creativity/machine

Category: literacy

  • vernacular literacy

    I don’t want ‘vernacular’ to become another ubiquitous adjective that I just stick in front of every ‘traditional’ cultural category, just like ‘e’ went in front of every Foucauldian discourse/institution 10 years ago (e-education, e-medicine, e-government). Especially considering that I’ve only recently added Nava’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism‘ to the pile of readings for my thesis on…

  • hackability and adaptive design

    I sometimes talk about a tension between ‘usability and hackability‘, and somewhat pessimistically about how, most of the time, technology (in the broadest, most social sense of the word) teaches us what we should do with it, and how we should do those things. I need to get more across current thinking in interaction design/critical…

  • the uses of participation

    Ross Mayfield has made a nice graph of a continuum of participation in social software and online communities: I use something similar in my PhD, talking more specifically about ‘creative’ and ‘network’ literacies. But I was struck by the way that the continuum moves from ‘passive’ consumption through to mastery and control. Something that I’ve…

  • ‘more than a mere assemblage of moviemaking information’

    Thank you Glen for sending me this little treasure which I found in my in-tray this morning – for that you are a prince among men. I’ve also uploaded the first two pages of one of the many fabulous example storyboards that the book includes in glossy colour. It’s called ‘Laura’s Seventh Birthday’, and it’s…

  • the gendered act of reading

    There is much to enjoy at Kristine Steenbergh’s blog Earmarks in Early Modern Culture, but today I especially noticed the gender of reading (lots of great images, too). It draws out in longhand what Jeanette Winterson sketches in breathtaking shorthand for Marylin, reading Ulysses in the sun. But I wonder how this other image of…

  • post-humanism and the phonograph

    I won’t even bother to pretend to rehearse the endless determinism vs. agency debate problem, but here is Nicholas Gane on Kittler on technology: Gane, Nicholas. Radical Post-humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 3, 25-41 (2005) (citations removed for the sake of nice clean copy) Kittler…

  • (not) like sweeping powder over glass

    Some things about typewriters and the corporeality of the mechanical and the sensuality of literacy: Typing means “taking foolish chances with words”: Typing represents to me the work of writing, of striking the physical world, and in so doing, changing it. Writing on a laptop (as I did to write this) is like sweeping powder…

  • AoIR Panel

    [Apologies for loooooong blockquotes] I recently received word that the AoIR 7.0 panel I’m organising with Melissa Gregg, Sal Humphreys, David Berry and Christina Spurgeon has been accepted. The title of the panel is ‘Creativity and its Discontents: Critical Perspectives on the Cultural Economy of New Media’, and here’s the abstract: In recent years there…

  • on having nothing to say

    I’ve been in one of my quiet moods lately – plenty to think about and contemplate, but nothing pressing to say. But if you have a blog (and a million emails to answer) it is hard not to feel pressure from the imagined audience or potential respondent to say something, just to mark presence (kind…