As I look over our assigned readings this week, it strikes me that the app is a distinct medium for structuring and interacting with content.
Apps can act as filters that help us to curate relevant content from the Web. For example, the Navigation app presents only the information I need: directions for the shortest route from starting point to destination. The Wikipedia app brings me right to that site, filtering out the rest of the Web.
The desktop or laptop PC is my native digital environment. Even though I have a Washington Post app on my phone, I tend to read the mobile version of the Post website on my phone's browser instead of using the app. The same goes for Wikipedia. I'm so accustomed to accessing the Web through a browser that using a site-specific app doesn't even occur to me.
Hence, of all the apps I've used, my favorite is the browser, which lets me do what I want and then gets out of the way. The browser's UI is minimalistic, consisting mainly of a search/address bar and the area where Web pages are displayed. I can access the mobile version of any Web site, and in a pinch, I can access pages originally designed for a full-sized computer, zooming in and out as necessary.
So far, I've been less than enamored of apps that are more specific to particular Web sites or platforms. An app, as I said, imposes its own structure on the Web. I prefer to use the browser, which gives me the most freedom and versatility to use the Web as I please.
My smartphone is the LG Optimus Elite ... unfortunately not named the Optimus Prime. Although that's what I call it in my head.
The biggest problem with my smartphone is the slow Virgin Mobile (Sprint) 3G network to which it connects. And it always takes forever to find a satellite for GPS when I use the Navigation app. Still, I use a few apps regularly:
Web browser
Facebook
Gmail and email
Navigation and maps
And ... that's about it. In the past, I've used my phone to play games or to log my work-outs/runs, but I only really use the four apps above. I rely on my laptop for the most part. The full-size keyboard is important to me, and the full-size monitor is better for reading or watching videos.
I don't know who this man is, but I agree with him.
hitRECord is similar to Baraniuk's idea of open-source learning, in that it depends on a lot of people doing a lot of work for free.
Looking over hitRECord, I am amazed by the sheer amount of work people are willing to do without being paid. Even a trite two-minute animated video takes an enormous amount of skill and hard work to put together.
So many amateurs are doing professional-level work, and so many professionals areworking at the amateur rate (i.e., $0).
Meanwhile, the social media platforms that host this work get rich.
It boggles my mind.
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Why are so many people willing to do so much work for free?
Why are so many people willing do to so much work for free?
Do you know what Richard Baraniuk's concept of open-source learning really means?
Here's a hint:
Open-source learning means that scholars and professionals contribute their expertise ... for free.
I just don't get it. Underneath all the talk of "knowledge ecosystems" and "sharing" and "creativity" and "collaboration," what's going on is that highly-qualified people are doing huge amounts of work without being paid.
This model is not sustainable.
Open-source textbooks can only exist because somebody else is paying these scholars and professionals. If all education becomes open-source and the university as we knows it ceases to exist, then open-source learning companies like Baraniuk's Connexions will find that their contributors can no longer afford to write for free.
Think about it this way. Scholars are able to contribute to open-source textbooks because of their paid careers as professors or researchers. Universities basically subsidize scholars so that they can spend their time thinking.
But the university is the opposite of open-source: Universities are all about controlling access. By conferring degrees, the university controls access to different levels of society. In other words, the university's existence depends on the restricted flow of power/knowledge.
If universities weren't around, then all research would have to be funded by corporations. (The government also provides research funding, but that funding goes either to universities or to private companies; without universities, most government research funding would go to private companies.) Just like the university, the corporation is all about controlling access. Think about patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property. Corporations make their money by controlling the flow of information.
So what's my point? The knowledge that gets included in open-source textbooks was originally discovered by people, either in academe or the private sector, who were paid to come up with that knowledge. Hence, a free, open-source textbook is only able to codify knowledge that has already been created. For new knowledge to be created, people need to keep being paid for their thinking!
The "long tail," which Baraniuk describes at 10 minutes into the presentation, is a red herring. The long tail does not produce enough revenue for people to be able to support themselves. The long tail might produce enough revenue to pay the Web hosting expenses for a site like Connexions, but could Connexions really afford to pay a full-time salary to dozens or hundreds of contributors? Not likely.
