“Logic, emotion, credibility: these old-fashioned notions of persuasion take a back seat to the mere attention given to an interface itself. A person, organization, or institution can make their digital interface and prose style flatter the audience’s attention with the primary goal of creating a cool place to inhabit. This sense of a cool place is not only the main goal; a site can bank on coolness as the best bet at persuasion towards their goals.”

The interface rules. By appealing to the narcissism right behind the surface, an interface can hook users. If it is sticky, this is even better. Locking the user down and appearing to be cool is all that is needed to maintain the user’s attention. Just be cool. Everyone be cool.

“If there are any threads that run through the ever-changing notion of cool, they may be narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism in the name of a private rebellion that constantly accounts for its place within the social.”

We want what we want. If we can get it through a cool site, cool. If not, well, there are other places we can go for what we want. And what we want is ever changing. Give it to us now, or we go somewhere else for what we want. And we do want it. Now.

“Cool is the negotiating process of constantly heralding one’s individuality but only by comparing one’s self to both similarly and dissimilarly minded people (all the while acting like none of your actions matter that much or will have any intended effects beyond the individual ). The contradiction, of course, is that one’s sense of cool must necessarily come from other people despite cool’s focus on private rebellion. This is why it’s not so cool to define cool. Cool’s contradictions are socially useful ones and a deep analysis of its workings betrays the value of detached impassivity.”

Cool is a performance, man. We shout and yell at times, yeah, but it’s all part of the act that is our cool, our motion. Don’t harsh our cool and we won’t harsh yours, you know? We just want to be left alone. Unless we don’t. And then we do. You know? It’s all an act, man, just get on the stage with us and all.

“Itutu has a strong focus on helping others and lacks the hedonistic pleasures that mark today’s cool; nonetheless, the focus on presenting a calm and secure self in the face of adversity could be a foundation for cool.”

Fear is the mind killer.

“Pountain and Robins (2000) argued that “one way this nihilism expressed itself was through the cultivation of revenge fantasies” (p. 99). If large scale political action wasn’t possible, then individuals like Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle or Dirty Harry‘s Harry Callahan could coolly (violently) take the law into their own hands (giving an interesting new spin to cool’s brand of individual defiance).

“Rice works from Gregory Ulmer’s critique of the topoi as serving print culture’s need for expectation and fixed–places of argument (paragraphs, tables, footnotes, etc.). He adopts chora (originally from Plato) to update the topoi for a digital age where “choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer’s specific position in the time and space of culture” (Ulmer, 1994, p. 33).”

Tables? Paragraphs? Footnotes? Style and markup.

“Juxtaposition takes potential meanings of individual signifiers and forces us to fashion new meanings from viewing them in close proximity. Juxtaposition is the cool rebellion against normalized meaning in favor of the often concealed intentions of a composer and the preferred interpretations of the individual subject.”

“Information is subjectively observed difference amongst a sea of potential sameness that causes the observer to note relevance or application. This highlights the importance of subjectivity to information; it’s not information if it makes no difference to the observer. Further, this implies that information is never static or pre-defined.”

So writes Hayles, too.

“Remember, as Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) suggested, information is not about meaning; rather, information is primarily concerned with the mere possibility of selection from choices.”

Useless
More useless
Super useless

 

 

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Comments:

Chvonne’s “Reading, Thinking, & Reflecting 11/10 (link)

I could definitely relate to the point she made about how Pepper’s approach to writing about cool was one the best ways to do it. Trying to walk the path of being academic without seemingly writing or speaking down to people who aren’t is one I take pretty often. Especially within the indie game dev scene, this can mean the difference between being “real” or seemingly like you are trying to crash into the scene without taking the time to prove yourself. (It’s a very product-focused scene. You have to show you can make interesting games, even if they aren’t always finished or polished.)

Summer’s “Lighting Up Classical Rhet_Reading notes for November 10th” (link)

The colors, Duke, the colors.

