrate on some things and ignore others. We combine facts and stories in our own way to gain meaning. Juxtaposition is no longer random but incredibly significant. Do you remember the activities in children's books where there were two or more images next to each other, and the task was to synthesize a word?

 

My own (slightly more adult but still easy) favorite:

+ = ???

 

Its a highly simplified example but it gets the point across. We take two seemingly unrelated things and create one meaning out of it. Another favorite is Mad Gab, the board game. "It's not what you say, it's what you hear!" There are several words written on a card. When read aloud with the right rhythm and pitch they sound like another word or phrase. If not, it sounds like mumbo-jumbo and makes no sense. A few examples (read them out loud..although if you're doing it in public you might end up in an institution):

"ASK RUDE ARRIVE HER"

"hype people earth duh hey"

"Dish hippie slaw stats he"

"up he such ease"

 

So, you take seemingly random terms and force them through your brain until they have meaning. And, you sound like an idiot :). Anyway, the idea was to take two separate texts and mash them together to synthesize something with significance.

 

Ginsberg's use of repetition, both of words and of patterns, worked well for me. In my mind it was the perfect tool to emphasize the feeling of relentless inevitability that Ubik presents us with. It creates a drive that both leads you on and creates moments of pause, or caesura, in which to reflect.


4/1/2007 - Remixed

Alright, my Ubik remix is up here. It's a mash-up of Ubik and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". I didn't use the whole poem, just cut bits and pieces out and modified them with Ubik-ness. You could say I took the operating system written by Ginsberg and plugged in the data written by Philip K. Dick and then added my own wetware software. The explanation will be linked to from the remix, once I create the page. Enjoy!

 

On another topic, I'd really like to do the collaborative De-finitions thing as my final project, but it won't work unless most of the people in the class go through and write their own definitions of most of the words. Because it might look like a long list right now, later tonight I'm going to go in and edit it down to just ten words or so. I'd really appreciate it if you could spend a few minutes thinking about them...put up music pictures videos words and mixes of them all. If Mobius approves my project will be the synthesis of a single 'definition' for each word and an explanation of how it symbolizes the wiki and our collective class' consciousness.


4/1/2007 - April Fools?

Looks like my April Fools day joke came a few weeks early...lets not discuss trying to get home from spring break, eh?

That said, once I get it into wiki-friendly format, which should be sometime tonight, my remix will be up here. I know its horribly late but I hope at least one person reading this finds it moderately interesting! More later.


3/11/2007 - Hawaii loves wikis!!

Perhaps not this sort of wiki, but still...


3/7/2007 - Transgenic Involution?

I managed to spend an hour or so last night going through Mobius' piece, "Transgenic Involution." After googling "White Widow" and "DJ Short" on a university computer, I may not be around tomorrow...

 

Kidding.

 

I hope.

 

Anyway, aside from my agreement with Mobius on many points, I can't seem to help that my main reaction had to do with Alba the bunny. I can't help but feel some latent misgivings at the use of an animal as art, despite the eloquent explanation given by Eduardo Kac. This probably stems from the fact that since birth I've been an animal lover. I'm not sure about anyone else, but I've never considered my animals 'pets' so much as companions, and I tend to think of them as equals despite the communication barrier.

 

Take, for instance, my cat Sasha. She and I have a bond that most of my family and friends don't quite understand. She responds to several nicknames I have for her, we tend to follow each other around the apartment, I miss her when I'm away for more than a few hours (as she misses me), and I respond to her needs without prompting (she likes to drink out of the sink, not the water bowl. Evidently the water bowl isn't good enough for her...).

 

(I've heard that cats like to drink from sinks and toilets because it is running water, which in nature is cleaner than stagnant water, which would be what's in their bowls~Echan)

 

When I'm sad or stressed out, she knows and will sit quietly on my lap or lick my hand. She likes to wrestle and have little boxing matches, we play hide and seek (taking turns hiding, of course), and when I take a bath she'll occasionally sit on the edge of the tub cleaning her paws and playing with the pages of my book.

