Identity Online

"Annoying Facebook Girl is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a teenage girl rolling her eyes with her mouth agape accompanied by a blue and white color wheel background. The overlaid text typically associates the girl with vapid status updates, attention whoring and generally irritating Facebook activity." - Know Your Meme

"It'll only get worse. Here's what I am listening to on Spotify. This is the page of the book I am reading. I am currently watching the 43rd minute of a Will Ferrell movie. And I'm not telling you this stuff. The software is. I am a character in The Sims. Hover the cursor over my head and watch that stat feed scroll". - Charlie Brooker guardian.co.uk

"Dozens of revelers filmed pretty brunette Amy McCrow, 20, as she drunkenly frolicked in an inflatable paddling pool. The footage was posted on Twitter where thousands of people were soon passing round the ten-minute clip." - The Sun

The idea of having an identity online would have been nonsense to most people even  a few decades ago. Now it is taken for granted that what we do on the Internet is part of, if not all, of who we are. People perform on the Internet and this creates an identity that is in turn attributed to that person. Even if the person is unaware they are performing, as seems to be the case with Annoying Facebook Girl and "pretty brunette Amy McCrow"* the identity of these people is something that is recognized and attributed, in the same sense as stereotypical portrayals of ethnic groups in Hollywood films do. Identity is not you name, or personal number in the case of performed identity, it is about the recognizable traits, types, images and behaviors one subscribes to or that are attributed to an individual. For a detailed analysis of indentity and meaning online see, Meaning and Identity in Cyberspace: The performance of gender, class and race online (PDF).

In this lecture I will first define what I mean by identity online. This identity is based on performance, as "there is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains 'integrity' prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only the taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ’taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (Judith Butler 1990 145). Identity as a performance needs recognition, an audience and feedback. It cannot be achieved alone. What is at the center of this performance is not the performer, but the tools. The raw processes of identity construction are grounded in the social; in norms of behavior, dress, action, language, rank, stereotypes, visual cues, perspectives and attitudes. Online these are mediated by the speed and breadth of digital media. What these social norms either appeal to do react against are modes of identity. These modes should not be thought of as separate. Rather they act in concordance and dialogue with each other on multiple levels. Once example is the relationships between gender and national identity (Swedish text) that have been found in a study of violent men who channel this behaviour into political (ir)rationality. Modes of identity performance online include

* Gender
 Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity. Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word "gender" to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like feminist literature.

Most modern societies have only two traditional distinct, broad classes of gender roles, masculine and feminine, that correspond with the biological sexes of male and female. However, some societies explicitly incorporate people who adopt the gender role opposite to their biological sex, for example the Two-Spirit people of some indigenous American peoples. Other societies include well-developed roles that are  considered more or less distinct from archetypal female and male roles in those societies. In the language of the sociology of gender they comprise a third gender.

If the idea that gender is performed according to socially defined rules, codes and constraints, then it seems more than obvious that gender is not necessarily a polarized set of identities, i.e. masculine and feminine. Rather gender can be understood as a potential, and there are countless possible ways gender can be performed.While many people use the Internet to preform traditional binary gender roles, many people use it to perform gradients of gender, between the ultra-masculine to the ultra-feminine.

One example. of millions, of online gender performance is the Gender Queer Chat channel on YouTube.

* Sexuality
The performance of sexual identity is everywhere online . Just like gender performance, sexuality online relies on cues, stereotypes, symbols, behaviors, actions, images, language and attitudes. The heteronormative is the idea that "people fall into distinct and complementary genders (man and woman) with natural roles in life. It also holds that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation, and states that sexual and marital relations are most (or only) fitting between a man and a woman" (Wikipedia). The heteronormative is very common as a form of sexual identity online. However, there are very many variations on sexuality online.  Some examples are
Polysexuality: the attraction to multiple genders and/or sexes.
Polyamory, the desire to be intimately involved with more than one person at once.
Pansexuality, which is attraction to all genders and sexes.

One example of the performance of sexual identity online is Qruiser: "the largest Nordic Community for homo, bisexual, transgender or queer people and our friends".


* Nationality
Nationality is membership of a nation or sovereign state, usually determined by their citizenship, but sometimes by ethnicity or place of residence, or based on their sense of national identity. Like gender and sexuality, nationality is performed online using cues, stereotypes, symbols, behaviors, actions, images, language and attitudes.

This German advertisement for IKEA portrays Swedish Midsummer using the symbols of the nation and national identity in a parody. There are of course much more serious performances of nationality online. The same stereotypes of Swedish nationality can be contrasted with Syster Sol feat. Hot This Year Band - Mad Mad Mad as a statement about nationality as identity.

