November 27, 2006
The Emergence Continue…
The reading for this week is even more interesting. Chapter four focuses on feedback system. Feedback loops is what causes the first stirring of emergence due to specific changes in the underlying system of mass media (133). Johnson talks about positive and negative feedbacks. A positive feedback is simply a feedback that amplifies the output, continuously adding on to the previous input. A negative feedback is one in which the output is being brought back to equilibrium. According to Johnson, the feedback loops of urban life are what cause the world’s most stunning neighborhoods.
During discussion, the Amazon website came up as an example of negative feedback. This is because every time you order books from the site, it gives you a list of similar books or books that are written by the same author as suggestions. Another example that was brought up in discussion was the internet as a whole. It seems to be a positive feedback because files of information, new sites, and new programs are being added everyday. As Scot puts it, emergence in this sense is like a simple program that gets build into a complex network, in which learning and evolve are assessable.
In the feedback system, a question that was asked was how would one determine news from non-news? The response given in discussion was that events and things about celebrity are not really news but because we as the majority are curious about it, then it becomes more of news. In a sense then, we created and determine what news is and what is not consider as news just like a feedback system, a bottom-up process.
November 21, 2006
So far the book “EMERGENCE” by Steven Johnson is pretty cool. Last week we read up to chapter 3 and his ideas are getting intense. It is to the point where you should really be thinking where his provocative ideas are coming from and how to go about connecting his ideas together to understand the concept of emergence.
First off, I really like comparison picture of the map of Hamburg, circa 1850 and the diagram of the human brain at the beginning of his book. It just seems that there are so much we can learn from the things that exist around us, whither it’s the microscopic live or the macroscopic creature that function around us.
Steven Johnson begins his book with the slime molds illustration. By definition, slime molds are peculiar protests that normally take the form of amoebae, but sometime transform into slug that travel to high area. They are classified as the kingdom of Protista, the Amoebozoa phylum, and are under the class of Mycetozoa (Wikipedia). What can we learn from the slime molds? As explained by Steven Johnson, the individual cells of slime molds functions independently but comes together at the right conditions and are then able to move functioning as “they” (13).
Inspiration of the slime molds examples lead to the understanding of self-organization and bottom up theory. These concepts lead to the development of “EMERGENCE.” By Steven Johnson’s definition, emergence is the movement from lower-level rules to higher-level complexity (18). By making taking the emergence concept and apply it to our everyday life and looking at society, one can say that our city functions similar to emergence. We had many great discussion in class about whither the city is a bottom-up or top-down. Most of us agree that city is a bottom-up that has a feedback loop that comes into effect. I think this explanation works well in a democracy society like ours, but what about communism country like N. Korea. Would city like theirs be a top-down process?
Another interesting idea that was discussed on Friday by Andy and Erik was that, emergence exists from the local interactions, like neighborhoods. At first this concept was pretty unclear to me but as class went on to explore more about it, I finally understand it. As Steven Johnson puts, it is in the local interactions that the information is being store, ready for a trigger to give responses. As Scot puts it in class, it is just like the creation of the Constitution that the fathers created. They created for it to grow knowing that society will change.
More of Emergence Next week…
November 17, 2006
Let’s face it for real. I’ve made a schedule since the beginning of the semester to go to the gym to work out. After two weeks of following up with the schedule that I made, things start to fall apart. First, you begin having homework problems to do, papers to write, and books to read. Then exam comes, which don’t seem to ever end…one exam after the others. You spend a couple weekends catching up on works and realizing that you haven’t even gone to the gym to work, which is probably why you are so stress out.
They always tell you that you need a balance life style to maintain a healthy mind. But what they always do is give you a load of works to keep you busy meaning not having enough time to go out for any activity. What does this all mean? Are we living the life style that we want or are we living it because we really don’t have the choice?
Many studies showed that sedentary life style causes 20% of all deaths for people of age 35 and older. This is a pretty scary percentage. It is even more dangerous for our health than smoking (Adams). Sedentary life style leads to many diseases such as cancer, respiratory ailment and heart diseases. What can we do solve the problem? I think there are many things you can do depending on the kind of position and situation in life that you are in. But the most important thing is to get out there and exercise. This can be playing basketball at the SERF or running on the track.
