digital digs

Compositonal computation

So I will be doing my thing at CCCC. I believe I have the honor of being in the final session. I signed off to make my presentation more accessible, but the only way my presentation is going to be accessible to anyone at that time is if I do it in the airport terminal. What are you going to do, right?

Anyway, here's what I'm going to be looking at how mobile, computational-informational networks operate to establish the conditions of composition. I'm planning on doing a series of mobile phone composition experiments in my classes with the idea of articulating compositional computation, a heuristic for using networks to encourage invention.

Here is part of my proposal. It mentions some material familiar to this blog.

In a 2006 cTheory interview, N. Katherine Hayles remarks that postmodernism ends in April of 1995 with the development of the Netscape browser, contending that "the sense of shock that accompanied postmodernism... has now just become mundane reality." In "Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere," Hayles writes that what follows postmodernism is a post-human regime of computation: "the penetration of computational processes not only into every aspect of biological, social, economic and political realms but also into the construction of reality itself" (161). Hayles fundamentally suggests here that computation has become a metaphysic where we are no longer individual cyborgs (as in Haraway's manifesto) but rather nodes in an extensive network.

2012 composition

So I'm tapping away on my iPhone to see if I can have the will to publish something substantive this way. I suppose it's like any interface. It requires practice. And yet there would seem to be physical constraints as well: fat thumbs.

But I digress. Perhaps this is the compositional mode of the future (or at least one mode). Arguably it is the dominant mode of textual communication already with trillions of text messages sent each year, to say nothing of IM, tweets, etc. Perhaps we might say there's little of substance here, but if that's the case then it's a whole lotta nuthin'! Intimate relationships are born, maintained, and ended this way. Business deals are made everyday. And political movements operate through these little keyboards and handheld devices. The bottom line is that there are billions of these machines lying around, and as William Gibson said, the street finds its uses for these things.

iPhone musings

I've been carrying around the new iPhone for about 2.5 weeks now. So here's what I have and haven't done with it.

1. I have used it to stay in connection with my online summer course. Since the course is only five weeks (ending today), it's been fairly intense. Being able to keep up with what's going on has made it easier for me to do other things, even if it means that I don't have to get on the computer every couple hours to check on business. That's been useful.
2. Being connected to a serviceable internet is surprisingly useful. Whether its a matter of checking weather or getting directions or finding some local business. I'm sure all those also works better in more urban locales. I still find myself often in Edge service areas and there's just not a lot of social/ user-participation data out here in the sticks. As such I could see how this could be more useful.
3. Here are the applications I have used:
   
   • Weather Bug: having radar has been great with the many summer thunderstorms of central NY.
   • Pandoara/Last.fm: these music services work pretty well, especially with wi-fi. Since I'm always shuffling my iPod playlists anyway, I've gotten into listening to these customizable radio stations.
   • Google: obviously, but you can also search your contact list
   • AOL Radio: haven't used it too much yet, but you can tune into a couple hundred radio station feeds.
   • EccoNote: just downloaded this one. It allows you to record voice memos. They are promising that in a later version, you'll be able to e-mail it to yourself.
   • Nearby/Where/YPmobile: these are various ways of finding location-based information. I imagine these work better in more information-rich areas than Syracuse. Still YPmobile works fairly well for me
   • NYTimes/Mobile News: these are both good news feeds.
   • Typepad: it works well. My main issue is whether or not I want to be tapping out blog posts on the iPhone. Maybe short ones. As I said in an earlier post, it would be cool if you could quickly record and post an audio podcast.
   • Twitterific: works just as you would expect it to and I use it regularly to tweet.
   • Pownce, Facebook: I use these less but they seem to do the job as well.
   • Jott and Evernote: Still seeing if these are things I'll actually use. The Jott application seems limited to 15 seconds. If you call into Jott you can get more time, plus you can also send your Jotts to Typepad, which is kinda cool, I guess.
4. As for the built-in apps, I use the iPod all the time. I've also been using the Camera, which is better than the one I had on my old camera, except.... you can't do video (unless you jailbreak the phone). I might do that down the road. I'd like to be able to do a simple little video, upload it to YouTube and quick put it on my blog or ning site.
5. And finally I have been doing a trial version of Mobile Me. The push e-mail feature seems to work fairly well, although not as well as I would expect (it doesn't always seem to push). I like the syncing feature, the file sharing, and the back to my mac thing. But I'm not sure it's worth $99/yr. We'll see.

digital digs goes mobile

Spurred on by my own recent acquisition of an iphone, I've created a mobile version of Digital Digs (digitaldigs.mofuse.mobi) Now I just have to figure out how to detect devices and redirect folks there. There are a number of javascript options, but I don't have time right now to play with all that.

Writing from my iphone

So yes, I just got my iPhone today and downloaded the Typepad app. It's pretty cool I must say. I'm not sure how much blogging I'll do from here. But thank god for error correction!