National identity is the person's identity and sense of belonging to one state or to one nation, a feeling one shares with a group of people, regardless of one's citizenship status. National identity is not inborn trait; various studies have shown that a person's national identity is a direct result of the presence of elements from the "common points" in people's daily lives: national symbols, language, national colors, the nation's history, national consciousness, blood ties, culture, music, cuisine, radio, television, etc.

The iconic image of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was used by the Australian national ISP Bigpond in its promotions in Second Life.

* Class

"Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users." - Does your social class determine your online social network? (CNN 2009)

Social class online is a bit more difficult to determine as the means of representing class, i.e. the Internet, has class status built into it.  In order to be online you have already moved beyond at least 6 billion other people on the planet in terms of access to infrastructure and education. This suggests a class divide in itself. Within those that do have access there is the concept of the digital divide. The Digital Divide refers to any inequalities between groups, broadly construed, in terms of access to, use of, or knowledge of information and communication technologies. The global digital divide in 2010:

Once the shift has been made into the realm of global digital culture, then the performance of social class online as identity once again relies on cues, stereotypes, symbols, behaviors, actions, images, language and attitudes. Class can be signified by speech, dress, location, education, income, profession, and family background. 

* Ethnicity

Cyberspace entices us with the promise of an online utopia--a web of fluid identities and infinite possibilities. When we look for signs of freedom online--anywhere from chat room conversations to cyberpunk fiction--we are almost inevitably urged toward "liberation" from our bodies and their "restrictive" attributes like race, gender, and age. But cyberculture critic Lisa Nakamura insists that the Internet is a place where race matters. Race itself may not be fixed or finite, but Nakamura argues that racial stereotypes-or "cybertypes"-are hardwired into our online interactions: Identity tourists masquerade in virtual roles like Asian_Geisha and Alatinolover. Web directories sharply narrow racial categories. Anonymous computer users are assumed to be white. In Cybertypes, Nakamura looks at what happened to race when it went online, and how our ideas about race continue to be shaped and reshaped every time we log on. Examining all facets of our everyday online experience fromInternet advertising to email jokes, Nakamura shows that the postmodern ideal of fluid selves made possible by network technology is not necessarily subversive, progressive, or liberating. The harder race is pushed off-line, the greater the consequences in real life for people of color. A lively and provocative discussion Cybertypes offers a valuable new way of thinking about race and identity in the information age.

The Tumblr site Asians Sleeping in the Library is one example of how race is performed, or portrayed on the Internet. The Asians Sleeping in the Library emerged at the same time as the video, Asians in the Library - UCLA Student's Racist Rant:

Ethnicity on the Internet is a major source of identity.I have chosen to focus on examples that take up Asian identity in an American context, but it could easily be within the Swedish context.

* Generation 
Much like sexuality, gender, ethnicity and race, a generational identity distinguishes each of us. Imprinted by major experiences and events -- like Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, the Challenger explosion -- a generation's shared identity shapes the values, ethics, and attitudes about the world in which its members live and work. By appealing to particular events, memories, cultural products (fashion, music, books etc.) an identity based on a generational understanding can be portrayed. At the same time components of a generational identity can be called upon to create meaning, often with a sense of nostalgia involved. A recent example I came across is the excellent Swedish group First Aid Kit, who use retro elements in their music to appeal to a wide band of age demographics;

It could be 1979 all over again. While the girls in the band were born in the early 1990s they revive many of the folk sounds that were popular in the 1960s. Melanie Safka is one comparison that can be made to First Aid Kit, one that spans three generations, and will make First Aid Kit even more popular.

Melanie - Ruby Tuesday (1975)

Presenting online as a member of a particular generation is important for people to understand who you are in general terms. People may try to appear younger than they are, and in doing so will resort to referencing sources outside their own generational context. The recent phenomenon of the so-called 'cougar', or age disparity in sexual relationships is an example of generational identity in action in social contexts. These are often mediated online.

* Taste
Taste as an aesthetic, sociological, economic and anthropological concept refers to a cultural patterns of choice and preference. While taste is often understood as a biological concept, it can also be reasonably studied as a social or cultural phenomenon. Taste is about drawing distinctions between things such as styles, manners, consumer goods and works of art. Social inquiry of taste is about the human ability to judge what is beautiful, good and proper. Of course what is considered beautiful, good and proper is totally grounded in social praxis. The Internet is one arena where taste is developed and referenced to build identity.

