New Media Reader, On Selections from pp. 599-798

Once again I really liked a chapter/article title.  I love intertextualities, and even before I read past the large bold font, I knew that Bill Nichols' "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems," would have something to do with Walter Benjamin.  In fact, Nichols drew on the ideas of many, many others, but I enjoyed the parallelism between his piece and the Benjamin classic.  Bejamin wrote in 1936, when film was still somewhat young, and Nichols wrote in 1988, in the early years of video games and the like.  I actually wrote about Benjamin's piece earlier in the year for a course called "Theorizing Popular Culture," in which I applied and evaluated the continued relevance of his writing in relation to the band, Pearl Jam.  Nichols takes it a bit further than I managed in a couple of types pages, but it made me connect with him even just a little.  He discusses the "shift from a fetishization of the object to fetishization of the process of interaction, of simulation…" and I discussed how in 2008, hearing thousands of voices drown out Eddie Vedder to the point that he had to pause and start over when singing "Better Man," the aura of all the fans in a shared activity possessed the aura of a singular, unreproduced work of art.  Or at least the aura existed, the moment had artistic importance and value, even if according to Benjamin it would not have compared to a show pre-dating the easy downloading, burning, etc. of a work of art.  I digress…

When reading about Lucasfilm's Habitat, I thought the discussion of Ultima Online was rather amusing--how game developers were shocked that players enjoy killing each other so much.  I was also reminded of William Gibson, who coined the term CYBERSPACE.  In that same "Theorizing Popular Culture" class I mentioned earlier, we actually read a chapter from Gibson's Burning Chrome entitled "The Gernsback Continuum." I guess I'm a little surprised Gibson's work did not come up more in the New Media Reader, but I'm sure there are thousands if not more people who could fit into a limitless version of the book.  Perhaps, a hypertext version?

I found J. David Bolter's "Seeing and Writing" very interesting.  I have always been mildly interested in typography, and ever since we watched Helvetica, I have paid even more attention to all the font choices around me.  Perhaps Obama's campaign would not have been so wildly successful without Gotham, making the word CHANGE look like CHANEL.  I mean, I'm pretty sure he still would have won, but the appealing font choice certainly upped his laid-back, coolness.  Because writing is visual, it really is in competition with the actual words written.  I liked that Bolter looked to the history of typography to analyze the written word on the computer screen and new media's effect on established media ("remediation").  I had never really thought too much about the novelty of text reshaping with the resizing of text boxes, how different windows open on a screen are on the same plane until you decide to overlap them just by dragging.  It's simple, but it's so simple you don't think about how great it is.  I can't imagine how much more time I would have spent making spreadsheets by hand for Focus Features and in other jobs instead of using Excel.  As Nick Montfort stated in the chapter introduction, "An understanding of new media can only come when truly novel elements can be divided from those which are imitative, using scrutiny of the sort Bolter applies."  I suppose this course has shown me how fascinating I find media ecology.  

I liked how Stuart Moulthrop used John Lennon's lyrics to discuss the media "revolution."  I'm a big Beatles fan.  And, as I have already stated many times, I am also big Marshall McLuhan fan.  I thought Moulthrop took a really interesting approach when analyzing hypertext, using McLuhan's four-part media interrogation.  McLuhan's work really seems relevant to so many of the people who followed him, as seen very clearly in the New Media Reader.  

Have we reached the "end of books?"  Robert Coover put forth back in 1992 that the sun was setting on literary hypertext's Golden Age.  I found the following quotation from his New York Times Book Review essay, actually a quote from "hyperspace-walker George P. Landow, interesting: 'Hypertext: "Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book.  It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism, and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type."'  It's interesting to think of hypertext as only being the next shift after Gutenberg, but the internet in general has certainly altered our society in almost every aspect, from subtle to major changes.

I LOVED Scott McCloud's comic strip about comics.  I especially enjoyed his analysis of perceived time.  It is so great to read about comic books IN a comic.  What a wonderful inclusion in this text book!  Not only is it fun, but McCloud is so interesting and articulates his points in such a creative, engaging way.  His being called the Aristotle of comics makes me want to read Poetics right away, although I have a feeling it will not be as visually entertaining…

I had an eerily intertextual experience when reading the introduction to Philip E. Agre's Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy.  It was strange to read about 1984 after writing a paper for "Contemporary Aesthetics and Cultural History" comparing Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, in relation to 1984 and technology, among other things.  In that same class the day before, we discussed Kate Moss in terms Michel Foucault's writing, and there's Foucault's panopticism in the same intro.  Also, I vaguely knew who Jeremy Bentham, the father of the panopticon prison building design, but the name was more recently familiar as an alias on LOST for (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! if you haven't seen the finale of Season 4) John Locke.  Lostpedia.com is great with all things LOST, including cultural references.  I remember now that I looked up Jeremy Bentham, listed on the site.  CLICK HERE to read some interesting and even bizarre trivia about the real Jeremy Bentham.  I guess it clarifies the alias, since it appears the Oceanic Six will have to bring Locke back to the island with them in a coffin and Bentham is brought in his wooden cabinet to University College London council meetings, as "present but not voting."  Okay so this is just showing me being a crazy LOST fan, but it was my own little investigation of Jeremy Bentham, who's concept of the Panopticon is an important part of Agre's chapter.  It is scary how our private lives are all over Facebook and the rest of the internet… maybe we are really being watched.