Desert of My Real Life

{November 2, 2009} Differences in Media

I’ve been thinking lately about the differences between media types. This thinking was inspired by the new movie Disgrace based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name. I will definitely see this movie (if it is ever released throughout the US) but I’m worried about the choices that the filmmakers have made. I thought Coetzee’s novel was brilliant because it was told from the point of view of a character who is somewhat reprehensible. But, of course, his reprehensibility must only be hinted at since he himself wouldn’t think he was reprehensible. The subtlety of the novel is difficult to convey in a film. And so the filmmakers have made choices that reduce the brilliant ambiguity of the novel. And that makes me wonder whether I’m interested enough in the plot of the novel to enjoy the movie.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD. The original series aired on television and so the commercial breaks are obvious on the DVD. In the most recent episode that I watched, a character is in a room with a spiritual advisor, discussing a recurring dream. At a dramatic moment in the telling of the dream, the screen goes black, clearly a commercial break. When we return to the story (without having to watch a commercial, which is why we like NetFlix), we enter the story at exactly the same point that we left it. We left the story at a tension point so that we would be sure to come back after the commercial. This technique works well in television.

The same technique does not work well at all in novels. I read and hated Dan Brown’s novel, The DaVinci Code. I really wanted to like this novel. Dan Brown, after all, is from New Hampshire, and the premise of the story is intriguing. But I couldn’t get past the poor craftsmanship of the novel. The characters were two-dimensional and indistinguishable from each other. I figured out the “secret” of the novel (which I won’t spoil here) about half-way through. But my biggest problem was the chapter breaks. Dan Brown writes really short chapters, some of which are a page long. And often it is completely unclear why these chapter breaks occur. Why have a chapter that is one page long and then have the next chapter start right where the action of that really short chapter ended? I felt as though Brown had thought about moving these two chapters around, away from each, in order to build tension, in much the same way that Battlestar Galactica’s breaks for commercials build tension. A good editor could have made sure these two chapters did not appear one right after the other, unlike the two scenes with the commercial break between them. These examples remind me that different media require different production techniques just as they require different analysis techniques.

On a side note, the use of the made-up word “fracking” on Battlestar Galactica is getting on my nerves.

{October 25, 2009} Making Sense of All Things Digital

For the last few years, I have been volunteering my time at a local senior center, teaching computing skills. One of the struggles is to explain the subtle cues that the computer provides to us as its users to let us know what we can do at that particular time. What do I mean by “cues”? This Friday, I talked about how you know when you can type text in a particular spot. Think about it. You look for your cursor to change to a straight vertical line that blinks. Wherever it blinks is where your text will appear if you press the keys on your keyboard. We all know this, right? The problem is that there are thousands of these items. Each appears to be a small thing, without much consequence. And yet, by paying attention to these small, visual cues, we all know what we can do and when we can do it. It’s challenging to teach people who aren’t used to paying attention to, much less deciphering, these subtle cues. I love it but I’m constantly struggling to explain why things are as they are on PCs, to help make sense of the virtual world.

One of the things I have never been able to explain is why sometimes you need to click and why sometimes you need to double-click. I would like to be able to articulate a rule about when to engage in each action but I have not yet been able to do so. Instead, I tell the students in this class that they should first try to click on something and if nothing happens, they should double-click. This explanation feels wholy unsatisfactory to me because I want to believe that computers are logical. But deep in my heart, I know they aren’t. They are just as subject to whims of culture-making as any other artifact of our culture. And now I have proof of that. Tim Berners-Lee (that’s SIR Berners-Lee to you) recently admitted that he regrets the double-slash.

Sir Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. The author of the article I linked to says he is considered a father of the Internet but that’s not true. There is much confusion about the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. In fact, most people consider them to be the same thing. But they are not. The Internet is the hardware that the World Wide Web (which is comprised of information) resides on. The Internet was created in the early 1970’s. The World Wide Web was conceived of by Berners-Lee in the early 1990’s. Berners-Lee’s achievement is monumental. We don’t have to give him credit for the entire Internet. He’s still an amazing guy.

