week 6

edward picot review:

it's so funny that he actually asked what wegman's is. my dad shops there all the time (it's like a high end safeway), and i've been there very often. he's right in assuming that it's a real place, and that it's really out there in the world, thereby making this murder even more realistic. but for me, when i read that quote, i actually pictured this guy standing outside of the wegman's that i knew (granted, his wegman's was no where near mine), in deep thought. it became placable to me. i started to wonder, albeit irrationally, whether i might have seen him standing deep in thought outside of wegman's. it made this true story seem even more horrific to me. it made it seem like i could have stumbled across him, too.

elo nonfiction hypertexts:

360 degrees

i checked out john mills's story. on the one hand, it was so heartbreaking to see pictures of this guy and to hear his voice and to see his mom. you want to think that the people who end up in jail are "bad, bad people," but this guy is just a guy. this project humanizes him, describes his home, highlights his mom's frustration with the judicial system and lawyers. on the other hand, it just lays everything out for the viewer/reader. if this were in an article or in a novel, the voice of john and his mom and the prison employees would be your own, you would be able to imagine what his house looks like...etc. there's no room for creativity here. i guess that's a good thing when it comes to non-fiction.

abducted

this just seemed like some kind of journal placed online. it's not nearly as engaging as inanimate alice or 360 degrees. it was more along the lines of aftershocks. the poetry was tight, though.

anxiety

THIS WAS WEIRD. i couldn't understand what it was trying to say! i get that it was trying to relate the machine and the human together, but still! why be that obscure/dense? the graphics/interactivity was really cool. i spent too much time playing around with the visuals. (but only becaus ei didn't get what they were trying to say).

archiving nature

it was so dense in its explanation in the beginning (like anxiety), that i completely lost interest once it had to load the visuals. and when i tried to understand what was going on with the visuals, i got compeltely lost and frustrated. in this situation, i would have preferred to just read something in a book.

[a note: lots of the pages didn’t open. i think that i’m not compatible with elo. :-( ]

readings:

the second superpower rears its beautiful head

ok. i’m all for the individual. i love the individual. but, i think that when we begin hailing the individual as the modern jesus, when individualization becomes the solution to everything, we need to take a closer look. i’m not going to pretend to debunk this article here, but, i do think it’s important to think critically about specific communication and commentary devices that moore deems almighty. first of all, he’s really into wikis and peer-reviewed things. he says, “high quality peer-reviewed commentary involve[e] large numbers of members of the web community in recommending and rating items” (2). my question is, how can i trust someone else’s judgment? their goals are not my goals, their expectations are not my expectations. why would i want information for the ordinary joe? if i’m doing a research project, believe me, i’m not going to wikipedia to find out what billy bob thinks of the history of benday dots and lichtenstein. i’m heading straight to the library. secondly, he says “instant messaging…provides an intimate sense of connection across time and space” (2). i would like to disagree. iming only allows for more confusion and frustration across space and time. how can you be ironic? sarcastic? will you have to invent an emoticon for that? will irony and sarcasm fade away, just like the love letter and face to face conversations?

indymedia

santa cruz art conspiracy

i had actually heard about this before—my ceramics professor lives in santa cruz and told me about it. this is hella tight. i love diy culture—art just fits itself right into it. i added my name to their mailing list for more info.

rt mark

hypocrisy. the beauty of counter culture and taking a stand for something you believe in is that it’s different from the business world. they’re applying the charts and diagrams of the office to the passion and fire of the anarchist’s heart. the two don’t make sense in combination.