Notice how, at about 6 minutes into his presentation, Baraniuk says a "team of volunteers ... graduate students" was responsible for translating a textbook. The exploitation of free labor: That's what open-source learning is all about.
Anyone else notice the hitRECord monetization page? For a legal document, it's pretty easy to read. In case you haven't look at the page yet, here's a one-sentence summary:
hitRECord can make money off anything you have ever uploaded, paying you whatever percentage of the profits it wants.
Now let's look at the page in a little more detail. Here's a step-by-step summary:
If the hitRECord.org "Operating Committee" decides to monetize a song, video, or whatever else you've uploaded, it will let you know. But, hitRECord does not need your permission and has the right to modify your content however it wants.
Who is the "Operating Committee"? It could be a single person, or it might have multiple members; either way, hitRECord has "sole discretion" over who sits on it.
Anything uploaded to hitRECord.org is eligible to be monetized.
Once hitRECord starts making money from your work, it will put half of that money into a "Contributing Artists Profit Pool."
If more than one artist was involved in making the content, hitRECord will decide how to divide the Profit Pool among artists.
Until the Profit Pool grows to at least $500, artists will be paid nothing.
You can complain to hitRECord if you're not happy with your percentage, but hitRECord doesn't have to listen.
What I'm wondering is: What happens when hitRECord starts displaying advertisements? Will artists be eligible for half of advertising revenue? If so, hitRECord will have a much fairer system than Facebook (which shares 0% of advertising revenue with users) or YouTube (which shares a very small percentage of advertising revenue with its most popular users).
Regardless, though, you give hitRECord a lot of control over anything you upload. They, not you, have the final say over what is done with your content. And even if you take your content down, hitRECord retains a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right" to any text, music, videos, or anything else you have ever uploaded.
Of course, the same thing is true of Facebook, Twitter, and ... yes ... Tumblr. It's not that hitRECord is uniquely bad. In fact, it's better than many other social media platforms. But I would like to see a platform where produsers keep most of the money from their own content, not just a small fraction of it.
In this entry, I'll talk about two hitRECords with only one message (and style) between them.
First: The Man with a Turnip for a Head
Sorry, but the turnip-head in the video isn't nearly as riveting as the turnip-head in this picture.
Elements of "The Man with a Turnip for a Head":
Narrator: Somewhat stuffy, British-sounding.
Subject Matter: Tells the story of a man with a turnip for a head.
Illustration Style: Fanciful.
Theme: The virtues of individualism. ("One cannot win when ashamed of one's natural quirks. So parade them with pride; never hide them inside for fear of offending life's jerks.")
Second: Outsiders Creation Myth
Angel from video
Features of "Outsiders Creation Myth":
Narrator: Stuffy, British-sounding.
Subject Matter: Tells the story of angels who "crafted new beings" to make pretty shapes.
Illustration Style: Fanciful.
Theme: The virtues of individualism. (People should "burst through the lines" rather than "never altering their course.")
Notice any similarities?
In Western culture, individualism is an orthodox belief. Free choice, "being yourself," "coloring outside the lines" ... I think anyone who grows up watching TV, especially in America, is inundated with these messages from childhood onward.
Not that I disagree with the idea of "being yourself"--how could I? And that's my point: Today, it is completely uncontroversial to say that people should express themselves freely.
The "Turnip" video was presented at Sundance 2012. The "Outsiders Creation Myth" is a featured record. Both videos, then, have attracted attention, and I wonder: "Why?" I guess that viewers have an insatiable appetite for the same old message, repeated again and again and again with very little variation.
Internet commentators have mastered the animosity-infused non sequitur. Consider a recent Washington Post article about Hurricane Sandy. Here are two representative examples of comments this article has attracted:
1. notintn says:
The approaching 'SANDY' is wiping out the Obama-NorthEast Corridor.
"Behold His Mighty Hand."
2. chuckterzella1 is quick to erect a strawman:
Sandy is ALL Obama's fault...you just watch- Limbaugh and FOX WILL SOON EXPLAIN WHY.
