Internet Destruct

A more or less defunct blog, which initially explored why the Internet sucks so bad and considered whether it should be rebuilt (a theory of mine which was vindicated by a handful of Stanford researchers about 2 years after starting Internet Destruct, even though those rubes at IETF laughed at me when I initially pushed the thought (you are soooo passe, IETF....vengenance is sweet!). It then meandered into New Media & network engineering, hacking, tweaking, and, eventually, to my minor epiphany in which I realized what I really gave a crap about was Information itself, and then a little bit of history, and then eventually back to hacking.

In other words, I generally have no idea what I love, though I know it when I see it, but this blog helped me figure out that if it has a liberal sprinkling finessing and tinkering, 2 parts history, 2 parts sociology, a hint of art, and a healthy dose of information|learning|knowledge|cognition, then I am probably going to be all over it.

Read in ascending order (start at the bottom) for a probably no-so-fascinating look into the evolution of Alexis' thought.

April 27, 2005

some links

http://www.manovich.net/new_media_map_02.htm
http://www.google.com/search?q=+%22new+media%22+phd&hl=en&lr=
http://cnm.berkeley.edu/program/index.php
http://danm.ucsc.edu/related/programs/usa/blogfolder_view

May 03, 2007

My final ever 'I suck post?'

Okay, dispensing with how much I suck for not posting up front, there are many reasons for this, including:

1) Let's just get the suckiest one out of the way first, okay? I did not get into grad school. This has unsurprisingly taken a bit of the wind out of my sails for the last 2 months or so. It's only been the last couple of weeks that I was reminded of why I wanted to go to grad school in the first place (shout out to Litza for an article she sent me that did the trick). I would like to believe that I will now tackle things with renewed energy.

2) I have been becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the limits I put on myself with this particular blog format. Don't get me wrong - it has been outrageously valuable to me, and I could not possibly have figured out what I wanted to do with myself without it. I went back over everything the other day and read my posts from day 1 till now. The evolution of my thought was quite fascinating. It has been a ridiculously useful experiment, but I am not quite sure where to take it from here. I think my interests have diverged and refined themselves enough now that it might be time for something a bit more flexible.

3) Give both 1 & 2 above, I am planning on completely revamping my entire website. This has been taking a lot of attention lately, as well as efforts to be more social, be more artistic, read more, devise a paper topic that will allow me to be successful next time I apply to school, and reconnect with my old network of friends. I am also trying to fine tune my Spanish (which isn't half shabby, but could still use a lot of work) and seriously considering picking up another language.

So, yeah. That sums it up in a nutshell. The ideas have started flowing again after a pretty serious block. Now that I have explained all that to you, I will leave you with a fun, actually Internet related story entitled

"del.icio.us is creepy"

So, I suggested to dorkbotpdx today that we compile all the dorkbotpdx members' del.icio.us links together and pipe them into the dorkbotpdx site via an RSS feed. As a precursor to this, I went to del.icio.us and searched for the term dorkbotpdx. I found about a dozen links, and went to each person's links to see what sort of stuff they were looking at. Then I went to one of their personal websites.

This is the part where it gets creepy.

So the guy turns out to be married to a gal I went to high school with. In Houston. 12 years ago.

That seems vaguely cyber-stalkeresque, even if it was just pure coincidence. So I'm tooling around on his website, and discover he links to an obscure (?) hacker group in NY that I once knew. I'm thinking, no. No. This can't be the same moloch I knew. So I follow the link.

And it is.

There's my picture from at least 10 years ago on their website, sitting in a hacker's lap, gettin' ma feet rubbed.

Linked to from this dude's site who is married to a chick I went to high school with halfway across the country.

Who is, unknown to me, a member of the same social/geek/artists group that I'm a member of.

The Internet is fucking strange.

March 19, 2007

I checked today, and we're still irrelevant

Academic law reviews are irrelevant, obtuse, too specific, boring, crappily written, and unread. Hm, sounds like all academic journal articles, to me.

February 21, 2007

There is no man behind the curtain

In an effort to scrupulously avoid the glaring fact that I have not yet heard from grad schools, I am feverishly devoting myself to collecting resources, tools, links, and feeds that I will use once school starts up in the fall. del.icio.us users to stalk, mailing lists to haunt, professional orgs to join, research tools to build, rss feeds to consume, future colleagues to track...Spanish, Python, Aristotle, logic, the inner workings of academia...I am adding them all to my arsenal. I feel like a starving hyena with a tape worm.

This has kept me suitably busy from confronting ugly hypothetical situations like, "what if I don't get in?" It has also afforded me a slew of incredibly useful resources, and the overwhelming sense of despair at how many more there are to find. At any rate, in addition to the incredible amount of awesome things I have found and learned, two of the other side effects of these foraging behaviors are that 1) I have been terribly lax in updating this lately and 2) my mother is not the only other person reading this blog any more. Strangers are adding me to their del.icio.us networks and reading my posts.

So, I suppose this is my way of saying hello. I have seen you and I am intrigued. (And...uh...please feel free to suggest any resources that you find wildly invaluable - the comments section is waiting. Area of research is "history of information" and anything that might conceivably entail [internet, philosophy and history of science, education, knowledge, cognition, psychology, intellectual history, human computer interaction, information theory...yeah...one or two things, anyway].)

December 28, 2006

Search Competition

There's been a flurry of articles in the press lately about search engines, especially focusing on "Google as Goliath," as though this were a sudden revelation. (As an aside, this is a rather interesting example of how memes or popular ideas work virally....wouldn't hurt to note this for later examination.) At any rate, the latest appears on BoingBoing - "Google 'Disappears' Sex Blogs? Something's Broken".

It also just came up on the Rhizome mailing list about 3 days ago. I saw it in Wired (3 months). CNN. BBC. Red Herring (3 days).

It seems that people are finally realizing, with a start, that Google, as used in the US, is a near-monopoly. Without concerning myself with traditional economic or models of monopoly, this is problematic from the point of view of information access. Politics. Education. What qualifies as relevant to your search is entirely up to Google, and it is up to spammers - those whose access to millions of dollars a year is dependent on a precise understanding of the ever-changing algorithm Google employs to rank pages. Who is going to be able to ensure their page lands at the top? You? A faculty member at a university who is publishing their personal research online? Or a spammer who will net $70,000 a month from that rank? (Answer is C, for those wondering).

The system is ripe for gaming, and the only people who are interested in doing that do not have "the net's" best interest in mind, they only have their own. Google is implicit in this in their push to make themselves THE search engine of the world. Although this is not necessarily working in other countries, it is very firmly the case in the States right now. The problem is not simply that spammers can manipulate what you see as information, but that so can Google. If Google goofs, or actively decides they don't like topic X, well, good luck finding X. You can do it. But it will be unlikely.

What's the solution? The obvious one, of course, is simply to get more competition. Companies with different search algorithms. Different foci. This could be taken a step further, however. Say....search engines that search a carefully defined subset of the web, or that can be tweaked to place more emphasis on one topic over another. Google ironically? unsurprisingly? is working on something like this with their Co-op tool, but the understanding needed for a user to implement this is still unnecessarily steep.

Well. Perhaps more on this later. There are quite a few messy points for me to think about further. How do you narrow on a subset of information when there is no good way to identify that info yet (eg - academic info can occur places other than .edu, and thanks, Google Scholar, for not really addressing that fact particularly well)? There STILL is no answer to the invisible web problem, something like....7 years? after people really started identifying it as an issue. How do you actually avoid a few unscrupulous users gaming the system - education of normal users? punishment for the spammers? other?

December 08, 2006

Lighting a fire under (my|academia's|everyone's) ass

Man, I seriously need to create a new system for research notes, not least of which is because of this awesome article in Inside HigherEd, and the paper it refers to:

Article: Rethinking Tenure

Paper: MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion

I must say, although I am going gangbusters into PhD land (ignoring, for a moment, the niggling detail of, say, still having my application in review), the only thing sitting like a brick in the pit of my stomach is some of the bullshit I've seen circling around getting a secure position, the (un)importance of teaching - which to me is one of the aspects of the job I am most looking forward to, the hostility towards new media and tech studies within the humanities, and the preference for abstruseness and intellectual eliteness over wide dissemination and impact of work. I don't even have to be in the thick of it to see that those are serious problems.

Huh. Did I say "the only thing" before? I guess that sums up almost the whole field. Scholarship is academia, or at least it should be. So why have we cut it off at the knees by focusing on such a very, very, very small subset of what it entails, to the detriment of everything else?

At any rate, enough aimless wondering. I was damn glad to read these tidbits today. It gives me hope that once I come out the other side of grad school, some of these ways of scholar-ing may be getting the recognition they deserve.

December 05, 2006

Thinking ourselves out of jobs

An interesting article on why philosophy is dying. For that matter, it's struck me for a while now as the reason why academia on the whole is becoming more superfluous with each passing day - we're Foucaulting ourselves out of work. "Scholarship" is becoming less relevant, less accessible, and less thoughtful.

November 27, 2006

Simple, elegant, sensible

An excellent blog entry that suggests a more pragmatic approach to research than the traditional "read everything that exists on the subject:" The difference that makes a difference

In short, reading causes you to reformulate how you understand a topic, create new ideas, and new theories. When you stop developing new theories, it's time to write.

I'm actually experiencing this now - S. can't understand why I keep reading and don't just start writing already (esp. given that the paper is due in a month). But the thesis is still solidifying itself in my mind. It's almost there, but, if I start writing now, the paper will swing this way and that without settling down on anything coherent.

