Category: exam readings

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exam readings identity learning theory

Exam reading: “Life on the screen”

In “Life on the Screen,” Sherry Turkle builds on many interviews with MOO participants (which really is a step back in time) to look at the psychology of computer use:

Summary: Turkle explores ideas about the computer both as a new medium of interaction and as a model for the human mind. The computer provides spaces to explore our own identities: taking on virtual personae and different genders, forming online relationships, and working through psychological problems in a virtual space. For Turkle, computers are an iconic postmodern technology, providing us “objects to think with” and simulate reality (in contrast to earlier notions of the computer as a modernist, hierarchically-programmed tool). Additive models for computer programming (complexity emerges from lower-level parts) have been incorporated into ideas of how the human mind works (“connectionism”). Acceptance of this decentralized mindset is leading us from ideas of the unitary self to a more multiple, fluid self-identity (e.g., there are blurry boundaries between avatars and our real-life personae). We see computers as capable of intention and intelligence, but still draw a sharp line at calling them living. Our comfort at describing ourselves in machine terms and computers in human terms is helping mainstream the idea that humans are programmed “meat machines.” She also discusses drawbacks of increasing virtual experience: loss of the public sphere, devaluation of real experience, and privacy and accountability issues.

Comments: Discussion of specific programs (esp. MUDs), technologies, and trends in AI research is obviously dated, but many of her general observations still apply. Other authors touch on the drawbacks of virtual space more fully; Turkle’s emphasis is on the psychology of computers & virtual spaces.

Links to: Hayles (model of mind); Haraway (multiple identities); Gee (learning by exploration)

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exam readings research methods/philosophy rhetoric tech design

Exam reading: “User-centered technology”

In this book, Robert Johnson explores technical design from a rhetorical perspective. His “system-oriented” and “user-oriented” distinction brings to mind this cartoon.

Summary: Johnson explores the relationship between technology and people from a technical communication perspective. He articulates two types of knowledge: expert theoretical knowledge and applied practical knowledge; traditionally, theoretical knowledge is valued more highly. End-users are often invisible in the design process, which can lead to problem-prone technologies. Johnson advocates getting users involved from the start of the design process, and incorporating their practical, task-based knowledge into design. He contrasts this approach (user-centered design) to system-centered and user-friendly design processes. Johnson grounds his book in a “user-centered rhetorical complex of technology:” a reworked version of the rhetorical triangle which places the user at the center; has the designer, the system, and the user tasks as the vertices; and places this relationship within concentric circles of general activities (learning, doing, producing), constraints of human networks (institutions, disciplines, community), and finally large social factors (culture, history). He emphasizes the importance of reflecting on assumptions about technical determinism when designing large projects. He also discusses the specific case of producing technical explanations for computer systems (e.g., documents should be organized in a task-oriented way). He ends by connecting the ends of technical writing pedagogy to those of rhetoric (focus on the user/audience, supposed to be working toward “the good”), and suggesting a service-learning approach for tech writing classes.

Comments: Johnson falls somewhere in between Feenberg and Norman on an axis of “politics and philosophy” vs. “design for easy use.” For non-technical writers, there are still some good design ideas here (though he does emphasize the application of his ideas to this field), mainly having user input throughout the design process, designing with specific tasks in mind, and avoiding a “design for dummies” approach.

Links to: Norman (user-friendly approach); Feenberg (phil./politics of technology); Gee (learning by doing)

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exam readings hypertext learning theory

Exam reading: “Electronic literature”

N. Katherine Hayles has studies a number of issues related to human-technology interaction, including ideas about consciousness, technological determinism, and the physical experience of technology use. In “Electronic Literature,” she explores said genres as a set of metaphors for her earlier work:

Summary: In this book, Hayles builds a case for electronic literature (e-lit) being a metaphor for modern human-computer interactions. She begins by outlining the current diversity in e-lit genres, and discusses the importance of interpreting e-lit while keeping in mind both print and new media theories. She discusses three major ways e-lit reflects on HCI. First, it foregrounds “dynamic hierarchies” (feedback/feedforward systems that tie together objects into dynamic hierarchies) and “fluid analogies” (flexible algorithms that structure interactions), both of which inform her interpretation of how consciousness arises (other key concepts: recursive loops, adaptive systems). Second, it supports her interpretation of where agency resides in HCI (thus, what our framework for study should be). She rejects both technological determinism (e.g., media determine what we can/can’t do) and purely human embodiment (e.g., tools are only important in how they affect the human body), and instead argues that agency is distributed among both humans and their tools. Third, e-lit helps us explore the interactions between the conscious mind and bodily knowledge; it “revalues computational practice” and foregrounds how human agency interacts with nonhuman agents.

Comments: I’m glossing over the many specific examples Hayles uses from e-lit to support her arguments (book comes with a CD with several examples). I have problems with two big arguments on a scientific basis (given, these are not my areas of expertise): the definition of cognition that calls current attempts at AI “aware” (more of a philosophical issue), and the equation of brain plasticity and the ability to learn with genetically heritable change (this is a bigger issue for me, and supports her assertion that tool use has shaped human evolution- my understanding is that this is lacking in empirical evidence at this point).

Links to: McGann (HCI); Manovich (transcoding-multiple layers of meaning); Norman (knowledge of the mind and of the body)

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exam readings politics tech design

Exam reading: “Free culture”

In “Free culture,” Lawrence Lessig looks at how copyright law intersects with new media, and the freedom of experimentation with information afforded by electronic technologies. Some timely connections to recent news events in this book.

Summary: After outlining the history of copyright in the U.S., Lessig describes recent movements by content distributors to expand scope of copyright law. Online content includes traditionally non-commercial culture and can easily be monitored, leading to a trend for copyright holders to encroach upon traditionally free/fair use of intellectual property. Lessig discusses the tremendous possibilities for cultural creativity using electronic media, as well as industry (MPAA, RIAA) attempts to quash creative efforts. He outlines four ways that intellectual property is regulated: laws, cultural norms, market forces, and by the distribution architecture itself. His thesis is that the law should change to balance public interest with the interests of copyright holders. Currently, law, the market, and distribution architecture are all being used to restrict fair use of copyrighted materials (e.g., extending copyright terms, software permissions for use, software making everything regulatable, media consolidation), while cultural norms are becoming more accepting of piracy and illegal activity. For Lessig, the ideal is limited-term intellectual property copyright, followed by either release into the public domain or extended copyright under a system that makes it easy for later users to get permission to use works. He also discusses positive developments, including open-source development and Creative Commons licensing.

Comments: Lessig offers several examples of historic and current conflict between content producers and later users (e.g., radio, p2p file sharing, documentary filmmaking, news archiving), which provide a good historical grounding. He likens the current situation to Prohibition (stifling laws with little public support leading to widespread illegality).

Links to: Liu (discusses uses of “free” info); Feenberg (politics/philosophy of material technology)

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exam readings tech design

Exam reading: “Design of everyday things”

This book could be an interesting read for a wide audience, while introducing useful concepts for designers of all stripes. Donald Norman’s “Design of everyday things” discusses the places where technology and people just don’t get along: goofy door handles, impossible-to-program electronics, hanging chads, etc. (Hey, it’s election season in Florida, so I can dredge that example up!)

Summary: According to Norman, object design frequently is non-intuitive and causes users headaches; users perceive faults of use to be their own. These faults include slips, where the user has a good plan, but poor execution (e.g., substituting numbers, doing a habitual activity by mistake), and errors, where the goal itself is not well-thought out (e.g., social pressure, subconscious vs. conscious decisions). He outlines several ways to make design better, to help users avoid such errors. First, correct uses should be visible: conceptual models of the proper use should be apparent in the placement of parts (“natural mapping”), and feedback should let users know whether something is working. Next, users should be guided by constraints on possible uses as well as affordances (design features that lead users toward the appropriate actions). Designers should also be aware that knowledge about how to use an object can be “in the world” (i.e., apparent from structure) as well as “in the head.” Other key things to do are simplify task structures, design for error, and standardize when all else fails (standard configurations become social conventions, hence “knowledge in the world”).

