Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures

CKamp introduced us to Xtranormal last week with her screening of the viral masterpiece “I want to be a college professor,” whereupon I became utterly giddy about the possibilities of creating my own video (the result was a brief sketch in which I cast Ted Nelson as the tech guy). Turns out Blaine was equally inspired to create a couple of vids, too. If you need advice on how to How to Lose Investors and Alienate Bond-holders, then his are required viewing.

While my interest in Xtranormal started out as something of a lark, I’m now trying to think about it more academically: Could this tool be useful in the classroom? Where might something like this fit into our discussion of New Media? One key to understanding the irresistible allure of Xtranormal, I think, is to realize that it affords us a way to do something we’ve already been doing for 30,000 years: Puppetry. In this case, though, digital puppetry. A Google search for “puppetry history” served up a link to a site that looked like it had been attacked by the Geocities-izer, but there was in fact a very telling observation on that site that brings me back to this week’s reading by Sherry Turkle:

It seems to me, man has always been interested in creating and controlling other worlds, as well as in trying to define his own. Puppetry, to me, is an extension of one’s self. It may be motivated by the need to explain, explore, embrace or critique the human condition. It is still, one of the safest ways to act out, act up, entertain, educate, commiserate, wonder out loud, unburden yourself or release your feelings. I have used it, along with my story telling to fulfill my need to see the good guys win and justice done. It has always been both a sword and a shield to me. It is my armor in a world of frustrations and disappointments, when indeed, the bad hats seem to be ahead in this game, we call Life. In short, I have found Puppet Theater to be a wonderful place to find peace of mind and spirit.

As I read this, I immediately called to mind the video game enthusiasts Turkle writes about in Video Games and Computer Holding Power (post forthcoming on that) and how they sought escape in video games in the same manner–and for the same reasons–as our anonymous puppeteer quoted above. Interesting.

Back to Xtranormal… Here’s a brainstorm of some possible scenarios where this service might be handy:

• Demonstrating effective interviewing techniques for job applicants or journalists
• Role play for would-be counselors and therapists (similar to above, what and what not to say)
• A story boarding tool, where dialogue for an original movie scene may be quickly roughed out

Granted, the potential for any video created in Xtranormal to be more humorous and distracting than educational may be a barrier to its adoption in the classroom, but still–it’s yet another resource in the digital storytelling toolbox.

A few things I really like about Laurel’s essays (apart from their liberal use of the word “bastard”): For one, reading Star Raiders transports me back to 1982, when the Atari 2600 gaming system was in its heyday.

How many hours I spent playing the arcade knock-off versions of Frogger, Pac-Man, and Joust, I’ll never know; furthermore, it’s a wonder I didn’t develop repetitive stress injuries in my hands for all the times I tried defeat the bomb-dropping burglar in Kaboom! (anybody remember that one?).

Like so many of the other writings we’ve read, it’s hard to grasp the full significance of the essay on the first read, and so my understanding of The Six Elements is very awkward at this point; but I can at least glean the thumbnail sketch: The application of the Aristotelian model of drama, and our understanding of what makes it work, as it’s applied to our relationship with computers. Interestingly, in our seminar there’s this recurring concept of “agency” that is once again articulated by Laurel.

To my thinking, the agency Laurel’s talking about as it relates specifically to character and thought gets to the heart of our expectations about “the ways in which things should work or exactly how they have gone awry” in computer design (I’m thinking less about computer games than native functionality, though). By the way, Sherry brilliantly explains how we build these expectations into our gadgets, even beyond the point of practical use to fulfill our understanding–or need–for what Laurel might call the full “spectacle” or “performance” of the machine:

It seems that our tendencies towards presupposed existence of spaces which exist in their entirety extend to the outer representations of our machines, not just the inner workings of them.

This phrase alone makes Laurel’s essay come alive for me! Aptly titled “Anthropomorphism,” Sherry’s post once again moves us closer to considering the fine line between humans and computers and our desire to make them into our own image.

Speaking of, another thing in Laurel’s essay that really jumps out at me is the idea of consistency in character, and how–just as in stories–inconsistencies in the user experience violate something akin to dramatic order. Laurel’s example of the spell-check-gone-bad illustrates how even well-intended features in computing can, without our prior knowledge of them, upset this innate sense of order if “this behavior is not represented to you in some way … ” (Where this is concerned, Microsoft is king IMHO. Animated paper clips emerging unexpectedly to *help* you?! But to be fair, Apple’s auto-correct feature on the iPhone is just as disruptive). Laurel’s point is well taken: When agency, thought, and character all conspire against the viewer-user, the result is either a really bad B movie or a horribly designed computer application.

Finally, Laurel points out something that really resonates with me, and it reminds me why I’m the kind of person who never, ever starts watching a movie in the middle (and, I think, why I’m also not much of a gamer since I generally don’t have the time to understand the complexities of modern video and alternate reality games). I think what Laurel is saying is that, whether you’re watching Dr. Zhivago or playing World of Warcraft, full enjoyment of the interactive experience depends on one’s expectations of what that experience should be–via the Aristotlean model, if you like–and then how well the experience conforms to those expectations. To illustrate this concept as it applies to computing, Laurel uses her Macintosh as an example:

My favorite Macintosh example is an error message that I sometimes encounter while running Multifinder: “Excel (or some other application) has unexpectedly quit.” “Well,” I usually reply, “the capricious little bastard!” Providing graceful beginnings and ending for human-computer activities is most often a nontrivial problem …

Nontrivial, indeed.

My favorite part of The Last Lecture, which to me is also the most moving part, is the twist ending: Randy Pausch head-faking all of us into believing that his 76-minute aphoristic speech was intended primarily for the general audience.