November 21, 2006

Take II

Uhn. Primary focus of research has changed. Need to change blog accordingly. But don't expect it to happen till January at the earliest. But probably actually April or May. Feh.

(Seriously, though. I have some bitchin' ideas about creating an online research journal cum academic note-taking system from scratch. Please alert me if such a thing already exists - I will crib from it liberally. Looking for PHP, MySQL, AJAX...and no bloat. I don't need the thing to tie my shoes, just write some stuff to a db. See netvibes for good sample AJAX interface. Want tagging. Bibliographic formatting.)

November 09, 2006

In Which I Eat Crow...Sort of

I was, typically, ranting a few months back - in this case about what a load of crap "Web 2.0" is. The gist of the argument was that it was a marketing gimmick to make nothing new...or, at least, a natural progression.....seem like a new paradigm. In particular, most of the rhetoric seemed to me to say 2 things - Web 2.0 is a "platform" and Web 2.0 is "interactive."

I still maintain that neither of these two things are true any more than they were for Web 1.0. The idea that clicking and moving things around a screen is somehow more "interactive" than reading is vacuous at best. The web was, and still is, about information. Information by itself is data - it's nothing more than a lifeless lump of facts and bits sitting, meaningless, doing absolutely nothing. It is dependent on the reader to take those lifeless bits and process and understand them to give them meaning. Reading, by definition, is interactive.

That said, I have spent the last couple of weeks playing more with "Web 2.0," only to discover what is truly exciting about it. It is not that it is a platform nor interactive, any more so than Web 1.0. And, while its currency is still, first and foremost, information, it doesn't offer "better" information. The incredible thing is that it offers a radically new approach to managing and finding information. Web 2.0 offers both information and tools, if you will, where Web 1.0 offered only information. Methods like XML, RSS, AJAX, and tagging, sites like del.icio.us or netvibes - these offer methods more powerful than search engines and hyperlinks for understanding, and finding, how information is connected. They improve the ambient findability of relevant material, communities, peers, and ideas.

Sadly, I am quite sure that my minor epiphany is hardly that - no doubt this is something that 2.0's proponents have grasped since the get-go. But I'll be damned if that was clear from their silly trivial talk of "collectivity," "platforms," and "interactivity." So, I'll be proud of my hard-earned understanding. And I'll still maintain that collective authorship is not necessarily something to strive for.

October 25, 2006

The 'All Alexis, All the Time' Search Engine

Google has a new search tool - Google Co-op Personal Search Engine, in which you can specify an entire range/subset of sites or even individual pages to search.

I think I'll have to create individual search engines for any/all research topics that enter my flights of fancy. New media search engine? You bet. History of science search engine? There is now.

Seriously, this is one of the most ridiculously useful tools I've seen in a very long time.

October 13, 2006

To Do. I'm Serious.

Well, in spite of the fact that this thing bears no resemblance to the research note filing system I originally had in mind, and that, taken individually, the posts on are tedious and boring, it turns out it has unexpectedly functioned as a totally rad research journal. Who knew? It actually helped me figure out what I am studying before I got into school and screwed myself in the wrong field.

Blah blah blah. Some more here. Blah meh blah meh.

Subjects I need to learn more about before next year (more than a little different than the last time I busted out this list):

Philosophy
Cognitive science
Psychology (esp. Deception)
History
Language
Political Science
Formal Logic

...Oooh! Look! It's all the things I should have learned at Sarah Lawrence but didn't! (I love you SLC, I do...but still.)

October 06, 2006

Intelligentsia

I don't have anything to discuss today; however, I do need to record the following conversation (which began as a discussion on writing essays for admission to a PhD program) for my notes, in order that I might remember the very crucial ideas contained herein.

fivefingers6toes: I must have more caffeine
fivefingers6toes: I want so much that my heart explodes
fivefingers6toes: I am about half way there
saxa1995: awesome'go for it
saxa1995: I'm not drinking soda anymore
fivefingers6toes: I'm trying not to
fivefingers6toes: right now i am having tea
fivefingers6toes: But it is strong tea
fivefingers6toes: I didn't know tea could do this to a person
ivefingers6toes: I was just chillin in the bathroom when I left you, and I was suddenly overtaken with the urge to punch the air for no reason at all
fivefingers6toes: well, more like karate chopping
fivefingers6toes: it made me want more caffeine
saxa1995: yes
saxa1995: violence
fivefingers6toes: if an old lady walked by right now, i bet I could totally take her
saxa1995: with your breath
fivefingers6toes: well, i was thinking more like hand to hand grappling combat
fivefingers6toes: but i guess breath could work too

September 25, 2006

Hit me three times

The History of Information.

That's it. The three little words that sum up everything that I am interested in, academically. History of Information.

If we want to get all medieval on its ass and dissect it till we know how it works, let's take a look at some more specific examples:

Con men, frauds, deception, carnies
Hacking and pirate radio
The Internet
History and philosophy of education
Cognitive psychology, understanding, perception, learning
Misunderstanding
How to manipulate the above two items to our own ends
The train wreck we call modern academia
Educational reform
Propaganda
The personal agenda and background of anyone attempting to do anything in any of the above, any time, ever

So, yes, I think this sums it up quite nicely. The History of Information. And the battles that we wage over it every day.

September 04, 2006

Reform this.

Gaines, Donna. 1998. Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Based on this quote alone, I simply must read this book:

"Working-class kids have learned patterns of coping with an educational system originally designed by middle-class reformers to elevate the masses. It is generally agreed that the values and 'cultural capital' needed to survive and thrive in this environment has given middle-class kids a bigger advantages... But if the (working-class) parent culture itself is dying out, the strategies learned from it have no value. They won't lead to reproducing one's parents' lives in industrial labor. They'll lead to nowhere" (156).

August 28, 2006

I Still Hate BlackBoard

Ugh - checked the server logs today and realized that there are actually people who subscribe to this blog. It kinda puts the pressure on to actually produce something, instead of getting caught up in the mundane details of life (moving, actually -applying- to grad school instead of merely discussing it, reading books...you know).

At any rate, here is a little gem I was alerted to today at work. Apparently, BlackBoard is trying to patent all e-learning software - specifically, the combination of things like an online gradebook + syllabus + course materials + discussion board. A great rundown of the whole fiasco can be found at e-Literate. As part of the project to stop the madness, a timeline of the history of virtual learning environments has been created on Wikipedia. Damn fascinating stuff.

Speaking of patenting, I think I will try and patent the technique of writing letters to the editor, but, you know, online. I mean, the use of the exact same tools that ALL teachers use in the real world is both novel and un-obvious, as long as you put those exact same tools that ALL teachers use online. So I think that patenting online letters to the editor could, like, totally work.

July 25, 2006

Goodbye to the GUI

I saw an article on this one about a month or two back, but I guess these guys finally officially released their study in Nature last week and the traditional media are understandably starting to flip out. At any rate, without forcing you to tramp off and look at it, basically some scientists hooked up a quadriplegic's brain to the computer and built a device that lets him control the mouse and type and shit with his brainwaves.

The CNN Money article above is naturally throwing around quotes from experts about how this means the end of the desktop, we'll all move to wearable computers (because the experts just LOVE wearable computers right now - just look at how many groups are working on this shit at MIT right now), telekenisis, etc etc. Aside from the horrifying notion that I will actually have my BRAIN hooked up to my WORK COMPUTER (seriously, do I need employers having a thought log of what really goes through my mind, even as I respond to an e-mail in an appropriately tactful way?), the idea makes me want to cry, albeit on a purely selfish and small minded little level.

Imagine the death of the user interface. I mean, seriously, why would you need it? You could just think about the computer performing an action and it would do it, regardless of whether there was a button for you to "click" saying that you could do that. Why would software designers go to the trouble of devising a calculator where you have to imagine punching numbers in, when you could instead just think the phrase "what's 10 x 10" and the computer could just tell you?

It's a tough call. On the one hand, isn't this pretty much what the goal of computers has been all along? Seamless...well...computing ability. Making things easier, faster. Taking anything we can envision and doing it? But how, for instance, would you build a pedagogical tool that is meant to guide someone through understanding a topic? How would you lay the foundation to what you wanted to get across to someone else, when they could change it merely by thinking about changing it - they could navigate something in inappropriate and undesirable ways. In other words, how do you retain authorship, create a well-planned user-experience, when presumably we will reach the time where the whole POINT is that there is the experience is entirely self directed? How do you idiot-proof something? Surely there would be ways devised, but what would they be?

Jesus, this area could be quite ripe for exploration. I wonder how many people doing research into wearables & brain computing are planning ahead 20 years instead of just 2?

July 21, 2006

I'm so frigging excited...meehhhhh.

Sometimes, I get so excited about shit it drains all the energy from my body and I can't muster the strength to do anything at all.*

According to the ISEA2006 site, it's currently 16 Days 10 Hours 48 Min. 48 Sec. to the conference. Yes, I'm going. Yes, work is paying for it. Last night I also managed to find 2 new schools that actually look like they would be worth applying for, thus bringing the number of non-crap-looking programs I've found up to 5. So now I have to nail down the application processes for each, line up reference letters (Jenny Perlin, are you reading this? I hope you liked me as much as I liked you), remember how to write real essays and not absurdly bad blog entries that I try and pass off as 'writing,' and probably retake the GRE. Somehow I have to convince a bunch of people that I am not completely retarded (Eugene Thacker, I sure hope you don't remember that embarassingly bad presentation I gave 6 years ago when I was on a panel with you. If you do, I hope you can appreciate it as a 'learning experience' as I have come to appreciate it). Sweet baby Jesus, when I think of all these things, the mere prospect of being compelled to read over 200 books in 2 years...and actually remember them....is literally making me so ecstatic I don't think I have the energy left to actually apply, much less read them once I get accepted.

