Vilem Flusser: Excerpt from "Toward a Philosophy of Photography" and assignment

http://www.altx.com/remix.fall.2008/flusser.pdf

Distance

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Remix a short online narrative using both "Distance" as your visual model and the Flusser text as your theoretical source material.
 
Your image/text sequence should be 10-15 pages total.
 
Suggested ways of sourcing/creating images:

• Surf the internet for live web cams, take screen shots of selected web cam images, and crop and resize images to fit "Distance" template.
• Capture images with a mobile phone and crop/resize as necessary.
• Take screenshots of live video chats (i.e. Skype, iChat or Chat Roulette) and crop/resize as necessary.
• Find images and build a profile on http://www.thefancy.com/ t use in your narrative
• Use the photo album function on Powerpoint to create your slideshow and anaopensource app like Slideshare to publish your narrative to the web.

For each image, create a one sentence text caption that remixes autobiography, fiction, poetry and/or theory focusing on themes that resonate with contemporary ideas of the "virtual self," "networked identity," "online role playing," "electronic narcissism," or any other phrases and concepts you research, remix, or make up on-the-fly.

Remix Assignment

Remix "Borges and I" so that it becomes "your" short work of pseudo- autobiographcal fiction and post it on your blog.

Jorge Luis Borges
"Borges and I"

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
 
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Bittersweet Symphony

"Bittersweet Symphony" - The Verve

"Last Time" - The Andrew Oldham Orchestra 

"The Last Time" - The Rolling Stones

"This May Be The Last Time" - The Staple Singers

"Maybe the Last Time" - James Brown

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Watch Rip: A Remix Manifesto

Film Representations of Writers

Sebastian Seung: I Am My Connectome

English Composition as a Content Farm

NPR this morning did a story on Lance Armstrong's multi-billion dollar company that supplies content for the website eHow.com, Demand Media.  Specifically, the story detailed how eHow outsources the articles that are posted to freelance journalists usually for minimal compensation: journalists get paid about $30 per article.  One journalist was interviewed, a person with a B.A. in journalism from a reputable school, said the gig wasn't worth her time because it would take at least 2 hours to produce anything worthwhile, which would mean working for less than $15 per hour (after taxes).  The practice is referred to by critics of the practice as content farming, and the big internet media companies hiring content writers as content farms.  It's easy to see why the content farming is so controversial: in a struggling job market, writers are more willing to take jobs writing for less than a living wage, and the reality is that real information--valuable, rich content--can't be produced like a widget in a factory.  The result is shoddy workmanship.  That's right--crappy writing, crappy information.  In an article about content farming at Mediashift (a PBS subsidiary) about the realities of this kind of work, a journalist (she didn't want her name to be used for fear of embarrassing her current employer),described writing content for eHow, admitting "I was completely aware I was writing crap" when she wrote articles like "How to Wear a Sweater Vest," "How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed," and "How to Make Gin."  She was quoted saying that she "hope[s] to God people don't read my advice on how to make gin at home because they'll probably poison themselves." There's nothing like spam that might kill you.

What's at stake here is the availability of good information--valuable content--for the global community.  How is that possible? EHow uses algorithms to record what people are searching for on Google and other search engines to decide what articles to write, and once the content is written, they tag the spam content so that it appears first in a Google search (which btw is the reason why some critics have found declining search results for Google and other engines).  But big picture, bad content is more problematic than not being able to find good information; ultimately, when words are divorced from reality--eg, when dog doesn't exactly mean dog any more--not only is language corrupted, but also and more importantly (as Wendell Berry points out in a great book The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture) a meaningless language means a dissolution of human connection.  Apocalypse from ambiguity, so to speak.  My Delicious tags for content-farming


Student Essays As Content Farming

The kind of writing produced by content farming is often on par with the writing that is produced by student writers in composition courses on the college level.  Not always, but often.  Writing is on-demand, much the same way the assignments for stories are at the big content farms.  The writers producing the articles aren't engaged with the topics; they could are less.  Likewise, sometimes students approach writing assignments with little interest, especially if the topics are assigned.  Reading them, like reading spam, is a particular kind of torture punctuated by hilarity (eg, titles of essays like "Othello: The Moor the Better").  When it comes down to it, spam content and the average student essay don't do any thing in the world.  Note also that the departmental rubric used to grade final exams in a fresh comp class at my college doesn't measure the accuracy of information as a element that be assessed.  That's right: as long as it's well-written, you could plausibly argue that the Holocaust didn't happen.

