Highlights from blog posts (made more difficult by the fact that I can’t copy/paste from Digication, please bear with my paraphrasing):
Allison  posted that online communication seems to be far less interactive today than it was in 1998, when Donath published her article on Internet ethos and deception–more like a billboard, less of a community.

Aneela discussed the disturbing aspects of online deception and the examples in Catfish (both the movie and the tv show).  She also got me to watch, finally, the movie Catfish, which was a highly rewarding experience beyond what I’ve heard about it from others (as basically an indictment of social networking where one cannot trust others to be real). She also wrote: “For some it is a chance to not be judged based on their race, religion or income the way they would when meeting someone face to face, Instead it is an opportunity to be welcomed based on thoughts and creativity, even though people construct images of how a person looks in their head anyway. It is also true that many people just want to get their voice out and engage in discussions without intentionally deceiving anyone.”  I will say a bit more about Catfish below.

Bryan wrote: “Although the channel of expression has changed overtime, the idea of self-expression in a digital space has only become a proven fact. More particularly, social interaction has been now completed in a digital way not just through an analog or perhaps linear fashion.”  This relates back to how remediations of the letter, the book, the journal, etc. and even the movie have turned what might have once been one-way signals into exploding networks (a Twitter or Facebook post hitting anywhere from 1 to 5000 receivers at once).

Maria questioned Donath’s desire to improve social cues in online communication: “My thought when I read this was, why would anyone want social cues—they are limiting and dictated by presupposition. Yes, systems are possible that can track participants’ behavior, but why would one want to track such information? When talking about a virtual life, the thing that makes it the most appealing (to me) is the interplay (emphasis on play) of many imaginations simultaneously in the virtual world.”

Michael shared a story of his youthful (and extensive) involvement in online communities, in which he managed to convince a listener that he lived in Anarctica. What this story showed me was how Internet deception is partial and fragmentary, in many cases, and reminds me of Haraway and her cyborg commitment to partiality and irony.  That seemed clear in Mike’s example, as he did not set out thinking: tonight I’m going to deceive someone on the Internet.  He decided to not share his location with a group, and when someone questioned him about the one item that he fabricated –his location–he decided to play that role instead of correct the “error.”

Deborah read boyd’s “Writing Oneself Into Being” and compared the features of Facebook to the features that boyd discussed in her review of teens’ use of MySpace.  In particular, she pointed out the increased visibility of friends’ presence on Facebook profiles as a feature that makes teens (and others) more aware of audience; also, she discussed the sophisticated privacy features of Facebook and how these can allow teens to filter for audience in a way that MySpace did not encourage (although they still often ignore these features).

Libby researched the LambdaMoo and provided us with a great screenshot of the textual interface that Julian Dibbell would have been seeing during the days of “A Rape in Cyberspace.”  She also pointed out  insightfully that Bungle’s case is a case of identity tourism, although it has less to do with race and more to do with gender.  (However, I’d point out that some of the victims described in the story were raced avatars.  One of them was of “interdeterminate gender” but was also described as a Haitian trickster.)

Ryn took us back to the fandom communities of tumblr and provided examples of race whitewashing in fanart, even when the characters being featured are clearly raced in the original work.  She provided as evidence several screenshots and quotes, including the example of a participant who was shocked by the racing of the character of Rue in The Hunger Games (even though the character in the book was described as dark-skinned).  This person had imagined an “innocent blonde” Rue, not “some black girl.”  The association of whiteness with innocence was striking.

Anne took another careful look at boyd’s “Writing Oneself Into Being” and noted with interest that the youth studied by boyd did not veer very far from their offline selves, seeming to express a wish to simply “be” online rather than construct a persona.  She also noted that Nakamura seems to think this is pretty impossible to do.  She also noted that Twitter seems more likely to encourage unstable personas because of the brevity of the forum, even more so than MySpace.

Scott reviewed “A Rape in Cyberspace” with reflection on how great a disappointment LambdaMoo must have been to those who initially regarded it as a safe haven or utopia from the limitations of the real world, and compared the current state of the Internet to 5th-century Athens, where a cacophony of unqualified voices led to the collapse of democracy there.  He stated that Internet communities are more imaginary than real.

