For our ETEC 540 Final Project, Scott Richmond and I recorded an unscripted podcast discussing  Native vs. Browser based word processors as a reading and writing technology, considering historical and cultural contexts, and implications on literacy and education.

Word processors are hosted on machines engineered to commandeer attention, distracting from the task at hand…. More on SoundCloud.

References:

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge. 

McLuhan, M (1977). Laws of the Media. ETC: A Review of General Semantics (34) 2., 173-150. 

Ong, Walter, J. Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York; London: Routledge.

First Narrative – Near future – 2035 – two class society – not necessarily rich & poor, but those who can self-regulate and those who can’t; those who are not addicted to their personal devices and those who are; those who create and those who consume.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones, but my father tells me I’m not lucky – it was hard work; an investment in energy and teaching. He tells me that he and my mother intentionally got me to where I am. They told me stories of discs that arrived in the mail that would grant access to the internet through wires before wireless phones. I have vague memories of childhood when they would let us watch videos and then cut us off when they thought we’d had enough and we would kick and scream. We were in the minority of teens who weren’t allowed to have smartphones. In hindsight I’m glad they did.

My name is Lexie and I’m 23 years old. I had barely finished my bachelor’s degree when I was tapped to work at an engineering and software design firm for Inter-Aries – the company that transports people to the Mars colonies (a spinoff of SpaceX). I always dreamed of becoming an astronaut and I love my job. It’s really exciting and not that difficult to be honest. I’d almost say going home from work is harder. A few of my friends from high school are doing ok – the ones that stayed with it and got jobs in design and programming. I think I know a couple that played esports for team Canada at the olympics. But most of the kids barely finished high school or didn’t. My dad calls them zombies. I’m grateful that most services are automated these days, frankly, because the “zombies” just don’t want to work. I remember going to buy shoes and lunch at the mall (oh my gosh remember malls?) and the employees couldn’t look up from their phones to help us or take our order. My dad says it was like that when the first iPhones came out, but it got so much worse.

At Inter-Aries we have trouble finding good people to do some of the non-automated jobs. We just fired our fifth person in a month. One didn’t show up for work after lunch and we found him in the break room gaming. Another just didn’t show up. She says she didn’t feel like working but forgot to quit or couldn’t get around to it. Professor Hurari called it the new opioid crisis. In the 2020’s when I was a kid, everyone was worried about their private data being stolen (or given away), but nobody thought the attention economy would turn more than three quarters of the population into addicts. I can’t believe some people still think it’s not a big deal. I heard a few days ago an 80 year old woman had a stroke and died while her husband was sitting next to her on the couch, staring at his phone. He didn’t notice she was dead until the next day. I sometimes catch myself thinking awful thoughts, that my friends, colleagues, and I are better than those “lowlifes,” but that’s not fair… Anyway, I have to get back to work. We’re training a new algorithm and testing it on the “trolley problem.” TTYL.

*****

Second Narrative – A teacher teaches a lesson to kids in 2051.

“Hunter.”

“Fuck you.”

“Excuse me?”

“What? Oh, no I wasn’t talking to you Mr. S… Some asshole shot me.”

“Hunter! Drop out of whatever game you’re playing, turn off your implant, and pay attention!”

Hunter exhaled loudly and turned his eyes from blankly staring at the wall towards his teacher and blinked a few times, looking bleary. At the front of the room, Mr. Spanis stood looking disappointed but not surprised at the teenager.

“Hunter, you know you’re not supposed to be using your implant during class time.”

“But Mr. S, I didn’t get to finish my game at break and Eri just beat my high score.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten a notification if your chip was turned off.”

“This shit is boring and when are we going to use it anyway?! I don’t see why we even have to be at this stupid school. My dad says no one needs to work anymore.”

The teacher rolled his eyes and took a breath. This year was his final year of teaching before retirement, and he’d heard this complaint before.

