Aram Sinnreich

MediaCon Panel with Trevor Pinch & DJ Spooky (audio)

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I. 

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

ExtendingPlay_Keynote_Sinnreich_Pinch_Miller

 

 

Aram's Keynote on Remix Ethics at DMY Berlin [video + slides]

A few days ago, I gave a keynote speech at DMY Berlin's Copy/Culture Symposium. The subject was the ethics of configurable culture, and the ways in which our cultural norms and expectations are increasingly more complex than -- and in conflict with -- our intellectual property laws.

Although the presentation drew on themes I've discussed in previously published work and presentations, it featured brand new qualitative and quantitative data from a survey I recently fielded with Mark Latonero and Marissa Gluck. My audience was largely design professionals, so I tried to keep the academic jargon to a minimum.

Here's a link to the video:

(Unfortunately, the engineer screwed up and for a few minutes, this video relies on the room microphone instead of my direct mic).

If you'd like to follow along at home, here's a link to my PowerPoint presentation:

New draft syllabus for "Visions & Revisions of Cyberspace"

I taught this course as a Masters-level class at NYU a year ago, and the syllabus worked very nicely. Now, my challenge has been to improve, update and upgrade it for my Ph.D. students at Rutgers. I think it's pretty good, but please weigh in and let me know how I can make it better (especially you, former students of mine!) (UPDATED 8/29)

9/1: Introduction

 

9/8: No Class Today

 

9/15: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud

 

• Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic.
• 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)

 

OPTIONAL:

 

• Leiner, et al (2000). A Brief History of the Internet.

 

9/22: The Metaverse

 

• Nelson, T. (1974). Computer lib/dream machines. [excerpt]
• Baudrillard, J. (1988). Simulacra and Simulations [excerpt]
• Chesher, C. (1994). Colonizing Virtual Reality.
• 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)

 

9/29: Rules and Regulation

 

• Internet Society, DNS Root Name Servers Explained for Non-Experts
• Mueller, M. (2002). Dancing the Quango: ICANN as International Regulatory Regime.
• Wu, Tim (2006). Network Neutrality: Competition, Innovation, and Nondiscriminatory Access
• Sinnreich & Zager (2008). E-Speech: The (Uncertain) Future of Free Expression
• Hinze, G. (2010). Preliminary Analysis of the Officially Released ACTA Text

 

OR

 

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

 

10/6: Free Love, Free Speech, Free Software

 

• Stallman, R. (1985). GNU manifesto
• Barlow, J. P. (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
• Markoff, J. (1995). A Most Wanted Cyberthief is caught in his own web.
• Turner, F. (2005). Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy.
• Christopher Kelty (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics

 

OR

 

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

OPTIONAL

 

• 2600, Interview with Kevin Mitnick (video)

 

10/13: dot-com Fantasies

 

FOUR OF THE FOLLOWING:

 

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

 

OR

 

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

 

10/20: Our Second Selves: Video Games and Identity

GUEST: Joost van Dreunen

 

FOUR OF THE FOLLOWING:

 

• Bogost, I. (2006). Playing politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism and Advocacy. First Monday. Special Issue number 7. (10 pages)
• Ito, et al (2008). Living and Learning with New Media (pp. 18-39)
• Brathwaite, B. (2007). Sex in video games. Charles River Media. Chapter 4, pp. 89-122.
• Parisi, D. (2007). Playing the Interface: Video Games as Bodily Techniques [Unpublished paper]. (19 pages)
• Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. (Chapter 3)
• Costikyan, G. (2007) Super Columbine Massacre: Artwork or Menace?

 

OR

 

• Dibbell, J. Play Money. (Basic Books, 2006)

 

 

10/27: Configurable Culture

 

·      Sinnreich, A. Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture (U. Mass Press, 2010)

 

11/3: 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

 

11/10: 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.
• Bossewitch & Sinnreich (2009). Beyond the Panopticon: Strategic Agency in an Age of Limitless Information
• EFF, Surveillance Self-Defense Project

 

11/17: Adventures in MeatSpace

GUEST: Laura Forlano

 

·      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)

 

11/22 (Monday of Thanksgiving Week): Field Trip

 

·      Readings and destination TBD

·      Exact date/time TBD

 

12/1: Singularity and Fracture

 

• Vinge, V. (1993). What is the Singularity?
• Kurzweil, R. (2010). Q&A on The Singularity (pdf)
• Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget. [Chapters 2-3]
• Baym, N. (2010). Personal Connections in the Digital Age [Conclusion: “The Myth of Cyberspace”]

 

OPTIONAL:

 

• Vance, A. (2010). Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

Seeking perfection in digital fascism

As people said of Mussolini, at least he made the trains run on time.