The World Wide Web is comprised of web pages and social networking sites and blogs and such rather than the actual machines that hold all of that information. When we browse the World Wide Web, we typically use a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. If you look in the address box of the web browser you’re using, you will see that the address there contains a number of pieces. The first part of the address is the protocol that your computer is using to communicate with the computer that contains the information you want to see. A protocol is simply a set of rules that both computers agree to abide by in their communication. You can think of a protocol as a language that the computer agree to use in their communication. Typically, the protocol these days for web browsing is http (hypertext transfer protocol) or https (hypertext transfer protocol secure). Much of the text of the address of the web site you’re looking at specifies the name of a computer and the name of some space on that computer. The thing that Berners-Lee regrets is the set of characters he chose to separate the protocol from the rest of the address. He chose “://”. He doesn’t regret the :. It’s a piece of punctuation that represents a separation. He does regret the //. It’s superfluous, unnecessary. This whole conversation makes me feel better about teaching the senior citizens who choose to take my class. Some digital things are not logical. They are whims. Just ask Tim Berners-Lee.

{October 13, 2009} Arrested for Poking

A Tennessee woman was arrested after poking another woman on FaceBook. What’s interesting to me about this story is that ABC News decided it was newsworthy. It just doesn’t seem like it is to me. The woman who was poked had a protective order against the poker. A protective order means no contact. Poking is a form of contact and so, yes, if the woman violated the protective order, she should be arrested. Her lawyer, of course, is questioning whether she actually was the perpetrator of the poke and if she wasn’t, then she should not go to jail. But if she did poke the woman in violation of the protective order, then she should face the same punishment as if she had called the woman or showed up at her house. I think ABC News thinks this story is newsworthy because it involves what ABC News considers an unusual medium for communication. I only wish they had made it clear that THAT was the reason the story was interesting to them. As the story reads now, it seems like they think it’s ridiculous that a poke would be considered contact. If it wasn’t contact, people wouldn’t poke their friends, right?

{October 11, 2009} Corpus Libris

Interesting “ongoing photo essay on books and the bodies that love them” at Corpus Libris. I like this photo a lot.

{September 29, 2009} The Ambassador of Semiotics

I heard Madeleine Albright this morning on Morning Edition, the fifth or sixth interview I’ve heard with her since Sunday morning. Albright just released a new book and the ensuing media blitz has brought attention to the unusual tactics she used while pursuing her diplomatic duties in the Clinton administration. In the new book, called Read My Pins, Albright discusses her tactic of using costume jewelry, brooches in particular, to send messages about the state of negotiations in which she was involved. Albright’s articulation of her use of jewelry in this manner is an example of semiotics in action.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols in communication. Albright first began using her brooches to send messages in diplomatic meetings when Saddam Hussein called her a serpent. Consequently, whenever she dealt with Iraq, she would wear an antique snake pin on her left shoulder. She then wore all sorts of pins to signal how she was feeling about diplomatic negotiations.

Semiotics is concerned with signification, the process of using symbols to encode messages. Communication of a message requires a second step, the decoding of the message by the receiver. Albright’s audiences learned that they could gauge her feelings by looking at the brooch she was wearing. Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton that he could tell what the tone of a meeting with Albright was going to be by looking at her left shoulder.

Semiotics doesn’t make it to the mainstream very often. Albright’s deliberate use of the field is a reminder that the safety of the world might in fact depend upon diplomats being good semioticians, being able to correctly read the symbols and signs in front of them.

{September 28, 2009} Human Pain

I’ve been watching Battlestar Galatica on DVD. One of the roles of science fiction, I think, is to raise controversial issues, to help us understand what it means to be human. Although the original 1970’s miniseries was cheesy and not very interesting, a few changes to the original idea makes the recent TV show one of the best when it comes to asking difficult questions and making us think about things in a new way.

The basic plot of the show is that humans created machines which then evolved into autonomous, intelligent beings called Cylons. Humans colonized twelve planets and after years of relative peace, the Cylons attacked the humans, destroying much of the human population of the colonies. The survivors, including those aboard a number of space ships, are now on the run from the Cylons, struggling to survive a war with a superior enemy.

One of the major changes from the miniseries to the TV show is in the look of the Cylons. In the miniseries, the Cylons were one of the cheesiest parts of the show, looking like robots made primarily of cardboard. In the new show, some of the Cylons look like machines but now they are computer-generated and sophisticated. But the most interesting change comes from the fact that Cylons can look and act just like humans. They bleed and sweat and some of them are even programmed to think that they are human, leading to what appear to be emotional responses such as love. Human-looking cylons allow the writers to raise questions about civil rights and justice and faith.