Oddly, after yesterday’s seminar–to date, the most poignant for me–I began to feel this same sense of being pleasantly (and movingly) hoodwinked. Something about Bill Viola’s essay and the wonderful commentary provided by my colleagues and presenters Jim Kendrick and Rob Rogers crystallized something in my brain. To their credit, I don’t think I could have teased out as much meaning from Viola without their presentation. Another read of “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is surely in order. To Gardner’s credit, sequencing the Viola essay after McLuhan was a stroke of genius.

In doing the required readings for NMFS and blogging haphazardly, and in listening to presentations and ideas being brought forth about the many topics we’ve investigated, my assumption has been that the proper focus of this class is the New Media itself. Like the typical student, I’ve progressed through readings and discussions with a lingering refrain in my head that goes, “Ok, so that’s interesting. But what’s the most important thing about this? What do I take away from all this?”

After yesterday’s seminar, something clicked. I had a mind splinter all evening and into this morning. Call it a moment of clarity, if you like, but I think I’m at the precipice of real understanding here. The most startling realization for me is that we have, in fact, been head-faked: This class is NOT about New Media at all. It’s about Us (with a capital ‘u’). It’s about our need for finding meaning in everything that we do and see and hear, and it’s about HOW we go about constructing that meaning for ourselves, cognitively speaking. It’s about the human brain–although, “mind” sounds better to me–and how it devours everything in the pursuit of truth and beauty “steadily and without any resistance.” It’s about how memory and the act of remembering IS like art: Every waking hour, we’re constantly editing, rearranging, and combining our memories all for the sake of telling stories and teasing out meaning from life. And it’s about how we instinctively and incessantly project those cognitive tendencies into the material world in the form of media, all again for the sake of making sense of it all.

But this is a class about New Media, after all. So what’s the point? The point is this: For the first time in human history, we have the most complete and elegant mechanism for extending our minds–THE most important part of ourselves–into the material world. Beholding the Internet with all of its attendant weirdness and beauty is like standing back from your own brain as you would admire it in some glass case in a museum: There we are, perfectly externalized in technological form, warts and all! (Only, you’re not looking at just your brain, but a billion others, too).

Marshall McLuhan writes that “We become what we behold,” but I’d wager the opposite is just as true: That what we behold becomes us. As Viola demonstrates with his water wall technology via video in “Ocean Without A Shore,” the better technology becomes, the more it enables us to convey ideas like the thin wall separating life and death, for example, exactly as that idea might have occured in a dream. That’s to say nothing of the fact that, not only can we now map our minds into our own data spaces; we can also connect to shared data spaces and take advantage of collective intelligence and creativity that exists there.

Again, my mind goes back to McLuhan. I can finally understand why modern computing as a medium (although, to be correct, it should be “media” because computers allow us to call on all media at once) is conceptually more important than all the bits and bytes that make it possible–or more important than all the individual tools and services that we as educators and technologists feel compelled to incorporate into the classroom. As for the message:

” … the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change
of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

The standard response of the technophobe is that computers are making us all into robots. But if like McLuhan we accept the notion that any medium’s message alters the scale of our sense ratios to the extent individual senses are emphasized over others, then the greatest promise of our digital age is that the Internet may in fact help to make us more fully human since it represents our collective brains “externalized in technological form.” It means that learning and creating with New Media means we are doing something more fundamentally innate and human than if we were locked away in our own rooms reading the printed page. And I think this is what everyone from Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay were getting at in their individual essays when they pointed to the power of computing and its ability to more fully replicate our thought patterns and the promise that it could make us smarter by allowing us to collaborate more richly.

Finally, I came away with another notion yesterday that’s harder to verbalize or pin down in a single blog post, but it has something to do with how life is really a lot like art. Every breath represents another opportunity to create, to remember, edit, and rearrange our own stories and ideas in our own data spaces to find meaning. What’s even better is that I can now share my data space with you, just as you can share yours with me.

Literally. For those of you wanting to finish “Personal Dynamic Media,” you may get the complete version here: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf. The online version of this article contains the rest of the conclusion, which speculates about the possible downsides of the Dynabook’s general appeal:

The total range of possible users is so great that any attempt to specifically anticipate their needs in the design of the Dynabook would end in a disastrous feature-laden hodgepodge which would not be really suitable for anyone.

While modern-day OS’s may not be exactly “disatrous,” most of them come pre-bloated with features not everyone will use, and most don’t provide intuitive resources for programming custom tools a la the Dynabook (can’t speak to Linux). Kay and Goldberg’s SmallTalk language, however, was meant to combat this problem–it would provide a means by which bootstrapping users could program their own tools:

… [A] great deal of effort has been put into providing both endless possibilities and easy tool-making through the Smalltalk programming language. … The burden of system design and specification is transferred to the user. This approach will only work if we do a very careful and comprehensive job of providing a general medium of communication which will allow ordinary users to casually and easily describe their desires for a specific tool.

Alas, nothing like SmallTalk exists today. Sure, Macintosh users have Automator, an application that lets users of OSX program AppleScript visually, and I suppose if you were really into punishment you’d immerse yourself in MicroSoft’s Visual Basic programming language, but the sad part is that both of these scripting languages–presumably, the only end-user tools for programming the world’s two most ubiquitous desktop operating systems–are merely meant to program event sequences, not design personal “metamedia.”

Interestingly, more opportunities for bootstrapping seem to exist within the world of mobile devices, where the growing popularity of Android, Google’s open-source OS for mobile phones, is giving would-be developers a ray of hope.

Here is a really good post that I read at another blog. It takes a recent development within the porn industry and makes some intriguing (and I think appropriate) comments about our society as a whole. Here is the link to the blog:

http://qideas.org/blog/meet-roxxxy.aspx