To set up his discussion, Sterling begins with a brief hypothetical confrontation between the “Old” Richard Feynman and his present-day counterpart, the “Atemporal” Richard Feynman. Drawing on a memorable speech by the real Mr. Feynman, Sterling outlines how “Old” Feynman viewed the process of generating knowledge as having three simple stages:

• Write down the problem
• Think really hard
• Write down the solution

“Of course it’s a joke,” Sterling observes. “But it’s not merely a joke — [Feynman is] trying to just make it as simple as possible.” This simplicity is confounded by the Atemporal Feynman, for whom knowledge production is at best a much more circuitous and unstable process, and at worst, a kind of upside-down hyperbolic oxymoron:

• Write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.
• Write problem in my blog. study the commentary cross-linked to other guys.
• Write problem in Twitter in 140 characters. see if i can get it that small. see if it gets retweeted.
• Open source the problem. supply some instructables that can get you as far as i was able to get. see if the community takes it any farther.
• Start a Ning social network about my problem. name the network after my problem. see if anybody accumulates around my problem.
• Make a video of my problem. YouTube my video. see if it spreads virally. see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.
• Create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. create some gadget that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.
• Exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media.
• Find some pretty illustrations from the Flickr looking into the past photo pool.

Sterling: “Old Feynman would naturally object, you know: ‘you have not solved the problem. You have not advanced scientific knowledge, there is no progress in this, you didn’t get to step three, solving the problem. Whereas the atemporal Feynman would respond, you know, it’s worse than that. I haven’t even done step 1 of defining the problem and writing it down. But I have done a lot of work about its meaning and its value and its social framing, combined with some database mining and some collaborative filtering, which is far beyond you and your pencil.”

More info: Futurity Now!

Chicago’s Version 2010 (April 22 to May 2, 2010) is “now seeking proposals and presentations about tactics and strategies that help sustain our communities, find better uses of our resources, and maintain and expand our networks.”

For eleven days and nights, we will explore the best practices and boldest failures in interventionist, participatory, and collective social, political, and cultural practices. This year’s theme is presented in order to bring together groups and individuals seeking additional methods for connecting our networks and creating solid foundations for the practice of art, education and social activism well into the next decade. We want to use this opening during the current economic and political crisis to expand and amplify our shared ideals, values and strategies for survival and expansion. (Version 10 CFP)

Submissions are programmed under themed “platforms.”

• Free University
• Live Musical Performances
• The Chicago Art Parade
• Performance/ Interventions/ Mobile Projects
• A Catalog of Strategies
• the NFO XPO
• Version Group Exhibition
• Curatorial Projects
• Underground Multiplex (Film/Video)
• Printervention
• Web Selections
• The Other

Submission form here. See also the related call for papers from Proximity Magazine: “A Catalog of Strategies.”

Via @glowlab

There are real risks in reading the present moment into historical accounts, but I couldn’t help doing just that as I read “The Amateur Operators” by Susan Douglas (one of this week’s recommended readings for Henry Jenkins’ class, Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0).

For those who haven’t read the piece, the gist of it is that the period of 1906-1912 saw an explosion in amateur wireless telegraphy, with boys and young men across an increasingly urbanized America “[reclaiming] a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology.” (191) Wireless kits and how-to guides (some published by the “founder of science fiction” himself, Hugo Gernsback) sold like hotcakes, and in just a few years there were several hundred thousand amateur wireless operators spread out across the country.

This hobbyist culture, at once intensely social — as it inherently involved communication — and potentially isolating — as it required technical skills that could only be acquired outside of the flow of ordinary life — bears a striking resemblence to the tinkering subcultures that have attended the rise of home computing, network culture, and social media. Like the initial “boy wonder” practitioners of homebrew wireless telegraphy, early adopters of computational and network technology have been characterized in the popular discourse as heroes of the arcane, the possessors of secret knowledge, and even potential messiahs. But, as was the case with amateur radio operators, the culture has a tendency to swing in the opposite direction as the technologies and practices in question become more widely embraced and therefore subject to greater scrutiny (and acts of mischief). In many cases this scrutiny has led to calls — rightly or wrongly — for regulation founded on anxieties about safety, morality, and legality (compare, for example, the heirarchically-minded US Navy’s half-pragmatic, half self-righteous outrage at the “leveling effect” of amateurs sharing the airwaves with professionals to academia’s worries over the loss of control over canon or the RIAA’s efforts to distinguish “professional” content from amateur production via vehicles such as tonight’s awkward and remarkably irrelevant Grammy awards ceremony).

