Quotidianity

Just see it. Three words are all you need: It. Is. Great. 100 percent. Power level over 9000. A++. And want to know why? Because at 2:30 am, after the midnight showing, everyone in the theater stood up covered in sweat inside a 90-degree house.

My friend the illustrious James Sotis put it this way: “If there’s ever a movie to go out on, this has to be it.” Heath Ledger = win.

On the path to planning panels for South by Southwest next March, I came across a link for ETech 2008, an O’Reilly conference held earlier this year in California. One panel discussion, Really Really Really Intimate Interfaces, caught my eye because on the conference homepage it linked to the panel’s placeholder with the term “sex hacking.” A query for a “hacking” and “sex” combo on Google turns up only the faint whispers of a long-past forum post from HOPE 2006.

There’s life hacking and even school hacking, but can we hack sex? Or, at least follow LifeHacker’s motto and “get things done” with technology when it comes to romping in (or out of) the bedroom.

Explanations aside, today I came across this nifty little item from OhMiBod:

They call it the NaughtiNano — essentially it’s a vibrator powered by your DRM iPod. According to the website, it “vibrates to the rhythm and intensity of the music.” Now good for them if they got the piece of equipment to shake its tail if you turn up the volume. But let’s try to conceptualize: what if the unit pulsated according to a song’s bass, or wavelength oscillation, or any other obscure yet relevant musical factor. It’s already possible for a music UI to produce a visualization of music. But what if an orgasm looked like this…

or this…

(borrowed from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³’s Flickr)

Or, a deeper question: can a genre excite us? Can sexual desire derive from accordion-dominant, Louisiana zydeco between 150 and 170 BPM? Would seventeenth century Gregorian chant serve up a stronger pleasurable climax?

OhMiBod also sells a product, monikered as Boditalk, a vibrator that reacts to your cell phone calls, buzzing for the duration of your wireless chat. I’m sure that someone could engineer an idea to combine the iPhone’s GPS and some odd sort of social network with this amusing gizmo.

Apologies for the unannounced blog vacation (my euphemized term for outright, down-to-earth, human, carnal, base, heart-felt, summer-induced indolence). The metal tick has kept on ticking, yet the physical tock never really kicked in, but that only means that I have a lot to write about in the coming days. So, let us begin…

When I was younger, I liked to brag a lot, until one day I realized I was gradually turning into “that kid,” which propelled me into a slow process of self-exoneration and forced-realization of the humble. But I’ll take a moment to plug two upcoming talks that I’m hosting at Connecticon in Hartford, CT, from 1-3 August, entitled “R-R-Remix! The Mashed Up Culture of Anime Fandom” and “State of the Otaku 2008.” I mention these because I have been reading through a book by one of my favorite beach-babe-turned-Harvard-professors, Chris Kelty, called Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, for a Harvard Free Culture mini-group project, which will henceforth be known as 2B2P for short, or the Two Bits Processor Project for long. This post will be a reaction and modulation of/against/for Chapter 1, Geeks and Recursive Publics, of Part 1, The Internet. I apologize in advance for this article’s long, rambling nature. If you comment, it’ll help me to organize my thoughts for the future.

Free software… to hormone-crazed, socially-bungling Japanophiles? Where’s the segue? On one hand, I could say the Internet (the title of Part 1, hey hey, coincidence?, I think not!) and only be half right. On one foot, I could say geeks, and become a tad closer to the answer. Doing a handstand, though, if I uttered “recursive public,” I just hit the bullseye. And on the topic of recursive publics is where I will tie in my latter, Connecticon-bound presentation. I want to bring in the demographic of fans of Japanese animation (also known colloquially as otaku), unrelated to any matter in the book, as an experiment in modulation: instead of responding directly to Kelty’s content, in this post I will try to flesh out, squish, and redefine the idea of recursive publics while applying the concept to another relevant population of geeks.

To begin, let’s simplify this notion of recursive public. Kelty’s definition essentially boils down to a population that deals with a content through a form, yet the content and form are the same thing. To develop it slightly further, a recursive public works through the form to protect the content mediated by the form. Kelty uses the Internet as his example, being the form that geeks use and through which geeks mediate. Geeks want to foster the Internet by coding the Internet to their own specifications (bounded by the geek moral order). Very meta indeed. Putting a quote against my simplification, “A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public” (Kelty 28).

Recursive publics are not limited to geeks or the Internet. Kelty does not provide examples of branches. One possible example: American Republicans and Democrats might be considered inclusive to the recursive public scene. Political subtleties aside, both parties exist as part of the government — the medium through which they operate and the content on which they focus their operations. Government also is the medium that allows the parties to “come into being in the first place” (28).

But there’s more to recursive publics, in fact another element entirely. Kelty discusses the concept of “layers,” regarding which he says geeks can identify and connect to create new structures to operate the form. He writes, “[Geeks] express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways” (29). This second element ties in with the idea that recursive publics “argue through” their medium(s)” (29). Kelty highlights the combination of Napster and network connections to form a miniature scale of the Internet at large. The layering process then provides additional support for the population of the recursive public to develop and protect the medium.

Otaku are part of a recursive public. However, the demographic of anime and manga fans interacting with their medium fundamentally challenges Kelty’s notion of the recursive public. Why: the anime fandom’s medium is, obviously, animation. However, most anime fans do not have the technical expertise or sometimes even amateur aptitude to interact with the animated medium. For anime fans, it is easy to “express ideas” yet difficult to “express infrastructures” (29).

I’ll step away from that difficulty for a moment. First, I want to tackle the ideology of the recursive public. In a long-winded explanation, Kelty basically argues that recursive publics operate through a type of morality, one that structures the goals of the community. To reiterate, geeks of the recursive public participate in “writing and publishing and speaking and arguing” but also make software for “circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability” of those forms of rhetorical communication. In total, arguments and the methods employed to sculpt those arguments evolve into a sense of morality which will govern future arguments and methods. It’s all very cyclical, but “the circularity is essential to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (48).

To return to the otaku: these geeks too share a moral ideology based in the medium of animation. Examples include the cease of the distribution of fansubs (subtitles added to the original Japanese animation, distributed for foreign audiences) once an animated series is licensed by a US company, or doujinshi (comic book remixes of series) that do not copy the original series but build upon it [this latter topic is discussed in Chapter 1 of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture]. This morality, then, continues on to affect what Kelty calls “changing relations of power and knowledge” (29). Japanese animation, particularly dealing with fans in the US, has challenged the current production market and copyright itself, particularly regarding Free Use. And although barely developed as that of the culture of free software, the power and authority in otaku culture continues to change, led by greats such as Toshio Okada and Takashi Murakami.

But I must return to and address the problem of the formulation of infrastructures when animation is the medium. Can a recursive public exist when a technical boundary is inherently set up in the public’s system? Let’s examine a possible route to the solution: topical and metatopical spaces. Kelty recognizes that geeks of free software do not congregate in topical spaces, meaning assembly in the physical arena, but instead “[knit] a plurality of spaces into one larger space of non-assembly” (39). Anime fans in the US, contrarily, began in so-called topical spaces (also known as mom’s basement), eventually immigrating to the Internet where the fandom now continues to thrive. Is it possible that because the culture of free software began online that its followers automatically shared the prowess necessary to participate fully in both argument and creation, and they shared such knowledge and capabilities between each other, while otaku might not possess these technical traits because they did not mature in the presence of the medium (layman’s terms: they weren’t animators, so should we expect them to animate?).

That’s certainly a pressing question to Toshio Okada, co-founder of Gainax (one of the original major Japanese animation production companies) and self-proclaimed Otaking. So pressing, in fact, that he has declared, “Otaku are dead.” What can he mean, when thousands of American anime fans are running around with their heads cut off at hundreds of conventions across the United States yearly. Just that: with their heads cut off, today’s fans have no direction.

In a public talk, recorded by Otaku2.com, Okada answered the following question:

You mentioned that there is a gap between fan generations, or yours and that of today. Can you elaborate on this?

Okada: I think there is a big difference that is clear in what is popular. Take manga, which is selling in the mainstream, and series popular with maniacs, which are not selling. “Clover and Honey” is a good example. Some people just buy it, some are fans and only a few are maniacs who really dive into the series, so it fails to move the masses. The manga becomes nothing but a topic of discussion among older men who compete on who read it more properly. When with others, these tangents don’t go well and a discussion never takes off. The media can’t talk about otaku as one anymore because we aren’t. There is no core literature or readership. I don’t think I can explain this well enought to convince you, but anyway.

