164 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2022
    1. Organic compounds not previously found in nature were identified, such as the twining of plant and animal DNA—the calcium and phosphorus of antler marrow fused with urushiol, the oil secreted by poison ivy; bird feather keratin threaded with chlorophyll, pine sap, and squirrel hair follicles; the glossy chitin of a southern pine beetle’s carapace threaded with white-tailed deer hair; human semen in mosquito proboscises; human teeth with Virginia creeper root fibers

      Boundary transgression. Human-animal, organic-inorganic

    2. A plague made half of us crueler than ever.

      Covid

    3. He looked beautiful in some terrible way that makes me want to cry when I think about him.

      Repulsion, attraction

    4. I heard Derek screaming like his scream was turned on in the middle.

      Another eerie line

    5. Everything smelled real green.

      Sensory transposition, confusion

    6. It sounded like all the floors in my gramma’s house before she died.

      The hum of old houses…gothic frequencies

  2. Oct 2020
    1. He helped to develop new tools for moderators that can automatically blur out faces in disturbing videos, turn them grayscale, or mute the audio

      Classic Silicon Valley: imagining the solution to problems created by technology is...(wait for it) more technology.

    2. “global resiliency team

      Resiliency is just a neo-liberal codename for how much shit you can put up with before you break.

    3. Legos and encourage him to play with them to relieve the stress as he worked. Speagle built a house and a spaceship, but it didn’t make him feel better.

      This kind of on-the-job therapy is laughable and despicable. A bucket of Legos?

    4. Moderators were told they had to watch at least 15 to 30 seconds of each video.

      Ugh. Efficiency comes at what cost?

    5. Facebook contractors are required to use a browser extension to report every time they use the restroom

      workplace surveillance

    6. watch a video of a man slaughtering puppies with a baseball bat

      wtf

    7. Under the policy, the video was allowed to remain on Facebook.

      Animal cruelty: 👍 from Facebook

    8. Speagle was put onto the production floor, a manager told him he and a colleague would be reviewing graphic violence and hate speech full time

      This bait and switch is like a metaphor for social media in general

    9. individual contractors in North America make as little as $28,800 a year. They receive two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch each day, along with nine minutes per day of “wellness” time

      white collar service economy workers

    10. Others ignored the commotion entirely, and continued to moderate Facebook posts as the paramedics worked.

      This is one of the scariest details in the entire article.

  3. Aug 2020
    1. Examining power means naming and explaining the forces of oppression that are so baked into our daily lives—and into our datasets, our databases, and our algorithms—that we often don’t even see them.

      What "examining power" means

  4. Mar 2019
    1. We don't need a backbone. We don't need an information backbone. With an ad hoc network

      Galloway thinks that the most important DIY tech development could be ad-hoc networks.

    2. Critique means you have to take a position, and you have to defend it. Likewise, you have to be against something. This produces a dynamic or differential.

      How is this as a definition of "critical"?

    3. open-source licenses replacing or standing in for the idea of being critical or thoughtful.

      Open source washing - using open source as a stand in for truly thinking about culture, IP, accountability, etc.

    4. we now focus a lot of energy on the elevation of the individual's productive capacity

      The maker movement is a symptom of a larger phenomenon, which is about individual productivity.

    1. Society is always in flux, and the designer can’t predict how various political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt, augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed

      Worth talking about in class

    2. Makers, in other words, are the new hackers.

      At least, according to popular imagination

  5. Feb 2019
    1. People still want to use technology for detecting and communicating with ghosts, though the preferred gadgets have evolved into electronic voice phenomena (EVP) recorders and geophones.

      Like the ghost-detecting apps for smart phones.

    2. communicating with spirits didn’t seem much more impossible than harnessing electricity
    3. the spirit phone’s unbelievable promise invoked technologies like the telegraph and air flight, which were both seen as impossible until proven otherwise

      Reminds me of Arthur C. Clark's "third law" that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

    4. “spirit phone”
    5. In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he told American Magazine: “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” 
    6. He theorized that like our bodies, our personalities have a physical form, made of tiny “entities” similar to our current view of atoms. He thought these entities might exist after humans passed aw

      How similar to Be Right Back is this, or the idea promoted int the Augmented Eternity startup?

