Exit Strategy, Rushkoff
After careful consideration, I decided that one useful addition to my dissertation is a chapter that specifically deals with the novel. After all, novel is my first love, my initial training, it is what i am good at. I intend to include the usual suspects… Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy are still good additions in terms of performative reading habits that construct the text and they fit into Anna Gunder’s ideas on performing the work, forming the text.
But I also had a brilliant idea, which sadly, may or may not work, depending on what I can dig out. Douglas Rushkoff’s Exit Strategy. Advertised as an open source novel, it would be the perfect equivalent to Second Life.
As we all know, Second Life’s selling statement is "Your world, your imagination." When I was in San Francisco, attending the Second Life Community Convention, Mitch Kapor, Chairman of the Board of Linden Research, who had contributed to the invention of the spreadsheet application, was talking about how he thought Phillip Rosendale was a bit crazy, when he marched into one of the meetings and said "I got an idea, the users will create the content!" But he said, in the end, he decided to support this crazy man and pony up the cash… Well not in so many words, but the gist of it was that.
Now of course, with Web 2.0, this is no longer a crazy idea, but a fact of life. So Exit Strategy, conceptualized as an open source novel, would make an excellent counterpart. But whatever is left online is too general. It would have been super had Yahoo left the original files intact or someone published the user comments somewhere. The actual novel has some user comments included at the end, but what about the ones that were discarded? The interesting stories that happened along the way? Damn, all but five years late. Depending on what i can find out, it may be a chapter or a footnote. We’ll see.
Also the story is about a hacker, so in tune with what i am researching in SL.
Research Proposal almost in
I am almost done with my research proposal to be submitted to IRB. I e-mailed it to the lady who is helping me out to see what she thinks. So many format descriptions, margin, padding stuff. Unbelievable. Mine, ofcourse, does not really fit any of it. We’ll see what she says. Now I need to prepare my recruitment material and write some questions, and I should be good to go. I think i will put something on my Web site too.
Jaka’s changer program, continued
Holy cow!!! I just found out a new feature of the changer program that I saw at the Perform.Media festival. The program actually lets you retype any page of your choice! What a cool concept. You choose a URL, once it downloads you begin typing whatever you want to type and the content changes in front of your very eyes. That is way cool if you ask me.
Convergence, poaching, and text
This morning i woke up in an ungodly hour. Normally I wake up around 6:45-7:00 to take my dogs hiking, but for some reason I woke up a little bit earlier and drifted in and out of sleep as I mused about the meeting I had with my other chair the day before. It was a rather pleasant meeting. I really like both of me chairs, they are both engaging and stimulating people to be around. They are downright very cool and I am so lucky to have them chair my committee. All in all, she sees a great progress in the way my ideas are developing, so i guess that is good news. But at this point, I won’t call it a touchdown until I see the replay, meaning until I nail a chapter down.
I told her about my idea on textual poaching and how hackers are not in a position devoid of power when they hi-jack texts. On the contrary, they are quite the powerful forces behind the recreation of the text, because they are the masters of this esoteric machine language called the "code." Some of them even get hired by the positions of authority so they can be neutralized and their knowledge can be put to more constructive use. She indicated that this could be a significant revision of De Certeau’s and Jenkins’s model of poaching. And it dawned on me… Did somebody say "an argument"? The holy grail that I have been seeking all this time when my other chair kept pushing me to find one? Oh, blessed powers that be… Can this be true? Holy sh*%^t, can i have found one already, but didn’t know I had it until this meeting, or rather until this morning when I was drifting in and out of sleep? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll just have to see as I write this paper.
Then I kept thinking about the ad-hoc meeting I had with another assistant prof from Telecom and thought about media convergence. Cool idea, always have tried to implement it somewhere right from the beginning. And i thought about my other chair’s question vis a vis my persistence of redefining the text: "Why do we have to redefine the text? What will this bring to the table? So what?"
I defined the text as such:
"A
text, I contend, is a form that emerges in, or with the help of, one or
multiple platforms as a result of the reader’s interaction with the present
signification systems in her quest for a meaningful outcome."