Okada is famously known for his participation on the infamous otaku commentary, Otaku no Video, a major yet sardonic commentary on the state of otaku in Japan. As a producer, though, Okada exemplifies the paragon leader of the otaku recursive public: one who comments on and comments through the form. He sees, though, a major change in generations of otaku, which leads to his harsh declaration. Describing his own generation of anime fans, Okada said at MIT in 2003: “These were fans who were so passionate and enthusiastic about anime that they became vocal and informed critics.” Speaking of the modern anime fanatic, he stated, “Unfortunately… the latest generation of anime viewers in Japan are not true Otaku. They may be anime fans, but they lack the deep, passionate connection to the medium, and many of them seem to have taken up anime fandom because it’s cool or “fashionable.” Rather than being active critics of anime, they are content to be customers, or consumers.” Okada is right about many viewers even five years later, today, as teenagers attend anime conventions with nothing short of shoutouts to Naruto and Bleach. Still, there are some fans that put their critical eye to work to uphold the name of otaku, but cannot argue for anime through the infrastructure of animation. How should they be considered in a culture that began as a recursive public yet has in recent times reverted to a mere consumer culture? A younger Okada, seeing no good animation after the end of the original Gundam series way back when, participated in the creation of two original animated shorts, Daicon III and Diacon IV (the latter of which, if you watch it quickly, contains a homage to Star Wars of all things). The importance of these novelties remains the fact that the recursive public protects the content by arguing through the form. Okada’s message to young fans rings with Keltyism: “Just make your own anime, in English, by yourself.”

I’m not depressed. The phrase “All is not lost” is too drastic to use, yet it would encompass a little bit of the situation. But only a little, because the situation is improving. Paul “Otaking” Johnson recently published on YouTube a criticism of the online fansubbing community, a five-part video series which begins here. It’s just one example of the recursive public finally taking a stand once again. In an interview not too long ago, he stated, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. My video was free and I got paid nothing, but it didn’t stop me researching translation theory for a year or hand drawing and animating the cut scenes just to grab people’s attention (they certainly wouldn’t stick around for my voice, that’s for sure!),” which exemplifies exactly what Okada wanted out of the new otaku generation. Other models include Makoto Shinkai, who animated his own story, Voices of a Distant Star and went on to produce a number of other anime, or even the father of Japanese animation, Osamu Tezuka, who copied Disney’s style to form the foundation of what would compose anime fandom today, who animated for entertainment yet still included his own acute commentary on post-war Japan.

Back to the issue, though: What happens when a fan simply can’t do this sort of high-caliber work?

Layers. The second element in Kelty’s concept. What does Japanese animation become when applied to new intrastructural models? Doujinshi. Anime music videos. Cosplay. Fansubs. Remixed comic books. Reworked animation set to music. Dressing up as characters. Subtitling original show material. All these examples are miniature structures of the animation scene at large, yet do not require the ultimate technical expertise vital to the production of genuine animation. But Kelty does not approach the potential for layers to avoid manifestation as the actual infrastructure (eg. Internet) and instead form new forms of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, for free software in relation to the Internet, no new form of the infrastructure exists, because there is only one Internet. For anime, though, animation exists as media with many offsets. Anime fans congregate in topical and metatopical spaces. Otaku participate as much as possible as the true nature of the recursive public has begun to resurface over the last decade. Hopefully as technology advances fans will be provided a more accessible platform to evolve the recursive public and resurrect the name of otaku.

Please comment on this second post in the Two Bits Processor Project, and please visit the blogs of my friends who are participating with me on this most excellent project:

Tim Hwang, blogging at The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches
Christina Xu, blogging at ComPromise
yours truly, blogging at DianaKimball.com
Mike Wolfe, blogging at Machinations
And me, Alex Leavitt, blogging here

Instead, this is a small catalogue of books that I recently bought, borrowed, or brought to a close.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins (finished) - A mashed potato of a book that works much better if you separate the chapters and read them as essays. Pretty much an anthology of modern, cool changes in media. Recommended. Will blog (hopefully) multiple times about this at a future date.

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, Mimi Ito, et. al. (borrowed from the BPL, just started) - If I had the linguistic skills, I’d definitely do some further research on mobile culture in Japan when I’m abroad in Kyoto in the fall and early winter. Reads sociologically, meaning interesting yet dull language.

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, Lawrence Lessig (recently bought) - I figure that I need to start reading this, since I’ve firmly entrenched myself in this free culture thing for years to come.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler (recently bought) - Yochai laid the smackdown on Cass Sunststein at a forum/lecture that I attended via MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. This is my thanks to him.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain (recently bought) - After Berkman@10 and two riveting JZ talks, I had to pick up this book. Besides, it’s at least a bit relevant.

Other relevant books that I want to read:
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger
Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization, Ian Condry

Have you read any of these seven titles? Tell me what you think about them. Comment, btchz.

Photo courtesy of Farfando.

Chris Kelty. Teaching at Rice University as a professor of anthropology. Visiting Harvard to teach History of Science & Tech. Popping out of a small beach top.

Actually, this is not Chris Kelty. This picture just so happens to be the first result in a Flickr tag search for “kelty.” However, it’s not unfortunate that Chris isn’t a black-haired, bikini-clad bombshell, because he is, in fact, the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (read it here or buy it here).

If you’ve been turned off to this post because I have disappointed you with dreams of scantily-clad ladies, I apologize. To make up for my indiscretion, I present to you the real Chris Kelty, to provide an introduction to what will henceforth be called the Two Bits Processor Project:

Chris explains Two Bits as a toolbox for asking questions. A quote that acts as a perfect segue into explaining the methodology behind the *echoing announcer’s voice* Two. Bits. Processor. Project. Essentially… Five people. Five blogs (FYI, each letter of the word blogs is a separate link). Nine chapters, one introduction, and one conclusion. One section per week. Compose and comment and collaborate. Chris calls this modulation (I call it awesome). Hopefully our endeavor will succeed more fully than a two-bit processor would ever operate, but I have much confidence. For a much more starry-eyed and reflective introduction to our (Tim, Christina, Diana, Mike’s, and my) project, check out Diana’s post.

Following is, first, a reaction to the Introduction of Kelty’s Two Bits and then two lighthearted rejoinders in light of the book as a book.

一番：前置き

Two Bits is an anthropological ethnography, which might also be known as a description of the customs of a people. Example: puking into their children’s mouths might be a topic relevant to a penguin ethnography. Together, these multiple customs equal a culture. For geeks, the focal group of the book, Kelty describes their culture in terms of, in one light, “figuring things out… in discussion… designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and fixing” (Kelty 18). Since Two Bits comes off as a more anthropological text, Kelty writes that a lot of stories will “illustrate what geeks are like.”

But where do geeks stand as a culture in society? I think this is necessary to understand before tackling a book of this caliber (unless Kelty explains that in Chapter One and thence I am hosed). Bluntly, he emphasizes geek nature: “vocal, loud, persistent, and loquacious” (19), a strange dichotomy compared to a backdrop of popular opinion regarding ’80s and ’90s high school kinetics (à la Sixteen Candles. A couple of decades later and geeks are getting more press than getting shoved into lockers. Basically, geeks have a voice. A statement that leads into a revelation of my own English-major-based nerdgasm when I spotted a convoluted reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). In her treatise, Spivak defends what she terms the subaltern, associated with the regional persons or groups outside of the hegemonic structure of power. Specifically, she argues for a dominant voice not to represent the repressed classes of the Indian subcontinent, but for some utterance to escape these peoples’ mouths, to speak for themselves by themselves. The remixed allusion that Kelty creates is that “The superalterns can speak for themselves” (19). In the twenty-first century, geeks have leapt up the social ladder in measures of numerous rungs. We geeks have a voice that others listen to in society. And because we have a voice, we can initiate what Kelty describes as the “reorientation of power and knowledge” (6).

Because geeks have a voice, though, it seems that Kelty finds this fact to be a barrier in the composition of the book. However, it is not a hindrance. Instead of having to explain geeks as a people, he can use them to explain themselves, since they are so prominent on the Internet that it’s impossible not to find the unavoidable information. He elucidates, “I am less interested in treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they are not the objects of its analysis” (19).

The wonderful thing about geeks becomes their habitation: the Internet. Kelty explains the benefit: “[A] very important aspect of the contemporary Internet… is its singularity: there is only one Internet” (9). Tim highlights in his modulation that Kelty’s ethnography isn’t localized. We don’t see a professor exploring the forbidden highlands of Southeast Whoknowswheresia. Instead, Kelty deals with people, what they do, and how they do it, via the Internet. But the point that the monopoly of the Internet exists solely by itself goes beyond possibility and potential of geographic limitation or liberation. Just like geography, geeks work in one space and work for that space. Proud, Kelty says, “The outcome of [the decisions to create certain configurations, standards, and protocols to make the Internet work] has been to privilege the singularity of the Internet and to champion its standardization” (9). The convenience is simply that the world’s geeks live a beep and a click miles away from each other. It’s glocalization on a metaphysical (both senses) scale.

二番：題名

I want to have a bit of fun trying to dissect Two Bits. As an English major, I take pleasure in titles, so I want to examine what the moniker suggests as we move into the text.