Social and cultural phenomena concerning taste are closely associated to social relations and dynamics between people. The concept of social taste is therefore rarely separated from its accompanying sociological concepts. An understanding of taste as something that is expressed in actions between people helps to perceive many social phenomena that would otherwise be inconceivable.

Some judgments concerning taste may appear more legitimate than others, but most often there is not a single conception shared by all members of society. People with individual sensibilities are not unique either. For instance, aesthetic preferences and attendance to various cultural events are associated with education and social origin. Different socioeconomic groups are likely to have different tastes, and it has been suggested that social class is one of the prominent factors structuring taste.

As a performance of identity according to taste, this video (a remix or mashup), provides viewers with a set of ideas regarding taste and music that are attributable to the identity that hosts it on his/her YouTube account.

The Textual Internet

The title of this lecture requires some explanation (as does 'Dream' by M. C. Escher - by here is not the place, its just an interesting image).

In a functional, mechanistic material sense the Internet is:

"A global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email" - Wikipedia

The Internet is all these things, however it is more. The Internet is made up of many millions of meanings. We who use the Internet interpret it, compose it, define it, agree and disagree, and even feel transported by it. In this lecture I will first define what I mean by textual in relation to the Internet. I will then provide some examples of how meaning in the textual construction of the Internet operates. Finally I will discuss some methods of analyzing specific examples of content on the Internet. From this analysis I will provide some suggestions for authoring with the Internet.

Some Key Terms

Materiality: "the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers." Katherine Hayles, Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis, 72.

So what are some of the material characteristics of the Internet that result in signifying strategies?

• procedural (composed of executable rules)
• participatory (inviting human action and manipulation of the represented world)
• encyclopedic (containing very high capacity of information in multiple media formats)
• spatial (navigable as an information repository and/or a virtual place)

These four characteristics are common to all digital environments according to Janet H Murray (Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace 72-90). I think there is a lot of weight in the logic of the procedural, participatory, encyclopedic and spatial as defining the medium. I would also add the simultaneous, in that is shared at the same time as a non-rivalrous resource.

Textual: The textual as we understand it today is the product of a rather long and complex series of conceptual associations that are produced by cultural, historical, social, political and even economic changes. The 20th century is largely responsible for what we have at the moment as the focus for representation and how meaning is attributed to the symbolic.

text (n.)

late 14c., "wording of anything written," from O.Fr. texte, O.N.Fr. tixte (12c.), from M.L. textus "the Scriptures, text, treatise," in L.L. "written account, content, characters used in a document," from L. textus "style or texture of a work," lit. "thing woven," from pp. stem of texere "to weave," from PIE base *tek- "make" (see texture).

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth. [Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style"]

"This year", said Tristouse, "fashions are bizarre and common, simple and full of fantasy. Any material from nature's domain can now be introduced into the composition of women's clothing. I saw a charming dress made of corks. It was certainly equal to the charming wash cloth evening dresses which are the rage of premiers. A big designer is thinking about launching tailor made outfits made of old book bindings done in calf. It's charming. All the ladies of letters would want to wear them, and one could approach them and whisper in their ear under the pretext of reading the titles. Fish bones are being worn a lot on hats.

One often sees delicious young girls dressed like pilgrims of Saint James of Compostela; their outfits, as are fitting , are studded with coquilles Saint-Jacques. Steel, wool sandstone and the files have all made an abrupt entry into the vestmentary arts. These materials are used in belts, on hat pins, etc, and it so happened that I saw an adorable reticule composed entirely of glass eyes, the kind you see at an occultists. Feathers now decorate not only hats, but shoes, gloves, and next year they'll be on umbrellas.

They're doing shoes in Venetian glass and hats in Baccarat crystal. Not to mention oil painted dresses, brightly colored wools, or dresses curiously splashed with ink. For spring wear, they'll be many clothes made of bladders, pleasant shapes, light and distinctive. Our lady fliers will wear nothing else. For the races, there will be the child's balloon hat, made of around twenty balloons, a very luxurious effect and sometimes some diverting detonations. The mussel shell is work only on high top shoes.

Notice that they're beginning to dress in live animals. I encountered one lady whose hat had twenty birds, canaries, gold fiches, robins, held with a wore on claw, singing wildly and flapping their wings. The coiffure of an ambassador dress was, at the past party in Neuilly, composed of thirty snakes. "For whom are those serpents who hiss on your head?" said a little Romanian attache with the Dacian accent, who has the reputation of being successful with women.

