Writing About Ugly

As in: Thinking

zeFrank on why Ugly is Cool rocks. I've heard these things before, of course, but it would be interesting to use this in reposte to people arguing for teaching design alongside electrate writing tools.

Spelling error inspiration

As in: Thinking

Have you ever made a spelling error or typo and had it inspire you? I'm not planning to pursue the following line of inquiry, but I'm inpired by the post-it error on my desk right now.

I made a note about one of my classes, but ended up scrawling Writing for New Medea. It occurs to me that a course about Writing for New Medea could think about the Jerry Springer syndrome and modern television, in which the morality tale mixes with the public shame ritual. The course could also explore the effect of New Media on parenting in the new medea age—murdering mothers being a central node in the conversation.

When have you flown off on a fancy after discovering a typo or spelling error?

Katamari as Database Logic

As in: Thinking

Jenny and I have been playing Katamari Damancy quite a bit recently. For those of you who haven't played it, the general idea is that you roll a sticky ball around and pick up stuff that you roll over. As you roll, the ball gets bigger and can pick up bigger stuff. The general goal is that you, the prince (bottom right corner) must repopulate the sky because your father, the king of all cosmos, has destroyed all the stars. (He's a weirdo, that king.) It's fun and pretty addictive.

I was thinking about this game in the context of a couple things:

1. New interfaces. One thing about new media that fascinates me is the invention of new interface metaphors. I've written about this before, and each semester I have my students in my Writing for New Media course experiment with interface metaphors as they work their way through Manovich.
2. Database Logic. The conundrum of writing the database has always been a noodle-scratcher for me. I love the notion of writing Benjamin-Arcades style, but the organization throws me for the loop. Ulmer once characterized one trait of new media as moving the burden of conclusion from the writer to the reader. Working in a rhizomatic way seems to necessitate that. As you write, you may or may not want to organize your bits and pieces into a single line of progression. If you don't want to do that, though, how do you give your reader the information? I usually open this discussion by having students read The Doll Games and talk about how it presents its info.

Those ideas said, perhaps Katamari Damancy gives us a new interface. What about producing a digital project laid out like a Katamari town. The different ideas are scattered around in a semi-reasonable fashion, but the reader can roll from one to the next following her interests. The screen would have a two part layout--the left would be the katamari ball and town, the right would be a scrolling/scrollable frame with the chunks of text attached to those objects that have been rolled: As the user rolled around the town, the text chunks would appear in the right menu. Clever programmers could produce some sort of active linking system that would build links between the chunks that relate or hook up especially well, so that as the page went along links appeared between chunks.

The reader could stop rolling at any time and scroll the right window up and down to read what he/she has collected. There could also be an 'export' function that allows the reader to save a clear .html version of the katamari they rolled.

Lessig is to Roosevelt...

As in: Thinking

Someone on Writing and the Digital Life recently made the suggestion that the early conception of cyberspace was much like the early conception of the American West, and its settlement was not unlike the Gold Rush. Following that analogy, I said:

A key emergence, for me anyhow, of digital culture is the "creative commons" movement. Perhaps the Manifest Destiny metaphor applies to the digital world in this context as well. To whit: as the American West was settled, divided, and deeded, people began to realize that despite its size, the resources of North America were not limitless. Those who enjoyed the open, wild spaces of 'nature' began to work to solidify protections for that wild space. The national park system emerged. Similarly, as the digital realm has been 'settled' and deeded, people began to realize that a resource formerly taken for granted (the public domain) was being eroded by the expanded copyright protections brought into law as part of the digital age (see Lessig's FREE CULTURE for a careful delination of this history). In response, the GNU public license and the creative commons movement each work to secure a space in which the public can still enjoy the 'natural wildness' of the digital age. I'm certainly romanticising the National Parks system, but the analogy works for me.

I like this analogy a lot--it encapsulates, for me, the relationship between corporate use of digital spaces and the resultant legal tomfoolery regarding things like copyright. At the same time, I dislike this analogy because I dislike the idea of the public domain being in the position of the Parks system, which we have seen only survives as long as it's actively protected. What would the digital analogue of exploratory drilling in Alaska be? The re-sale of public-domain copyrights to private corporations? Ugh.

Manipulating Logic

As in: Thinking

I really like this essay, "Why smart people defend bad ideas." Enjoy:

If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It’s the only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life by going to places you don’t usually go, spending time with people you don’t usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for us. If you go out of you way to find diverse experiences it will become impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook filtered them out. (Link via Slashdot)

Best two sentences from the piece?

Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)