I’m started to see why college students are pretty stress out most of the time. I barely have the time to go workout at the gym anymore. Much even worse, my roommate had been doing all nighters at college library for the last five days and he looked terribly exhausted during the day time. I think that our life style would be more active if society gives us the chance to breathe and enjoy spiritual time.
November 13, 2006
Last week we watched "Lost in Tranlsation" directed by Sophia Coppola. This was a great movie and it demonstrated a lot of what we have been learning so far, such as postmodernism and non-place. Watching this movie for the second time and finally understanding Auge’s idea of non-place makes this movie so much interesting.
Auge’s description of non-place finally makes more sense now that we had watched “Lost in Translation.” A non place as described by Auge is something a person cannot relates and identify with. In the movie, Bob Harris and Charlotte were both in Tokyo, Japan, a foreign place where they both do not understand the language and culture that is happening over there. Everything in Tokyo is very strange to them and they cannot relate and identify what is really going on. They both settle in a hotel, a non-place and continue their daily routine in non-places. This movie demonstrated a nonplace pretty well. Most of the scenes mainly have individuals going about their business and not have interactions at all, especially scenes of the street of Tokyo which is linked to the idea of solidarity. According to Auge’s solidarity, a person is left alone being detached from its surrounding. In the movie, there are many scenes when Bob was in the car looking at the outside surrounding and everything seems to just spin around creating a sense of supermoderity; which according to Auge is the essence of a non-place.
November 10, 2006
Did any of you went out and vote this past Tuesday? I hope you thought it threw because P. Diddy says that either you “vote or die.” He’s been on the campaign to encourage young adults to get out there and make a difference.
click on the image to check out the original article
So, when did rappers and politicians start sharing the same mic? It all started with P.Diddy making a slick move on former first lady Hillary Clinton, the current junior senator from New York. He complimented on her outfit and how she is one of the best-dressed politicians in the game. They have two goals in mind. P. Diddy wants all the young folks to get out there to vote or die and Hillary Clinton wants the Democratic Party to win. It sounds like a pretty good deal. Really, voting is a great deal and it keeps the power in your control.
But what I really want to address here is the power of rhetoric in network culture. You see a famous rappers/producers/designer -P. Diddy stepping up to encourage young folks to vote. His image is very powerful in the campaign because in the hip hop world, P. Diddy is an icon. When P. Diddy tells you to vote, you better vote otherwise you’re not cool. And Hillary Clinton on the other is well known with the politicians and the noble folks. When she tells you to vote, you better vote if you want more jobs, better education and a better heath care system. Who ever is the master mind of this rhetorical scene is a genius.
November 7, 2006
Today I finally made it to one of the software training workshop and it feels great. It feels like you are standing on top of a tall mountain and looking back at the accomplishments you made, if you know what I mean. Because when it comes to software and animation, I’m the last person you want to ask for advice.
But it’s exiting that I had attend the Flash 1 workshop at college library this evening. The instructor Drew did a great job going over the overview and demonstration of what Flash is. Basically, Flash is a program to create interactive website and spicing the effect to any designs. We covered the basic tools of flash and understand how it functions. Here is a list of what we did in class:
- Creating shapes and symbols
- Apply motion and shape tweening
- Create movie clips and graphic symbols
- Working with layers
- Create motion guides
In the session, we design a car moving in motion across the screen with the wheels spin. Also, the care can be adjusted to move in all directions on the screen. I have to say this flash training session is something worth going to. One important trick that I learned was to always create new layers to every object that you made so that you won’t confuse any of the objects once you have up to hundreds of objects on top of each other.
Flash will definitely rock my website and project for my English 201 class. It will help me create a better representation of what I really want to show and help make my project and websites be more rhetorical. By this, I mean more animations to all my designs. When I can accomplish the animation effect, it will help interpret my website in a more meaningful way. Because looks and appearance contribute a whole lot to rhetorical and the idea of cool, I can apply the animation in Flash to create a sense of character in my project to make it look cool. One important concept that I want to use from Flash was the object in motion idea. I think it’s pretty cool to have a design object spinning across the screen. I hope Flash will function according to what I have in mind and stimulate my project for the class. Finally, I’m looking forward to attend the Flash 2 and 3 sessions.