“Good point, Hunter” he began. “You might not work. Some of you might pursue creative design and programming jobs, some of you will do gig work for simple labour that robots can’t do, and the rest of you might very well just consume content and collect UBI.” He looked around the room as he spoke, trying not to look at which students he thought were the better ones as he listed the categories. He turned his gaze back to Hunter. “But remember, school isn’t training for a job; it’s stuff you ought to know as a person in the world. And the law says you can’t start collecting your Universal Basic Income until you get your high school diploma, unless you want to do monthly drug tests.

“Eww!” some of the students exclaimed. Mr. Spanis gestured with his hands that the students should quiet down.

“Now. This is your last class to finish your assignments on writing technology, from oral traditions to Gutenberg, computers, and neural links. Remember you can handwrite or type but no neural links allowed. Got that Hunter?”

Later that day, Mr. Spanis, Chris, left the school and walked to his car. He got in as a familiar tone sounded. He nodded to confirm that the default destination, home, was where he intended to go. The car pulled out of it’s spot and rolled onto the street, noiseless but for the crackle of traces of sand under the tires. He read over the day’s news headlines as the car turned itself onto the highway, and he smiled when he saw an article on another successful landing at the Mars colony. His daughter, Lexie, was chief engineer at the company that designed the spacecraft. A tone sounded, interrupting his article and video with a popup video from the camera at his home’s front door.

“Hello Mr. Spanis,” the voice said. “Are you home to receive a package?”

“Hi, I’m on my way. Be there in 5 minutes. Just leave it on the step, please and thank you.”

“I’m afraid as this is wine, category, alcohol and other controlled substances, I cannot. Would you like me to try again later?”

“No, no. I’ll remote-open the door. Can you drop it inside?”

“Yes sir,” the voice pleasantly replied. Chris reached over to the display and tapped it. A tone confirmed the front door opened and the delivery bot lowered the case of wine into the front entryway. He chuckled and thought to himself “for a so-called automated world I still have to intervene a lot for simple, dumb shit…” He felt a sudden warmth followed by happiness. His wife Jennifer had sent a stim message, a token of affection like x’s and o’s at the end of a letter or a text message emoji, but sent wirelessly without words or images as a delivery of pure emotion directly to his neural implant. He smiled and sent back with a thought, “you too hon. See you in a few minutes.”

In “playing” User Inyerface, an online “game” by Bagaar, you are meant to navigate to the end of a series of prompts designed to mimic typical web page/form filling mechanics, but twisted and satirized. I caught on to the shtick fairly quickly, as the opening page seemed wrong – the words on the buttons were not what you’d expect them to be, and the fine print text had underlines and what appeared to be hypertext in unexpected places. 

The feature that stumped me the most was a popup stating “the clock is ticking.” It wasn’t the time that rattled me, rather the only button or word that seemed to have any action was a button that locked the popup to the screen. The form that I was supposed to fill out was greyed-out behind the popup and inaccessible. I eventually navigated away from the game and reloaded. It wasn’t until my third attempt and encounter with the popup that I realised the copyright fine print line actually used the © symbol as the letter “c” in the word “close.” Once past this hurdle, I was able to get through the proceeding steps mostly uninhibited. 

I was reminded of Bolter (2001) in this use of misleading iconography. I criticised Bolter back in week 6 for having an over-the-top disdain for imagery and graphical elements co-existing with (and pushing out) text, bordering on paranoia. I think he would love this “game.” On reflection, the strategy I employed was to read the text literally and try to ignore any visual cues that would normally lead people to navigate without actually reading (e.g. graphic design elements, colours, shapes, highlights, buttons, etc.) – typically, for example, the “next” button is green, or is in the bottom right corner with an arrow pointing to the right; a selected option is highlighted in a bold colour; and the cursor changes form when hovering over hypertext or buttons. These are features we take for granted and the game plays on this. A similar concept had occurred to me before, but not the realization that is the visual cues that influence our behaviour. Perhaps Bolter was right to be worried. Reading and writing are artificial – human creations – and evolution wired our brains for visual preeminence. 

The utilitarian application of such a “design flaw” in the human architecture is being harnessed by advertisers. While this is not news to anyone in the third decade of the 21st century, it’s study is nevertheless of great importance. Brignull (2011) outlines these practices and the deeper psychology being taken advantage of, as does Thaler’s studies of influencing behaviour through establishing “defaults.” 