But, on a more serious note, I think leaning towards a “cool threshold” is something to consider. About how trying for the cool-factor, as Pepper highlights from the thetruth site, can actually hurt the overall message in different ways.

Media spreads, sure. But what does this mean for users? What do they do?

How do people participate?

First, people lurk. Drawing from Jean Lave and Etiene Wenger, Jenkins, Ford, and Green, make the connection between new users within a community and those watching it from the sidelines to learn the rhetorical and social rules. It is through this activity, write Lave and Wenger, that “legitimate peripheral participation” happens and new comers are are able to first observe (lurk) and then more toward more active participants (158). They must first see what happens from the outside before they can be made part of the community.

Once inside, we “participate in something, that is, participation is organized in and through social collectives and connectivities” (163). In quoting Daniel Dayan, Jenkins, Ford, and Green, record: “A public is not simply a spectacular in plural, a sum of spectators, an addition. It is a coherent entity whose nature if collective; an ensemble characterized by shared sociability, shared identity and some sense of that identity” (2005, 46). We act within a social sphere through a performance that reenforces our social links and echoes our consensus beliefs. By becoming part of a community, we agree with their overlapping ideologies and act, to some degree, as part of that collective in the process.

To maintain these links, we act through three ‘C’s: curation, conversation, and circulation (171). We maintain collections of content as part of our community interactions. Be it part of utterances as embedded through a specific image shared or video played, we build a communal set of iconography that represents the thoughts of the community at the moment. And we talk about this content, creating or reenforcing social bonds through our conversation and discourse. By participating in a community, we become part of its information workflow: we maintain its imagery, embed its ideas, and circulate its feeds.

Jenkins, Ford, and Green place the community of users and their actions above their commercial value. Instead of being merely selling points, they see “that audience members are more than data, that their collective discussions and deliberations — and their active involvement in appraising and circulating content — are generative” (179). People, and their participation, are at the heart of the how spreadable media works: without the people, there are no social networks and no fertile soil for media content to thrive.

It is this empowering that raises participation into the fundamental source of understanding spreadable media. Write Jenkins, Ford, and Green, “In a world where everyday citizens may help select and circulate media content, playing active roles in building links between dispersed communities, there are new ways of working around the entrenched interests of traditional gatekeepers and in allegiance with others who may spread their content” (288). Instead of being based on the content or the ways it may be repressed, Spreadable Media holds an emphasis on the people and their actions — media is only spread through them!

It’s starts right on the very first page: “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” (1). Positioning Spreadable Media as a look at media from both the bottom-up and top-down, Jenkins, Ford, and Green, quickly get to the point. Digital culture is composed of people who are “shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (2). They are transforming the works they interact with in ways both profound and mundane. To exist in this new ecology, though, to move between the actors and boost along the network, media needs to be spreadable.

What does it mean for media to be ‘spreadable’?

Spreadability is “the potential — both technical and cultural — for an audience to share content for their own purposes, sometimes with the permission of the rights holders, sometimes against their wishes” (3). In one case, it might mean uploading a television episode to YouTube, or could mean fans subbing anime not available in certain markets. It each instance, though, the media survives longer and proliferates more because it has this same quality: it is spreadable.

However, this spreadability is limited by a number of factors. The first of which is the technical resources needed to circulate the media. The more restrictions placed on the media in terms of digital rights management or just simple legalities, the harder it is to spread around to other actors. If it is locked away, or even takes more experts to handle, the less likely it will spread. The more control over it, by means of market, law, access, or anything else, really, the greater the investment needed to move it and the decreasing case it will be spread.

The second (and arguably the most important) factor is the economic structures around, containing, and within the media itself. How much does it cost in work to move the media? How many people are needed to create it? Maintain it? How about transfer its content between mediums? How much, in other words, does maintaining and spreading the media cost? If it is too great, it might not last.