Click on the object to see what Flash can do…
November 5, 2006
When did modernism end and postmodernism begin? To understand today society we must look into the many aspects that exist in our cultures. In his writing “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson writes about postmodernism. He describes that the particular art forms are in terms of capitalism and it is fluidity in motion. Looking at the painting done by Van Gogh and Andy Warhol, Jameson was able to illustrate the difference between high modernism and postmodernism. In the painting of “A Pair of Boots” Van Gogh illustrates a peasant shoes and reconstructed into a form of art, showing glories pure color in oil paint. Andy Warhol on the other hand, painted his “Diamond Dust Shoes” which had no sense of organization and is just a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas. Van Gogh’s painting is what Jameson considered high modernism and Andy Warhol’s painting is what’s considered postmodernism. Here is a list of the differences between high modernism and post modernism presented by Scot:
High-Modernism Postmodernism
Depth Surface / Depthlessness
Centered De-centered
Stable Instable / In-flux
Content Form / Style
Affect Affectless
Hitorical Ahistorical / Eternal Present
Accessible Disorienting
Mappable Unmappable
Reality Hyperreality / Simulation
Hierarchical Distributed
Grid Network
Elitist Populist
Coherent Fragmented
Industrial capitalism Late capitalism / network culture
Autonomous nation-state Globalization
Work Play
Place Placelessness / Non-place
Authenticity / Originality Reproduction
Unity Difference
Coherence Schizophrenia
Centripetal Centrifugal
Community Isolation / Shared solitude
The reading from Marc Auge writing of “From Places to Non-places” was interesting. Though I think it was pretty difficult to understand the philosophical concept that he’s trying to get across. Jordan did a great job of leading the discussion on Friday which really helped my understanding of the non-places. A place was defined by Mark Auge as “relational, historical and concerned with identity” and a non-place would be defined as not relational, or historical, or concerned with identity(77). Example of non-places would be hospital, hotel, holiday clubs, supermarket, train station, or refugee camp. Non-place as Mark Auge linked it to two concepts: spaces formed in relation to certain ends and the relations between individual and their space (94).
Many great discussions came up in class. One particular was about the idea of living in memory, in which we are taking pictures of the present so that we can move on in life and refer to them in memories. I think this is the kind of society that we are moving toward because of the way our society is economically structuring. Everyone is basically busy working hard and keeping up with the economy in order to earn a living. This just means that there will be less time for socialization, less time to be in a place, and more time in a non place wondering from place to place. We will no longer have time to enjoy the valuable moment in life as we use to. In these form of interactions, time is space.
October 29, 2006
The focus of this weeks reading was on Identity. How can one define identity and whither it is stable or always changing in time? How can one distinguish between what is real and what is virtual?
In her paper “Life on the Screen,” Sherry Turkle talks about our social world as being fluidity rather than stability and that in the virtual communities like in MUDs, people learn to be fluid and have multiple characters (255). These are the sort of characters we portrait ourselves when we are online. In the paper, online users expresses themselves being more freely and being closer to the “self” than ever before. In this case “identity” was described as the correct representation of appearing at the right time and in the right context (256). Does this mean that we have multiple personality? We had a great discussion on the idea of role playing in class on Monday. I think that all the characters that we play or portrait in everyday live or online are all part of the “self.” Just like how Sherry mentioned, we response according to the context and time of the situation. Take for instance when I’m around my friends, I would act differently from when I around my parents or with professors. All these characteristics that I represented are all part of me. So I think the “self” is a complex network consisted of many characteristics and role playing.
When we are online, our identity is acting as multiplicity and coherent at the same time (259). In discussion Scot explain how online we are playing multiple role while at the same time constructing a personae reality which makes online users feel comfortable in virtual and bring it back in reality, coherent. In this sense, virtual reality provides us an alternative to accept ourselves in reality.
Sherry went on exploring the cyborg dreams which are machines that are able to experience like human. In this dream, the “self” then was considered as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, and flexible (263). This idea was carry on by Carolyn Miller on the paper “Writing in a Culture of Simulation.” In this paper, Carolyn talked about Julia who is a software robot that was designed to help users of MUDs find their way around the virtual rooms and locate messages and other players (59).