For example, season one of the show, which aired in 2004 and 2005, raised issues about terrorism and torture and justice at a time when the Abu Ghraib scandal was fresh in the news. The humans on the ship called Galactica discover a human-looking Cylon in their midst. Their instinct is to kill the Cylon by putting it into space (because human-looking Cylons breathe oxygen just as humans do) but the Cylon claims that there are several bombs planted throughout the fleet, scheduled to go off in a short amount of time. Sensing an opportunity to prevent these bomb attacks, the military commander sends the best human pilot, Starbuck, to question the Cylon (ok–so the plots are always completely logical). The Cylon messes with Starbuck’s head, telling her lies containing just enough truth to make her wonder what’s true and what isn’t. But he won’t tell her where the bombs are. Starbuck notices that the Cylon sweats and reasons that if he sweats, he must feel fear and pain. So she and her colleagues begin to torture the Cylon.

One of the most thought-provoking exchanges during this torture comes when Starbuck tells the Cylon that she recognizes the dilemma he is in. He wants to be human because being human is better than being a machine. But while he is being tortured, every instinct must be telling him to turn off his pain software. But if he turns it off, he won’t be human anymore because the defining characteristic of being human is the capacity to feel pain. I don’t know if I think that’s true or not but the conversation reminded me of research in machine learning that postulates that in order to really learn about the world, a robot must have a body.

The importance of embodiment to learning comes from the observation that human knowledge, especially that most basic knowledge that makes up our “common sense”, is gained through via perception, through the interaction of our bodies with the physical world. Not all AI researchers believe embodiment is necessary for learning. Cyc is probably the most famous example of an attempt to codify all of human knowledge without the use of embodied machines. The project was started in 1984 and has yet to be completed because of the difficulty of articulating all human knowledge. Imagine trying to put all human knowledge into a computer by writing statements such as “Bill Clinton was a President”, “All trees are plants” and “Abraham Lincoln is dead.” Each night, after spending the day coding statements like this, the researchers run some software (called an inference engine) which allows the computer to infer new statements about the world. Each mornin, the researchers look at what the computer has inferred. The inference process is somewhat flawed and the researchers find themselves having to correct some of the computer’s logic, encoding such bizarre facts as “If a person is dead, her left foot is also dead.” Because of the difficulty of encoding these kind of facts, many researchers now believe that embodiment and direct experience of the world is a more efficient way to teach a machine about common sense knowledge. So perhaps feeling pain is a necessary requirement for being human.

The same episode that contains this interesting conversation about the nature of humanity also contains a conversation about the purpose and effectiveness of torture. After many hours of torturing the Cylon, Starbuck and her colleagues are visited by the President of the colonies who asks Starbuck whether she knows where the bombs are yet. When Starbuck says no, the President asks why she has been torturing this man for eighteen hours, what makes her think she will get him to talk. Starbuck replies that the Cylon is not a man which she seems to think justifies the torture. The President orders that the torture be stopped since it has clearly not been effective. The President later shows that this is not a sentimental choice, one that has been made because she is soft on the Cylons. After getting the information she needs from the Cylon, she orders that he be placed in the airlock and sucked out into space so that he will no longer pose a threat. The implication is that she ordered that the torture be stopped so that the humans would remain human, that the torture was damaging to the torturers and their humanity.

Themes of faith and love and treatment of outsiders and many other of the most interesting, controversial debates in our society run throughout this series. I agree with Diane Winston, who said on Speaking of Faith that shows like Battlestar Galactica represent the great literature of our time, that people will come back to shows like this over and over, just as they read great books over and over.

{September 14, 2009} Patrick Swayze

At 8:05 tonight, the AP announced that Patrick Swayze had died. By 8:25, my Aunt Ava had posted a FB status update that he had died of pancreatic cancer. Within minutes of that, several more of my FB friends had notified me that he had died. Information truly is instantaneous. How would I have found out about his death otherwise? Ah, social media.