*Please note that this is absolutely true. It occurs to me that some of my less savvy readers might mistake this post for sarcasm. But in all...oh, fuck it. Who has the strength?

July 20, 2006

More links for later processing

Perpetual childhood & creativity
Beating creativity out of children

(Based on last post re novelty, innovation, change, invention....)

June 28, 2006

Hack the Planet

I'm constantly trying to find parallels between the seemingly disparate things that fire my imagination, not so much as a mental excercise to justify my interests (because there's nothing stupider than a long winded and thiiiinnnn justification for why killing people is okay), but as a more practical endeavor - if I can understand how the things I like are connected, the hope is that I can actually figure out how to find the time to do them all.

So is this post just a long winded and thiiiinnn justification for a post about parkour on a blog that is purportedly about the Internet? Maybe. But I have actually realized that the things I find most fascinating are *all* related, in one way or another, to hacking, tinkering, and breaking the accepted ways of doing things so as to make them better. There's nothing inherently interesting about wireless networking, but when you think about it as a technology that could possibly create an unstoppable, omnipresent, mobile, and free connection to the Internet, it becomes a hell of a lot more intriguing. Likewise, running is an absurdly pedestrian act (sorry, I couldn't help it), but when it is turned into a way to bypass the constraints of the urban landscape...well, then it becomes a thing of beauty.

So, here is a tiny list of just a few people breaking the constraints imposed upon us, thereby creating a new world of possibilities, all different, and all fascinating. Enjoy:

June 21, 2006

It Cuts Both Ways

For all my incoherent ranting about how the Internet, when someone finally gets off their ass to make it work properly, will usher in some new era of brilliant understanding for human kind (who said I was a pessimist?), I am nonetheless occassionally hit with a bout of fear/sinking realization that, since no one is getting off their ass to make it work properly, it is actually having the opposite effect on society. Namely, the easy availability of information which is so readily "remixable" (please kill me for allowing that blasphemous buzz word into my thoughts at all) has created a generation who no longer understands the concept of authorship.

I'm not banging the drum for rigid copyright laws. I'm simply saying that when an entire generation does not understand the entire concept of authorship-ownership - that an original idea comes from person A and is no longer original when person B comes along and merely rephrases it - something very, very fundamental to the nature of understanding has been lost. How can innovation occur amongst a culture that doesn't understand the difference between a truly new idea and an old one? Or the difference between taking an existing idea and expanding on it, as opposed to adding nothing at all? The difference between grappling with a point, thinking about it, refuting it, and ultimately deciding it worthy - agreeing with it, in other words - versus simply thinking it "looks good?"

I think the Internet needs to find a better way to show the connection between ideas, but it is a very delicate task to accomplish, certainly moreso than I considered before. Showing how things are related creates a deeper fundamental understanding of them, but if done improperly it creates the notion that such a combination of existing ideas (remixing) is the goal, not the means to something more.

June 14, 2006

The Yellow Chair

Perhaps, one day, the yellow chair will become so ubiquitous as to serve as an immediately recognizable war chalking symbol.

In a perfect world, anyway.

May 31, 2006

The most awesome fucking thing I have ever seen

"That's no thing. That's Jimmy!"

May 29, 2006

Academia will eat itself

S. and I were having a wide-ranging discussion the other day about the current situation in academia. I don't know how strongly she would agree with my ultimate conclusion, but, quite simply, I think academia is about five minutes away from making itself completely irrelevant. Academia is in crisis.

S., being more the scientist, and I, being more the humanitarian (don't laugh, it's true) each had worries about our respective disciplines - S. has unsurprisingly been floored by the absolutely pathetic scientific research that came across her desk every day (she performed systematic reviews on drug studies for about a year). The main complaint she had is that, aside from sloppy and clearly biased research design, most of the work duplicates already existing work. The problem as she sees it (again, apart from outrageously bad research design) is that there is such a huge glut of information that no one seems to know what to do with it. In the best case, they search it poorly. In the worst case, they don't deal with it at all.

My complaint is that academia has begun dealing with trivialities to such extent, and dealing with them so obliquely and fraudulently, that its work no longer has meaning or importance. Post-modernism is killing academia, and the academics seem blithely unaware of the fact. I lay this squarely at the feet of three men: Joseph McCarthy, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. McCarthy terrified academia during his witchhunts, turning it against itself as academics rushed to protect themselves at the expense of naming each other. The air of distrust and political fallout has never left. Academics spend more time maneuvering themselves in petty political games than teaching or researching. The fear of pissing off the wrong people has never left either, and this is where kindly Mrs. Derrida and Foucault step in - their styles are appealing to the average academic because the writing is so arcane and oblique, and the focus so narrow and divorced from everyday reality, that a 200 page book can easily be written that doesn't say a single thing. That's right, nothing, and the best part is, the reader can't tell. So academics can safely sit, tucked away in their studios, writing absolute nonsense that has no effect on anyone's life, means nothing, and is politically safe, yet is pompous and important sounding enough to excite other academics. In other words, academics work is for other academics and no one else. It has no effect, meaning, or relevance to the outside world, which, last time I checked, was what academics are always patting themselves on the back as being their mission.

Of course, the root of both goes back to the laughable educational system we have in our country, whereby children are taught to a pathetically simple test, lectured at, cowed, and told flat out lies as a way to make them more "patriotic." The true outcome, of course, is that they come out, not more patriotic, but just plain stupider. Research methods and design are not taught in school. The ability to distill complex information from multiple sources is not taught in school. The difference between a primary source and a secondary source is not taught. Hell, the fact that all sources are not equal is not even taught, and, by extension, the fact that a source can be questioned at all. These ideas are not advanced research concepts - these are the fundamental building blocks to understanding any subject beyond "knowing" that 2 + 2 = 4.

The greatest problem with this, aside from the obvious short term Duh Effect, is that the Internet is changing our very understanding of information but schools, both upper and lower, are not responding. There is more data out there now. People are exposed to more sources, and they do need to be able to critically evaluate the worth of one source versus another. People do need the tools to grapple with complexity, not just in ideas, but in the sheer mass of information they are exposed to. People need new tools and new methods to understand absolutely anything currently being produced, but academia is taking steps in the opposite direction. Academia is killing itself, and it is killing an entire generation of people in the process.

This is what I am trying to tackle with the Internet. The Internet will (should) never replace a human teacher, but it does have the capability to manipulate and distill the endless reams of information that are available, calculating and presenting them in such a way that any person can instantly grasp their meaning, something which a human is becoming less and less able to do unaided. The Internet is capable of taking disparate surces of information and presenting them such that heretofor unnotticed connections can be seen so clearly as to appear trivial. The Internet is the means to both education's salvation and destruction. Those who do not learn to deal with complexity will find themselves locked out of almost everything within 30 years.

So which would we prefer?

May 25, 2006

Chunked data is better than sliced bread

Sweet Jesus, I was reading the XHTML 2.0 specs last night and thought I would start weeping tears of joy. Please don't let them get rid of anything they have proposed, especially, God bless them, the ability to place a src attribute on almost anything.

Do you see what this means, people? Instead of using src strictly as a way to call up an image file in a document, like <img src="file.gif" />, you can actually call up anything from an outside source. You could be all like, <p class="module" src="rssfeed.com#today"></p>, and insert a specific part of another webpage inside of your page as a weensy module! That is not small cake. That is the best thing since sliced bread - a giant leap towards Xanadu. You could put that shit together with targeting and get chunked data. You could put multiple items from disparate sources next to each other on the same page and look at the connections between them. You could call up your own style sheets to display the underlying meaning in a way you wanted, getting rid of another person's useless decoration to show what all these different sites mean as a whole.

May 05, 2006

Censorship never goes away

I noticed some unusual activity in my logs today. The visitor was clearly a robot, slammed the servers for every ounce of content over only about 1 minute, and never bothered to check robots.txt. So, I took a little visit to Lightspeed Systems to figure out what the hell it was.

Lightspeed, it turns out, has a very cool Archive that includes every unique word that appears on a site, as well as some statistics on the most common words, what it believes the subject of the site is, and a list of all outgoing links. I started to get pretty excited about having such a sweet-ass spider crawling my site! I would love the idea of seeing every word on a site!

Then I read their explanation of why they do not honor robots.txt. Rats. Lightspeed's clients pay it to monitor sites based on content filtering rules, and then allow or disallow their users access based on what Lightspeed finds. Lightspeed, in other words, is their clients' Big Brother in every sense of the word - sanitizing the web and selectively choosing what info to allow. And if that didn't blow enough just in its own right, their smug self-satisfaction in the explanation was truly vomitous, including gems about "safeguard[ing] the innocents in our classrooms." ... Oh, yes. That is the best part. Lightspeed's clients are schools.

Almost as good as "the innocents" was the line, "Believing that a 'Robots Directive', not reinforced by law, will protect copyrights as well as moral sensitivities is a naive notion at best." In other words, my moral sensitivity at having companies whose entire business model concerns limiting access to information in schools and libraries are naive, misplaced, and stupid; however, the paying clients moral sensitivities, which presumably compel them to seek out Lightspeed's services in the first place, are wise and good and, most of all, lucrative.

