Through a very in-depth look at David Weinberg; his books, blogs, movies, radio segments and the philosophies within them. I have learned a lot about one of the most interesting on going insights into the future of the internet and subsequently our future-based world. His significant discoveries, interests and style of presentation is reminiscent of my blogs throughout the year.
Unwittingly, i wrote my blogs with full knowledge that coherency was not key to the requirements of this unit. This allowed me to passionately look at the prescribed readings and actually enjoy responding to them. Because for once i was not just “selling my soul”, so to speak, for an end of term mark (hopefully HD). I was trying to understand the significance of studying a subject which is not historical exhausted and over-talked about. I was and am studying the internet which is still wrapped in mystery. Few things that are known are quite liberating like how it internet allows for new trends, experimentation and insights into information without borders and scholarly limitations. I have witnessed a range of interesting people who have tried to define the internet by their understanding of it. From Walter J. Ong, George Landow, Mark Bernstien, Darren Tofts, Greg Ulmer, Wark Mckenzie and finally David Weinberg. All of which have taught me there is sooo much more involved to the internet than just mere lifeless pop-sites like Facebook, Myspace and Msn Messenger. Within which people become enslaved to “pimping their image” © Boo Chapple. some have taught how the internet has taken society away from its autocratic television and authoritative book world and replaced it with a democratic system where no comment is finalised without clarification or debate. This culture of democratic literature is encapsulated in the world of the blog where free speech and endless possibilities are in abundance. some have presented the internet as a purer form of truth where ideas are constantly re-understood thus posing as a richer tool to philosophers who wish to uphold one of the most fundamental truths of philosophy that truth is ever-changing and with this so too should our philosophies. If Michel Foucault was alive today i imagine him to be really taken in to the amazing world of the internet. He, more than most philosophers, was discredited as changing his stance on certain previous conclusions in his later works. And to this he replied…
When people say, “Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,” my answer is… [laughs] “Well, do you think I have worked hard all those years (claiming to be a philosopher) to say the same thing and not to be changed?”‘
This encapsulates the very nature of truth as ever-changing. Further to this he is presenting being trully intelligent and not just being true to intellectual standards.
I hope to hold on to this most basic philosophy of nothing being conclusive for the years to come.
Another development in my intellectual maturation has been the way i present information through the final assignment, using the process of Mystory. I have learned how to present information with an intuitive flare, that leaves no room for a measured calculative approach. Put succinctly…
“{…} a speculative mode that requires that the mystoriographer approach her material in a way that promotes conjecture, as a mystery, rather than calculation. Calculation involves a set of rules or the imposition of an empirical grid that delimits the possibility of chance encounters by relegating intuition to the margins of inquiry. Intuition, on the other hand, is more personal and visceral, relying as it does on feelings{…}” © Lisa Gye.
Through finishing up this course on David Weinberg i have seen the way this philosophy on, well, life can be actually applied. He has successfully achieved what we, students, are trying to do in this course. Creating a new world, a new standard of hermeneutically understanding and presenting information. Weinberg has succesfully set out clear guidelines through examples displayed on all forms of media, from Print to internet to orality.
1 June, 2008
For some time she-storians (female historians) have been bringing a homeostasis to the male gender specific statement, history, with their own term herstory. Herstory is a neologism coined in the late 1960s as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography. In feminist discourse the term refers to history (ironically restated as “his story”) written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman’s point of view. (The word history (from the Ancient Greek ιστορία, or istoria, meaning “a learning or knowing by inquiry”) is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.)(wikiPEdia).
