Jenny has continued the discussion about blogs and privacy. Pointing out that the issue for her is that it is about students' rights rather than privacy per se. Meanwhile Raymon Montalbetti over at 'if' has quoted my sort of proto-posthuman take on the blogosphere, which Chuck Tryon quite liked, while over at reloade they just find the post interesting.
Plenty to think about, or at least to continue with. I don't think I was suggesting that privacy was important but not for students, or if I did then I certainly retract that! My point would be more simply that being able to negotiate the public and the private is one of the most significant skills to learn on the network, perhaps the most important in terms of networked communities and the social sphere, and that blogs are somewhere where this must be explored. I think any one who wants to work (for money, art, industry) in the first world and use the network (I struggle to see how any graduate in any discipline can do the first without using the second) must learn how to represent themselves in these environments, and blogs are an excellent place to start.
Why? Because the individual owns it. All content, and the design if they're so inclined. Because you can edit any post, remove it, amend it, or keep it. Because it uses words as its primary form and words remain the primary currency of networked environments. Becaue words remain our primary form of quotidian communication (we can pretty much all do it). Because it can be as private or public as you wish. Because it can be as personal or not as you wish. Jenny asks whether failure should be private? Again I'd suggest that depends on how the individual defines failure and the private. I'd suggest that the blogs endorse the personal, the private is that which we wouldn't blog, though of course as in all definitions this gets blurred at the edges (as it ought).
Meanwhile as Raymon suggests, blogging is about finding your identity, yes, sure. But identity should always be either identity or identities. It is plural. What is identity in a blog which attracts the number of comments as this? (Though checking it now it seems that its turned into a strange message board and the great unwashed have arrived.) What is identity in the series of links that this post is actually located in or within and constituted by?
Finally I do think blogging has some intimacy with emergence, and has the blogging equivalent of strange attractors, bifurcating systems, and self organisation. But I'll leave that to the Kate Hayle's of the world to explore, too much for me. I'm just happy thinking that ideas want expression and they get expressed and then they have a life of their own. That's not identity. :-)
Jenny has picked up some things I've written (and said) recently to encourage some of my peers to think about how they might use blogs in their professional practice. She points out that blogging might help some of her students become "accustomed to writing", which is probably true. Though Jenny also worries that some things ought to be kept private, and wonders whether blogs ought to be about community.
Good questions, aren't they? Of course some things ought to be private, though what constitutes private is up to individual definition. I also find this sort of odd in the context of creative practice, presumably there is a great deal that is personal in the realised creative work, and so being able to articulate something about that, whether about the finished work, the process, or just that the cost of paint sucks, might be useful. The risk, for me, in some notions of privacy and creativity is to reify and romanticise something, yet this something ought to be able to be approached without breaching what constitutes your notion of privacy.
Blogs and community. A diary under the pillow is not a blog. A blog that is like a diary under the pillow is not a blog. The notion of community inherent in blogging is much more elastic than this. It is not just your blogroll of 'those you read' but the links that constitute your blog and blogging. What this weaves is a community which is not community as people, but an emergent semantic or epistemological community, people are sort of attached there, bit like avatars, but this link economy has its own forces and logics and it isn't really about community as social agency, but community as information nodes meeting up. People are just the vehicle these information nodes exploit.
Toni Dove's Sally is a very interesting looking interactive work, particularly since it is made using Jitter. Jeremy's just purchased Jitter so I'm hoping for a serious demo shortly.
Jitter are objects for MAX, which is an environment that lets you build these custom, well I guess they're objects (I haven't used MAX so don't know the vocabulary) that take inputs, apply stuff to them, make them outputs for something else, and so on. Sort of lets you build a series of pipes with all sorts of filters and generational things you can do along the way. Jitter are specifically for video. This sort of stuff is useful for real time performance work, but it also means you can make video works that emerge in real time, much in the manner that digital musicians have always worked.
Found that the database just got corrupted somehow with the movable type install I've done for staff. This happened after most had actually started writing (of course) and has required me to spend my afternoon reinstalling all from scratch. (Went looking for the link I found before but can't find it now without having to set up an account. mmmm. no thanks. Anyway, mt-medic.cgi would probably have saved things if I was using mySQL, with Berekeley, dead in the water.) I think now I know why I ought to be using mySQL for this instead of BerkeleyDB. So stage one of the hegemony of blogging has had a hiccup.
As part of a master plan <insert heinous laugh> I have just run an introductory 'how to blog' seminar for some of my colleagues in Media Studies. The plan is to get all staff familiar with blogging, and hopefully most of them using a blog (in this case Movable Type) to develop some network literacies, reflective practice, and to make it easy for them to model activities for students and even to disseminate documents. I'm running all of their blogs out of a single install of Movable Type on my main server. This is stage one of the plan. Stage two involves considering the possibility of providing all of our students with their own blogs. This would replace the journal writing that goes on now, so that one blog would be used to document and reflect upon all their coursework, and of course since it is their blog they can also use it to do whatever else they wish with it.