What do you use jott? (edited)

What do you use jott for? I'm not really sure what the answer is to this question yet. I was wondering if anyone out there is using Jott and can tell me what they use it for. It seems to me that you would use it to send a message when you have very little time or if you want to send something brief and you were away from your computer. You know, I don't know why you would use Jott to send a message to Twitter rather than just sending a text message; it would seem to make more sense that you  would do that. But I guess there could be instances where you would not be able to text and would be able to call into Jott instead. I guess that's a possibility; I'll have to think about that one. The other possibility here with blogging I guess again is if you were going to send more informal.. listen

Powered by Jott

How 'bout that? (edited)

How about that? So I'm not sure exactly how much time that was before it decided that it was going to cut me off. Yeah, so I guess I'll have to look online and see what the length it is in terms of how long a Jott can be. [Turns out to be 30 seconds I believe.] But that broke me off in mid sentence of what I was going to say.  If you're using this for blogging, you'd obviously want to send a fairly short message. I'm not sure how that will work for me, because I always write longer things, even if they're not necessarily all that well revised or anything like that. So okay, and I guess we'll see what I want to do with this. And keep trying it, and find out what happens. listen

Powered by Jott

Afterword: so from my perspective I certainly wouldn't use Jott to do the kinds of blogging I normally do. That shouldn't be surprising: different technology, different compositional context/practice, different result. The Jott blog post will need to be short. Even these start to get fairly garbled. Usually a short blog post would include link. I'm not sure how I'd do that in Jott. If I figure it out, I'll post about it.

Assuming I won't be linking in a short Jott blog post, I'll need to figure out a new genre for myself. Some witty aphorisms perhaps... maybe not.

microblog compositions

Following up on my earlier post on microblogging, I saw a thread on the TechRhet listserv regarding this subject: essentially how might one use Twitter in the writing classroom?

The general consensus in the thread was that there was a potential to teach concision in the 140 character limitation of the tweet. There was also extensive comparison to the haiku. Well, a tweet may sound like its a haiku on the classic subject matter of nature or spring, but that's about as far as it goes.

Writing a short message is not the same as writing a concise message or a haiku (btw, I would not characterize haikus as concise; there's a different aesthetic @ work there).

Fortunately our students don't need to be taught how to write short messages. They probably write more than their instructors. Obviously the 140 character limit reflects the important connection between microblogging and SMS. And as we know the point of texting is not to be concise! In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. In microblogging we say anything and everything b/c it's quick, easy, and free.

A couple other observations...

Jay Bolter, locative rhetoric, and eversion

Final post catching up on Computers and Writing on Bolter's keynote speech. The bottom line is that Bolter offers a vision of inscription (of writing/composition) that lies far beyond what any but a very small group of rhet/comp faculty, even within computers and writing, are able to engage. I think it shows us a world slipping away from us and really speeding away from what institutions are able to understand and do.

But I want to speak to some of the particular details. As I've mentioned before, in an interview with Arthur Kroker, Kate Hayles somewhat playfully identifies April 1994 as the end of postmodernism, signaled by the arrival of the graphical web browser. Bolter gives a related history, a history in which he played a significant role, in the development of avant-garde hypertext fiction and early web philosophy, inspired of course by William Gibson's kenning cyberspace. As Bolter notes, the early web articulated itself as a separate space whose utopian promise lay in its ability to allow us to leave history and materiality in meat space.

And I think we all know where that dualism leads, both practically and critically/theoretically. Nowhere especially useful.

making the e-book pay off

There's been much recent discussion of Amazon's new e-book, Kindle, on KairosNews, if:Book and many other places. Apparently the device has sold well here at the start and has received more positive reviews than I've seen for past e-books. Here are what seem to be the main issues for me:

• Cost: at $400, that's a steep buy-in for a device I'm not sure I need.
• Wireless web access: It seems like the main positive of Kindle is that you get free EVDO internet access. Unfortunately, the device is designed for reading electronic books, not surfing the web. It seems like the device missed its mark! I would pay $400 for a mobile device that would bring me quality, free web access. Who would care about reading books on it!
• Proprietary book formats: Do I really need to explain why this is undesirable?

Anyway, here's how I think you get this product out to a bunch of young, tech-loving consumers. If you have electronic versions of textbooks, give students who buy the device a couple hundred bucks worth of e-book textbooks. Most students will go through that in a year. Then they'll be back next year buying more. It's not unlike the way that Microsoft gives away its Office product to students (or at least they used to when I was working at Penn St).

Personally, I don't see buying this thing. I don't have any problem accessing books in their print form. I like the idea of digital ink making the screen more readable. I really like the idea of free, cellular web access included. Perhaps when the web access is better or when the device doesn't look so clunky or when e-books start to take better advantage of the fact that they are being published in a dynamic, convergent media network rather than on paper.