14 – 16 november: another chance to follow the RFID-workshop at Mediamatic in Amsterdam: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html — it’s not booked-out yet & it’s a chance, as well, to hear the opinions of & about the projects of Timo Arnall and Julian Bleecker (http://research.techkwondo.com/); as well as Rob van Kranenburg (http://robvankranenburgs.wordpress.com/, and, yes, me.

Good reader online too: http://www.mediamatic.net/article-9691-en.html.

Btw at the public library in Amsterdam the RFID-system is installed and working & I must say, the first few times one borrows books now, it feels truly like magic. Scan your library card. Put books in two stacks on the lending table. Table ‘says’: “Are there indeed 8 books on the table?”. If the number is correct, push ‘Yes”. Books are lent to you. Takes less than 30, well, 20 seconds.

Jan van Eyck goes Second Life — led (& initiated) by Hinrich Sachs, on Friday 27th October, 5 euro entrance, 21.30 – 3.00. http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_3_events_info/arc_06_galanightofthecannibals.html

Just now read Jodi Dean’s paper on blogging for Hyperpolis. Very good, makes quite a few points I would’ve liked to make. I hope it’s allright with her that I already ‘reblog’ & pick some quotes (btw, these quotes do not capture her main point really):

“To be sure, words beyond control are a noted feature of writing. Academics, journalists, and bookwriters have long been familiar with the ways our words take on a life of their own. Blogging accentuates this new life. It makes more people aware of the ways that their words are not theirs.”

“Bloggers imagine communities. In part, they mark this imagining with their link lists. Yet, these lists are as (if not more) changing, uncertain, and porous as any other border.”

“My experience with blogs is that they allow for slower reflection, the emergence of spaces of affinity through specialized writing, and the experience of a presentation and cultivation of a self. These three attributes of blogs—reflection, affinity, self-cultivation—necessarily traverse the old liberal division of the world into public and private spheres.”

“A critical theory of blogging cannot extend out of presumptions of journalism, punditry, and relations to mainstream media. Instead, it has to begin from the communicative practices specific to blogging, practices that install confrontations with difference, with otherness.”

From Jodi Dean, Blogging Difference, 2006, paper for Hyperpolis, see http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/10/blogging_differ.html.

With regard to the last point I cite here — basically Jodi Dean’s conclusion — I agree in principle that yes, a critical theory of blogging should start with looking at communicative practices that are specific to blogging. But there are various types of blogs: some are focussed on conversations, some (like that of Jodi Dean) are indeed confrontations with the other (but isn’t all talk, and all writing in a sense a confrontation with otherness?) And then there are also the blogs, (notably some early ones) that are not conversational at all, that do not even want the confrontation, or who prefer to not even look at comments, if there are any. (Hey, why do I write this here and not in the comments of Jodi Dean’s blog? That characterizes me…. — supposing that trackbacking does the job?). Two extremes: there’s the blog as ‘my turf’, ‘my voice’ — and there’s the blog as an invitation to chat. And on a lot of blogs there’s not much ‘otherness’ of ‘confrontation’ going on… I should say that Jodi Dean tackles this issue as well in her paper (and looks at how a blog is also ‘me talking’), yet she emphasises the confrontation with otherness where I’d put more emphasis on the ‘publish for no public’-aspect.

Monday at DNK, Amsterdam: No-Input-Night, with a.o. Lucio Capece — Toshimaru (Toshio) Nakamura: http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com/.

Yours truly still has to come up with a bit of publicity text … Though I like the mention that the no-input mixer is such a hip instrument that it doesn’t have a page on wikipedia.

Listening now to a duo of Capece and Yannis Kyriakides; free download here:
http://www.audiotong.net/audio/releases/tng3005-en.html
http://www.audiotong.net/audio/releases/tng1010-en.html.

“Tech refuseniks will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.”

Sez a study by PEW Internet Research: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/188/report_display.asp.

Also at PEW, the fairly extensive survey of (American) bloggers from last July — often referred to since then: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp. “A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers”. What is ‘funny’ though is that quite a few of the respondents stated they use MySpace for blogging, and none WordPress, MoveableType &c.

And just in: a small report on the buzzword web2.0: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/189/report_display.asp.

The transliteracies-project, led by Alan Liu: http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/category/research-project/. Don’t think I linked it before, from here.

Just a quick ‘reminder’: the web has been around for 15 years now… since August 6th 1991.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm.