An excerpt from Kelty’s website explaining the cover art of the book:
“The cover of Two Bits features one panel from a series of paintings by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), a symbolist painter from Lyon and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The series is called The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit, the Harbinger of Light and decorates the entrance hall of the Boston Public Library. The particular panel on the cover is called “Physics: By the wondrous agency of Electricity, Speech flashes through Space,” and represents the telegraph. I’ve heard it said of this panel that it is colloquially called “Good News and Bad News.” Hence, Two Bits” (http://twobits.net/cover/).

So, good news and bad news. Is that what I’ll have to expect from the book? I wasn’t foreseeing a Zittrain in the least. Personally, the first impression of the title alluded to the phrase my two cents to refer to a unique opinion, namely Kelty’s. Considering the idiom, would such a cheaply-priced opinion be of any worth? A minimal amount of sleuthing revealed both value (importance of putting a stamp on your letter) and aquality (disrespect for pennies as currency).

However, two bits may also refer to the equivalency of twenty-five cents. Hey, that’s one pay phone call, or used to be. Lack of value now that we’re all on cells?

I’ll tell you what gives value to the phrase, though. Apparently two bits is a response to the idiom shave and a haircut, which isn’t an idiom at all but a tune with which we should all be familiar. If you peruse that Wikipedia entry, you’ll discover that the equivalent of “two bits” in vulgar colloquialisms equates to “You bastard!” I have no idea how this fits into Kelty’s vision in the least, but if you’re ever reading the book on the T and someone insults you, shove the text in his face. Maybe Free Software will make a small impact on that SOB’s life.

三番：本か画素

Another influence of the literature concentration on my approach to texts is to view the content in terms of the form. I attended the talk that Kelty gave at MIT to announce Two Bits, and in the Q&A session an audience member inquired as to the benefits and consequences of the book being released in PDF form online for free. Thus the room gave birth to a discussion concerning the value of books. In the end, it really comes down to paying for a physical object that satisfies the carnal needs in our fingertips. Kelty did succeed in arguing that bookstores in most rural communities across the U.S. would probably not carry the text due to its highly technical nature, not relevant to the general populace in the area. The PDF online provides the opportunity for individuals in these communities to check out the book with the potential for them to purchase it post-skim.

I bring up the argument, though, because the circulation of a text online satisfies the criteria of an instance where the attitudes behind the Free Software movement transfer to another realm, namely market politics. Two Bits in PDF, as a form, reflects the practices that Kelty enumerates in his arguments. The book online also mirrors what Kelty explains as part of the “spectrum of political activity” in which geeks participate: “[Geeks] can both express and ‘implement’ ideas” of Free Software in Free Software.

I’ll end this post with some of the other excepts that I marked off whilst reading through the Introduction that I felt were necessary to mention, if not explicate, and to which I might return in the reading of Two Bits:

• “By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system…” - When we approach the concept of a culture, do we not consider it in light of its traditionalism more than its fluidity?
• “‘For more people, the Internet is porn, stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail, online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc. etc.’ It is impossible to explain all of these things…” - Can these items actually be explained?
• “Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify, mash-up, remix, or reuse.” - Which media are difficult to [verb]?
• “Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free press.” - It seems as if this statement was more applicable a few years ago…
• Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture) finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, what does its temporality look like…? - No comment. This deserves it’s own future post.
• What does it mean to plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? - I wonder how many people would comprehend the potential to/for remix.

I, along with my benevolent colleagues over at the Two Bits Processor Project, always encourage commenting on our modulations, or creating a modulation of your own.

I should be writing about the 27 Bits blog project (or reading for that matter), but I had to compose this article tonight out of a pure buzz for 1) blogging and 2) magnificent content.

If you know anything about the history of Japanese animation, it should be that anyone can easily trace its origins back to the United States and Walt Disney. Osamu Tezuka (most famous for Astro Boy) was inspired by Disney’s work, but of course moved well beyond the scope of serious content that the Disney Corp. would ever attempt to consider. The ironic thing about contemporary broadcast American animation (the stuff on Cartoon Network targeted at the ordinary youth demographic) is, of course, the influence of Japanese animation (see, for example, the art style of Teen Titans).

But I don’t want to blabber on about anime, even if I can be a real geek about it. That’s for later (aka. YouTomb blog post I’ve been meaning to compose for a while). What I do want to introduce, though, is a strange yet fascinating instance of secondary cross culturalization, but one that has to do with music.

This evening in my weekly Japanese class, 雨水先生, before we started our lesson, wrote on the board a popular singer’s name, ジェロ, and mentioned something about J-Pop, all of which went for the most part over my head. The name, though, transliterates to Jero. I assumed, after a syllabic translation, that she had been talking about J-Lo. 日本語-fail.

Actually, Jero, the pseudonym for Jerome White, of Pittsburg, PA, is a black American kid, now five years out of college, who sings enka. Yes, 演歌, the twentieth century Japanese music genre. But not regular enka, oh no. Enka, remixed with hiphop.

Why is this cool? Well, let me quote from Wikipedia for a terse explanation on what enka is: “Modern enka (演歌 — from 演 en performance, entertainment, and 歌 ka song) came into being in the postwar years of the Shōwa period. It was the first style to synthesize the Japanese pentatonic scale with Western harmonies. Enka lyrics, as in Portuguese Fado, usually are about the themes of love and loss, loneliness, enduring hardships, and persevering in the face of difficulties, even suicide or death. Enka suggests a more traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes, comparable to American country and western music.” Essentially, enka is already a blend of multiple genres of remix: Performance and song. Modern/postwar and traditional. Japanese scale and Western harmony. Nippon country culture and American country music. I find the last one the most unusual, because the country melodies sound particularly corny.

Who’d have thought that you could remix this music any more? Well, apparently Jero, and I now brand him as officially badass.

The above video is a profile of Jero and how he got into enka as a child. Just the fact that he learned from his grandmother makes him awesome. And traditional. Traditionally awesome. The Japanese are raving about this guy, too. One interviewee says, “He sings enka, but he looks like a hiphop guy.” This is kind of important, since in Japan physical looks do carry some social weight. I’m sure that a lot of press he receives revolves solely around the fact that he’s an African American who can speak fluent Japanese. But with hiphop rising in popularity, the authenticity of his image in a society foreign to something so culturally American compels Japanese viewers, especially younger ones, to pay more attention.

Here’s another video profile, this time from Reuteurs. The phrase I pulled from the audio is “bridging the generation gap.” Of course, Reuters is directly referencing the multiple issues that the older generation in Japan has had with the younger demographic over the years. However, the phrase also suggests the remix culture that seems to be ever more associated with the Millennial generation. The fact that remix is acting as a bridging agent is beneficial for distinctly traditional societies ordinarily hostile to change. The title of the video also highlights an unexpected element in the enka-hiphop relationship: the “blues” allusion. Blues, in American society, refers to a specific genre of the jazz movement. Plugging blues into YouTube’s search bar yields a B.B. King video heavy on the improvisational nature of American jazz.

Let’s take a quick look at the jam session. First, the audience’s cheers beat down the guitar in the first few seconds of the video; important, because jazz is “social music”, according to Miles Davis. Though, although the audience participates, the spotlight remains affixed to King and his guitar. Second, watch King’s face. Emotional. A bit self-aware. Pretty funny too. The musical performance becomes theatrical in its presentation. Third, if you listen closely, you’ll notice that he reuses melody patterns to remix on the third or fourth repetition — a common and yet necessary component of jazz. Blues, then, is communal, dramatic, and blended.

Above is a generic enka song that I found, sung by Itsuki Hiroshi. Compared with B.B. King’s video, Itsuki’s song shares a number of ingredients though the music remains different. The singer of enka appears to depict him/herself more emotionally even than the blues’ singer. Antithetically, enka seems to focus more on the individual performer than the communal experience, though this reflects the nature of personal storytelling present in common American country music. The spotlight here also stays with the performer. Enka might even be associated with the theatrical monologue: one performer, alone, telling the story from his/her perspective. This again applies to blues, without or with a vocalist such as Bessie Smith. The remixed measures in the enka melodies are subtle, yet the meld between traditional, archaic instrumentation (the koto on the right side of the camera view at the start of the clip) and sung/played notes stands out easily.

This is the final Jero-related video that I’ll reference, but I wanted to throw up a sample of one of his music videos to analyze its aesthetic qualities. The clash between antiquated instrument (shamisen) and modern hiphop moves (yet these are also mashed together with fluid movements which I would refer to as strangely relevant to Japanese seasonal culture and, here in the video clip, the lyrics). Jero’s vocals I find utterly eerie, both in their texture and the fact that they’re too indistinguishable from an ordinary enka singer’s tonality. The video itself should even be viewed as a new style of remix. American hiphop music videos focus on the performer and assistant dancers, yet Jero’s video incorporates the addition of the acoustic instruments, borrowed from pre-hiphop visual styles. I like the more modern instrumentation of this video, because Jero strives for similar sounds those he updates to electric guitar and synth keyboard.