Final Thoughts:

Where does it lead? Following the insights of Harris (2017) and Tufekci (2017), my thoughts go to environmental equilibrium. Just as it’s taken the past several decades for governments and corporations to acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change and realize that exponential economic growth through resource extraction isn’t infinitely sustainable, I wonder if the companies whose practice is to harness the hunger for misinformation to obtain more clicks will have to find a pendulum-swing-point and equilibrate; if Facebook pushes it’s far-right or extreme left users too far, it could cause such political instability as to jeopardize its own existence. If the ethics of behavioural economics and consumer psychology don’t motivate corporations to change of their own volition or governments to legislate them to more ethical practices, hopefully they will act when they see the potential implications of “social climate change.”

References

• Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
• Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.
• Decision Lab – Richard Thaler. (Retrieved 20 March 2021) https://thedecisionlab.com/thinkers/economics/richard-thaler/
• Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en
• Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en

Co-written by me (Chris Spanis) and Scott Richmond.

This post is the result of the two authors having a phone conversation while trying to digest the network data on Palladio. After some frustrations we were able to understand what we were looking at and quickly turned toward analysis. 

The way the data is presented in Palladio gives very little context on the underlying reasons why individuals chose what they chose. The co-authors of this post came to our curation decisions from very different places. One of us chose based on purely auditory aesthetics or pleasingness, whereas the other chose based on an attempt at a maximally diversified spectrum of human musical representation and auditory modes. This makes it very difficult to create any kind of groupings or communities based on common interests or ways of thinking. Based on this kind of selection, how would any algorithm be able to make sense of anything beyond the music selection themselves? 

Google contextualizes searches on two levels:

1 – not signed in – uses location data, session search search history, device, operating system, etc. feeding into a set of assumptions which direct the algorithm. 

2 – signed into a google account – uses, basically, your entire life.

We were unable to find a way to group classmates connecting them by what they did NOT choose in common (null commonalities)

This activity was less an activity in choosing the “best,” but rather eliminating options. All of the music is worth including – we could have either chosen our favourites OR eliminated options for various reasons. Just as the sort/web is not able to show WHY we chose our choices, it is unable to resolve why we didn’t choose the ones we omitted. 

How could one go about trying to suss out motives or commonalities among classmates? 

1. We could attempt to categorize the songs by genre and look at commonalities or diversions. 

• folk, classical, etc.
• vocal, instrumental, etc. 
• major or minor keys 
• Beats per minute or cadence
• “civilized” vs. “ethnic” or high vs. low technology (I intentionally used obviously massively politically charged language to exemplify that arguably all attempts at genrefication will oversimplify, overgeneralize, and stereotype.)

…Did classmates tend towards selecting within or among common genres or did they share in common the goal of attempting to represent diversity in genres?

2. We could also layer in demographic information on the classmates (self-provided or mined from UBC’s student records)

• Sex or gender could yield interesting data
• Age – was age a significant factor in choice? What if there is a young student in the class who felt that all of the musical choices were terrible?
• Location – different places in the world appreciate wildly different types of music, e.g to Westerners, the minor scale sounds sad or mysterious, but in southeast Asia it is the preferred traditional scale. 
• Ethnicity
• Education

Final Thoughts:

We were both surprised at how few songs we chose in common. Upon discovering this, we immediately engaged in the process of accusing the other of flawed selection reasoning. This highlights that the personal differences in choice were not just due to sociocultural differences but also due to potential interpretations of the assignment (the selection criteria themselves).

At the end of the day, no matter how we treat the data, the question remains: What does the data actually mean? For instance, is there any relevance to the fact that Chris is one of the only classmates that didn’t choose Johnny B Goode? Perhaps, the quiz could be reconstructed to ask classmates to score songs on a weighted scale, in which students must rate every song on a continuum but only 10 songs allowed the top weighting. There could also be a checkbox for a null choice, or songs that classmates explicitly did not want included on the Golden Record. While we wouldn’t know why without a text box (and even so, can we ensure honesty or self-knowledge?), it would yield useful data.