Too bad. The stats they generated were interesting. Lightspeed is now banned from my site. I highly recommend all other webmasters do the same.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} lightspeedsystems\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

May 04, 2006

Uber-viral networking

Everyone talks about viral networks. Viral networks are the thing. Borrowing their ideas from the biological world, viral networks respond to their environment to make connections and jump to the next host in different ways, whether traditional connectivity is disrupted or not.

What about envisioning viral networks in the full sense of their namesakes? Networks that can change hosts, mutate, develop resistances? Networks that can look like they are doing one thing, when they are doing another? Networks that use carriers to travel undetected, until reaching a receptive host? Could a viral network bypass efforts at network censorship? Survive even when the protocols underlying the technology have been sanitized? Viral networking is really seen as a way to spread technology, but what if there are greater forces trying to prevent it, or, even if the technology spreads, it has been crippled?

April 21, 2006

net.art hasn't even been born yet

I think most people view net.art in too small a box. I mean, really, the only requirement is that it is art whose platform/medium is the Internet. And, of course, because it requires the Internet, it requires a level of code.

The problem is that it is viewed through the lens of traditional art, which severely limits what people dream up to do with it. Was I truly the only person on the Rhizome list to pick up on the use of the term "Abstraction," which does NOT only apply to art? Perhaps...they're still endlessly pursuing the art idea. But it is also a computer concept, and can be used to refer to the simplification of concepts into a set of instructions for the machine. Net.art cannot be anything other than abstract in its soul, whether or not a particular piece bears resemblance to a previous movement which also happens to have that name.

How very boring to view net.art as limited to a frame and a canvas like traditional art. What tunnel vision to only be able to compare it to traditional movements and modes of expression like "Abstract art" or "Pop art." It can borrow from all of these things, but it can do more. It is not relegated to a flat screen or a 3-dimensional shape. Indeed, its mode of distribution is not the traditional gallery, it is an entire world of wire, and, increasingly, air. Just because a person doesn't go into a gallery to view a piece of art doesn't make the art stop existing. Little waves of net.art are hitting everyone of us in the face right this instant, and sitting as a series of zeroes and ones on a hard drive somewhere. If we aren't looking at it, it doesn't disappear. It sits in wait. It propagates itself. Programmed with a push protocol? It forces itself into the world of its own accord.

The telegarden certainly counts as net.art in my book, and that is a living, breathing, 3-dimensional installation, albeit
controlled by a user behind a screen. But you don't need a screen to watch it work. net.art can be delivered to anything with an internet connection, whether a phone, an e-radio, a PC, a robot, a satellite, a microchip embedded in a person, or even just the air.

With net.art, all bets are off, but it'll take a hell of a lot longer as long as we pretend that the media is some sort of an immutable creature and can, or should, simply mimic the modes that came before. We'll never get anywhere if we only think of it in terms of what the Internet does today, and what other movements did yesterday.

April 20, 2006

The Tyranny of Code

A potentially interesting thread popped up on Rhizome today, concerning the nature of Abstraction in digital art. Of course, as Rhizome seems to be mostly made up of traditionally trained artists that have made the leap to technology, the conversation has had a rather sad tendency to focus waaayyyy too much on Abstract Art with a capital A.

In spite of itself, and without even realizing it, the conversation has had tiny glimmers of intriguing ideas. For instance, the idea of Abstraction as applied to digital art brings up all sorts of entertaining plays on the idea of Abstraction in Art vs. Abstraction in code. I have no doubts if I bothered to think about this at some length I could derive some delicious parallels. I mean, ultimately, they are the same thing - the distillation of a concept into its essence. But the differing approaches leave a wide playground for experimentation.

There was also an offhand remark about how net.art is overly Pop-y and Graphic Design-y because of its having to be rendered on a screen and its heavy borrowing from mass culture, which was really rather missing the point. No one bothered to follow up on that one either, but it was just ripe for exploration. Of course, the real reason net.art is overly Graphic Design looking is because the tyranny of code makes it very difficult to move beyond pixels and protocols, past a syntax driven (markup|programming) language, to a freeform expression. Digital art is probably more repressed and bound by its medium than any of its predecessors.

The interesting stuff won't come along until people find out how to break the rules elegantly.

April 13, 2006

One up Wireless

Tracemap beats me to the punch on visualizing wireless network coverage in a city. I was thinking of trying something like this with Personal Telco Project here in Portland - a map of the "physical" wireless cloud coverage in a city. (And not that shitty Google Maps interface, either, but a real, easy, uncluttered, aesthetic map that pulls off a realtime network.)

Anyway, enjoy tracemap. I'll be enjoying Alison Sant's Sitespecific syllabus.

April 09, 2006

Everything's already been done, anyways

Sigh. Grumpy day today. Sometimes I wonder if we are all doomed to repeat the same boring shit for ever and ever. All art projects have been done. All people are dumbasses. All mailing lists are forums for losers and morons who sit in basements shitting and pissing themselves because they can't step away from the computer for even a moment. Still. 20 years after mailing lists were invented. Why isn't anyone doing anything new?

On the one positive side, I am surreptitiously sitting in on a network class that is being taught at work. One of the unwritten benefits of working at a University department is that I can "take" classes off the books. No grades. No paperwork. Just learning. Delicious. And, as if getting to learn something I really love just for the hell of it isn't enough, it also means I am going to be able to cross "Networking" off of my list of prepping for school next year. I wonder if there is a way for me to prove that I took the class even though I am doing it totally illicitly....

April 06, 2006

All in Good Fun

This has nothing to do with anything, other than how hilariously fun the Internet can be:

Make your own Chevy Tahoe ad!

Ah, the endless possibilities for culture jamming. Enjoy mine.

(I seriously must figure out how to download and save this ad before the Chevy web gurus block this stuff.)

April 04, 2006

Whore for Ideas

I suffer from being completely smitten by whatever the latest interesting idea I've heard is, at least for the two minutes it takes for the next interesting idea to fall into my lap.

At any rate, this is my way of saying that I really need to work a little harder at articulating precisely what it is that attracts me, the areas I want to study. Hey, it was a real coup just deciding it was the Internet, for crying out loud....whaddaya want from me?! So, to fall into the trap I so often poke fun at in others, a short list of areas of interest, not in the least uninspired by Science 2020, which I just finished reading about 1.75 minutes ago:

  • data visualization
  • networks
  • mapping
  • ridiculously, weepingly, painfully large subsets of data
  • design
  • information
  • distant connections
  • creation and identification of meaning
  • ways of learning
  • art as social catalyst
  • science as information
  • computing as the means to both

March 24, 2006

Towards 2020 Science/Computing

Just a note to self:

Read the Microsoft Research Towards 2020 Science findings.

Read the Nature web articles in response to above.

March 08, 2006

The Marketing Machine Keeps Spinning

I finally looked up more info about Web 2.0 - I heard bits and blurbs about it here and there, and it's definitely been cropping up more and more in sites I come across during my research. It seemed potentially intriguing, touted as the New Net, a completely different of doing things, being more focused on information - form and content over mere presentation. Etc. Etc.

So, given the extravagent claims and boundless gushing, I am absolutely 100% unsurprised to discover that it is all a very, very large load of crap, and that comes straight from the horse's...mouth....Tim O'Reilly, who was responsible for coining the term in the first place.

For those still wondering what the hell Web 2.0 is, I think it can be summed up quite succinctly by saying that it is a comprehensive In-Out list. Literally.

Example:

    in
  • blogs
  • constant site updates
  • rss
  • wikis

    out
  • personal web sites
  • content management systems
  • evite

Evite?! This is serious proof that the list in question is nothing beyond a popularity contest. Yawn. Just more of the same old shit keeping web developers employed and overpaid. I guess I can stick "Web 2.0" on my resume now and earn $20,000 a year more, seeing as how no one doing the hiring will actually know what a load of horseshit that is. I mean, that's the point of coining marketing buzzwords, right? Give a new name to something trite and boring, and everyone will just have to have one.

March 04, 2006

The Answer

Here it is:

The Internet does not currently expose the inherent connections between information any more than any previous medium. To travel from one thought to the next, you must go to an entirely different location, and you cannot see the separate thoughts side-by-side - in other words, nothing on the Internet is in context.

The current hyperlink is too slow and simple. It makes the Internet linear, but the mind makes leaps so quickly that it sees connected ideas as more of a cluster.

The line of thinking started with Nelson (Literary Machines 90.1). I agree with his premise that ideas need to be presented as the mind understands them. But his system design is all wrong. It's too rigid. I think I need to get Protocol at Powell's to put a better finger on my unease with the rigidity. How to design a system that guarantees accuracy, but without sacrificing creativity or freedom?

March 03, 2006

Why do Programs have to suck?

Looking at programs more. Have decided on some fundamental requirements:

  • User Interfaces
  • Theories of New Media
  • Cognitive Theory
  • Art/Studio classes
  • Theory period

  • Funding available
  • Graduate teaching positions

February 15, 2006

The Pot and the Kettle

I haven't yet decided whether the following excerpt from the current House International Relations subcommittee hearing on tech companies' behavior in China is hilarious or just plain offensive.

"Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace," Lantos said at the hearing.

"I simply don't understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night."

