Aram Squalls

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace, revised

I'm almost done with the syllabus I blogged a few weeks back. But I still need some help from all you smart folks out there. Please take a look, and let me know what I'm missing. Feel free to borrow, as well. Remember, this is for Masters students in Media, Culture and Communication.

UPDATE: Here's the final revision going into the first class:

Topics in Digital Media:

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

 

Dr. Aram Sinnreich

Description

 

Today, for the first time in history, computer-mediated culture has become mainstream for a majority of individuals in technologically developed societies. From email to texting, from online gaming to online banking, from YouTube to Hulu, from DoS attacks to Second Life sit-ins, nearly every traditional aspect of our lives has found a new expression in its digital proxy.

 

In order to understand the cultural, social, political and economic consequences of this development, we must look to the origins of today’s cyberculture, in the futuristic visions (both dystopian and utopian) that shaped the development of today’s networked technologies. We will trace the genealogy of these visions, as they developed in tandem with the growing digital communications infrastructure over the past three quarters of a century, and evolved into new forms that even the most forward-thinking of visionaries could not have predicted. Ultimately, one can argue that the Internet has both exceeded and fallen short of the hype that surrounded its birth and development, and, by comparing the myth to the reality, we may better understand what aspects of the human condition are likely to persist regardless of technological development.

 

Class will be conducted as a seminar. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the readings, and are encouraged to critically engage the readings and class conversations.

Schedule

9/9: Introduction

 

9/16: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud

 

• Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic.
  
  AND 2 OF THE FOLLOWING:
  
  
• Borges, J. L. (1941). The library of Babel.
• Rifkin, J. (1995). A view of the future. Utne Reader.
• Slouka, M. (1996). Reality is death. (from War of the Worlds)
• Leiner, et al (2000). A Brief History of the Internet.

 

9/23: The Metaverse

 

• Nelson, T. (1974). Computer lib/dream machines. [excerpt]
• Baudrillard, J. (1988). Simulacra and Simulations [excerpt]
• Dibbell, J. (2008). Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World
• Pendragon, H. (2008) Griefers: Why Dibbell’s Wired Article Was 1-Sided.

 

OR

 

• Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash (Bantam, 1992)

 

9/30: Rules and Regulation

 

• Internet Society, DNS Root Name Servers Explained for Non-Experts
• Mueller, M. (2002). Dancing the Quango: ICANN as International Regulatory Regime.
• Sinnreich & Zager (2008). E-Speech: The (Uncertain) Future of Free Expression
• Wu, T. (2005). Network neutrality, broadband discrimination.

 

OR

 

• Lawrence Lessig, Code v2 (Basic Books, 2006)

 

10/7: Freedom to Hack

GUEST: Karl Fogel, founder, questioncopyright.org

 

• Christopher Kelty (2005), Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
• NY Times (1995), A Most Wanted Cyberthief is caught in his own web.
• 2600, Interview with Kevin Mitnick (video)
• Stallman, R. GNU manifesto

 

OR

 

• Doug Thomas, Hacker Culture (U. Minn Press, 2002)
  
  

10/14: dot-com Fantasies

GUEST: Gene DeRose, CEO, HouseParty, former CEO, Jupiter Research

 

• Dyson, E. (1995). Intellectual value. Wired.
• Sinnreich, A. (2001). Remixing the Distribution Chain for Digital Music. Jupiter Research.
• Meeker, M. (1995). The Internet Report. Morgan Stanley. [Read part 1. The rest is skimmable].
• CNET, Top 10 dot-com flops

 

OR

 

• Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (Vintage Books, 1996)

 

10/21: Web 2.0

 

• Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail. Wired.
• O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0?
• Schiff, S. (2006). Know it all. The New Yorker.
• boyd, d. (2007). Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.

 

10/28: Remix/Configurable Culture

• Aram Sinnreich, Mashed Up (U. Mass Press, 2010)

 

OR

 

• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006)

 

OR

 

• Lawrence Lessig, Remix (Penguin, 2008)

 

11/4: The Cloud

 

• Downes, S. The Cloud and Collaboration
• Zittrain, J. Lost in the Cloud
• Golden, B. Clueless on the Charles: How Zittrain’s Cloud Missive Got it Wrong
• Doctorow, C. Not Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining
  
  

OPTIONAL:

 

• Google Blog, Introducing the Chrome OS
• Chappell, Windows Azure Whitepaper

 

11/11: Surveillance, Sensors and Semantics

 