Today we will not delve into this feminist debate, rather look at another neologism… Mystory © Greg Ulmer. Mystory appears to be a presentation of personal information that involves not conforming to any literary or social standards that dictate how it should be expressed. For this, people who have upheld this concept have come under attack as not being credible sources to appreciate. To understand the difference between Mystory and standard, scholarly text Rodman puts the opposition to Mystory as…
‘{…} scholarship involving reason rather than passion, coherent narratives rather than discontinuous fragments, and logical chains of cause and effect rather than intuitive leaps between unconnected events.’ (Gilbert B. Rodman in http://www.comm.umn.edu/~grodman/pubs/Mystery.pdf)
After entering into discussion about Deleuze and Guattari Rhizomatic alternative, Rodman asks how can these complex theories be applied to everyday life how can we present them? This question got me thinking about a debate i was having recently about the bible. someone quoted something from the bible and i tried to explain that i believed the bible to be a complex collection of history, fables, mythology, theories and complicated and abstract philosophical writtings. Which i believed to be written by several different sources, To give an accurate description of what the truth of life was. If that was the case, she retorted, why then does god not clearly outline in almost dot point format what is truth, or the point of life. After much thought i replied, that if that had happened people throughout history would have given up on the text as being old fashioned and out dated jargen. The bibles unclear nature, and the claims of greatness that surround it make it the most powerful piece of literature in known history. What is more powerful than a book of truths that are subject to personal interpretation. It was once explained to me, that art was believed to be truer than science because over 80% of scientific research is to discover and resolve inaccurate discoveries within science. I remembered the part in Hitch hikers guide to the glaxy where they had built the supercomputer to answer their most fundamental query “what is the meaning of life? and the computer responded… 42. I imagine that the bible is perhaps god or humanities response to the never-ending series of questions directed at god about this life.
I personally think there is a place for non-linear, abstract, Dada-inspired presentations of information but not in everything. Mystory should be treated as an art from and not as the new form of information with which we should subscribe (in the very broad sense of the word).
1 June, 2008
this – a l l this. = but 01 ch!!!!!!p. uneventful
korporat fascist gullibloon zpektakle.
What in the weird? How has it come to this? Are we now witnessing merely an experimentation of art? Or could this be the future of our inadequate language? It wasn’t always inadequate, I suppose, we will say in the years to come. Books! those magical things gave us our intellectual sustenance. Until the time of the computer, Where whole novels could be put into a melting pot and boiled down to a kind of computer code. Which completely eliminated the poetic beauty of language and replaced it with a more capitalist, clear, concise and efficient approach to sharing information.
This highly conceptual artistic approach to the potential future of language is boiled down to one term “code work” © McKenzie Wark.
Wark introduces us to this interesting new world through the work of various artists like,
Alan Sondheim who uses IRC, as a means of composition,
IRC log started Sat Oct 20 23:01
*** Value of LOG set to ON
*** Nikuko ([qIbgrP30O@panix3.panix.com) has joined channel #nikuko
*** Users on #nikuko: @Nikuko
*** #nikuko 1003633320
* Nikuko want to be alone this evening of white dust and stars
* Nikuko dissolvers in your spores
* Nikuko writers her shattered skin in your stars
<Nikuko> Ah, I will paint in nail-head line! in swallow line!
<Nikuko> Ah, I will write in glowworm line, in swollen female line!
* Nikuko painters her torn skin into many kanji
* Nikuko turn towards gnarled knot line, toward whirlpool line
<Nikuko> Her dark hair outlinered in white spore her bamboo knot line
<Nikuko> Her name in grackle line, her death in beauty white crane line
* Nikuko brush in loving spores in white beauty anthrax
* Nikuko writers in sublimation line, towards line of rising-up
* Nikuko in white beauty anthrax in white beauty anthrax mouth
I’m very fond of this new form of poetry, it has a dark, abstract nature. Blending technology and Japanese tradition in the same way the country itself does. Here we feel the teenage Japanese attitude of technology and nature as one in the same. A pure naturalness within a highly technoligised existence.
another artist Stéphan Barron asks others to volunteer texts. In “Com_post Concepts” The sender receives her or his own text back at weekly intervals, in an increasingly noisy and unintelligible state.
This entire article has been introduced into this work of art. I am interested to see what will be made of it.
Give it a go at www.com-post.org
Until next week……………………………………..
3 May, 2008
In the world of internet everything is so interconnected and shared there is less of a feeling of ownership over ones work. It all began with what we now believe to be a simple process Microsoft Word and its famous “Copy and Paste” strategy. Since then we have been able to forward onto e-mails or save onto our computers information we appreciate or may some day wish to look back on. However, this eventually developed and people began seeing its application in plagiarism.
Is this necessarily a bad thing?
Well for one thing, cinema has been doing it for years. recreating older films with the latest technology allows us to appreciate an old story with a new effect. I liken this process to that of natures process of producing honey. The bee takes pollen from surrounding flowers and creates something new and natural from it.
What if I told you the last sentence I just wrote about bees is actually from philosopher Arne Naess who talks about ‘Deep Ecology’. Would that REALLY matter. I am taking a comment way out of the sphere it was originally created for and creating something new from it.
