Month: August 2011

Group 8 Final Paper – Encouraging the Use of Virtual Environments by Librarians – Final

Here’s the Group 8 final paper.

I’m signing out! Thanks everyone for the great learning experience!

Second Life explorations with Tristan

Hi everyone,

It has been a pleasure learning with all of you. Please check out the attachment to this post. It describes my brief exploration of Second Life with Tristan.

Best of luck to everyone, and I hope to see you around in the virtual world someday.

A coworker recently asked me which route I take when driving home. I stumbled in my description. “I go out the garage, take the left side of the little street loop. Take a left, go past the library, in between the library and the hospital on the right, you know… Then past the hospital, I take a right; that curves up to 35…” Huh?

My primary profession at the moment, hopefully not much longer, is architecture. But I don’t know names. I don’t know names of streets or buildings or people usually. To me, names are arbitrary things that are attached to deeper essences. The names usually don’t have much at all to do with the actual things or their deeper meanings. So I don’t remember them.

I remember shapes and colors and people walking past a rusting metal wall. That was in Washington D.C. where I lived for a while. I remember a hotel lobby where someone was murdered a couple of weeks prior with MS13 scratched on the wall of a centuries old church in front of the hotel. I remember a huge wind blowing leaves around the narrow street in front of Diego Rivera’s house in Mexico City and thinking that this was his spirit welcoming me. I have no idea what the name of that street is. Tall windows, somber gardens, cantilevered stair up to a loft, that’s all. I remember a giant red neon OCHO peeking out between some palms at the end of that street outside the office tower where I now work; that street I can’t remember the name of that I take past the library, with the hospital on the right.

This is all very strange for someone in the architecture field. I should know things and stand up confidently and declare my place in the world. But I don’t. I’m fairly confident, but mostly about the fact that I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing most of the time. I experience my environment through the lens of existence. Hooking conversations and anecdotes to fragments of walls and textures and smells.

When I enter a virtual world, most of these clumps of event on which I build my structural framework of reality and memory are missing. But there’s another element involved here; another filter through which I perceive the world. When it’s dark and cold outside with the wind whipping the house, I think of the old pawnbroker from ‘Crime & Punishment’ tormenting the young murderer from beyond the grave in his tiny, bleak attic room. When I see a report about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the BBC, I think of the childish corporal in ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ living an actual war through the heroic war stories he will tell after the war is over; peeking at reality through a small slit between his scarf and hat. When I think of the tedious days of work in a monolithic glass office building, I think of the savage in his lighthouse in ‘Brave New World’ looking very much the caricature of a Native American in a 1950’s spaghetti western. When a helicopter lands on that hospital across from the library that I pass on the way home, the savage hangs himself in the lighthouse as the clones swarm in, landing like mosquitoes in their helicomics.

It’s not the morbidity that I’m focusing on in these stories. They just happen to be what I’ve read lately. They shape my current landscape as much as a conversation I’ll have with someone on the street today. They inform the conversation.

And that, in my long, roundabout way, is my point. Reading informs our lives and helps shape us into what we want to become. It puts us in conversation with other people and their wrestlings with existence across time and place. Whether people come to the conversation through a virtual world or through a physical artifact is irrelevant, just as long as they come. Our job is to coax and cajole if need be to get them there. If this can happen on a virtual island in a virtual place, so be it.

When thinking about aggregation, another definition of the term came to mind. In the construction industry, aggregate is a noun and refers to coarse material that serves as reinforcement to add strength to the overall composite material to which it is added.

In the information field, when we say aggregate, we are referring to the categorization and consolidation of disparate and dispersed information objects. If you take from the first definition and add to the second, you end up with the altered idea that the categorization and consolidation of information in the service of the creation of a learning environment can add strength to the overall composition of the material. One of my professor’s mantras is “the organization of information creates new information.” This is also at the heart of all of the 2.0 mindset that we’ve been talking about throughout this course. It is an interesting and valuable perspective.

The other point I would like to make is that it seems like when we aggregate information from a crowdsource, that we are actually aggregating the people who create the information in the first place. We cannot separate the information from the people even if the people are anonymized in the process.

http://slidesha.re/ro5J97

http://lgregfergl.glogster.com/Virtual-Library-Presence/

Here’s the video that’s supposed to play in the glog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuYWLYjOa_0

2.0 is about creativity and collaboration. The concept of property is transformed in an environment of non-physical objects.

Copying and mash-up remind me of Dada techniques and impulses. Dadaists used collage “to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life”. They used photomontage “to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media”. They used assemblage which was a type of 3d collage constructed of everyday objects “to produce meaningful or meaningless pieces of work including war objects and trash”. And they created the concept of the readymade which was a manufactured object situated so as to be considered as art. (all quotes are from Wikipedia… I stole them…)

I have had conversations with several friends who bemoan the death of all originality in the current time frame. They lament the endless copying and remixing and they think that this is the beginning of the end of the human creative spirit. I think that this is a little too one-sided and misses a larger point. Much of what is “stolen” or copied or sampled is actually, in my brief analysis of the work, taken from the surrounding environment. The constituent parts of the mash-ups are images of surroundings or samples of media output.

So, in this way, 2.0 media is more of a commentary than a theft. It’s much more like Dada art which challenged the accepted reference frames by using media output to comment on itself. Turning the camera lens back on itself to create an array of infinite regression.

I was looking into Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism recently for a paper that I’m working on and was interested in a quote by Marx about the idea of a commodity: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

When something is interacted with as a commodity, it is assigned an abstract value that shares a common denominator with other commodities. Two things may have nothing at all in common until an exchange value is assigned to them. What do an eggplant and your labor have in common? They can both be bought and sold. Now that everything seems to be a commodity, I find it interesting that people are deliberately producing value items that are not commodities. They are creating them and distributing them for free. This undermines their exchange rate. I suppose someone is getting paid somewhere along the line, though I’m not really sure how or at what point along the creation-consumption pipeline. Is this all really so free and loose, or is there some underlying commodity market hiding under the cyber-surface?

One thing I think is true is that neither Marx nor any capitalist ever imagined that people would create valuable stuff for free. This is a new type of revolution that seems to undermine, or at least significantly challenge, the current economic system. Thoreau said “Enjoy the land but own it not.” (Walden) This can be said of intellectual property, too. On the other hand, I realize that I’m a total hypocrite. I own many little bits of property that make me feel secure. I would be uncomfortable if my ownership of them were challenged. Maybe the whole 2.0 property paradigm will have to settle on me over time.

I think that the main difference between physical property and 2.0 property is that much of the information that goes into making virtual objects comes from the environment. It’s a commentary on the state of the world. Human capital is put into it in the form of labor in different ways than with physical objects, and the end result is a different type of thing. Maybe that’s why it should be interacted with in a different way; as a different type of commodity. And maybe the new capital is your personal relevance and collaboration ability. You don’t want to squander it by being disagreeable, so you have to cultivate it through social interaction.

Anyway, here’s an interesting web site that I found and want to share: It’s a place that you can go to find open source equivalents to name brand products. http://www.osalt.com/