The same can be written for the last two factors: the attributes of the content itself, and social networks through which it is shared and given value. Like other resources, if the media has great worth to the members of the network it will spread throughout their interactions. If, however, the attributes of the content prevent it from spreading somehow, if is has some inherit fragility, for example, its spread will be slow and careful, with each new link measured for security and stability. It will still spread if it has great worth, of course, but much slower and with greater deliberation.

Stickiness is not spreadability.

Jenkins, Ford, and Green mark a clear difference between stickiness and spreadability. Stickiness, they write, “capitalizes on the easiest way companies have found to conduct business online — rather than the ways audiences want to and do experience material online” (4). These companies creates sites and drive people to them. However, they also do more, borderline nefarious, things as well. They create, in the words of Jenkins, Ford and Green, “virtual ‘roach motel[s]” where media gets collected and ultimately “dies” instead of moving along to new places (6). Instead of spreading media around, they explain, the stickiness is trapping users and preventing them from using media or changing it to suit their needs.

The term stickiness originally comes from Malcolm Gladwell, they write, but has been put into use in all matter of marketing campaigns. What started as a way to get people to come visit a site and spend some time has morphed into targeted strategies to keep users trapped there indefinitely. In some cases, this has even meant opening new windows or finding ways to disable the ‘Back’ button in a user’s navigation history. Anything, in some extreme cases, for keeping a user around as long as possible and with zero hope of them finding things to them share outward along social networks.

Sharing is caring?

The decisions around whether to share something are grounded in its context: “Is the content worth engaging with? Is it worth sharing with others? Might it be of interest to specific people?” (13). To see media shared between people is to assume a relationship of some kind; however, people often don’t think of the content itself (or what might be behind it), but of the messages imparted with the content. Users want “to feel like they’re a part” of the discourse around some content, to be in on the joke or meme shared (14). It is this sharing, and the media embedded within the networks of worth, that guide the spreading.

The users here are not infection vectors only, though, as Jenkins, Ford, and Green point out. Users are not getting content to go “viral,” nor are they trying to infect their friends with some material. No, “audiences play an active role in ‘spreading’ content rather than serving as passive carriers of viral media; their choices, investments, agendas, and actions determine what gets valued” (21). “Spreadability,” they write, “assumes a world where mass content is continually repositioned as it enters different niche communities” (27). Users are bringing content back to others because they see worth in it, not because it has changed them into zombies capable of only infecting others; it is much more about the users, their intentions, and their actions than the content itself, really.

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Comments:

Sarah Camp’s “Week 10 – Technologies of Wonder (work in progress)” (Comment)
[Posted at 11:24 PM, Friday, December 12, 2014]

Always love a shout out to Judith Bulter and some talk of gender performances. Plus, I like the re-emphasis of bodies that Feminist Geography brings back to the table. Seems pretty neat, that.

Shantal’s “Does Writing Have a Future? Reading Notes Pt 1.” (Comment)
[Posted at 11:44 PM, Friday, December 12, 2014]

I still don’t like Flusser. His “computers are ruining everything” approach is just such a major turn off given my background and skill-set. Programmars aren’t making the world worse. Well, mostly, anyway.

I admit I’ve always been fascinated by various fonts. The power they hold to unlock different feelings and moods through merely having ‘feet’ or not has always been quite interesting to me. How, by changing between them, the reader can be affected in some way. Just by the shape of the words themselves. Not just their content, but the form itself.

Of course, this is pretty common knowledge. We all know this on some level, don’t we? Spend enough time researching things on the Internet and you will, inevitably, run into some fonts that pain your eyes. Those that you react to very strongly. And those that you don’t react to at all, seemingly. Yet, that very un-reaction, is a reaction of sorts, too, right? Due to our cultural assumptions, some, like Old Style font families, hold a greater seriousness for us. And others, like Decorative font families, are less serious and more playful.