Jero’s remix of the hiphop and enka genres gives birth to nothing seen like this before in Japan, or around the world using these styles. I mentioned before the term secondary cross culturalization which, applied to Jero, relates to the adoption in Japan of American hiphop and Jero’s subsequent return to traditional enka. Basically, as hiphop was remixed in Japan stylistically and culturally, Jero re-remixed the hiphop genre and culture through enka’s respective genre and culture. I hope that people will look at Jero’s work with a critical eye, because it’s interesting to discover what camouflaged nuances you can discover by looking at your own culture through a different variety of window.

For the rest of the summer, I’ll be in the office on Tuesdays, so I won’t be able to attend the Berkman luncheons in person. However, I tuned in today via live webcast (oh the wonderful innovative potential of technology) and took down notes. The discussion about borrowing and novelty in collaboration hit home a bit, from my very strange experiences in Calculus AB during junior year of high school. I won’t get into why my teacher limited the number of questions I could ask per class (maximum of three per day), but the two or three quizzes we had per week were collaborative efforts between two or three people to arrive at a shared grade. I still find it weird that my best group ended up during my pairing with one of the slackers of the class, while I performed near the top. A strange team, yet I’d say there was limited tension between the novelty and reuse of applying our skills to solving the few questions on the quiz sheet. I’d usually bring to class the necessary new material while my partner would go over my work, rework it in places, and sort of the small mistakes that I missed in review. The value of my original material and his reuse of my applied knowledge, I’d say, was fairly equal.

So, on to the notes…

—

The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse

Karim Lakhani, Ned Gulley

Karim:

we think collaborative innovation as more modern: open-source/Wikipedia
most major innovations: highly collaborative in history

airplane development: not just Wright brothers, but creation with multiple people
pre-Wright brothers: network of 10 individuals
locus on innovation: moved over to Europe after Wright brothers

collaborative innovation: Meyer’s Analysis

dynamics of collaborative innovation: how people build off of others’ work

Ned:

contest at MathWorks: MATLAB programming contest
usually: smartest person gets the prize
but: not how ideas move/work in the world
contest: notion of borrowing/stealing ideas in contest: create page of code

Competitive Wikipedia
everyone: encouraged to edit articles
if article made worse: thrown away; if better: article edit it kept
would Wikipedia display article editing winner?

MATLAB week-long open collaborative competition for programmers
- entries automatically scored, ranked, displayed immediately
- code author score are visible at all times
- anyone can modify other’s code

leaders –> view entry: person makes new entry and becomes leader

first place: completely objective
good code: gets better optimization score from test lead

really about reputation and interaction with community

what we see in practice:
people: anxious to acknowledge people they took code from

types of changes:
- Big changes (leaps)
I know a much better way to do this, replaces previous code
- Small changes (tweaks)
minor optimization; tweakers don’t need to understand full optimization to improve code

code: improves over time
sometimes: people take best code at certain point in time & make it worse

by inserting new idea after previously solved problem: people swarm on it to work with and improve idea

tough question: how would you value tweakers over leapers
hard to say who really is making the important contributions

systematic variations: tweak bombs: take the entry in the lead, sniff around for secret number replacements to test
changes to the lead entry: fly off like sparks

social signals: sent through entry titles
- scrambled eggs
- rotten eggs
- I didn’t start the fire
- Don’t get obfuscated… follow the light
- You Call This Collaboration? Give Me a Break

motivation:
to participate: opportunity: for personal glory or collaboration?

behavior of successful code:
high rank, time on top, high status author, clarity, elegance, novelty, etc.

tension: not between any two coders
code: wants to propagate
coder: wants to block code propagation

a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg
a hacker is only code’s way of making more code

—

Karim:

collaborative innovation: implicit tension between collective and individual:

collective point of view: value contributions that get reused more often
individual view: value being the top amongst peers

social value of contribution (code) = # of times lines of code reused
relative novelty: helps you; too new: others don’t use it/know what to do with it
value of adding new things, after a while: gets too complicated
not much value in borrowing code, but if you use it in the right way it’s very valuable

leaders: borrow > novelty, in this setting

Twitter. I’ve been tossing around ideas in my head about this service for verbosity-challenged conversationalists for at least a month now. At first, I was skeptical. A few weeks later, Twitter grew on me a bit, but it still felt dirty. Recently, I’ve benefitted.

Last week, I Greyhounded myself down to American University in Washington DC to attend Beyond Broadcast 2008. The amiable conference organizers offered me a scholarship in exchange for a little guide to Twitter, because evidently those guys and gals over in broadcast media don’t understand simple methods of sociability online. Either way, to save $50, I had to force myself to like Twitter. But I do like Twitter, don’t I? I mean, I’m not a Twitter obsessor; I follow less than twenty users. What’s so appealing about Twitter?

First off, kudos to the design team. You’ll pulled off a Threadless/Victorian mashup that I truly find appealing.

But really, the element that makes Twitter what it is: simplicity. One hundred forty characters may not be a lot, but such a limit persuades the composer to ruminate on the few phrases he can put together to create a coherent thought.

Then there’s the element that makes Twitter useful: the fact that it produces coherent thoughts. Keep in mind I did not write relevant or sensible. I agree that some messages are completely inane. But good things come out of Twitter. I’d say that the most useful, albeit less frequently utilized, potential of Twitter is to become an idea aggregate, for people to compose quickly-scribbled, Post-It note sized messages that would be more utilitarian published for the world to see than ported around inside someone’s head. Unfortunately, it seems that other Twitter inhabitants would rather employ the service as a replacement for a Facebook status feed, just to keep on top of what everyone’s doing. Of course, there’s also the in-the-moment practicality of Twitter, especially if you have it hooked up to your mobile phone, in situations such as reporting breaking news (eg. the earthquakes in China or if you get thrown in the slammer).

A positive: the Twitter community, I’ve noticed, is fairly peaceful. Well, disregard when Twitter goes down for lengthy eras of time. But in terms of argument or plain old insipid flame wars, I haven’t seen or read about it. There’s no competition on Twitter. And that’s good. (Unlike

OK, so Twitter’s not bad. But, honestly, Twitter has a cult following and it’s turned into something akin to a fraternity considering its most loyal users. A few weeks ago, I surmised what might have caused Twitter’s popularity to skyrocket so quickly and not peter out. At first, I simply blamed the adults and called Twitter the solution to the next generation middle-aged crisis. Now, I feel like being a bit nicer. So let’s pull it back to ROFLCon…

At ROFLCon, Friday’s opening keynote, a talk by David Weinberger, and Saturday’s opening keynote, by Alice Marwick, dealt with Internet fame, which I guess became the official theme of ROFLCon 1. Instead of dissecting Internet celebrities online, think about the general concept of fame, popularity, fashion in the online space. Dave spoke about the current evolution from a broadcast system (mediated, where The Man chooses what we watch and eventually what we find popular) to a network system (free-reign, where We link each other to videos and images, and choose what becomes famous). In a broadcast domain, alienation results. Via network, the focus is intimacy. And so Twitter’s success, I believe, is based in the familiar. As I alluded to previously, I find more statements about breakfast and bodily functions than theories and thesis. But modernism is about the quotidian, the familiar, the ordinary: for example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the in literary terms revolutionary piece of fiction that follows the everyday, unspectacular actions of Clarissa Dalloway as she experiences London in less than twenty four hours. Localization, therefore, is a product of intimacy. Becoming acquainted with one person familiarizes with a community. Although it appears that location does not matter, geography exists and cannot be ignored. And although the Internet and its culture is highly specific, the consequences of connection becomes globalization, yet also localization. Twitter simply links to some acquaintances on a global scale, and others on a local scale.

Can I answer the question, Why is Twitter famous? According to Alice, fame represents value. So what does the populace of the Internet value? Connection. Ease. And I suppose a little bit of humor. I guess Twitter’s popularity is due to people trying to find an easy way to make friends online. It’s not about being famous for fifteen minutes, or being known to one hundred people, or being connected to everyone by n degrees, or garnering a million hits. We want to get to know people, plain and simple.

Want to know me better? Follow me.

Once in a while at Houghton Library (Harvard U), I come across a famous writer/author/playwright/professor/screenwriter/what-have-you whose publicly unfamous (yes, I mean not-infamous) scribblings stand out like a wild jackal in Kenmore Square. Today, we in Technical Services came across once such beautifully-composed discovery:

Tennessee Williams

“If I were given a word-association test and the word I was given was playwright, meaning American playwright, I am dreadfully afraid that my immediate, associative response would be “stuffed owl”. Could this be the unfortunate consequence of working too much in hotel-bedrooms where all too often the only good writing surface is the top of a bureau with a mirror above it? Sitting before this bureau-mirror, you look up, gloomily reflective, from your slow mutilation of a clean white piece of paper and if you wear horn-rimmed glasses on a round face, the image that you see resembles an owl’s so much that, on dull mornings, there is an impulse to utter a long-drawn, mornful hoot and to hunch and shrug your shoulders a bit, as if the straight back chair in which you are seated is the branch of a tree in a cold, dampish field with no field-mice in the grass. Yes, such is the charm of most playwrights. Ask any actor or director is [sic] I speak not truth on this subject.”