 

Sometimes we just sit and think together.

 

She even sleeps like a person! :)

 

The point of all of that (aside from a chance to put up pictures of my baby and sound absolutely insane)? I don't think "humanity" is limited to "humans." That is, we aren't the only ones with emotions and intuition and communication skills. We aren't the only ones who have good and bad days and get grumpy when we're hungry. We aren't the only ones with the capacity for love or fear or hatred. I see Sasha (and Alba) as having her own identity. So the question arises: did Alba have a choice in becoming part of a worldwide art project and social/scientific revolution? Should she have a choice? Maybe Kac should have manipulated his own genes...

 

Perhaps not. But in all seriousness, I think that when we see a glowing bunny, that bunny tends to lose its identity as a bunny who likes to eat alfalfa and poop all day, and turns into a cultural symbol or cause or point of contention. I'm not saying that she doesn't serve an important purpose, merely that we should make every effort not to lose sight of little Alba herself, beneath the glow.

 

From the other side: Maybe Alba's glow is part of herself now. Maybe a part of her personality is to be this art phenom and inspiration for dialogue. Maybe little Alba is the one who started it all, planting the thought in Kac's head. Its not impossible! Much as Mobius was saying yesterday about cannabis controling its own propagation (to a certain extent) through its continued appeal to those who would grow it, maybe Alba is the master of her own fate. That argument, though, falls through (for me) when you consider the fates of those creatures involved with animal testing and vivisection (By the way, check out this site for animal-friendly products and companies :)).

 

Alba DOES, however, blur the boundaries between art and artist, art and viewers (subject-object distinctions again...), animals and people, animals and science, art and science...you get the point. She serves quite wonderfully to show us our own capacity for science, manipulation, and perhaps love. In other words: she is a mirror. My concern is merely that we don't get so caught up in our own reflection that we cease to care for the bun-bun herself.

 

 

 

PS:

 

and an example of an odd human-bun relationship (strange...are we abusing them, profiting from their natural behavior, or playing with our pets here?):

 

PPS: image hosting available at photobucket. You can also "steal" bandwith by copying the image location from any website - right click on the image, select properties, and copy 'image location'. Then put it on the wiki in brackets and voila! a picture and no more wiki space taken up.


3/6/2007 - De-finitions

I posted a few things in the De-finitions pages, specifically on Reality, Existence, and Being. I hope that by throwing a few quotes up I can inspire some debate, or at least intellectual discussion! A link in the Being page that I feel is worth posting here: Cyber-Being and Time - an interesting discussion on the potential (or lack thereof) for humanity in robots/AI.

 

A few other interesting links on technology, intelligence, and information:

 

"Ambient Intelligence"

"Evolution, Artificial intelligence, Genetic Engineering" - a summary of sorts

"Sources and Techniques of Obtaining National Defense Science and Technology Intelligence" (from Bejing, 1991) - note particularly chapters 6,7, and 8.

"Artificial Intelligence: Realizing the Ultimate Promises of Computing"

"How the Anti-Terrorism Bill Puts CIA Back in the Business of Spying on Americans" (from the ACLU)

"A Timeline of CIA Atrocities"


3/6/2007 - Crowley

Aleister Crowley. I occasionally spend nutty nights reading, re-reading, regurgitating, remixing, and drooling over The Book of Lies. Tonight, apparently, is one of those nights. I believe that we could all benefit from a reading of it, in conjunction with Cosmic Trigger. The link I provided is to a full text from 1952, which includes Crowley's commentary on his original 1913 text.


3/5/2007 - Update!

So, I took an hour or so and put up a page for the project/experiment outlined in the previous blog. I called it De-finitions out of some nebulous play on the word 'finite' and the action of 'de'-ing something. So we are taking interpretations of words and removing them from a finite explanation into an infinite realm of meaning...

or something like that. Anyway, each word has its own page, so we can add as much content as we like. Please do take a look and start thinking/adding. There are a lot of words there, so just write about the ones that strike you at the moment. We'll have to see what comes out of it, if anything.