The advantage of this is that it ought to make things a bit easier for students, so that instead of 3 journals in 3 subjects they will now have 1. They can use categories, if necessary, to demarcate content, but since one thing we want students to learn is to see how content areas cross over, I'd think that categories tied to subject or course codes would be counter productive. As collatoral outcomes we also start to develop some network literacies, and of course there will be some students who will customise their blogs, and probably do the same for others, and that actually becomes a model for peer support and mentoring.
The final trick is that the student blogs will be permanent. Rather than encourage them to blog for the three years of their undergraduate careers and then turn the tap off, they can continue their blog (if they wish) into their retirement. This is because if I'm serious about some of the advantages of blogging for reflective practice, self expression, and networked literacy, then it would seem silly to encourage students to do this then tell them to stop when they leave. No teacher wants students to stop reading, learning, thinking, and doing, so why should they stop this particular writing practice? Of course it also might (or might not) become quite a good advertisement for the program too (I've always been impressed by the way in which MIT provide their graduates with a permanent email address, just seems like a sensible alumni service, as well as a rather good advertisement).
Anyways, stage one is begun, and hopefully staff will start using their blogs.
My tibook has run out of room. It is an older one with a 20GB hard drive and, well, it's full. Doesn't help that I do quite a bit of video work on it, and since it is the only computer I use these days I tend to also regard it as my archive. In other words I keep all the old vogs on it, as well as everything else. So, I either need to persuade someone to let me buy a larger hard drive for it, or get a firewire drive that I use as a video archive. I've still got plenty of server space, but I kinda like the idea of being able to have the work travel with me (which shows a positively non-networked notion of possession doesn't it - having it on the server in principle makes it more accessible to me than archiving it to firewire!). I guess I'll just have to set up an archive on the server and use that to maintain a backup of all the video work, and then clean out my hard drive to get some workable space back. OS X gets seriously badly behaved when it runs out of space, I assume because of the virtual memory and swap file stuff it does. Which reminds me, need more RAM too. Nearly time to establish (re-establish?) an ecological computing movement.
Matthew has been pining for the Internet days of yore, the old glory days when PPP was cutting edge (when I first asked for a PPP account at the IT department of one of Melbourne's biggest universities no one actually knew what it was, and they all told me I couldn't do it from my Mac, they were wrong, on both counts of course), command lines were more common than graphical clients (and sometimes there were only command lines) and communities really did have a frontier ethos. Like Matt, I miss some of this. Not the interface, though I still have not found an email client that has the utilitarian functionalism and speed of pine or elm, but the ethics that seemed to go hand in hand with the early academic communities I participated in.
Michael Current? Yes, I remember Michael. He was the moderator for what was then the Deleuze list, as well as active on several other of the spoon lists, and no doubt numerous others. He was the person who taught me what list ethics meant. Not the etiquette things of editing replies, naming writers, not sending attachments, making subject headers relevant, but the more important public sphere meets the frontier ethics of dialogue, equity, and community. The mourning for Michael after his death made me acknowledge that online communities are legitimate communities, and that it is always and only really about people and communication. Thanks for reminding me Matt.
It helps to think on your feet, doesn't it? (He asks of nobody in particular.) Noah Wardrip-Fruin has stayed on after MelbourneDAC, and so we've made sure he's had network access, access to some software, a desk, and generally seen friendly faces. So we've been able to formally invite him to be a visiting research fellow, and so some of Noah's research will in turn be attached to my university. It is a simple quid pro quo, but one that benefits all of us and helps me be able to justify simple collegiality, as well as make it much easier to do similar things in the future. Though lots of places are happy to have you come and visit, it can be surprising how few are able to actually find you a desk, give you access to some hardware, and the like. I'd like to think that we've always done that well. This is Noah's official blurb:
The Center for Computer Games Research is a new research lab at the IT University of Copenhagen, where quite a few of my friends happen to work. As far as I know this is the first dedicated computer games research place in the world, and is why Espen Aarseth is moving from Bergen to Copenhagen. We can only hope that Espen finally updates his website, or finds someone to do it for him!
One of the papers presented at MelbourneDAC has been slashdotted. This is rather impressive. The conference blog made the rhizome net art news of the day, and now Slashdot, so we seem to have run a conference that has street cred of some sort. Apart from generating a lot of traffic (each mention has translated into around 1000 individual readers to the conference index page alone, let alone the rest of the site) it is a good example of the way that online work like this produces variable demographics in readerships outside of what could ordinarily be expected from an academic conference. The Slashdot community, by and large, is a complementary, rather than a cognate, community to MelbourneDAC and providing appropriate material online facilitates the reappropriation of 'academic' work by and for these other communities.