Big Brother is watching...

well, not me, but definitely someone...

Visit
William Gibson's blog.

Quote of the Day

As we discussed Blogging at the Village Coffee House, a young man pulled up a chair, and whispered to the only other male in our group:

"Is this a real class?"

Nope, we're all faking it.

Boing this!

We were playing on Boingboing, and I found this, and was thus distracted for quite awhile, until I heard the word "censorship."
Censor this!



Yep, it's a hairdryer shaped like a gun. For those who want to symbolically "kill the principle" without writing Paradise Lost.

Link to the original Japanese site

Note that the packaging says "Western" on it. A commentary?

And while we're on weird Internet findings, check out this bibliography on "Amish Science Fiction" .
Prepare to be wigged, or offended.

Amy's 632 Paper: Writing Amy style

Topic: Utopian impulse and the Communitas/Scapegoating drive

Intro: Cheesy intro here. Thesis: While "Communitas" is a helpful concept, it may help us to include the idea of scapegoating when talking about ideal online communities.

Bridge: Girard's scapegoating and desire in "primitive" communities: Definition and justification

Main points:
1. Utopian impulse: The history of the Well/connection to counterculture
2. Connection of Utopia to Communitas (def of communitas, defs of Utopia)
3. Communitas and Scapegoating--Burke on textual scapegoating and symbolic action.

Meta-blog

Yep, it's a blog on blogging. From our COM 632 class, my discussion for this week:

Definition of blogging
The definition of "blogging" emerging from our readings this week seems pretty broad. Just as we found the idea of "community" to be too broad last week, and had some trouble sussing out what counted as "communal" in organizations, I think "blogging" will pose similar problems for us. Perhaps we should spend some time identifying what we, as a class, consider "blogging" to be, and suggest some names to help us keep the kinds of blogging straight, so we don't end up talking over each other? "The Business of Blogging" uses the phrase "stand-alone blogging" to refer to the diary-like texts produced by individuals and seen by only a few; I like this, but I think we need, at least for this class, to add some more differentiations. (Is that even a word?)

amylea 14:05, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Blogging as interaction?
The authors of "The Business of Blogging" are partially concerned whether blogging can "generate meaningful revenues" (36)--and while I understand that their purpose is quite different from our own, meaningful revenues are less important to me than meaningful dialogues. Is online interaction through blogs really "interaction"? The model of communication for blogging seems to be very similar to the top-down, manipulative rhetoric version that the blogging ideal seems to eschew. How much "interaction" is there really in blogs, at least the political blogs that generate a lot of money (since that was the article's focus)? How does that interaction affect revenues (meaningful or otherwise)?

Retrieved from Mindmeld COM 632

Who owns this blog?

The writers of Wired's article on "The Business of Blogging" have a legitimate concern when talking about who "owns" the "content" of corporate blogs. Of course, my Burkeian hyper-quotation in that sentence shows that I am concerned that their terms are indeed de-termining the scope of discussion terministically. We return to the Platonic problem: What is writing? What does a writer do? What is the writer producing? Is writing poesis and to what extent can "we" own thought-made-text? What is the "value" of thought/word/logos both within and without the capitalistic system?

Does Blogger.com (owned by Google) now own my words? Or just the machines on which they are stored and disseminated? In order for my blog to make any money, according to the Wired article, it must get at least one million hits per month. After Kari and Lou, and occasionally my father (when he remembers), maybe Dana and Kate, who reads my blog? No one, I assume, and that's just peachy with me. But fandom sites get thousands of hits from lurkers like me--and make LiveJournal and friends quite a bit of dough.

Who owns fandom, then? Strikethrough07 (see Mizbean's site) was an attempt to remind the bourgoisie that the big-wigs may own the means of production, but we still own our thoughts. The problem is that ownership is tied too much to monetary value (in the Marxist sense) for us to theorize owning thought.

The Dystopian Impulse in Blogging?
In Dan Gillmor's We the Media, he writes

Also possible, though I hope equally unlikely, is a world of information lockdown. The forces of central con­trol are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their authority.
In this scenario, we could witness an unholy alliance between the entertainment industry—what I call the “copyright cartel”—and government. Governments are very uneasy about the free flow of information, and allow it only to a point.

A good example of this is, of course, Strikethrough07 (see the fandomcounts page). While I would hardly want to promote pedophilia, I do want to promote free speech and a free internet. Of course, LiveJournal is a private company, driven by revenue, and can do whatever they want in order to please their customer base...but the groups that have begun and supported censorship in fandom aren't interested in just removing it from LiveJournal--they want to censor fandom as a whole. And they want to do it to promote "innocence" or "morality." And while I won't argue that the fics that got censored were particularly moral or amoral (because "smutfest" is just what it sounds like), most fans are respectful and clearly mark their work with appropriate warnings (which some of us then search by), this move by innocence_jihad is an attempt to control the flow of information. Let me introduce a logical fallacy for effect's sake: If they take down porn, they take down democracy.

Because most fans' LiveJournals aren't just smutfests; they're journals, they're blogs, they're information-sharing platforms. Orwell was the first to imply that language control, journalism control, is the beginning of totalitarianism, the beginning of U/dystopia. And the fact that we even recognize censorship as a problem is a sign that there is a dystopian consciousness in the zeitgeist. The blogging question again brings questions usually placed in the background to the fore.

So I'm doing my part to increase the volume, move toward a tipping point of common knowledge and Weltanschauung. I'm avoiding dystopia by blogging about blogging as dystopian consciousness.

Squee!