I forgot to tell you that last Wednesday I saw on the boulevards an old dowager dressed in mirrors stuck to fabric. The effect was sumptuous in sunlight. You'd have thought it was a goldmine out for a walk. Later it started raining and the lady looked like a silver mine. Nut shells make pretty trimmings, especially if they're mixed with hazelnuts. Dresses embellished with coffee beans, cloves, cloves of garlic, onions, and bunches of raisins,these will be perfect for social calls. Fashion is becoming practical and it no longer looks down on anything. It ennobles everything. It does for materials what the Romantics did for words"- Guillaume Apollinaire, The Poet Assassinated 1923.

The sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem Sacred Emily, which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays. In that poem, the first "Rose" is the name of a person. Stein later used variations on the sentence in other writings, and "A rose is a rose is a rose" is probably her most famous quotation, often interpreted as meaning "things are what they are," a statement of the law of identity, "A is A". In Stein's view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it, an idea also intensively discussed in the problem of universals debate where Peter Abelard and others used the rose as an example concept. As the quotation diffused through her own writing, and the culture at large, Stein once remarked "Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a ... is a ... is a ...' Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years." (Four in America)

Stein herself said to an audience at Oxford University that the statement referred to the fact that when the Romantics used the word "rose" it had a direct relationship to an actual rose. For later periods in literature this would no longer be true. The eras following romanticism, notably the modern era, use the word rose to refer to the actual rose, yet they also imply, through the use of the word, the archetypical elements of the romantic era. It also follows the rhetoric law of thricefold repetition to emphasize a point, as can be seen in speeches dating back to the sophists.

William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963) is famously known for coining the term: “No ideas but in things.” This one line from the 1927 version of his poem, Paterson, became a mantra for poetry in the early 20th century. Its expression is still strongly influential today. It changed the look and feel of poetry, possibly more than any other single idea in the past hundred years. It was not original, however, as this essay hopes to show. His statement was a summary of the poetry trends at that time.

The historical context will show that Williams meant for poetry to focus on objects rather than mere concepts, on actual things rather than abstract characteristics of things. The mention of any object creates a visualized idea in our minds—we form an image of the thing. This does not happen at the mention of abstractions, like “truth”, or “memory”. Abstract words do not create images in the mind. Only “things” create visual images. Things can be tangible, such as a wheel barrow. Or things can be a behavior, such as a sidelong glance. The image of a thing creates an idea of what the thing means in the context it is used. Hence there are “no ideas but in things” according to Williams.

Close Reading:
Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read. The technique as practiced today was pioneered (at least in English) by I.A. Richards and his student William Empson, later developed further by the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century. It is now a fundamental method of modern criticism. Close reading is sometimes called explication de texte, which is the name for the similar tradition of textual interpretation in French literary study, a technique whose chief proponent was Gustave Lanson.

In his book "Is There A Meaning in This Text?" (1998) Kevin Vanhoozer explains Jacques Derrida's dictum that "there is nothing outside the text" by saying that everything is part of a signifying system or classification system that is constituted by differences. He offers this illuminating illustration: "a Ford has its particular connotations because it is part of a signifying system that includes Yugos, Peugots, and Jaguars. The 'meaning' of a Ford Escort is constituted by its differences from other cars (including other fords). An Escort is a text in the context of other automobiles. There is no such thing as an 'absolute Ford,' whose meaning could be considered in a cultural vacuum. Rather, the particular value that we have come to associate with Fords depends as much on how cars are marketed as how cars are manufactured, and on how 'Ford' is placed in the signifying system that includes 'Jaguar,' 'Volkswagon,' 'Chevrolet,' and 'Toyota.'" The point is that there is NO grasp of "Ford" by stepping outside the system of classification, no "absolute Ford" that transcends the classification system, nor even an "absolute automobile" that is outside the "text" of different makes and models.

Performance: 

The union of navigation, manipulation and interpretation for the Internet can be accomplished within a reading that is performative. Such a reading is broader than that associated only with the alphabetical and goes beyond the concept of close reading due to the variables and interoperability of the diverse media forms in the work. Performance in reading is related to what Fernández-Vara describes as the interactive applications of the digital, which “may run but are not functional until there is input from the interactor, since someone has to complete the process of making meaning. […] The interactor is thus an active performer along with the computer” (5). The interactor must firstly recognize the various elements of the digital text mediated by the computer before inputs are of concern. Reading the digital works is “ to create meaning cognitively in the encounter with the text” (Dovey and Kennedy 102). Cognitive encounters with the text include the tactile and visual ranges that digital works are capable of manifesting, as well as the technological capabilities, design and the legal frameworks that define them. The act of reading multimedia works demands human manipulation, which results in the performance of discourse by readers. 