    7. Edison’s phonograph

      Makes sense. After all, it’s like hearing the voice of the dead.

    1. Like, who is going to own my information after I pass away?”

      In this case, presumably Augmented Eternity, and not your family.

    2. He sees it as one way of leaving a legacy—a way to keep contributing to society instead of fading to black

      What’s wrong with this line of thinking? How does this diminish our legacies?

    3. Flybits provides a platform that lets companies tailor

      Ironically FlyBits doesn’t use a chat bot on its own site: https://flybits.com/contact-us/

    4. decision support tool

      Why exactly do we need to outsource our decisions? Isn’t a way of abdicating responsibility and accountability?

    5. With enough data about how you communicate and interact with others, machine-learning algorithms can approximate your unique personality

      But how much of our personalities are unarticulated? And don’t the hidden anxieties, fears, and desires influence us in ways you can’t pin down?

    6. Augmented Eternity
    7. Creepy

      Creepy isn’t quite the right word. Misguided, maybe?

  6. Oct 2018
    1. Waiting icons make us willing to wait longer — three times as long as designs with no visualization to indicate something is happening behind the scenes.

      Icons make waiting more tolerable.

  7. Sep 2018
    1. They're in a privileged position where they don't need to think about it.

      Trolls operate with a particular kind of privilege. They’re immune to consequences .

  8. Jan 2018
    1. When things were going smoothly, this friend said nothing. When things break, race comes up. We learn making from breaking. Racism hovers in the background when things are working, which is how race can come up so quickly, when things stop working.

      The phrase "racism hovers" was quoted by Tara McPherson in her #MLA18 talk.

  9. Oct 2017
    1. Some of the most dangerous people out there are perfectly happy expressing hate and violence in their own names.

      Think of the alt-right and white supremacists

    1. values and seeks to facilitate the greatest amount of speech from the most diverse group of people

      An alternative definition of free speech

    1. he found his history degree had approximately the same effect on employers as a face tattoo

      Fuck you, Wired. This is simply not true.

    2. two-tiered moderation system

      Illustrates just how contextual social media image ethics are

    3. active moderation

      Active moderation vs. reactive moderation

    1. when black people are the go-to choice for nonblack users to act out their most hyperbolic emotions, do reaction GIFs become “digital blackface”?

      Good question to ask the class.

    2. black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs.

      It does feel that way. Wonder if there's a way to quantify it in order to prove it empirically.

    1. Pick a meme, any meme, conceived or co-opted by Black social media — I’ll show you a meme that worms its way toward respectability political rhetoric, with misogynoir at its core.

      We should test this claim out in class

    2. “misogynoir” to succinctly describe the anti-Black misogynist intersection of racism and misogyny that uniquely impacts the lived experiences of Black women.

      Definition of misogynoir

    3. white and non-Black people making anonymous claims to a Black identity through contemporary technological mediums such as social media.

      Working definition of digital blackface

  10. Sep 2017
    1. a smartphone streaming an hour of video on a weekly basis uses more power annually than a new refrigerator

      Whoa

    1. Streaming is a tech-nology that allows content providers to “keep” the file

      It occurs to me that just the general idea of streaming (as opposed to downloading) could serve as a topic for a Snapchat Research Story.

    2. more than 80 percent of Netflix’s data traffic is served from the local Internet service provider’s data center, saving the company transit, transport, and other upstream scaling costs.
    3. one billion hours of content per month

      Wow. I'm sure this number has only gone up since 2015.

    4. “data center corridor,”

      For further reading on North Carolina's data center corridor, see https://gigaom.com/2012/07/08/a-geeks-road-trip-north-carolinas-data-center-cluster/

    5. this insurance built into the design of data centers

      Something to think about: data centers are designed precisely to withstand activity that could crash their operations. They are built with accidents in mind.