-Hearing on The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression? (View it online [soon])


This quote comes from the same federal government who in the last year:
  1. Made it a federal crime to anonymously "annoy" someone via the Internet (H.R. 3402, Sec. 113)
  2. Blocked creation of a .xxx domain for moral reasons (more)
  3. Used military PsyOps to place fake informational sources online in the Middle East, which then filtered into the US mainstream media as sources of fact for US citizens
  4. Subpoenaed 4 major search engine companies for data on US citizens' Internet search habits (more)
  5. Used the NSA to perform warrantless pattern-analysis and direct monitoring of e-mail and other networked communication channels. In many cases, international communications were intentionally routed through US systems to allow greater access (more)

Scratch that, I decided. Outrageously fucking offensive.

February 13, 2006

Taking the Air for Granted

"...you learn about the file as if it were an element of nature, like a photon. That's a dangerous mentality. Even if you really can't do anything about it, ... it's still important not to let your brain be bamboozled. You have to remember what's a human invention and what isn't. And you have to think about files in the same way you think about grocery carts. They are a particular invention with positive and negative elements. It's very important to keep that sense of skepticism alive."

February 08, 2006

*** Hacking the Mind, Hacking the Internet

How the Internet can make previously unidentified connections visible (in other words, learn/create new meaning):

If the human mind creates meaning by forming connections between two discreet facts, the Internet can be considered a mind. The hyperlink functions as a neurological connection, creating a relation between two different (but, presumably, similar) pieces of information.

If one could map the Internet in a new fashion - rather than simply mapping where it is active, where it is physically located, or where the packets flow - if one could map the connections between ideas that the Internet holds, one would have a map of the human mind. One could plot meaning and calculate relationships between different pieces of information. With the power of the processor, one could find connections that have not previously been consciously identified.

Scribblings:

Standards: standards keep the Internet from being free-form and anarchic like a mind; however, because computers are not yet capable of true intelligence, standards might be a necessary evil to allow the computer to understand what it comes across. One cannot learn a language without a frame of reference (what is a thing [noun] vs an action [verb]?). Something like the Semantic Web would be necessary, at this point in time, for a scraper or other program to properly collect and taxonomize the information it comes across.

Spiders: At this point I am assuming these would be the only proper solution for collecting the vast data that is the web. Must study more on the subject.

Neuroscience: Learn more. How does the mind make connections? What causes neurons to fire? How is one thing identified as related to another? How is one thing mis-identified as being related to another?

February 03, 2006

Information Aesthetics

Information Aesthetics, where form follows data - towards creative information visualization.

January 26, 2006

Enlightenment

Re: imparting bits of information in my last post:

  1. Information is communicated from one person to another in discreet packets.
  2. Discreet packets of information are meaningless - meaning is created from a body of information and the relation of one packet(s) to another.
  3. Communication takes a tangible amount of time. The more packets of information are communicated, the longer the interaction.
  4. The human mind processes information and makes connections between discreet bits of data (creates meaning) in a period of time so short as to effectively be considered instantaneous.

The Internet currently imparts information in packet form. Could there be a way for it to display information that creates meaning or makes meaning apparent instantaneously? In other words, we use the Internet to communicate exactly like we have communicated for thousands of years, the only differences being scope and availability. Could we use the Internet to change, not just where information is imparted, but how? Could it illuminate distant connections in the blink of an eye? Discover meaning where it was previously overlooked? Could it make people understand things in new ways?

January 26, 2006

The Nature of Information

All too often, those in web-related industries, design in particular, get to hear the plaintive/derisive whine, "But it look just like print!" (print being a dirty word). These people believe that the web is so much more than mere print, and how, oh how could these talentless infidels continue to create static pages that mirror paper brochures?

The Internet is a medium. Print is a medium. TV is a medium. Radio, music, newspapers, books, magazines, paintings...all media. Vehicles for information. Painting is a visual medium. Radio is an aural medium. TV gets to be a little funky by using both sound and images (and it gets to move, no less). Designers that piss about web pages that don't dance, sing, talk, and film all at the same time suffer from the belief that the web must, for the love of all that is good and holy in the world, do absolutely everything it is capable of at all times, or it isn't living up to its promise.

But what does the web promise, anyway? It does differ from traditional media, I won't argue with the anti-print element on that point. Media uses sensory input to communicate with people - sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. The Internet is unique in the number of senses it can simultaneously interact with - TV has two, but the Internet adds in touch, in the sense that the user must, generally, type commands or click a mouse to navigate its reaches. And it is one of the first mediums that accepts input from the user/viewer to manipulate it, and this is what truly sets it apart from its predecessors. Ultimately, it's differences highlight what it shares in common with other forms of communication, and that's just it - communication. Information. The Internet is information, but on a greater scale, more widely available, and with more potential than ever before.

Those that want the Internet to do everything at once are scratching at the surface of what's wrong, but the answers they've come up with fall short of the real problems. The problem is not that one has to do everything at once to have a great site (10 years ago, spinning envelopes were the height of the Internet's abilities, but no one wants to admit they were a fan). I agree that the Internet is boring, derivative, and isn't Internet-enough. But it's because no one has yet figured the very nature of information itself. No one has reverse-engineered information, or figured out how to depict it, as an entity, in a sensible form (as opposed to merely imparting bits of it).You're getting warmer

January 24, 2006

Bite me, you stupid assholes

It's now a federal crime to annoy someone on the Internet if you don't use your real name.

Love,
Arlen

December 16, 2005

You can keep your fucking music

France is trying to pass the most restrictive piece of software/copyright legislation I've ever seen. In essence, all free software will be banned.

Unsurprisingly, the people fighting it are screaming about not being able to have their free music sharing and P2P software anymore. What in the fucking hell is it about free music that makes people so militant, practically blinded to anything else? Granted, the legislation was originially pushed by France's equivalent of the RIAA specifically to ban music copyright infringement/theft/whatever, but is everyone missing something much larger?

This legislation would make it illegal to run any free software that permits downloads without corporate tracking software as part of the program. Over half the servers in the world run off of Apache. The French would no longer be able to run free servers, leaving only those with money able to maintain servers and host web sites. No one would be able to use SSH, or a standard, free browser. The legislation would, in other words, cripple individuals' access to the Internet and ghettoize French personal and small business sites to ad-laden abominations like Angelfire (based on the assumption that any free hosting companies currently in France would have to move to a pay model, seeing as how they would now have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for their server software. Those wanting free hosting would have to look outside the country).

Individuals would no longer be able to run free software or usefully participate in the Free Software Foundation, a worldwide movement of developers that many in the tech sector believe will become the only model for all software development within the next 15 years (see claffy again - "business models that depend on controlling distribution will go away"). The French will be ignorant of its workings, intentionally having removed themselves from the Net. Ironic, really, considering how loudly and proudly they rail against the current division of the Internet along national lines (see any of their arguments at WSIS, ISOC, IETF,etc).

December 15, 2005

Reprogramming Google

Now anyone with a few bucks in their pocket and the ability to program can write their own search engine: Amazon and Alexa have made copies of the web available so that anyone can search it using their own homebrew search interfaces. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530978.stm

I wonder if you could make a search engine for illiterate people, where you have a predefined set of images (like the UN ones or something), and the user clicks through till the search becomes specific enough? It could search through pages that contain the meta tag "non-written" or that are well formed enough to work with a screen reader (any page that could be read out loud, images/video only, or a combination would work). The only difference is finding a way to get the illiterate person to the page in the first place.

20 questions with pictures.

Idea
Thing ->

Animal ->
fish
mammal
reptile ->
snake
crocodile
*lizard
vegetable
mineral

It's not very elegant, is it? It can't exactly deal with complex ideas as queries. Though more difficult, it would be more efficient to skip to the next step, which would be having them speak the query into a mic, converting the words into text for the computer, and searching that way.

December 09, 2005

Fight & Flight

Apparently, the US Air Force has modified their mission statement. The new statement expands the USAF's "domain" from air and space to air, space, and cyberspace. It also mentions "sovereign options."

The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.

So...what? The US is the world's lord (read...sovereign). The Air Force, as the fiery hand of this God, will defend her majesty the world over? This includes the global Internet, and they'll fucking kill us if they don't like what we do there?

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123013440
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123881,00.asp

Why can't I find the full text of this thing?Try here: Information operations as a core competency

December 02, 2005

AaarrrRRR!

I'm obsessed with pirate radio, so why not extend the concept to the Internet? A lot of the ideas I've been throwing around lately aren't that far off the pirate-broadcasting mark - making the specialized technology easily accessible, providing the knowledge and empowering people to take matters into their own hands. I think this is the model the Internet needs to follow.

Maybe I should work on a pirate internet portal (or, first, I should bother to see if there are already some up). The ability to create local networks and install home servers already exists, but it's a bit of a jungle to get through, figuring out how to do it and all. Perhaps we could turn our attentions to making the process as absolutely simple and straightforward as possible. Turn its simplification into an art form.
------------
Of course, this would work alright right now, with existing technologies, but if we were to truly take the idea of turning it into an art form, the current technologies would have to ultimately be improved a hell of a lot. Security, for instance. In my opinion, the most hellish aspect to running a personal server is securing it. People spend their entire lives devoted to nothing but securing networks. What if the entire process were built to be more secure right from install? Yes, yes, there will always be loopholes in absolutely any system, period. But the thing looks like a damn piece of Swiss cheese right now. If the security were seriously implemented at every level (EVERY level - wires, cards, transmission, file systems, authentication...everything)....it would make it easier for your average person to just slap a box up, create a community network, or connect a school.

I want out of the box solutions. Multiple modules that can be put together in a million ways and still all work.

Resources:

December 01, 2005

180°

Top Problems of the Internet and How to Help Solve Them (KC Claffy)

We Have Never Been Modular (Lev Manovich)


So, a couple of interesting articles got me thinking (I will have to revisit this more later when I have time, but just wanted to scribble a couple of thoughts down while they were fresh)....