If we look back at the Dada movement there is a clear emphasis on affect rather than the mode of production and a complete absence of this ‘turf war’ attitude of who created what.
Dadaism, if you are unaware, can be understood by looking at artist such as Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.
Some important elements of Dada art include the rejection of the dominant modes of distribution and valorization of cultural artefacts, the elevation of the importance of audience response to and interaction with the art object or event, interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinarity, the abstract use of language and sound as material, an embrace of randomness as an aspect of artistic practice, the use of diverse ‘at-hand’ media and found objects, and the representation of the human body as man/machine hybrid or grotesque deformity rather than as idealized beauty.
Through understanding dadaism we are introduced to a more artistic approach to creating electronic writings, images, or movies. It places the attention- where it is deserved- at the end rather than at the production.
In a Kantian sense, To will an end, means to will all necessary means to its attainment.
This teleological stance should be applied to our current electronic culture, if we are to get anywhere in a creative sense we might as well get there together.
To conclude:
Tristan Tzara famously described the recipe for a Dadaist poem in the July/August 1920 issue of Littérature as follows:
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article in the newspaper of the length you wish to give your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out carefully all the words that make up the article and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Then remove each cutting one after the other in the order in which they emerge from the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
You will now become ‘an infinitely original writer with a charming sensitivity, although still misunderstood by the common people (Tzara, 2006b).
3 May, 2008
When we think about the might of print. We think of it in relation to its ability to change the world we live in, through force. The bible has created for us an ethical doctrine from which we must live by. Michel Foucault argues text has been used by the catholic church to deter free thinking people from revolution. He uses the example of sexual desire, the bible does not require us to be embarrassed by our sexual desires in some points it even promotes it. And yet, confession boxes where spawned out of the dark ages. A place where people go to express their shame for looking at another man’s wife. In the west we have given in to this most basic form of societal control. Sexual experimentation is sinful here, whereas, in the east it is celebrated.
Just as text has been used to quell the violent overthrow of power, it has also been used to start revolutions. Like that of the text written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ” The Communist Manifesto”. Which to the dismay of the authors led to the deaths of thousands of supporters and the inevitable corruption of the manifesto. Elizabeth Eisenstein discusses how text transformed the “Italian renaissance to a permanent European renaissance” . Text was said to implement Protestant reformation, make world literacy a realistic goal, changed family life, politics and modern science. An epic display of the powerful might of books.
I wonder if we are as effected by text today? If Marx and Engels wrote the manifesto in the year 2008 would it have started anything?
I Doubt it… We are completely under control, Our affluent lifestyles have made us fat, disinterested and complacent. Money is the only fuel for any progress. Work, family life and admittedly university are all institutions that base their success in life around monetary gain. If we remember back to when we were children what were our parents REALLY fighting about, in fact what do we REALLY fight about today.
When someone argues about why communism can’t work they say why would I be a doctor when I can make the same money driving a bus. One would hope that a doctor is really wanting to help people not only for the sake of their bank accounts, but because that’s what they genuinely believe they should be doing.
Why are we starting to notice that the legal system is flawed? Because Lawyers make more money the more cases they win, and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make a name for themselves…for money. But some cases weren’t meant to be won it is the ethical responsibility of the lawyer to know when they are defending a real criminal. But ethics don’t put food on the table. not in this society anyway. So the only way out of this dead end existence is some kind of massive revolution. But I don’t think the text will be found in print. It will be on the internet…. in blogs….much like this one. Mwa hahahahaa 
13 April, 2008
Wello this week we delve into the miraculous world of font, script, jargen and blorgen. words which you should all be familiar with…or should you?
This guy is a genious! you know the feeling when you’ve touched on a work of genius well I had that when I read this.
It was so simple that I had never thought of it before. You should check these out.
Web Typography: Now there’s an oxymoron! —– http://www.tomontheweb2.ca/CMX/7262D/
Typographic Contrast and the web —– http://www.tomontheweb2.ca/CMX/D4FBD/
It should be clear now just how important type is. It almost feels like we are all going down the path of creating a new language. one that incorporates images within its text to express vignettes that allow us all to better understand something on the web. An author who created a novel with this idea intended was James Joyce.
For those who don’t know much about Joyce check this out -
-Go: www.youtube.com -Input: A Study of James Joyce Part 3 -Click: on the first option.