    6. persuasive designs: as artifacts that aim to steer user be-havior and attitudes in an intended direction while constraining others

      So what practices and attitudes do data centers encourage and what practices and attitudes do they discourage?

    7. “poetic mode” of infrastructure

      Huh. This is an intriguing phrase. We don't usually think of infrastructure of having a "poetics."

    8. in order to understand how control is exerted through media infra-structure, it’s rather naïve to simply ask who owns it

      This was the question traditionally asked of media organizations. Like, how does NBC exert power? Let's see who owns it! (GE)

    9. even more beautiful because of the giant data center in the picture.

      I wonder if students can find other examples where the vast infrastructure of the web has been aestheticized?

    10. “boring backstage elements”

      Honestly, this is a concern I have teaching this material: that students will simply find it boring. Who wants to learn about where their iCloud photos actually reside?!?

    11. toward the notion of transparency, all while working to conceal or ob-scure less picturesque dimensions of cloud infrastructure.

      The suggestion is that by appearing to make the cloud transparent, these companies actually obscure it.

    12. “politics of artifacts”:

      This is a reference to a hugely important article by Langdon Winner called "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" In it, Winner argues that technology is never neutral, that there are in fact embedded politics in almost all forms of technology.

    13. a marketing concept

      Interesting to think of "the cloud" as essentially a marketing concept. What are the implications?

    14. offers particularly dramatic sights, complete with German submarine diesel engines for backup,

      You can see images of this bunkerized data center here: http://www.bahnhof.net/page/datacenter-pionen

    15. offering virtual tours through photo galleries of the tech-nology, the people, and the places making up their data centers.1

      And you can see these "tours" via Google Map/Streetview

    1. “Why would I ever need a [insert name or function of new technology here]?”

      What emerging technologies fit this description now?

    2. Essentially, the kaleidoscope had been “domesticated.”

      NOTE: The phone has had the opposite trajectory, moving from private space to public space. The domestic phone has gone wild.

    3. Of the millions who have witnessed its effects, there is perhaps not one hundred who have any idea of the principles upon which it is constructed, and of the mode in which those effects are produced.”

      Ditto with the iPhone...

    4. He felt betrayed, “deceived into believing that what he saw was at least the shadow of something real and beautiful, when in truth it was only a delusion.”

      Sounds like what we might say if we took apart an iPhone!

    5. 462,880,899,576 years and 860 days

      Maybe connect this to Laura Marks idea of "lame infinity": "digital technology seems infinite but is used to produce a dispiriting kind of sameness" (source: https://thenewinquiry.com/the-conservatism-of-emoji/)

    6. immersed

      What do we typically mean by "immersion"?

    7. kaleidoscomanics

      Parse this word: what does it mean?

  11. Jul 2017
    1. laptops do not enhance classroom learning

      This article does a poor job providing context for the study. Dig into the actual research article and you find that the study took place in a single Intro to Psych lecture class of 500 students, a point Robert Talbert makes on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobertTalbert/statuses/885522574809210880

    2. participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes

      There'll be times when I explicitly say, pull out your laptops if you have them, and we use them in class. And other times I explicitly say, close your screens. Either way, this stat here is well worth sharing with students at the start of the semester.

  12. Apr 2017
    1. But sometimes repairing means creating a novel tool;

      static repair v. dynamic repair

    2. three key concepts speak to an elevated degree of  subversion
      • shift from industrial to artisanal
      • defying traditional lifecycle
      • alternative functions
    3. a growing disrespect for an object’s identity and for the truth and authority it embodies

      Definition of technological disobedience

    1. where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the original's name.