The nature of a performance text is as simple as it seems, it is finding an appropriate venue for the sharing of the text that is the challenge.  Anything written and extant falls under the umbrella of "performance text."  Thanks in a great deal to Dada and surrealist artists, many of the standards a text was held to in order for it to be considered a "performance text" have been shattered.  Today’s theater has no way of policing or authorizing what qualifies as a performance text.   The concept of formalizing some expression as "Performance Text" would be useless because even a piece everyone may agree upon as a model is, by its nature as a performance piece, an extremely protean entity.  No performance of any piece will ever be repeated and every production will be necessarily unique.  The words written in a text cannot be interpreted the same way twice and once the play lives for an audience it cannot be compared to the carcass of a text it came from.  There is a certain inherent anarchy to any performance, with no way of calculating the final results accurately beforehand despite the exactness a piece may be written with.  The script, or roadmap for maneuvering through the journey, must be as flexible and open a medium as possible in order to allow writers to explore and incorporate such extreme possibilities for expression. --Sam Gromoll

Reading the Internet

The Internet is huge, so reading the Internet is not something a person can do. However it is possible to read parts of it. I would like to give as an example my analysis of Facebook from 2007:

"Facebook is a horizontally arranged network based on association rather than interest (unlike Myspace). One builds connections with others in the viral sense; email is used to bring contacts into the system. By allowing Facebook access to email account (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL) mass mail-outs can be one way of building up you friends list and of course bringing contributing to the Facebook database. The other way of finding contacts is through work, school and college. I myself went to a tiny high school in a small town in rural Australia (Oakey State High) so it is not on the list of schools (you can only choose, not type in). But the town I went to university in is well represented. Interestingly the private schools (as in non-government) seem to be much more represented in the lists of high schools. In Brisbane, the capital of my home state there are 13 High schools listed and only 3 of them are government schools that did not charge fees. I wonder if this reflects the overall demographic of Facebook or the use of digital social software in Queensland, Australia. There is also college and company searches but when you type in the title Facebook will not prompt the line for you as there are no prior entries in the database of the term.

Setting up a profile on Facebook is not too different from other social platforms. There is lots of plug-ins that can be loaded into a page; video, books I’ve read, photos, movies and the list is growing daily. There are issues of readability relevant in regards to a Facebook site. I myself believe minimalism works on the web, this is a design question but I try to keep my site fairly sharp and to the point. I decline lots of offers from friends for zombie clubs, vampire attacks and poking or biting my colleagues. I have decided it is an identity thing I have going on Facebook and not a game. I am also fully aware of what I disclose on Facebook as it is a public space, even if it does have something of a gated community feel to it. I don’t think the gated (restricted access, password protected etc.) is that substantial."

 The in 2011 I did one last reading of Facebook before closing my account:

"When I signed on to Facebook in 2007 it was defined as "a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them." Now, with the implementation of Timeline, Facebook is defined by its founder as “[A]ll your stories, all your apps, a new way to express who you are.” Anyone familiar with the architecture of Facebook knows that it is far from simply 'expressing who you are' on the platform. Who I am on FB is formed by Facebook itself. If I contribute 'all my stories, all my apps and express myself' on FB, I see myself as losing those contributions to the vast database of the program. Plus with Timeline I am now part of an information flow in real time, the nature and perimeters of which I do not control. Suddenly friends-of-friends are within my feed and I am, I presume, within theirs. There is little time or space available for my own self-expression in FB now, because if I even just throw a pebble in the pool, it returns to me as a Tsunami of unknown origins. The entire equation of FB has changed. the analogy used by the Napperville Sun is today ancient history:

"To users, Facebook will no longer be a bench by the side of a river where they sit and watch an endless flow of ephemera float by and then disappear."

I prefer the village square or Agora analogy myself, where I once could go to share with a group of people whom I actually knew, and we could talk, share links and catch up. The circle I once had on Facebook seems to be possible today with Google+, or at least that is what I am hoping.

Added to the expanse of contacts and information I am exposed to on the 'new Facebook' is the somewhat sinister promise of the Timeline interface, which is described by one commentator as,

"Your Facebook presence is now intended to be durable. In 2029, when your firstborn son’s holographic avatar is going off to lunar robot fighting school, you can rewind your Timeline to 2011 and show him what you were up to in the week before he was born."

as well

"Facebook's updated Open Graph will make the social network far more "sticky." Zuckerberg said users will have the ability--thanks to Timeline and a new addition, Ticker--to see what a friend is doing, like watching a movie on Netflix or listening to a song on Spotify, and engage in that same activity from within the social network. The Facebook CEO said he believes the improvements will help create "a completely new class of social apps" that will let users share every single facet of their lives on the social network." - (Cnet) Facebook Changes Creeping Out Some Customers