Comments: Norman offers some specific advice for computer design (e.g., find a balance between text- and icon-based displays, make them explorable), but his general advice could easily be adapted to digital media. Probably most useful in a design context (could include information design), rather than for exploring expressive possibilities of new media.

Links to: Gee (network model for memory, learn by doing), Tomlinson (tech design), Liu (user-friendly design), Johnson (user-friendly design principles)

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exam readings knowledge work politics tech design

Exam reading: “Laws of cool”

Again, another book that went in a direction I didn’t expect. Alan Liu’s “Laws of Cool” raises some important questions about the relationship between corporatism and knowledge work:

Summary: In this book, Liu takes a somewhat pessimistic view of knowledge work and the information economy. He contends that knowledge work, and the culture of “free information,” is the continuation of a developmental trajectory that minimizes history and subordinates individuals (and the humanities, as a field) to corporatist, profit- and efficiency-motivated thinking. In the new corporatist economy, personal identity and social class are subsumed into the team; workers are expected to constantly improve productivity, be lifelong learners, and effectively become “nomads” across the employment landscape. The producer culture dominates life and work to the extent that counterculture is an alternative “workstyle;” “cool” is the “shadow ethos” of knowledge work- the only way to resist while not being able to escape the system. “Cool” is characterized by a fusion of ironic snark, mockery, design that delivers unimportant or information-poor content in typically information-dense formats, and a politics (or non-politics) of the “bad attitude.” Liu especially criticizes “cyberlibertarianism,” which presses for some individual freedoms (e.g., access to Internet, free speech) while ignoring others (worker health, workplace privacy), and completely ignores class issues like social justice. According to Liu, students mistakenly associate school with the dominant culture and turn to (corporate-sponsored) pop culture; in order for educators to break this association, they must help students become grounded in historically-informed critical thinking.

Comments: Some of his description of the online aesthetic was dated (the book came out in 2005). Liu’s conclusion is that the fusion of avant-garde & electronic arts with the historical perspective afforded by the humanities is the most likely site of resistance to the new corporatism (though he also discusses historical critical thinking). I think there are two reasons why this isn’t necessarily an effective approach: 1) (shallow) not everyone can relate to this sort of art; and, 2) (deeper) perhaps the social justice and labor movements, which he does discuss, are more effective approaches to resistance (as well as appealing to a wider audience). Though, in the latter case, perhaps an argument can be made that we need conditions of scarcity for people to empathize with these materially- and collectively-oriented movements; Liu’s book was written from an affluent American perspective during fairly flush times, and maybe these movements could be more effective nowadays…

Overall, this book was more thought-provoking than I expected it to be. It got me thinking about social/environmental justice issues and how these interact with new media in a very different way than the dominant culture that Liu describes. His suggestion that what the humanities should offer “cool” culture is a historical grounding was also a useful thought, and is something that has added to my thinking about dissertation projects in the last few days.

Re: libertarianism and knowledge work, this book articulates some things that I’ve thought about but not from an employment-based perspective. For example, the lack of individual responsibility for the common good and the environmental consequences of non-regulation espoused by libertarianism are things I’ve really disagreed with before. The historical lack of attention to worker rights among libertarians (when they often define themselves as knowledge workers who you’d think would need these protections) was a new thing to think about for me.

Links to: Brown & Duguid (corporatism, knowledge work, changing education culture); Feenberg (philosophy of technological development); Lessig (“free” information); Norman (user-friendly design)

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exam readings tech design visuals

Exam reading: “Language of new media”

Well, class started this week- I have no idea what the historical basis is for starting school in Florida in the middle of August when it’s 95 degrees out and there’s 90% humidity. It’s bizarre: it makes our “Spring Break” a winter vacation. Maybe it’s because August is one of the only months without a national holiday (Florida is stingy about state holidays– I miss Hawaii, where we got at least one day off a month.)

