Uncategorized « Department of Alchemy 4-273

Entries categorized as ‘Uncategorized’

Adventures and The Question

25 October, 2008 · No Comments

The adventure.

Tomorrow afternoon, I along with my friend and fellow traveler Matt Sabban will commence a journey of epic proportions, never before witnessed in the history of our study abroad program.

Shikoku, one of Japan’s larger islands south of the mainland, maintains eighty-eight (88) temples along the perimeter of the island. For hundreds of years, adventurers and thinkers have attempted to visit every temple along the island, starting in the northeast and ending around the whirlpools of Naruto city. They call it the pilgrimage of the eighty-eight sacred temples of Shikoku. Matt and I, setting out from Kyoto (on the map linked above, about halfway between Osaka and the northern coast), will mount our bicycles and attempt to visit fifty-nine of these temples. We plan to cycle from the first temple in Tokushima to the thirty-sixth, bike north across the island to the sixty-fifth, and end up at the eighty-eighth, entirely in six days. Is this possible? Is this crazy? Or is this necessary? We’re on fall break, so we’ve decided to ignore the answers.

This is the farthest I have been from the Internet in a while, since my seven-day canoe and hike through the mountains in Maine back at the beginning of high school. In Japan, you are never without a cell phone (if you want to send words of encouragement, reach me at a13x@softbank.ne.jp [no more than 140 characters]), but my primary tools will be a pen and notebook. I suppose I’ll see what results.

(photograph by Alex Leavitt, http://flickr.com/photos/alexleavitt/)

The question.

Dear Internet,

I hope that, at least once, every person is faced with a question or problem that changes his or her life. Last week, I may have been asked that question: Would you like to stay in Japan for another semester? Internet, if you have opinions, please relate them to me. If I stay in Japan, I will basically set aside classes, research, internships, conferences, friends, family. I must still deal with jobs, graduation, and grad school applications. On the other hand, I’ve already taken over a thousand photos, traveled around the country, and lost myself in and out of translation, and reveled in every minute of it.

As with any difficult question, I need advice. And if you’re willing to give it, I’d love to hear it.
Sincerely,
Alex

Categories: Uncategorized

Revisiting Jero: Authenticity, Subculture, and the Japanese Visual

30 September, 2008 · 2 Comments

Previous post here

Lifted from the unkempt desk of Alexander C. Leavitt, Adjunct Professor, Department of Alchemy, 4-273

9 月 30 日 2008 年

The protean weather patterns of the fair city of Kyoto have as of late been lending a pinch of vigor to my lesser health, allowing a brief escape from the minutiae of my daily interactions and distractions around the office to let my mind wander like a Kamogawanian river koi. I have decided to approach once again the fickle topic of cross-culturalization and its implications in the contemporary Japanese nation-state. As recently as recent can ever be, I dissected the captivating subject of Jero, Pennsylvania-born Jerome White turned enka extraordinaire in the grand land of Japan. Having mastered the subtle strands of traditional enka vocalism, this young lad has captivated the minds of old and young Japanese alike, particularly given his American-hip-hop-ified clothing, dance breaks, and music videos. Realizing that I had only grazed the surface in my previous report, I have now set out to reanalyze the musical (or is it visual?) phenomenon known to all modern Japanese citizens as Jero.

From my previous engagement, I would like to reintroduce some important points, to be thrown momentarily into a paper shredder. Direct from Wikipedia’s article on what Japan calls its traditional music, enka:
Enka lyrics… usually are about the themes of love and loss, loneliness, enduring hardships, and persevering in the face of difficulties, even suicide or death.
Enka suggests a more traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes…

Reuters reports:
Jero is bridging the generation gap.

And to quote my own phrasal abuse:
Basically, as hiphop was remixed in Japan stylistically and culturally, Jero re-remixed the hiphop genre and culture through enka’s respective genre and culture.

Lately, I have been immersed in Ian Condry’s “Hip Hop Japan,” an anthropological look at the Nipponese hiphop clubs and underground scenes, while being bombarded with criticisms from my fellow Japanese Popular Culture colleagues.

Just this week, much was to be discussed over the matter of authenticity of image, authenticity of sound, authenticity of culture. My own observations tend toward agreement with [name of source not included, as written document is here illegible], supporting culture as based on habits (read: actions) and subculture as grounded in style (read: impressions). Hip-hop, in just terms, falls under both culture and subculture: the former, through the trends in its music and associated dancing, graffiti, etc.; the latter, by ways of an aesthetic that conducts the masses into a homogenous flurry of caps and chains. Japan’s history of music follows a sinuous, beaten path of meticulous appropriation, ever striving for the pure authenticity of that which had been borrowed (ie. early jazz in Japan). The same seems to follow with image, even in modern times: Gucci and Prada and Coach; cut, dyed, and chemicalized hair; high heels and high-style garb of popular (American? Hollywood?), pleasurable visuals. Four weeks walked on the streets of the old capital accumulate to one word: image.

To emphasize, I must restate that enka as an art form, whether it shares any history with Western music (particularly country and/or folk songs), partakes of the same emotional urges that lead to its moving music and lyrics. “Enduring hardships” and so forth mirror the same sentimentality found in either blues (jazz) or hip-hop, a common area of some musical Venn diagram that led Snoop Dogg to cover Kyo Sakamoto’s Ue o muite arukō on his premiere album (read Condry for more).

The amalgamation of hip hop and enka in Jero’s compositions result in a harmonization of genres that pushes both styles beyond their original expectations, one that brings together modern and traditional, one that can no more contradict the statement that “enka suggests a more traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes” (Wikipedia, above). In the first video I had displayed, a music store owner comments, “Great voice. Fantastic and tender.”

However, and here begins the dissatisfaction with my previous entirely-positive critical eye toward Jero, the amalgamation of hip hop and enka in Jero’s performances result in a genreal dissonance, both audially and visually. As my astute colleague Christina Xu has pointed out, “One thing I am wondering, though, is what role hip-hop plays exactly in all this. It seems to me that to characterize his music as enka remixed with hip-hop is a bit of a stretch. I listened to Umiyuki… in full, and there’s none of the beats or the flows that you would associate with hip-hop music.” Rewatching the Umiyuki music video, the first five seconds include an introductory phrase of hip-hop, but slowly transition to the electric-guitar-led, conventional enka sounds. As Jero and crew walk down a poorly-lit sidewalk, the pause and subsequent hip-hop break moves clash hard with the Japanese country tunes. As Jero initially begins to sing, his body stays firmly rooted on stage, hands passionately roaming in front of his face in the cliched manner that classical enka singers are known to use. If the music and lyrics were muted, the graffiti-styled lyrics displayed on screen plus Jero’s ghetto getup give the impression of authentic American hip-hop. Sound returned, the lyrics of frozen rain, ocean whitecaps, lost love, and desperate suicide confront the succeeding bridge, during which synchronized dance moves are displayed against a graffiti-covered wall behind a fence reminiscent of a public Bronx basketball court. The strangest transition of song and setting occurs between the first and second sections of the melody (preceding and following the bridge), when during the enka portions Jero stands lit on a stage, removed from the actual “hip-hop locale,” instead now performing enka in its original context. By the end of the song, the music jumps back and forth between the street and theatrical settings, to remind the viewer of the stark contrast between the hip-hop and enka styles, while they are forced together throughout the four-and-a-half minute music video.

Agreeing with Xu, I hold that much of the pleasure behind Jero’s popularity is derived from his foreignness (read: that black American who can sing in Japanese). In interview, although some of the audience comment on his perfected tenor, one woman merely mentions, “I nearly fainted when I first saw him. He’s so cute.” And this comment comes from the young Japanese lady sporting cornrows and a Fubu-style hoodie.

The fascination of image and style in Japan is not a negative aspect of the fashion culture or popular culture of the area by any means. Consequences abound, such as the visual’s penchant to categorize and stereotype. Such an emphasis on the visual merely means that in the battle for authenticity, the subcultural attitudes shine much more brightly against a cultural background. Instead of discovering a new genre or remix, we see Jero as a black mask over a yellow face. In the first photo in the set above, Jero’s profile gives the appearance of an ordinary album cover (one that may or may not typify enka albums); however, the diamond earring stands out as a beacon of the hipo-hop subculture awaiting any listener. In the second photo, we see Jero in his hip-hop-styled attire, but his background dancers were hats, clothes, and a crewcut that disguise the bodies underneath, as if their Japanesenes must be repressed to achieve the authentic American rap style. Finally, in the third picture, more than the microphone or headphones shine a thick ring, watch, and chain — the bling to which younger fans uninterested in the enka will be drawn. Jero certainly bridges the generation gap, but it seems that he sits between the generations, stuck among two conflicting genres, instead of drawing the two eras together.