1) One of the biggest problems facing the Internet is economic (claffy). Also says that in next few years all software production/availability will move to free models (open source, presumably?).

2) Manovich (need to read other works) states that internet/computing wil move to strictly modular models, to get rid of incompatibilties between systems. Like the ultimate plug n play. Browsers will work on all systems. Networks will work on all systems. Rather than being hulking behemoths, they will be tiny and can be fitted together in different ways to create different solutions.

3) claffy also says that education will be key. students should be taught networking such that they can build their own networks.
--------------
So, put them all together and what do you have? The direction the internet should be taking is even further anarchy than currently. I like it. It's current robustness is due to its distributed nature. Make it absolutely, 100% distributed. Put the tools to create mini networks in everyone's hands. Make them free. Make them small and easy, and customizable. Make them available everywhere. Get rid of centralized architecture, get rid of proprietary and expensive components.

In other words, make things ubiquitous - physically, economically, and educationally. Make them viral (see Lippman).

Interesting, isn't it? Not one bit different than the original hacker ethic/Free Software Foundation/Electronic Frontier Foundation ideals. But developing a new level of sophistication and outlets. Being heard by new people. Entering public conciousness. In other words, becoming more realistic, respected, and therefore unavoidable.

November 22, 2005

The Emperor has No Clothes

Someone just brought my attention to this post on the Geneva ISOC reps page saying that the only reason the UN wants to take over the Internet is because one guy with a huge telecom interest is afraid of the Internet's growing squeeze on that sector. It's jaw dropping, and, since I am fairly sure that is not ISOC's official position (perhaps a hacker?), I am saving the text on my site for posterity.

The Foolish Dream of an Emperor

November 15, 2005

RE + ACE

Earlier I was ranting on about how digital/Internet change needs to come from the unholy alliance of Art, Computing, and Engineering, but I think I need to throw Research/Education into the mix to be complete. I think the Internet is, first and foremost, a vehicle for change because of its ability to allow collaboration, research, and educational opportunities. Any effort to fix it has to stay focused on whether the final result is at least as, if not more, conducive to these aims.

...Yeah, they made me go to a crappy conference today for work (should I say it's crappy? I have no doubt that at least one person from work and/or the company hosting the meeting will stumble on this at some point, especially since my URL is emblazoned all over my resume). At any rate, the crappy conference was not without its merits, one of which was the fact that it reminded me of how much I believe the Internet is the ideal educational tool. It's just that no one has figured out how to use it right yet.

So, yeah, I'll fess up - the crappy conference in question was for BlackBoard. I don't really like BlackBoard very much, to be quite honest. It's just so...empty. With a couple of really cool exceptions, it is doing nothing more than simply taking the place of traditional classroom learning.

Now, there's nothing wrong with traditional classroom learning, insofar as it's worked just fine so far, but it certainly doesn't offer students everything it could, and this is where I think the Internet is just drumming its fingers waiting for someone to put it to good use. Someone in the conference today actually told a little story that said very plainly something I've known deep down for a long time, but could never prove. He sent his colleagues images from a recent study that did brain scans of students learning. When they were listening to a lecture, one part of the brain lit up. When reading, another part. When watching video, a third. On the other hand, the professor giving a lecture had a full, colorful brain scan with everything illuminated. The guy's point was that it should be the other way around. To get someone to really, truly learn something, you must engage them on all levels.

With all due respect, tools like BlackBoard just don't do that, or, at least, the people using them don't. The software has a fairly (fairly, mind you, before the Bb people start attacking or something) rigid structure that essentially stifles any creativity on the faculty member's part. You have your course materials. You have your lecture section. Your course information section. You put all the things in Bb, in other words, that you would put in a normal course. The only difference is that the student can access them at her leisure, instead of at a proscribed time.

Not very exciting or groundbreaking, is it?

Oh, sure, you can do cool things easily like set up an online discussion board for students to post thoughts, and this is above and beyond what a normal classroom does. But how many faculty are creating interactive ___insert your programming language of choice here___ applications that the students can manipulate, program, or alter? Or that crunch data in real time, or use distributed networking to solve problems? How many of them treat their Bb world as a portal rather than a course, with links or front ends to primary source databases? How many of them see the web as a way to put all their specialized knowledge, and that of 50,000,000 others, in one place, with a structure and interface that makes the connections between things obvious, or illuminates connections that no one noticed before? How many of them are actually teaching their students to use the technology to learn how to learn more, as opposed to making it copy our limited physical-world systems, in which students are only supposed to learn by passively listening to what teacher tells them?

I guess the easiest way to put it (as a statement, rather than one of my eternally maddening questions) is to say that a traditional classroom has walls and everyone comes and sits in it, cordoned off from the rest of the world, and they get to hear what the book in their hand, the professor in front of them, and the people sitting next to them have to say. Most people using BlackBoard use it exactly the same way - insulating their students from the rest of the Internet outside of the little course's shell. But the Internet is not meant to exist in a shell, and this is where BlackBoard (and/or its users, depending on how you want to look at it) fails.

Nothing about BlackBoard inherently encourages people to go beyond the limitations of time and space to travel, from their armchair, to a private archive they would have previously spent 8 hours on a plane for. Nothing about it really encourages people to consider the Internet as anything other than a photograph of the real world, mimicking its appearance and function and then preserving it for access at a later time. Nothing about it, in other words, does anything more than barely scratch at the surface of the Internet, and the fact that it is a living, breathing, changing entity, capable of breaking down any of the boundaries that have historically hampered knowledge acquisition and sharing.

That, my friends, is why I hate BlackBoard, and I why I think the Internet needs to change. The Internet is stifled by its own shortcomings, but also by every crappy product and web site that keeps reinforcing the old way of doing things.


On a related note, I also got a cool link to the MIT Open Courseware project at the conference. In the past, I've always scoured university sites for syllabi and tried to do my best at recreating the course for myself. This, of course, has varying degrees of success based on how thorough the professor's materials are on their website. Anyway, following MIT's lead, scads of schools (seriously - do a Google search for "opencourseware") have made course documents available in a systematic way.

November 09, 2005

Dynamic Compositions

Burak Arikan's Dynamic Compositions should be seen. It's not really anything more than a computer geek playing with art and form, but since it's pretty much where my own heart lies, I'm hardly going to knock it. The best part is that he makes his source code available, so I can study it and figure out how to do such things myself! He uses Processing to do it, and they have other projects with source available.

November 05, 2005

Must...Learn...More

I've set goals for myself of stuff I need to know before I go back to school (at least enough not to drool when the subject comes up).

Love learning. Hate learning. 2 years is not enough.

  • Linux
  • Networking
  • Java
  • Italian (read)
  • French (read)
  • Art history
  • Electrical engineering
  • Algorithms

October 19, 2005

Digital Information Design

Digital Information Design Camp 2005 considers some rather pedestrian themes (fonts), but builds on them to end up with a handful of really cool projects, especially when it comes to diagramming. There's nothing wrong with going back to basics now and then.

(Rational Type | Thinking with Digital Type)
(Dynamic Form | Generative Form)
(The Big Picture | Information Distallation)


October 06, 2005

The Art Formerly Known as New Media

http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibits/2005/formerly/default.htm

Blah blah blah. The e-mail notifying me of this event summed up why it is interesting a lot better than the event's web site:

A tube of paint was once new media. And remember the shock of those newfangled Daguerreotypes? Theorists have speculated wildly about what drives humans to crave newness, but the truth is that all media age. And while some are still prompted to use the phrase 'new media,' art has been made under this moniker since long before Madonna was a Material Girl. 'The Art Formerly Known as New Media,' at the Banff Centre's Walter Philips Gallery, was curated by fellows Sarah Cook & Steve Dietz to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Banff New Media Institute. On view through October 23rd, the show features 14 BNMI alums whose once-novel work now verges on being canonical. Ranging from html and 3D experiments to more ironic or tactical pieces, the show is less bogged-down by the premise of displaying important early works than it is concerned with getting us over the hump of considering a medium's virginity, and onto considering art's persistent themes. Dietz said the curato! rs hope that, like the artist formerly known as Prince, the work formerly known as New Media Art can simply come to be known as 'Prince' --I mean 'Art.' - Marisa Olson

September 29, 2005

Read this shit and memorize it

Note the sweet, sweet links. http://www.itu.int/wsis/

September 29, 2005

UN Takes over the Internet

Holy shit! How did I miss this one? There's an option on the floor right now over whether control of the Internet should be given to the UN.

Whoah. I have no comment at this time. I still have to get my head around this one.

Okay. Given it a little more thought, but there are still many questions to ask. Check out the UN's Internet taskforce website: http://www.wgig.org/.

The WGIGReport is especially useful, and helps give one pause before running off screaming and ranting senslessly like a little baby (which currently seems to be the common response on the IETF mailing list, for instance). English version of WGIG Report. In particular, I find the section entitled "IV. Developing a common understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders from both developed and developing countries" calming. At least they recognize that there are many players, each with different interests, needs, resources, and abilities.

Still, the thought is huge. I cannot even begin to fathom the repercussions. Good? Bad? Useless? Revolutionary?

September 28, 2005

ACE in the hole

I finally had a moment of epiphany regarding what exactly it is I want to study, even if it didn't necessarily make my school search or quest for a dissertation topic any easier.