      Definition of a "reflexive" remix: challenges the "aura" of the original

    2. offer resistance to dominant narratives

      Part of what gives these remixes the status of an "argument"

    3. Vidding, she explains, "is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies are set to music" such that the images are read through the interpretive lens of the song

      Definition of vidding

    4. Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker"

      Homer as uncreative genius

    5. viewing remix as a digital speech act would rid of us terms like appropriation and recycling, which suggest the primacy of an original author or text

      Kuhn's wants to fight back against the tendency to view the original/source as "better"

    6. a digital utterance expressed across the registers of the verbal, the aural, and the visual

      Kuhn's definition of "remix." What's missing from it?

    7. a claim for which evidence is provided, that also retains a dialogic or conversational nature

      Kuhn's definition of "argument"

  13. Mar 2017
    1. We carry personal computers in our pockets—nothing could be more decentralized than this!—but have surrendered control of our data, which is stored on centralized servers, far away from our pockets.

      The illusion of freedom, while in fact we are tethered to companies.

    1. “Should I keep it running as some kind of memorial?”

      Good question. Which of my bots would I like to continue after I die, as memorials?

    2. Bots are “processes, not artifacts

      What other aspect of our digital life are more like processes than objects?

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    Annotators

  14. Oct 2016
    1. By rendering a virtual Middle East as a frontier inhabited primarily by male terrorists where the American military (and by invitation of the gaming industry, all subjects with a reasonably modern computer) can engage in a cleansing and perpetual war, the world finally begins to resemble the one outlined by George W. Bush shortly after 9/11

      Intriguing reversal of orientalism: originally orientalism imagined the Middle East as a feminine space, while now it's a male space.

  15. Sep 2016
    1. it’s pretty much the only thing in a book’s toolbox for creating immersion, and it works in games too

      Uh, no.

    2. players forming a mental model of the game’s make-believe space

      And this doesn't have to do with photorealism. We can make a mental map of a Tetris grid, for example.

    1. The aim of her technique here is to link the player to mental instability through use of the cube (both in language and game world). Of course, the technique is an obvious failure since the player does not feel any strong personal attachment to the cube to the point of mental instability. It's a hole in the performance, but one I doubt many players realized due to the layers of implementation.

      I disagree here. Players do notice—or at least this one did.

    2. make fun of institutional processes
    3. understating of the possibility of danger are standards of institutional talk, yet the consequences are usually kept behind doors.
    4. the typical, false politeness that one receives in such institutional contexts.
    5. visually portrays itself as an institution

      using narrative architecture!

    6. the idea of a front and backstage
    7. All institutions have a backstage that mask their inner workings.

      This is true even of places such as a college!

    8. we have a place where we manage the performance and a place where we give that performance

      Interesting to think about videogames this way. And does this intersect at all with Galloway's two axes?

    1. Play is free activity but Portal only offers this in constrained doses.

      Again, this is the definition of play

    2. Portal is an algorithmic exploration of human struggle against algorithmic processes.
    3. It is the tension between the cold, hard certainty of algorithms and the creativity

      I just don't see Portal as about the conflict between algorithms and creativity. I see the game as a critique of institutions, not algorithms.

    4. Portal's art-worthiness is in its exploration of the increasingly algorithmic nature of the world.
    5. In Portal, the gun’s apparent freedom always opens up into the same trap.

      But this is also one definition of play. Salen and Zimmerman call play "free movement within a more rigid structure." See Rules of Play.

    6. test chambers embrace the limitations of level design

      Portal literalizes the concept of level design.

    7. This murderous intent brings together multiple narrative elements foreshadowed in the game,

      The authors seem to read the game as an allegory about science gone wrong. But I see Portal as a satirical send-up of all those science fiction films about science gone wrong.

    8. Rattmann’s scribbles, therefore, warn Chell to beware the player. The game is a lie.

      Wha?

    9. Even here, when the Milgram-like nature of the experiment is clear

      I just don't see Glados here acting like some Nazi scientist, and I don't see the player as somehow just "following orders." The whole scene is a joke, because the Companion Cube is obviously just a cube.

    10. GLaDOS compels the player to be part of the algorithmic process.

      More like, Glados compels the player to be part of the scientific method. (A fucked-up extreme instance of the scientific method, but still.)