I want to retract my previous statement: “Basically, as hiphop was remixed in Japan stylistically and culturally, Jero re-remixed the hiphop genre and culture through enka’s respective genre and culture.” Remix as it is known contemporarily cannot be used to describe the Jero phenomenon. Instead, Jero’s boon of popularity is caused by an attempt to remix two cultures, the enka musical culture and the hip-hop musical culture, but one that results in the layering over of the style-based hip-hop subculture on the enka musical culture. It is a masque of masks that imitates an amalgamation of genres but one that in reality echos facial make-up or the wrapping of a gift.

Please expect to see more writings soon; I promise I’m working on composing my ideas into solid forms. Next up, probably more on Japanese visual culture in the analysis of Engrish, quotidian philosophies, and the massage of the message. Also, Japanese toilets.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: culture, enka, hip-hop, japan, jero, visual

Japan

6 September, 2008 · 2 Comments

I have been in Japan for five days. Too much to tell.

However, internet culture here exists on a much different plane. No wireless. Most homestay families do not possess internet. Keitai (cell phone) purchases initially will be difficult.

I will not have internet in my room at my homestay, but I hope to write much while I have access at Kyodai Kaikan, my school building.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: internet, japan

Girl Talked: Remix, Reproduction, and a Recipe for Copyright Stew

14 August, 2008 · No Comments

Even though I’m off to Japan at the beginning of September, which will prove to be an epic and unforgettable experience, I have to deal with news about events, activities, and orgies that I’m missing out on while across the Pacific. Brings a tear to my eye, really (especially those orgies). To be frank, though, I really am bummed about having to skip out on a specific concert to be performed on BU campus in late September: Girl Talk.

Girl Talk, or Gregg Gillis, the engineer-turned-DJ (though he’d rather call himself an artist), remixes clips from a variety of popular songs to create ~~new songs~~ clips of songs glued together by a common BPM. Honestly, it’s nothing special, but there’s something appealingly freakish about it that I’ll keep his MySpace page on loop for a good hour at work. It’s like the nineties joined up with the 00s and drove a car through the panoramic window of my storefront. It’s music improbable to dance to yet so possible that I find myself dancing anyway. You can actually buy Girl Talk’s latest album, “Feed the Animals”, for any price.

Well, Girl Talk’s been all the… talk… on the Students for Free Culture national mailing list for the past week or so. The issue: Girl Talk’s defense of fair use to create his music without having to deal with musical industry copyrights. Tech Dirt explains Girl Talk’s theory: Girl Talk uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license for Feed the Animals, even though the songs on the album were made by using hundreds samples from other artists. Gillis claims his songs are fair use on the basis of being transformative and because the clips used are very short. TechDirt mumbles about the definition of transformative, but Girl Talk is furthering the production of a newly popular, cultural, musical genre and form: remix, also known as the mash-up. The New York Times uses the term collage, which I find fitting.

The problem I have with Girl Talk with regards to copyright license: the copy.

In one interview, Gillis explains the effort required to put together one of his CDs, Night Ripper.

Pitchfork: The samples are very specific– when you listen to a song for the first time do you know which lines you want to pick out immediately?
GG: Sometimes. Anyone can make a mashup in 30 seconds but that record took me– outside of collecting the samples– at least a year of putting everything together. It’s always just trial-and-error, I get all the loops and mix-and-match them on my computer.”

Girl Talk mixes hundreds of fragments of songs together — a process which has been thoroughly documented on Wikipedia, such as on Feed the Animal’s page. The wonderful power of the Internet has even provided the initial play times of every sample included in each track. This last point is the key to unlocking the copy. Well, no, I would consider it to be more the tumblers of the lock.

The ultimate key that moves those tumblers is the creative environment, specifically software. Special thanks to Tim Hwang for helping me realize this (look out for future related awesomeness on his part). The improved availability of software and ever-lowered ability requisite of the user to operate said software will complicate copyright beyond anything we’ve seen yet.

To explain my idea, I’ll ask a simple question: What if you produced an exact copy of a song, but without actually copying and pasting the original music?

By this I mean creating a cover of a song, entirely self-produced, but one that exactly (read: PERFECTLY) matches the source material. Of course, such a dream is impossible: no garage band will ever replicate the exact twang of a Hendrix guitar or a flawless warble akin to that of Johnny Cash. When we use our own instruments, musical covers will remain covers, ever removed from the classic prototype that retains the value. And according to copyright law, royalties are due to the original musician if you decide to market a cover song.

However, what if you’re provided with the materials, so that you avoid having to reproduce anything? Here’s where the trouble lies.

Girl Talk licenses his latest work with a Creative Commons license that prohibits others from garnering money from the retail of his music. I cannot download his CD and sell it to another person. However, assuming that Girl Talk’s claim to fair use upholds, then I also may use fair use to put any clips of music together to create another song. If I decide to choose the same original songs as Girl Talk to create the same tracks on his CD, then I have not copied or reproduced his work as long as I have personally toiled to put together each song.

Props to the new genre of remix, because musical recognition is simpler than ever before. The recirculation of cultural works (read here: music) into the mainstream (or even tributaries of popoular culture) certainly seems beneficial to a generation branded as “unable to create any new meaning.” Girl Talk mirrors the Internet: he’s making ideas available. If a young kid of this decade listens to Feed the Animals, he’s likely to miss most of the references to the popular songs of an older generation. However, Girl Talk refreshes the material, while at the same time refreshing the genre. Yet even if Gillis were not indirectly advertising music from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, technology has kept up with the pace. A program called Listen on the iPhone will analyze a piece of music and identify the name of the song, its composer, and the track’s album.

With new technologies, composition is also easier than it ever once was. Given the availability of open source software (eg. audio programs like Audacity) and the ease-of-use provided by these new software, it does not take much effort to (re)create Girl Talk’s music while avoiding literally copying and pasting it. In fact, I could probably spend much less time producing my own songs compared to Girl Talk’s “at least a year,” since I have a storyboard for each song on Wikipedia, samples available on Pandora, free editing software available online, and the optimum cheat sheet, Girl Talk’s compilation. If Gillis had decided to sell his CD for the ’90s average price of $12, an unemployed, middle-school-based teenager could spend an afternoon recreating the music, possibly even extending the production to suit his own needs.

This post has been about copyright, but instantly the issue has evolved into a debate over intellectual property. Does Girl Talk have legal rights to protect his idea to mash together a bunch of previously-released songs (down to each second that he switches to a new sample on each individual track)? Or do we have to start from the beginning by ruling Girl Talk’s appropriation of songs as illegal?

Compared to composing an academic essay, obviously we cannot copy the words of another person and claim it as our own. The MLA would kick our ass (I mean, that’s why we’ve been writing citations pages, right? because we’re afraid?). However, I can write a book while quoting other people and still sell my book without paying royalties. If we read music like words, Girl Talk has already plagiarized, although he has created a new idea out of it. So, by creating my own (identical, but personal) version of Girl Talk’s music, I am plagiarizing from the artists’ original songs from which I take the samples, but am I also plagiarizing Gregg Gillis?

Or, to spin these questions another way: what if an eight-year old kid did all of this? Well, not entirely similar, but we’ve already seen some teeth bared.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: copyright, free use, girl talk, intellectual property, music, plagiarism, remix

SXSW: Promote That Which is Awesome

12 August, 2008 · No Comments

Awesomeness will be going down in Austin, Texas come March 2009.

I’m putting together a panel on technology in the classroom for an infamous conference called South by Southwest. My presentation’s called “Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow.” This thing’s BIG. And I’m trying to make it bigger.

I’d love to show the audience the potential and capability of students connected. The Internet is a grandiose machine. So I’m extending a hand to fellow students and friends to get the word out.

If you’re willing to help, go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1123, take five seconds to create an account, and vote on my panel idea. If you want to be more awesome, vote and then leave a comment, to get people talking.

This would be an awesome way to show that students, together, can break the system, be it a simple voting interface or the conventional, old-school methodology of education.

Visit the original Facebook note here and throw it around between your own group of friends.

Also, check out these other nibblets of amazing:

Christina Xu’s Behind the ROFLs: Next-Gen Conference Organizing While Broke

Tim Hwang’s The State of the Internet Memescape: 2008-10 and Obsolete?: A World After E-mail

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: education, panel, sxsw, technology

Tumblr and the Path to Identification

30 July, 2008 · No Comments

I did it. Went over there. Got a Tumblr.

In some ways, I feel like I’ve conformed to another hipster precedent that I’ve been resisting for too long. And yet even though I’ve finally caved in, I still reckon that I’ve stumbled into a secret cavern lit by candlestick glow. Like an dusty, Victorian house, but one quainter than those along Brattle St.