To me this sounds like a total nightmare scenario.The week before my son was born was and are my memories, my images and mine to explain to him should I choose to do so. Facebook or any other web platform (that I do not control) has no place in the representation or explanation of that period in my life. Futuristic fantasies do not convince me otherwise. Added to this is the intrusion of Facebook cookies;

"Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit . The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions." - Logging out of Facebook is Not Enough"

In both of these readings the design and materials of the text are as meaningful as the words, pictures, and audio. It is precisely this balance between the materials, the design and the ways the text speaks to you, the reader, viewer or listener that creates meaning.

The reading of Facebook give you some idea of how an interactive digital machine operating in real time can be interpreted for meanings. However, there are many texts within the structure of the Internet that defy close reading. Consider Twitter, how can one read a vast network of 140 character entries running in real time from millions of people? One suggested method is distant reading:

"Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more." - Franco Moretti - Conjectures on World Literature

Distant reading is a quantitative method where the relationships within a text and between texts are measured according to the symbolic. Distant reading pays attention to the materials of the text, along with its design and the ways it addresses an audience. It does however have problems capturing something of the performative as indicated in the text.

So you are thinking about writing for the web 

1. Think about procedurality, encyclopedia, space and participation

2. Think about the simultaneity of the web, the sharing and the meetings 

3. Think about the performance of the text in the hands of your audience

4. Think about the rules and how they make people do things 
5. Think about the shortcuts, the ways it can be broken, the hacks and the glitches.

Mashup: Deformative Practice as Comment on Gender and Sexuality

Let’s talk terms. ‘Remix’ and ‘Mashup’ . What is the difference. According to the great wiki:

A remix is an alternative version of a song, different from the original version. A remixer uses audio mixing to compose an alternate master of a song, adding or subtracting elements, or simply changing the equalization, dynamics, pitch, tempo, playing time, or almost any other aspect of the various musical components. Usually, a remix will involve substantial changes to the arrangement of a recorded work; lyrics may be added or removed, such alterations are not a necessity. A song may be remixed to give a song that wasn't popular a second chance at radio and club play, or to alter a song to suit a specific music genre or radio format.

While:

Mashup (or mash it up) is a Jamaican Creole term meaning to destroy. In the context of reggae or ska music, it can take on a positive connotation and mean an exceptional performance or event. The term has also been used in hip-hop, especially in cities such as New York that have a high Jamaican population.

Mashup, or bootleg, is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.

Differences? Remix has cool white connotations of high tech interventions. Mashup is Creole (read black), with a hot edge of violence (to destroy) and also termed ‘bastard pop’. Remix is attributable to ‘a remixer’, whereby the artist as genius lives on within the new technology. Mashup is a process (as is Remix actually) that confuses boundaries while striving for a constellation that is only “considerably more than the sum of their parts” but never a new thing. But remix creates a song with “substantial changes” and “a second [coming??] chance”. Remix exists in the production of commodity culture while mashups subvert the values of that culture. Originality is supposed in the remix while it is erased in the mashup.

Consider the points raised in this seminar outline (PDF) in regards to mashup culture. Who owns words, and what is the value of fan production? Can you see value in mashups if we think about it in the following ways:

( from: Mashup Cultures by Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss - editor. p9)

Mashups are combinations of one or more existing works of media that rely on references back to the original/s in order for the newer combinations to be meaningful. In this way mashups differ from remixes as the latter creates a new work and can be made from a single already-existing work. As a critical device a mashup works from what literary theorist Jerome McGann calls derformance.

"Imaginative work has an elective affinity with performance: it is organized as rhetoric andpoiesis rather than as exposition and information-transmission. Because this is so, it always liesopen to deformative moves. Harold Bloom's trenchant theory of poetic influence spelled outsome of the imagination's performative "ratios," as he called them. Certain of these ratios areaggressively deformative, as when Blake famously overturns both Milton's Paradise Lost and itschief precursor, the Judaeo-Christian bible, or when Ronald Johnson selects from and revisesParadise Lost in RADI OS (1977)" (McGann and Samuels)

"Deformative scholarship is all but forbidden, thethought of it either irresponsible or damaging to critical seriousness. It exists nonetheless, and incertain cases it has gained justifiable distinction and importance. Forgery is the most importanttype of deformative scholarship, nor should its contribution to the advancement of learning beunderestimated, as Anthony Grafton has recently shown." - (McGann and Samuels)

Buffy versus Edward is a well know mashup that exposes many of the biases and stereotypical gender assumptions that underpin the Twilight series, along with foregrounding the strong female character in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. This mashup is an excellent critical reflection in the deformative sense that McGann refers to.