I realized as I was surfing around at several of the New Media Studies websites that the ones I kept coming back to over and over (in particular MIT's New Media Lab and Irvine's ACE program) both put an emphasis on Arts, Computing, AND Engineering, not just one or two. I can't tell you how bored I am by the thought of New Media Visual Arts programs (Parsons). Seriously. I mean, if I want to be a visual designer, I'll just go get a Visual Arts MFA and read a book on HTML in my spare time. Whoopee. I can work for a web design firm and keep making pretty web sites like I've been doing for the last X years. I surely can't do anything interesting like visualize a new way to make the Internet, or create a technology that might actually effect some sort of change, God forbid.

No. I realized that I keep coming back to these programs because they make use of all the tools available to them. You obviously can't understand the Internet and its capabilities without having an appreciation for computer science. What good is the Internet without computing (programming/calculating/crunching) ability, without the ability to manipulate, transmit, and present data? And you can't grasp how it works without engineering. How can you build new equipment for broadcasting or receiving data? And art. Well, I may be silly and naive, but I still believe it is art that is required to engage people, to illicit a response, and to create change. And how much more powerful to have technology in the artist's toolkit, especially one that can reach more people than ever before.

I think it is only by employing all of the disciplines in a consistent way that I/we can really do anything of note, or even understand what the Internet is - because it is all of these things at once and more. It is a political landscape, a technological marvel, a forum, a gallery, a library, and a collaborative tool all at the same time.

September 09, 2005

How to Make (Almost) Anything

Sweet Jesus. Please let me go to MIT. I want unfettered access to the FabLab.

September 09, 2005

The Poetics of Spam

But they need to remember how ridiculously clodhopper defined by cargo bay trembles.Unlike so many cups who have made their botched widow to us.Still fall in love with her from skyscraper related to, make a truce with her diskette inside pig pen with toward alchemist.When related to cowboy gets stinking drunk, of dolphin procrastinates.A few lunatics, and ocean inside hole puncher) to arrive at a state of dilettanteFurthermore, cleavage near paper napkin panics, and for hole puncher find lice on clock behind.

September 08, 2005

Misdirected energies

Wow. Bringing bitchiness to whole new levels. Every technology has to start somewhere. What the fuck would happen if they started by controlling nuclear power plants this way? jerk off.Remotely control sythesizers and drum machines via the Internet! Turn real knobs and dials!

Why doesn't anyone do something good with this technology? Like remotely control nuclear power plants so no living people have to work in them?

August 15, 2005

Paradox

The single most interesting thing about the Internet is that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Democracy is a beautiful, terrible beast.

How incredible that anyone can create a web page to say anything they want to say. It has created a ghastly, unweildy, ugly, boring, stupid monstrosity with nothing to say. How equally enjoyable, fascinating, tedious, and maddening trying to find something worth looking at.

I was talking about it with some of Sarah's friends today (Rachel, Anne Marie, Thomas) and realized that this one point is probably what holds my attention more than any other. How frustratingly difficult to solve a problem that perhaps shouldn't be solved.

August 15, 2005
:Categories

Paradox

The single most interesting thing about the Internet is that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Democracy is a beautiful, terrible beast.

How incredible that anyone can create a web page to say anything they want to say. It has created a ghastly, unweildy, ugly, boring, stupid monstrosity with nothing to say. How equally enjoyable, fascinating, tedious, and maddening trying to find something worth looking at.

I was talking about it with some of Sarah's friends today (Rachel, Anne Marie, Thomas) and realized that this one point is probably what holds my attention more than any other. How frustratingly difficult to solve a problem that perhaps shouldn't be solved.

June 24, 2005

Self-replicating wireless internet?

I hate the current setup of the Internet. Although, in theory, it is supposed to be a distributed network (robust, protection against nuclear attack, blah blah blah), it is, in reality, not, as it essentially mimics the phone system. It's a noded network, which means when stupid things happen like fires in subway/network tunnels, an entire city ends up completely isolated from another one. Frigging retarded.

Because of this, a lot of folks are starting to look into wirless networks. I'm a little unclear on the down and dirty of networks (to do: get network+ certification and job in networking until I know more), but my understanding of wireless networks is that they need satellites to work, similar to the way cell phones do. And, often, at some point the connection hits a wired network, replicating the problems with the current system. Someone please tell me if I am totally incompetent in my understanding here.

Anyway, I had a dream while I was in Greece about a self-propagating wireless network system that uses a series of repeaters the way radio does. Basically, each server broadcasts it's information via a wireless card. A wireless router/repeater-like device then picks the signal up and passes it along to the next one. The repeater devices also broadcast to the servers and other machines. They could be tiny devices that can go anywhere - you could stick them on the side of a phone pole or a building or a cactus in the middle of the desert (seriously, all they need is a little electricity - why not solar powered in areas where an electrical connection is hard to come by?). Users pick up the signal in the same way.

So, basically, a server and a user are connected to the Internet, not by wires and satellites, but by this little repeater plopped absolutely anywhere.

That's my fruitloop idea of the day. Crazy? Or naively brilliant? Help me out here.

June 06, 2005

Tree Wave

I feel like I'm still bumbling along in the dark with the Internet, even after building things on it for 7 years. As always, once I start looking, I realize I've only ever scratched the surface.

Of course, I also realize this is true for almost everyone out there, especially in regards to something as vast and labyrinthine as the Internet.

I've discovered the wonder of Rhizome, and, although my impending move and vacation are preventing me from following its corridors as assiduously as I'd like, I have started tenatively culling through the ArtBase looking for interesting new media art objects. Thus far, at least, they seem to be few and far between, running into the perpetual problem of being navel-gazing deconstructionist crap. Apparently, if it looks like it was made on a computer and/or employs lots of recognizably technological imagery, it makes it Art with a capital "A." The actual theoretical or artistic merit of the work seem to be irrelevant.

Then again, this is true of most art.

At any rate, today I was tickled to discover a freshly added art work by the Texas-based band Tree Wave. They've recompiled Ataris and other obsolete equipment (Commodore 64s, etc) and used them to make music. And it actually sounds damn good. I guess there's hope, after all.

June 01, 2005

Irony of ironies

Right after my last post, I discovered an "article" claiming that Mark Tribe has declared Net Art dead.

2 thoughts:

1) Um, the inSite_05 website does not, in fact, appear to say this anywhere. Unless, of course, I am retarded and simply can't find it, which is entirely possible.

2) NetArt has been dead for years, because nobody could come up with anything creative to do with it. Seriously. You can only create so many ascii artworks, hypertexts, and pseudo-guis before people start to ask if there is anything interesting behind all the hype.Ooooh! It's boring because it's only deconstructive. I finally figured out you want to see constructive. If NetArt wasn't so goddamn self-reflexive, it might garner a little more interest.

According to the blog post making the above statements, Tribe also stated, "But to say that the net is just another medium along with video, painting, installation, etc. would be misleading. The net is both a medium and a platform, a set of tools for art-making and a distribution channel for reaching people."

Damn. I hate it when people say what I was trying to say, except way, way more good.

May 31, 2005

Stating the Obvious

The classes of web project

Text: centered around text. Ideally, uses (X)HTML, CSS. Can be straight text or can include extensive visual design.

Interactive: requires user input. Moves beyond simple forms. Requires programming of some sort, Java, Flash Action Script, C++, etc.

Multimedia: mimics traditional moving images, animations, film, audio, etc. RealMedia, Flash, etc. Photography. Images, still and moving.

Bastard: uses Flash to present text. Uses object-oriented programming to present text. Uses images to present text.

Get beyond merely looking at something's visual presentation. Ask why it was designed using a particular technology. Is that technology necessary and integral to the project's message or focus? Intent. Purpose. Medium.

Medium.

The web does, in fact, have many media choices - painting is not a single medium. Watercolor, oil, acrylic all have a different purpose. So it is with web.

Visceral reaction. Message. Passing on information. Entertainment. Commerce. Teaching. Learning. Games. Movies. Radio. Art. Influence. Upset. Recruit. Sell. Find. Rant. Protest. Write. Photograph. Showcase. Personal. Public.

May 21, 2005

Incest Pixxxs

I don't think I've found a community as incestuous as the Internet. When my site was about urban exploration, I could find nothing but urban exploration sites. They all linked to each other. They made cute in-jokes and snide references to other urban explorers. Within this group, there was a weird, super-holy contingent whom everyone else aspired to be part of, and to whom everyone else linked and asked questions and who got all the media requests.

So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the new media/digerati crowd should be any different. On the one hand, it's reassuring to be able to determine the perceived worth of a site by the number of fawning, simpering fans it has, and how well the creators have pimped their services and opinions to the rest of the world. Given that new media studies and art are academic pursuits, as well, you can just notch that up to the nth degree. The downside, of course, is that it becomes exponentially more difficult to wade through the bullshit that goes along with self-important pinheads.

Is it funny? Maybe a little. On a good day.

Stupid artists. Fucking academics. Stop being such a critical bitch and admit that sometimes, sometimes, the cream rises to the top.

May 16, 2005

I Just Need to Read More, After All

See, this is exactly the reason I need to do this project and go back to school.

Lev Manovich and The 5 Questions About Digital Culture:

1. We live in 'remix' culture. Are there limits to remixing? Can anything be remixed with anything? Shall there be an ethics of remixing?

Who cares? We don't live in a remix culture. Culture implies tradition and time. We live in a remix fad. In 10 years, we will look at our remixed clothes and design and wonder what the hell we were thinking, and we will burn with shame when we see pictures of ourselves wearing clothes that were just as stupid when our parents wore them 30 years ago.