3/5(?)/2007 - Questions/Definition

 

Out of curiosity and a seedling idea for a project, I'd like to get everyone's definition of several different words/ideas. I'll leave it here for the moment, but I was thinking that perhaps I could create a page of definitions that everyone edits...remix and reform and reprogram it...so that we'd eventually have a sort of collective expression of what the class as a whole understands to be the meaning of certain words. Words I'm thinking of:

 

Reality

Existence

Being

Time

Meaning

Truth

Life

Death

Knowledge

Soul

Mind

Conscience

Society

Control

Technology

Science

Philosophy

Literature

Author

Student

Teacher

Beauty*

Love*

Taste*

 

*thanks GoNZo

 

Maybe more, maybe less...I'd attempt to stick to things related to class, but that would pretty much encompass any word you can think of :)

In other words (and please do respond), what do all of those words mean to you, individually or collectively or however you choose to interpret it? And if there's any sort of response, I'll toss a few 'dictionary' definitions up on a separate page as a point of origin, and we can get to work remixing and responding. I think it'd be interesting to see how we generate a 'definition' of things which can have intensely personal meanings. I suppose as a sort of regulating factor, we could start out with everyone posting their own definition separately, and then take on the task of incorporating them all into one meta-definition that encompasses them all (or at least attempts too).

 

Any takers?

 

How about Beauty, Love, Taste - I mean, one could write a book on just one of those words. I know Kant did. --GoNZo

Re: tutoring... When I applied to become a tutor, I followed this link, filled out the app. on the page, and sent it to Jon Olson, the director of the center. In a few weeks he responded and conducted an interview with me. Then, I had to wait a few more weeks (until after the end of Spring semester actually) before I was notified that I got accepted into the training course. Some suggestions: Be as detailed as possible in your responses to the app. questions. He compares all the applications to see which applicants are more descriptive about writing experiences and whatnot, so make yours stand out. Also, make sure you explain that you are a fan of collaborative writing and learning (key) and that you enjoy helping others (as you should if you're applying :) ). Overall, the job is a lot of fun, the coworkers are cool, and the pay is pretty decent ($7.50 starting then after 100 hrs of tutoring you're bumped to $8 per hr). Good luck! And let me know how it goes/if you have any other questions. -Houdini

Really cool idea, Cer (Can we call you Cer?). Reminds me of the idea behind UrbanDictionary, 'cept we can also include pictures, music, videos, and whatever else to define the words. I also think I remember mobius describing (not defining) definitions as the results of discoursive wars. Guess I'll start with "science." Hmm...maybe..."a process or system whose goal is to find information." I think today, most people think of science as something that only discovers empirical truths (whatever that is). Rhetoric, however, can also be a science (I forget who said that). -loadstool

 

Moving on now...

Mobius mentioned Magritte in the last class, so I thought I'd post his (arguably) most famous image (text reads "this is not a pipe").

 

I'd also recommend Foucault's book, "This is Not a Pipe"


3/1/2007 - incredulity ("State Patrick's Day")

In case you haven't heard, tomorrow, March 2nd, has been dubbed "State Patrick's Day".

Excuse me, I don't grok. Why?

Because we have a right to drink chime the masses.

 

There's even been an official request for the borough council to declare that tomorrow is St. Patrick's day? First of all, St. Patrick's day has nothing to do with drinking. See here. Aside from that, it's incomprehensible to me that these students, who cannot manage to get out of bed for a ten am class, plan on going to bars by eight in the morning (as quoted in today's Collegian).

 

 

Is this the issue that you're most concerned about? That you'll be out of town for what has become 'drinking day'? Is this what weighs so heavily on your mind that you stirr your politically apathetic souls to petition the government for change?

I suppose I'm mistaken, then, that there are issues more deserving of our attention and effort. Perhaps, oh, maybe a war. Or a failing healthcare system, a failing justice system...maybe the global climate issues which we seem to enjoy preaching about but not attempting to fix. Maybe you haven't gotten inspired because you aren't directly affected...yet. And, of course, the right to drink all day, miss classes, and get sick is vital. I recognize that right. I do NOT recognize your right to change an established holliday for that purpose. I do NOT recognize your right to vomit on my doorstep. I do NOT recognize your right to drive drunk and kill someone, permanently (and incredibly severely) injuring another.