Finding the optimal balance between liberty and efficiency has always been an element of social theory and planning, and obviously, there's no objectively perfect spot on the curve. Some of us prefer a cleaner, safer, more efficient city, others prefer the chaos and tumult of a more organic sprawl. Either way, perfection is impossible to define, much less to achieve.

Not so in SimCity 3000. As it turns out, despite the intentional open-endedness of this virtual city planning software, it is possible to "beat" the game by developing an optimal algorithm.

Vincent Ocasla, a 22-year-old Philippino architecture student, spent 4 years working to accomplish exactly this task, and by all appearances, he succeeded. Technically speaking, he built the "perfect" city within the possibility space of the game's software.

Of course, few of us would ever want to live in his fictional city of Magnasanti, and fortunately, there's no place remotely like it on earth today. But as professional-grade versions of software like SC3k become increasingly prevalent tools for architects, city planners, policy wonks and other engineers of our social environment, the risks of such a city -- and such a society -- being built seem less and less remote.

The danger isn't necessarily in some 21st century dictator forcing us to live in a grid of his or her own design. Instead, the danger resides in our collective blindness to the limits of our tools, our societal inability to see the invisible walls we erect for ourselves when our tools are both too complex for us to understand fully and too logic-based to allow for happy accidents and other perversions of intent.

I'm not saying that we should abandon software for quill and parchment -- simply saying that we need people like Ocasla to keep us honest. Without the hackers, the tinkerers, and the obsessives to show us where our tools will lead, we can never hope to understand the future consequences of our actions.

An interesting interview with Ocasla over at Viceland Games.

(thanks for the link, Gabe!)

A new spin on an old game: 1st-person Tetris

Sometimes the best ideas come from the most minute reinterpretations on existing ones (a subtlety that copyright law steadfastly fails to acknowledge).

Case in point: First Person Tetris. Instead of rotating the falling piece, you rotate the board. Surprisingly difficult, even for us seasoned shape-fitting vets.

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.

All the world's a board game, and all the men and women merely tin shoes...

Well, it's finally happened. Hasbro and Google have teamed up to launch Monopoly City Streets, an online riff on the capitalist world's favorite board game, using Google Maps as the platform.

Although I think this is a great mash-up, I'm a little disappointed because, from the little the blog and site reveal (official launch is tomorrow), this appears to be more like an MMO, and less like a big game. In other words, it seems to be using computers to bring the real world into the confines of the screen, rather than bringing the datasphere out into the world we inhabit physically.

One of the spiels I find myself giving often of late is about how the moment of the metaverse has passed, and the adventures in meatspace are just beginning. With mobile smartphones, connected cameras, and emerging solutions like MIT's 6th Sense, there's no reason a game like this should be confined by the keyboard and monitor; we should be able to "buy" streets and buildings, and to pay and collect rent, by traversing actual cities as well as virtual ones.

Of course, there very well may come a day when processing becomes so ubiquitous and latency-free that there's no perceptible difference between bringing physical experience into the computer and bringing data into the physical world. But until then, I'd like to be out and about, footloose and fancy free, rather than chained to a glowing square and a brick of keys.

My radio interview on Beatles Rock Band

Today I spent an hour on MPR's "Midmorning" (along with Daniel Radosh and Jason Della Rocca) discussing the soon-to-launch Beatles Rock Band, and some of its bigger-picture implications for the media industry and society at large. We also responded to a lot of listener questions. Altogether, it was a nice, freewheeling conversation, aided by host Kerri Miller's terrific moderation.

Here's the stream of the show:

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!

The 21st century is wasted on the young

Boy, do I wish these had existed back during my college days, when I was in a more, um, experimental phase of my life.