• Brin, D. (1998). The transparent society.
• Berners-Lee, et al. (2001). The Semantic Web.
• Dodson, S. (2008). The Net Shapes Up to Get Physical.
• EFF, Surveillance Self-Defense Project

 

11/18: Adventures in MeatSpace

GUEST: Dennis Crowley, founder, Dodgeball.com

 

• Doctorow, C. (2004) Anda’s Game
• NY Times (2004). Quick, After Him, Pacman Went Thataway
• Laura Forlano (2010). WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place
• Area/Code, Big Games Manifesto (1 page)
• Patti Maes, The Sixth Sense (Video)

 

 

11/25: MOVIE/FIELD TRIP

 

12/2: Presentations

 

12/9: Presentations

 

FINAL PAPER DUE: 12/16

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

RIP: A Remix Manifesto -- tonight at UnionDocs

Whatever you think you're doing tonight, cancel those plans. Because Brett Gaylor's massively acclaimed documentary, RIP: A Remix Manifesto will be screening at UnionDocs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if that weren't incentive enough, you can hear me and Fred Benenson from Creative Commons talk about the social significance of remix at a panel immediately following. Serious fun. Begins at 7:30pm.

The wisdom of the anti-crowds

One of the main problems with the whole wisdom-of-the-crowds thing, as any skeptic or nonconformist knows, is that crowds can actually be pretty stupid. Not only are large groups of people acting in concert susceptible to all manner of delusion and misdirection for organizational and structural reasons (ever play a game of "telephone"?), but there's a snowball effect, where we tend to believe that if everyone else has validated an idea, it must require less scrutiny on our own parts.

Politics aside, no recent cultural trend has better exemplified this than The Secret, the asinine "self-help" book and video that's become a social phenomenon in recent years. Its central tenet appears to be (according to the proselytizers I've had to fend off; I admit to not having read it or seen it) that all you need to do to get what you want out of life is to think about it really hard, and it will just manifest. Ergo, by the law of modus tollens, if your life is shit, it's because you just haven't focused hard enough on getting good things. Sent to the ovens by Nazis? Too bad, nebbish! Laid off by your boss? Don't blame AIG, blame yourself! Laid out flat for months with a neurological disorder? Think yourself healthy! Etc.

Needless to say, this bit of severely counterproductive flimflam has been selling like hotcakes for the last few years; the book is currently ranked #62 on Amazon, and 5-star ratings beat out 1-star ratings by a factor of over 2:1.

Thank goodness, then, that hilarious stealth critics like Ari Brouillette are using a wisdom-of-the-crowd apparatus -- the Amazon user review -- to subvert the system's logic, writing gloriously absurdist reviews for everything from The Secret to a water bucket. He's been at this for years, as have countless other members of wise anti-crowds, injecting skepticism, silliness and critique into a system structurally built to ignore or sideline dissent.

And kudos to the 6,624 of 6,775 people who found Brouillette's review of The Secret "helpful" -- I proudly count myself among them.

Here's a snippet of Brouillette's tongue-deep-in-cheek water bucket review:

At first glance the Dover Parkerburg 610 is clearly a step above the competition, the smooth galvanized exterior is indicative of the more modern electrocoat process which produces much less surface bubbling and insures a uniform surface. Jagged Edges? Not on this baby! Also of note are the two horizontal ripples which are placed 6 inches from the base. A simple structural analysis and crush test showed the slight corragative additions to be more than simple decorations, they actually produce an increase in tensile strength of 35.8% when compared to smooth walled galvanized buckets of the same carrying capacity.

4 Swedes sentenced to jail for pointing at stuff

This just in: four founders of Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay have each been sentenced to a year in jail, and have been assessed an additional fine of $3.6 million.

The PirateBay never copied, hosted, or distributed any copyrighted material. All the site did was provide a search engine indexing and linking to text files known as "torrents" that provided instructions to users about how to share specific pieces of content (some copyrighted, others legally free to distribute). In other words, it didn't do anything different than Google, Yahoo, or a million other indexes of Internet content.

Not only does this ruling pose a tremendous potential chilling effect to free speech, it also marks a problematic incursion of U.S. industry and legal institutions into foreign markets and sovereignties.

And here's the icing on the cake: although people certainly used the Pirate Bay to download tons of unpermissioned copyrighted material, the jailing of its founders won't even mark a blip in the inevitable transformation of the media industry from a retail to a service model. In plainer English, the record labels and movie studios won't save a single, solitary dime as a result of this verdict.

