Aram Squalls

Awesome new video game magazine needs your seed capital

My friend Jamin just sent me this: a very cool-looking new magazine project called "Kill Screen," dedicated to video game culture and commentary. Along with Jamin, who covers games for the Wall St. Journal, other contributors include writers for The New Yorker, GQ, the Daily Show, Christian Science Monitor, LA Times, the Colbert Report, the Onion, and Paste.

They're aiming for $3,500 in startup capital and are about halfway there. Your pledge can help push things over the line.

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.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

One of my former students, a copyright scholar and photographer named Daniela, just sent me a link to this on Twitter:

Apparently blogger Leo Babauta, who used the hoary old chestnut "feel the fear and do it anyway" as a post title, was shortly thereafter contacted by legal thugs representing Susan Jeffers, PhD., who apparently wrote a book by the same title.

Jeffers' thugs want Babauta to acknowledge on his blog that this well-known idiomatic phrase is now the exclusive trademark of Dr. Jeffers. Babauta isn't capitulating. In support of Babauta's cause, I am using the phrase as the title of this post, and encourage you all to do the same. The only solution to the absurd proprietization of language and culture is to stand up for our rights to free expression, even if it means using a stupid phrase that's practically meaningless as a blog post title.

If you're interested in some legal backstory, or feel like being galled by some ridiculous corporate overreaching in the privatization of public culture, check out David Bollier's excellent book, Brand Name Bullies.

A light at the end of the fiber?

As news and evidence of the rapidly imploding global economy continue to assault us from every angle, it's natural to feel blue, or even panicked. But before you finish sealing off the blast door on your bunker, make sure you download some good reading material.

If there's a way out of this mess, it's going to have something to do with using all of these nifty communication tools we've developed in recent years to jumpstart the global economy, catalyze innovation, and resequence the entire production process. This can be a daunting task, to say the least, but one thing we know for sure is that it requires an intelligent reassessment of communication policy and economics. Fortunately, two prominent scholars, Peter F. Cowhey and Jonathan D. Aronson, have just released what looks like an excellent book outlining their strategy for a way forward.

I knew Jonathan pretty well when I was at USC. He's the real deal, both pragmatic and visionary. I'm looking foward to reading the book, and you should, too, if you have any wonk at all in your DNA. Fortunately, it's been released for free in PDF format, under a Creative Commons license, so you have no excuse not to.

The mother of all mash-ups

Marissa just sent me a link to Thru-You.com, a site where YouTube videos are mashed up into gloriously harmonic amalgams. I'm only on the second video, but I'm already very, very happy.

Broken industries, fractured lives

I recently saw an old friend of mine, Norm Savage, after about 10 years without contact. He's a writer -- of the post-beat, neo-romantic, soul-searching, confessional variety (although he'd hate being classified this way, I'm sure). He wanted to talk with me about using the Internet to self-publish.

Norm had been a hair's breadth away from landing a big publishing contract with FSG for his powerful memoir of diabetes and heroin addiction, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic, which had been about 25 years in the works. Just before the paperwork went through, the economic downturn shook up the market, and his editor got canned. She recommended he wait until she landed somewhere else, and publish with her there, but Norm just couldn't wait any longer. After a quarter of a century of masochistic labor, he wanted his words out in the world.

Despite my frequent championing of participatory culture, I have to admit I was a little skeptical about self-publishing on a site like SmashWords. I've been more successfully brainwashed by the traditional cultural gatekeepers than I like to admit, and for me (an aspiring book author myself), the concept was tainted with the odor of "vanity publishing" -- narcissistic, self-deluded, amateurish, delusional, desperate, etc. After all, FSG is the top of the heap publishingwise, and SmashWords just seemed to be such a tragic fall from grace.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a ridiculous point of view that is. I've read drafts of Norm's book, as well as other work of his, and I know that his story is one that needs to be told, and that his style is one that needs to be read. His book is deep, powerful, painful -- in a word, human. If the traditional publishing industry is so dysfunctional they can't serve as a conduit for writers of Norm's caliber to reach potential readers, then maybe we readers and authors should let them die -- and switch our focus to publishers like SmashWords. Don't get me wrong -- I love the stuff that FSG puts out, from their cover designs to their content. It's just that, knowing the specifics of this case, I can imagine all the other innovative and valuable books they and the other publishing houses are failing to put out.