    11. Some players may even assume that they are Chell - akin to Heidegger’s notion of a tool being ready to hand rather than present at hand

      I call bullshit here. Totally superfluous Heidegger reference.

    12. sure the voice is a computer

      Huh. I never questioned whether Glados was human or machine.

    13. Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. We hope your brief detention in the relaxation vault has been a pleasant one.

      I hope the authors talk about the humor of Portal. So much of the official narrative voice is full of double-voiced meaning and irony. To wit, "relaxation vault"? And "computer-aided"—these and many other examples are dripping with irony.

    14. there are ways that only games can signify

      What can games do that other forms of media cannot?

    15. The key mechanic1 - a gun that shoots portals or tunnels that allow physical movement between unconnected spaces - explores the meaning of freedom when trapped in the algorithmic processes of what we perceive as reality. 

      The heart of their argument: the portal gun helps us explore the tension between freedom and confinement.

    16. As algorithms are used in and applied to social situations they become forces that shape and persuade.

      Probably important to note the difference between algorithms and heuristics, which are more like a "rule of thumb." I wonder if the authors here are confusing the two.

  16. Aug 2016
    1. since the categories are neither narrative nor game-like in themselves: order, speed, frequency, duration, simultaneity, and time of the action.

      Looking at Tetris in terms of time, or temporal relations.

    1. In simulations, knowledge and experience is created by the player’s actions and strategies, rather than recreated by a writer or moviemaker.

      Yet, simulations also embed algorithms made by the game designers. The designers decide how to model the world they're simulating. So, knowledge does come from the designers.

    2. games are not intertextual

      Wrong. So many games rely on knowledge of the conventions of the genre. And the games that subvert the genre only make sense because designers and players know about the genres.

    3. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently

      What about Mr. Bean: Tomb Raider?

    4. So why should not games also be a type of story?

      A rhetorical, or genuine question?

  17. May 2016
    1. Collapsing all of the humanities onto literary studies is just one example of the conservative moves this article makes

  18. Mar 2016
    1. the makerspace community continues to judge itself on the basis of startup metrics:

      A huge mistake, IMHO!

    2. Kickstarter has a thirty-seven percent failure rate

      Actually lower than I would have thought!

    3. And while the case for makerspaces has centered on educational and economic impact

      Hmmm, I actually see the greatest potential of makerspaces in being so-called "third spaces": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

    4. bleeding-edge application and grown-up play,

      And another way to think about maker culture

    5. a new amalgam of art, craft, and technology.

      One way of thinking about making: art + craft + technology

    6. Trenton

    1. Rachel Maines's work
    2. Make magazine brand of making usually involve building things with Arduinos, making LEDs light up, and using 3D printers--in many ways, this seems like just of another style of technology consumer.

      "Making" is just another aspect of consumer culture.

    3. Today, everyone is a maker, but no one is really making anything.
    4. So let's learn how to code, but let's also read Plato.
    1. “Towards a Liberatory Technology,”
    2. Ivan Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality,”

      I should put this on the syllabus! A classic work!

    3. Inequality here is not just a matter of who owns and runs the means of physical production but also of who owns and runs the means of intellectual production—the so-called “attention economy”

      The online world reproduces (and introduces new) inequalities that exist offline.

    4. Department of Defense

      Connections between the maker movement and defense industry echoes longstanding relationship between the military and tech.

    5. Anderson starts by confusing the history of the Web with the history of capitalism and ends by speculating about the future of the maker movement, which, on closer examination, is actually speculation on the future of capitalism

      Connections between making and capitalism. "Making" is just a Trojan Horse for capitalism and commodification.

    6. our hackers aren’t smashing the system; they’re fiddling with it so that they can get more work done.

      "Hacking" as a synonym for productivity.

    7. He distinguished the hackers from the planners

      hacker v. planner. It's really easy to set up dichotomies between hackers and other categories, because "hacker" is such an amorphous term.

    8. “The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,”

      And I like the phrasing of this line too. How would we update it for the 21st century?

    9. “when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher.”