Everyone with a brain in the media industry (a surprisingly large subset) knows that the traditional models of remuneration are over, and there's no turning back. Information goods are transforming into something more akin to a utility -- a fact the labels and studios are acknowledging by attempting to license at the ISP level, and supporting ever more on-demand services, from Netflix to Hulu to Spotify. Furthermore, recorded music is increasingly seen even within the industry as a marketing tool for the really profitable touring and merchandising industries. Warner Music Group has tacitly acknowledged this by announcing last year that all new artist contracts will be "360 deals," in which the label participates in the full gamut of a recording artist's revenues, far beyond simply keeping the wholesale on record retail.

So if the labels and studios are resigned to the structural changes of their industries, and the closure of a BitTorrent tracker will have zero effect on revenues, what's the reason for this trial, and for the amazingly punitive sentence? Pure and simple: the Pirate Bay founders are being hanged as an effigy for all of us. This is a pure act of spectacle, calculated to make us, the world citizens of digital culture, frightened and guilty for our sin of independence.

The only question is: will it work, or will the backlash catalyze an even greater revolt against the dominance of the gatekeepers?

New research: Playing music synchs your brainwaves

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute an the University of Salzburg just published new research in BMC Neuroscience demonstrating something that music makers have known for time immemorial: playing music together makes your brainwaves synch up. And the longer you play together, the more synchronized your brainwaves become.

As I argue in my doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, this facet of the musical experience is precisely what makes it such an effective tool for communicating -- and monitoring -- social organizational ideas. Put in other words, the act of making music together is not only analogous to, but constituent of, the act of producing society.

There's a pretty nifty video here showing the EEGs side-by-side with performance footage. Unfortunately, there's no embed link.

In defense of Songsmith

For the last week or so, there's been a little tizzy in a teapot among the music nerd informatosphere about Microsoft's brilliantly/awfully-marketed Songsmith software (see trailer below), which essentially "composes" on-the-fly, karaoke-style accompaniment to any song you sing into your computer mic.

Most of the commentary has followed Valleywag's excoriation, proclaiming Songsmith the final death knell for human culture, etc. etc.

I respectfully disagree.

First of all, you can't kill something that's dead already. What universe do you have to live in to believe that Songsmith poses a credible threat to "legitimate" music production? The radio, television, internet, and every public space are currently awash in a cacophony of computer-generated, market-researched, auto-tuned, HSS-approved, virtually identical songs, produced by the same handful of engineers, for an ostensibly diverse group of artists, genres and programming formats. Everything is already compressed to hell, as well, adding dynamic flatness to the aesthetic sameness. So I fail to see how this meager intervention by Microsoft could really make things any worse, sonically.

Second of all, despite all of the factors I mentioned above, music isn't dead -- in fact, it's thriving. Never in the history of industrialized society has there been such a broad range of sonic material available at our beck and call, and never in the history of the modern music industry have musicians had so many opportunities to share their work with potential listeners. In fact, some of the most interesting work being made and shared today begins with the insipid songs and tools I have mentioned, and uses them in unintended, unofficial, critical, and resistant ways. This includes lo-fi goofing around, such as creative karaoke, as well as an efflorescence of mash-ups, remixes, glitch and the like. Valleywag untintentionally cops to this in its post, by sharing a bunch of videos in which people have run a capella versions of much-loved pop songs through Songsmith, and paired the result with the original video for the song (The Police's Roxanne, brilliantly songsmithed, is embedded below). In other words, Songsmith may be evil, but its evil may be used for good.

Finally, I am always wary of people who react to any democratizing technology by bemoaning loss of standards and quality; they sound a bit too much like Habermas bitching about the public sphere. Far too many erstwhile defenders of goodness and beauty are slaveowners in liberators' garb, too busy saving us from ourselves to give us the room to save ourselves. The truth is that most people these days don't know how to make music with instruments. It's a damnable shame, but that's how it is, and we can blame everyone -- the government, the schools, the recording industry -- except the people themselves. Clearly, a great many people remain very interested in producing their own life soundtracks rather than buying them ready-made, and I say more power to them. Any tool that helps them move towards this goal is a good tool. And if Songsmith isn't up to the challenge, someone else will come along and offer a better tool (unless Microsoft owns so many patents they effectively chill innovation).

Anwyay, that's my rant. Take a look at the videos below. Buy the software or download a hack, and play with it. Decide for yourself before you start writing society's epitaph.