"Five months in the making, Buffy vs Edward is essentially an answer to the question “What Would Buffy Do?” My re-imagined story was specifically constructed as a response to Edward, and what his behavior represents in our larger social context for both men and women. More than just a showdown between The Slayer and the Sparkly Vampire, it’s also a humorous visualization of the metaphorical battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century" - What Would Buffy Do? Notes on Dusting Edward Cullen by Jonathan McIntosh (on WIMINs Voices).

One of the primary strengths of digital media as a meaning making system is how the collision of two elements can make a third. A video and a soundtrack can be joined in a webpage to create a new set of meanings when compared to the previous two or more works.

(Note: Some of these references are incorrect, but the general idea is present)

Materiality: “Dream America Movie” is constructed entirely by recombining semiotic content from Internet sources. The material consists of the following elements:

1. Moving visual imagery derived from YouTube, with one of two direct references to 131 course material, i.e., a clip from Michael Moore’s documentary, “Bowling for Columbine”;

2. Still photography from news sources and Microsoft clipart;

3. Spoken verbal commentary in the forms of voice over (inserted from YouTube) of the introduction to “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin, newscaster narration, clips from news conferences of former President Bush and current Vice President Biden, and, in one of two direct references to 131 course material, a clip from Morgan Spurlock’s TV documentary, “Minimum Wage”;

4. Written verbal content in the forms of title (her only self-created addition to the video text), news channel logos (ABC; Fox News; CNN), news captions and scrolling banners, signs in the hands of individuals in visuals or propped on objects in visual); a combination of complete sentences in the narration, voiceover, and signs; and one-line clauses and phrases in the news banners and captions;

5. Streaming music throughout (Carmina Burana’s “O Fortuna”) inserted from YouTube (http://vodpod.com/watch/3134307-carmina-burana-o-fortuna).

(Source: Mashup of Discourses: A Critical Analysis of the Videotext, "Dream America Movie" by Nancy Fox)

What unites all of these elements in the above video is the critical theme of 'What is America today as a contrast to the American Dream?'. The focus provided by a theme is an important thing to remember when making a mashup.

The creation of a mashup can critique an established code or order that represents gender or sexuality.

This video was created by Michelle Redman and Kyle Nimmo for MACS 221 at UFV. It is meant to highlight how gender stereotypes are present in commercials and advertisments.

Making the Mashup

a) Writing for a Mashup
Creating a mashup is a lot about improvisation, using the materials at hand and understanding how references work in popular culture. You may decide to make a mashup based on a video you have seen that you believe needs to be answered. The YouTube function of Video Response caters for this aspect of the mashup. You may have thought of a theme, say Barack Obama is a Player, and you construct a mashup around that idea, gathering material from videos, podcasts, news images and broadcasts and audiobooks. The time line and rhythm of the segments you use in the mashup are important. Adding music can often make the mashup more effective, or it can fail.

b) The Tools:
There are three approaches to gathering moving images for the construction of a mashup; 1. copying, 2. ripping, 3. making.

1. Copying - screen capture using Camtasia, Jing (Mac and PC), AviScreen Classic, Fraps, GameCam, and Capture Me (Mac compatible). Using these programs you can capture images and often sound (AviScreen is image only). These can be saved as an .avi file and edited in a video editing program. I will return to video editing in the third section, making.

2. Ripping is the taking of content from the Internet. the Fast Video Download (FVD) addon for Firefox is one way of taking videos from the Internet. DownloadThemAll allows for fast download of videos, audio and images from a webpage. It does not work with embedded content the way FVD does. KeepVid does work with embedded videos on the Internet.

When making mashups a Creative Commons License (CC) is your friend. The CC License allows you to copy and modify content for non-commercial use. There are many sites on the Internet that allow for free use (free as in open). These include the enormous archive.org, OurMedia, and Freesound.org. Soundcloud is a music sharing site that allows for free downloads, as does the Free Music Archive.

3. Making is the stage after both copying and ripping. You have the gathered the raw materials for your mashup and now you need to put them all together. This is the hardest part of the process in many ways. For video editing there are a number of options available. In HUMlab we offer FinalCut Pro. As a free online download, but much simpler solution for video editing I use VirtualDub. There is also Windows Movie Maker. Camtasia (Free 30-day trial version) has a fairly advanced editing function as well. To covert AVI to MOV files for Window Movie Maker, there is a free solution. To covert Flash to MOV try this one. For working with sound, I use Cubase LE4, but there are free solutions. Audacity is one of them. Sill images can be inserted into the editing time-line of Camtasia and FinalCut. You can import the ripped video (after conversion if necessary) into each of the video editing programs mentioned here, using the Import Media function. You may want to add your own content as well and this can be done with the video cameras in HUMlab, the audio software I have mentioned here or using your own images.