With the presidential election about a week away, these comments speak to a timely exigence ... but kairotically, they fail, because they're not addressing the same exigence as the article to which they're appended.
I have chosen to analyze comments posted about an article by Michael Hirschorn called "Truth Lies Here," to which I alluded in my post about Alicia Shepard's article. I hope you'll give that post a look before proceeding through this one.
Building on that post, I'm going to take Shepard's ideas--along with my reaction to her ideas--and apply them to comments posted about "Truth Lies Here." Hirschorn describes how a group calling itself the Digg Patriots conspired to bring right-wing content to the fore on social networking site Digg while suppressing left-leaning content. Digg's content-ranking mechanism (which has since been modified) allowed, at the time, for concerted effort by the Patriots to outweigh the "diggs" (votes up) and "buries" (vote down) of lone users.
Pertinently, Sheppard points out that "many, not all, comment sections are an exercise in faux democracy," where a raucous minority shouts down the muted majority. On a site where users vote content up or down, this dynamic becomes particularly pronounced.
Yet the comments posted to Hirschorn's very article show that online discourse can be reasoned and civil but still impassioned. A few of the comments are onymous (associated with the writer's real name), but most of them are pseudonymous.
The top comment, with 33 upvotes, reads (in part; truncated for length):
This strikes me as a completely one-sided scolding of conservatives for excessive partisanship without even a trace of self-awareness. ... Maybe I'm misjudging you. All I can say is I see little effort at balance here. If you're ever interested in hearing another side of the story, and maybe having a real conversation about some of these points, I'd be happy to oblige. Believe it or not, there really is another side to this story.
This commentator, despite disagreeing with Hirschorn, extends the benefit of the doubt to him, and the commentator's offer to explain "another side of the story" seems to be made in good faith.
I do not mean to imply that a lone example of a fair, thought-out comment disproves Shepard's contention that anonymity debases discourse. Indeed, one reply to this comment aims to be pithy rather than to participate in a dialogue. It reads:
There is a reason why only 6% of all scientists are Republican. Stating this as it is is not biased, it is reality.
And of course, nastiness can find expression in response to even the most reasoned post. Another reply reads:
Despicable Hirschorn has written a despicable slanderous broadside, in character with his previous rants. And he wonders why readership of "mainstream press" is dropping so precipitously.
For the most part, though, comments to this article make substantive points, even when commentators enter into vigorous disputes. I must acknowledge, though, that many of the more substantive comments are onymous rather than pseudonymous; the top comment is attributed to John Sexton, while the "despicable Hirschorn" comment is attributed to genetics73.
Alicia Shepard's article "Online Comments: Dialogue or Diatribe?" is centered around a question:
Would Boulder Dude [and other pseudonymous online users who post abusive comments online] be so cutting, ugly or mean-spirited if he had to use his real name?
Shepard believes not. She contends that anonymity emboldens produsers to be vicious and even brutal, and she proposes that commenting accounts on NPR and elsewhere be linked to Facebook, "where the ethos is that people are known as who they are in real life." As Shepard acknowledges, sufficiently determined produsers can falsify their identities even on a site like Facebook. Still, such a measure would erect an additional barrier against abusive commentators; for many of them, the inconvenience of making a fake Facebook would outweigh the impish glee of posting mean comments.
This kind of commenting does not necessarily constitute trolling. Trolls make nasty posts online with the intent of derailing conversations and provoking the consternation of other users. Out of the "thousands" of critical or insulting comments that Shepard says she has received, many were doubtless motivated by a desire to air what the commentators saw as legitimate grievances against Shepard and NPR. Shepard does assert that these "messages are often rude and accusatory; they indicate little interest in joining a conversation," suggesting that she sees idle malice as the motive fueling the flames sent her way. Yet ferreting authorial intent out of a text is problematic; a text is not like a conversation, where tone of voice and other aspects of embodiment help the audience to discern the speaker's intent. (Although a text, being a corpus in itself, might be argued to possess qualities analogous to a speaker's self-presentation.)
I would like to pause, here, and introduce a word not often seen: onymous. Anonymous stems from the Greek onoma, which means "name." Anonymous, thus, means "without a name." Keeping in mind that an author is a classificatory rhetorical device, whereas a writer is an embodied person, I will use onymous to refer to any author who shares the name of the embodied person who wrote the text.