The Voyager Golden Record could be seen either as a frivolous waste of time or one of the most profound human gestures in history. The likelihood of any intelligent species coming upon it in the vastness of space is unimaginably low for a myriad of reasons, yet the time capsule is meant to last for over a billion years; even if the human species survives that long (and indeed it is barely a hundred thousand years old, with the invention of writing to a civilization capable of launching such a craft existing for only a couple thousand years, while multicellular life has been on the planet for a billion…), the sun is believed to reach the end of its life in 4-5 billion years and in doing so will expand to swallow and incinerate the planet Earth. How to leave a mark on the universe that we were here? Where to start? What to choose? The antiquated analogue technology is ingeniously superior to modern digital tools – rather than digital, which relies on software to make “real,” a record uses physical texture to encode the physical pressure waves of sounds. How a discoverer will listen to it or perceive it is unknown.

Now, to the task of curating the selections to a short-list of ten. Any attempt to represent humanity with a limited set of samples is by its very nature problematic. Indeed, as the principle producer of the Golden Record Tim Ferris said in interview with Twenty Thousand Hertz, nearly all of the music humans have ever made is left out, NOT on the record (Taylor, 2019). There are issues with representation, equity, and stereotyping that simply cannot be overcome.

Here is my list:

1. Brandenburg Concerto
2. Ketawang: Puspåwårnå (Kinds of Flowers)
3. Liu Shui (Flowing Streams)
4. Chakrulo
5. Muğam
6. Barnumbirr (Morning Star) and Moikoi Song
7. Navajo Night Chant, Yeibichai Dance
8. Bhairavi: Jaat Kahan Ho
9. Melancholy Blues
10. Izlel E Delyo Haydutin

My first strategy was to eliminate redundancy. There are several pieces of European orchestral music that could be reduced to one. My other intentions were to have major world regions represented once, to try to have a mix of instruments with little overlap, and to have a range of tempos and tones. If “music” cannot be interpreted they way we experience it, at least an alien would get a diverse range of sounds. Finally, given the choice, I would give equal time to nature sounds.

To play my Twine “choose your adventure” story/game, click the link below to download the file and it open it. It will run in your default browser.

METcraft Adventure.html

Reflection

In the creation of my Twine, I wanted to play with Bolter’s notion that “Despite its apparently ephemeral and ethereal quality, electronic writing maintains a sense of place in the physical world.” (2001. pp.29). I thought that writing a hypertext story-game based in a virtual world (Minecraft) might blur the lines between physical and digital. The player interacts with the text virtually while interacting with their computer physically, and the story of the game itself takes place in a virtual facsimile of the real wilderness. Bolter also says “electronic hypertext […] uses the printed book as its object of remediation.” (pp.45), which also made me think that composing a written story (primitive) from a video game (advanced) would be a bit of a reversal; the printed book is not being remediated, rather a new art form has evolved in parallel with print. 

After reading the history of hypertext in the early days of the internet (and before), it was challenging to craft a Twine that would live up to the early imaginings and be interconnected rather than linear. I tried to build my story such that it would be recursive and interconnected as Bush described of the possibilities of the memex: “at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button […] numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail […] as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book […] any item can be joined into numerous trails.” (1945). While learning the code of Twine was challenging for me, it pales in comparison to how complicated it might have been in Bush’s day to link texts without modern computer technology. I struggle to think of how he even imagined such a notion without first seeing a simple (and less utilitarian) application of hypertext like Twine. 

Finally, I had some fun with the code itself and seeing what I could do with Twine in the limited amount of time I had. While there’s so much more that can, and has, been done, I am reminded of Doug Engelbart “[the] human mind neither learns nor acts by large leaps but by steps organized or structured so that each one depends upon previous steps”(1962). The expectation of this assignment was (hopefully) not that of a large leap but of steps mindful of historical context. 

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1)

Engelbart, D. C., (1962). Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework. STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA.

For this assignment, I stamped a five letter word by cutting my own typeface from small potatoes as a representation of the revolutionary shift that was the invention of movable type printing. I chose “Tesla” as my five letter word because my wife and I recently purchased an electric car and it’s something we’re very proud of.

