:: Death of responsiblity in society ::

http://www.flakmag.com/opinion/classaction.html

:: Long live Wi-Fi! ::

Check out this long interview/article in Internet Week, in which Cory debunks all the urban legends and scare stories that have been circulating about Wi-Fi in the last year.

Cory Doctorow, you're my hero!

:: Happy holidays ::

As you've probably noticed, I've not been blogging much. I anticipate this to be a temporary hiatus, while I recover from a rather hectic four months of school and work and personal life stuff. I'll be back next week or in the new year, depending on what strikes my fancy.

And no, I've not yet got my marks back....hopefully that will happen in early January.

In the interim, during my little break, I urge all my fellow netizens to take some offline time with family, friends, and yourself to rest, rejuvenate, reconnect and smile. That's what the holidays are all about, after all.

peace, out.

:: Hypocrisy, Quebec-style ::

I'm a relatively new Quebecer, new enough that the thought of being called such still startles me slightly. As a result, I have an outsider view of life in this province, and am still interested in noticing its peculiarities and peccadilloes.

Here's a few recent examples that I've noticed or observed in the last week...

From today's Montreal Gazette, the only large English daily newspaper in the province, there is this story about the provincial lottery corporation's expansion into other areas of gambling on the Internet and CD-Rom and their attempts to find new clients outside the province. I find this a bit rich considering that the provincial legislation around gambling in this province is so byzantine that most other areas of Canada don't even bother to learn them and just exclude Quebecers from joining in their prize-winning games...such as this one or this one or this one too.

Overheard while listening to French language radio station Kool FM, one of the few rock-format radio stations in Quebec....the morning hosts were discussing the proposed hiking of provincial income tax in this province, (despite the fact that we already pay the highest provincial tax in the country). One of their listeners calls in to complain that his taxes are too high already and that they shouldn't be raised because they are already all going to pay for the flashy cars of Albertans, the fancy restaurants for Ontarians, the lazy farmers of the Prairies and the stupid fisherman in the Maritimes etc while he and other hardworking Quebecers work their fingers to the bone for nothing. Said listener was obviously a separatist raised on the illogical and harmful arguments of the PQ, or else he would have noticed that provincial tax does, in fact, stay in the province, and in Quebec's case, goes to pay for unnecessary duplicate "Ministere de this" and "Bureau de la...that", effectively completely duplicating bureacratic work that in every other province is handled happily only at the federal level. 'Course Quebec is in a perpetual power battle with the federal government and the duplication is tantamount to the one-upmanship we all did in Kindergarten and grade school when some kid in our class got a a new toy that we wanted...we had to get the same toy only better and throw it in their face.

And then there are the recent antics of the province's premier, warning Montrealers that the city is becoming "too bilingual" and that we have to be careful or he and his government will "take action" against us to preserve the French heritage. This article sums this stupidity up best. Why is it stupid? The results of the recent Canadian census shows that French use is up on the island of Montreal.

Ahhh...life in la belle province....

:: Dumb and dumber ::

This blogpostin The Bitter Shack of Resentment highlights the depths of blind stupidity being displayed in DC these days.

How can anyone believe that there is such a thing, in this day and age, as too many trees and living things?

:: What's next? ::

I handed in the analysis paper that was part II of the project for which I created this blog. So that's it...it's over. The project is done, for better or worse, and all that is left is for the professor to grade it.

Now I look at my blogspace, my own little piece of the I-Space, and I wonder...what next?

I'm certainly going to continue blogging. However, I think I might move this space off onto a server not owned by Blogger, so that I can add other pages, group archived posts thematically, create an area for essays so that I don't have to clutter my blog up with my 2500 plus word musings. I bought a few domains recently that I'd like to start using. I'm also going to learn more about basic JavaScript and CSS.

The one thing I will do right away is alter the frequency. From herein, I will blog when the desire hits. Some days, that might be a few times a day, and there will also be dry spells, based on what's happening in my offline life. Since I live in a project-based world, either at work or at school, if I'm working overtime on a deadline, chances are I won't have much thought of any worth left over to share in this space. Consider yourself notified.

As for me, I'm going to enjoy a rare evening away from the computer, school work, project webs, etc. etc. etc. Pizza, my comfy couch and my hubby are just what I need to relax and unwind for a bit before the Christmas season springs itself full tilt upon me.