Dear Generation X,

I submit to you a simple question: Why Generation Y? We can fiddle with jejune puns — Generations Why, You, or YouTube — but, really, Y just comes after X, and are you really that uninspired that you couldn’t think of a better moniker? I suppose we can consider our options, for example “Millennials,” which Robert Lanham contends originated because we were “renamed after whining too much.”

I’m writing to say that you need to try harder. Or at least settle on a brand before searing us with your misinformed, generalized diatribes. Lanham’s not defending you too well if he writes, “Millennials pose a vital threat to my generation’s cultural legitimacy.” Is it legitimate if we’re the ones making you popular? But don’t mind me too much. We’re making mistakes too, killing good ideas, what have you.

If you take a glance at Wikipedia (yes, you created it, but we made it), the Baby Boomers tossed around names for you too. After the Declaration of Independence, you’re the thirteenth generation to inhabit this thawing planet (SUVs = totally your fault). For us, Alex Pareene insists that “Millennials are the first generation whose every dumb mistake is archived forever on computer networks. We’re the first Googleable generation!”

You got the Cold War and the space race. We got teh internets. You caroused in your neighborhoods. Now, as the new wave of parents, you wonder why we grew up hugging keyboards. danah boyd tells it all: “Teens do not have as much access to physical space…, some teens don’t go out because there’s no where to go… Online is often easier and more accessible.” The internet is our neighborhood. We’re growing up on it. The first generation to do it. As we hangout more online, even our own brats will follow along (and consequentially never understand the nostalgic significance of some then-archaic band names). And don’t call us natives. We escaped the womb, not the firewall. Tim explains that we engage with the popular. Don’t trounce the way we’re growing up, especially when our methods evidently are much cooler than yours.

If you’re suggesting that the Boomers “never understood us,” take a look at yourself. If you think you’ve improved,

Sincerely,
Alex

As soon as I saw a derivative of the term “culture” in Anne Balsamo’s bio linked to from the Berkman website, I knew I wanted to attend this luncheon. Ironically, there was only mention of cultural reproduction (though it’s apparently present in her book, soon to be released), with much of the discussion focused around the future of libraries and museums (still interesting). The initial idea that jumped out at me from Anne’s presentation was her point about media as reproduction, specifically alluding to biological functions, and how this metaphoric/literal process defines and reworks our notions of gender online. Three other points were brought up that I want to discuss in future articles:
- Memory, remembering, and the evolution of stories and their telling in the move to the digital environment
- The future of the meritocracy of professorships in relation to publications
- The potential importance of Harvard’s Houghton Library after digital literary curation/publication and the hypothetical revolution of personal paper-based printing & publication

For now, the notes:

—

Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work: Anne Balsamo

—

book: transmedia project

addresses 3 points:

technological innovation: transform what is known to what is possible
technological imagination: engage materiality of world to create conditions for future world making
cultural reproduction: development of new narratives, myths, rituals;

technology, the world, culture: created anew
training of technological imagination: necessary

designers: work scene of technological emergence

ch. 1 - culture in the age of innovation

polemic of book: need to train imaginations to take seriously technological innovations: responsibility of educators across curriculum
how humanities can serve as resources: to engage new technologies

ch. 2 - gendering the technological imagination

always gendered, but we didn’t recognize it as such
biological reproductive technologies: connects to media technologies as premier reproductive technologies of our age: draws from feminist criticism on reproduction

ch. 3 - the performance of innovation

work on future of reading: w/ embryonic technologies

ch. - public interactives and technological literacies
designed to communicate history that is all of ours
future of literacies

ch. - working the paradigm shift
focus on literal labor: participatory culture: call people to the hard work required by the paradigm shift

ch. - the work of the book in a digital age
Q: why are you writing a print-based book?

—

transmedia project: relates to other previous projects:

interactive multimedia documentary (”women of the world talk back”) on women’s rights held by UN in Beijing

practices on new media journalism

museum exhibit: designed to probe how we might read in the future: not abandon but rethink the print-based book

—

we need to do something different to bridge the two cultures
need to create new institutional places: multidisciplinary research/projects

new participants: women, underrepresented participants
new commitments: requires everyone to be learners again
collaborative teams: from early work in feminist organizing
new spaces: where people can work together on technological things

—

distributed research network: in UC Irvine, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago
scholarship in a digital age: will look different: local and distributed
understanding technological infrastructure to support distributed research network

digital research & learning @ McArthur: funded: museums, libraries, schools, recreation, home, after-school
claim: learning is changing in a digital age: eg. learning occurs in distributed environment, not just one local place
think about how museums/libraries will function in distributed learning environment

—

What’s next?

XFR: Take 2
Digital Learning Objects: Open Education
MIxed Reality Learning Environments: Morse’s Law, Nintendo Wii (gesture-based interface)
Thinking with Objects: DIY movement, makers culture movement (making things with your hands; virtual: only simulations of what we used to do with our hands)

—

Q: what has everyone been thinking about futures of museums/libraries

—

Q&A:

Q: what is the future of designing librarians; how do you design professionals to adapt to new changes?

A: information designers: need standardization of metadata; also need people to understand how (meta-)information also has narrative, cultural effectivity; when we get to semantic web: it can’t be stupid

Q: Weinberger: future of paper-based books?

A: many genres of paper-based books that will migrate to the digital space; other genres: that aren’t going to disappear, because of physicality: paper-based: will long outlive human lives: part of case history; have to maintain digital archive
libraries: becoming museums of books that have ‘collections’

Q: Weinberger: in future w/ electronic readers: publishers won’t actually print books: will want to move directly to digital

A: things that are slipping away in a digital age: we will want to preserve

Q: humanities in the future: esp. w/ focus on publication

A: rethink scholarly publication, but I’m not the one to take on such a project;
have to learn to read again
UChicago: thinking about new paradigm of peer-review process for publication
tenure cases for those w/ digital scholarship

Q: printing a book: just output form; talk about crafting in digital environment: you: on laptop, w/ word processor

A: these kind of questions are critical, esp. w/ close reading of electronic text
authoring backwards
designer parallels with author

discussion:
libraries: providing ACCESS to books, etc.; cost of maintaining digital libraries: low, but not zero; decisions will always need to be made about curation
assumption: possibility of a canon: where all the ‘good’ books are

Q: “science fiction: the mythology of the industrial age”

Q: what do you think might be lost?

A: course: history of literacy: ongoing question of why is it important to remember?: disturbing: youth: just-in-time learners/rememberers
we haven’t taught value of remembering
culturally: remembering was more valuable to the other generation: ties to why history is important: ties to “future of the past”

—

digital divide: the other way: economic/social reasons
need to have interdisciplinary places of learning

Just wanted to announce that I switched the Zuneral video over to YouTube.

At Berkman@10 during the Language of Openness breakout session, someone in the audience complained about the too frequent use of the word “consumer” when discussing the Internet and media in general. Ever since, consumer has also irked me and yet I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it’s the English major coming out in me. Clearly the word has been contextualized and habitualized enough so that those familiar with the area of study understand and will employ the term. The association of consuming with eating, drinking, or generally ingesting, I believe, is what irritates the word’s users. I would go further to say that by utilizing the word consume in its gustatory fashion, we must also consider its consequences, thus alluding to digestion. And unless we’re speaking about the Internet strictly on academic grounds (where it would be mentally assimilated), I do not care for the WWW to pass through my bowel.

I will propose, then, that the use of consume came about because of adults. Yes, Generation X, I’m blaming you. Power to the Millennials! (I’ll discuss my intentional evasion of the phrase “digital native” in a later article. In fact, I don’t put faith in the term millennial either, but for the sake of brevity, it will remain for now.) I blame the older folk who grew up with television and commercials, spent money to go to the movie theater, and customarily lived in a pecuniary society. They are living, breathing customers. As customers, the adults of today matured regarding the world with an eye bent on finances rather than fervor. Therefore, it follows that they would approach the Internet with fiscal perspectives and intentions. Consuming digital media, specifically media inherent to the Web, then evolved from a money-hungry stomach.