Regardless of whether any particular commentator intends to troll, Shepard's point stands: a link between online identity and embodied meatspace identity is likely to foster greater civility and self-censorship. Arguments between onymous users are unlikely to lapse into the viciousness that often characterizes anonymous discourse.
Shepard's piece brings to mind an article by Michael Hirschorn called "Truth Lies Here" that ran in The Atlantic a couple years ago. Both articles address the distorting effect that anonymity--really, pseudonymity--has on discourse. I'll be looking at "Truth Lies Here" in my next blog post.
Bogost's central contention is that some "games use procedurality to make claims about the cultural, social, or material aspects of human experience." In playing through such a game, a player receives the message embedded in it. I agree with Bogost in this respect, but I believe he is too hasty in attempting to theorize procedurality as something distinct from other types of rhetoric.
The (Supposed) Difference between Video Games and Visual Rhetoric
Bogost declares that "in procedural media like video games, images are frequently constructed, selected, or sequenced in code, making the stock tools of visual rhetoric inadequate." Yet any content, visual or verbal, is similarly encoded. Online, text and images are encoded in HTML, in Flash, and in other programming languages. Offline, the very act of inscription "construct[s]" and "sequence[s]" words or images onto a piece of paper (and, more importantly, in the reader's mind). As far as "select[ion]," a reader may choose to read through a text in any order, or to look only at the pictures in a magazine. All content is encoded, and there is an element of procedurality in all rhetoric.
Audience Involvement
A video game does require a different kind of audience involvement than do television shows and other visual media. The course of a game changes based on a player's choices, which is not the case in other forms of rhetoric (excepting choose-your-own adventure novels, i.e. storygames). Yet particularly among younger players, moving through a game can become a rote reenactment of the choices prescribed by the game-maker. So-called strategy guides and walkthroughs tell a player exactly what moves to make in order to win a game. These guides are quite popular.
Indeed, even when a player beats a game using his/her own wits and not a walkthrough, the goal of gameplay is to figure out what the game-maker wants you to do.
Gameplay is Prescriptive--Even Normative
Gameplay is a matter of discovering what choices a game's design rewards, particularly in single-player games. Online role-playing games and virtual worlds such as Second Life offer more flexibility, but as in Bogost's example of Animal Crossing, in-game point or money systems still encourage certain player behaviors. Bogost puts it well when he says that games constitute "possibility spaces" bounded by procedural constraints.
I agree with Bogost that they extend literacy and can be an effective medium for questioning ideology. As Bogost says, "Video games have the power to make arguments, to persuade, to express ideas." This essay convinces me that video games can be considered as persuasive and identificatory rhetoric, just like novels and other immersive media. But I do not find games to be a radical departure from other kinds of rhetoric.
The Greater, Greater Washington blog held a contest for maps of the Washington, D.C., metro system. Two entries demonstrate the liberties that mapmakers can take—and the functional effect these choices have.
Above: a map that dispenses with geography altogether.
This map encourages the reader/navigator to think of metro stops purely in terms of their sequence rather than their distance.
Sequential rather than spatial thinking makes sense for metro riders. After all, what a metro rider most wants to know, when consulting a map, is, "What stop is next?" and "How many stops until my destination?" The kind of information a geographic map gives--e.g., whether a destination is two blocks or two miles away--is not nearly as important when riding the metro as when driving or walking.
The Greater, Greater Washington blog held a contest for maps of the Washington, D.C., metro system. Two entries demonstrate the liberties that mapmakers can take--and the functional effect these choices have.
First, a geographic map. The different lines of the Washington, D.C., metro system are superimposed onto a geographic map of the region. As I will discuss in my next post, a geographic map is not terribly pertinent to a metro passenger; it contains extraneous information, bogging down a reader/navigator who just wants to know, "What's the next stop?"
[T]he cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)
…
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory–precession of simulacra–that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.
An understanding of Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyper-reality is key to thoughtfully approaching maps. Baudrillard's fable, quoted above, about an empire buried under its own map is particularly relevant.
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