{August 18, 2009} Playing With Swine Flu

Everyone seems to be talking about and planning for the H1N1 virus these days. My university, for example, sent out a memo to encourage us to plan for extended absences due to the virus as we plan our classes for the fall semester. Now we can all participate in world-wide planning for the potential pandemic, thanks to a group of researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. They have created a new Flash game called The Great Flu that allows the player to try to stop the spread of a virus. The consequences of the player’s actions can be surprising, as when I isolated victims of the virus in China and Japan which caused “chaos”. This game is an example of a serious game, that is, a game with a serious purpose such as education or advocacy. There are so many examples of serious games that the category constitutes a subfield of game studies with organizations and conferences dedicated to it. Don’t let the name of the category fool you, though. Serious games can be fun too. The Great Flu is pretty good and I learned quite a bit about public policy implementation for virus containment. Who would have thought swine flu could be fun? Give the game a try here. The game also contains quite a bit of humor. At some point, as the deaths from the flu rose in Central and North America, one of the global events that occurred was that “No Virus” t-shirts began to be sold. That sounds about right.

{August 13, 2009} Summer Play

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m chairing a panel at NeMLA in April about using Web 2.0 technologies to play. Because of this panel, I’ve spent much of my summer playing and thinking about playing online. Yes, I recognize that I have a great job!

The game that has captured my online attention this summer is Scrabble on FaceBook. There are a few people (Liz, Scott, Ann) that I’m playing with regularly, multiple games at a time. There are also a couple of people (Sally, Carrie) with whom I seem to constantly have one game going. And then there are a few people (Gary, Cathrine, Kate) that I play with occasionally. I even sometimes play with strangers, although I find those games less engaging, probably because the social aspect of the game, which I’ve also written about before, is lacking.

One of the things I really like about Scrabble on FaceBook is that it will not let you play an invalid word. So the game is completely about pattern recognition. When I play the game in person, nothing stops me from playing an invalid word and so I am unlikely to take a chance on a word that I am unsure about. If my opponent challenges me in the real life game and I have played an invalid word, I lose a turn. In the online version of Scrabble, I can’t lose a turn for playing an invalid word. As a result, I’m likely to try letter combinations that I would never have tried in real life. I’ve learned lots of new words by just trying out letter combinations. What is “zax” for example? Or “tranqs”? And I’ve learned many, many two letter words whose meanings I’m sure I’ll never know. Anyone know what “za” is? Or “xu”? Or “ka”?

Lots of other FaceBook games have come to my attention and not captured it this summer. I’ve tried Farkle and Rummikub, both of which I love in the real world. Many of my friends have been playing Farmtown and so I’ve created my own farm but I haven’t visited it for days. And Mafia Wars. And Bejeweled. Well, to be honest, I won’t allow myself to really play Bejeweled because it is exactly the kind of game that I could become addicted to and I don’t really want to be addicted to a game right now.

But the kind of play I’ve been most interested in this summer has not been play that is associated with games. I’m really interested in play as a way of practicing and expressing parts of one’s identity that is difficult to practice or express in the real world.

My FaceBook friends seem to do a lot of quizzes. They want to find out which philosopher most closely represents them and how well they know their Princess Bride quote trivia. They want the rest of us to know five places they’ve lived and five jobs they’ve had and five cars they’ve owned. For some reason, I have resisted these quizzes although I’ve been thinking a lot about what people get out of taking them. And what I’ve come to realize is that these quizzes are a way to reveal one’s identity, either your real one or the one you wish you had. This came to me the other night as I was engaging in non-gaming online play of my own. I like to play with memes that come in the form of lists of questions that you answer in a note on your FaceBook profile. A meme is a cultural idea that is transmitted from one mind to another, in this case, via FaceBook. There are lots of memes running around FaceBook. Most of these memes allow users to reveal things about themselves (or not), helping to construct a kind of online identity that supplements (or perhaps alters) one’s identity in the real world.