Once you have completed your mashup I recommend sharing it with the world, using:

56.com (Chinese) Archive.org Afreeca (South Korean) AniBOOM Blinkx Blip.tv BlogTV Brainpop Break.com Buzznet Comedy.com Crackle Dailymotion EngageMedia ExpoTV FC2 Video Funnyordie.com

Flickr Fotki Gawkk Gaytube Tangle.com (formerly Godtube) Hulu HD share (focus on HD videos) Lafango Liveleak Mail.ru MaYoMo Mefeedia Megaupload Metacafe Mevio Myspace MyVideo

Novamov Nico Nico Douga (Japanese) OneWorldTV Openfilm Ourmedia Photobucket Podblanc Rayzz Redtube Revver Rambler Vision (Russian) ReelTime.com RuTube (Russian) Sapo Videos (Portuguese) SchoolTube ScienceStage Sevenload SmugMug Trilulilu (Romanian)

TroopTube Tudou (Chinese) Vbox7 (Bulgarian) Veer Veoh Viddler Videojug Vidoosh (Iranian) Vimeo Vuze Vzaar Wildscreen.tv xtube Yahoo! Video (no new uploads) Youku (Chinese) YouTube Zoopy

GET TO IT PEOPLE!

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home:

Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin

Jim Barrett

Language Studies/HUMlab

Umeå University

Sweden

“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.

“One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”

Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry. However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as the present situation in the education sector of most Western democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of culture.  There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works. Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual, sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism, iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of the digital works.  These works are

Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)

Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)

Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)

Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q

CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)

The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)

Patchwork Girl is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's 'Afternoon, a story' as an important work of hypertext fiction. "Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors."



The actions of the avatar, which is the identity of its operator in SL, conform to the traditions of Varjrayana Buddhism. The combination of the actions of the avatar and the audio is a two fold signifying structure, with the operator of the avatar at the center. In a simulative sense the operator of the avatar is enacting a practice that is firmly contextualized in religious and social contexts.



Last Meal Requested is an interactive net art work by Japanese/Swedish artist Sachiko Hayashi. It deals with themes of gender, state power, violence and the rhetoric of the image. The original work can be accessed at http://www.e-garde.net/lmr/lmr2.html

 

Selavy: What happens when you write in a diary? Of course, some people write down “got up at 7am, drank a coffee, had lunch with Jim, went to bed early”, but that’s not the type of diary I’m referring to. It is rather the idea of keeping a record of selected thoughts, feelings, moods, ideas, etc. The important part is, of course, that you do that regularly. And that is exactly what I did in CONSTRUCT: I added one room each day. Every one of the 75 days of the residency has its own room, often relating to the topic of the residency itself, a time capsule of ideas, artifacts, or reference to other work. If you read a diary, you may get an idea about the writer and her life. If you visit CONSTRUCT, you may get an idea about Selavy Oh and her residency.



The Celebration "combines a circular display of flatscreens, reminiscent of a giant zoetrope, containing amateur film footage from the 1910's-1940's with different soundscapes that can be manipulated by the audience" (Piers). How the audience manipulates the various audio and images, and how they combine to create an interactive and immersive space, makes The Celebration an engaging work of interactive digital art. The visitor enters a darkened space, where the only available light comes from the 10 screens showing the films of The Celebration. By moving around the space and judging their own distance, speed of movement, posture and height in relation to the (largely invisible) Arduino trackers, a dance begins with the audio and the cracked black and white images from almost a century ago. Each of the screens that make up The Celebration has an Arduino tracking sensor attached, which maps the movements of the body of a visitor, and implements pre-programmed changes in the presentation of images and sound. Unknown faces stare out from the screens, mostly laughing, talking (unheard) and often looking straight at the camera, and at the audience. As these faces watch, the visitor dodges and weaves, hops and slides, while the images and sounds change. At the same time the visitor is watching the faces, along with their bodies, their families and friends, competitors at sports events and classmates, neighbors and colleagues. It is according to this arrangement that a circuit of movement and gaze is achieved by the programming of The Celebration.




Façade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and story-intensive interactive entertainment. Façade is freely downloadable at interactivestory.net. In Façade, you, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time. In this video Facade is used to promote an abstinence program.