Going back briefly to Catfish–without issuing too many spoilers if you haven’t seen it–(and I do recommend it as required viewing for anyone studying social media, and I waited far too long to see it myself)–what moved me most about it was that yes, this woman might have been a pathological liar if you diagnosed her, but she was also clearly a gifted artist who felt she was in danger of completely losing her voice in the world, and what comes through is her utter soaring desperation to make herself seen by someone else who “mattered,” someone who was living the kind of life that she had once dreamed of having.  The tenderness with which she and her family is outed in the film tells me that the filmmakers did, actually, see her spirit.  Others disagree, as I can see from angry comments on the IMDB website (they think that the filmmakers mocked her, called her crazy, etc.).  I would be interested in what others here think of it.  I also am thinking of Vince’s final speech of the movie, when the name of the film is put into perspective, and how this relates back to Hayles’ theory about pattern-making and noise as the replacement of presence and absence.

photo Catfish Anatomy Study by ~DelightsJD (issued for reuse with modification by Creative Commons)

I just re-read Julian Dibbell’s “Rape in Cyberspace” followed by Judith Donath’s “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community,” and paid a heck of a lot closer attention to the Donath article because of that. It’s interesting how readings play off of each other to make one notice them more acutely. The first time I read Donarth, I was rather captivated by the descriptions of Usenet and starting thinking about my newbie forays into the web during graduate school. This time around, I paid much closer attention to her research on online ethos, and wondered why I had never referred to this while doing research on ethos in composition in general a few years back.

Let me toss this out for consideration: Online communication forums (CMC) remediate ethos, situated ethos. In the same way that it remediates the embodied subject (as is shown so dramatically in Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace”), it remediates the rhetorical subject, albeit differently. In both cases, the subject becomes less transparent, somewhat in the way that modern art makes its media come into focus (rather than it just being a means to representation). In both cases, the embodied subject behind the online one has deliberately chosen elements to represent themselves online (their avatar, their constructed profile and actions in the MOO, the documentation that contributes to their reputation in a USENET group). Constructed identities push the older, “natural” subject up a notch as those older identities become more visible, more scrutinized–less transparent.

So what happens in this process of “remediating” the “human” presence? What are we making? What are we abstracting here?

Here’s Donath:

Identity also plays a key role in motivating people to actively participate in newsgroup discussions. It is easy to imagine why people may seek information on the net: they have a problem and would like a solution. What prompts someone to answer? Why take the effort to help an unknown and distant person? Altruism is often cited: people feel a desire or obligation to help individuals and to contribute to the group [Constant et al. 95]. Yet selfless goodwill alone does not sustain the thousands of discussions: building reputation and establishing one’s online identity provides a great deal of motivation. There are people who expend enormous amounts of energy on a newsgroup: answering questions, quelling arguments, maintaining FAQs [1]. Their names – and reputations – are well-known to the readers of the group: other writers may defer to their judgement, or recommend that their ideas be sought in an argument. In most newsgroups, reputation is enhanced by posting intelligent and interesting comments, while in some others it is enhanced by posting rude flames or snide and cutting observations. Though the rules of conduct are different, the ultimate effect is the same: reputation is enhanced by contributing remarks of the type admired by the group. To the writer seeking to be better known, a clearly recognizable display of identity is especially important. No matter how brilliant the posting, there is no gain in reputation if the readers are oblivious to whom the author is.

It gets really interesting when she talks about deception on the Internet by observing parallels among deception in animal societies, and wonders why, since deception can be useful for survival, it doesn’t occur more frequently:

Why don’t more harmless butterflies mimic the bad-tasting monarch? And why don’t weak, undesirable mates just pretend to be strong, desirable ones?There is not a simple answer to this question; there is not even agreement among biologists as to how common, or effective, is deception. If a signal becomes very unreliable due to excessive cheating it ceases to convey information – it stops being a signal. Yet there are stable systems of deception, where the percentage of deceivers does not overwhelm the population, and the signal remains information-bearing, however imperfectly. And there are signals that are inherently reliable: signals that are difficult, or impossible, to cheat.

Here we are again talking about information systems, not present or absent groupings of bodies. If there is some deception going on in animal societies, that can contribute to survival, but if there is too much of this “noise,” the society/system itself seems to break down.  So perhaps some of this “noise” (to recall Hayles) is actually good for the system or society, invigorates it, allows it to reorganize on a higher level.

(contains spoilers about Sherlock, “A Scandal in Belgravia”)

The theme was “Bodies, Interrupted;”  the objects of analysis were N. Katherine Hayles How I Became Posthuman, chapter 2, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and “A Scandal in Belgravia” from the TV series Sherlock.  The quote that Ryn Silverstein posted at the beginning of her blog post, “We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system–from all work to all play, a deadly game” (Haraway 161) seemed like a fitting introduction to a discussion of the story of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler posthumanized.

The erotization of the “camera phone” owned by Adler is such a rich topic for discussions of the character as a cyborg (“a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” –Haraway) as well as a pattern of information: “Identifying information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity.  Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another. Each helps to define the other, and each contributes to the flow of information through the system” (Hayles 25).