      I like the phrasing here, but I'm guessing Morozov is skeptical about this idea.

  19. Oct 2015
    1. A Five Element Model

      Here begins the part of Wardrip-Fruin's article that will be especially useful to us in D004x.

    2. Process intensity is the degree to which a program emphasizes proces­ses instead of data. All programs use a mix of process and data. Pro­cess is reflected in algorithms, equations, and branches. Data is re­flected in data tables, images, sounds, and text.

      How useful is this distinction between process intensity and data intensity? How does it help us to think about digital media differently?

    3. I mean the arts that call our atten­tion to language, present us with characters, unfold stories, and make us reflect on the structures and common practices of such activities.

      I really like this sense of what counts as "literary."

    4. he Manchester Mark I

      This should sound familiar!

    1. I’m hot and sweaty

      The writer suggests that because she “hot and sweaty” after giving a vigorous lecture, she has somehow been an active teacher. We often associate “active learning” with activity on the student’s part, but the important flip side is that the teacher must be an active participant too, evaluating whether in fact students are actually learning what we expect them to be, and changing strategies accordingly. Not only does lecturing promote passive learning on the students’ part; it promotes passive teaching too.

    2. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult

      I don't know any professor who's given up on lectures because they're too difficult for students. On the contrary, students love lectures because they're so easy. No prep required, just sit back and let the professor's "argument" wash over you! And if difficulty is what makes a pedagogy sound, why not start lecturing in Latin? (h/t to Ted Underwood for that idea!)

    3. “It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”

      There are many ways to build an argument—and even better ways to teach students how to build an argument than a lecture.

    4. It keeps students’ minds in energetic and simultaneous action.

      Let's say this is true? How do you know? One of the problems with lectures is that we don’t know what’s going on in students’ heads during the exposition. So, yes, there’s an opportunity for students to be in an "energetic" state, but we don’t know if that’s what’s going on.

    5. Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities’ most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning

      Logical fallacy here: there are many ways to teach comprehension and reasoning. Lectures are not "essential," they are one approach, and not necessarily the best.

    1. This is our first stop on our tour of electronic literature definitions. Highlight passages here that you find provocative, unclear, or simply interesting! Be sure to add a #d004x tag to your comments.

      After you've finished marking up this page, you can go to the next stop on our tour: http://dtc-wsuv.org/mla2012/scholarship.html

      Be sure to open the hypothes.is sidebar again on that page!

  20. Sep 2015
  21. Aug 2015
    1. I see the maker movement as taking the controversy and politics out of hacking.
    2. The problem is not in our imagination. The problem is in our activity.
    3. we don't have a speculation deficit; we have a motivation deficit.
  22. Jul 2015
    1. machines of serendipity

      What do machines of serendipity offer?

      • shifts of perspective
      • visual discovery
      • dramatize fragmentary networks, serialization, and miscellaneous nature of periodicals and knowledge more generally
  23. Jun 2015
  24. May 2015
    1. Here we are on the last stop of our Definitions of E-Lit Tour. How does Brian Kim Stefans' idea of electronic literature differ from other definitions we've encountered?

      When you're done here, return to our course on EdX and move on to the next activity.

    1. This is a long scholarly essay! You don't have to read all of it (but you can). For this activity, scroll down to "The Words We Use to Describe the Field" section. What is the argument Jill Walker Rettberg is making in this section? What's at stake?

      When you finish up here, you can visit the last site on our tour: http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2011/07/third-hand-plays-an-introduction-to-electronic-literature/.

    1. Here is our second definition of e-lit. What is the context of this definition? Does it account for other perspectives?

      After you finish up here, visit the next site: http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2012/41/walker-rettberg/walker-rettberg.htm

    1. New technologies help maintain two crucial Euro-American myths: (1) the myth of progress and (2) the myth of white, Western superiority .

      How do these two responses map onto the much broader questions to ask of technology here: http://secondnaturejournal.com/76-reasonable-questions-to-ask-about-any-technology/