I think that was what I liked most about The Non-Designer’s Design Book. That end part on the various fonts and how to mold them in different ways. What was important for which functions — larger size here, changing the direction there. And, when to use different colors to make certain information “pop” over others on the same page. To put it in Williams’ own words, “If you can put the dynamics of the relationship into words, you have power over it” (192; original emphasis). By knowing the problem, you can shape your response in a better way.

(Don’t even get me started on web fonts and CSS measurements across browsers, either. That is a black hole of never returning.)

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Comments:

Sarah Camp’s “Week 8 – Contrast, Color, & Type Face” (Comment)

I liked Sarah’s application of Williams’ ideas in her personal business card. Plus, you know, her titles were enjoyable for the implementation of the same ideas on a small scale.

I’ve always had a slight problem with books on design. Instead of creating practice spaces for users to follow the steps and learn the underlining ideas, most usually present the finished products. It’s as if they are saying, to paraphrase a great quote I heard the other day in reference to teaching writing through examples texts, “Here’s a finished cake. Go try to cook your first one.”

That’s not to write that The Non-Designer’s Design Book doesn’t have some little areas for the readers to try something on their own, too, but the first half seems very centered on showing examples of the techniques. Which, of course, are they themselves summarizes of other, more complex ideas. Summary of summaries with visual examples, in other words.

This is not Bad, per se. Many people can and do learn this way and having the examples of what to — and not — do can be helpful when designing your own stuff. However, for me, it’s not as welcome. I need the steps and the motions to follow. I want the theory and not just, “Well, these works with this — don’t worry about why.” I want a little more depth than the book presents.

Still, though. Yes, having things boiled down to the handful (in the first half) of Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity is useful. I don’t want to knock it for that. It’s a good book to have on hand for its abstraction of design ideas and examples. Those are all neat and good and all. It’s just, for me personally, I want a bit more. I want the why more than just more examples.

What’s the theory at play here? How does it work?

 

Weiner’s Fear of Castration

One of the most fascinating potions of How We Became Posthuman deals with the father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener. Because so much of our current understanding of cyborgs is based in his work, N. Katherine Hayles takes the reader through a large chunk of his life and theories: how we came right up to the very edge of crossing over into a definition that would cross gender boundaries, of cyborgs reaching through and between social constructions of bodies, but couldn’t quite make it across himself. Part of the reason, explains Hayles, is the very epistemology that Wiener worked under — something that lead to our current state, but was ultimately flawed.

See, Wiener believed in a probabilistic universe. One in which there was a control of sorts for those who could only divine the patterns and obscure causality chains.

Noise (mapped to randomness in the Hayles’ pattern-randomness continuum) was seen as the ultimate death of a closed system. Once it has reached its entropic end, past the threshold where all patterns failed, there was nothing left. For Wiener, understanding the range of noise, of mapping various formula and functions to combat it, was the utmost goal. It was through these that we might could to understand information and how the universe worked: “the more information there is, the less entropy; the more entropy is present, the less information” (102).

Information, then, was the signal that there was complexity in the universe. It becomes a kind of energy, and as Hayles leads into, this means that it follows the same rules of all other kinds of energy: the laws of thermodynamics. By making this link, though, information (patterns) could be more easily written out in a mathematical way. It could be more easily computed. And it was along these lines that Wiener tried to bridge the two worlds of science and the humanities too.

Writing about mathematics, Wiener called it that “‘which most of see as the most factual of all sciences constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually, in terms of the success of this metaphor'” (93). Math, in words, was just another language. However, it was one in which the metaphors were not thought of as such. Its relations were thought of as pure and totally objective, not as slippage and loose relations between signifiers.

For as much as Wiener was able to lead the charge to use cybernetics as a way to reach different disciplines, of trying to cross into various fields and unite them in directly connecting math and metaphors, he wasn’t ready to think about bodies being penetrated, though. Not at all. In what Hayles writes as the “cybernetics of the subject and the subject of the cybernetics interpenetrate,” both the user and the machine intersect (108). If the body of the cyborg can be augmented, it can also be changed. Something that Wiener understood — and feared.