Haven't seen him recently? Here you go:

 

 

 

You have a right to drink, and drink you shall, but count me out. I, for one, have other things to care about.

 

Its things like this that make me ashamed to be a Penn State student. Its things like this that make me wish I'd gone to Dickinson. Not that there isn't drinking there, but I haven't seen any reports of it becoming an issue on facebook and in local government. It’s ridiculous, and the university tacitly sanctions it. They’ve provided "alternative" activities that no one would want to participate in. They’ve said that it’s a bad idea…not unlike a mother going "now, sweetie, I really wish you wouldn’t do that…" It’s as ineffective a parenting technique as I’ve ever seen. I may be a rebel in most ways but in this case, and in most others, I think the university needs to have a stronger presence. Why not mandate a course on civic responsibility, not just Statistics (as mentioned in the Collegian editorial today). Why not have mandatory "classes" or seminars in which students discuss drinking habits and their consequences? Because despite the outpouring of support for Aaron Stidd last year, he’s been forgotten. And even if they don’t drive after their twelve hour binge tomorrow, what does the "need" to behave in this manner say about a) the students participating, b) the university they attend (whose job it is to educate them to be upstanding citizens, not just train them for a job) and c) their parents, who buffer them from each shadow of responsibility they see coming.

 

 

comments. please.

Dr. Doyle just turned me on to this cogent critique of State Patrick's Day. I had wondered what was up with all the green. I have to say that this is the finest blog entry I have read since the "I hate Lion Brand Yarn" rant on Michelle's World of WIP's knitting and Crocheting Blog which convinced me to never again buy Lion Brand Yarn. This will be of even less interest to those of you who don't knit than to those of you who do. Like any of you knit! Anyhow, keep up the good work! Amy G.

I don't know if classes that train students to be responsible are the way to go. Our school may be among the worst, but it's certainly not one of a few. You also can't coach people to avoid that escape, just because it's so easy to find and so apparently necessary for getting through the week. I may not drink but I definitely search for other ways to avoid facing reality....I just can't live with the knowledge that I have to deal with these sleepwalking fools for the rest of my life. I don't hate myself for it, mainly because what I ingest tends to heighten my living experience rather than detract from it as with alcohol. So I could definitely empathize with these idiots, but I choose not to because the decision to have a good time (as opposed to suffocating) is entirely in their hands...What we really need is generation-wide recognition and avoidance, which could only occur if the substance in question had never been tasted/appreciated. It's quite easy to avoid a vice until you've actually partaken...And for the record, my painted piggy bank from HUB Late Night is still among my prized possessions, even after three some years... - moops


 

2/28/2007 - 3:05 pm - declaration and LSD

So, I've decided to stop watching TV. This decision came about from something a philosophy professor said in class today, to the effect of: "How much of our lives are spent just killing time? Clockwatching? How much of our day is illuminated with meaning, and how much of it is a barren desert of mindless activity...just getting by."

 

And I realized that while I do yoga and meditate and write daily, I spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing at all. Not consciously doing nothing for the purpose of allowing myself to think (which I believe is necessary), but frying my brain with the television, or browsing the internet not for information, but because I'm killing time.

