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9 Apr 2012

Pinterest and Panopticon: Self-representation Through Appropriation
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via here

What a terrific read from the website viz : visual rhetoric, visual culture, pegagogy.

It's about how we represent ourselves on-line, and how Pinterest has made it so easy to appropriate other "objects" (via repins or retweets) to speak for who we are and to visually perform our self-identities to the Pinterest network and beyond.

I think that part of the incredible success of Pinterest is because of its uniquely visual format, which sets it apart from delicious or diigo or other link collecting services. (Part of why I love Evernote, and before that, Microsoft's OneNote, so much is because those desktop services let me clip and save images into my digital notebooks and then display them so that I can search and identify them by looking at pictures rather than reading text). Pinterest has made that link between our desire to showcase our innards: our interests, our desires, our passions, and our draw or pull towards a visual way of consuming information.

The author of this post compares Pinterest boards to the public communal bulletin board in coffee shops or grocery stores and makes a bunch of other interesting observations throughout the piece.

Highly recommend it. Catch the full post here.
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4 Apr 2012

"Poor Politicians" book about Kosovar politicians
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via

“Poor Politicians” is a book that contains eye-catching prints of 28 destroyed posters of Kosovar political figures, all captured with the iPhone by Frederic Lezmi.

Lezmi says of the project:

These pictures were taken in the streets of Prishtina in May 2011, using an iPhone and the ‘Shake-It-Photo Polaroid’ app. All persons depicted are politicians of the different parties of the Kosovar political scene. Kosovo is Europe’s youngest democracy.

We like this series for its neat mix of street art, collage & culture.

“Poor Politicians”: An iPhoneography Project by Frederic Lezmi

via Lens Culture

Really interesting project, especially in a region where the practice and implementation of democratic government has not been an easy accomplishment.

I was drawn to the project because it highlights many of the themes that are fascinating to me: remix, iPhoneography, power, and visual culture.

Very good day to have stumbled upon it.
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28 Mar 2012

Manifesto for visual culture
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This is a manifesto for visual culture from Rencontres d’Arles.

(ᔥ The Histograms ↬Quipsologies)

Thanks to exp.lore.com
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13 Mar 2012

Digital traces of our mobile phone activity
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via vimeo.com

This blows me away.

It's a visualization of mobile phone interactions (calls? texts? it's not clear) that occur in one day in the life of citizens in Geneva.

It's just a different way of looking at these technological interactions and one way of trying to wrap our heads around their scale.

If there were no mobile phone, how else would these millions of interactions have taken place? Or maybe they wouldn't have? What would a lack of these streams of connected moments mean for citizens and for the city overall? What impact would that have on the pace, the quality of life, everyday choices and the overall identity of place in Geneva?

More information on this digital installation project is available at villevivante.ch.
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12 Mar 2012

"Searching for Memories"
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via boaeatselephant.tumblr.com

I follow a number of photography blogs on Tumblr, mostly iPhoneography and other phone photography ones.
They capture the various moments of life - some spectacular, some mundane - from all around the world. I'm curious as to what people see through their mobile device lens.
The world of "easy" blogging, with services like Tumblr, Posterous, Zapd, Jux and others, have made it so easy to set up and share these kind of photo blogs.
The capture above, featuring an elderly man looking at some old stuff in a square in Luxembourg, totally jumped out at me.
The photo speaks to memory, nostalgia, and something about glocality at the same time .
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12 Mar 2012

Homeless-powered wifi hotspots
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A marketing company is using some of Austin's homeless population as roving pay-as-you-go wireless hotspots during SXSW. The project is called Homeless Hotspots.

Homeless people have been enlisted to roam the streets wearing T-shirts that say "I am a 4G hotspot." Passersby can pay what they wish to get online via the 4G-to-Wi-Fi device that the person is carrying. It is a neat idea on a practical level, but also a little dystopian. When the infrastructure fails us... we turn human beings into infrastructure?

via kottke.org

Human beings as infrastructure.
How's that for blowing your mind away?
I do think about what would ever happen if our wi-fi hubs or networks were to suddenly all go down some day (electromagnetic pulse, shifts in the earth's core......er.... yes, that's from the movie "The Core"), and how we (that is, "I"), with our rather powerful dependency on the Internet, would cope.
(This is my one BIG hesitation with cloud computing - even with all the data stored locally, without cloud access, a lot would still be unavailable un-syncable.)
Anyway, running a business whose central idea is roving hotspots is really innovative but so out-of-the-ordinary, that in our current, sometimes complacent first-world mentality, I don't think it will thrive.
If that world fell apart and saw the breakdown of normal social relations and structures, then yes, I see the Homeless Hotspots really taking off.
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1 Mar 2012

Memory Is Not a Recording Device
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Memory: Fragments of a Modern History explores how the science and understanding of memory evolved over the past century, from early metaphors that likened it to a filing cabinet to the quasi-science of the prewar era’s “truth serums” to the psychology of false confessions and the latest neuroscience breakthroughs on how remembering works.

One particularly fascinating aspect Winter examines is the entwining of technology, media, and cultural accounts of memory. The book, Winter points out, “may tell us as much about how to approach the history of information media as as it does about human memory.”

The modern sciences of memory emerged when newly developed sciences of mind coincided with the proliferation of new media: technologies for recording, transmitting, and recreating sounds and images. Photography, the phonograph, and the moving image all developed between 1850 and 1900. They became identified with memory process in a series of associations that shaped both how those processes were understood and how the technologies themselves would be used. Throughout the twentieth century, memory researchers continued to look to the most recent, cutting-edge recording technologies for insights into the nature of remembering.