The ending of the Sherlock episode raised a few of our feminist eyebrows, as the 21st-century Adler loses the game with Sherlock, unlike the original Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”  Sherlock beats Irene in the final round of the “game,” and she becomes a target of terrorists as her protection is taken away.  Vulnerable and about to be killed, Irene texts Sherlock for a final time.  From the vantage of Sherlock’s memory, we see that he somehow managed to pose as her executioner and saved her at the last second.  She smiles (gratefully?) as the episode ends.  The whole thing looked very much like Prince “Charming” saving the princess.  However, if you read it as a text on posthumanism using Hayles as a guide, it’s more interesting than that, to me.  Perhaps Adler was the noise that caused Sherlock’s pattern-making machine (cyborg self?) to reorganize at a higher level complexity, and that was how he was savvy enough to save her.  She certainly will no longer contribute to the flow of information through his system if she’s dead (erased).

Also, we had some postings and discussions about whether the authors are utopian (Haraway) or apocalyptic (Hayles).  This is probably intensified by the fact that both writers use science-fiction works as examples in their theory-making.  I remember reading Haraway years ago and being rather turned-off by the idea that nature was socially constructed. The very word “posthuman” raises anxiety in readers, for perhaps we fear that something is being taken away from us.  What is it that makes these writers seem to be throwing down a gauntlet?  What do they have at stake for you?

Ways in which technology is improving human life were also discussed, especially in relationship to Wagner James Au’s “Nine Souls of Wilde Cunningham” and the video that Scott shared with us about a teenage girl with autism who broke out of the prison of her own body.

I just need to jot down a few thoughts for tomorrow’s discussion.  I read the several blog posts that have already been published on the readings with much interest in your penetrating perspectives on Hayles, especially in relation to Sherlock.

One point of entry/interest between the two texts (video episode and theory) is trying to figure out what Adler means to Sherlock in this story.  Is she friend, girlfriend, enemy, spy, lover, arch-nemesis, etc.?  It might be safe enough to say that traditional labels of relationship don’t clarify anything in this case.  What is Adler in terms of Hayles’ polarities: presence/absence, flickering signifier, information/noise?  Hayles writes:

Identifying information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an Identifying information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity.  Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another. Each helps to define the other, and each contributes to the flow of information through the system. (25)

Other things to consider: In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Maria’s final gesture is to bring together the head and hands (the head of state and the workers symbolized in the presence of Joh and Freder, father and son) to mediate via the heart.  In this postmodern story of head, hands, and heart (remember how Moriarty intones that he will burn the heart out of Sherlock?), what is “the heart”? What, if anything, mediates?

photo credit: License Some rights reserved by Cea.

In conversations about Remediation:  Understanding New Media (Bolter/Grusin 2000), Multiliteracies for a Digital Age (Selber 2004), and “Multimodal Composing: Appropriation, Remediation, and Reflection: Writing, Literature, and Media” (Reiss/Young 2013), points of interests came up as to the weblike nature of remediation today.  Webs and networks preoccupy our thinking and practices, and remediation flows in a web that is often almost immediate (interesting word given the authors’ preoccupation with immediacy (and immersion) versus hypermediacy) and relentless.  Michael brought in examples of game manuals from Mysts, the 20-year-old fantasy online game, and Bioshock Infinite, which has just been released, and pointed out that the styles and focal points of the manuals show drastically differing perspectives toward the media being promoted, described, and instructed for.  The Mysts manual describes an imaginative experience mainly, while the Bioshock manual focuses on the media from a more technical perspective (perhaps one could say, toward a more functional literacy than a critical or rhetorical literacy, in Selber’s terms).  Clearly the audiences for the two manuals are different.

However, it’s perhaps not wise to draw quick conclusions about what this means.  Bioshock Infinite is an extremely imaginative game, and players are certainly going to be immersed in the experience of playing it.  (The manual warns against physical signs of stress and urges epileptics not to play.)  Perhaps the makers of Mysts felt that they had to persuade players to become immersed in their fictional world, and the makers of Bioshock don’t even consider that worth mentioning?  More likely, it seems to me, today’s players are sophisticated consumers of technology and more likely to appreciate the specs; perhaps there are now so many online communities and forums devoted to the storyline and mythology of Bioshock (I know professors who have taught courses about it, or at leat part of a course, and written academic critiques of the earlier version) that it seems wasteful to replicate this in a game manual (after all, who reads game manuals in this day and age?).

In Mária’s summary of Multiliteracies for a Digital Age and the conversations that followed, the point of the text was interrogated a bit.  Is this a template for teachers? Should every writing teacher strive to teach functional, critical, and rhetorical uses of the computer as well as the critical thinking, generic distinctions, and rhetorical knowledge associated with composition? It’s not an easy proposition and less so in some circumstances.  We generally agree that 1) teachers do not need to be experts in all kinds of technology to encourage students to compose in it, which was a point made in Young/Riess, and 2) students should not be judged on technical prowess in a writing course, but on how well they could reflect on and write about their use of technology to communicate something (also in Young/Riess).  I asked the class to think of how a teacher could then make relatively sure that a student did progress in their ability to use technology in effective ways to communicate without undue anxiety.

photo:  “Bioshock2′ License Some rights reserved by verifex