This definition does not assume that there is a pre-existing text to begin with and as Hayles notes, it defines text as a process, not a product. When you are talking about digital texts, the components of the text, images, words, program functions, and all other stuff may reside in different servers millions of miles apart. So you see, it is only when the reader begins to *perform* the act of reading by clicking links and such, does the text start to assemble in front of your very eyes. Is this just the digital text as Hayles assumes? Not really… Take Alternate Reality Games, for example. Yes, they are primarily based on Web sites, but users are also contacted via phone, text messaging, snail mail, and e-mail. My definition allows room for these types of textualities as well. And these types of textualities emerge as a result of what Jenkins and Thornburn call media convergence. I think it is about time that i buy that book and look at it.
Performative aspects of reading
I am meeting my other chair this Wednesday to discuss with her the changes that happened in my dissertation topic. I also gave her the heads-up so I don’t needlessly shock her by revealing the situation abruptly. Plus, a meeting like that wouldn’t be as productive anyway, who has time to meet without making any real progress? I don’t and I am sure she doesn’t either.
So when I e-mailed her the general idea of what I really wanted to write about, i.e. performative aspects of reading and asked her if she has any sources (she specializes in performance), she e-mailed me this link to an online article called "Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions" by John Lavagnino. I must admit, at first, seeing the word "hypertext" on the title was a bit disheartening for me. I don’t particularly center my dissertation on hypertext per se, though i can see myself talking about it, after all, it is one kind of an electronic text. The beginnings of the article was similar to the many articles and books I have been devouring the past several months as I was writing my now-deceased-44-page-semblance of a chapter that was put to instant death in the previous dissertation meeting. It was another article on textual criticism. But I read on… And glad I did.
Lavanino argues for a similar thing that I want to argue for. Thinking about versions and authoritative texts, he argues that hypertext allow the reader to perform all versions of the work. He explains that a fundamental condition of reading a print text is that it must feel uninterrupted, like watching a theatrical or musical performance. We don’t want to be interrupted by an intrusive voice telling us about its variants. We just want to watch it till the end. He says reading is a performance too and we have the same desire not to have it interrupted by any obtrusive means of presentation. Now the book has become transparent to most of us and thus allow for this kind of an unintrusive reading. But scholarly editions with apparatus is a different matter. We are always reminded of the variants, the footnotes get in the way, we have to engage with the means of presentation. And hypertexts function in a similar fashion too. Hypertext editions seek to make it possible for readers to perform all versions of a work. Going back to Anna Gunder’s argument, one forms the text and she performs the work. As right from the beginning, I will make it clear that there is no pre-existing text, this idea should not be too difficult to follow.
Perform.Media (Part Deux)
After the reception, I decided to go to couple of panels that were going on in Perform.Media in the hopes that maybe i could find some more inspiration. Glad I did, they were quite intriguing. One general theme was the user input in creating the text. One project that was particularly interesting was the one developed by Robert Allen and Antoinette Lafarge. They are doing a very interesting performance project called Demotic that verges on political drama through the Internet. It is experimental drama that involves the performer to improvise what the user’s in MOOs (text-base virtual worlds) tells. So the users give inputs or type up sentences through the Internet, somebody on another end plays music and switches the music constantly, and a moderator streams all this information into the room where the performer is. The performer reads the text off the screen and performs according to the music playing. Pretty wild!
Here are some URLs that explain this project:
http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~players/demotic/index.html
Here is a link on “Virtual Live: Internet as Author, Venue, and Performer”
http://www.location1.org/artists/virtual_live.html
http://www.location1.org/artists/demotic.html
The next day I went to another panel and met an assistant prof in Telecom. We seem to have similar theoretical approaches in our respective disciplines. We chatted some after his panel and I decided to ask him if he’d be willing to read the paper i am planning on writing. I am sure he’d be able to offer some useful insights. Good to get to know people like him. It turns out that we both attended the last MIT conference, Work of Stories. He seemed a bit familiar…