And in a sense it is still so crude… Things that people 15 years ago thought would be easy to do in 15 years time, is still impossible or difficult. We have MySpace where we’d hoped (well I certainly did) to have good and usable authoring tools to deal with the richness of texts, images, music on the web. But what do we do, we copy them and throw them into separate folders into folders.

Look at Sophie, a software project of the Institute for Future of the Book to understand what I’m getting at: http://www.futureofthebook.org/sophie/SophieIntro.pdf. I’m afraid I have to say that I don’t think Sophie will succeed (I mean: become successful = widely used), but the complaints voiced in it are spot on.

(I try to use VoodooPad, I tried DevonThink, I am blogging, but still everything is a mess until I write / have to write a text for a magazine, or do a presentation or lecture). (Hence my interest in Knowledge Management ;-)

(Browsed around a bit on MySpace; it is easy to understand why it’s so successful: it’s all about identity-construction, music plays an important role in that for teenagers, apart from the ‘profile’, the ‘friends’-thing, there’s the possibility to have music playing &c. &c. But I find it equally easy to imagine that in 2 years time MySpace will be abandoned, when a new gulf of teenagers starts to use some other service. It will survive, of course, just like so many other profile-sites for chatting & dating survive. (I might be wrong — I’m mostly wrong when I predict something). But it won’t be deemed as important as it is now. I don’t think people generally feel a commitment to a service like this).

Wondering when (exactly) from all the aggregated clicking, tagging, writing &c. a ‘collective intelligence’ emerges, and wondering even more at what point we could speak of a community?

Look at the different, possible actions of a user — from low to high involvement:
– favoriting / bookmarking / clicking
– tagging
– commenting
– subscribing
– sharing
– networking
– writing
– refractoring (?) (criticizing, mirroring?)
– collaborating
– moderating
– leading
(copy-pasted from: http://ross.typepad.com/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html.)

Blogging certainly comes with much less social pressures & social manners & sociality tout court, than for instance ‘hanging around’ on a forum taking part in a discussion. This is my ‘turf’. Every piece of software that facilitiates a link or a communiation comes with its own social script.

Hmm, I don’t seem to get beyond the truism tonight.

Arrived: Only Revolutions, Mark Z Danielewski’s new book. Looks fancy.

Comes with a fancy website, that I do not want to look at since I like to judge a book by the book — the paper tome –, not by the peripherals. (When buying a new book I try not to read the text on the cover/jacket, try not to read the reviews).

http://www.onlyrevolutions.com

Yet here I wonder if the reader is assumed to have some (what?) information before reading the book. The book, as an object, has no end, it starts on both sides, two stories that I guess will intertwine in the middle. You have to turn and keep turning the book. All “O’s are printed in green or brown (bit gimmicky?). There are two columns of text and neither is narrative in the classical sense (as House of Leaves was) — judging by the first 25 pages (Sam side). The text seems closer to poetry, even brings to mind FW — the (re)circulation-theme and well, whoever spells ‘alone’ als ‘allone’ as Danielewski does here, brings FW to mind.

I do not know of a text that ressembles this. Either Danielewski is a writer who points to a future for literature (as Joyce did), — and is ‘beyond’ Eggers, Safran Foer, even DFW — or it’s one big mistake.

Just finished reading Ballard’s Kingdom Come. So now it’s time to browse some interviews and reviews.

These are insightful:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1867982,00.html (Ursula Le Guin’s trashing of the book).

http://www.ballardian.com/ (Look for the interview “Rattling Other People’s Cage’s”.)

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=516. (Shaviro pretty much sums up the good points of the novel & I agree).

Though this might not be Ballard’s best novel ever, it is an interesting head-on attack of England’s suburban consumerism, and it’s tendency to racism. While reading I was reminded often of the scary Fortuyn-craze — sort of an attempt at political ‘revolution’ by the white suburban consumerist masses — in the Netherlands and it seems as if Ballard took a cue from that (though I don’t think he did really).

Of course there are the small “sociological essays”, a few lines with a theory of modern society. Vintage Ballard. The bits that make reading a Ballard-novel worthwile.

The plot is not as gripping as that in Cocaine Nights or Super-Cannes. And if I were a “normal reader” (but what is a “normal reader”? someone who reads a few pages to be entertained before going to bed, who reads for the plot?) I’d complain that the story is often a mess, especially toward the end, the plot is quite unbelievable and the characters are too flat. But hey, doesnt that come with a SF-view on modern society — a SF view that brings tendencies into focus by enlarging them, by extrapolating?

In any case, Ballard’s picture of England’s suburbia alongside the highway, the M25, is unforgettable.