Anyway, to business: in this exam reading, I tackle Lev Manovich’s “Language of New Media.” The rest of my books came in this week, so I have a big stack of them staring at me. Moving on quickly…

Summary: In this book, Manovich discusses new media in the context of visual media (especially cinema) and computer cultures. “New media” are computer-based, but more specifically: data are numerically represented, objects are composed of modular parts, functions are automated, both data and structures are variable (e.g., updatable, scalable, customizable), and viewable in multiple formats (transcoded). It is not enough for a medium to be computer-based, digital, interactive; it has to have the former properties to be “new media.” Manovich discusses four key aspects of new media in detail: interfaces, operations, illusions, and architectural elements. “Interfaces” are important because the mediate the human interaction with the database; constraints on interface design include print and cinema conventions, as well as general computer-interface conventions (e.g., tensions between icons vs. work surfaces). There are three “operations” that characterize new media: selection of ready-made parts from a database, which are then composited into an object; and teleaction, realtime action at a distance. The “illusions” he discusses are primarily the move toward photorealism in computer animation; the important characteristics of such images that differentiate them from photography are that they are moving, and non-iconic. Finally, the “architectural elements” (my term) he discusses are databases and virtual spaces. These are important because they are cultural forms newly characteristic of new media.

Comments: Manovich’s background is in cinema, and much of his theoretical discussion is centered on theories of visuality. He also discusses how cinema has both influenced and been changed by new media. Since that’s not my main focus, I’m skipping this material here, but one could certainly read this book while paying more attention to the visual material. A comment on databases: M. states that the virtual world is composed of data structures and algorithms, but does not infer a rhetorical or political motivation for such things (unlike Brooke). For M., politics seems to enter into the process at a later level, during selection, compositing, and teleaction.

Links to: Brooke (M’s “death of rhetoric”); Benjamin (visual media, concepts of aura & flaneur); Gee (gaming; G. discusses learning with games, while M. focuses on the overall forms)

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exam readings hypertext rhetoric

Exam reading: “Lingua Fracta”

Another exam reading: Collin Brooke’s “Lingua Fracta,” which tries to apply the canons of rhetoric to new media. My approach to rhetoric tends to be fairly informal, because I don’t come from a composition background with a heavy investment in using it in a strict way. Brooke’s approach seems reasonable, but I’m planning to re-read several of the texts he mentions, so we shall see what that turns up…

Summary: In this book, Brooke reinterprets the canons of rhetoric for new media. He begins by discussing three units of analysis: individual texts, interfaces, and broad theoretical constructs; he focuses on the interface level. He breaks down media studies into three levels of scale: code, practice (which he focuses on), and culture. He describes the canons as “ecologies of practice”: dynamic, interlocking, socially constructed and medium-dependent systems of sites, practices, and objects (rather than fixed, prescriptive stages in composition). Invention becomes proairesis: generation of open-ended texts that function as sets of possibilities, rather than as hermeneutic investigations to a conclusion (e.g., social bookmarking sites). Arrangement becomes pattern: usually database-driven, pattern emerges from repeated searches (e.g., tagclouds). Style becomes perspective: the viewer, interface, and objects operate together to create a viewing experience (different from traditional external perspective of rhetorical analysis; e.g., gaming interfaces). Memory becomes persistence: not just storage, memory is a matter of building patterns (“persistence of cognition”- particularly appropriate to Web) and more thorough traditional synthesis (e.g., RSS feeds, tagclouds). Delivery becomes performance: not a simple transaction, it includes both the content and the medium as they interact in a particular social setting (e.g., Wikipedia and credibility).

Comments: Many connections to (non-core) new media, composition, and critical theorists: Barthes (readerly/writerly texts), Derrida (perspective for critique), Hayles (pattern/randomness, embodied memory), Landow (hyperext), Lantham (looking at/looking through). Seems reasonable to look at expression of canons as medium-dependent. Logically organized and understandable (after reading Burnett), making it a hermeneutic text, I suppose…

Links to: Bolter (hypertext studies, Lantham cited); McLuhan (medium); Manovich (B. disagrees with M’s assertion that narrative & database are mutually exclusive forms)

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exam readings visuals

Exam reading: “How images think”

“How Images Think,” by Ron Burnett, explores whether/how images help us think. Nope, they don’t actually think on their own- in fact, they have no meaning outside of what we interpret them to be.