Offline I go.

Peace, out.

:: Cool web app ::

While working on research papers, analytical essays and various other printed stuff, I frequently need to refer to a dictionary or thesaurus to verify my understanding of a concept or to provide a clear definition of something if I'm befuddled.

I've always looked to the web for this, usually through Dictionary.com. Until now.

I've found a very cool thesaurus online that provides information in a way that isn't just textual. It actually visually represents the links between words. It's called the Visual Thesaurus.

Check it out.

[ Link found via Darwin Magazine Online ]

:: Struggle continues ::

Is there nothing that can remain independent, uninvolved in the corporate economy? Must everything community-oriented and done for personal meaning and personal pleasure be co-opted into the never-ending hungry search for eyeballs and dollars?

I had hoped that blogging would be able to stay below the radar of the corporate forces of domination online, but this article in the Globe and Mail makes me doubt the chances of this.

[ Link found via Mikel.org ]

:: Critiquing advertising fantasy ::

To add weight to my theory that bloggers are fascinated with advertising in one way or another, check out this excellent post on Jane Galt's blog about jewellery advertising. I especially like the following comments:

In the case of the diamond commercials... it creates the fantasy of a man who loves you so much that he will sacrifice outrageous sums of money merely to buy you an object of absolutely no intrinsic utility whatsoever, and of which he himself takes no enjoyment outside of yours...

..Those commercials are drawn from a 50's world, when he brought home the bacon, and he got to decide how it was spent, so more diamond for you ment less golf clubs and sports car for him.

Well said. And so true.

:: Open Representations (Part III) ::

Closing textual meaning

In Part I of this topic, I discussed how blogging emphasizes textual representations and de-emphasizes imagery.

In Part II of this topic, I explored how this emphasis extends right into the tools used to manage a blog, and the process of writing and publishing the blog itself.

For this, the third post for this topic series, I want to look at the issue of representation as it relates to Stuart Hall's theories in a different light, by taking them outside of the tensions between image and text, and instead exploring them as it relates to textual representations only.

While preparing my oral presentation last week, I mentioned to my colleague Mikel the topic and title of my presentation. He looked at me a bit oddly, and then carefully explained to me that I should be careful in my choice of terms. He proceeded on to tell me that there is a bit of a schism in the blogging community over the use of the term "blogosphere" to describe the entire collected medium, methods and messages that are derived from individual blogs. Apparently, certain "old world" bloggers are not comfortable with the way that term represents the totality of the blogging experience and expression.

This set me to thinking about how quick I often am to use a seemingly fitting phrase, or to coin a new one if one doesn't already exist. The title of my blog stands as an example of my tendency. While I recognize that this stems from basic human nature, in which we notice patterns, group them together into categories, then label the cateogry, I wonder if the final step of this process doesn't actually limit us somehow.

Certainly, this string of behaviour, this process of concept labelling, is something I have always been very comfortable with and I have never given it much thought. I probably just shrugged it off as a personal quirk or "talent" and assumed it was good or at the very least harmless behavoiur.

Now, though, the representation concepts of Stuart Hall, coupled with Mikel's comment and my subsequent thinking have created a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I now wonder if my knee-jerk response to understanding my world might not also close down portions of the world to me? Could it be that, in my lazy easy labelling of concepts and patterns I notice, I inadvertently close my eyes to other representations of those phenomena? Could it be that I am just as guilty of "framing" the concepts in ways that shut out, preclude or otherwise ignore other representations of them?

Language, of course, is charged with fluid meaning. A concept expressed with one word or phrase will not only sound different when expressed with a different one, it will feel different, at a level that is part emotional, part intellectual and part instinctive. The old axiom that Polynesians have no word for snow, Canadians two or three and Arctic people 60 or 70 may well be particularly illuminating in this realm, in that my labelling of something based on my reality may well preclude my ability to understand the reality of someone else.

This all sounds a bit esoteric, but in fact is quite relevant to the goals I had in mind when I began this project. To bring the debate back down to earth and place it in the context of what started it for me, is my easy labelling of the collected methods, processes, styles, voices and activities that make up the blogging community closing out various other possible representations, understandings, meanings or realities? Is my word-framing of that community as "the blogosphere" too trite, too artificial and too facile to fully represent the whole that is the community? Am I guilty of silencing that portion of the blogging community who disagree with my chosen label, simply because I've unwittingly but forcefully included them in the community I've been calling " the blogosphere"?