Hayles describes this fear as the potential to “annihilate the liberal subject as the locus of control” (110). This lose of control was not just in the sense of bodies as whole, either. It had a very specific sexual anxiety attached to it: male castration. By decoupling the idea that bodies were a single entity, Wiener was able to make the case, just as the universe is composed of  similar, equal parts, so too is a body. However, this is also deeply problematic for social constructions like gender that dependent on a foundations of fundamental differences.

By thinking of cyborgs in a Haraway sense, of both physical and symbol, we can cross the interpersonal boundary. If bodies don’t really matter, neither does a physicality based social system. However, this was a bridge too far for Wiener. As Hayles notes, he saw a cyborg in the mirror in front of him and looked away. The threat of dismantling even a little masculinity was too much and, as Hayles tracks through his works as well, this anxiety manifested in the theme of a savage in which Wiener would use as part of examples and then safety tuck away again afterword.

In summarizing this view, Hayles writes that “Not only sex but the sex organs themselves disappear in this construction” (111). The fear of castration was too much for Wiener and he pulled out from taking the steps that future feminists following him and his work would: cyborgs as bodily disruptive, as humans being under the same subjectivity they sought to bring to their created machines. That the erotic anxiety was acceptable and not to be feared as the end of selfhood.

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Comments:

Sherie’s “The Cool Kids Pt. II” (Comment)

More interesting details about the collision of appropriation, both culturally and digitally, in its deployment and usage. Enjoyed the summary of the section on juxtaposition too. Always like a good shout-out to McLuhan.

Camille’s “10.6.14” (Comment)

Watched the video “Aspirational” (liked it; it’s far more real than comedy in my experience, though) and, of course, enjoyed seeing writing and comments discussing Remediation too. I liked the reminder about Bolter and Gruslin’s AT and THROUGH (and Brooke’s additional FROM) as well.

 

N. Katherine Hayles starts with the birth of the modern computer age. Opening the book with a story about the Turing test (and Turing himself), Hayles situates her thesis at the very beginning: the lesson taken away from the test and built upon by others was not that the test proved computers might one day act likes humans, but that humans could and did act like machines. It was the moment, Hayles records, that the overdeterminality of the erasure of embodiment began to take over the conversation. Where, previously, the thought was (and as many writers still do think) that humans would be augmented, the thought turned away from the body and more toward information (what she laters calls the replacement of presence/absence with pattern/randomness).

The materiality was gone, she writes; “information lost its body” (p. 2). Science fiction reflected new trends of bodies being merely sacks of flesh where the “pattern” of a life could be up- or downloaded. It is this idea, Hayles mentions, that became the basis of much of the fiction that would follow shows like Star Trek. With its teleportor technology in the show, bodies could be erased and remade by machines. The consciousness of a person was nothing more than information and the place where that information lived was in “bodies” of the machines themselves. It this this very theme Hayles makes the case against.

We have become seduced by the promise of immortality through machines. “If we can capture the Form of ones and zeroes in a nonbiological medium — say, on a computer disk — why do we need the body’s superfluous flesh?” Hayles writes in summary of this pursuit (13). The chase after the Platonic ideals, now moved away from philosophy and taken up by informatics, is at the very core of the move away from an understanding of an embodied view toward that of worshipping information itself.

Taking up a mathematical approach, Hayles also writes that “information is identified with choices that reduce uncertainty” (p. 31). Information can be understood to be the pattern against a background of randomness. Without understanding what noise is, the signal (in which information is embedded) cannot be determined. Each define each other as the presence and absence of the other: randomness is without pattern, while patterns cannot be found without knowing the concept of randomness.

