William Hon's Online Journal

Lessig has a huge head

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:08:41 EST

Jason's right, Lessig has a huge head. Check it out here

Oh Toby Keith, keep on rocking

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:55:41 EST

I know the introduction of this post has but a tenuous connection to our class work but i felt it was interesting, so what the hell.

As someone relatively new to the culture of a place like Southern Ohio, let me just say that a 4 hour drive south to the 'boonies' was most illuminating.

What was most illuminating was my personal discovery that I don't like listening to the same song(/shit?) over and over again. While the simple, earthy denizens of the area may know something about achieving nirvana that I don't, the fact that the repetitive song had to be Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red White and Blue made me almost want to gouge out my eyeballs.

After about the 100th playing, I had internalized his lyrics sufficiently to be disturbed by a fascist aesthetic that seemed to permeate the song. Starting with a description of a certain attack on America as a 'sucker punch' (which is something, being from manhattan, i wouldn't exactly characterize as) , Toby moves onto a gleeful metaphor of the U.S. retaliation as seeing through a black eye in order to 'light up their world like the Fourth of July."

It seems as if Mr. Keith has taken a page out straight out of the work of cultural theorists on how language obfuscates in order to compartmentalize something into easy categories. But I digress as this post is not (entirely) about why I think Mr. Keith is perhaps pandering to a disturbing ethic.

But enough of this hyperbole (or so you think).

After I returned, I wanted to post his deplorably moronic lyrics on this blog (and poke fun at them). However, I found out that such an act was an apparent infringement of copyright law and was something NMPA president David Israelite calls an "unauthorized use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing."

However, such an act is hard to define. What constitutes use of lyrics: the essence of the idea or using the words verbatim? For example, our good friend Toby uses the line "we'll put a boot up your ass, its is the American way." One has to wonder if he has exclusive rights to such a phrase. If so, are we doomed to a banal life that has lost the public use of such a delicious witticism?

I'm not so sure. But there's one thing I am certain of, for this city-boy, there's going to be no more trips down to southern Ohio unless I have a car that has more than just an AM/FM radio.

Oh and if some copyright mole is reading this, I made slight alterations to Toby's lyrics so they aren't repeated verbatim. So rest easy G-men and please don't 'light up my world'.

Anarchists?

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 21:21:07 EST

I seems as if one of the major issues Siva Vaidhyanathan wants to bring up is the pervasive ethnocentrism of the United States in the exchange of information. SV implies that many of the restrictions that Americans are trying to impose upon the world are very imperialistic in nature.

It is fairly ridiculous when Western companies demand first world prices for their merchandise to the rest of the world. This kind of rhetoric is dangerous and damaging in that it demonizes the poor as 'pirates' while simultaneously keeping prices too high for them to integrate into the information community.

RIAA: The true number of the Beast

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:35:19 EST

After reading Free Culture in both digital and print format (which can be found online for free here), I realized something: I don't like writing in my book. I had first read chapters 1-3 in my print copy of the book which had cost $13.50. I didn't take many notes in my fear of marking up the book too heavily with my heavy handed penciling. When I read chapters 4-6 in printed format, I wrote copious comments, read the material more carefully and basically became a lot more intimate with the stuff. This brings up the real point that Lawrence Lessig is trying to make, at what point does regulation interfere with innovation?

Lessig makes a claim that innovation is as much based upon the modification of existing technology as the creation of something uniquely 'original'. Through the manipulation of logistics, Lessig details instances where the utilization of various technologies have been stopped by various regulatory mechanisms: primarily the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA.

The RIAA seems truly pitiless and ruthless in its hunt for 'pirates' as lessig describes. The case of Jesse Jordan, who paid $13,000 for modifying an existing program to make it more palatable to human habits seems to make Lessig's point relatively clear. However, I was even more shocked to discover in the Harvard College Free Culture blog that the RIAA suggested to an MIT undergrad that she should drop out of school in order to pay her legal settlement. (Details can be found here )

More than anything, these examples reveal an interesting point about the RIAA and their extremely unscrupulous tactics.