For those who know Joyce well go to this – Go: www.youtube.com -Input: Yes (James Joyce)-Click: on the first option.
After seeing (Both) these highly romanticised portrayals of Joyce your brain should now be filling with some uncontrollable desire to understand more. More about this Joyce character, and more about what this has to do with our topic.
Well Joyce was quite a bizarrely humorous man and very ahead of his time in terms of his books. His humorous nature can be likened to the nature of internet writers, they are usually quick witted using abbreviations at every turn with little care for what there readers can understand. Internet writers have the luxury of being like this because if a reader didn’t understand a word or sentence or phrase they can immediately respond just like people do on this blog (or should do anyway). In a novel the writer is more fearful, they are uneasy about doing what Joyce did because the reader cannot directly communicate with the author. Their work becomes timeless and the writer does not want to be timelessly hated.
In a way Joyce was wrong to write a novel like Finnegan’s Wake it is a novel and therefore autocratic in the sense that it is not open for questioning or debate. However, I think he is a necessary writer of the internet revolution and if he was alive today and not blind I think he would prefer the web as an alternative to novels. Joyce is a past reference of how one can be free of the constraints that literature has imposed for too long.
Viva la webolution!
5 April, 2008
Before I start my rant of the week please go to you tube and type in “Apple Mac ad 1984″.
The ad depicts a similar world to the dystopia presented in George Orwell’s “1984″. In this ad, the focus is on television being “the opiate of the masses” and Apple Macintosh as their saviour. How untrue this depiction is, if anything television and internet support each other. The reality is that literature has been replaced by the internet. I mean haven’t we all been tempted to copy and paste or use internet addresses in bibliography’s when an assignment is due? It seems that some of us find it easier to use the internet rather than the dreaded and complicated world of the LIBRARY 
But is this necessarily a bad thing?
At the moment we are witness to a rapid decline of genuine library goers. And I say genuine because most students that attend the library are usually just following the recommended reading texts for their classes at school. Which highlights several problems in the education system, like a lack of REAL education but lets not get into that. We have reached a point where the world moves to quickly for books. I look at my atlas which still claims Yugoslavia is a country and That Thailand is really called Siam. Indeed it seems that our everchanging world requires a form that can be constantly updated, quickly and easily accessed and works to fulfill our needs…THE INTERNET
I turn now to a great article that details the many philosophers that have thought along these lines before me particularly Michel Foucault and his writing “What is an author” (1969) Where he highlights an essay by Roland Barthes called “The death of the author” (1967). In a general sense it is the idea that the writing and the author are seperate and Foucault expands on this by saying that in the 1960’s it is easy to imagine a world where there can be this breakdown of autocratic literature being fed into the mouths of the masses. Foucault demands a more democratic approach to writing and the sharing of information. But, I dont think foucault would be satisfied with the internet, The internet is unreliable as a means of democratisation sometimes a faster computer puts you ahead of the argument than those with slower internet caps. Sometimes the information is uninformed opinion that begins to spread amongs the internet community like a rumour. This is because we use different names or avatars so we no longer fear being judged. Although it can be argued that the internet is a truly democratic form of sharing information, there are still authors on the internet causing it to be an autocratic system. Like what I am doing right now, I write this omnidirectional argument in the hope that others will contribute to my ideas in a forum space that harbours free speech. However, Edublogs.org gives us authors the ability to reject undesired responses so where have the values of free speech, liberty and democracy gone. Well it seems we havent really thought of the internet as a place where these things should take place. Landow believed that the new revolution would be fuelled by the internet but he was wrong. We just don’t yet respect the power of the internet.
aside from this has anyone noticed how many reasonably educated people are starting to think and actually speak in terms of this abbreviated internet language. I remember a girl from school who actually got into the habbit -along with many of her friends- of saying lol rather than actually Laughing Out Loud. Not only is this aiding my perspective of capitalist lifestyle as ultimately dehuminising its just plain sad. To think that one day we may look back on a novel by Beatrix Potter and think gosh that is really old english. what irks me further is the possiblitity that Harry Potter no.34 will actually be in this dreadful language, just imagine it.
Harry awke 1 mrng to find that his room’d been brkn in2, he reach’d over the nite stand for his glasses that’d certainly seen btr dayz. He then turnd to his dear wife Hermione, who age had not been kind 2, her long flowing hair had lost its corn-like color and her face, its radiance. Harry’s false teeth were insrtd the same way he’d done over 1,000 x b4, but this time they felt diffrnt.