Anyway, check it out: geno.tumblr.com. The first post goes, of course, to Diana Kimball and her most recent essay, “In the Absence of Fiction,” which put me in such a mood today that I need to write about it soon (possibly tomorrow, secretively, during work). I blame her for getting me started on this compositional adventure. So inspirational, in fact, that she’s unintentionally getting her name out there: “Her writing is passionate, idealistic, reflective, personal and fantastically geeky.”.

In the creation of my new Tumblr, though, I had to come face to face with a situation floating around the skull as of late. Looking to Tim’s predictions, he hovers over the point of ever-increasing movement toward absolute identification (”information consolidation”). Compared to my early days on the Internet, when I engaged with the parental caveats toward personal concealment (even though my first username, Owl6887, clearly emblazoned my date of birth, like every friend at the time), my current Facebook profile prominently displays a full range of contact info and idiosyncratic characteristics. My resume sits on LinkedIn; my website URL remains a monikerized placeholder. I’m certainly not branding myself, but IRL Alex is approaching pure digital socialization. I look back at old usernames in awe of my referential mindset. CollegeBoard still waves Afylite (a misnomer of the treasure-hunting character, Graham Ayflite, from the SNES version of Tales of Phantasia) at me before I can access my financial PROFILE. All those old AIM screen names haunt the occasional memory.

My FC friends still try to retain that creative spark. Sleuth. Diana. Chrysaora. Christina. I could list more if I had an excuse to stay up later, but I’m already tired. But I’ve returned to the username graveyard to lay bouquets on the oldies and picked up Geno at the social security office. It’s homage to my nickname of four years from high school, Gino, but influenced by the fact that the name was taken already. Now, it’s a double salute, the secondary toward this guy from another RPG.

Look for the quotes.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: blog, identity, tumblr

Batman: Dark Knight

18 July, 2008 · No Comments

Just see it. Three words are all you need: It. Is. Great. 100 percent. Power level over 9000. A++. And want to know why? Because at 2:30 am, after the midnight showing, everyone in the theater stood up covered in sweat inside a 90-degree house.

My friend the illustrious James Sotis put it this way: “If there’s ever a movie to go out on, this has to be it.” Heath Ledger = win.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: movies

O-Face and Interface

16 July, 2008 · 2 Comments

On the path to planning panels for South by Southwest next March, I came across a link for ETech 2008, an O’Reilly conference held earlier this year in California. One panel discussion, Really Really Really Intimate Interfaces, caught my eye because on the conference homepage it linked to the panel’s placeholder with the term “sex hacking.” A query for a “hacking” and “sex” combo on Google turns up only the faint whispers of a long-past forum post from HOPE 2006.

There’s life hacking and even school hacking, but can we hack sex? Or, at least follow LifeHacker’s motto and “get things done” with technology when it comes to romping in (or out of) the bedroom.

Explanations aside, today I came across this nifty little item from OhMiBod:

They call it the NaughtiNano — essentially it’s a vibrator powered by your DRM iPod. According to the website, it “vibrates to the rhythm and intensity of the music.” Now good for them if they got the piece of equipment to shake its tail if you turn up the volume. But let’s try to conceptualize: what if the unit pulsated according to a song’s bass, or wavelength oscillation, or any other obscure yet relevant musical factor. It’s already possible for a music UI to produce a visualization of music. But what if an orgasm looked like this…

or this…

(borrowed from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³’s Flickr)

Or, a deeper question: can a genre excite us? Can sexual desire derive from accordion-dominant, Louisiana zydeco between 150 and 170 BPM? Would seventeenth century Gregorian chant serve up a stronger pleasurable climax?

OhMiBod also sells a product, monikered as Boditalk, a vibrator that reacts to your cell phone calls, buzzing for the duration of your wireless chat. I’m sure that someone could engineer an idea to combine the iPhone’s GPS and some odd sort of social network with this amusing gizmo.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: lifehacking, sex

2B2P.2 - Otaku Are Dead, or Recursive Publics in the Hands of Other Geeks

15 July, 2008 · 2 Comments

Apologies for the unannounced blog vacation (my euphemized term for outright, down-to-earth, human, carnal, base, heart-felt, summer-induced indolence). The metal tick has kept on ticking, yet the physical tock never really kicked in, but that only means that I have a lot to write about in the coming days. So, let us begin…

When I was younger, I liked to brag a lot, until one day I realized I was gradually turning into “that kid,” which propelled me into a slow process of self-exoneration and forced-realization of the humble. But I’ll take a moment to plug two upcoming talks that I’m hosting at Connecticon in Hartford, CT, from 1-3 August, entitled “R-R-Remix! The Mashed Up Culture of Anime Fandom” and “State of the Otaku 2008.” I mention these because I have been reading through a book by one of my favorite beach-babe-turned-Harvard-professors, Chris Kelty, called Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, for a Harvard Free Culture mini-group project, which will henceforth be known as 2B2P for short, or the Two Bits Processor Project for long. This post will be a reaction and modulation of/against/for Chapter 1, Geeks and Recursive Publics, of Part 1, The Internet. I apologize in advance for this article’s long, rambling nature. If you comment, it’ll help me to organize my thoughts for the future.

Free software… to hormone-crazed, socially-bungling Japanophiles? Where’s the segue? On one hand, I could say the Internet (the title of Part 1, hey hey, coincidence?, I think not!) and only be half right. On one foot, I could say geeks, and become a tad closer to the answer. Doing a handstand, though, if I uttered “recursive public,” I just hit the bullseye. And on the topic of recursive publics is where I will tie in my latter, Connecticon-bound presentation. I want to bring in the demographic of fans of Japanese animation (also known colloquially as otaku), unrelated to any matter in the book, as an experiment in modulation: instead of responding directly to Kelty’s content, in this post I will try to flesh out, squish, and redefine the idea of recursive publics while applying the concept to another relevant population of geeks.

To begin, let’s simplify this notion of recursive public. Kelty’s definition essentially boils down to a population that deals with a content through a form, yet the content and form are the same thing. To develop it slightly further, a recursive public works through the form to protect the content mediated by the form. Kelty uses the Internet as his example, being the form that geeks use and through which geeks mediate. Geeks want to foster the Internet by coding the Internet to their own specifications (bounded by the geek moral order). Very meta indeed. Putting a quote against my simplification, “A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public” (Kelty 28).

Recursive publics are not limited to geeks or the Internet. Kelty does not provide examples of branches. One possible example: American Republicans and Democrats might be considered inclusive to the recursive public scene. Political subtleties aside, both parties exist as part of the government — the medium through which they operate and the content on which they focus their operations. Government also is the medium that allows the parties to “come into being in the first place” (28).

But there’s more to recursive publics, in fact another element entirely. Kelty discusses the concept of “layers,” regarding which he says geeks can identify and connect to create new structures to operate the form. He writes, “[Geeks] express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways” (29). This second element ties in with the idea that recursive publics “argue through” their medium(s)” (29). Kelty highlights the combination of Napster and network connections to form a miniature scale of the Internet at large. The layering process then provides additional support for the population of the recursive public to develop and protect the medium.

Otaku are part of a recursive public. However, the demographic of anime and manga fans interacting with their medium fundamentally challenges Kelty’s notion of the recursive public. Why: the anime fandom’s medium is, obviously, animation. However, most anime fans do not have the technical expertise or sometimes even amateur aptitude to interact with the animated medium. For anime fans, it is easy to “express ideas” yet difficult to “express infrastructures” (29).

I’ll step away from that difficulty for a moment. First, I want to tackle the ideology of the recursive public. In a long-winded explanation, Kelty basically argues that recursive publics operate through a type of morality, one that structures the goals of the community. To reiterate, geeks of the recursive public participate in “writing and publishing and speaking and arguing” but also make software for “circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability” of those forms of rhetorical communication. In total, arguments and the methods employed to sculpt those arguments evolve into a sense of morality which will govern future arguments and methods. It’s all very cyclical, but “the circularity is essential to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (48).

To return to the otaku: these geeks too share a moral ideology based in the medium of animation. Examples include the cease of the distribution of fansubs (subtitles added to the original Japanese animation, distributed for foreign audiences) once an animated series is licensed by a US company, or doujinshi (comic book remixes of series) that do not copy the original series but build upon it [this latter topic is discussed in Chapter 1 of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture]. This morality, then, continues on to affect what Kelty calls “changing relations of power and knowledge” (29). Japanese animation, particularly dealing with fans in the US, has challenged the current production market and copyright itself, particularly regarding Free Use. And although barely developed as that of the culture of free software, the power and authority in otaku culture continues to change, led by greats such as Toshio Okada and Takashi Murakami.