Savage: God's Gift To Man

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:57:18 EST

The Sublime melding of First Person Shooter and Real Time Strategy can be found here:

(as with all of God's other creations, its free)

Baudrillard

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:20:17 EST

I happen to agree with Virilio that "there is a nihilistic dimension in Baudrillard's writings." The fact that Baudrillard gives up on the social brings up Virilio's point that "reality is produced by a society's culture, it is not given." Interstinly enough, it reminded me of the movie The Matrix. (without delving into the questions of the 2 sequels, whose strange mysteries could be debated ad nauseum)
In the The Matrix, Neo is to be admired for choosing "the real world", a planet where the sun has been blackened out, where there is nothing living, in essence a very unpleasant place. In the "the matrix" or the "fake" word, one encounters a seemingly typical human metropolis, one that resembles the society of our own. What the Matrix and Baudrillard seem to suggest is that somehow, the "fake" world is inferior to the "real." However, if one is to assume that the fake world created by the machines is operating as closely to man's "social" from before, why would anyone want to return to the cesspool of the "real" world?

A Second or First Life?

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 06:10:16 EST

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,71657-0.html

The death of the "patriarchal" author is one thing but user interactivity seems to have gone a little too far.

Authorship

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:56:35 EST

"We are beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside...we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth"

Barthes claims that language, text that we know is actually "a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." It would seem as if Barthes detests the classification of the author because none of what is created is essentially "original." Text is nothing more than a signifier, whose main purpose is to elicit certain feelings and impressions from the reader, without it it can only convey very little purely linguistically . It is "only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred." However, I may be reading Barthes totally wrong as much of his language seemed to elicit very little from myself.

While I do agree that our traditional notion of our author is rather authoritarian, the question of who we are to give credit of "authorship" still remains. If authorship is removed as one of the motivators of writing, will something fundamentally be lost as well?

Postructuralists and their discontents

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 01:58:27 EST

On P.44 of Grusin's article "What Is an Electronic Author?", he states that Derrida claims that the "concepts of the trace suggest that the contents of the mind or the spoken word are no less forms of writing for their spatial fragility and temporal simultaneity." He then makes the claim that "for Derrida, writing is always a technology and already electronic." While it may seem typical of deconstructionist to make such a claim, it is relatively hard to believe? Does Derrida actually believe that the distinction between the "sign" of a written text and that of electronic media has the same characteristics, thus negating the fact that electronic media conveys information in any new way?
One of my frustrations with a lot of deconstructionist theory is that it seems to embody a sort of nihilistic approach to almost everything. Thus, I have to agree with Poster because of its "failure to provide a politically useful contribution." I do agree that while Landow and Bolter may not provide the ultimate characterization, it provides a commentary with some truthful observation about the nature of technology. In our post-modernist age, what can anything be but a commentary?

Boundaries in Scheherezade and Metalepsis

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 02:43:40 EST

The continual fascination of Ryan and crossing boundaries seems exemplified in her analysis of metalepsis. She describes the ontological metalepsis as a "image of a snake that bites its own tail, a literal rendering of the concept of the strange loop." Almost like the story of Oedipus, she seems to be describing a very precise and very esoteric form of paradox expressed within narrative. Like infinity, how does one begin to acknowledge boundaries within such a concept?
I recall a text-based spoof where one would follow a path much like the CYOA novels. As one progressed farther into the story, a random plot generator would mix and match words and create totally new albeit extremely boring plotlines. Theoretically, the possibilities were endless in creating "original" material, there was no end to this story. However, the purpose of this program was to show the hackneyed nature of Tom Clancy novels and the very banal and ridiculous tone in itself created a boundary. Much like the story of Scheherezade while the story in theory may be endless, there seems to be accepted boundaries determined by the reader. In the case of the Tom Clancy random book generator, it is clear that the boundaries that apply to rhetorical metalepsis do still apply in the digital age. In this case, the authoritarian voice is replaced by another, the contributing voices of the readers which suggest a participatory rhetoric. In essence, very few people would enjoy the random story generator.

ted nelson

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:38:28 EST

Xanadu

mere games?