Inspired by Douglas, I looked up the 1907 New York Times article that she references in her text, and found in it many parallels to early descriptions of Internet enthusiasts (among many other possible analogies — for example, such fascinated exaltations of the “boy-inventor” now can be found in press coverage of Augmented Reality designers, physical computing tinkerers, Y Combinator whiz kids or certain social networking platform CEOs). Have a look for yourself — the article is here. Then have a look at this gem from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, circa 1993:

Young Peter Mansbridge’s awkward yet strangely fascinating decision to not use the word “the” in front of “Internet” notwithstanding, a final parallel with wireless telegraphy occurs to me as I write these notes. According to Douglas’ account, the wireless boom peaked quickly and came to an end as the airwaves became so crowded as to be unusable. The US Navy, among others, fought and won a battle with the amateurs, despite the latter’s claims that “the ether was neither the rightful province of the military nor a resource a private firm could appropriate and monopolize,” and that “their enthusiasm and technical spadework entitled them to a sizable portion of the territory.” (214) In the end, none of these objections mattered: the airwaves were either militarized or sold off to corporate interests, and amateur radio was relegated to shortwave only (a limitation that caused an estimated 88% drop in the number of hobbyists in the United States). In light of this, could we consider the emergence of “boy inventor” and techno-messiah characters in popular culture as harbingers of public resource conflicts to come?

MIT’s CROMA group brings together researchers from media arts, architecture, and chemical engineering. The group “aims at developing technologies and use case scenarios for building responsive, programmable, and energy-smart architectural components.” Their “smart organic window” project proposes the use of electrochromic organic polymers to enable touch- and motion-sensitive brise-soleil techniques.

A basic premise of this work is that a programmable and responsive façade element can not only be aesthetically provocative and improve energy-efficiency of architecture, but also has the potential to alter the ways we relate to buildings and surfaces, opening exciting avenues for new kinds of interaction and experience, and requiring new skills and competencies in the fields of design, architecture, and engineering. (CROMA)

I’m curious to see what kinds of game design and storytelling projects will emerge out of CROMA’s research. A variable-opacity responsive window is pretty amazing, but the radical step is using such a window to articulate a ruleset or open up new vectors for communication…

I met Eric Gradman at a meeting of the recently-formed Transmedia LA group; his enthusiasm and sense of humor are as infectious in person as they are in his work. Gradman’s “uncomfortably augmented reality” project, CLOUD MIRROR, is currently on show at the Sundance festival.

The CLOUD MIRROR is an interactive augmented reality art installation… Live video captured by a camera and is re-projected on the wall behind the camera, functioning like a “magic mirror.” But the CLOUD MIRROR software alters the images on the way to the screen. It runs an algorithm that tracks faces from frame to frame and also examines each frame for 2D barcodes printed on attendee badges. By pairing each face with a badge, and each badge id with a database row, the CLOUD MIRROR can identify by name whoever is standing in front of the installation.

The CLOUD MIRROR then augments each frame, adding a thought bubble to each face in the image. The contents of that thought bubble are selected from a set of “tags” associated with that person. Tags come from various sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and SMS data.

When registering for the event, attendees were asked to optionally provide their Twitter name, Facebook profile ID, and to answer the question “Where is your favorite place in LA?” In the weeks leading up to the event, the CLOUD MIRROR software sent a friend request to any attendee that provided that information. The poor trusting souls who accepted this request had their personal profile gently data-mined. Specifically, the information captured was “Facebook updates,” “Twitter updates,” and “Facebook relationship status.”

CLOUD MIRROR also capitalized on peoples’ innate desire to embarrass their friends by allowing anyone to anonymously “graffiti” in a thought bubble by sending an SMS message to a special number containing the target’s unique badge ID. (monkeys and robots)

Update: Eric’s documentation from Sundance and his reflections on some of the privacy implications of the project.