Here it is important to note that the demands of the composition classroom mirror the demands and values not only of the university but also of the demands and values of our culture: efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.  Scott McCracken in "Idleness for All," notes that "academic life is part of a larger culture of work that values visible products and perpetual motion" (65).  The student is always doing in the composition class—attending lectures, studying for tests, writing drafts for papers, workshopping drafts of his or her peers, researching topics, preparing works cited pages, and "reflecting" (another activity that is required by most composition teachers, although rarely with the results that true reflection offers).  As a teacher, I feel obligated to pack my syllabus with work because I believe we (the class) have a lot of ground to cover over the course of one semester.  I don't want to waste any time.  I want to see results.  I want to see drafts, revised drafts, and responsiveness to my comments on students' previous drafts and essays.  Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By identified the TIME IS MONEY metaphor as a root conceptual metaphor, a metaphor that even I draw on when thinking about things such as course design (wasting time in the classroom or spending time on a course objective, for example).

             

The well-intentioned teacher, however, manages to efface the creativity and engagement necessary for students of composition when busyness takes over the class.  Take, for example, "prewriting activities"—invention strategies or heuristics designed, like brainstorming or thought-mapping, to elicit student responses.  Prewriting, which encompasses four of the five steps in the creative process according to creativity studies, is a stage in the writing process model similar to every stage of the writing process—now do x and you will get to step y.  When the pseudo-doodling encouraged by textbooks doesn’t work and students show up during offices hours in need of topics, I have on more than one occasion pulled up the UPENN calls for papers.  The message I'm inadvertently sending students is that invention can be faked.  If you can't find a topic, then look for someone or something to give it to you.

Now What? 

There's one thing I've ignored up until now, and that is the ridiculousness of the topics on eHow and the topics that get assigned to students to write about.  I mentioned earlier that the topics that get assigned at eHow come from the algorithm results.  Meaning, if you were assigned the article "How To Carve A Shoehorn Out of Butter," then someone somewhere actually typed that into Google, in jest or all seriousness.  A recent essay assignment in one of my classes involved defining the term "good teacher."  The assignment might as well have been "Dirt. Discuss" for all the meaningless platitudes and overstating the obvious.

The old media model of pitching stories to an editor is one way to think about shifting the engagement from the algorithms/teachers to the writers.  That would at least shore up the tendency for the lack of engagement on the part of writers.  It doesn't, however, account for the lack of accountability for what is produced.  I'm reasonably certain my students would not want to post the essays they write for my class as notes on Facebook.  It would be too embarrassing.

The essay as Facebook update also brings up another important point: our students are writing more self-sponsored content than ever before in the history of the world.  Facebook, twitter, blogs (multiple blogs for many), Delicious accounts, Netflix (where you write your queue of movies), iTunes (where you write playlists of music)--and let's not forget the lesson of eHow--even the most passive user of the internet, what a lay person may call a spectator or consumer ONLY--that person is creating content by merely typing a search term into Google and navigating the web.  We're back to the concept of prosumerism (see later post).  What would happen if the class focused on online presence and students were evaluated based on a online portfolio showcasing that one great status update when s/he was washing dishing (This sponge smells like a hotdog) or the movie review that one over his girlfriend to see Country Strong: Original Motion Picture (click here to read Craig Meister's review of Country Strong).  We can't magically change the values of culture or the university (military industrial complex), but we can give students more leveraging power as citizens, consumers, and producers of culture, especially given the powerful argument made by writer such as Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life