The intricacy of accurately carving a letter even a couple centimetres high was particularly challenging, not just because of the medium, but the fine motor control and knife skill involved. Also, carving the letter mirrored is necessary or else the print will be backward which requires constant attention. I am baffled by the skill and precision of Gutenberg as described by Clement (1997) in decreasing the font size to get his bible to have more lines and thus fewer pages. 

It took me 20 minutes to make the stamps, but I planned ahead mentally, knowing that I would square the potatoes first into prisms, carve the letter mirrored, then skewer and stamp.

Rather than stamping individual letters one at a time, I attempted to secure my potato stamps by way of a skewer through the lot of them, similar to the way a compositor would have mounted the type in a “composing stick” (Clement, 1997. pp.14). 

I noticed that not all Roman alphabet letters are equally difficult to carve: Straight letters like L and T were easiest, as I could use long parallel cuts to form them. Removing the interior pieces from the E and A was challenging, and the curvature of the S was the greatest difficulty.

Considering the time and effort that took you to create a 5-letter word, my feelings on the mechanization of writing are as follows:

• • I owe a debt of gratitude I can’t fully comprehend to Gutenburg. Our species would not be where it is now without widely distributed and accessible literacy. As Ong tells us of Einstein, science would not have been possible without writing and printing (Ong, 2002. pp.115).
  • While printing is and was more efficient than scribing, typesetting was still a highly skilled and onerous task; the focus required to set error-free pages for long hours would have been gruelling (Harris, 2018).  
  • I have access to safe ink. Medieval pigments were expensive, hard to make, and sometimes toxic, containing mercury and/or lead (Clement, 1997. pp.12)
  • Having access to printed books, and the internet, plus not having to spend my life copying a book by hand nor spending a fortune on one, I get to spend more time with my family. My daughter enjoyed helping me with this activity and even carved a letter of her own!

References

Clement, R. W. (1997). Medieval and Renaissance Book Production. Library Faculty & Staff Publications. Paper 10. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/10

Harris, B. (2018, February 4). The printed Book: Opening the floodgates of knowledge. [Audio podcast episode]. In How it Began: A History of the Modern World. Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://howitbegan.com/episodes/the-printed-book/

Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge. https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf

For this assignment I recorded my computer transcribing my anecdote of an event while alpine skiing in tricky snow conditions. You can watch the video and view the final transcription (with all of its errors intact) below.

Well there we go perfect OK so last weekend I was skiing and the snow wasn’t great some peaks hadn’t had new snow in over a week but there’s no such thing as a bad day skiing as my friends like to say so I was on a run and it was groomed which is pretty rare this particular run as rarely groomed so I was enjoying that and then I thought I would step off the side of the run to see what the snow would be like on the bumps to the side of the run and so I went off the side of the run and I’m not good enough at skiing to negotiate moguls particularly well the snow was firm and I had a difficult time of it and I made a couple turns and had to pause to regain my composure and then went for a couple more turns and really committed I dove in colour car do round and the tip of my ski on one ski broke through the wind crest and I immediately ejected from the binding and sailed sailed through the air and I rolled tubes or the energy the impact but as I landed on my side and rolled I had this thought of oh there goes my ACL and PCL there goes all of my cells when I go to twist around and thankfully my binding released immediately and I popped right out and rolled a couple times and came to a stop and there I looked up the hill and there was my one ski laying across the slope and my other ski was just sticking out of the snow I wasn’t hurt and I went to pick up my skis and put them back on and as I stood up to get back into my bindings I broke through the Windcrest again and sunk up to my knees so it was you know it was a funny experience. 