But I must return to and address the problem of the formulation of infrastructures when animation is the medium. Can a recursive public exist when a technical boundary is inherently set up in the public’s system? Let’s examine a possible route to the solution: topical and metatopical spaces. Kelty recognizes that geeks of free software do not congregate in topical spaces, meaning assembly in the physical arena, but instead “[knit] a plurality of spaces into one larger space of non-assembly” (39). Anime fans in the US, contrarily, began in so-called topical spaces (also known as mom’s basement), eventually immigrating to the Internet where the fandom now continues to thrive. Is it possible that because the culture of free software began online that its followers automatically shared the prowess necessary to participate fully in both argument and creation, and they shared such knowledge and capabilities between each other, while otaku might not possess these technical traits because they did not mature in the presence of the medium (layman’s terms: they weren’t animators, so should we expect them to animate?).

That’s certainly a pressing question to Toshio Okada, co-founder of Gainax (one of the original major Japanese animation production companies) and self-proclaimed Otaking. So pressing, in fact, that he has declared, “Otaku are dead.” What can he mean, when thousands of American anime fans are running around with their heads cut off at hundreds of conventions across the United States yearly. Just that: with their heads cut off, today’s fans have no direction.

In a public talk, recorded by Otaku2.com, Okada answered the following question:

You mentioned that there is a gap between fan generations, or yours and that of today. Can you elaborate on this?

Okada: I think there is a big difference that is clear in what is popular. Take manga, which is selling in the mainstream, and series popular with maniacs, which are not selling. “Clover and Honey” is a good example. Some people just buy it, some are fans and only a few are maniacs who really dive into the series, so it fails to move the masses. The manga becomes nothing but a topic of discussion among older men who compete on who read it more properly. When with others, these tangents don’t go well and a discussion never takes off. The media can’t talk about otaku as one anymore because we aren’t. There is no core literature or readership. I don’t think I can explain this well enought to convince you, but anyway.

Okada is famously known for his participation on the infamous otaku commentary, Otaku no Video, a major yet sardonic commentary on the state of otaku in Japan. As a producer, though, Okada exemplifies the paragon leader of the otaku recursive public: one who comments on and comments through the form. He sees, though, a major change in generations of otaku, which leads to his harsh declaration. Describing his own generation of anime fans, Okada said at MIT in 2003: “These were fans who were so passionate and enthusiastic about anime that they became vocal and informed critics.” Speaking of the modern anime fanatic, he stated, “Unfortunately… the latest generation of anime viewers in Japan are not true Otaku. They may be anime fans, but they lack the deep, passionate connection to the medium, and many of them seem to have taken up anime fandom because it’s cool or “fashionable.” Rather than being active critics of anime, they are content to be customers, or consumers.” Okada is right about many viewers even five years later, today, as teenagers attend anime conventions with nothing short of shoutouts to Naruto and Bleach. Still, there are some fans that put their critical eye to work to uphold the name of otaku, but cannot argue for anime through the infrastructure of animation. How should they be considered in a culture that began as a recursive public yet has in recent times reverted to a mere consumer culture? A younger Okada, seeing no good animation after the end of the original Gundam series way back when, participated in the creation of two original animated shorts, Daicon III and Diacon IV (the latter of which, if you watch it quickly, contains a homage to Star Wars of all things). The importance of these novelties remains the fact that the recursive public protects the content by arguing through the form. Okada’s message to young fans rings with Keltyism: “Just make your own anime, in English, by yourself.”

I’m not depressed. The phrase “All is not lost” is too drastic to use, yet it would encompass a little bit of the situation. But only a little, because the situation is improving. Paul “Otaking” Johnson recently published on YouTube a criticism of the online fansubbing community, a five-part video series which begins here. It’s just one example of the recursive public finally taking a stand once again. In an interview not too long ago, he stated, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. My video was free and I got paid nothing, but it didn’t stop me researching translation theory for a year or hand drawing and animating the cut scenes just to grab people’s attention (they certainly wouldn’t stick around for my voice, that’s for sure!),” which exemplifies exactly what Okada wanted out of the new otaku generation. Other models include Makoto Shinkai, who animated his own story, Voices of a Distant Star and went on to produce a number of other anime, or even the father of Japanese animation, Osamu Tezuka, who copied Disney’s style to form the foundation of what would compose anime fandom today, who animated for entertainment yet still included his own acute commentary on post-war Japan.

Back to the issue, though: What happens when a fan simply can’t do this sort of high-caliber work?

Layers. The second element in Kelty’s concept. What does Japanese animation become when applied to new intrastructural models? Doujinshi. Anime music videos. Cosplay. Fansubs. Remixed comic books. Reworked animation set to music. Dressing up as characters. Subtitling original show material. All these examples are miniature structures of the animation scene at large, yet do not require the ultimate technical expertise vital to the production of genuine animation. But Kelty does not approach the potential for layers to avoid manifestation as the actual infrastructure (eg. Internet) and instead form new forms of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, for free software in relation to the Internet, no new form of the infrastructure exists, because there is only one Internet. For anime, though, animation exists as media with many offsets. Anime fans congregate in topical and metatopical spaces. Otaku participate as much as possible as the true nature of the recursive public has begun to resurface over the last decade. Hopefully as technology advances fans will be provided a more accessible platform to evolve the recursive public and resurrect the name of otaku.

Please comment on this second post in the Two Bits Processor Project, and please visit the blogs of my friends who are participating with me on this most excellent project:

Tim Hwang, blogging at The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches
Christina Xu, blogging at ComPromise
yours truly, blogging at DianaKimball.com
Mike Wolfe, blogging at Machinations
And me, Alex Leavitt, blogging here

Categories: Otaku Ethnology Project · Uncategorized
Tagged: 2b2p, chris kelty, otaku, recursive publics, toshio okada, two bits

This Is Not a Blog Post

1 July, 2008 · No Comments

Instead, this is a small catalogue of books that I recently bought, borrowed, or brought to a close.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins (finished) - A mashed potato of a book that works much better if you separate the chapters and read them as essays. Pretty much an anthology of modern, cool changes in media. Recommended. Will blog (hopefully) multiple times about this at a future date.

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, Mimi Ito, et. al. (borrowed from the BPL, just started) - If I had the linguistic skills, I’d definitely do some further research on mobile culture in Japan when I’m abroad in Kyoto in the fall and early winter. Reads sociologically, meaning interesting yet dull language.

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, Lawrence Lessig (recently bought) - I figure that I need to start reading this, since I’ve firmly entrenched myself in this free culture thing for years to come.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler (recently bought) - Yochai laid the smackdown on Cass Sunststein at a forum/lecture that I attended via MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. This is my thanks to him.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain (recently bought) - After Berkman@10 and two riveting JZ talks, I had to pick up this book. Besides, it’s at least a bit relevant.

Other relevant books that I want to read:
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger
Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization, Ian Condry

Have you read any of these seven titles? Tell me what you think about them. Comment, btchz.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: books

Two Bits Processor Project: A New Hope

30 June, 2008 · 4 Comments

Photo courtesy of Farfando.

Chris Kelty. Teaching at Rice University as a professor of anthropology. Visiting Harvard to teach History of Science & Tech. Popping out of a small beach top.

Actually, this is not Chris Kelty. This picture just so happens to be the first result in a Flickr tag search for “kelty.” However, it’s not unfortunate that Chris isn’t a black-haired, bikini-clad bombshell, because he is, in fact, the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (read it here or buy it here).

If you’ve been turned off to this post because I have disappointed you with dreams of scantily-clad ladies, I apologize. To make up for my indiscretion, I present to you the real Chris Kelty, to provide an introduction to what will henceforth be called the Two Bits Processor Project:

Chris explains Two Bits as a toolbox for asking questions. A quote that acts as a perfect segue into explaining the methodology behind the *echoing announcer’s voice* Two. Bits. Processor. Project. Essentially… Five people. Five b l o g s (FYI, each letter of the word blogs is a separate link). Nine chapters, one introduction, and one conclusion. One section per week. Compose and comment and collaborate. Chris calls this modulation (I call it awesome). Hopefully our endeavor will succeed more fully than a two-bit processor would ever operate, but I have much confidence. For a much more starry-eyed and reflective introduction to our (Tim, Christina, Diana, Mike’s, and my) project, check out Diana’s post.

Following is, first, a reaction to the Introduction of Kelty’s Two Bits and then two lighthearted rejoinders in light of the book as a book.

一番：前置き

Two Bits is an anthropological ethnography, which might also be known as a description of the customs of a people. Example: puking into their children’s mouths might be a topic relevant to a penguin ethnography. Together, these multiple customs equal a culture. For geeks, the focal group of the book, Kelty describes their culture in terms of, in one light, “figuring things out… in discussion… designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and fixing” (Kelty 18). Since Two Bits comes off as a more anthropological text, Kelty writes that a lot of stories will “illustrate what geeks are like.”

