Over at new media land we’re hunting the structure of day by days for New Media 1: Perspectives (Fall 2004 semester), the first course in Tunxis Community College’s New Media Communication program. Perspectives introduces students to the spectrum of media and their traditions and current applications, forms, and combinations. We’re going to paint with a big brush and eat lots of chocolate cake: we’ll cover image and text, screen and book space, film, photography, and story.

And we have a hero, too. Harold. We discovered today that Francis Ford Coppola has a purple crayon too.

It’s coming coming coming. Syberia II. Here’s a preview by Randy Sluganski. How do I get these things into a fiction course. Maybe we should just do a game course. No text books. Just games. We’ll do Adventure, then Myst, then Leisure Suit Larry, Deus Ex, Gabriel Knight, then Syberia.

The subject may be travel. People, a hypothesis goes, travel because they want to see something new, have new experiences, or revisit the past. This is distinguished from the functional kind–trips to meet friends or enemies, to conduct business, to find things.

Music and reading, therefore, are kin to the first kind of travel. If a reader picks up Homer’s Odyssey for the first time is this text, this story, really as old as the date suggests? What about Joyce’s Ulysses? The mental journey seeks something new, a new experience, or a revisiting or reexperiencing of a prior experience, feeling, and or image (to reexperience Marquez, Dario, or Wordsworth).

With music we seek this reexperiencing, new combinations of notes. Is this correct? When a band comes out with new songs, a new CD, is it the possibility of combinations that draws? Why the scintillation prior to reading new poems and fiction?

What’s on the other side of the forest? What does Tintern Abbey really feel like
–travel for verification of a theme?

Buey que vi en mi niqez echando vaho un dma
bajo el nicarag|ense sol de encendidos oros,
en la hacienda fecunda, plena de la armonma
del trspico; paloma de los bosques sonoros
del viento, de las hachas, de pajaros y toros
salvajes, yo os saludo, pues sois la vida mma.

Ox that I saw in my childhood, as you steamed
in the burning gold on the Nicaraguan sun,
there on the rich plantation filled with tropical
harmonies; woodland dove, of the woods that sang
with the sound of the wind, of axes, of birds and wild bulls:
I salute you both, because you are both my life.

Ruben Dario from Far away

Jason Iorio has concerns. It’s about this post, I assume, and the future. He writes:

My lack of interest in Programming is starting to become obvious to me. I never thought industrial-level programming was going to be my cup of tea, but I was hoping one of the classes I’ve taken was going to jump out and grab me by the armpit hairs. But it seems like I was a samurai trying to learn blacksmithery to make my own swords or something. Didn’t happen.

So what to do? How to proceed, and where to go? I’ve always been more of the idea man, and there is a place for that in the computer gaming world, but how to get to that point is the question. I mean, no one’s going to come looking for a Chief Creative Emperor or what-have-you anytime soon. Professor Steve said in his contacts that they’re always looking for people to write on video game projects. But can a job writing plot and dialogue for a game really lead anywhere? Maybe, but to the Czar-hood that I would really need to explore my own ideas?

Good, edgy writing–and writers–is–are–always in demand, but that’s only a part of the story. There are a lot of variables here. Good skills at articulation and competent discourse are key to every discipline, but the form and structure of those will always vary, as has always been the case. Good writers and speakers (i.e., people who need to articulate ideas to an audience in whatever form) adjust situation to situation. Reports, email, letters, conversation (determining which ones matter is a skill dance?), design documents, group talk, meetings–it doesn’t matter. We must read, listen, and pay attention to what’s going on. We all have to understand story. Which one we really need to learn is sometimes difficult.

Rick DeMarinis has written a similar story to Jason’s above. It’s called Horizontal Snow (The Voice of America 1991), originally published in Story. The first few lines go:

Because of a snag in my thinking I lost interest in both vector analysis and differential equations and had to drop out of college and hitchhike home twelve credits short of graduation.

The protagonist doesn’t have an easy time of it in the story. Help comes from unlikely places. He survives.

Via David Appell. Stephen Wolfram made waves with A New Kind of Science, a book which I have yet to read through. The work is now online. I like the fact that the site has surface appeal but I think the form and structure of the project is thoroughly inefficient.

The designers put up an information system. But the book is not online, although the download feels as if a book is being squeezed through the digital pipeline. In my opinion, the designers should’ve thought in terms of lighter nodes, efficient hypertext structures, with less concentration on the book as metaphor but with hypertext as the metaphor and system concept. New kind of science, encumbered reading online.

Yikes.

This post is mirrored on Narratives:

For those interested, John and I are thinking about running the Interactive Fiction course in the summer from June 2 through July 7th (or the 21st, depending on what people think), Wednesday night from 6 to 9 pm with 9 to 10 open for free time.

We’ll be adding resources here soon for people who want to explore games and other readings on the form.

In the mean time we will also be putting a CD together for people who want specific exploration.

First off, I think that this subject is a “new media” issue, which means that it’s about how we blend, merge, and cooperate through some sort of technos.

I just sent a message to my intro to lit students praising them for their “insights” into Raymond Carver on the Introduction to Literature computer conference. The online course uses a forum to emulate classroom discussion in the onground environment, but what I’m seeing (i.e., understanding) is that this style of interaction goes far beyond emulation and highlights the strengths and limitations of the “coincidental” manifestations of modern education: the school and the classroom. The school and classroom are designed spaces for learning modeled on “mentative possibility.” (Def: how it is possible to think and learn given various designed circumstances.)