Summary: Burnett argues that images are central to how humans conceptualize the world. In modern society, our (physical) experience is so mediated by human-created technologies that the distinction between nature and artifice is blurred; we also make sense of the world through “image-worlds” (psychological image-based constructs that mediate our experience with reality). These image-worlds make images intertextual- interpretation is dependent on our experience with other images. Our vantage point with respect to images is crucial for how we interpret them, and vantage point is largely culturally determined. Although images mediate our relationships with the world (including those with machines and other people), our interpretation of the images is more important to the images themselves. With respect to virtual worlds and simulation, Burnett believes that they are useful for overcoming distances between observer and subject, or tangible experience and the event (or object) being pictured. Simulations are “enhanced” reality, rather than illusions. Burnett also discusses the interactions between humans and machines, and how these affect our definitions of consciousness, humanity, etc. He argues that modeling communication as a sender-receiver model (or the brain as an input-output device) is too reductive, omitting context (materiality) while focusing on content.

Comments: While Burnett’s main focus seems to be on how images mediate our experience, in several chapters, the link between images and his subject is fairly tenuous. He seems to be trying to throw a little bit of everything into his book, e.g., embodiment, consciousness, online networked communities, gaming culture, models of communication. While these examples fit into his thesis that we live in intensively technologically-mediated communities, his emphasis on the overarching importance of images in each of these examples is not clear. One useful point for me is his contention that images of “unseeable” scientific concepts, while “virtual,” are what make these ideas “real” to people (i.e., “virtual” here =/= “fake”).

Links to: Haraway (cyborgs, embodiment); Hayles (HCI, consciousness); Tufte (images for communication); McLuhan (importance of medium); Baudrillard (Bur. disagrees with Bau.’s equation of virtual with fake/illusory)

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exam readings learning theory networks

Exam reading” “What video games have to teach us…”

This exam reading, “What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy,” by James Gee, was not what I expected (after an admittedly quick look at the book synopsis). Rather than making the case for incorporating educational video games into the classroom, Gee uses their structural features to highlight techniques for teaching “critical” learning to students:

Summary: In this book, Gee tries to make a case for incorporating inherent teaching principles of video games into educational settings by drawing connectiong between v.g.’s and current learning theories (primarily situated cognition, “New Literacy Studies,” and “connectionism”). Learning occurs within semiotic domains: sets of practices that utilize different media to communicate meanings. These domains have two aspects: content and a social group (“affinity group”) with a specific set of social practices. According to Gee, current educational practices teach content outside of these social contexts, which makes learning shallow (drill and test-based) and difficult to apply to real-world contexts or transfer to new domains. “Critical” learning arises from experience in a domain, affiliation with the affinity group (at least at some level), preparation/practice for future problem solving in the domain, and understanding the “meta” structures of the domain (content and the affinity group). Another important aspect of learning is identity: learners have a core (everyday) identity, a “virtual” identity within the learning situation (e.g., student, elf), and a “projected” identity that involves the desires/motivations for developing your virtual identity in a certain way (e.g., not wanting to let your character down). This projected identity is crucial for critical learning, but can be challenging to achieve. Gee also views learning as situated within in specific contexts, associational and embodied (in the sense of embodying the learner’s choices and actions), rather than abstracted from general principles. Embodied learning occurs in a “probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink” cycle; what divides novice learners from experts (“critical learners”) is the added ability to critically evaluate the results within the context of the specific domain they are working in, rather than just from “real life.” Learning should also be scaffolded appropriately to pace students’ learning, and it should be recognized that learning in these contexts is social: different members of a group have different skills, and knowledge will be situated in various tools, symbols, and learners.

Comments: Gee’s work incorporates some concepts I’m familiar with from other contexts: communities of practice, social learning theory, and the associational/mental models theory of memory. His motivation seems to be less about incorporating video games into school settings than using v.g.’s as models of how “critical” learning should operate. Some of these concepts are things I’m looking into in my subject reading lists.

Links to: Spinuzzi (network-based learning); some of my subject reading list authors