The end of print

Browsing through some movies in my fileserver at home, I came over something I downloaded a while ago that I hadn’t watched yet (like most of the stuff I download really…). It was a series of 3 documentaries called The End of Radio, The End of TV and The End of Print. I just watched the last one and since it gives a (superficial, but still) overview over what we’re reading about in class at the moment, I thought I could share it. Here. Grab it before CBC sues me.

How the interface affects my (lack of) blogging

Like I mentioned in my last post I’ve had some trouble with my blog appearing broken when posting through Opera. I think this affects my blogging in a very concrete way. In stead of being and working in the environment that feels familiar to me (Opera), I have to drag myself over to IE to post something. That’s not too bad though, I will do that now that I know I have to do it, it just took me some time to search to see if other people had the same problem as me and if there was a fix for it (apparently not). Another thing that’s been taking some time is finding a way to merge rss feeds, on a site that works (that one’s ok now). Also, I used much time trying to figure out if it was possible to use a moving .gif as a header background image, and if so, how. (No success there.)

My point is, until now I’ve been too hung up / irritated / focussed on the technical issues in my blog to actually post much meaningful content. That being said, I don’t mean this to be some apologetic text, taking the technodeterministic stance that since the technology is slightly acting up on me I cannot post. Another reason why I’m not posting is because I’m a lazy procrastinating type of student that really need a kick in the arse to get going (thank you Jill), but I myself have the full responsibility for writing my assignments on time, that’s my belief. Such a belief or theoretical stance is what Daniel Chandler calls voluntarism; “[people] are always able to make deliberate choices and to exercise control over change”.

The writing space proffered by blogging is inherently a social one. Anyone can read what you write choose to post. For me as a person with certain perfectionistic traits that is something that inhibits me from posting too often, which is a bad thing, and a thing that I just have to get better at. One of my methods for doing that was to create an rss channel where I merged all the huin206/307 student feeds into one feed, and included it in my blog as a sidebar widget. So now, instead of going through each of the other students blogs via my blogroll (takes tiiiime) to expose myself to some social pressure to write something myself, I now feel “kniven på strupen“, the knife to the throat, each time I visit my own blog. Self inflicted peer pressure, clever, eh? How’s that for co-constructonism? Me, initiating a device combined by the twin forces of society and technology, using it to work against me in order to help me? But now I’m only confusing myself here, am I a voluntarist or a co-constructionist? Well, those are only words, definitions that are worthless unless acted upon, I’ll now be a good existentialist/voluntarist and put some action behind my writing.

Must…. press….. [Publish]

Lorem ipsum

I’m having some trouble with the look of my blog in Internet Explorer, the lines just won’t break in the right place, they become too long, and my rightmenu is pushed down. In Opera its okay, the lines break when they are supposed to. My guess is it’s a bug with the wysiwyg editor and Opera.

So now I’m trying out posting through IE, just pasting in a bunch of text to make a long post. Not just any text, but a passage I’ve seen used a lot for things like filling out design tryout blogs. I didn’t know it before I searched, but this lorem ipsum-text has been in use since the 1500s for similar purposes. From lipsum.com: “It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.” Nice piece of info for Trivial Pursuit players there. Here’s the text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Short summary of “Writing as Technology”

(EDIT: Had to hack this text to pieces because of linebreak bug.) 

 

In this chapter from the book Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print, 
Jay David Bolter argues that a technology isn’t necessarily something tangible, an object, but that it can also be a skill or a technique. More 
specifically, he argues that that writing in itself is a technology. 
Papyrus, parchment, the printing press and the typewriter are all 
easily recognized technologies because they are
things in the world, but the process of writing is not something
you can see or touch. Even so,
Bolter (2001:15) argues, ”(a)ncient and modern writing are
technologies in the sense that they are methods for arranging
verbal ideas in a visual space.“

Writing (and reading) is so common and 
omnipresent in the world,
or interiorized as Bolter cites Walter Ong,
that it is hard to recognize as a technology by itself.
This also has to do with the fact that the process of writing always occurs in a material way; we have to write 
on something,
and somewhere, be it pen to paper or fingers to 
keyboard/screen. 
Without human writers and readers, writing/reading 
is meaningless 
as a technology.