 

Wait a minute; leisure is hard work! No offense to yr prof., but watching TV is not a mindless activity. TV viewers do not passively absorb shows & commercials. We constantly negotiate the meanings of media representations. We decide upon what images we identify with, what stories work within our worldview, what doesn't, etc. In the process, we become producers of an invisible culture. Bottom line: We always do something with our consumption. Btw, I'm sampling from the French philosopher Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Everyday Life, (a book that deserves to be in the reading list in future incarnations of ENGL473 for being such a badass instruction manual for subverting control) Certeau argues that the subject of late modernity "uses" consumption as a type of production activity by reconfiguring the meanings and functioning imposed on cultural products. Furthermore, consumption is doubly productive, he says, because remixing meanings ("poaching," "reading," or metaprogramming in mobius-speak) is also a practice (tactic) of resisting hegemonic discourses. Here's a cool passage from the book that illustrates what I'm getting at:

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/cultural_studies/decerteau.htm#bb

The imposed knowledge and symbolisms become objects manipulated by practitioners who have not produced them. The language produced by a certain social category has the power to extend its conquests into vast areas surrounding it, "deserts" where nothing equally articulated seems to exist, but in doing so it is caught in the trap of its assimilation by jungle of procedures rendered invisible to the conqueror by the very victories he seems to have won. However spectacular it may be, his privilege is likely to be only apparent if it merely serves as a framework for the stubborn, guileful, everyday practices that make use of it. What is called "popularization" or "degradation" of a culture is from this point of view a partial and carcicatural aspect of the revenge that utilizing tactics take on the power that dominates production. In any case, the consumer cannot be identified or qualified by the newspapers or commercial products he assimilates: between the person (who uses them) and these products (indexes of the "order" which is imposed on him), there is a gap of varying proportions opened by the use that he makes of them.

Woah! After typing out that last sentence from the book (woo for nerdy piracy!), I got a flashback from mobius's presentation earlier tonight when he mentioned the notion of the gutter, borrowed from comics theorist Scott McCloud. Certeau is doing something similar, arguing users make use of the inherent "gutter" functions in every cultural artifact. Get what I'm saying? -Houdini BTW Thanks for the comment+link on my wiki. I'm going to check out yr link tomorrow morning, I think.

 

"The time of your life." Think about that expression. That's supposed to mean a great, wonderful experience. But really, this IS "the time of your life." I don't mean college, or middle age, or youth, or spring break. I mean...life itself. The time of your life is...the time of your life. All you have is time, from birth until death, and to spend that time waiting for things to happen to you is a waste of a wonderful gift. This is probably senseless muttering to you...all I can do is refer you to Dewey's Time and Individuality (not the work itself, but an article which deals with parts of it) and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

 

Moving on now...

 

with regards to LSD, since it seems to have sparked a mass pounding away at the keyboards on the wiki, something to think about (a response to BigYellowPeep, and in addition to what I've said on his page already):

I'm just going to emphasize and re-emphasize Mobius' litany of "set and setting" with an example here. When my father was in college (late 60's to early 70's) he was in a fraternity. One of his fraternity brothers (call him Chris) used LSD a few times. No huge revelations, but no huge disasters either. He and his brother and several of their friends went out to a quarry and dropped acid. They were messing around, playing with road flares etc (tossing them as far as they could and watching the spinning light leaving streaks through the air, you get the idea). Somehow, Chris' brother was burned just below his eye. No damage to his vision, but it left a scar. Well, the 'trip' ended except that Chris couldn't get out of it. They took him back to his frat and his friends (my father), who tried to take care of him. Evidently, my dad stayed up with him for about three days, listening to him scream about killing his brother, about time moving backwards, etc. etc. Eventually they took him to the hospital, where he stayed in the psychiatric ward for upwards of six months. When he got out, he moved back in with his parents and never returned to school.

 

Now, a fatalistic tale if there ever was one, but one with a significant message. It coincides with Wilson's warnings in his prologue about his style of mind-experimentation not being for everyone. Putting a chemical, any chemical, into your body has consequences. Sometimes the benefits outweigh those consequences (like taking antibiotics when you're sick, for instance) and sometimes they don't (momentary enlightenment, perhaps, but several months in the hospital and a subsequent life of depressed hermitage).

