bomphiologia
Exaggeration done in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a braggart.
“[P]roblems without solutions are exactly what we need in a field like ours, where we are used to asking only those questions for which we have an answer.” (Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History 26)
The fact that it’s past 4:30 a.m. and I’m still up tweaking things on the homepage really illustrates the evil joy that is CSS. (Cascading style sheets, not Cansei de Ser Sexy. Though they, like any raucous band, are pretty good to listen to when you’re fiddling with style sheets. I built much of my first personal site to the sounds of Alec Empire and “Alec Eiffel.”) You’re trucking along, and then something odd–something that should work–doesn’t work. So you fiddle with it, and fiddle with it, and hit w3schools and alistapart, and you fiddle with it until…success. And somewhere deep in your brain (next door to the pineal gland I think) the w00t! gland fills your blood with 80 proof aw yeah! juice. And the next thing you know, it’s 4:41 and you’re writing a blog entry.
I haven’t read Everything Bad Is Good for You recently enough to remember, but I believe he addresses the phenomenon in which completing quests/goals in games rewards us with a burst of dopamine. (It’s not a unique claim; he’s basing it on a lot of research I can’t be arsed to look up right now, especially since it’s now 4:45 am.) I think there’s a similar phenomenon that happens to web devs. You get something almost right, almost perfect, and then bam, it’s broken. But then you figure it out and get that juice.
Dissertations are hell on non-school writing, you know? This poor blog has been neglected for far too long. I’m going to try and see if I can use it to work through some ideas that have come up over the past few months.
aka “Why I love my students (sometimes)”
This year, I’ve had some of my classes read excerpts from “The Precession of Simulacra.” Most of the students struggled with it, but after a few discussions, a few in each section really got into it. I’m not sure if I’ll do such a large chunk of it again (we only get through about half of the excerpt), but overall I have been fairly pleased with their engagement with the text. Hearing freshmen talk about “second order simulacra” makes me all a-flutter; who says they can’t handle theory?
Even better than having them discuss the essay is watching them apply it. And even better than in-class application is out-of-school, for-no-reason, I-have-a-new-tool-for-interpreting-the-world application. I just got an email from a former student that included a link to the New York Times’ terrible Photoshop creations of future Governor’s Island. His comment—”the simulation precedes the map, the people living on it, and even the hammocks”—made all those “well, what do you think he’s saying there” questions I asked all worth while.
(My favorite image is this one. The handlebars at the bottom make it look like Paperboy reenvisioned as an FPS.)
My Friday began with a text from a fellow Mac-head friend. “U gonna b in line 2morrow?” Ignoring his irritating use of abbreviations (dude, you have an iPhone with spellcheck and auto-complete!), I tapped out the same response I’ve given, in various media, to other friends, colleagues, and family members: the iPad’s not for me, or for you. The iPad is interesting not for its tech, but as an example of Apple’s skill at persuading important members of the tech press that new products are game-changers. The former copywriter in me marvels at the company’s rhetorical ability, but the ex-indie rock punk in me can’t help but roll its eyes at the “duped masses, man.”
The particular piece that set me off (and inspired me to write after nearly a year of comps) is Dylan F. Tweney’s Why We Are Obsessed With the iPad. Far more than Pogue’s Evening at the Improv-esque “techies compute like this, but non techies compute like this!” review in the NYT, Tweney’s approach encapsulates the maddening tendency of tech journalism to identify Apple products as possessing some mysterious “it” that will change the world 4ever, dude. Tweney begins his piece with the typical disclaimers:
the iPad has fewer features than a comparably priced netbook. Yes, it’s tied to an app store controlled by a single company that has proven to be both capricious and prudish in the kinds of content it approves. And yes, it won’t run Adobe Flash, instantly crippling many websites.
Sounds like a real POS at this point, but wait…there’s more.
But the iPad is an important device just the same, because it’s simple and it’s fast…there’s something seriously different about Apple’s tablet.
That difference can be summarized in two words: It disappears.
“People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.” (Galatea 2.0)
Brian McNely twittered (tweeted?–this verb form always gives me trouble) a link to the Complexity and Social Networks Blog at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. In light of the fact that I just came from a meeting with my diss. director in which we discussed Bourdieu’s conception of the four types of capital–economic, social, cultural, and symbolic, for those scoring at home–I was quite taken with Gibson’s idea. I do think there is some capital in disconnection, in choosing not to participate in a community (while still being recognized as part of that community). The reason for the long italics is that lurkers add an unusual twist. If you lurk at a no-login-required site (for ex., the Straight Dope Message Board), you may show up in the “X number of users online” list, and of course the sysadmin could probably capture your IP, but you are essentially invisible. To gain non-participation capital, you must be recognizably not participating.
The thing is, isn’t that just social capital in another form? Not to get all Foucauldian or anything, but refusal of discourse is still discourse; you are still participating in a discourse structure, no?
Even lolcats…even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat what it essentially says is ‘If you have some sans serif fonts on your computer you can play this game too’. And that’s a big change, right? I could do that too.” (2008 Web 2.0 expo)
As I was reading the entries for the most recent Teaching Carnival, I felt a jolt of excitement that has been missing from most of my reading this semester. Prepping for comps means delving into The Classics. Of course, many of my classics aren’t typically recognized as such. Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen and Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age are important to my research but they ain’t ending up in ED Hirsch’s compendia of cultural literacy any time soon. What with revisiting older CMC texts, classics of rhet theory (so much Plato!), and modern classics of comp theory (my copy of Errors and Expectations just came yesterday), I haven’t really spent much time reading what’s actually being written about Internet discourse.
Welcome to the third installation of the 2009 Teaching Carnival! Spring Break is looming (for some of us, it’s already here), which is the perfect time to take a breath and explore the academic blogosphere. Just as a reminder, here’s some definitions and a few words of wisdom for academic blog readers. And thanks again to Jason Jones and Kathleen Fitzpatrick for the first two Teaching Carnivals.
Beginning on a non-blog note, 4Cs (the Conference on College Composition and Communication), the big deal gathering in my field, takes place this week. If you’ve noticed your rhet/comp people making lots of photocopies and fretting about time, that’s why. If you’re going, Mark Crane has called the hash tag: #cccc09.
(Special tip for my Writing Center peeps…the master list of WC-focused sessions is available from the IWCA.)