Precedents and origins

• Grafitti

• Mail Art “The more theoretical branch of postal art probably has its roots in the Italian Futurists at the turn of the century. They actually used the mail as an artistic device. They sent letters back and forth from World War I praising the beauty of war (they were a sick bunch, what can I tell ya?) but they also used the mail imaginatively, creating innovative stationary, letterheads, logos, postcards and rubber stamps.” (A Brief History of Postal Art)
• Sticker Art such as Shepard Fairey’s Andre the Giant has a posse
• Implementation “Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. The text was written collaboratively by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg with some contributions from others. Its initial incarnation was as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that were distributed in monthly installments.” (nickm.com/implementation)

Web-based ambient storytelling

• The Nethernet “…(previously known as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is an online game in which players “passively” participate in while browsing web pages. Players earn data points by taking missions, which they can spend on various game items that could be attached to web pages to trigger events when another player next visited that page.” (Wikipedia: The Nethernet)

Context: Play and Mobile Media

• Come out and Play “Come Out & Play helps people rediscover the city around them through play. The festival offers a chance to explore new styles of public games and play. We show how much fun can be had by combining elements like GPS, sidewalks, chalk, smartphones, kickball, SMS, capture the flag, bluetooth, and treasure hunts in a dramatic urban context like New York City.”

• Geocaching “Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook. Larger containers can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value. Geocaching is most often described as a “game of high-tech hide and seek”, sharing many aspects with orienteering, treasure-hunting, and waymarking.” (Wikipedia: Geocaching)
• SCVNGR

Improvisition and personal micronarratives

• #sxstarwars a spontaneous re-enactment of Star Wars, carried out by a group of SXSW attendees via Twitter. Variety article here.
• Foursquare
• Brightkite

Rabbitholes and User-Generated Content

• The Jejune Institute Explore the site, then check out the Unfiction forum to find out more.
• World Without Oil “World Without Oil combined elements of an alternate reality game with those of a serious game. The game sketched out the overarching conditions of a realistic oil shock, then called upon players to imagine and document their lives under those conditions. Compelling player stories and ideas were incorporated into the official narrative, posted daily. Players could choose to post their stories as videos, images or blog entries, or to phone or email them to the WWO gamemasters. The game’s central site linked to all the player material, and the game’s characters documented their own lives, and commented on player stories, on a community blog and individual blogs, plus via IM, chat, Twitter and other media.” (Wikipedia: World Without Oil)
• Jane McGonigal: “Why I Love Bees” (.pdf) “Alternate reality games (ARGs) are massively multiplayer puzzle adventures that combine online interactive content with real-world game events. McGonigal proposes “stimulating ambiguity” as the central design philosophy of ARGs. She explores how ambiguous game content stimulates massively collaborative game play that allows for a greater share of leadership and meaningful participation in large-scale player groups. She also outlines how the open-ended puzzles of ARGs inspire multiple, creative interpretations that allow for diverse problem-solving strategies to flourish in a single player community. The essay is grounded in a close reading of player-produced content and their interpretations of the core puzzle of the I Love Bees game: a series of several hundred GPS coordinates, dates, and times that were listed on the central game Web site.” (MIT Press)

Embedding media

• Glyphs, RFID tags, and spimes: see Locative Media Resources

• Augmented Reality (AR) Please, please, please don’t confuse AR with ARGs. They’re totally different things. When we talk about ARGs, we’re talking about a set of practices related to storytelling and interaction; AR refers to a specific set of technologies that enable a real-world environment to be augmented by computer-generated imagery or information, creating a kind of “mixed” reality. Layar and Google Goggles are two examples of AR that have recently appeared on cell phones.
• Ghostwire An AR game for the Nintendo DSi.
• The Hidden Park An AR game for the iPhone in which “…children navigate their way through the park by following a map that lets them know where the magical creatures live. Of course, Trutton’s map is magical – as [the children] move past landmarks in the park the map tells them where to go next. The children must solve puzzles and riddles on their way to the next destination. Clues to the answers can be found on the signposts in the park. Following Trutton’s directions, the children take photos of various landmarks. As if by magic, Trutton’s fantastical friends appear in the photos – sometimes right next to the children!”

Location-specific ambient storytelling

• Million Story Building “…an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.” (USC MEML)

From NASw-512, “Engineering Man for Space”; May 15th, 1963 (abstract).

More: Cyborg bibliography.

via @caseorganic

The Grid

This is a blank version of the grid I created for this exercise (larger view). The horizonal axis represents the degree to which a particular practice is participatory, with the rightmost end of the axis representing a maximally-participatory level of engagement. Individual practices are positioned on this axis based on how I answer questions such as:

• Did my fandom lead me into actively engaging with an intellectual property’s (IP’s) broader fan community?
• Did my enthusiasm for a media franchise or category result in me attending conferences, connecting with others online, and participating in other events, or did I let such opportunities pass me by?
• Did I engage with the world of the IP to the point where I began to produce my own extensions to that world?
• And finally, did my fandom lead me closer to an “active” community of practice, or did I remain within the confines of a more “passive” community of spectatorship?

The vertical axis of the grid maps the degree to which a particular fan practice is “comprehensive,” and addresses the following kinds of questions:

• Did my commitment to the IP or category make me want to accumulate everything that I could get my hands on related to that franchise or practice?
• Did I become an obsessive collector of related information and media, or was I content to merely sample smaller portions of the world of the IP?
• Did I gravitate toward an “expert” level of knowledge? Or was I happy to remain on the surface in terms of my apprehension of the totality of the world of the IP?

The Rules

I set out some simple rules for myself to limit the size of my sample and to render the visualization as useful as possible. First, I decided that there should be no limitation to a particular period in my life; rather, I would plot fan activities from across the the full 36 year spectrum of my existence in the hopes that I might discover certain commonalities and tendencies that transcend age and context boundaries. Consequently, I found it necessary to invent a second rule, namely, that the plot on the chart should represent the point of my maximum involvement in a given fan practice. To do otherwise would have meant introducing moving plot points to reflect the rise and fall of my interest in a particular IP or category — which, let’s face it, would be super-cool, but in the absence of an easy-to-use tool to do just that, designing an animated interactive chart lies beyond the scope of the present sketch. Finally, to keep the size of the sample from ballooning beyond manageability, I limited myself to a single 10 minute brainstorming session during which I would attempt to think of all the fandoms that I consider myself to be a part of.

The Sample

This list shows the result of my brainstorming session. After writing the list (which is incomplete and potentially embarrassing — looking over it now, I realize I have left out about a dozen of my absolute most favorite things) free-hand in my notebook, I then entered it into my text editor and sorted it alphabetically. This is what I got:

• Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Alternate Reality Games
• Anderson Cooper
• Andrei Tarkovsky
• Animal Collective
• Apartment Rock
• Battlestar Galactica
• Calgary Flames
• Chris Marker
• Cinema
• Clifford Odets
• David Foster Wallace
• David Lynch
• Dungeons and Dragons
• EA NHL Series
• Electronic Music
• Euripides
• Frank Capra
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Hockey
• Italo Calvino
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Jejune Institute
• Jersey Shore
• John Maus
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Krystof Kieslowski
• Lars Von Trier
• Miami Vice
• Orson Welles
• Paddy Chayefsky
• Portal
• Sid Meier’s Civilization
• Star Wars
• The Antikythera Mechanism
• The Pixies
• The Sopranos
• The Voynich Manuscript
• The Wire
• This is My Milwaukee
• Traveler
• Twin Peaks
• Vic Chesnutt
• V (original series)
• Werner Herzog
• William Shakespeare

The Plot

The next step was to plot each item onto my grid by asking myself the questions outlined above:

(larger view)

While the process here is obviously unscientific, the aggregate effect is nonetheless a reasonably good sample portrait of my fan practices. As I plotted each item onto my grid, I began to notice certain patterns emerging. For example, the bulk of my brainstormed fandoms settled along the leftmost edge of the chart. These fandoms were differentiated from one another by my level of expertise (or “comprehensivity”), but all shared a distinct lack of participatory engagement (at least in terms of commonly-held notions about what constitutes participation, such as conference-going, fan club membership, online forum activity, and so on). The remainder of the chart was populated by small clusters of interests which represented my more socially-engaged forms of fandom. Interestingly, there appeared to be little correlation between social engagement and expertise. at least in terms of expertise being a pre-requisite for participation; that is, it seemed just as likely (or, at least, almost just as likely) that I would be “expert” in something that I didn’t actively participate in as it was that I would participate in something that I had only limited knowledge of.

Having plotted the chart and conducted a preliminary analysis, I then proceeded on to a more in-depth look at the contents of the four quadrants.