And us kids are just, well, different. We’re not online to make money or use money (at least not all the time, though I do not deny calling the Internet the new teenager’s shopping-mall-turned-after-school-hangout). I’ll even go far enough to accuse adults and their outdated perspectives as the cause of the dot-com crash way back when, because they simply approached the Internet in an ignorant manner (I commend them for taking risks). My hypothesis reflects what David Weinberger and Jonathan Zittrain discussed at the final discursive session of Berkman@10, Onward!. Weinberger said, “It occurred to me that what does hold Berkman together and probably for everyone here is that we really really love the internet, just love the internet. How many people were at ROFLCon? The atmosphere at ROFLCon (an internet pop culture conference) was very different type of love of the internet. So in 10 years, how are we going to love the internet?” He expounds that the youth approach to the Internet is one of curiosity, intimacy, and passion. Youth are developing a culture online because they are not consuming the Web, acidically digesting its content and defecating LOLcats, but instead embracing the Internet creatively and living inside it, rather than using it as a tool while remaining outside its realm. In response to Weinberger, Zittrain stated, “I was struck by David Weinberger’s description of ROFLCon. I wasn’t there, but I can’t help but think that some of the goofiness, and the wonderful inanity of it, is exactly the spirit of the Internet that we celebrate here that I am continually amazed and amused by. … It’s the ability not to take ourselves so god damn seriously, while doing serious things and worrying about things like billions of people who are about to join the club, digitally speaking.” Charlie Nesson’s final words echo a similar response: “The question in shorter term for me really is, can we figure out how to engage kids of all ages in an open integrated media educational environment in a way that has them learning critical, algorithmic, strategic, thinking skills, in a form that we can measure — and that can be used as a meaningful credential.” Both professors identify the Internet as a space of informal learning, just like the neighborhood streets where adults grew up. Kids are just doing it online these days.

So how do youth engage with the digital space, strategically thinking and processing the culture that they unconsciously create? Certainly not through consumption. It’s simply by maturing, growing up, experiencing.

I RSVP’d to the Berkman Center on a whim a couple of days ago, and I am glad that I went to this luncheon (the first of hopefully many for me). Sitting in a room of thirty people, with Walter sitting at the head of the mahogany table, talking calmly, solidly, professorly, I felt like part of a secluded university lecture. He’s an advocate for an education and he keeps faith in the three elements that I’ve always found necessary to education: learning from risks, learning from mistakes, and learning from experience. Notes are below.

—

OLPC: plan: have impact on learning
lack in opportunity: how do you give kids high quality education, opportunity to learn

school reform: impossible if done top-down; way it will change: generation of children who come to school w/ different skills/expectations: will change school
these laptops: will be part of manufacturing change

title: “Confessions of a Fundamentalist”
passionate about free/open source software
fundamentalist about: learning itself: what are the best ways to position/plant seeds of learning

constructionism: role for computation as thing to think with; something children should engage with
not just access to knowledge, but appropriation of knowledge
learn through doing; what’s a better tool for doing than a computer
want to engage people in things they’re passionate about

child-centric v. teacher-centric view of education/learning
everyone’s a learner, everyone’s a teacher
humans: expressive & social

proprietary v. free/open source
a = deals with delivery of knowledge
b = trying to move over the standard deviation: users: people who appropriate, rather than just access, knowledge
open source: culture of appropriation: cultural value

service-oriented stuff: not very good
phones: about service, not construction: service model: example: people don’t write programs or essays ON their phone
point: social nature of phones
optimal situation for learning: phones: lacking in other attributes (teaching, learning, expressive)

example: Dynabook, with background
building platform: skewing odds to ~ activity happening
1. build
2. critique/reflect
3. iterate (go back to step 1)

learning: wants to be free
culture around open source –> how do you decide about governance? difference between governance and engagement of community in critical discourse

engaging in collaboration, engaging in critique
tools to do this: lacking in education (maybe not university ed, but definitely in primary ed)

example:
Nigeria: English = official language, but spoken: probably 3rd largest
kids: built spelling dictionary for Igbo

Sugar: primary user experience on OLPC
at core of Sugar: notion of activity
before: run applications; turned “application” into “activity”: enhancement of application: 1) brings notion of sharing/sociability into the open: always present; presence of others is always with you; eg. ability to share document between users, whether online or offline; 2) journal: file system that automatically saves everything you do: never have to save/back up; creating a diary/portfolio of your work; place to watch your progress, have conversation with another about your progress: importance of progress, march through time: important feature of learning; 3) transparency: no ceiling; music: network with other laptops to play music, can compose music, make own instruments
Python: language that underlies Sugar: open

[why cell phones will never replace computers: memory capacity]

example: want to change metrics inside Sugar so that kids can measure in anything, any metric they imagine

David Hilbert: 23 problems of mathematics
23 problems facing people in technology & learning:
- how to make the network work?
- make code that is malleable yet won’t lead to malware
- better tools for localization & internationalization
- power: use a scarce resource better? even if you’re using calories to crank in power, better use them intelligently
- construction in scale
- economics: correlating economic development with learning: hypothesis or fact that learning leads to economic development
- governance
(will be blogged)

—
Q&A:

Q: definition of free
A: not as in beer
comes down to appropriation: example: learn to code by copying code, breaking it down & changing it

Q: small inexpensive laptops: ie. Asus EEE
ultimately: help cause of learning via computers by making hardware more available, or hurt it by losing sight of mission of learning
A: definitely help it; $200 for laptop, versus $10,000/year on education; in developing countries: maybe $200/year on education

Q: cultural implications behind OLPC
A: one item of 23: understand culture vs. construction; constructionism: about people, about how they learn: based on Piaget’s constructivism
teacher: having more fun

Q: resistance — proprietary companies: don’t like idea of open source; how does interaction of proprietary companies and developing nations play out?
A: big social/economic battles in next few decades; people that go with open source: will do better in the long run;

Q: concern: not if enough laptops will be available in 1 week, but how many available in 5 years
A: OLPC: trying to keep the pressure on: so that industry won’t slip back; 5 affordable laptops announced in the last week
if we replace chalkboards with laptops: loss of value

Q: modern edu: these principles aren’t being taught
A: part of education: should be dirt on hands experience
lots of children, but “laptop” is part of OLPC so don’t forget that

Q: what is it that drives discussion: people, community, tools? what assumptions drive the balance and what we can do about it?
A: open source projects: rely on developers but also multiple volunteers; don’t think many are in it for the glory, but think they can make a difference

Q: people seem more willing to work on things and jump into them if they’re not shiny/new; how does design seem to enable more interest in working inside the laptop?
A: thought about it in slightly different way; skins: can replace set with more inviting images; other issue: don’t want things to break, but want people to explore: how do you make environment where you can find that balance?; instead of make it hard to break, make it easy to repair, so that people are willing to take risks and make mistakes

On May 26th 2008, Alex declared “Xanadu and the Internet Memetics” a great band name. So, if y’all steal it, I’m calling Creative Commons on you!

But, really, in this post I want to discuss Internet memes. Not in full — that was done well enough at ROFLCon, though the conversation will continue, especially at ROFLCon 2.0 (??). What I will talk about: On Thursday, Weezer released a music video for their new song, Pork and Beans, via YouTube. The theme? Internet memes.

If you haven’t heard already, the term ‘meme’ has hit mainstream, and Richard Dawkins even gave memes a new branch of academia: memetics. On Wikipedia, the “meme” is defined as a unit of cultural information. What kind of culture Jay Tron Guy Maynard, Tay Zonday, or Sneezing Panda are reflecting cannot be explicitly defined, unless we consider the Internet to have birthed its own culture (which I will discuss in a future article), but all of these Internet stars certainly can be classified as belonging to contemporary popular culture.

To wend a way back to Weezer… the music video encapsulates a general bird’s eye view of the popular Internet memes of the day. But can Weezer’s video exist as a separate meme entirely? To pose the real question: Is tallying Internet memes a new meme?

At the beginning of the year in a creative display of marketing to the digital niche, Mozilla uploaded a marketing video (also of the musical variety) which borrowed the talents of many Internet icons:

On April 2nd, a South Park episode aired in the show’s twelfth season featuring a number of famous Internet memes:

view it here until I can embed it into WordPress

In another example, Meth Minute 39 produced a short, animated tribute to the same memes:

If you visit MM39’s website, they wrote a chicken-or-the-egg post about whether or not MM39’s video had influenced Weezer’s own. Originality is difficult to define online — hence the brouhaha concerning intellectual property rights, or the term “public commons” — but it seems here that these videos all fall under the category of Internet metameme. (Or maybe I should rename that, since Christian Lander hates the prefix meta-.)

Yesterday, Harvard Free Culture held a funeral service, or Zuneral, for Digital Rights Management — one that was, according to Dean Jansen, “part viking, part mafia, and part probably something else.” Four members of HFC encased a Zune and an iPod in a bucket of cement, performed a memorial and eulogy, and put a physical manifestation of DRM to rest in the Charles River outside Harvard University.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, I pieced together a video encapsulating the momentous occasion:

Notes:
- Pictures of the Zuneral preparation are borrowed from Christina Xu’s Flickr.
- The marble engravings are from the JFK memorial fountain inside JFK Park.

You can browse the Zuneral photographs tagged on Flickr here.

Also, take a look at DRM is Dead to Me, featured in the video, for the community’s perspective on the life and times of DRM.