It is within this greater structure that Hayles also positions “mutation” as “the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction” (31). Connecting to to a Lacanian framework, Hayles states that mutation is the “rupture of pattern” that marks the castration point where the psycholinguistic “mirror stage” reaches into the posthuman cyborg and severs the connection between man and machine. It is this junction that is identified as the the primary paradox: while it disconnects, it also reaffirms the connection itself.

From this bridge, Hayles builds outward to centering point of view (pov) as the site of subjectivity for the posthuman. Because we are forever ‘looking in‘ to flat screens projecting a virtuality, the pov “literally is the character” (38; original emphasis). That is, narrative arrises, Hayles writes, from the application of a temporal dimension of travel across spatial data. By traversing structured information, we humanize it and thus “subjectivity is computerized, allowing [data and subjectivity] to join in a symbiotic union whose result is narrative” (39). Without a materiality to ground us, we cannot disconnect from the virtuality nor can we, in forging a new connection, be under subjectivity either: we must both be able to act within the informational system and “gaze” from outside of it.

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Comments:

Shantal Figueroa, “Week 6 Reading Notes: Rhetoric of Cool and Innovatin Characteristics” (Comment)

Chora is an interesting pull from Aristotle. That we can find connections between different sources, part of a greater theme of being “cool” (participatory, knowledgeable of oppression, and relaxed), is a great lesson in understanding culture and technologies. We draw from so many different sources in our creativity that it behooves us to understand this underlining structure.

Ramona Myers, “Week 6: “Innovation” (Tornatzky and Klein) and 1/2 Remediation (Bolter and Grusin)” (Comment)

The darker edge of remediation, of wanting to be more immersed (lose traces of media) while also dependent on it, strikes a chord with me. Most video games in the AAA space try to be as visually arresting as they can be while also being highly dependent on the interface of the system itself. In trying to be “immersive” (a problematic word), they often reach for immediacy and trip over hypermediacy in the process; they try to be more “real” by raising graphical fidelity and simultaneously cover the screen in all manner of heads-up displays that hook into the complexity of the game’s playable mechanics.

While my previous post dealt with my feelings on the book as a whole, this one is more to do with one topic: perspective. It is, as Brooke mentions, paramount to understanding the situation of how users interact with virtual environments; they are projected into a three-dimension space as positioned on a flat plane. The extra dimension (the perceived one) is nothing more than a visual illusion, one crafted to suggest a depth that is not actually “there” for the user.

This also gets at the “ideal of transparency” Brooke summarizes from the writings of Lanhom on print (132). The typed words on the page create a distance between the reader and itself. In the terms of Brooke, the text is looked at, it is the subject of a user’s gaze. However, within a digital settings, as I mention in the other post too, the positioning changes. The user is the subject of perspective.

Instead of merely words on a page, the user can cross the print event horizon and change its font and placement; the text is both static and dynamic simultaneously. As Brooke quotes from Bolter and Gromala, the perspective has the “states of transparency and reflexivity” (132). The user sees through, to employ another Brooke term, the window to another while also looking at the text itself. The information is superimposed and juxtaposed at the same time.

This also creates, in turn, the subjectivity of the user as a reflection of their interactions. The term Brooke uses here is from which to situate the user as within the prism of the perspective itself. The reflexivity of the feedback loop keys the user into interactions that both create the depth of context (as a function of the perspective) and trap the user as existing within the intersection of their point of view and that of the screen itself. The perspective exists because of the user; the materiality of the user grounds the perception as coming from a body.

 

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Comments:

Sarah Carter’s “Week 5: Sept 22nd Notes #4” (Comment)

I liked the videos highlighting the different ‘p’s covered in the reading. Even though I don’t really know Stanley Kubrick works super well, it was cool to see how one-point perspective has played such a significant role in his films.

Sarah Camp’s “Week 5 – 3D Game Labs and Lingua Fracta” (Comment)

The reminder about the spread — and reinterpretation — of ideas and memes between subculture groups was interesting. How situated certain concepts can be is a great point about the various groups that inhabit various parts of forums and blogs too. Discourse communities often collide.