[…]

There was never just one way to use recording technologies to think about memory. At one extreme, researchers suggested that they were models for memory itself. Perhaps, they reflected, memory was an internal recording that could be replayed at will… But on the other extreme, researchers also used recording devices to define precisely what memory was not. For a number of scientists, the idea that memory is a recording device rests on an unrealistic fantasy of accuracy and permanence. Instead of practices that facilitated ‘reliving’ a permanent record, they sought out ways to reveal an ineradicable role of interpretation… in the construction of knowledge and memory.”

It's been a while since I posted but there has been JUST SO MUCH to think about since the second semester started. I think grad school is just barely starting to instill and encourage clarity and confidence in my mind, not only with regard to ideas about culture and identity, but also about ways of thinking about things, which is part of the whole graduate studies exercise.

Today I came across this post which expressed so completely some of the thoughts I've been having regarding the link(s) between technology and memory and how the very way individuals and society remember may be shifting. The subtitle of the original post at Brain Pickings is: "how technology shaped our metaphors for remembering."

My own strand of curiosity about memory and technology first emerged when my toddler son would say something like, "Do you remember when I ....?" and refer to something that happened when he was 18-months-old. Did he actually remember the occasion (or book, or story, or food) that he experienced when he barely had words to express knowledge and perception, or did a photo or narrative he saw or heard prompt a construction of that event in his little mind? In part, I think he responds to visual triggers - we have just so many more photos (thousands, already) that he can and does look at frequently that reference that past for him. He certainly has a stronger sense of "the past" than my younger sibling displayed or that I remember having when I was young.

I sense that his seemingly vivid sense of the past has something to do with the technologies that are around him, that he has access to, that we bring into our lives together. I'm not sure what the relationships are, though, and look forward to one day picking up this thread and looking at it more closely.

Alison Winter's book may be a good place to start exploring.
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10 Feb 2012

Social Media and the US president
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We all already know President Obama likes Al Green. But No Doubt, Arcade Fire, Wilco, REO Speedwagon, and Bruce Springsteen? His official 2012 Campaign Playlist on Spotify was released this morning via his Twitter feed...

The reality is the Spotify playlist isn't comprised of all President Obama's favourite tunes; his campaign staff likely pieced most of these together for the sake of creating a compaign narrative, and added a few choice songs from the President's own playlist (because for some reason, I'm not sure the POTUS really follows Arcade Fire). But it is notable to see our first president who knows and utilizes both social networking and social music services as part of his campaign.

via

Yeah, it's probably his staff stacking the Spotify playlist and composing and sending the tweets.

It's sort of weird to think about the President, not of some company, but of the United States of America, engaging in Twitter and social music services.

It's not really even him, but his mantle: the OFFICE of the President.

And social media is supposed to be about "engaging" people. Doesn't this imply a dialogue? Where is the dialogue in campaign social media streams? I can't see any replies in the first however many pages of scrolling down the tweets and did't really expect to. So it's more a status update and schedule stream, with plenty of attraction: 12 million plus followers!

What makes me uncomfortable is that this campaign strategy isn't really "engagement", which is the word I hear most often in connection with the why and wherefore of Twitter. Yes, people are more immediately updated of related news, and there is the illusion of being closer to the President (or his office) since idividual people can personally click and follow @BarackObama, but as a result, the perception of what social media relations entails ends up skewed. It isn't closeness; it isn't engagement, in this case. It's just an immediate status update being fed into one's own media stream.

One thing social media makes me think about a lot is immediacy and the question if it is bringing us closer to others. I think it CAN bring us closer to others; that it does bring people who would not otherwise be on my radar into a space where I will notice and perhaps connect with them. There is validity to social media, but I question what is "social" when the word is thrown around so easily.

It should be about connecting and the best connections are mutual.
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8 Feb 2012

A man and his phone....
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Emailing Facebooking Twitting Googling etc (Taken with instagram)

via boaeatselephant.tumblr.com

Along the lines of an earlier post about Chris Crutchfield's video project, here is a photo that showed up in my Tumblr feed today.

There is a photo project out there, I wish I remember by whom, looking at people and their phones in all sorts of places and times of the day. We have very interesting relationships with our phone in this day and age.

It's a topic totally worth looking into more deeply.
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5 Feb 2012

Collaboration and commiseration with the cohort
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Ah, breakfast.

All the better for the company of my fellow students. This time it was at The Loop in Calgary's Myrtle Loop community and double delight in the fact that it wasn't too cold venturing out earlier than usual on a Saturday morning.

One piece of advice we heard a couple of times during our orientation week last fall was to really make the most of the relationships at grad school. It's easier and harder than it was in undergrad: easier because it's such a small cohort (less than 15 for this year's PhDs and MAs together) and harder because everyone is so. dang. busy. Between reading, being a teaching/research assistant, writing papers, journal entries, articles and proposals, it's hard to make time to meet, let alone coordinate getting together.

But it's so worth it.

Conversation topics on this Saturday morning, other than food and shopping and goings-on in the city, consisted of:
- hashing it out about the professors - who's demanding, who was unfair, who has good advice, who doesn't, who's helpful, who isn't (and it was all relative and personal)
- assignment expectations
- the stages of our writing (which pretty much we were all agreed on: nowhere yet)
- the stages of our thinking about writing (lots of progress, different stages, there)
- WTF about readings and theory
No one was really (yet) at the bitching stage and it was the best Saturday morning social gathering I'd been to in a while.

I really don't want to sound cliche, but it was really really good to know that none of us were truly alone in this master's degree process: we were on similar pages with similar, yet different, struggles and cares and there was a true sense of encouragement and support amongst the group.

If anyone ever asks me for advice about going on to graduate studies after a bachelor's degree, I'm now going to include that same advice: get to know your peers and make relationships with them.
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