But I don’t want to be seen as one sided especially with such a freshly concieved subject for debating, the internet still has its uses. A world without internet would be less entertaining and certainly more autocratic. The books I read for philosophy are interesting, granted, but there all so one sided. I mean, try having an argument with a book its quite a sight. So perhaps we need to all start taking our internet usage quite seriously because it is a dangerous lifestyle if we don’t. And I do not mean start policing it either, it should remain a free domain. In fact, it should be protected from people who use it to monopolise on the free people of the internet, particularly those damn viagra companies. In reguard to books, they should be used as resources for factual information so as to avoid the spread of internet sites with false information. there might even be a person or institution employed to ban comments and websites that use false information. And that institution can also be put under high scrutiny by the internet community. Its about balance and free thought, without it, we are no longer human but a product of the machines we use.
29 March, 2008
If anyone remembers the movie, starring David Bowie. The Labrynth can be a terrifying and eerie place.
Go Here to see for yourself… http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/
So after viewing that you’ll be one of two people. You’ll either hold a majority perspective that the networking of nodes in html is a very easy and beneficial system of presenting information. Or, you’ll hold a similar opinion to mine that disagrees with this view.
Now the PSYCHOLOGICAL idea of the symantic network is well-supported and hard to disagree with. Humans do, indeed, connect oncoming information about the world to other similar connected strands of information. Sometimes the relationship is less obvious than others. For example, One likens the word “door” with the word “car”. This could be understood in the obvious sense that a car does have a door. Or it can be associated with an accident that individual had with a door. and the word accident itself as related to cars, due to the common relationship of the two.
It is a strange system that our brain creates for the sake of remembering large amounts of information.
For an extreme example go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NROegsMqNc
So just because we understand our brains to function in this way does not necessarily mean it will be an easier system to follow when applied to the internet. Firstly, when we read, our brains are active in the temporal lobe. Whereas, the area for remembering (which is required for semantic networking) is the pre-frontal cortex which can frequently be seen rubbed when a person is trying to remember. Because the two functions reside in disparate quadrants of the brain they are separate, therefore, the same experience does not apply for the individual on-line. There are also navigational issues, It is complicated going back to a thought once you have left it. And increasingly harder to resist the temptation to click on any word that you find interesting before you have fully read the article for the word you just clicked on.
A question I pose to you now is… “Do you think that the brains ability to connect semantic information in a complexly categorised manor is due to the inception of literacy?
-Stay tuned same time next week for my article on Hypertext, Theory and Criticism-
16 March, 2008
This article is in response to a very interesting argument about the nature and history of literacy and orality by Walter J. Ong. This article can be found at www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/relg/ong.html. Go there now so that you can see what i’m goin’ on about in this blog.
A word that springs to mind reguarding the state of the world before language…lacking.
Where would we be without orality and literacy?
These are the bare foundations of society. Certainly we would be left in the dark, unaware of human potential.
I love the point Ong makes about orality as natural, and literacy as artificial. As i type this sentence right now, i feel an internal struggle between my rational and emotional brain to refrain from going back and making my i’s capitols. I also feel the need to think about tone and spelling while righting… its really distracting. But then why am i writing this?
Ong rightfully points out, we use literacy in order to allow human natures artificial desires to be fulfilled. I write this blog to reach a wider audience than ummmm… lets say the people in my house who are hardly interested in my philosophical rants on Walter J. Ong.
Ong talks about the Greeks who began the Phonetic alphabet. Kerckhove (1981) suggested this favoured left hemisphere activity and therefore allowed for abstract and analytic thought. Which, was very true in the case of Aristotle who was known for writing hierarchical lists used to present his philosophical ideas. Like, his theory on the embodied souls of the world having three levels of virtue:
Rational (Human) – moral virtues
Appetitive (Fauna)- appetitive virtue
Irrational (Flora)- vegetative nutritional virtue
Notice I am able to present this hierarchical structure so conveniently on this blog.
Tagged: , Aristotle, Greeks, Hebrew, Kerckhove, Ladino, Literacy, Orality, Phonetic, Spanish, Walter J. Ong 5 March, 2008
Hello new blog world,
Just thought i’d write a short hello.
Here’s a nice picture of tokyo.
Tagged: blog world, First Blog Ever!!, hello 26 February, 2008