• How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
  • First, It reads as a single run-on sentence, with lots of “um”s and “and”s, but reflecting on that I think that there is a lot of invisible punctuation implicit in our speech. My speech-to-text software did a reasonably good job, I might have sloppy enunciation or my dialect might not be recognized, but they key feature missing, to me, is the lack of punctuation. Unless I interrupt my own train of thought to tell the software “full stop” it will continue transcribing as I speak, making no attempt at punctuation other than spaces between words (which, interestingly, were not a common feature of carved lettering in Ancient Rome…)
  • Second, it shows a lack of preparedness, organization, or polish. There are several details to the story that are presented out of order, or I realized as I was telling the story that I hadn’t explained myself fully and needed to interrupt the narrative to provide a clarifying detail.
  • It also doesn’t read as a piece of academic writing. I tried to be “loose” with this piece and tell the story as I would to a friend, and so my vocabulary and grammar were chosen and ordered unconsciously.
• What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
  • a repeated error that occurred twice was “wind crust” being transcribed as “Windcrest” or “wind crest”. The construction of a proper noun is a bit bizarre. I assume that my speech to text software, which doesn’t work when offline, uses machine learning or an algorithm to determine content or context which may help with interpretation and word choice, so this one stood out as odd.
• What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
  • Well, it definitely would have been better organized and edited. I forgot to set the scene and explain before the anecdote that the snow was a hard crust with softer snow underneath. This made the effect of the punchline or climax less impactful.
  • I also would have been more likely to instruct the software to include punctuation without interrupting my thought, as the structure would already have been determined and the content available to see.
• In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
  • Oral storytelling is unique in that it is blemished and flawed, not polished or refined like edited writing, but it is engaging; it captures readers in the moment and enables them to picture the events as if they are happening.
  • I personally enjoy listening to podcasts and audiobooks over reading in many cases for this reason: that there is so much more information encoded in syllabic emphasis, tone, cadence, volume, etc. than text alone can convey. This, in part, explains the rise of the emoticon or emoji – because sarcasm is so hard to communicate in text/writing alone without being misconstrued.

**Note: This post will be updated regularly until the April 14th Deadline.**

Prompts:

• How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?
• What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?
• How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authouring and end-user interface?
• What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?
•  What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?
• How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?