The Four Quadrants

Non-Participatory, Non-Comprehensive

This is the most casual of the four quadrants. My fandoms here are typically born of simple affection. Anderson Cooper, for example, is just someone from whom I’ve gotten used to getting my daily dose of CNN; I consider myself a “fan” not only because I think he is the most well-informed of a crop of decidedly out to lunch major network broadcast personalities, but because he occasionally enacts a kind of earnestness that I find believable for whatever reason. I focus on Cooper here because his is probably the least participatory fandom represented on this chart: for a variety of reasons, I just don’t see myself ever feeling the need to get any deeper into the community around AC360 than I already am. My involvement with this “IP”  is essentially limited to watching Cooper on TV and clicking on news reports or blog posts that provide information about his life — and I’m fine with leaving it at that. What’s interesting here is that there are several fandoms listed about which I know even less than I do about Cooper — for example, I have seen the inside of Anderson’s apartment via various random web happenstances, while I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across so much as a picture of Italo Calvino (well, now I have…) — but with which I have been more engaged in terms of participation. Calvino, for example, I know only through two of his books — If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Invisible Cities; but in the course of creating some mobile phone artworks last year, I produced an SMS-based collaborative storytelling project using snippets from Invisible Cities, which brought Calvino into the purview of a group of participants who might have otherwise never heard of him. While this engagement might not be within the boundaries of a traditional definition of “fandom,” I believe that at the very least it entitles Calvino to a spot on my chart a little bit to the right of Cooper. The same goes for the Voynich Manuscript, another oddball kind of fandom that I have placed even further along the continuum toward participation. While I know basically nothing about the mysterious manuscript — indeed, few people do, which is what makes it so interesting — I have taken the time to blog about it a little, and have pointed to it in other fora, including on Alternate Reality Gaming boards and Twitter. More recently, I have joined in on the discussion around the manuscript raised by its recent coverage on xkcd. Clearly, the amount I know about a given IP or practice does not necessarily reflect the degree to which I participate in that community’s fandom.

For me, the relatively passive fandoms of the non-participatory, non-comprehensive quadrant occupy the least amount of my time, and are in many senses the most easily-retained of my fan practices. Is this because the media properties in this quadrant somehow ask less of me? Or is it more a matter of me simply choosing not to get involved? My sense is that it is a combination of these two things. Some media properties do in fact inherently demand participation — World of Warcraft, for example, is almost unavoidably participatory. Other IPs or categories are more flexible. In general, those IPs and categories in the non-participatory, non-comprehensive quadrant must be in this latter group of flexible fandoms, for otherwise they would of necessity be located elsewhere on the grid.

Non-Participatory, Comprehensive

Moving upwards from the non-participatory/non-comprehensive quadrant, we move away from simple “messing around” and closer to “geeking out” (although, to be precise, full-on geeking out necessitates a degree of participation that will only emerge once we move into the quadrants explored below). This is the domain of much of my expert-level knowledge, such as that gained from my exhaustive back-to-back viewing of all five seasons of The Wire, supported by ancillary research on Baltimore, biographical research on the show’s performers, and even the printing of a t-shirt bearing the face of Omar Little (beneath which my girlfriend printed the text, “Indeed”).

The Wire sits along the left side of this quadrant with other properties and categories of which I would identify myself as a fan — which, as with the non-participatory fandoms in the previous quadrant, raises the not insignificant question of, well, what’s a fan anyway? To this I answer that to be a fan is to be on a continuum. While I have never participated in fan clubs, conferences, online fora, or the myriad other social activities that exist around the properties and categories in the leftmost portion of this chart, the fact that I’ve placed these things onto the chart at all indicates that on some level I feel a connection to the social structures that support and give life to them.

Some of the most interesting points on this chart are those that exist in the interstices. Two items from the (arbitrarily imposed) border between the non-participatory/comprehensive and participatory/comprehensive quadrants deserve brief note in this regard. First, the Calgary Flames: this is the hockey team I’ve followed since childhood, and as far as me and my friends are concerned, I know just about everything there is to know about the team. That said, my engagement with the larger fan community through websites such as Matchsticks and Gasoline has taught me that no matter how much I think I know, there’s always more to learn — a lot more to learn. This reveals an interesting phenomenon: as one moves deeper into participation, the notion of what it means to have “comprehensive” knowledge changes. Prior to my encounter with the online fan community, I got all my Flames news from the Calgary Herald, Yahoo! Sports and so on. Now, I realize that there is a whole underground world of independent sports analysts, girls who go to the rink to watch the team practice and listen to the coach, guys who hang around the parking lot after games to eavesdrop on the players’ conversations, and more. That is, getting involved in the community gave me a better sense of what I didn’t know as much as it opened vectors for me to learn and share.