 

What I'm trying to say is this: I don't think that LSD should be illegal. I think its illegality does more harm than good, because it's not controlled at all. But I don't necessarily think it's a wise choice, unless there's a significant amount of time beforehand spent preparing, opening yourself up to possibilities and experiences through meditation and exercise, fasting, etc. And the use of it should be treated like a scientific and psychological experiment, not like something to do just because you haven't done it or it's illegal or your friend said it was fun/enlightening/etc. Sorry if that all came out like a lecture, but I figured I'd post it.~ Ceridwen

 

Well said Ceridwen! This is a strong case for legal therapeutic and scientific use of psychedelics by trained professionals. Harm reduction should also extend to alcohol - how many such stories in that frat house revolved around alcohol. - mobius


2/27/2007 - 5:18 pm - Hillarious (and terribly sad) video mentioned in class

2/26/2007 - 12:35 am - Hello out there

I am back.

Unfortunate digital absence due to a great avalanche of poo which was heaped on me. Anyway, for all the wiki participants out there reading: what is the deal with the final project?

Mobius, I'm emailing you as soon as I click "save" here.

 

I will let everyone else chime in, of course, but it looks to me like you are in a good position to grow a final project on the effects of wiki on the practice and concepts of authorship. You have some links below to orient you to a history of the idea of an author, but you might also check out Mark Rose's book on authorship and intellectual property. If I recall correctly, Rose argues that authorship emerges as a official function in order to enable the ownership of ideas, something required less by writers - who often realize that their ideas are coming from elsewhere - than by our nascent control society's need for ownership to be a master paradigm: Everything must be a commodity!

And since you are back, you can take this opportunity to catch up on all yer wiki reading as well sa writing. Here's a blog prompt for ya: Should mobius add a final exam on the contents of the wiki to future curricula in order to encourage "buy in"? Or does that undermine my goal of teaching creative intellectual freedom by making such writing an obligation? I wouldn't drop an ex post facto exam on you, so don't worry, but do please get composing! - mobius


1/23/2007 - 7pm - What the bleep is an author, anyway?

 

 

(yum yum. The tasty Ginsberg and Palahniuk...who write endless combinations of words so wonderfully, you want to eat them.)

 

Foucault, on the 'Author Function'

The Original Author: A History of the Concept

What does Wikipedia say?

The ‘death of the author’ as an instance of theory

 

If indeed the author is dead and we're about to embark on a collaborative creative journey, (see VulpesLogos ), what then of individuality (not necessarily individualISM)? What of personal merit and creativity and expression? Is our eagerness to conform to a group identity just another function of a 'society of control'?

 

Forgive my gukkering, but I don't grok. What needs there be this "conform to a group identity"? As if group identity were a solid-state top-down axiomatic prescription for living. Nay, I decry, the crowd is an organism and a ecosystem, of which the individual is a constituent part and particle. "What of personal merit and creativity and expression?" Well I don't know much about the first one, what do you make of distinction among seperate ego-identities? But it seems to me as though individuality stems from creativity and expression; it ain't the individual will that shoots down mana from heaven. Creativity as I said is a matter of response, not willed intention. Divine information processors we be. And so quoth the old adage "garbage in, garbage out." But it ain't so simple as that, within the morphogenetic field of Consciousness lurk attractors and bifurcations, feedback loops, negative and positive, convergent and divergent. Human minds have always been cross-referenceable, intertwingled, and enmeshed. It is our mediums that have been trying to catch up. - VulpesLogos


1/22/2007: Response to Digital Proposal

 

First off, let me say that as a student using wiki technology and loving it, I agree with Mobius on several points (mainly that it can be incredibly beneficial to students as well as teachers). For that reason, I won't go over the reasons that Wikis are phenomenal learning tools, but rather outline my misgivings.

 

Perhaps I'm simply being recalcitrant to the idea of curriculum-wide wiki because of my hopes of becoming a professor of literature and philosophy, but a part of me clings to the idea of printed text. It's important to note, however, that the proposal deals with composition classes (ENGL 15, 30, 202, etc). I believe I've voiced (or blogged) my concerns about this before, but I'll repeat myself. A printed text gives us a concrete piece to examine, study, interpret, enjoy, emulate, etc. My own apartment is stuffed with books, running the gamut from the latest romance novel to an antique first-edition copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass(I also own first-printings of the Camden 1876 edition and the slightly controversial McKay 1900 Edition). In truth, many of the books I cherish are now available online, either for free or for a small charge. And yet I find myself dusting off an old, worn-in favorite, inhaling the smell of old books, and settling in for a full day of immersion. That single-minded focus is something that I think the internet (and the computer) simply cannot provide. In other words, if I close my door, turn off the TV or the radio (or my iPod), put on my reading glasses, and begin to read a book (or article or report), that text has my entire focus. When reading online, pop-up advertisements compete for my attention, I can hear my email calling me to check it, and I get lost in a sea of wikipedia links.