A few weeks ago, for example, I revealed to my friends the fifteen books that I’ve read that have stuck with me. The idea is that you list these books without thinking too much about them, presumably so you can’t make yourself seem cooler than you actually are. My list contained books that I’d talked recently with Ann about (Disgrace and The Road) as well as books that I’d seen on other people’s lists (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple). The list also really did contain books that popped into my head because they were memorable and important to me in some way (A Separate Peace, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Sing, Gone to Soldiers and The Mists of Avalon). But I rejected a number of books from my list just because I didn’t think I’d want to reveal them (Valley of the Dolls, The Other and The Group). And I rejected some just because they didn’t send the message that I wanted to send (Heart of Darkness and Carrie). As I reflected afterward on the books that I put on my list, I started to think about identity management again, that is, how I present myself to the world, the FaceBook world in this case.

What does this have to do with play? The other night, the two concepts merged for me. I was playing with another of these memes, called My Life According to … . The note contains a series of questions that you are supposed to answer using the song titles from one artist or band. I chose the Indigo Girls so my note was called My Life According to the Indigo Girls. Here’s what I wrote:

Several people have tagged me with this–I won’t tag anyone. Play if you want to. Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me (presuming I’m someone you like). You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. Repost as “my life according to (band name)
Are you a male or female:
“The Girl With The Weight Of The World In Her Hands”
Describe yourself:
“Trouble”
How do you feel:
“Closer To Fine”
Describe where you currently live:
“Get Out the Map”
If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
“Perfect World”
Your favorite form of transportation:
“Midnight Train to Georgia”
Your best friend?
“She’s Saving Me”
You and your best friends:
“Devotion”
What’s the weather like:
“Watershed”
Favorite time of day:
“I Don’t Wanna Know”
If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
“Lay My Head Down”
What is life to you:
“Pendulum”
Your relationship:
“Moment of Forgiveness”
Your fear:
“Kid Fears”
What is the best advice you have to give:
“Don’t Give that Girl a Gun”
Thought for the Day:
“I’ll Change”
How I would like to die:
“Joking”
My soul’s present condition:
“Cold Beer and Remote Control”
My motto:
“It’s Alright”

The interesting thing to me about this particular meme isn’t the answers that I gave but the process I went through in deciding which artist to use and then which song titles to use for each question. As I chose song titles, I tried to think about how that particular choice would be received by my potential audience. For example, I don’t drink beer but I thought the song title “Cold Beer and Remote Control” was a clever response to “My soul’s present condition:”. So I clearly wasn’t trying just to reveal true things about my identity. I was also trying to construct (or reinforce?) an image of myself that shows me to be funny and clever.

I’ve been searching for work that discusses how adults use play in identity management. I have found lots of work that discusses these issues for children but not much about adults. I’m just starting to read Brian Sutton-Smith’s Ambiguity of Play. He identifies four categories into which play activities can be grouped. One of those categories is “play as self” so I’m hopeful that his work can help to advance my thinking on this subject.

{August 11, 2009} Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Radical Medical Technology

Unless you have been on an island somewhere lately, you probably know that Eunice Kennedy Shriver has been hospitalized for the past few days and died this morning at age 88. The achievement she is most well-known for, of course, is founding the Special Olympics. She often cited her sister Rosemary as the inspiration for founding the Special Olympics, a fact that has been mentioned many times in the past few days. I heard an interesting comment about Rosemary on NPR today. The reporter said that Rosemary herself lived a very long life but had to be institutionalized for much of it because of her mental retardation. I think this is actually a false statement.

By all accounts, Rosemary’s mental retardation was mild. In fact, there is some dispute as to whether she was mentally retarded at all. But as an adolescent and young adult, she had violent mood swings and became difficult to control. Her parents heard about a radical new procedure that could mellow out those mood swings and met the man who performed the procedure. The man they met was Walter Freeman, whom I have written about before. He popularized the lobotomy in the United States and performed thousands of them, including one on Howard Dully when Dully was twelve years old. Dully went on to write the amazing memoir My Lobotomy, revealing that he probably is able to function as well as he does precisely because the procedure was performed when he was so young and his brain was able to recover. Rosemary Kennedy was not as lucky. Freeman performed the procedure on her when she was 23 years old and it left her with the mental capacity of an infant, incontinent and unable to speak. She was institutionalized for the rest of her life. Rose Kennedy (Rosemary’s mother) is said to have considered Rosemary’s incapacitation via the lobotomy to be the first of the Kennedy tragedies. So it was Walter Freeman and his revolutionary procedure that caused Rosemary to be institutionalized for most of her life, not her mental retardation.

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