But where do geeks stand as a culture in society? I think this is necessary to understand before tackling a book of this caliber (unless Kelty explains that in Chapter One and thence I am hosed). Bluntly, he emphasizes geek nature: “vocal, loud, persistent, and loquacious” (19), a strange dichotomy compared to a backdrop of popular opinion regarding ’80s and ’90s high school kinetics (à la Sixteen Candles. A couple of decades later and geeks are getting more press than getting shoved into lockers. Basically, geeks have a voice. A statement that leads into a revelation of my own English-major-based nerdgasm when I spotted a convoluted reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). In her treatise, Spivak defends what she terms the subaltern, associated with the regional persons or groups outside of the hegemonic structure of power. Specifically, she argues for a dominant voice not to represent the repressed classes of the Indian subcontinent, but for some utterance to escape these peoples’ mouths, to speak for themselves by themselves. The remixed allusion that Kelty creates is that “The superalterns can speak for themselves” (19). In the twenty-first century, geeks have leapt up the social ladder in measures of numerous rungs. We geeks have a voice that others listen to in society. And because we have a voice, we can initiate what Kelty describes as the “reorientation of power and knowledge” (6).

Because geeks have a voice, though, it seems that Kelty finds this fact to be a barrier in the composition of the book. However, it is not a hindrance. Instead of having to explain geeks as a people, he can use them to explain themselves, since they are so prominent on the Internet that it’s impossible not to find the unavoidable information. He elucidates, “I am less interested in treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they are not the objects of its analysis” (19).

The wonderful thing about geeks becomes their habitation: the Internet. Kelty explains the benefit: “[A] very important aspect of the contemporary Internet… is its singularity: there is only one Internet” (9). Tim highlights in his modulation that Kelty’s ethnography isn’t localized. We don’t see a professor exploring the forbidden highlands of Southeast Whoknowswheresia. Instead, Kelty deals with people, what they do, and how they do it, via the Internet. But the point that the monopoly of the Internet exists solely by itself goes beyond possibility and potential of geographic limitation or liberation. Just like geography, geeks work in one space and work for that space. Proud, Kelty says, “The outcome of [the decisions to create certain configurations, standards, and protocols to make the Internet work] has been to privilege the singularity of the Internet and to champion its standardization” (9). The convenience is simply that the world’s geeks live a beep and a click miles away from each other. It’s glocalization on a metaphysical (both senses) scale.

二番：題名

I want to have a bit of fun trying to dissect Two Bits. As an English major, I take pleasure in titles, so I want to examine what the moniker suggests as we move into the text.

An excerpt from Kelty’s website explaining the cover art of the book:
“The cover of Two Bits features one panel from a series of paintings by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), a symbolist painter from Lyon and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The series is called The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit, the Harbinger of Light and decorates the entrance hall of the Boston Public Library. The particular panel on the cover is called “Physics: By the wondrous agency of Electricity, Speech flashes through Space,” and represents the telegraph. I’ve heard it said of this panel that it is colloquially called “Good News and Bad News.” Hence, Two Bits” (http://twobits.net/cover/).

So, good news and bad news. Is that what I’ll have to expect from the book? I wasn’t foreseeing a Zittrain in the least. Personally, the first impression of the title alluded to the phrase my two cents to refer to a unique opinion, namely Kelty’s. Considering the idiom, would such a cheaply-priced opinion be of any worth? A minimal amount of sleuthing revealed both value (importance of putting a stamp on your letter) and aquality (disrespect for pennies as currency).

However, two bits may also refer to the equivalency of twenty-five cents. Hey, that’s one pay phone call, or used to be. Lack of value now that we’re all on cells?

I’ll tell you what gives value to the phrase, though. Apparently two bits is a response to the idiom shave and a haircut, which isn’t an idiom at all but a tune with which we should all be familiar. If you peruse that Wikipedia entry, you’ll discover that the equivalent of “two bits” in vulgar colloquialisms equates to “You bastard!” I have no idea how this fits into Kelty’s vision in the least, but if you’re ever reading the book on the T and someone insults you, shove the text in his face. Maybe Free Software will make a small impact on that SOB’s life.

三番：本か画素

Another influence of the literature concentration on my approach to texts is to view the content in terms of the form. I attended the talk that Kelty gave at MIT to announce Two Bits, and in the Q&A session an audience member inquired as to the benefits and consequences of the book being released in PDF form online for free. Thus the room gave birth to a discussion concerning the value of books. In the end, it really comes down to paying for a physical object that satisfies the carnal needs in our fingertips. Kelty did succeed in arguing that bookstores in most rural communities across the U.S. would probably not carry the text due to its highly technical nature, not relevant to the general populace in the area. The PDF online provides the opportunity for individuals in these communities to check out the book with the potential for them to purchase it post-skim.

I bring up the argument, though, because the circulation of a text online satisfies the criteria of an instance where the attitudes behind the Free Software movement transfer to another realm, namely market politics. Two Bits in PDF, as a form, reflects the practices that Kelty enumerates in his arguments. The book online also mirrors what Kelty explains as part of the “spectrum of political activity” in which geeks participate: “[Geeks] can both express and ‘implement’ ideas” of Free Software in Free Software.

I’ll end this post with some of the other excepts that I marked off whilst reading through the Introduction that I felt were necessary to mention, if not explicate, and to which I might return in the reading of Two Bits:

• “By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system…” - When we approach the concept of a culture, do we not consider it in light of its traditionalism more than its fluidity?
• “‘For more people, the Internet is porn, stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail, online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc. etc.’ It is impossible to explain all of these things…” - Can these items actually be explained?
• “Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify, mash-up, remix, or reuse.” - Which media are difficult to [verb]?
• “Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free press.” - It seems as if this statement was more applicable a few years ago…
• Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture) finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, what does its temporality look like…? - No comment. This deserves it’s own future post.
• What does it mean to plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? - I wonder how many people would comprehend the potential to/for remix.

I, along with my benevolent colleagues over at the Two Bits Processor Project, always encourage commenting on our modulations, or creating a modulation of your own.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 2b2p, books, chris kelty, ideas, internet, literary criticism, title, two bits

Across the Pacific: Remix from Japan to the States and Back Again

27 June, 2008 · 3 Comments

I should be writing about the 27 Bits blog project (or reading for that matter), but I had to compose this article tonight out of a pure buzz for 1) blogging and 2) magnificent content.

If you know anything about the history of Japanese animation, it should be that anyone can easily trace its origins back to the United States and Walt Disney. Osamu Tezuka (most famous for Astro Boy) was inspired by Disney’s work, but of course moved well beyond the scope of serious content that the Disney Corp. would ever attempt to consider. The ironic thing about contemporary broadcast American animation (the stuff on Cartoon Network targeted at the ordinary youth demographic) is, of course, the influence of Japanese animation (see, for example, the art style of Teen Titans).

But I don’t want to blabber on about anime, even if I can be a real geek about it. That’s for later (aka. YouTomb blog post I’ve been meaning to compose for a while). What I do want to introduce, though, is a strange yet fascinating instance of secondary cross culturalization, but one that has to do with music.

This evening in my weekly Japanese class, 雨水先生, before we started our lesson, wrote on the board a popular singer’s name, ジェロ, and mentioned something about J-Pop, all of which went for the most part over my head. The name, though, transliterates to Jero. I assumed, after a syllabic translation, that she had been talking about J-Lo. 日本語-fail.

Actually, Jero, the pseudonym for Jerome White, of Pittsburg, PA, is a black American kid, now five years out of college, who sings enka. Yes, 演歌, the twentieth century Japanese music genre. But not regular enka, oh no. Enka, remixed with hiphop.

Why is this cool? Well, let me quote from Wikipedia for a terse explanation on what enka is: “Modern enka (演歌 — from 演 en performance, entertainment, and 歌 ka song) came into being in the postwar years of the Shōwa period. It was the first style to synthesize the Japanese pentatonic scale with Western harmonies. Enka lyrics, as in Portuguese Fado, usually are about the themes of love and loss, loneliness, enduring hardships, and persevering in the face of difficulties, even suicide or death. Enka suggests a more traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes, comparable to American country and western music.” Essentially, enka is already a blend of multiple genres of remix: Performance and song. Modern/postwar and traditional. Japanese scale and Western harmony. Nippon country culture and American country music. I find the last one the most unusual, because the country melodies sound particularly corny.

Who’d have thought that you could remix this music any more? Well, apparently Jero, and I now brand him as officially badass.

The above video is a profile of Jero and how he got into enka as a child. Just the fact that he learned from his grandmother makes him awesome. And traditional. Traditionally awesome. The Japanese are raving about this guy, too. One interviewee says, “He sings enka, but he looks like a hiphop guy.” This is kind of important, since in Japan physical looks do carry some social weight. I’m sure that a lot of press he receives revolves solely around the fact that he’s an African American who can speak fluent Japanese. But with hiphop rising in popularity, the authenticity of his image in a society foreign to something so culturally American compels Japanese viewers, especially younger ones, to pay more attention.

Here’s another video profile, this time from Reuteurs. The phrase I pulled from the audio is “bridging the generation gap.” Of course, Reuters is directly referencing the multiple issues that the older generation in Japan has had with the younger demographic over the years. However, the phrase also suggests the remix culture that seems to be ever more associated with the Millennial generation. The fact that remix is acting as a bridging agent is beneficial for distinctly traditional societies ordinarily hostile to change. The title of the video also highlights an unexpected element in the enka-hiphop relationship: the “blues” allusion. Blues, in American society, refers to a specific genre of the jazz movement. Plugging blues into YouTube’s search bar yields a B.B. King video heavy on the improvisational nature of American jazz.

Let’s take a quick look at the jam session. First, the audience’s cheers beat down the guitar in the first few seconds of the video; important, because jazz is “social music”, according to Miles Davis. Though, although the audience participates, the spotlight remains affixed to King and his guitar. Second, watch King’s face. Emotional. A bit self-aware. Pretty funny too. The musical performance becomes theatrical in its presentation. Third, if you listen closely, you’ll notice that he reuses melody patterns to remix on the third or fourth repetition — a common and yet necessary component of jazz. Blues, then, is communal, dramatic, and blended.

Above is a generic enka song that I found, sung by Itsuki Hiroshi. Compared with B.B. King’s video, Itsuki’s song shares a number of ingredients though the music remains different. The singer of enka appears to depict him/herself more emotionally even than the blues’ singer. Antithetically, enka seems to focus more on the individual performer than the communal experience, though this reflects the nature of personal storytelling present in common American country music. The spotlight here also stays with the performer. Enka might even be associated with the theatrical monologue: one performer, alone, telling the story from his/her perspective. This again applies to blues, without or with a vocalist such as Bessie Smith. The remixed measures in the enka melodies are subtle, yet the meld between traditional, archaic instrumentation (the koto on the right side of the camera view at the start of the clip) and sung/played notes stands out easily.

This is the final Jero-related video that I’ll reference, but I wanted to throw up a sample of one of his music videos to analyze its aesthetic qualities. The clash between antiquated instrument (shamisen) and modern hiphop moves (yet these are also mashed together with fluid movements which I would refer to as strangely relevant to Japanese seasonal culture and, here in the video clip, the lyrics). Jero’s vocals I find utterly eerie, both in their texture and the fact that they’re too indistinguishable from an ordinary enka singer’s tonality. The video itself should even be viewed as a new style of remix. American hiphop music videos focus on the performer and assistant dancers, yet Jero’s video incorporates the addition of the acoustic instruments, borrowed from pre-hiphop visual styles. I like the more modern instrumentation of this video, because Jero strives for similar sounds those he updates to electric guitar and synth keyboard.

Jero’s remix of the hiphop and enka genres gives birth to nothing seen like this before in Japan, or around the world using these styles. I mentioned before the term secondary cross culturalization which, applied to Jero, relates to the adoption in Japan of American hiphop and Jero’s subsequent return to traditional enka. Basically, as hiphop was remixed in Japan stylistically and culturally, Jero re-remixed the hiphop genre and culture through enka’s respective genre and culture. I hope that people will look at Jero’s work with a critical eye, because it’s interesting to discover what camouflaged nuances you can discover by looking at your own culture through a different variety of window.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: remix, hip-hop, japan, anime, jero, enka, ethnomusicology

Notes from the Berkman Luncheon with Ned Gulley & Karim R. Lakhani

24 June, 2008 · No Comments

For the rest of the summer, I’ll be in the office on Tuesdays, so I won’t be able to attend the Berkman luncheons in person. However, I tuned in today via live webcast (oh the wonderful innovative potential of technology) and took down notes. The discussion about borrowing and novelty in collaboration hit home a bit, from my very strange experiences in Calculus AB during junior year of high school. I won’t get into why my teacher limited the number of questions I could ask per class (maximum of three per day), but the two or three quizzes we had per week were collaborative efforts between two or three people to arrive at a shared grade. I still find it weird that my best group ended up during my pairing with one of the slackers of the class, while I performed near the top. A strange team, yet I’d say there was limited tension between the novelty and reuse of applying our skills to solving the few questions on the quiz sheet. I’d usually bring to class the necessary new material while my partner would go over my work, rework it in places, and sort of the small mistakes that I missed in review. The value of my original material and his reuse of my applied knowledge, I’d say, was fairly equal.

So, on to the notes…

—

The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse

Karim Lakhani, Ned Gulley

Karim:

we think collaborative innovation as more modern: open-source/Wikipedia
most major innovations: highly collaborative in history

airplane development: not just Wright brothers, but creation with multiple people
pre-Wright brothers: network of 10 individuals
locus on innovation: moved over to Europe after Wright brothers

collaborative innovation: Meyer’s Analysis

dynamics of collaborative innovation: how people build off of others’ work

Ned:

contest at MathWorks: MATLAB programming contest
usually: smartest person gets the prize
but: not how ideas move/work in the world
contest: notion of borrowing/stealing ideas in contest: create page of code

Competitive Wikipedia
everyone: encouraged to edit articles
if article made worse: thrown away; if better: article edit it kept
would Wikipedia display article editing winner?

MATLAB week-long open collaborative competition for programmers
- entries automatically scored, ranked, displayed immediately
- code author score are visible at all times
- anyone can modify other’s code

leaders –> view entry: person makes new entry and becomes leader

first place: completely objective
good code: gets better optimization score from test lead

really about reputation and interaction with community

what we see in practice:
people: anxious to acknowledge people they took code from

types of changes:
- Big changes (leaps)
I know a much better way to do this, replaces previous code
- Small changes (tweaks)
minor optimization; tweakers don’t need to understand full optimization to improve code

code: improves over time
sometimes: people take best code at certain point in time & make it worse

by inserting new idea after previously solved problem: people swarm on it to work with and improve idea

tough question: how would you value tweakers over leapers
hard to say who really is making the important contributions

systematic variations: tweak bombs: take the entry in the lead, sniff around for secret number replacements to test
changes to the lead entry: fly off like sparks

social signals: sent through entry titles
- scrambled eggs
- rotten eggs
- I didn’t start the fire
- Don’t get obfuscated… follow the light
- You Call This Collaboration? Give Me a Break

motivation:
to participate: opportunity: for personal glory or collaboration?

behavior of successful code:
high rank, time on top, high status author, clarity, elegance, novelty, etc.

tension: not between any two coders
code: wants to propagate
coder: wants to block code propagation

a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg
a hacker is only code’s way of making more code

—

Karim:

collaborative innovation: implicit tension between collective and individual:

collective point of view: value contributions that get reused more often
individual view: value being the top amongst peers

social value of contribution (code) = # of times lines of code reused
relative novelty: helps you; too new: others don’t use it/know what to do with it
value of adding new things, after a while: gets too complicated
not much value in borrowing code, but if you use it in the right way it’s very valuable

leaders: borrow > novelty, in this setting

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: berkman, collaboration, notes

Twitter Famous

23 June, 2008 · No Comments

Twitter. I’ve been tossing around ideas in my head about this service for verbosity-challenged conversationalists for at least a month now. At first, I was skeptical. A few weeks later, Twitter grew on me a bit, but it still felt dirty. Recently, I’ve benefitted.

Last week, I Greyhounded myself down to American University in Washington DC to attend Beyond Broadcast 2008. The amiable conference organizers offered me a scholarship in exchange for a little guide to Twitter, because evidently those guys and gals over in broadcast media don’t understand simple methods of sociability online. Either way, to save $50, I had to force myself to like Twitter. But I do like Twitter, don’t I? I mean, I’m not a Twitter obsessor; I follow less than twenty users. What’s so appealing about Twitter?

First off, kudos to the design team. You’ll pulled off a Threadless/Victorian mashup that I truly find appealing.

But really, the element that makes Twitter what it is: simplicity. One hundred forty characters may not be a lot, but such a limit persuades the composer to ruminate on the few phrases he can put together to create a coherent thought.

Then there’s the element that makes Twitter useful: the fact that it produces coherent thoughts. Keep in mind I did not write relevant or sensible. I agree that some messages are completely inane. But good things come out of Twitter. I’d say that the most useful, albeit less frequently utilized, potential of Twitter is to become an idea aggregate, for people to compose quickly-scribbled, Post-It note sized messages that would be more utilitarian published for the world to see than ported around inside someone’s head. Unfortunately, it seems that other Twitter inhabitants would rather employ the service as a replacement for a Facebook status feed, just to keep on top of what everyone’s doing. Of course, there’s also the in-the-moment practicality of Twitter, especially if you have it hooked up to your mobile phone, in situations such as reporting breaking news (eg. the earthquakes in China or if you get thrown in the slammer).

A positive: the Twitter community, I’ve noticed, is fairly peaceful. Well, disregard when Twitter goes down for lengthy eras of time. But in terms of argument or plain old insipid flame wars, I haven’t seen or read about it. There’s no competition on Twitter. And that’s good. (Unlike

OK, so Twitter’s not bad. But, honestly, Twitter has a cult following and it’s turned into something akin to a fraternity considering its most loyal users. A few weeks ago, I surmised what might have caused Twitter’s popularity to skyrocket so quickly and not peter out. At first, I simply blamed the adults and called Twitter the solution to the next generation middle-aged crisis. Now, I feel like being a bit nicer. So let’s pull it back to ROFLCon…

At ROFLCon, Friday’s opening keynote, a talk by David Weinberger, and Saturday’s opening keynote, by Alice Marwick, dealt with Internet fame, which I guess became the official theme of ROFLCon 1. Instead of dissecting Internet celebrities online, think about the general concept of fame, popularity, fashion in the online space. Dave spoke about the current evolution from a broadcast system (mediated, where The Man chooses what we watch and eventually what we find popular) to a network system (free-reign, where We link each other to videos and images, and choose what becomes famous). In a broadcast domain, alienation results. Via network, the focus is intimacy. And so Twitter’s success, I believe, is based in the familiar. As I alluded to previously, I find more statements about breakfast and bodily functions than theories and thesis. But modernism is about the quotidian, the familiar, the ordinary: for example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the in literary terms revolutionary piece of fiction that follows the everyday, unspectacular actions of Clarissa Dalloway as she experiences London in less than twenty four hours. Localization, therefore, is a product of intimacy. Becoming acquainted with one person familiarizes with a community. Although it appears that location does not matter, geography exists and cannot be ignored. And although the Internet and its culture is highly specific, the consequences of connection becomes globalization, yet also localization. Twitter simply links to some acquaintances on a global scale, and others on a local scale.

Can I answer the question, Why is Twitter famous? According to Alice, fame represents value. So what does the populace of the Internet value? Connection. Ease. And I suppose a little bit of humor. I guess Twitter’s popularity is due to people trying to find an easy way to make friends online. It’s not about being famous for fifteen minutes, or being known to one hundred people, or being connected to everyone by n degrees, or garnering a million hits. We want to get to know people, plain and simple.

Want to know me better? Follow me.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: beyond broadcast, fame, twitter

Sometimes An Interesting Job

18 June, 2008 · No Comments

Once in a while at Houghton Library (Harvard U), I come across a famous writer/author/playwright/professor/screenwriter/what-have-you whose publicly unfamous (yes, I mean not-infamous) scribblings stand out like a wild jackal in Kenmore Square. Today, we in Technical Services came across once such beautifully-composed discovery:

Tennessee Williams

“If I were given a word-association test and the word I was given was playwright, meaning American playwright, I am dreadfully afraid that my immediate, associative response would be “stuffed owl”. Could this be the unfortunate consequence of working too much in hotel-bedrooms where all too often the only good writing surface is the top of a bureau with a mirror above it? Sitting before this bureau-mirror, you look up, gloomily reflective, from your slow mutilation of a clean white piece of paper and if you wear horn-rimmed glasses on a round face, the image that you see resembles an owl’s so much that, on dull mornings, there is an impulse to utter a long-drawn, mornful hoot and to hunch and shrug your shoulders a bit, as if the straight back chair in which you are seated is the branch of a tree in a cold, dampish field with no field-mice in the grass. Yes, such is the charm of most playwrights. Ask any actor or director is [sic] I speak not truth on this subject.”

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: job, quotes, tennessee williams

A Tip of My Hat to Generation %@!# You

12 June, 2008 · 1 Comment

Dear Generation X,

I submit to you a simple question: Why Generation Y? We can fiddle with jejune puns — Generations Why, You, or YouTube — but, really, Y just comes after X, and are you really that uninspired that you couldn’t think of a better moniker? I suppose we can consider our options, for example “Millennials,” which Robert Lanham contends originated because we were “renamed after whining too much.”

I’m writing to say that you need to try harder. Or at least settle on a brand before searing us with your misinformed, generalized diatribes. Lanham’s not defending you too well if he writes, “Millennials pose a vital threat to my generation’s cultural legitimacy.” Is it legitimate if we’re the ones making you popular? But don’t mind me too much. We’re making mistakes too, killing good ideas, what have you.

If you take a glance at Wikipedia (yes, you created it, but we made it), the Baby Boomers tossed around names for you too. After the Declaration of Independence, you’re the thirteenth generation to inhabit this thawing planet (SUVs = totally your fault). For us, Alex Pareene insists that “Millennials are the first generation whose every dumb mistake is archived forever on computer networks. We’re the first Googleable generation!”

You got the Cold War and the space race. We got teh internets. You caroused in your neighborhoods. Now, as the new wave of parents, you wonder why we grew up hugging keyboards. danah boyd tells it all: “Teens do not have as much access to physical space…, some teens don’t go out because there’s no where to go… Online is often easier and more accessible.” The internet is our neighborhood. We’re growing up on it. The first generation to do it. As we hangout more online, even our own brats will follow along (and consequentially never understand the nostalgic significance of some then-archaic band names). And don’t call us natives. We escaped the womb, not the firewall. Tim explains that we engage with the popular. Don’t trounce the way we’re growing up, especially when our methods evidently are much cooler than yours.

If you’re suggesting that the Boomers “never understood us,” take a look at yourself. If you think you’ve improved,

Sincerely,
Alex

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: digital natives, generations, internet

Notes from Berkman Luncheon w/ Anne Balsamo

10 June, 2008 · No Comments

As soon as I saw a derivative of the term “culture” in Anne Balsamo’s bio linked to from the Berkman website, I knew I wanted to attend this luncheon. Ironically, there was only mention of cultural reproduction (though it’s apparently present in her book, soon to be released), with much of the discussion focused around the future of libraries and museums (still interesting). The initial idea that jumped out at me from Anne’s presentation was her point about media as reproduction, specifically alluding to biological functions, and how this metaphoric/literal process defines and reworks our notions of gender online. Three other points were brought up that I want to discuss in future articles:
- Memory, remembering, and the evolution of stories and their telling in the move to the digital environment
- The future of the meritocracy of professorships in relation to publications
- The potential importance of Harvard’s Houghton Library after digital literary curation/publication and the hypothetical revolution of personal paper-based printing & publication

For now, the notes:

—

Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work: Anne Balsamo

—

book: transmedia project

addresses 3 points:

technological innovation: transform what is known to what is possible
technological imagination: engage materiality of world to create conditions for future world making
cultural reproduction: development of new narratives, myths, rituals;

technology, the world, culture: created anew
training of technological imagination: necessary

designers: work scene of technological emergence

ch. 1 - culture in the age of innovation

polemic of book: need to train imaginations to take seriously technological innovations: responsibility of educators across curriculum
how humanities can serve as resources: to engage new technologies

ch. 2 - gendering the technological imagination

always gendered, but we didn’t recognize it as such
biological reproductive technologies: connects to media technologies as premier reproductive technologies of our age: draws from feminist criticism on reproduction

ch. 3 - the performance of innovation

work on future of reading: w/ embryonic technologies

ch. - public interactives and technological literacies
designed to communicate history that is all of ours
future of literacies

ch. - working the paradigm shift
focus on literal labor: participatory culture: call people to the hard work required by the paradigm shift

ch. - the work of the book in a digital age
Q: why are you writing a print-based book?

—

transmedia project: relates to other previous projects:

interactive multimedia documentary (”women of the world talk back”) on women’s rights held by UN in Beijing

practices on new media journalism

museum exhibit: designed to probe how we might read in the future: not abandon but rethink the print-based book

—

we need to do something different to bridge the two cultures
need to create new institutional places: multidisciplinary research/projects

new participants: women, underrepresented participants
new commitments: requires everyone to be learners again
collaborative teams: from early work in feminist organizing
new spaces: where people can work together on technological things

—

distributed research network: in UC Irvine, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago
scholarship in a digital age: will look different: local and distributed
understanding technological infrastructure to support distributed research network

digital research & learning @ McArthur: funded: museums, libraries, schools, recreation, home, after-school
claim: learning is changing in a digital age: eg. learning occurs in distributed environment, not just one local place
think about how museums/libraries will function in distributed learning environment

—

What’s next?

XFR: Take 2
Digital Learning Objects: Open Education
MIxed Reality Learning Environments: Morse’s Law, Nintendo Wii (gesture-based interface)
Thinking with Objects: DIY movement, makers culture movement (making things with your hands; virtual: only simulations of what we used to do with our hands)

—

Q: what has everyone been thinking about futures of museums/libraries

—

Q&A:

Q: what is the future of designing librarians; how do you design professionals to adapt to new changes?

A: information designers: need standardization of metadata; also need people to understand how (meta-)information also has narrative, cultural effectivity; when we get to semantic web: it can’t be stupid

Q: Weinberger: future of paper-based books?

A: many genres of paper-based books that will migrate to the digital space; other genres: that aren’t going to disappear, because of physicality: paper-based: will long outlive human lives: part of case history; have to maintain digital archive
libraries: becoming museums of books that have ‘collections’

Q: Weinberger: in future w/ electronic readers: publishers won’t actually print books: will want to move directly to digital

A: things that are slipping away in a digital age: we will want to preserve

Q: humanities in the future: esp. w/ focus on publication

A: rethink scholarly publication, but I’m not the one to take on such a project;
have to learn to read again
UChicago: thinking about new paradigm of peer-review process for publication
tenure cases for those w/ digital scholarship

Q: printing a book: just output form; talk about crafting in digital environment: you: on laptop, w/ word processor

A: these kind of questions are critical, esp. w/ close reading of electronic text
authoring backwards
designer parallels with author

discussion:
libraries: providing ACCESS to books, etc.; cost of maintaining digital libraries: low, but not zero; decisions will always need to be made about curation
assumption: possibility of a canon: where all the ‘good’ books are

Q: “science fiction: the mythology of the industrial age”

Q: what do you think might be lost?

A: course: history of literacy: ongoing question of why is it important to remember?: disturbing: youth: just-in-time learners/rememberers
we haven’t taught value of remembering
culturally: remembering was more valuable to the other generation: ties to why history is important: ties to “future of the past”

—

digital divide: the other way: economic/social reasons
need to have interdisciplinary places of learning

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: notes, education, berkman, anne balsamo, technology, innovation

Zuneral Video Update

9 June, 2008 · 2 Comments

Just wanted to announce that I switched the Zuneral video over to YouTube.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: YouTube, zuneral

Digesting Intarwebs

7 June, 2008 · 1 Comment

At Berkman@10 during the Language of Openness breakout session, someone in the audience complained about the too frequent use of the word “consumer” when discussing the Internet and media in general. Ever since, consumer has also irked me and yet I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it’s the English major coming out in me. Clearly the word has been contextualized and habitualized enough so that those familiar with the area of study understand and will employ the term. The association of consuming with eating, drinking, or generally ingesting, I believe, is what irritates the word’s users. I would go further to say that by utilizing the word consume in its gustatory fashion, we must also consider its consequences, thus alluding to digestion. And unless we’re speaking about the Internet strictly on academic grounds (where it would be mentally assimilated), I do not care for the WWW to pass through my bowel.

I will propose, then, that the use of consume came about because of adults. Yes, Generation X, I’m blaming you. Power to the Millennials! (I’ll discuss my intentional evasion of the phrase “digital native” in a later article. In fact, I don’t put faith in the term millennial either, but for the sake of brevity, it will remain for now.) I blame the older folk who grew up with television and commercials, spent money to go to the movie theater, and customarily lived in a pecuniary society. They are living, breathing customers. As customers, the adults of today matured regarding the world with an eye bent on finances rather than fervor. Therefore, it follows that they would approach the Internet with fiscal perspectives and intentions. Consuming digital media, specifically media inherent to the Web, then evolved from a money-hungry stomach.

And us kids are just, well, different. We’re not online to make money or use money (at least not all the time, though I do not deny calling the Internet the new teenager’s shopping-mall-turned-after-school-hangout). I’ll even go far enough to accuse adults and their outdated perspectives as the cause of the dot-com crash way back when, because they simply approached the Internet in an ignorant manner (I commend them for taking risks). My hypothesis reflects what David Weinberger and Jonathan Zittrain discussed at the final discursive session of Berkman@10, Onward!. Weinberger said, “It occurred to me that what does hold Berkman together and probably for everyone here is that we really really love the internet, just love the internet. How many people were at ROFLCon? The atmosphere at ROFLCon (an internet pop culture conference) was very different type of love of the internet. So in 10 years, how are we going to love the internet?” He expounds that the youth approach to the Internet is one of curiosity, intimacy, and passion. Youth are developing a culture online because they are not consuming the Web, acidically digesting its content and defecating LOLcats, but instead embracing the Internet creatively and living inside it, rather than using it as a tool while remaining outside its realm. In response to Weinberger, Zittrain stated, “I was struck by David Weinberger’s description of ROFLCon. I wasn’t there, but I can’t help but think that some of the goofiness, and the wonderful inanity of it, is exactly the spirit of the Internet that we celebrate here that I am continually amazed and amused by. … It’s the ability not to take ourselves so god damn seriously, while doing serious things and worrying about things like billions of people who are about to join the club, digitally speaking.” Charlie Nesson’s final words echo a similar response: “The question in shorter term for me really is, can we figure out how to engage kids of all ages in an open integrated media educational environment in a way that has them learning critical, algorithmic, strategic, thinking skills, in a form that we can measure — and that can be used as a meaningful credential.” Both professors identify the Internet as a space of informal learning, just like the neighborhood streets where adults grew up. Kids are just doing it online these days.

So how do youth engage with the digital space, strategically thinking and processing the culture that they unconsciously create? Certainly not through consumption. It’s simply by maturing, growing up, experiencing.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: berkman@10, conferences, definitions, language, roflcon

Notes from Luncheon with Walter Bender (Sugar Labs) @ the Berkman Center

3 June, 2008 · 1 Comment

I RSVP’d to the Berkman Center on a whim a couple of days ago, and I am glad that I went to this luncheon (the first of hopefully many for me). Sitting in a room of thirty people, with Walter sitting at the head of the mahogany table, talking calmly, solidly, professorly, I felt like part of a secluded university lecture. He’s an advocate for an education and he keeps faith in the three elements that I’ve always found necessary to education: learning from risks, learning from mistakes, and learning from experience. Notes are below.

—

OLPC: plan: have impact on learning
lack in opportunity: how do you give kids high quality education, opportunity to learn

school reform: impossible if done top-down; way it will change: generation of children who come to school w/ different skills/expectations: will change school
these laptops: will be part of manufacturing change

title: “Confessions of a Fundamentalist”
passionate about free/open source software
fundamentalist about: learning itself: what are the best ways to position/plant seeds of learning

constructionism: role for computation as thing to think with; something children should engage with
not just access to knowledge, but appropriation of knowledge
learn through doing; what’s a better tool for doing than a computer
want to engage people in things they’re passionate about

child-centric v. teacher-centric view of education/learning
everyone’s a learner, everyone’s a teacher
humans: expressive & social

proprietary v. free/open source
a = deals with delivery of knowledge
b = trying to move over the standard deviation: users: people who appropriate, rather than just access, knowledge
open source: culture of appropriation: cultural value

service-oriented stuff: not very good
phones: about service, not construction: service model: example: people don’t write programs or essays ON their phone
point: social nature of phones
optimal situation for learning: phones: lacking in other attributes (teaching, learning, expressive)

example: Dynabook, with background
building platform: skewing odds to ~ activity happening
1. build
2. critique/reflect
3. iterate (go back to step 1)

learning: wants to be free
culture around open source –> how do you decide about governance? difference between governance and engagement of community in critical discourse

engaging in collaboration, engaging in critique
tools to do this: lacking in education (maybe not university ed, but definitely in primary ed)

example:
Nigeria: English = official language, but spoken: probably 3rd largest
kids: built spelling dictionary for Igbo

Sugar: primary user experience on OLPC
at core of Sugar: notion of activity
before: run applications; turned “application” into “activity”: enhancement of application: 1) brings notion of sharing/sociability into the open: always present; presence of others is always with you; eg. ability to share document between users, whether online or offline; 2) journal: file system that automatically saves everything you do: never have to save/back up; creating a diary/portfolio of your work; place to watch your progress, have conversation with another about your progress: importance of progress, march through time: important feature of learning; 3) transparency: no ceiling; music: network with other laptops to play music, can compose music, make own instruments
Python: language that underlies Sugar: open

[why cell phones will never replace computers: memory capacity]

example: want to change metrics inside Sugar so that kids can measure in anything, any metric they imagine

David Hilbert: 23 problems of mathematics
23 problems facing people in technology & learning:
- how to make the network work?
- make code that is malleable yet won’t lead to malware
- better tools for localization & internationalization
- power: use a scarce resource better? even if you’re using calories to crank in power, better use them intelligently
- construction in scale
- economics: correlating economic development with learning: hypothesis or fact that learning leads to economic development
- governance
(will be blogged)

—
Q&A:

Q: definition of free
A: not as in beer
comes down to appropriation: example: learn to code by copying code, breaking it down & changing it

Q: small inexpensive laptops: ie. Asus EEE
ultimately: help cause of learning via computers by making hardware more available, or hurt it by losing sight of mission of lea