Me playing Rock Band with Charlie Nesson, et al., courtesy of the Berkman Center @ Flickr

I’ve already discussed the social tools used (or overused, or underused?) during Berkman@10, but of course as at any conference much real networking occurred as well. Not one particularly adept as networking in any sense, I did meet an excellent bunch of new contacts and friends. I didn’t speak with many adults — probably a mistake on my part — but I did make the acquaintance of Jeff Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education; Miriam Simun, the coordinator of research in the Digital Natives project over at the Berkman Center; and recently-graduated Andy Sellars. Of course, I’m extremely sociable with those my own age, so I spent a good deal of time speaking with and hanging around Diana Kimball, Tim Hwang, Dean Jansen, Greg Price, Christina Xu, David Edelman (from Oxford University) and Rob (aka. moot, of 4chan). I have to admit: I’ll probably be attending more Harvard Free Culture events than those of BUFC in the future. On the other hand, two pieces of really good news: First, I spoke with Miriam about participating in the Digital Natives project next spring as an intern, after I return from Japan, and the potential looks good. Second, after talking at length with Christina and Diana, it looks like I may have a spot on the team of ROFLCon 2008. All in all, I took away a bunch of real-world connections from Berkman@10 and now I’m hooked on attending conferences.

If anyone’s willing to help me fund a trip to Washington D.C., I really want to go to Beyond Broadcast 2008 at American University on June 17th. Maybe I’ll get some cash from my 21st birthday on June 8th *hint hint*.

This afternoon, I was introduced to an amazing Google tool that I wish I had found a year ago. It’s called SketchUp — a 3D technical drawing program available for free download from Google. Or if you want to upgrade to pro, you can buy it for $500. It’s extremely simple to use, though it follows a pedantic logic, but at least it’s very fun and has instructional pop-ups for each instrument in the program. In about forty five minutes this afternoon, I threw together this beauty, a set design for BU Stage Troupe’s summer theater show. True, the dimensions are off (I believe it’s about thirty-five feet high) and a few angles are skewed, but it looks great and you can rotate the image around to see every intricate detail of the set. Definitely worth it for college theater geeks, or if you’re bored and want to procrastinate by reorganizing your entire dorm room.

In other news, I got into another bike accident yesterday. I say another because last year in May I got hit by a truck door and sent to the hospital. On Monday afternoon, I was riding through the stationary post-Red-Sox traffic in Kenmore Square, zigzagging between cars, when the chain popped off my bike and I wiped out in the middle of the street. Luckily it wasn’t a bad fall and I got off relatively OK (see figure 2). It’s not that I want to brag about war wounds, but literally a minute before I collapsed in the street, a car nearly pushed me into the lane of parked cars on the side of the road. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the phone, or speaking to your spouse (*cough cough*), any kind of distraction on the road subtracts from total awareness. I’m stealing the video below from the blog of Rachel Popkin, one of the ROFLCon team. It’s an excellent YouTube commercial from the UK about awareness of cyclers on the road.

If you’re driving, please be safe and be aware.

I feel that this panel, hosted by Yochai Benkler, Tim Wu, and Terry Fisher, finally established a full understanding of the base issues of net neutrality, so I wanted to post my notes from the panel so that others could also attempt to understand if they haven’t already. So, here we go:

Tim Wu
Yochai Benkler
Terry Fisher

—

YB

1st half of 1990s: telecom networks: demanding economies of scale; if wanted competition from incumbents, needed to allow competitors to share facilities; most controversial: bundling: allow competitors to use physical infrastructure; competition: building facilities ever closer to the home; redundant networks

what would happen w/ cable?

trend 2000: toward open access; a few cable enfranchising authorities; needed to think of it as direct communications;

initial reports: what we want: shift from idea that each pipe is competitive and we need multiple competitors; AOL merger: had to offer access to at least 3 other competitors; during period: shift from competition on each wire, to competition between two wires: moving away from open access

many policies passed between 2001-2008 that need to be revised
1) why can’t we have actual competition in physical infrastructure as the main model?
2) do we need an alternative workaround infrastructure that is public?
3) should we be focused on user-owned infrastructure? (buy device, create own local thing; buy own fiber to connect to public main?)

—

TW

snapshot of where net neutrality is right now:

4 issues of network regulation:

1) payments: whether or not service providers can demand payments for delivering access to their customers
(see picture)
access fee: charge people to reach your customers (Ebay using Verizon to reach AT&T customers)
legislation: says fee can’t be charged

2) what is reasonable network management?
when can carrier delay or block or mess with connection between two parties on Internet for purposes of managing bandwidth?
unilateral approaches: not accepted

3) floating net neutrality norm that is sometimes enforced by FCC; what is form/scheme going to take?
ad hoc –if FCC sees something they’ll do something about it– system
right now: moving toward that
net neutrality: not supposed to transgress, when you do you get fined
common law development of what are acceptable/nonacceptable practices

4) Hollywood; what does Hollywood think of network neutrality? what side are the content industries on?
Hollywood: same situation that Ebay is in: studio: also has to pay?
hesitant about getting engaged with provider

this year: struggle in policy community to get allegiance of content providing community

—

TF

types of network neutrality:
content neutrality
application neutrality: bits are bits idea
sender neutrality: no discrimination between senders
toll free (tim’s #2 point): ISPs charge recipients

if we should allow discrimination:
1. discrimination is efficient
2. market should be making decisions
3. ISPs have freedom of speech rights
4. Internet: never been neutral: historical argument
5. moral argument: layer separation, truth in advertising

if curb discrimination:
1. ISPs: monopolies
2. preserve opportunities for innovation
3. major content providers will cut deals with ISPs
4. preservations of opportunities

[powerpoint graph]
content discrimination: clear
strong: sender neutrality, toll free
most strongly opposed: application neutrality

—

ETC.

options available to most consumers have diminished sharply:
- roughly 50% of consumers in the US have a choice among two broadband providers
- roughly 25% have access to only one provider
- roughly 25% don’t yet have access to any broadband providers
next few years: looking at monopoly/duopoly

• private networks should create virtual private networks, not use public Internet

• possibility of corporations paying piece of consumer fee to bring price down, and Internet companies can make up for it by advertising more, etc.

• if there is no competition, that’s fine; supposedly having a market but regulating it into a duopoly that is the problem; market or no market, choose!
• ultimately: only resource we have owned by nobody is feasible, we just haven’t built it

I wrote last night about implementing IRC in an educational setting. The topic is coming up right now in the Digital Natives discussion about technology’s role in the classroom, methodologically and physically. I think it’s quite funny though how most of those sitting with laptops in front of them are not currently in the IRC channel. There’s been a huge debate that further proves the opportunities for hyperdiscussion. I’ve reproduced the IRC discussion below:

[11:12am] t55e: sc1olist: just noticed wiki page for the Digital Natives session
[11:12am] t55e: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/berkmanat10/Digital_Natives
[11:12am] daithi: so, where is everyone for these sessions?
…
[11:13am] alexleavitt: Digital Natives win.
…
[11:16am] daithi: digital natives is about 75% Macs!
[11:16am] sc1olist: Well, we *are* digital natives…
[11:16am] sc1olist: A discerning population, to be sure.
…
[11:16am] sc1olist: Digital connoisseurs, if you will. Ha
…
[11:30am] daithi: over in natives, Urs Gasser is explaining the context, through a discussion of layers, but after that all the action will be at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/digitalnativeberkman10
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[11:34am] EricaG: I love the mixed IRC & twitter chat from multiple rooms at once. Makes it almost possible to go to everything :D.
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[11:34am] sc1olist: (digital natives) Welcome to academia, everybody.
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[11:34am] sc1olist: what’s the twitter tag tracker for berkman again?
[11:34am] dwitzel_: using the question tool in the Digital Natives session - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/digitalnativeberkman10
[11:34am] dwitzel_: #berkman
…
[11:35am] EricaG: berkmanat10 is the universal tag for everything but twitter.
…
[11:35am] EricaG: twitter tag is #berkman since it’s shorter and enables both twemes and hashtags to track
[11:35am] daithi: i’m trying to get as much down as I can at http://www.lexferenda.com/16052008/native/
…
[11:44am] jeckman: somebody in the last breakout called me an adult, by which I think he meant I was old
[11:45am] daithi: are you? Apparently the digital native cut-off point is 1980.
[11:45am] jeckman: because I was Born before the internet. Not a native by a decade, fwiw
…
[11:45am] jeckman: though I have been on the net since 1989
[11:46am] dwitzel_: jbeckman, i think you can still get a digital green card
[11:46am] jeckman: <- (digital immigrant)
…
[11:46am] dwitzel_: illegal immigrant?
[11:47am] EricaG: I’m in the cusp. Most people won’t claim me in GenX, but I’m a coupe years older than the official “digital native.” [1978]
…
[11:51am] fonchik: naturalized digital citizens?
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[11:52am] daithi: John Palfrey wonders whether classrooms should be wired/online during class. What do ye think?
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[11:53am] jeckman: @jessamyn Which means technically I was born before the internet (1970)
[11:54am] jeckman: And yes, classrooms should be wired during class
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[11:54am] sc1olist: (digital natives) So far, no mention of it being useful in class to find context to what’s happening/discussed. Or that people take notes on laptops.
[11:55am] daithi: or IRC it
[11:55am] saraw1: exactly. i don’t know why professors are so threatened by it.
[11:55am] ltsui: connectivity is great for looking up things in wikipedia during class
[11:55am] saraw1: besides, what constitutes participation? Can you participate without talking? I think yes
[11:55am] sc1olist: @ltsui Exactly. ESSENTIAL in history, particularly at the graduate level.
…
[11:56am] EricaG: jassamyn, it’s so time for revolt. these aren’t supposed to be lectures.
[11:56am] jessamyn: speaking of IRCing it, does anyone have a link for THIS Scott MCloud (do I have that right?)? I keep finding the cartoonist
[11:56am] dwitzel_: shouldn’t your twitter feed count for “participation”
[11:56am] saraw1: i was in school before we had any computers in the classroom. i knew then how to feign participation/interest
[11:56am] saraw1: dwetzel-I should say so!!!!
[11:57am] jessamyn: I am trapped by my own politeness
[11:57am] fonchik: I came to college with an electric typewriter
[11:57am] saraw1: the computer has nothing to do with whether you are participating or not, nor BTW does speaking in class
…
[11:58am] sc1olist: @saraw1: I disagree on the latter, but the former is quite true. In fact, it often helps give people the confidence to talk.
…
[11:58am] alexleavitt: I don’t see why IRC shouldn’t be implemented in classroom, or at least seminar, discussion
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[11:59am] saraw1: why does speaking in class count as participation while being silently involved does not? it’s discrimination against introverts
[11:59am] alexleavitt: http://alexleavitt.com/2008/05/16/berkman10-irc-and-the-dialogue-of-education/
[11:59am] saraw1: besides, note that there is such a thing as saying something just to say it. e.g. content-free participation
…
[12:00pm] alexleavitt: most of my English teachers have counted class participation simply through attendance; class participation grades just seem to be part of the old system that needs to change
[12:00pm] daithi: @sara: it can raise interesting gender/class/social/ethnic/disability issues too, i.e. multiple options for participation can be an anti-exclusion device
[12:00pm] sc1olist: @saraw1: It’s not that it doesn’t, it’s that it’s an important part of the training that school provides–the confidence to vocalize opinions and defend them. THere’s an argument to be made for it, that’s all. Don’t completely disagree with you.
[12:00pm] saraw1: absolutely.
[12:01pm] sc1olist: @saraw1: BTW, it’s discriminatory to teach math to people who are inherently worse at quantitative methodlogy?
[12:01pm] EricaG: it’s annoying that participation measurement favors people who speak before they think over people who save their thoughts & produce analysis later, or wait to speak til they have something new or useful to say
[12:01pm] jessamyn: I have a general feeling that we measure the wrong things, in libraries this happens, no suprise in education too
[12:01pm] sc1olist: @EricaG: Yes and no. I think we don’t give professors enough credit for suggesting participation is simply quantity.
[12:01pm] saraw1: No, it is that the definition of what constitutes participation is too narrow and variable
[12:01pm] ltsui: ericag: isn’t that why we also have response papers, final papers, exams etc? i can imagine blogging (live or not) also being part of participation.
…
[12:02pm] saraw1: it’s not objective—and i don’t know that there is any correlation between someone’s arbitrary definition of participation and learning–which is, after all, the point of education
[12:02pm] EricaG: @sc1olist I remember being in classes where the number of times you spoke up was part of your participation grade, or where you could only actually get a chance to speak if you raised your hand ridiculously early
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[12:02pm] alexleavitt: so, are we going to define participation by who writes in a collaborative Google doc?
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[12:03pm] sc1olist: @EricaG: Yeah, that’s insane. And not productive for learning.
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[12:04pm] saraw1: no, until it can be shown to be objectively assessed in a fair, consistent way—and until it can be shown to have any correlation w/educational outcomes, it is not worth grading
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[12:04pm] sc1olist: @saraw1: And the same goes for paper grading? Becuase that can’t be done in a fully objective way.
…
[12:05pm] ltsui: saraw1: i do think learning to speak in public (incl classroom) should be part of an education
[12:05pm] sc1olist: @saraw1: Do you really believe that one’s ability to defend their ideas verbally is not correlated to educational outcome, or, in another word, IS itself an outcome (since it’s so directly useful in life almost regardless of the field?)
[12:06pm] alexleavitt: @Itsui: I entirely disagree. Public speaking should be a requirement in every educational institution.
[12:06pm] sc1olist: @alex: agreed.
[12:06pm] alexleavitt: @myself: don’t add in “not”s to people’s comments
[12:06pm] fonchik: Could someone in the Digital Natives session explain this discussion (someone just tweeted it) “teaching with twitter rocks”
[12:06pm] saraw1: you are reading my objection to participation grades way, way too broadly and btw discrediting the point i am trying to make by way of hyperbole
[12:07pm] ltsui: @alexleavitt: i was saying learning to speak publicly is necessary. i dont think we are disagreeing
[12:07pm] alexleavitt: @fonchik: We’re talking about using laptops in classrooms.
…
[12:07pm] EricaG: i agree people need to learn how to defend their ideas and speak confidently and extemporaneously. but that can be done by having people make presnetations and take questions, having debates, etc. rather than trying to pretend you’re measuring it quantitatively
[12:07pm] daithi: Someone said that they were encouraging students to use twitter in class, and JohnPalfrey asked who else did, and there was some murmurs
…
[12:07pm] alexleavitt: @Itsui. Re: alexleavitt: @myself
[12:07pm] saraw1: learning to speak in public and learning per se are two different things
[12:07pm] fonchik: @daithi thanks!
[12:08pm] sc1olist: @saraw: basically, the question is if we’re teaching knowledge in some existential sense, which I think is what you’re getting at with “learning” (correct me if I’m wrong) or useful skills that could be tought (learned) in school.
[12:08pm] alexleavitt: The interesting thing about using twitter during some type of lecture is that with the limitation of input, the results usually end up highlighting important, favorite, or interesting quotations (just look at the Berkman twitter feed)
[12:10pm] alexleavitt: BTW, for anyone inside or outside the Digital Natives discussion, this YouTube video is a must watch: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o (A Vision of Students Today, Michael Wesch, Kentucky State University)
[12:10pm] saraw1: i want to go back to daithi’s comments about gender/race/native language/cultural differences re-comfort w/public speaking.
…
[12:10pm] daithi: si?
[12:11pm] sc1olist: @digitalnatives talk: How is having one’s head buried in a laptop different from in a notebook? Aren’t the people who have their heads buried in laptops simple the close notetakers of the present? Same typology.
…
[12:11pm] fonchik: @ericag is this IRC getting archived somewhere somehow?
[12:11pm] saraw1: with which i completely agree. btw, I have no trouble speaking up when i have something to say.
[12:11pm] EricaG: No
[12:11pm] alexleavitt: This discussion will be copypasta-ed to my blog.
[12:11pm] • MooingLemur can provide a log.
[12:11pm] EricaG: cool
[12:11pm] daithi: i’ll give a bit more context on what i meant, look for example about the debate on dyslexia and separating out core learning outcomes (and tapering assessment to the outcomes)
[12:12pm] daithi: to avoid assessing something that’s not part of the outcomes
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[12:12pm] saraw1: but I do have a child who is brilliant but very shy. she gets 100%’s on most of her exams, knows the material cold, but gets b’s and c’s for not speaking up enough
[12:12pm] daithi: for class participation, the pedagogical question is what are you trying to communicate and measure
[12:12pm] alexleavitt: webuse.org/papers
[12:13pm] saraw1: exactly (daithi)
…
[12:14pm] saraw1: but, because she is shy, she gets b’s and c’s for not speaking enough. oh, btw, i would love to see a study measuring how often teachers called on kids with different demographic characteristics
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[12:15pm] dwitzel_: i have save a sizeable chunk of the IRC. can share somewhere
[12:15pm] sc1olist: me2
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[12:18pm] daithi: Palfrey (DigitalNatives) recommends the MacArthur/MIT Press series on digital media and learning
[12:19pm] daithi: the link is http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=170, on screen in the classroom
…
[12:23pm] dwitzel_: who is talking?
[12:23pm] dwitzel_: what university?
[12:24pm] dwitzel_: thx @alex
[12:24pm] dwitzel_: sorry — who is talking in digital natives breakout
[12:25pm] daithi: http://www.fir.unisg.ch/org/fir/web.nsf/c2d5250e0954edd3c12568e40027f306/fe9db20511dda0edc1256ae1002c64ff!OpenDocument
[12:25pm] daithi: Herbert Burkert (also http://www.herbert-burkert.net)