Category Archives: Media Space

We’re Winning (Not)

From Steven Thomma

A majority of Americans think the United States isn’t winning the war on terrorism, a perception that could undermine a key Republican strength just as John McCain and Barack Obama head into their first debate Friday night, a clash over foreign policy and national security. A new Ipsos/McClatchy online poll finds a solid majority of 57 percent thinking that the country can win the war on terrorism but a similar majority of 54 percent saying that the country is NOT winning it.

Well, we’re no doing well on a couple of other fronts: stupidity and speculation, either. The fault here is not with strategy but with language. There is and has been no “war on terrorism” because such a grammatical object is false. You cannot fight metaphor. Such thinking can only be reactionary as the war would be lost with a single person’s act in some small out of the way place.

Still in bizarro world.

Press Actions

This is a good idea from Dave Winer:

Barack Obama isn’t a sexual pervert, the law that he voted for when he was an Illinois state senator was designed to protect small children from sexual predators. The news should not report a controversy, they should report that McCain is telling a desipicable lie. Until that lie is acknowledged, retracted and apologized for, both to Obama and to the electorate, McCain should not receive any of the services of the press. The first question in any interview should be “Why are you lying and when will you admit that you are and stop.” If he continues to lie, that’s the end of the interview. The reporter wraps it up and leaves. You can’t continue to interview someone who you know is lying. Reporters do it all the time, but this must stop now.

Composition 2

I think I have it. In Composition 2, Tunxis’ research course, we will be watching Wesch videos and simply infer subjects from there. It will give an opportunity to branch into media, politics, law, new media, futures, and space. Basically, I have generic assignments constructed whose content can be pretty much anything, but lay a grid of rules down for length, presentation, and content.

We will see heavy use of collaboration, wikis, blogs, netvibes as an organizing tool. Then we’ll see what happens.

Game Building

An interesting night in new media. It was all about games. We reviewed a few interactive fictions considering ideas such as puzzle clues, description as a means of orienting the reader, and details as a means generating interest in world exploration. These require the art of poetry.

Then we built board games. The students split into groups and put together some interesting variations of chess. We’ll have those who weren’t in class do a little play next week before we hit Pong.

Editors

Why is it that the spaces I pay attention to are filled with hypertext and the tools, such as Gimcrack’d (could someone check the iphone on this one? Um, Jesse?), Hypertextopia, and now the wall outside my office at work? This is a good thing.

Thanks Susan for the links.

One genius of Storyspace is its editor, however. Hopefully this framework will come back into people’s thinking as software like Hypertextopia and Literatronic become more popular. It’s a good thing, genius, to have the editing space linked coherently to the reading space. This is just sound epistemology.

Doninger, Free Speech, and Borders

Reportage from the Second Curcuit Court of Appeals is coming in on the Avery Doninger case, an item often in the post space here. This case is about relationships. These relationships should not be overcomplicated.

It calls for a rethinking by school administrators of their role in public discourse. It’s not about whether a student can or cannot call their school principles names on a weblog. If a student does call their teacher or principle an asshole, then this provides an opportunity for the teacher or the principle to engage: “Why are you calling me an asshole?” That’s a starting point. On Twitter, I asked a question about Facebook semiotics. This was a serious question. On Facebook, I have students in my course who have added me as a friend, a term that has numerous meanings. These students have made the choice to add me to their lists. I typically accept their call. But this is potentially dangerous for them. Soon, they may want to retract because part of my role as instructor is to evaluate their performance.

But the student may also evaluate mine. Is it proper for a student on Facebook or in their own weblog to call me an asshole? Sure. Would my feelings be hurt? Sure. Honestly, who “wants” to be called an asshole without compensation? But it would provide me an opportunity. “Why are you calling me an asshole when I basically performed my function: which was to evaluate your performance? This is a function the student has agreed to in their role as someone who’s basically asked and paid for it. The opportunity comes with the response: “Why did you claim that I used too many generalizations or did not back up my conclusions about Romanticism with evidence from the texts” or “I thought I had supplied sufficient logic yet you claimed that paragraph 3 needed development.” These questions I can deal with, in private or in public.

People generally know that what they say on Facebook is public within the Facebook context. Same goes for the weblog.

The Doninger case is a waste of litigation space: can we not engage each other in real disputation? Again, I make a call. Administrators should not be out to enforce boundaries. They should have engaged the student in her comment space. They should have made their case in public using their own fingers. That’s what keyboards are for. For practicing classical speech! This is what I mean:

The school officials’ attorney, Thomas R. Gerarde, argued that the Internet has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate, allowing them to reach hundreds of people at a time. If a student leader makes offensive comments about the school on the Internet, the school should have the right to act, said Gerarde, who represents Mills Principal Karissa Niehoff and former Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz. “We shouldn’t be required to just swallow it,” he said.

I disagree that the internet “has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate.” The same cause and effect relationship could have resulted from a slip of paper passed around in the cafeteria. Should the school have the right to act? Please: why is this not fallacious in that Gerarde’s assertion assumed a narrow definition of “act.” It did have the right to act in all kinds of ways. Officials have the right to comment on a student’s weblog now, at this moment, to ask simple questions: “Yes, we did make the decision to ‘Cancel’ (record correction provided by Andy Thibault [thanks, Andy]) Jamfest. Why does this make us douchbags?

P.S.: Correction added.

Sally Terrell Travels

forkeeps.jpgCongratulations to Sally Terrell, our wonderful talent, for her inclusion in For Keeps, a collection of memoir edited by Victoria Zackheim. Over the course of the next few days, Sally will be reading from her work. She’ll be at Community Book Store in Brooklyn tonight at 7:30 PM, December 8th at Bluestockings in Manhattan at 7 PM, and East Haddam’s Burgundy Books on Sunday at 12:30 PM.

Sally’s work is yet another effort in the creative production going on at Tunxis. We’re proud to have her among our numbers.

From the book:

In FOR KEEPS: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance, twenty-seven gifted authors write personal essays about how body image has colored, changed or enriched their lives…or how life’s events have changed their body image. Many of these authors have experienced some transformative moment when they thought Aha! and life was never the same. Whether the focus is illness, depression, our mothers, or growing older, the writing is profound, sometimes hilarious, and always engaging. What better than humor and the naked truth to celebrate and flaunt our bodies…and our attitudes toward them? Whoever we are, the way we feel about our bodies profoundly affects the way we live our lives.

Comments and Collaboration

It’s interesting that given the subject of weblog comments that Susan adds to the issue in a post on collaboration and lets the blogger/typepad magic work on its own. She links back to Wayne at Nutty Streamers to illustrate weblog community.

In a like-minded community with a job to do the issue isn’t writing but getting the job done, and comment space can be an excellent method for collaborating, if people can make themselves understood with their symbols and rhetorical schemes; likewise, if the goal is to create a community of readers, then the weblog works as well. This, of course, comes with a whole host of issues, some of which are technical and political. Good reading and good writing is implicit in all this.

P.S.: I’ve taken her hint and added semantic links.