Bolter talks about how the technical and the cultural aspects of writing are influenced and are influencing each other, 
and that these 
aspects cannot
be seen as separate agents, but should be viewed 
as parts of a whole. 
More generally, “(…) technologies do not determine
the the course of
culture or society, because they are not separate
agents that can act on
culture from the outside.” (Bolter 2001:19).
He also notes that
tecnologies can be reconed with as an agent
of change in society
without seeing it as an external force working on society
from the outside.
Thus I would say that Bolter refuses a hard technological deterministic viewpoint, and 
that his stand 
is more in line
with those who use the theory
of co-construction to examine how technology and society 
affects one another.

The writing space itself has through the times
been reshaped with the comings of new technologies; the 
codex (ancient book) replaced the papyrus roll, and with it 
much of the 
oral tradition 
that was connected
to that medium. When the printed book came along it 
introduced the
beginning of a change towards a standardization of fonts 
and layout,
a change that has been going on up to our own times. 
This has led 
to a sedimentation of our expectations of what we’ll find
when opening
a book (, or of what’s supposed to be on the outside of a
book for
that matter). With the introduction of the electronic 
medium of the 
computer and the hypertext (how could I write that 
word and not link it…), the writing space is changing
again.

Bolter calls these changes in the writing space
remediations;
the new media takes properties from the old writing space and uses them, 
along with the new or improved 
features of the new media,
to shape a new writing space. The shift from book 
to digital media, 
Bolter says, is turning out to be a
difficult remediation, because ”digital technology
changes the
“look and feel” of writing and reading.“ (Bolter 2001:24)

Source:
Bolter, Jay David. 2001.  Writing as technology.
In Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and 
the Remediation of Print. (2nd ed.) 
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Merging RSS feeds

Usually I use Operas built-in feedreader to subscribe to my favourite readings, but now I wanted the links to the other students posts in my sidebar to make my site more meaningful and interactive. Instead of adding each of the other students rssfeeds to my sidebar separately, I thought of a better way to keep myself updated on what the others were writing. Merging all their feeds into one big feed and putting it up on my site.

After looking around for a while I found a few sites that offered this service. First I tried Superblog.org, but it didn’t
work, so I found Feedshake.com, a very web2.0 stylish site, and
it worked like a charm. If you want the link to the feed it’s
http://feedshake.com/rss/g09snp13.rss .

 (EDIT Wednesday 7th: this worked fine yesterday, now it’s down.. nothing but trouble.. grumble.. )

Future HCI

Take a look at this. It’s 10 mins long but if you’re at all interested in the subject human–computer interaction (HCI) it’s worth your time.

The video is from a presentation by New York University scientist Jeff Han, at a technology convention in february last year (TED 2006). Here’s an article with some more info.

The automated ”post to wordpress blog” feature on youtube didn’t work for me, and one cannot post just any code
to a wordpress.com hosted blog I also found out
(tried the <object>…</object> code offered by youtube). Luckily I found a fix to this problem offered by the Wordpress staff.

Also I,m having some linebreak problems, sometimes the line will break before reaching the end of the input box, sometimes the line will just continue on beyond the box boundaries so a horizontal scroll bar (oh the horror!) appears. This bug shows up in my published posts too, quite annoying. Must search for a solution, or perhaps I’ll set the blog up at my own webspace at uni, so I’ll have more control. I’ll try and live
with the
restrictions and bugs for now though.

Clouds scrolling by

Changed my banner and title to something more pleasing to the eye. I photoshopped a piece of digital art by Cory Arcangel; Super Mario Clouds, originally a modified Super Mario Bros game cartridge. The game was reprogrammed and stripped of almost all content, only the beautiful clouds were left on the gamers TV screen. Beautiful, peaceful clouds, a reminder of carefree childhood for the Nintendo generation perhaps?

Couldn’t figure out if it was possible to use the moving .gif image as a banner though. Would’ve been cool but some other day perhaps.

First post

Allright, first post in my new courseblog at Huin206/307, first assignment in class is to get to know each other, partly by through linking to each others newlysetup blogs; expressing our social links through technological links so to speak.

Hamdi, has like me, studied some arabic (I was a fresh student and dropped out though, after facing the huge workload of learning a new spoken language and a new alphabet at the same time..)

Morten likes pistachio ice cream like me