 

On the other hand, learning through a series of connections, hyperlinks connected to more hyperlinks connected to even MORE hyperlinks, is an effective and helpful method. But much as Mobius said in the proposal, it leaves us without a citation for our thoughts, without something which we can point to as a definitive source or aid.

 

As far as composiion goes, however, I believe that the wiki is a wonderful tool. It provides instant feedback, inspires more writing than an assignment to write ten pages for one person (the instructor), and engages those brought up in a technological world. I am myself a blogger, so there's no question that I see merit in writing in a digital medium. My fear, though, is that we may ultimately produce generations of authors who cannot produce a text without the direct input (through co-authoring, editing, or constant commentary) of several others. Writing more traditionally forces us to have a begining, make arguments, support them, and then make a convincing conclusion. Writing online/in a wiki perhaps allows us to depend on others for large parts of that process.

 

(and yes, I'm aware that before a novel is published it goes through many stages of writing, several of which involve editors, friends, family, and test audiences. But the fact remains that the text itself was ultimately synthesized by one person.)


Man, I'm posting twice in one day...

Has anyone heard the story of Christopher McCandless / Alexander Supertramp? The story was chronicled in Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild.

 

 

It is indeed a fascinating story, and I find myself getting drawn into a kind of romanticism about the young man who walked into the wilderness, to his death. But I wonder, is this merely a foolish and youthful obsession with an intriguing death? Or is it perhaps a latent desire for my own "spirit quest." Krakauer's book also calls to mind questions about the responsibilities of an author. He has been heavily criticized for making Mc Candless' journey seem like a heroic undertaking by those who see it as a foolhardy suicide. It is my personal belief that Krakauer did an excelent job of tiptoeing a fine line of narrative and factual account.

 

I'm sure most of this isn't yet making sense. Assume that someone, having read Krakauer's book, set out on a trek into the wild (so to speak) and died. Krakauer's book having inspired the journey, is the death in any way his fault? Or, as another example, the so-called heavy metal suicides. If a song creates/fosters/encourages/uncovers a feeling of depression or anger so great as to cause someone to commit suicide, is that artist responsible? It would be easy to claim either extreme...

 

Who mourns for James Vance? cf Arseface - VulpesLogos

 

1) "of course not. the consumer made a decision to purchase a product, and then a decision to let it influence him to proceed in an ultimatly destructive manner. The author/artist has no control over his product once it leaves his hands." or,

2) "of course they're responsible. The author/artist knew that his product would be sold and that a part of the audience would be succeptible to the negative aspects of the work. They are accountable."

 

I tend to think that it's somewhere in the middle. Writing (to return to my original topic) is an incredibly powerful medium (more powerful than the sword, if you'd like a cliche). And it's always said that power comes with responsibility. When we have a tool for incredible social change, for extreme harm or extreme good, are we then obligated to use it in a manner "benefiting" society, or is it acceptable to let our craft dictate itself, and damn the consequences?

 

And FURTHER (this is so disjointed and complex that I'm sure no one is reading it by now, but I'll continue anyway), to bring things around to the wiki medium...Once a work leaves the author's hands, is it his own anymore? Even in printed text, each sentence, word, letter is filtered through the reader's experiences and prejudices, through every facet of his personality. A good author (perhaps metaprogramer) knows his (or her) audience well enough to manipulate their interpretation, to a certain extent. But in all honesty, we are each responsible for what we glean from any text (or exerpt of text). According to David Sedaris, "Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."