Participatory, Comprehensive

Just on the other side of the border line between the top two quadrants is the category of hockey. In general, I am a huge hockey fan. I know less about hockey as a whole than I do about the particular “IP” of the Calgary Flames, but my involvement is much greater. For example, when I lived in Toronto, I participated in an artist-run hockey league, organizing a team that competed in dozens of games a year and put on a good show at the annual “Hootenanny,” a celebration of hockey and rock n’ roll that is probably only possible in Canada’s largest city. Here we see a fandom that has fully transitioned into the realm of the participatory; here we see my passion for the puck and music engaging directly with a community of like-minded others…

Fandoms in this quadrant require the most passion and dedication; indeed, many of the fan practices listed here in fact have become careers for me — my love for the cinema led to a career as a screenwriter and story editor, and my deep interest in role-playing games and improvisatory storytelling led me down the path that I presently walk, along which I have discovered such inspirations as alternate reality gaming (itself now a closely-held fandom). While distinctly non-casual, these kinds of fan practice are among the most rewarding activities in my life; so much so that I wonder if the word “fan” can and should still apply. Is the continuum of fandom in fact a part of a larger continuum, one which is ultimately inseparable from the desires and impulses of our deeper selves? Should we reconsider the word “fan” — or, conversely, apply it more broadly?

Participatory, Non-Comprehensive

My initial thought when I conceived of this grid was that this quadrant would be more or less empty. To my surprise, it ended up being almost as full as the participatory/comprehensive quadrant — and with a more complete sample set, I expect it would actually exceed it quite substantially. Indeed, on further reflection, I would like to suggest that in the future, this quadrant will be by far the most heavily-populated kind of fandom — that is, if “fandom” continues to be a useful category, which itself is something I have questions about.

The participatory/non-comprehensive quadrant contains activities that take place in inherently networked situations. Apartment rock is a part of a long tradition of shared mix tapes, crude recordings passed from hand to hand — a tradition that is now greatly expanded and accelerated by the Web and social media. The same goes for electronic music, exemplified by artists like John Maus, of whom I am both a fan and a remixer. Finally, at the rightmost extreme of the chart, we find an online video game — EA’s NHL 10 — that I play exclusively with others; in this case, my affection for the video game is inseparable from the act of participation — the sharing of points, the trash-talk in the lobbies, the intense team play that requires getting to know other players in order to win… Even though I don’t know that much about the game — there are others who clearly know 100 times as many tricks as I do, secret ways to fool the goalies, set defensive plays that produce breakaways, and so on — simply by virtue of playing, I am participating. I believe such intrinsic relationships with participation will be the future of fandom.

Final Word

Plotting a sample from my own fan practices on a Cartesian grid measuring degree of participation against degree of comprehensivity reveals that my fan practices shift depending on the form and context of the media artifacts they focus on. Key discoveries include insights into the new kinds of fandom brought about by the fundamentally participatory nature of online multiplayer gaming; a vision of the continuum of affinity and practice to which fandom belongs; and an acknowledgement of the inherent connection of even the most passive fan practices to active communities of fandom.

Readers are invited to download their own blank charts, onto which they may place their own fan practices. Blank charts can be downloaded here. Send one to me if you like!

Bestiario is a Barcelona/Lisbon-based Flash info visualization group whose projects “permit the treatment of abundant amounts of diverse relational information of all kinds.”