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 12:30:04 EST

I must admit, after reading Ryan's "game wheel" and other various observations she made upon games, I had an image of a crotchety old woman staring disapprovingly upon youths playing nintendo.
In general, all I want to acknowledge is the exceedingly difficult job one has in order to characterize the term "game" within technical boundaries. At what point is the line between "pleasure" and "work" blurred? Adherents of "games" such as Everquest or Second Life would violently defend their virtual lives against the notion that they are playing mere games.
After all, the term "game" seems to bring up a very pejorative and puerile ideal in most people; a adolsecent fingering away on a console onto the wee hours of the night. I believe that before technical classifications of games can occur, we must truly try to determine the differences between what we as human beings perceive the difference is between pleasure and work. At 5 in the morning, with our eyes bloodshot and our heads throbbing, my brother and I would hardly be compelled to call our 8 hour Diablo II binge as "fun", at that point we were truly "working" for the first time in our lives.

A New Age of Narrative?

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 21:59:30 EST

Ryan talks of the traditional Aristotelian ideas about narrative, namely the “(1) fixed sequence, (2) definite beginning and ending, (3) a story’s “certain definite magnitude,” and (4) the conception of unity and wholeness associated with all these other concepts.” However, it would seem odd that these ideas would be challenged by hypertext in any way more than they have been altered and changed within print and oral forms of communication. For example, without delving into a semiotic frenzy, what does a fixed sequence entirely mean? Does Ryan imply that somehow hypertext and digital technology is going to break this down entirely or even change certain ways of human interpretation of the traditional narrative? James Joyce's Ulysses doesn’t seem to have a coherent “fixed sequence?” As Josh mentioned in class, no sane person would feel compelled to start his sequence with “And.” Ryan further ponders whether this new technology is going to make “it an autonomous medium, on par with film and writing…a technology that enhances other non-computer –supported media, such as, precisely, film and writing… or is it a family comprising many members,: the various applications of digital technology.” I’m not quite sure that digital technology is going to change really the way we interpret stories as human beings. While the film may have revolutionized certain aspects of the narrative it is because it utilized pictures, which have simply been put onto a digitized format. I would think that the new technology is rather not the destruction of say “traditional Aristotelian ideas” or a “autonomous medium” but rather a force that allows many of these concepts to be far more transparent and accessible to the reader.

Nietzsche in Hypertext

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:37:17 EST

In one of my other classes, we’re reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. One difficulty of his writing is that he makes many obscure references in the aphorisms he’s written. Nietzsche writes his book so obtusely and with so many cultural references, it is almost hard to understand his point entirely without having an extensive philosophical background. I was also thinking about how useful hypertext would be in this situation as one could easily access many of these cultural references with such a technology. While it may certainly not be the end of written text, an extensive hypertext version of Nietzsche could prove a powerful tool.

Landow

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:35:32 EST

In Hypertext 3.0, Landow brings up Meyer who states the fundamental rationale for categorization; that “we generally rely on “arborescent structures,” such as binary thought, genealogies and hierarchies, to divide the “seemingly endless stream of information about the world into more easily assimilable bits.” Landow also proceeds to suggest that Hypertext is without significant critical analysis and perhaps a threat to traditional avenues of information and communication. However, while Hypertext is often a budding and convoluted system, it is profoundly experiential in its non-linear nature. I also believe that is simply a clearer expression of human communication through technology. Quite simply, it is hard to equate the nature of Hypertext to a “rhizome…which has multiple entryways and exits,” [which] embodies something closer to anarchy than to hierarchy]” However clever a metaphor it may be, communication not ordered in rigid structures and hierarchies do not necessarily mean a lack of message. Many forms of “anarchical” communication such as abstract art seem at times dense, pointless and packed with information. However, to condemn Hypertext as a “rhizome” belittles the complex nature of human feeling and knowledge on the pretense of informational “anarchy.”