Semioclast

The University of Pittsburgh Colloquium on Electronic and Interactive Texts (which I co-organize with Professor Don Bialostosky) will be hosting a lecture and seminar with our second guest speaker, Stuart Moulthrop, Professor of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore. Professor Moulthrop’s wife and writing partner, Nancy Kaplan will be joining us for the seminar. She is currently Professor and Director of the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore.

We will be discussing the place of New Media in the academy as well as the ways in which it is shaping current scholarship in the humanities. The seminar will be followed by a lecture entitled, “Releasing _Content_.”

The metaphor (or ideology) of _content_ — some stable or irreducible quantity/entity at the core of all communications, in whose service mechanisms and media are assumed to operate – remains powerfully pervasive even as media evolve rapidly away from static inscription, toward the very different regime of signal processing and computation. Kaplan and I believe modern media require a new approach, based not on a scheme of containment but rather one of dissemination and (in Pierre Levy’s terms) “interaction.” We therefore suggest a new general term, _data_ (that which is _given_), as a crucial supplement, suggesting at least three forms of _giving_ that may be discerned in contemporary practices. In place of _content_, we propose a _content/data complex_, as a way to address the inherently complex relationship between so-called new and old media forms, and their respective cultures of reception. We offer instances of this complex in operation, in both the carnival context of the Internet’s viral media, and the more austere domain of emerging scholarly practice.

After this explanation of our agenda, we address what seems a first critical problem: how does this approach – in company with other theories of new media, by, e.g., Levy, Manovich, and Bogost – strand apart from the general project of poststructuralism in the last century? We explore several answers to this challenge, adding our own, which focuses on the feedback loops of Zuboff’s “informating,” or the convergence of communication with logical processing, or control.

Ultimately, we argue, the challenge of theoretical priority becomes a challenge _to_ that tradition. Near the end of the last century, two late poststructuralists wrote: “If you read books, justify it.” A similar question might well be put to those who write books, especially academic humanists. Has the idea of the book changed substantially since the advent of digital networks? What else might we (and do we) write, besides books? How do engagements with new and old media interfuse and co-evolve? In the release of _content_, we hope to prepare the ground for exploration of new forms and institutions for discourse, as part of a much larger project we understand as a renewal of the life of writing, or _secondary literacy_.

The seminar will be held on November 26th at noon in room 362 of the Cathedral of Learning; the lecture will follow at 3:30 in Cathedral of Learning room 501.

For information on upcoming events (including information on our spring speakers as it becomes available) check out the Pitt-Etext Google Group.

Two stories today show us how, even when they are not provided for us (as they are in Alternate Reality Games), we find ways to create our own rabbit holes:

The first story, from the blog Save The Robot, chronicles the author’s recent fascination with a minor player on an yet another MTV Networks reality show. The girl, Ellie, barely gets a paragraph on her MTV bio; probably because she gets axed pretty early in the game. But Chris is intrigued. There’s something about her; she’s different than the others. She was the “rocker” and they were (mostly), well, strippers lunging for the bright lights.

The rabbit hole was deep:

I keep Googling. Is Heagney a model? (Scroll down on the page - no seriously, keep scrolling you perv, we’re making a point here.) Is she in this photo of an all-girls swimming pool party, being held by a girl who looks a hell of a lot nicer than Tila Tequila? Is this where she went to high school? And whoa - is this her, SPC Ellie Heagney on a skiing trip in Korea? It looks like her, shy Maggie Gyllenhaal smile and all. Was she in the military?

Eventually, all of this access starts to squick him out. Even beyond the creepy stalker vibe it gives off, the impulse to fill in untold parts in the stories that interest us is a powerful one. Writers turn to fanfic to fill in the fictional blanks themselves; but when the characters are real people the shift seems to be away from writing, towards research.

But when it’s a real person, two things get in the way: 1. They’re real, and probably creeped out. And 2. there’s a nagging feeling that, even if I became obsessed with Ellie Heagney, even if I wanted to write fan fic about her and wiki her and do all the other kinds of things that say, obsessive Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans do with their favorite marginal characters, well, at the end of the day - shouldn’t she be telling us all that stuff? Characters are characters because we get to project stuff onto them. We learn about ourselves by watching what they do and letting them press our buttons. But in this case, we don’t have much right.

The second story, from the newly-added-to-my-RSS-reader NYT column The Medium, takes up a similar impulse and applies it to transmedia storytelling. With access to paratexts of all kinds, from IMDB to Wikipedia, research is becoming an increasing component of casual viewing.

Every visitor to the Internet, or even user of e-mail, is greeted by insidious questions, seductive links and tantalizing chances to click. These rabbit holes — the kind Alice fell down, the kind that tempt Neo in “The Matrix” — provide microportals into what can only be described as new worlds. There’s a blog, Stolen Vermeer, where you can trade tips with people searching for the Vermeer boosted during the $300 million art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990; Flickr pages where you can scrutinize and discuss photos of what people around the world are wearing today; and a vast message board, prisontalk.com, where in addition to advice for the incarcerated and those who love them you can find poetry and letters by people currently in prison.

Say I get e-mail that mentions Nasdijj. Is that an amp manufacturer, I hazily wonder, picturing a logo? Two minutes later I’ve read the Wikipedia entry, and I’m onto source material. Turns out he’s one of those fraud memoirists whom everyone adored until they found out he wasn’t who he claimed to be.

Such research and close attention to textual cues are key elements of the ARG experience. And this reminds me why the ARGs that I enjoy most have been ones that draw very closely on real world events, using reality as a diagetic element and then layering gameplay over that. One of the best moments in Metacortechs a few years ago was when we figured out that one of the characters had “caused” the 2003 northeastern US blackout.

These ARGs are rare, however, most likely because they not only have to deal with the unpredictabilities of player communities, but with an even more unpredictable reality.

In the wake of the DMCA and its triennial exemptions (the most recent of which allows educators to break CSS encryption on DVDs to make clips for students, among other allowances), clarity on intellectual property issues escapes many academics who feel that, in their classrooms at least, anything goes when it comes to “fair use.”

Well, SCMS released their long-awaited statement on fair use in film and media studies yesterday. This foray into the increasingly murky waters of fair use (or, what Lessig calls, “uses that trigger the law of copyright, but which are nonetheless free because the law deems them ‘fair’ — such as copying words from a book in a review of the book“) has been a long time coming and will, hopefully, do more than just clarify the organization’s position on the matter.

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) strongly supports the attempt to define the fair use of visual and aural materials by film and videomakers, educators, programmers and curators, and other film and media practitioners. As a scholarly organization with an ongoing interest in advising its members and constituents on the considerable ambiguity regarding fair use practice and its possible ensuing consequences, SCMS supports the principle of clarifying the legal, ethical, and practical implications of the fair use of visual and aural materials. To this end, SCMS has constituted a committee on public policy, which has been charged with developing a stance on fair use practice, among other policy matters. SCMS seeks to work with other organizations to develop a comprehensive policy stance regarding the fair use of visual and aural materials.

SCMS’ “Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching” (PDF!) is geared towards all educators, but attempts to clarify issues that are especially pressing for those who are teaching online. I found it most interesting that, while fair use is fairly understandable in the physical classroom, online the distinctions get much more troublesome. For example, if I show a film as part of my class during in-class time, I’m fine. However, if I rip the whole film and put it on my Blackboard site things get problematic. This is despite the fact that Blackboard has a notoriously closed architecture that limits access to course materials.