 

So, is a wiki, where everything is infinitely editable, that very different from any other medium? I think the only difference is that the author is now confronted glaringly and immediately with the changes to his meaning, rather than allowing us to have our proverbial heads in the sand and think that what we write is set in stone and equivalent to what we intended it to mean.

 

Ultimately, all of this rambling really boils down to more and more questions. What is an author? What does it mean to be an author? Is the author responsible for the meaning of a text or is the reader (or perhaps both...)? Is a reader's interpretation of a text a result of the author's craft or his own psyche (or both...)? Is my control of my own word choice and phrasing and underlying meaning merely construct of my imagination and education? Or is it all a complex combination of all of the above that changes with each individual?

 

maybe this is why I'm a double major in English and Philosophy...


1/21/2007 - Introduce yourself?

I figured I'd do a beter job of introducing myself here. I'm an English and Philosophy major, minoring in Animal Bioscience (not as entirely incongruous as it may seem). This semester I'm taking English 473 (this course, which I have yet to completely grasp), English 231 (American Literature to 1865), English 442 (Medieval English Literature), English 450 (The Romantics), and Philosophy 204 (20th Century Philosophy).

 

That said, I'll be reading everything for this class, as well as: Bradstreet, Franklin, Emerson, Hawthorne, Douglass, Thoreau, Fuller, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson for 231; anything but Chaucer in 442; Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey in 450; and Dewey, Heiddeger, Wittgenstein, Marcuse, Gadamer, Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lyotard, and Kristeva in PHIL 204.

 

Quite honestly, I'm already overwhelmed with the ammount of reading, writing, and 'journaling' I will be doing throughout the semester. Thus, if my writings on this wiki tend to drift into musings about Pragmatists or Deconstructionists or Coleridge's poetry (and how I dislike it), please forgive me. In addition, if you've taken/are taking these classes or have experience studying any of the above, perhaps we could exchange academic assistance from time to time? And by that I mean have coffee and rant about life in general, occasionally touching on topics related to all things Literature (yes, capital "L").

 

I haven't quite grasped everything either! Glad to see I'm not alone. I'm sure there are others. -loadstool


1/18/2007 - 3pm(ish) - class business

Here is a link to Phaedrus, as suggested by Mobius in class. The text I've linked to is a good translation with decent sized font. I've found, with Phaedrus, that its best to do a cursory reading to absorb the story, and then do some internet research and re-read the text.

 

If you have any links to different translations or better analytical treatments, add them here! This is, after all, a wiki.

 

PS: in the interest of aiding the 5/6 of the class that "needs connected", I suggest clicking on "edit page" and then browsing the "style help" link you should see on the right side of the screen. Feel free to add content to your heart's content (content and content...hmmm heteronyms. I mean CONtent and conTENT, respectively).

 

Further, in the main section (the chaotic meeting of our collective minds): to add your own blog/link/whatever to the page, create a page (by clicking "new page"), add your content to it, save it, and then return to the main section. Then, click "edit page." On the right you should see a list of recently created/edited pages. Simply clicking on the name of your page will insert a link to it. If you'd rather type it, type the name of your page in brackets (another way to create a link).

 

Hope that helps some of you. I myself am not a technical giant, but have been fiddling for awhile on various forums.

 

Also, take a look at the list of books that I've added in the section below. They're books near and dear to me, so if you've an interest in sparking an intellectual discussion (or an un-intellectual one, if you prefer) let me know.


 

I'm Ceridwen. The name is of Celtic origin. look it up :)

 

you can also find me here

 

__Books to read:__

 

HOWL by Allen Ginsberg (And Supermarket and America. life changing)

 

Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted, Choke, and Invisible Monsters)

Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels)

Arthur Nersessian (The Fuck-Up)

Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)

Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked)

Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Filth, and Marabou Stork Nightmares)

Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Eiger Dreams)

Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions and Emile)

Jaques Derrida (Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference)

Mary Karr (The Liars' Club and Cherry)

Plato (Phaedrus, Crito, Symposium, and Republic)

 

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