Paradoxically, learning spaces manifest both strengths and weaknesses in their very construction. Deconstructively, as learning spaces, they destroy as well as create learning opportunities: they decapitate as well as strengthen the head. Simply speaking, people “know” or “are told” what they are supposed to be doing in a classroom, which “can” ruin genuine insight: go read this story and learn something. (For me the analogy that really helps to define modern schooling is prison). This process runs counter to making your way to a camping spot deep in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico in January and finding that you forgot both the tequila and the matches. Both of these are “learning” situations. We know that people learn “by nature.”

In a way, some kinds of online education undermine mainstream definitions of education. The school is a “mainstream” definition of education. English happens at 11 to 12 on Monday and Wednesday in this room–school influences how time is structured (Carnegie Units and all that). We will sit at these desks–school influences how and where we sit. Then comes homework. Come back next Monday and we’ll talk non-commutative geometry and hopefully you will have been thinking about it and doing some practice problems (of course, if children don’t do their homework because they want to play Pac Man, then their parents will be labelled criminals).

Students in the Intro to Lit course break the time and the space barrier by speaking and sharing over a “greater period” of time and within a space that they themselves shape physically. For them the idea of the classroom as bounded by mainstream definitions no longer works. I could claim that this idea is “taught” by the online environment. Learning can be other than the square, the clock, and the billion dollar “unnatural” procedures of “No Child Left Behind.”

Just a thought.

Steve Masi in the Online Introduction to Literature course writes:

I like how the hypertext brings up past readings. Like for example when you click on the term ideology you will find a link about the story Hands. Bringing up past stories helped to correlate the similarities between Hands and The darling. . . I feel I have gotten much better reading hypertext formats. I remember the first month I printed each passage out then read it in order to comprehend what I just read. Now it is so much easier reading the hypertext going back to a word document and taking notes. This is so much easier than reading a text book.

I think that Steve’s quote, which was written into the hypertext review section of the online course, illustrates a lot about new and traditional expressive forms. (Note, writing “expressive forms” is not an attempt to sound pedantic; I’m just trying to be “inclusive.”)

A lot of teachers at many levels plug up their ears when they hear the term “text book.” These days text books try to mix and match just about everything that can be done with print layout to appeal to the senses of students, to make illustration and connection. The result is sensory overload and confusion, a turning of the printed page into an overcooked stew. I read the text books that my daughter brings home and cringe at how “helpful” text book writers and publishers are trying to be. Yikes! These texts are a far cry from the medieval and renaissance illuminated manuscript.

Here’s another example of a problem with text books. In the text book I use for Intro to Lit the book is kind enough to print William Blake’s poems in a different form than they were actually displayed for his audience–as intricate text and image pieces, whose images feed the meaning, and vice versa. All we get is the text portion: so I ask the student in that course–are these really Blake’s poems? It’s a question that really goes to how we have been presented with Blake’s poems without his permission. It’s a question about form. It’s a problem that develops from how we think about creations and how we think about learning. It’s a question about the business of the distribution of ideas.
Continue reading →

They’re cookin up some interesting stuff over at Georgia Tech. Tunxis New Media Communication might be sending some students on to Janet Murray.

John over at Five Fingers has put together a great run down on new media definitions and concepts. Under new media common ground issues he lists these issues:

1. It is a digitally-based medium;
2. It has narrative structure;
3. It involves levels of interaction between “reader” and “author”;
4. It implies elements of communication.

Anyone who has perused Amazon.com knows that fundamentally that “system” is a book store. I go to Amazon to buy books. I “can go” to Amazon to buy books or I can go to the just-down-the-street Borders to do it. Anyone who has done both knows that “getting there” involves a different “route.” I must drive to Borders, find a space to park, and open the front door. Getting to Amazon is, we might say, a little harder, “depending.” Typically, to get to Amazon I must be hooked up to the network which involved an “industry” and an “infrastructure” that is different from the one everyone has been used to for years. I take my body to Borders; at Amazon, I send and receive digitized chunks of information. Amazon isn’t “there”; it is “translated” by my browser; Amazon is both on my machine and on a server all at the same time. One way of thinking about new media is how its manifestations are similar and different to another model of interaction and thus changes the way we think about that interaction.

Issue 2. Everyone who has perused Amazon knows that it is more than a book store, just as Borders is more than a retailer of copies of original works in text. Borders is the result of the tradition of print technology. But they also sell toys, DVDs, CDs, journals, soft porn, and coffee. Amazon, however, offers cutlery, camping equipment, and anything else one may want–even stuff for the garden. Amazon has a pretty good idea of who I am. My gold box waits for me, says my name, welcomes me, and simulates me by offering things I may want–steve as consumer is in the database–based on what I’ve ordered in the past, often to comedic results. For some reason I was offered the DVD of “Legally Blond” in my gold box. Maybe I do want that DVD? Maybe the machine has me all figured out. I have to remind myself–this is a number cruncher. Mythologically, I vest Amazon with “will” just as the Greeks vested the clouds with Zeus. This is the network marketplace, a digital octopus. But it is human made, designed from the ground up. I traverse it by reading and clicking and “searching.”

To quote the judge in MccCarthy’s Blood Meridian, “For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us” (146).

And those who build in digital?