This diary at Daily Kos confused me at first, because it was completely empty. No title, no text: there was nothing there. But looking at the various tags for the diary makes it clear why:
Justification for Iran War, Justification for IRAQ war, Faith-based diaries, Harry Reid’s Leadership, The Truth about 9-11, Cultists Only, John McCain Policy Map, Obama Madrassa Evidence, Rosemary Woods, 17 minutes of audio tape from the Nixon White House, Huckabee’s Missing Votes, fnord, WMDs, Impeachment Hearings, Subpoena Power, Checks and Balances, Congressional Oversight
I’ve finished a short piece on tagging as a form of classification, called Getting Things Done?
Why do tomorrow what can be put off until the day after?
I’ve been reading some classic texts on categorization and how the issue has been dealt with on the Web …
Richard Grusin has a video up called 1-20-09. Along with some others, Grusin has ‘entertained’ the fear that the Warner act of 2007 will keep George Bush in office next year (something Bush could do relatively easily and arbitrarily by claiming a state of emergency based on classified information). Grusin is putting his theoretical concept of ‘premediation’ to the test, wondering if the exposure of this scenario can pre-empt it, actually eliminating the possibility of it occuring.
The final speaker for the session Cinema and Narrativity was visual artist Dan Oki. In contrast to Jan Simons and Thomas Elsaesser, who drew on ‘old media’ to analyze the Web, Oki’s talk focused on how the database can benefit future cinema research and production.
‘Constructive instability’ is how Condoleeza Rice described the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. It’s a term that brings to mind tropes of globalization – maybe a synonym of precarity, or the state that produces a desire for sustainability. Thomas Elsaesser uses it to describe the kinds of experience engineered on the Web, especially through collaborative filtering. He asks how our experience of the new forms of artificial life – “or art made more life-like” – known collectively as Web 2.0, might help us think about the whereabouts of ‘the human’ in the new ‘posthuman’ landscape.
Lately I’ve been taking a shovel to the Internet Archive, looking for material on the history of blogging. It used to be that a query for ‘blog history’ would return a number of would-be Spanish civil war buffs, but that’s changing now. More and more, attempts are made to sum up the various ins and outs of the movement that brought us permalinks and LOL cats.
Notions of ‘virtual community’ and ‘virtual reality’ have been put to rest by locative aspects of the Web in recent years – from flickr maps to Facebook, from questions of legal jurisdiction to problems of national censorship. As much as we may have wanted to enter cyberspace, we now find ourselves clearly back in the here and now. But this move makes it easy to forget that virtual reality itself had to evolve out of previous ‘futures’ of digital media.
On Thursday night Alexander Galloway, NYU assistant professor and founding member of the Radical Software Group, gave us a peak at his latest project, an online version of the Game of War.
Whether you’re the latest social networking site out of Silicon Valley, or a lowly blogpost fueled by coffee, plans don’t always work out. I started writing this post with the title The Wasteland of Web 2.0, and was going to describe my experiences with Spurl and Furl, two social bookmarking services in the worst kind of disrepair. What drew me to them was not their Flickry names, but that they both lacked an icon on Mashable’s list of social software applications.
Here at MofM we’ve done our share of Google criticism, but I think The Last Psychatrist has one up on us. What Hath Google Wrought is a giant-sized portion of skepticism about the ‘accidental monopoly’, which focuses not just on current problems of data retention but some of the long term (cultural) consequences as well. I’ve posted a few choice quotes below.