During discussion Scot helped clarified Carolyn’s argument that there was no such thing outside of the simulation. This basically means that reality doesn’t exist and everything is simulated. I think this idea is pretty interesting, though it is hard to determine what is real and what is not. I have trouble agreeing that reality doesn’t exist. I think that such things as nature are real and they exist beyond our control. By nature, I mean things like the reproductive cycle in life, the way the sun is acting as an energy source, and the way gravity functions to pull objects toward the universe.
Going back to the idea of ethos and how it relate to the Turing Test (whither machine can behave like human). Ethos is characters that are constructed for particular audience and in this case for the Turing Test. As Carolyn pointed out, rhetoric is an art of simulation and also an art of cooperation in which construction of character is a requirement for interactions. This idea of constructing a character is very important in this course and in all our form of writing. In order to be rhetorical and get an idea across, we have to construct a character aiming toward the type of audience we are targeting.
October 26, 2006
There are two more days until Halloween event on State Street. A lot of things will be getting down this weekend. There will be tons of people dressing up to impress the spirits. There will be live music performance by many bands. There will be many people filling up the bars. Whither you are on State Street or outside, it will be a good time for every body.
To goal is to have a great time celebrating Halloween while being safe. With more than 75,000 people attended every year, many things had happened in the past few years which resulted in injures and damages.
2005: 447 people arrested
2004: 450 people arrested
Here are a few guidelines if you want to be safe this weekend:
-Go out with people you know/trust and return home with the same people
-Know your limits on alcohol and be cautious with beverage in public setting
-Don’t wear costume that restricted you from seeing or running
-Dress accordingly for the weather
-Don’t leave your keys around
-Don’t drink and drive…and ect…
Alternative to State Street:
for all those who want to have fun somewhere else. The Union South is open for only UW-Students, faculty, staff and Union members. Where am I going to be and what will I be doing? I haven’t really decided yet. Hopefully I will come to a solution soon. Or else being spontaneous is COOL.
October 22, 2006
What does it mean to sampling?
Jeff Rice defined it as “the process of joining pieces of different songs together to create a new song.” Many artists use the sampling method to make their own album from other artists. An example that Rice mention was the band Sugar Hill Gang, who recorded their first major hip-hop hit with the song “Rapper’s Delight,” which comes from the music of Chic’s disco hit “Freak out.” Sugar Hill Gang made no reference to Chic nor gives Chic any credit until Chic filed a lawsuit in which Sugar Hill Gang ended up paying for using the song.
Many artists soon follow the sampling method and find it successful with fans. Groups like Public Enemy takes the sampling method into the next level in which they sampling political speeches to make social changes. Rice brought up the concept that Public Enemy taught us to make good usage of rhetorical technique to construct meaning in new media. They did so by creating a sense of power in the African-American community and argue for a change in how Americans think about race. Their messages were through hip-hop music.
That’s probably why learning how to make a graphic design in Fireworks can be very beneficial. The Fireworks tutorial that we went over in class on Monday and Wednesday was amazing. Scott went over the instructions on how to use the Fireworks program on how to create designs and add effects. Creating the bubbling test tube was something to be proud of. At first it seems pretty tough, but by the end of Wednesday the test tube with rollover buttons were completed. I think it will take a while to get use to running the program smoothly and hopefully with many practices, it will become easier.
On Friday, we had a great discussion about sampling and how it is use in writing. Many of the forms of writing that we use in college writing such as research paper are a form of sampling. We pretty much takes ideas and chunks of information from different area of sources and put it together to form our own argument. Though there are many questions regarding the process of sampling. One question is whither sampling is stealing?
Many great responses were giving in class by students. One particular response that caught my attention was the one stated that it really depends how sampling is being used and whither the person have permission from the original source. If a person got the permission from the original source than sampling their song would be okay and not be consider as stealing.
I think sampling help to stimulate creativity. Though one can argue that it is not something original when you sampling. It seems to be that you can’t create something from nothing and everything seems to be connected in a way in which most ideas are influencing one another.