Portfolio site: http://www.bestiario.org/
Blog: http://blog.bestiario.org/about/

Posted via email from remotedevice’s posterous

Some pics from the drive back to LA from Alberta

Posted via email from remotedevice’s posterous

The magic of cardboard. The mythos of Star Fox. More info: http://www.bladediary.com/ (via Urban Prankster)

Posted via email from remotedevice’s posterous

Jejune Institute Induction (Part 1) (via BrettLowers)

LA Monsoon

Victoria Kaʻiulani Kalaninuiahilapalapa Kawekiu i Lunalilo Cleghorn, Crown Princess of Hawaii (16 October 1875 – 6 March 1899) was heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and held the title of crown princess. Kaʻiulani became known throughout the world for her intelligence, beauty and determination. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, she spearheaded a campaign to restore the Kingdom. In New York, she made many speeches and public appearances denouncing the overthrow of her government. In Washington, D.C she spoke before the United States Congress and pleaded with U.S. Presidents Benjamin Harrison and later Grover Cleveland, but her negotiations could not prevent eventual annexation. (via upload.wikimedia.org)

is this ARG? is a social media aggregator I’ve built to gather feeds from the ARG community/affinity. The site is kind of like an amped-up Twitter list, displaying feeds from blogs, Delicious accounts, and other open/publicly-available social media sources — including the Unfiction forums and even Wikipedia.

The idea is to amplify the potential vectors for collaboration and research among and across the ARG community (and provide a handy real-time research tool). Everything that gets posted across the web by the sources listed on the site’s sidebar is gathered and put into a single stream on the root page. I’ve also made it possible to view the individual output of people/sources on the list by clicking on their names. There’s an FAQ on the site, and I’m also working on some more features that will roll out soon, including a way of archiving everything, curating venn-diagram-like clusters of streams, and generating keyword clouds to help with browsing through past posts.

The inspiration for this came in part from something Brooke Thompson wrote in reference to the ARGdb project, something to the effect of wanting to find a way to bring together all the energies members of the community are putting into different web fora. This is an effort in that direction, and also a bit of a curatorial endeavor: for me, making this project is kind of like editing a magazine or journal of sorts, populated not by articles or essays but rather by voices.

Introduction

For some, the very notion of “pre-Splash Knowledge Studies” (PSKS) is an oxymoron. The academic institutions of the time were notorious for being wasteful where they should have been stingy, and stingy where there was need. Worse, restrictive copyright laws and archaic credentialing rituals sealed off important participation vectors and created an atmosphere of distrust and resentment.

Significantly, one doesn’t require the remove of time and circumstance to make this bleak assessment of the period. Thought leaders clearly understood that crucial components of the academic ideal, such as the free and universal access to knowledge, were “compromised by the current intellectual property regime,” and that the so-called ‘new media’ initiatives put forth by most institutions were “about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it” (link) And yet while this frustration was shared by many within the Humanities, few seemed to know what to do.

Part of the reason for this desperate state of affairs was a lack of examples of alternative knowledge production systems that could point the way. As one scholar noted:

[Reimagining the Academy will] involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and [require] students to build on each other’s work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goal since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like. (Confessions of an Aca/Fan, October 2008)

Indeed, despite the incredible advances in network technology and ubiquitous computing that had taken place during the early 2000s, the inherently conservative nature of degree-granting academic institutions meant that official scholarship continued to treat “digitally (re)produced research…as if it were more or less a prosthetic extension and enhancement of print.” Worse, in many cases, knowledge produced in online spaces – particularly collaboratively-produced knowledge – was often rejected altogether. So high was the anxiety about the future that many turned to denial, attempting to wish the unfolding changes out of existence by clinging to the past; in so doing, these actors did their part to set the stage for the cataclysms that accompanied the Splash. Such was the tenor of the time.

On the other hand, it has become something of a Crosbyism to simply equate all pre-Splash knowledge production practices with corporatism, neofeudalism, and rampant careerism. As broadly accurate as these clichés might be, the reality is, of course, much more nuanced. Our research has revealed numerous progressive models for the production of knowledge that were actively explored in various sectors during the decade leading up to the Splash. One such practice, namely that of “Alternate Reality Gaming”, a cross-platform recreational knowledge production activity whose popularity exploded in underground “alpha geek” culture in the years immediately preceding the Splash, has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of our node to such an extent that we have decided to dedicate our centennial activity almost exclusively to its study. By exposing this little-known genre of story and play to a wider audience, we hope to spark fresh discussion about popular conceptions of life and learning in the first decade of the 21^st century. Further, by revealing how the ARG community (among others) enacted many of the very practices that would have enabled the Humanities Academy of the time to break free of its self-imposed chains, we intend to make a larger point about the all-too-human tendency to miss the solutions to one’s problems even when they’re sitting right in front of one’s nose.

Full paper: watson-hypothetical-worlds.pdf