I'd never purchased a book on SmashWords before, but I just bought Junk Sick. It only costs $2.99, and for that price, I can read it in every imaginable digital format, from HTML to PDF to EPUB. And it's DRM-free, so I won't have the amazingly frustrating experience of being locked out of my own library by a stupid robot, which ended my brief sojourn into ebook-purchasing a few years back.

If you're at all interested in the psychological and social dimensions of diabetes, addiction, writing, sex, music, loneliness, pain, friendship, art, introspection, exhibitionism, love and fear, you should seriously consider buying this book. SmashWords will even let you read the first 35% of it for free. Or you could read an interview with Norm at the SmashWords blog, which will give you a pretty good sense of his character, his story, and his relationship to language.

Norm also publishes his own blog, which is basically fragments of his new book-in-progress, posted as he writes them. It's called The Savage Diabetic.

New Biggish Idea: Pandora for Politics

I spent Saturday at Columbia University, attending a mini-conference devoted to the subject of the disintegrating news industry and the future of the American public sphere. Despite never once getting called upon in 6 hours of hand-raising, and having to listen to some less-than-informed comparisons between the news industry and the music industry, it was a pretty interesting event, and I met some very smart and cool people.

One of the interesting ideas that came out of the conference was generated by me and Jack Balkin, in response to a talk by Bruno Latour about the negative effect of "attention deficit" on civic participation. In its essence, the idea is this:

THE PROBLEM:

• It's difficult for even a civically-engaged person to develop confident opinions about a broad range of political issues, mostly due to our limited attention and resources.
• This difficulty is exacerbated by (a) the dwindling resources of the professional journalism industry, and (b) the increasing [perceived] partisanship of the mainstream media, which reduce both salient information and the vital bond of trust between information-seekers and providers
• The result is increasing homogenization/polarizing of platforms, and civic disengagement

A SOLUTION:

• A recommendation engine for political facts/opinions/news that captures and reflects the underlying value systems that drive civic engagement by individuals, and delivers customized political information to those who seek it

The reason I cited Pandora specifically at the conference (when I finally stopped waiting to get called on and just started talking) is that I believe its tag-based database infrastructure, which charts the relationships between the intrinsic qualities of songs, rather than between their audiences, provides a promising alternative to more traditional collaborative-filtering recommendation techniques. Whether applied to music or politics, collaborative filtering tends to have an "echo chamber" effect, reinforcing the "tyranny of the majority" and supporting traditional generic categorizations. In politics, its effect would be to provide obvious recommendations that already match the reductionist platforms of the two major parties for most users. A Pandora-style architecture, on the other hand, would have the plasticity and nuance to deliver counter-intuitive news and information. Just as the music site now offers recommendations that fall outside of people's established generic preferences, a political version might offer Republican points-of-view to Democrats (or vice-versa) much more frequently, and accurately to the needs of individual users.

The problem with adopting the Pandora model whole-cloth would be its reliance on experts; its database is populated by a team of highly-specialized music analysts, who apply their expertise to the coding process. Clearly, to put a political recommendation engine in the hands of such "experts" would be problematic for several reasons -- the most important of which would be that they would provide the same reductionist coding as a collaborative-filtering engine, being steeped in the dominant Manichaean political framework. Much more useful (not to mention more robust, less expensive, more timely, etc) would be to crowdsource the database generation using a process similar to Wikipedia's.

So, in short, the political engine would use:

• Wikipedia-style data generation and management
• Pandora-style database architecture and processing
• Newsreader-style, queryable front-end..? (not so sure about this part yet)

The other benefit of this system would be that the degree of complexity introduced by processual firewall between data generation and database analysis would limit the potential for hacking, google-bombing, SEO, or whatever you want to call "tipping the electronic scales." In other words, if well-designed, it would be very difficult for a third party to pre-determine the opinion and data retrieved by any given individual -- just as Pandora is more or less immune to record label promotional efforts (they could, of course, accept payola and hack their own database, but founder Tim Westergren is vociferously against such meddling, even if it would save his business from going under).

Clearly, there's even more to it than this (the idea kind of sprung wholly-grown like Athena), but these are the rudiments. I've discussed it with a few smart people in the past 2 days, and everyone thinks I should try and build it... Comments? Suggestions?

#*!@&%ing with The Count

This isn't particularly clever, or even new, but when my family and I needed a laugh this weekend, this video came through like gangbusters.

Amazing what a little creative censorship can add... your brain fills in the naughty parts, making it far funnier than either the pre-censored version, or any actual dirty version could be. Kind of like the way revealing underwear can make someone look sexier than they do in the nude. Thanks, brain! And thanks, cousin Mark!