Songsmith commercial:

"Roxanne," Songsmithed:

The teen social networks gospel (according to danah)

My friend danah boyd, who recently received her doctorate from Berkeley's Information School, just made her dissertation available online. I haven't read it yet, but I've spent a lot of time reading her past work, and sharing panels with her at conferences, so I'm confident it's a doozy. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this will very likely emerge as the definitive academic work on social networks from the Web 2.0 era. I can't think of anyone else (except maybe her mentor, Mimi Ito) who's done so much solid ethnographic work on teens and online community.

I have a feeling I'll be assigning sections of this in many classes to come...

Here's the details:

"Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics"

http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

Obama, the Mash-up President

Smarter folks than me have long realized that musical innovation often seems to precede social and political change. Even back in the day, Plato warned that "when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."

A large portion of my research in recent years has attempted to apply this premise to new forms of digital and sample-based music, especially the mash-up -- a musical form that combines several preexisting recordings into a new composition/performance that is both completely derivative and completely original.

Today, basking in the glow of last night's ecstatic coup d'etat, it occurred to me that Barack Obama's ascent to the presidency is (thus far) the defining political manifestation of the mash-up aesthetic/ethic. Or, to put it another way, the man is himself a walking mash-up.

Obviously, there's the racial angle -- with a black African father and a white Kansan mother, he is a living rejection of the American racial binary. By the way, this transgressing of ethnic and cultural lines is also a fundamental, and conscious, goal of the mash-up ethic. As DJ Adrian of Bootie told me, "The audience [at our club] is so mashed up, like the music, and that’s [what] we’re most proud of."

But there are other mashed-up aspects of Obama, as well. His rhetoric is equal parts MLK and Harvard Law. His social agenda combines the "personal responsibility" and "family values" mantras of mainstream (pre-Bush) conservativism with pro-choice, pro-civil rights liberalism. His persona is both young and old, immigrant and native son, Christian, Muslim, and rational humanist. He is both a political insider, a scion of the Chicago Democratic machine, and consummate outsider, a first-term senator with a platform built on "change." He is from Hawaii, Kansas, Illinois, Kenya, and Indonesia. He is both "Barry" and "Hussein."

Critics have suggested that Obama's multifacetedness is just a blind, that he's a chimerical Zelig figure, a screen against which we hopeless optimists project our wildest fantasies.

Maybe.

But I think he's more mash-up than chimera. Like "Smells Like Booty," "Careless or Dead," or -- most obviously -- the Grey Album, Obama is far more than the sum of his parts. His unique juxtaposition of cultural and political logics creates a meta-logic that reveals the deeper truths uniting these seemingly disparate strands, and exposes some of our deepest beliefs to be nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecies of self-negation.

Our categories have bound us for too long. It's time for us to become a full-spectrum society, made of fully realized individuals. Mash-ups give us a template for understanding how society needs to evolve, and Obama has given us the hope that we can get there.

Griefers: The Anti-Situationists?

For my masters course in digital media yesterday, I assigned Julian Dibbell's excellent, if flawed, Wired article on griefers, as well as a few critiques of the article.

As often happens with grad classes, I felt that my students had an excellent understanding of the subject matter, but not much historical contextualization.

I thought it would be interesting to discuss the griefer methodology, namely interrupting the normal flow of behaviors and protocols in online social environments, as a descendant of Guy Debord and the Situationists. (Similarly, my friends and colleagues Doug Thomas and Biella Coleman have both chronicled the Yippie origins of the hacker movement).

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that griefers are really anti-situationists. What do I mean by this? Dubord and company were revolutionaries, attempting to forge a "new culture, independent of the political and union organizations which currently exist," through their theatrical disruptions. By contrast, griefers are (mostly) a bunch of white, male, middle-class, middle-Americans who use racist avatars (such as the "Patriotic Nigras") to disrupt furries, fantasists, and other "deviants" and dreamers from enacting their alternative lifestyles online.

In other words, griefers use the methods of the Situationists, and the tools of hackers, to enact a reactionary political agenda that is anathema to the Situationist movement, and to most hacker cultures. In a way, they are almost agents-provocateur, giving a bad name to the online environments and communities which threaten their "real world" hegemonic power.

In a way, then, the Situationist claim that we should treasure "the value of the game, of life freely constructed" is opposite in both literal meaning and political valence to the griefer battle cry that "the Internet is serious business."

Just a thought, at the moment, but hopefully when I get a little time, I can work this up into a more formal journal article.