Since I’m writing this after reading the whole book, it’s hard for me not to think about it as that: a whole. That is, as the book as one unit instead of as the divisions of the first half, Chapters 1 – 4, and the second half, Chapters 5 – 8. Divisions that don’t make that much sense, anyway, given the interconnected nature of the writing itself. It’s part of a self-referential style, I’d like to think, which mirrors its subject matter. After all, how you write about “new media” without trying to mark what is “old” in the first place?

From that position, viewing the book as a whole, I think it worked well. The organization flowed from simpler themes, remediation, to the later, more current, view of “delivery as performance” as a way to analyze interfaces like Google Reader. However, and is increasingly my problem with most books of this type, by the time it “catches up” to the more contemporary look at technologies, it’s outdatedness makes me cringe. The theory I’m all there for; I like that. However, once it gets to trying to be current, it’s age shows. Greatly.

Still, given the knowledge I do have the timeline of how long it takes a book like this to be created, I have to give Brooke some credit: being only a few years out of date is not too bad. Sure, “credibility” is not as much a hot-topic item as it used to be, and Google Reader has been dead for some time now, but, generally, looking at interfaces and performances is still of great importance. More so, I’d personally wager, than Brooke even realizes.

It was actually the last thing I wrote about this book in my notes: “The Interface is an Object.” It’s something Brooke mentions at the very end in the coda. That there might be some competition between the two. Yet, as I see it in code and as practiced in form, they are the same thing. The interface is an object, one through which, to quote from Landhom via Brooke, we see through, at, and most definitely from in regard to other objects within the ecology of the system itself. We are situated by the interface and act from what it allows us to do.

We are not often even aware, to reference the early part of the book, how our ecology of practice has translated us either. We exist within a restricted possibility space, one designed, within a digital environment anyway, as part of an operating system (a practice itself) and afforded only what is allowed to us. Sometimes we can install things; sometimes we can’t. All is derived, however, from normalizations brought forth by the assumed actions of the greater computing community. Since we invest certain people with power (i.e. a republic), we choose to elect them to administrate our system and guide our movements.

It’s hard not to think about Facebook and Twitter in regard to archives, Derrida, and Foucault. We post everything — well, other people post everything, not particular me — to our feeds. We save our moments in time for others to consume. We log our lives in the public.

Yet, we have this expectation of privacy. That, despite posting thoughts many wouldn’t dare share standing with others face to face, we have the demand that we be private. Just for our friends. And probably our family. And those co-workers too, as well. And maybe this cute dude I just friended. Just those. And, well…

(Megan Mize and I just had a great chat about the class expectations of privacy, and of the privilege, often assumed, of posting information — the ego displayed, praised. Not to mention the norming behaviors of posting. “This is how we should be acting. You should ‘Like’ this, if you aren’t a monster.”)

We also own our feeds. That is, we feel it is created for us, for our own enjoyment, and should not be infringed upon. For those that disagree, we counter-post against them. “You like your baby. Well, I — I hate your babies. All babies. And seasons changing.”

Folksonomies get a mention too. These are the collections of tags, the going-against of Traditional Systems of Categories created by people to organize their things. They tag whatever they post however they want. They buck against the system; sometimes purposeful, sometimes not.

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I was, of course, loving Kittler’s points about the ‘protected mode’ (kernel level 0) and how, in his words, it ‘[hides] the whole machine for its users’ (1997; 151). [There was some great talk on kernels design from a back-episode of Debug.] Understanding the choices that define the tools we use help us to see through its own history and backward to what shapes our possibility space.

Hardware is designed. Software is designed. There are choices and decisions made for end users before they even begin to use the tools themselves. They shape what we can do, how we can do it, and even if we can do it in the first place. The tools have fingerprints we often overlook.