2. In the last few years information visualization became increasingly popular and it attracted the energy of some of the most talented new media artists and designers. Will it ever become as widely used as type or photography - or will it always remain a tool used by professionals?

It will remain a tool of professionals. Type has a one to one relationship with the object it represents. The typed letter "A" represents the spoken sound "a." It is not abstract and is therefore not terribly relevant to compare it to photography or information visualization.

Photography is more interesting, in that you can have photography that has the same one-to-one relation as type (not abstract, point and shoot, the result appears as the subject, tourist photos) and requires no special or expensive implements (can be done with a disposable or point and shoot camera and taken to the lab to be developed), but you can also have more complex, abstract, technically proficient, and/or equipment-intensive photography. The former is accessible to all, and the latter tends to be practiced only by the professional.

Photography as an example illustrates why information visualization will probably remain primarily in the hands of the professional, at least for the immediate future.

  • It often requires technical skill (programming),
  • abstract thinking capabilities (there are few set rules at this phase, so information visionaries must still develop their own language and definitions),
  • money and tools for computing power,
  • and it is often used to display unusually large or complex relationships between data which are not usually necessary for non-academic or research purposes.

Is it possible that some or all of the above difficulties will be overcome? Sure. But even in that case there is no guarantee that the technique will make its way into the mainstream. Librarians have been information retrieval professionals for hundreds of years, but their knowledge is still considered arcane.

3. Today cinema and literature continue the modern project or rendering human psychology and subjectivity, while fine art seems to be not too concerned with this project. How can we use new media to represent contemporary subjectivity in new ways? Do we need to do it?

I am still trying to answer this question for myself.

4. 'Blobs' in architecture and design - is this a new 'international style' of software society, here to stay, - or only a particular effect of architects and designers starting to use software?

Blobs are to current architecture what post-war architecture was to the last century: a knee jerk reaction to world events that will be deeply regretted by suburbanites in another 50 years.

5. While the tools to produce one's [sic] own media have been more accessible and more powerful, people never consumed more commercial media than now. Thus the essential division between 'media amateurs' and 'media professionals' which got established in the beginning seems to be as strong as ever. In short, the 1960s idea that new technologies will turn consumers into producers failed over and over again. Will this situation ever change? What will be the next stage in media consumption after MP3 players, DVD recorders, CD burners, etc, etc, etc.?

I have come to the depressing realization that people are lazy fucks and do not want to produce things for themselves. I wish there were a fascinating and academically obtuse answer to this question.

May 15, 2005

The Internet has no memory

I used to belong to a mailing list for local women professionally involved with web technologies. I finally had to unsubscribe because the people on the list would routinely infuriate me with their lack of technical and intellectual grasp of the Internet.

(I don't mean to be snotty about it. I certainly wasn't expecting a list where people endlessly debate the merits of starting a foreach loop before or after calling the function, because it might save 1 millisecond of processing time, nor would I want to be a part of such a list. But if you're going to earn money building web sites for people, I don't think you should be posting questions asking how to make a table in HTML.)

The particular conversation that most made my brain explode was one concerning advertising on websitessearch archives for exact posts. save for reference. An individual wrote to the list asking why people weren't clicking her Google ads. I replied that, although I couldn't speak for all her users, I personally never click ads because I do not want to encourage their use, as I prefer not to be bombarded by them while surfing. Although it was offered merely as an observation, the statement incited an argument.

To put it in a nutshell, this webmaster had never heard the argument made against the use of ads on the Internet, nor could she fathom why anyone would not want to see ads on the Internet, even after the rationale was explained to her. In fact, she seemed surprised to learn that some people use the Internet for anything other than shopping at all (literally, she was dismissive and disbelieving to hear that the Internet can and is used for research).

This is a perfect example of the short memory the Internet has. I started using it my first year of college (1995), and I have heard the above argument backwards, forwards, and sideways since the very beginning of that time. I have no doubts that it existed before that time. So how is it that a paid Internet professional can be unfamiliar with it? Nay, even unfamiliar with more than one use of the Internet?

Somehow, the overall design of the system has changed little or none (and, I assume, is therefore taken for granted as being incredible)why don't you prove this?, but the ideas about the user-experience are that anything old is crap.

How does a short memory hinder the Internet? Does it help it progress (no sacred cows to hold it back)? Does it doom it to repeat and perpetuate problems? Where can I find memory banks?

Does any user routinely use the Internet for more than one or two purposes? Do I? Am I stuck in an Internet rut?

May 13, 2005

Almost there

So, the site's almost up. Need to finish:

  • Bibliographic formatting
  • Add resources
  • Build Digital Resource database
  • Double check links
  • Try to fix MT search engine bug
  • Create links from fly out menu for non-:target aware browsers

Anyone who stumbles across this thing in its bastard child phase, feel free to let me know if you find any bugs or errors. Please note that I am not completely retarded - if the Resources link says "Alexis hasn't built this yet," then I probably know it isn't working.

May 05, 2005

Fuck you, BibTeX

Apparently, there is no program out there to take a MySQL bibliographic entry and convert to MLA format in HTML. There are some that come close, but they're appalling pseudo-software with GUIs. I just want a plain goddamn HTML bibliography as output. Now I have to write that shit myself.

Fuck you BibTeX.

Book, general:

Pers_Author. Part. "Title_Piece." Title_Main. Ed. Pers_Editors. Trans. Pers_Translators. Comp. Pers_Compilers. Num_Edition. Num_Volume. Title_Series Num_Series. Date_Previous. Location: Entity_Publisher, Date_Date. Num_Pages.

applies to:
Book
Work in Anthology
Article Reference Book
Introduction, Preface, Forward, Afterword
Anonymous Book
Edition
Translation
Multi Volume
Series
Republished book
Imprint
Pamphlet
Government Pub
Conference Proceedings
No Pub Info
Unpublished Dissertation
Published Dissertation
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

anthology:

Pers_Editors, ed. Pers_Translators, trans. Pers_Compilers, comp. Title_Main. Num_Edition. Num_Volume. Title_Series Num_Series. Date_Previous. Location: Entity_Publisher, Date_Date. Num_Pages.

Applies to:
anthology
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

bookcrossref
bookpre1900
articlejournal
articlenews
articlereview
articlemagazine
articleabstract
articleanon
articleeditorial
articlelettereditor
articleserialized
articlespecialissue
articlemicroform
articlelooseleaf
televisionradio
sound
film
performance
musicalcomposition
artwork
interview
map
cartoon
ad
speech
manuscript
letter
legal

April 30, 2005

Phoenix

I was talking with Litza last night when I admitted to her why I am fascinated by the Internet. I admitted to her something I haven't really fully explained to anyone before, and which she was (and I am) completely baffled by.

I hate it. I hate the Internet. I spend 12 hours a day on it, and I want to destroy it.

It's one of those uncanny things that I can't put my finger on. It looks like the Internet. It smells like the Internet. But it's not the Internet. It's not what we were promised, or what the tech nerds envisioned, or what everyone says it can be.

So what is it, and what is it that it's not doing?

I don't know the answer yet. I don't even know my questions. Are my complaints the same boring and utopian drivel we've been hearing for years, naive dreams about free information and how we're not getting it? Childish tantrums about overcommercialization and co-option? Do they tread in the more practical world of unwieldy and inefficient technology? Search engines that leave vast expanses of information orphaned and out of reach? Misdirected and slavish devotion to standards? Too much anarchy? Not enough anarchy?

My most troubling inkling is that there's a complete lack of creativity. That 99.99% of things are still being done the same way they were 10 years ago, and that the new way most things are done has no reason. I don't believe new is inherently better. But the Internet does. It embraces and proliferates worthless gadgets, coding, languages, and technology just because it can. The Internet is being wasted on technological gewgaws. I want to see novel, elegant, and useful steps forward, going where? but no one seems to be doing those things, and if they are, they're relegated to obscurity in a basement somewhere. I don't mean just visual changes, or just changes to content, or languages, or infrastructure. I mean the whole, fucking thing.

I'm tired of seeing patches on a system that needs to be burned and recreated from the ashes.

April 29, 2005

Sense from Nonsense

I finally, finally figured out what I want to study. I've only been completely and totally obsessed with the Internet for about 8 years now, so I'm impressed that it only took me that long to figure out that that's what I want to research for my PhD.

Yeah.

So, now begins the long, tedious, frustrating, and, ultimately, completely enjoyable hunt for a school. Unfortunately, Internet Studies is something completely different at every single university. Some places, it is called New Media Studies. It might be part of the Media and Journalism School, Art department, Art History, Computer Science, Design, History, Engineering, or even Architecture department. It might be about designing pretty sites, the social ramifications of the technology, reinvisioning new ways to create it, or building it with your bare hands. You might need to know a high level programming language, or you might not even need to know how to build a website.

Holy shit. How can I tame this thing?

June 12, 2007

SDF turns 20

Warning, shameless plug follows:

It was on June 16th, 1987 that the SDF-1 received its first caller at 300bps. This little Apple ][e BBS of the late 80s turned into a Public Access UNIX System with the demise of "killer.dallas.tx.us" during the "Operation Sundevil" raids. Since then it has grown to become the oldest and largest continually operating PUBNIX on the planet.

Over the years SDF has been a home to 2+ million people from all over the world and has been supported by donations and membership dues. SDFers pride themselves on the fact that theirs is one of the last bastions of "the real INTERNET", out of the reach and scope of the commercialism and advertising of the DOT COM entities.

SDF Turns 20...Read more