Goldsmiths: The … uh, Eighth Week?
Rapidly losing grip on reality. Reading week disrupted normal time and space, propelling me into a whole world of messed-up circadian rythmns and academic guilt. I’ve was told the week after (the week before the one that’s just gone – confused yet?) was the Eighth Week (16/11 – 20/11), but I’m not so sure …
This week, one of my friends from undergrad was down in London. She’s studying for a PhD on the mating behaviour of massive scary ants, and was learning how to radio-tag insects as a guest of ZSL. Having been woken by the fire alarm test an hour after the start of my Wednesday morning American Lit seminar, I needed exciting animals and zoological facts to cheer me up – so legged it across town to meet her at London Zoo. Hence the photo, which is sufficiently odd to stand as an illustration of Week 8:
Course notes follow, below the cut.
Backchat, some thoughts
Having penned a short definition of ‘the backchannel’ for December’s Wired UK (see subsequent celebratory arm-flailing), it was with a tightening stomach that I read this blog post from web researcher danah boyd:
“… I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was …”
An interesting discussion of the way an audience can rapidly become a mob, in all it’s pitchfork-waving, windmill-burning glory – full kudos to danah for being so open and honest about the whole thing. There’s also something interesting (and faintly disturbing) about the journalistic/political side of this.
We dwell in possibility
“My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world. ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects. I will leave that to others more concerned than I. Change is not disconcerting to me. People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity. We will live.”
- Lisa Galarneau, ‘I dwell in possibility’
A spirited defense of techno-optimism, from digital anthropologist (?) Lisa Galarneau.
Wearable Computing, Circa 1996
© photo credit: Steve Mann
Goldsmiths: The Sixth & Seventh Weeks
What’s up internets? It’s been a while …
Week Six (2/11 – 6/11) was a reading week, so no timetabled classes. Instead, a bit of frolicking in London, a trip back to the Sussex countryside to see the parents, the peculiar voyeurism of watching novels being penned (keyboarded?) in real-time on Google Wave, and a concerted effort to finish the bulk of a diagnostic essay for my Digital Media course.
M&M at the Tate Modern, with Joseph Beuys‘ installation, (The Pack):
[key texts] Wired UK 12.09
Riding on the tailcoats of my January internship with the zeitgeist-riding wunderkinder of Wired UK, I’ve got two short pieces in the December issue – both as part of the feature, ‘25 Ideas for 2010+‘. It’s my first professional byline, in one of the most awesome individual magazine issues to spit on the much-touted ‘death of news’, and – naturally – I’m all kinds of adrenal.
© image credit: the conde nast publications ltd.
Now that it’s safely in print, I feel comfortable pointing you to a copy of the email interview I conducted with Swedish doctoral student Jonas Anderson. There’s some seriously interesting stuff in there, very little (unfortunately) of which made it into the final 250 words.
Oh, and with the apparent ratification of Lisbon, it’ll be interesting to see the reception Amelia Andersdotter gets from the European Parliament (and the media) when taking her seat at the start of December. Researching the Wired piece, I spent fifteen minutes transfixed by her interview with Andrew Keen for (of all things) The Daily Telegraph:
Setting aside my own nascent megalomania for a moment (if we must), the December issue also contains Mic Wright’s fantastic feature on photographic miracle the Impossible Project – mentioned briefly in my delirious (and slightly incoherent) economic analysis of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Makers. Also: heaps of nifty infographics, airfix hacking, and Warren Ellis’ spirited defence of phonic curmudgeon Paul Morley.
Now, most of this is probably available online, but – admit it – you need the tactility of print. Underneath it all is the realisation that it’s just not practical to take your laptop to the toilet with you. Netbook, maybe, but not your laptop …
We Live in Public (2009)
Ondi Timoner’s video documentary of the last days of Rome, where Rome is the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Rolls along like something out of Coupland, all the more absurd and disturbing for the fact that it actually happened.
“It took me a beat to realize that what Josh Harris created in 1999 was a physical metaphor for where the Internet would take us,” she said. “It was his way of saying, ‘No matter what I put together, no matter how fascistic it may appear; whether you have to wear uniforms or you have to be interrogated, or the fact that you can’t leave — people won’t care about that. They won’t bother with the details.’ He knew they would pour through the doors for the promise of 110 surveillance cameras and being part of what, right then, was the place to be.”
- Timoner, quoted in The Washington Post
Goldsmiths: The Fifth Week
Fifth Week (26/10 – 30/10)
I’ve fallen a bit behind with these, but this week is reading week (half-term), which gives me a bit of a window to catch up. In retrospect, I seemed to spend a significant chunk of week five in pubs and flat kitchens, hanging out with other MA students. Great fun, but – outside of timetabled workshops & seminars – not particularly conducive to productivity. Also managed to fit in a couple of trips to London town, and an aborted attempt at research training.
Ooh, look – it’s Canary Wharf:
