Just finished reading “Welcome to the ‘Augmented Revolution’” by Nathan Jurgenson (available at http://www.salon.com/2011/11/06/the_21st_centurys_augmented_revolution/). Very interesting thoughts on the juxtapositioning of reality and social media. Or, as Jurgenson says, “the enmeshing of the on- and offline.” Five years or a decade ago, most of society (except the couple who met online or the people who watched Ze Frank’s “The Show” and made a world sandwich) saw the offline and online as two separate worlds that didn’t impact each other. Now, however, our society’s current obsession with Facebook, Twitter and even creation of the Occupy Movement “shows that technology and our global atmosphere of dissent is the effective merging of the on- and offline worlds” (Jurgenson).

IRL being a phrase in itself shows that there’s no difference between IRL and the digital world. Jurgenson says that, “Research has demonstrated that sites like Facebook have everything to do with the offline. Our offline lives drive whom we are Facebook-friends with and what we post about.” My generation and many others know how true this is. We are friends on Facebook predominantly with people we are acquainted with outside the computer. But we keep in touch with these friends via texting, Twitter, FB. We set up meetings IRL on these same social media.

(The research mentioned above was done by the auspicious Pew Research Center and is available at http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks.aspx. A short summary by Jurgenson is available at http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/06/16/augmented-friendship-illustrated-by-pew-data/.)

In “Welcome to the ‘Augmented Revolution,’” Jurgenson also discusses that the Occupy Movement and other ideas have a wider audience in the internet. “Augmented by the Internet, what you are doing seems to matter more,” he states, as you can watch the likes and retweets in real time. He says that “we are being trained to experience the world always as a potential photo, tweet, status update,” a frightening but true statement. I often think, “Oh, I could put this on Facebook” or “I could text someone about this.” Maybe I should just tell them in person? But the last time I called a friend to tell her about something I texted her to set up the time first.

These ideas of the juxtaposition of traditional reality and digital reality were shown in my interview with two members of Occupy Austin’s media team for our class Occupy Anthology. They said many things that made me think that it’s easier to keep track of the Occupy Movement on the internet and for them to get noticed by traditional media because of their use of social media.

I just finished interviewing Wendy Darling and Kit O’Connell, part of the media team for Occupy Austin. We happened upon a lot of interesting topics and I think I learned a lot. I’m excited to edit this week and see where that process takes me. (My second experience with editing audio.)

From the first page, Peter Krapp’s chapter on “Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?” puts lovers of privacy like myself into an uncomfortable place.

Apparently I’m watching the wrong media, because I do watch media that is “romanticizing the obsessions of talented nerds” (Krapp 28). I like characters such as Ried and Penelope in Criminal Minds (http://www.cbs.com/shows/criminal_minds/) and Hank and John Green of the Vlog Brothers (http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers) and Alex Day (http://www.youtube.com/user/nerimon). I also am currently in the middle of reading Orwell’s 1984.

Well, this is problematic.

My website is up and running at http://cargocollective.com/IdentityandFoodBloggers/Identity-and-Food-Bloggers. Warning: Some delicious pictures of food, some (hopefully) deep thoughts. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to leave comments!

Reading Rita Raley’s Tactical Media this week for class. Now that I’ve realized it is titled Tactical and not “tactile” media, I feel less interested in the book. Nonetheless she’s bringing up a lot of good hacktivism, tactical gizmology and other types of media-based activism. Here are my comments on the two that are most interesting to me so far.

1. Ubermorgen’s Amazon Noir and Google Will Eat Itself

On pages 18-19, Raley talks about Ubermorgan (” ‘the day after tomorrow’ or ’super-tomorrow’”) and Amazon Noir: The Big Book Crime. Thier website www.amazon-noir.com says it well; they “used the frontdoor to access the huge digital library of Amazon.com. They tricked around with Amazon.coms ‘Search Inside the Book‘ function until it gave away the complete volumes of copyright protected books. This was carried out by sending 5.000 – 10.000 requests per  book. After this process the data was logically reassembled into pdf-format by the SIB-Book-Generator” (http://www.amazon-noir.com/press_release_nov15_2006_1.html). Genius! I’ve always wondered what was the use of including so many pages of the book for free, unless for smart lazy people to read what they need and get on with life. I’ve used Google Books for just such nefarious uses myself. But using P2P networks to pass on the books takes it to a whole new level. (Mark Poster would approve.)

While looking up Ubermorgen’s Amazon Noir website, I stumbled across their project called Google Will Eat Itself. They’re getting money with Google ads, putting it into a Swiss Bank Account (those always sound mysterious and sort of fake, but they have pictures!), and then buying Google stock with the proceeds. Hilarious. According to the website today, only “202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google” (http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/googleshare.php). Google is probably my favorite of the large corporations, but I still find this hilarious. Maybe I should up my McDonalds stock by working at McDonalds to fully own McDonalds. All the sugary, high-calorie fries I could ever want.

2. The conversation on DoEAT’s Caution Signs in the Borderlands of San-Ysidro-Tijuana

Though the signs are interesting (http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/110862.shtml), I found Raley’s discussion of the border afterwards even more interesting. She said that the border acts as a “metaphysical binary [of] . . . the ‘we’ against the ‘them.’ A fence has been built, binaries constructed, and these artists intend to overturn them.” (36-37). I think the fence is built in the mind of those who do not live there. As an ESL teacher, I work with many ESL students from around the world. The binary isn’t there for me and I don’t think it’s there as powerfully in parts of Texas either. Some of my students came because they won the visa lottery and would have felt guilty if they hadn’t come. Many of them came here for protection, all legally. Texas certainly divides Latinos and white/blacks, Asians and Latinos, etc. But the binary erodes as well. Spanglish is common. Who doesn’t love a good taco? No, tacos in Chicago or Kansas City cannot be good tacos in the same way that Texas has good tacos. The Alamo screams of Latino rights that pale Texas with their fat, star belt buckles somehow resist and yet embrace. The binary doesn’t exist in the same way when you live here.

P.S. Hardt and Negri are everywhere, aren’t they? See Raley page 11, 25 and more.

First of all, I love the homepage of Collection 2 of the Electronic Literature Organization, located at http://collection.eliterature.org/2/. The red color with the strict organization of rectangles with that, when scrolled across, show the title in the double-rectangle on the left is just perfect. I hope our class anthology’s homepage is just as well-organized and appealing as this one, though it will obviously be different.

The two pieces that I was most drawn to are poetry pieces. It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten to read poetry and it was great. I looked at Jorg Pringer’s soundpoems and V: Vniverse by Stephanie Strickland Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo.

Pringer’s soundpoems was my favorite. I love linguistics, the International Phonetic Alphabet and all.  I teach pronunciation so I often have my students repeat different words with the same sounds. In Pringer’s three poem-games, you interact by clicking and/or dragging and different sounds are produced. In the poem “gravity and reflection,” you click to create falling letters which make a rattling sound like in pinball. Sounds of cicadas and other flying insects are created by clicking the letters A, E, I, U, M, R and S in “predator vs. prey.” The “ssss” or “uuuuh” on the page also makes shapes that remind me of bugs. Pringer’s last poem, “food chain,” is a play of existing consonants whose course you can change by clicking to place vowels. The resulting sounds–Pu or Ka or Ko, etc.–were fascinating to me. I played all the games multiple times. The ideas of how sounds are not always connected to words and can be the same across languages is brought up to me by these poems Would be great to have students in a linguistics class look at.

The second piece of literature I looked at/read is “V: Vniverse.” This is also interactive poetry. The night sky is revealed and by clicking on stars, a few lines of a poem are revealed in thin gray letters that are associated with the stars and a constellation. By typing a number between 1 and 252 on the top right circle, you can also read the poems in order. When you double-click a star in a constellation, the lines are revealed in stanzas, with the lines for that particular star in red. The poetry is quite lovely, with lines like:

“Meander, 9

the power of ex-opponents or logs. if you put

your meander/zigzag/ric-rac

on your favricated lens-shape, if indeed you deep”

Many of the stanzas have patterns like “if you understand X, / understand Y, you understand ZZZ. / you do not understand.” I can’t quite follow the story behind the poem but it was very interesting to read.

I really enjoyed the pieces I was able to view in Collection 2. I plan on going back when I have a chance to read through more. One thing I did notice was that the computer made my eyes tired, the only drawback I know to reading on the screen. IT guys, get on fixing that problem. Or maybe I should buy new glasses.

For my website, I’m planning on using Cargo Collective (http://cargocollective.com). It looks like iWeb but based on the internet and with free hosting. By invite only, let me know if you want one.

In chapter nine of Poster’s book Information, Please, he devotes a chapter to who controls digital media, and discusses copyright law and peer-to-peer file sharing. I found this chapter very interested. Poster wrote the book in 2006 and seems behind on some of the ways file sharing of music can work. I want to talk about a website I use where musical artists have “authorized the downloading . . . of their work” (pg. 194). There are legal ways now for us fans to download music for free and for musicians to become better known.

Noise Trade is a website started by musician  Derek Webb. Webb had found great success when he allowed fans to download one of his albums for free. He had the idea that musicians can actually gain fans and earn more money if people have heard of their music. He started the website Noise Trade with others. It’s free for musicians to upload their music and a page is created for them. By sharing their name, zip code and email, anyone can be sent an email with a download code. The music is free. Some artists have twenty songs posted, some two, some a whole album. Fans can also pay a tip of up to $100 if they wish. I think it’s a great way to learn about new music and play the whole song for free before downloading. If I like a band, I might pay to go see them in concert or to buy a different album. Their motto is “Thousands of albums. Completely free. Completely legal.” They have big names and unknowns. I encourage you to go check it out.

Another website is Sound Cloud. Artists can upload songs and let fans download them–either completely and to remix, or only those who have the code. It’s another free and legal way to fileshare music. I haven’t used it as much, but have downloaded songs by Derek Webb and by CvrBrthrs (like this songhttp://soundcloud.com/cvrbrthrs/the-beatles-blackbird-covered).

Proposal for Occupy: The Anthology

for English 5380, Authorship 2.0

by Sarah Visser

My project for Occupy: The Anthology will be an interview with members of Occupy Austin. I will interview Wendy Darling, Occupy Austin’s media contact, and possibly with one or two other occupiers. I plan on doing the interview over Skype and recording the audio. I will edit the audio down to 20 to 30 minutes and post it to our website as a podcast/sound clip. I will choose the most interesting responses and those that provide the most information about the Austin movement to include in the final audio.

Along with the podcast, I plan on including a 100-200 word written introduction. The introduction will hopefully go very near to the audio player so visitors can see that the two are connected.

My interview will have four main focuses: The main events in Occupy Austin’s history (their first general assembly, the start of the City Hall occupation on October 6, 2012, and their third month anniversary on January 6^th), the uniqueness of the Occupy movement in Austin (how Austin stereotypes have affected them, what a normal day was like during 24-hour occupation, why people choose to get involved, the creative side of the movement, and how movements in other cities differ), how media has had a part in the Occupy Austin movement (how the movement feeds off social media, reporting by independent media outlets and the Austin Chronicle) and the future of Occupy Austin after their eviction from City Hall on February 3^rd (part-time occupation, the future of Occupy Austin, involvement in the Occupy Bank of America movement).

Obviously  I thought Poster’s chapter on identity was the most interesting in the book so far. Read an article in the newspaper yesterday and brought up many of Poster’s ideas and what we discussed in class about how you cannot really identify someone through a computer mediated conversation. The article,

No inappropriate-relationship charges for Burleson coach (http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/03/06/3789978/no-inappropriate-relationship.html#storylink=cpy) is about how someone claiming to be a Burleson ISD coach having suggestive conversation via Skype with a 16 year old student. Why the student ever agreed to the conversations was not discussed, but let’s point out that, at 16, she’s more than old enough to know that it was inappropriate. The person on the other end could have well be 16, female, male, who knows? Either way, it’s difficult to tell identity. Evil can be more easily gotten away with with machines.