1. Chelan H’s “What’s in Your Bag” post.
   Chelan took a brilliant and alternative approach to mine. I presented my bag’s contents as they are – an artifact always in flux and reflecting (as an archaeologist would infer) the time it exists in. Chelan divided her contents into ones that are constant and ones that used to be common but have lost their place due to the pandemic. She chose a google site provided by her employing school district’s license rather than my own choice to use UBC blogs despite similar access to google. I suppose the google site would have been easier and more attractive but I elected not to use it for reasons of keeping work and personal life separate (and yes, I consider my own further education separate from work) and for a distrust of google. While I went with the default site settings and have a simple text-dominant interface, Chelan’s site is more aesthetically pleasing and more intuitive to navigate. Not that I wouldn’t like to have a nice looking site, it just wasn’t a priority for me in this circumstance. In fact, it may communicates different and possibly unflattering perceptions visitors might have of me: a positive light such as seeking to direct my efforts toward the content of my work itself and not try to “dress it up,” or a negative light such as a sign of attempting to complete a Masters degree with minimal effort… At any rate, both sites rely on a degree of 21st C web literacy, navigating the pages and posts by way of clicking hypertext. But Chelan seems to have posts organized on their own pages, while mine are a stream of ideas in chronological order, tagged to facilitate searching as the site grows. Finally, I chose to go through my bag in video form, as well as providing annotations and elaborations for readers. I thought that the arrangements of items, how they fit together, and the process of unpacking might elicit more thought or meaning around the items than the visual of them laid out in tableau. I think that choice also helped my audience to feel more a part of my life with a more immersive and tactile experience than a still photo and text. Since we are thinking of the items we carry as some form of “text” about us, I sought to make the communication of that text richer without just using more words.
2. Katrina’s Potato Printing
   Katrina approached the task in a much different way than I did – scribing all the letters in a single block. I was inspired and challenged myself to follow Gutenberg’s great idea of “movable type” and string together letter blocks. It definitely complicated things – getting equal alignment, inking, pressure… Katrina simplified and made it efficient, but it took skill and artistic ability (and RISK – if she made a critical mistake, the whole block needed to be discarded and start again from scratch). The video was a step up from my photo essay, but I believe our methods were equally accessible and require similar literacies to consume.She discussed how carving the text in negative was challenging which struck me – it didn’t even occur to me but it makes sense. Intuitively, if one were to pick up a potato and start carving letters, one would (I think) carve the letters INTO the block, rather than preserve the letter and cut away the surround. In her conclusion she also touches on a point that completely evaded me – while printing en masse is better for humanity’s education and sharing of knowledge, is it better for the planet? True, the calf skins had a large carbon footprint as well, but the sheer scale of the paper industry beggars belief. Obviously I don’t believe it would have been better to remain illiterate, as paper can be done sustainably, but it highlights that nothing is simple and without consequences. Not even text.
3. Task 5 – Twine (Manize N.)
   I really appreciated Manize’s perspective on this assignment, especially opening with the admission that she is not a gamer. Manize’s idea to have FAQ’s as hypertext and as a means to continue down the player’s own path or to return to the linear plot is truly brilliant. I’m envious. Her use of Bolter’s “verbal units” to guide the divisions in the game design is clever too. Though I went for a sort of “meta” approach making a game about a game, I didn’t back my design up with as much theory as she did. I also liked her perspective of Twine being like storyboarding. I completely agree – I just couldn’t put my finger on it. We agreed that it took longer than anticipated to create the game, for me it was not just the inherent complexity of the game we were creating, but the “analysis paralysis” of having endless possibilities and being frozen, unable to choose one and run with it.
4. Sandra’s Golden Record (Task 9)
   I agree with Sandra’s assessment that with a (short) list of 27 items, I expected to see more commonalities. I also love that she discovered an obvious point that I missed: there was not one single song that everyone in the class chose. Not one. The highest was Johnny B. Goode and while Sandra chose it, I was one of the few dissenters who didn’t. We DID agree on the reasoning though: Sandra says “[…] which leads me to believe that almost everyone in the class found this song was culturally significant enough that it should be preserved through time and space and sent off to unknown aliens in a far away land. I myself had this on my list! But, I don’t actually think the song is that important. It’s just not.”
   The major difference in our assignments is that Sandra explored the reasoning behind her own choices and speculating on her classmates’ choices, while I immediately started asking questions about how one might attempt to find reasons in the data, both in the given dataset and how the assignment could be altered in future to make stronger assumptions.
5. Scott R’s Task 10 – Attention Economy
   Wow. First of all, Scott really committed to the presentation on this one. While both our assignments were in written form with similar accessibility and literacies required to understand, Scott’s was visually more engaging constructed consciously to fit the theme of the week. The visuals – are they great? are they distractions? is that the point???An interesting difference between Scott’s assignment and mine was that I immediately focused on Bolter while Scott didn’t mention him. I commented “I criticised Bolter back in week 6 for having an over-the-top disdain for imagery and graphical elements co-existing with (and pushing out) text, bordering on paranoia. I think he would love this “game.” […] Perhaps Bolter was right to be worried. Reading and writing are artificial – human creations – and evolution wired our brains for visual preeminence.”I really appreciated Scott bringing up Richard Thaler and defaults; how so many free or “freemium” services require an opt-out strategy, which companies bank on people being too busy to do. It’s an odd revenue stream and I chuckle at the thought (unchecked privilege?) of explaining to someone in the Western world 50-100 years ago that people will spend money because they’re too lazy to cancel something that stopped being free.
6. Deirdre D’s Speculative Futures (Task 12)
   I love the idea that 100 years from now, society will have moved to deep and disturbing uses of brain-connected tech, but schools will be only just adopting smart watches. Such a pessimistic but accurate satire. The notion of a Central Data Gathering Authority seems very big brother, very 1984 to me. Similar to my approach, Deirdre wrote a letter as the format of spec. fic. I think it adds a personal touch – a way of quickly connecting to a character in such a short passage. It also presents a challenge, though, in that, realistically, a character in and of their time would never dumb things down to a reader from our present time as their own internal monologue. The true common thread is that technology is not going away. The march of progress beats onward.The idea that a device can monitor grip strength on a pen is brilliant – it adds dimensionality to text and communication technologies we’ve explored in this course. Not only are the words, the language, the medium, the details part of the message, but the mental and emotional state of the author could be encoded in it somehow as well. Such an interesting idea. I think Ong would approve. Bolter would be losing his hair…