There are now no less than five pages between me and freedom (Whoopeeee!!!).
I'm back with old Foucault, this time joined by his friend Habermas, and we're putting our heads together to come up with something about social rationalization. I'm still trying to figure out what social rationalization is, let alone what I think about it. Needless to say, I'll be burning the midnight oil.
Meanwhile, my computer emergency dialogue box just popped up to let me know that my hard drive, which I labeled "Lulu's Brain," is dangerously full and that I should back up my information. This issue could prove disastrous and yet I can't help but smile at the coincidence. Hopefully my brain has enough room for one more paper...
I'm not sure which one is Foucault in this illustration, but supposedly he is tucked in among these gentlemen.
This weekend Presentation Theater will host "Move", a dance concert featuring new choreographic work from members of USF's dance department (Cecelia Bowman, Naby Bangoura, Katie Faulkner, Sharonjean Leeds, Eli Nelson, and Alison de Oliveira). As if seeing work from some of SF's finest choreographers isn't compelling enough reason to come, you will also get to see me perform dressed like a secretary at a morgue!
This is some seriously good stuff and should not be missed. Tickets are $5 at the door. Get more info here.
Balls of marble-sized hail started to pelt the cars and tables outside the small "strip mall" -- if you could call the antique store, country grocery and coffee shop that -- where we paused to gas up for the final leg of the trip home from Humboldt County. "Now I get to laugh at all my friends who just finished planting their gardens. I told them to wait until May 1st!" a shop keeper chuckled as she rushed passed me to bring chairs inside her antique store. "That's country living for you!" she threw in.
I know plenty about country living myself. Growing up, I had few neighbors -- none of them under the age of 30 -- and miles of country around me to explore. I know about scraping knees on the rough bark of Crabapple trees and poking sticks into strange holes in big fields. I know about ice skating on hidden ponds and walking barefoot in the late spring grass. I know about baby ducks and biting things -- mosquitoes, horse flies, greenheads, spiders, ticks, and noseeums. I know about gardens that change with the seasons. I know the patience of letting the land set the rhythm of one's existence. This was the way I grew up. Why was it so challenging to return to this mindset for one weekend?
I moved from rural Ipswich, Massachusetts to San Diego, California the summer before 7th grade, and traded the time I spent exploring outdoors for time newly spent exploring the Internet (note me doing the robot in my new school uniform on the left).
Since then, the rhythm of my life has been less about seasons and more about e-mail. When I work, I'm online. When I relax, usually I'm online. Whenever I see myself, it's online. Even when my neck hurts, I can't turn away from this technology. Am I addicted or is this the way it has to be?
When we, the Davies students, arrived (finally) at StoneLake Farm for our "logged off" retreat last weekend, I still couldn't turn away from technology completely. My life has become so interconnected with others through it that after only a six-hour drive with my cell phone tucked into my suitcase in the back of the car, I had to answer to texts and voice messages asking me where are you? or why aren't you answering me?
Initially, I carried my cell phone around in my coat pocket, turning it over and feeling it occasionally like a hand to hold. It reassured me that I was never far from anyone in my contact list. I also had to beg Francis Lake, one of the two homesteaders running the farm, to use his "Internet Cafe" so that I could conduct important Foghorn business from afar. Making a clean break was difficult for me.
I think I finally "logged off" when we sat together on the hillside outside the octagon (where we stayed) eating a lunch I had prepared from scratch. The meal was a rather deconstructed Spanish tortilla with seasonal vegetables and a side salad. We drank white wine, ate the tortilla and salad, and enjoyed a leisurely afternoon because we had no where else to be.
Once I realized that there was no rush, the anxiety I felt fell away and I sank into the retreat. I thought about the food I was preparing and consequently enjoyed it more when I ate it. I looked at the chickens for extended periods of time and played with the dogs. I gathered and sawed wood and stared into the fire we started (Francis started), appreciating its warmth against the growing chill. I dug big holes in the garden and listened to the stream. I went on walks and admired the moss on the trees, the buttercups peaking out of the grass and, eventually, the falling snow.
On the last day of our retreat, I was the first one up. I took a glimpse at the white snow falling (and sticking!) out the window above my bed. Some familiar rush made me throw my snow clothes on and head outside to enjoy what, fifteen years ago, surely would have been a snow day. I waited for the first person (Lis) to return from the frost-covered outhouse and then lobbed a big snowball at her from the other side of the octagon. Instead of editing Foghorn submissions that morning, I had nothing else to do but throw snowballs at unwitting victims. It was great!
Our trip to Stonelake Farm was a return to a simpler way of life that I didn't know I needed. It felt wholesome. As we packed the cars to leave, I secretly wished we would get stuck in the snow.
Guest speaker Alexander was simply talking about www.twitter.com, a site that encourages individuals to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of brief, frequent answers to the question "What are you doing?" These exchanges are known by those who use the site as "tweets."
Alexander is definitely a frequent tweeter. Even as he lectured us on pedagogy and Web 2.0., tweets of various hellos from around the world scrolled on the projected computer screen behind him.
The long-haired, bearded technology buff was visiting USF from his home in snowy rural Vermont, where he conducts research primarily on mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. "It's fun to lecture on 3D technology and then go off and chop wood for an hour," Alexander said.
Reflecting his easy-going approach to technology, Alexander followed discussion of "Connectivism" (G. Siemens, 2004) and "Wikipedagogies" by taking us to the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. "Web 2.0 is easier than web 1.0," he said.
If that's true, then I should have no problem disintermediating my A-list web services and designing social folksonomies later this week.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Brewster Kahle takes us way back with the Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian at the non-profit Internet Archive, stopped by USF to speak with the Davies students and friends last Thursday. Kahle also helps direct the Open Content Alliance, a collaborative effort among a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.
Kahle noted that, with Web 2.0, there is a desire to share information that we need to explore now because "we could lost it really quite quickly," he said.
"Knowledge available to everyone is a possibility," said Kahle, " but the political will to live in an open environment is missing from society." Kahle believes in "Universal Access to all knowledge" -- free information to all. "Free as in beer, free as in speech," he said. Kahle works towards this end by focusing on archiving texts, audio, moving images, and software on the web. "We live in an unexamined world," he said.
One of his primary projects is digitizing texts so they can be accessed and easily reprinted. So far he has up to 300,000 books in eight collections. Many of these digitized books are printed out for only $1 a book by the Book Mobile, a library on wheels. He is setting his sights on digitizing the Library of Congress, which houses 26,000,000 unique texts.
The Internet Archive is also home to recordings of 40,000 concerts and 2,500 bands that range from The Grateful Dead to chamber music and 55,000 moving images in 100 collections. These videos tend to be "those films that they showed you in junior high when you had a substitute teacher," Kahle said. This would include things like drive-in movie ads and tobacco industry videos. "It's an influential medium that almost always goes unexamined," he said. Additionally, the site has been recording television 24 hours a day for the last eight years.
One of the most interesting and popular projects the Internet Archive has done is the "Wayback Machine," which takes a snapshot of every page on the internet (with some exceptions) every two months. It has been operating since 1996 and "it's getting pretty big, " said Kahle. It now houses 2 PB of stuff.
Should the Internet be public or private? Open or proprietary?
"How we communicate across generations is in our artifacts. We are in our most interesting phase in the battle over the internet. It's got to be public or we will perish," Kahle said. "Universal access can be one of the greatest achievements; our generation's gift. All you need is curiosity."
This blog is about me, my friends, my family, my teachers, my enemies, my pitfalls, my curiosities, my findings, my hopes, my fears. It's about all the funny little things I encounter in the places I visit and the lessons I learn along the way.
Posts