My answer? Possibly, yes.

The take-away learning from this, as it relates to Stuart Hall's theories, seems to be that representation of a concept in either graphical or textual/linguistic format is capable of producing representations that silence certain groups or individuals through the creation of the very representation itself.

:: Owning up to ignorance ::

Earlier this week, I posted an entry about a group's website called The Banner Art Collective. I'll let you read the original post yourself to see what I said.

Now, upon reading further into Naomi Klein's amazing book, "No Logo", I have encountered the term "subvertisement" again, in the context of being a form of culture jamming. That twigged on me, because I remember speaking rather derisively of the term in my earlier post.

It would seem now, upon further investigation and reflection, that I committed a rather grave blogging crime. I failed to thoroughly research something before voicing an opinion on it.

Now, of course, I realize that my original post was probably seriously mis-guided. A new visit today to the Collective's website reveals a banner prominently portrayed at the top of the main page, which promotes last Friday's "Buy Nothing Day". Based on all of this new information together, it now dawns on me that the Collective may, in fact, be a culture jam organization, working against the corporate forces of domination, a cause for which I have great respect and admiration.

So here I am, owning up to my own arrogant ignorance. Publicly.

This post, then, is a form of penance.

I now urge you to take another look at the Collective's site. If you want to see the "Buy Nothing Day" banner that I referred to above and it's no longer on the main page by the time you read this, click on the link to their collection and scroll down to find the banner called "buy-sell(f) nothing" by artist Zebra3.

I also encourage you to find out more about Klein's book. In fact, now that "Buy Nothing Day" has ended, I urge you to surf over to your bookseller of choice and buy the book.

Perhaps these will open your eyes and mind, as they have mine.

:: Made me think ::

All I can say to this is...hmmm...

:: Love/hate relationship? ::

What do Guiness, Apple, the Metropolitan London Police and Star Wars all have in common? Their advertising has either been critiqued in blogs or had links to their spoof ads from Mad Magazine or "Dave from Canada" showcased in blogs during the last month.

I wonder why it is that so many bloggers seem to have a love/hate relationship with advertising? It seems curious, given that a big part of the appeal of reading blogs is the ad-free nature of the vast majority of them.

What's the connection? Where's the intersection? Is it because of the ad-heavy nature of the commercial Internet? Is it because so many of the people who create the ads are, as a consequence, online? Is it because advertising has become so important to our 21st century culture that it has become popular culture in its own right?

Questions abound, as do possible assumptions, but no concrete answers are to be found to date.

Have an opinion? Voice it in the new weekly poll, over there at the left.

:: Birth of the blog ::

The following is a creative essay entitled "The Birth of the Blog" that I did as a way of explaining to my fellow students the historical context behind blogging, online activism and the image versus text representation debate from Communications/Cultural Studies.

This essay was read in class as a lead-off to my November 28 oral presentation on blogging as a form of active response against online corporatization.

In the beginning there was the word.

The word begat sentences.
Sentences begat paragraphs which strung together
into a language that the people
could use and create themselves.
Through this, language begat communication
and communication begat meaning.
Meaning became understanding
and understanding gave birth to pleasure.

Thus did the people look at the word,
the beginning of it all.
They said the word and proclaimed that it was good.

Then along came someone who asked,
“why can we not represent what we see exactly?
Why do we have only words
to show what we see is real and around us?”

And the Image was born.

And along with the Image came the Company.
The Company begat a Brand
and the Brand begat the Message.
Through the Message came its offshoot, control.
Because of control
born of the Company and its Message,
Image began to wall off itself from the word.
Image began to compete with the word.
Image used colour and motion
to illustrate to the people that only the Company
could be trusted to provide their meanings and pleasures
in the online world.

The people saw the image,
experienced the motion
and they believed.
They turned their back on the word.

Until, one day, it happened.
Another person came along and said,
“see? In this place, controlled by the image,
the word is still alive.
It is there, it has meaning.
But the meaning is yours to create,
yours to control, yours to decide.
Take the word, go out there and multiply.
Bring the word to the people,
for them to decide
their meanings, their pleasures in the online world”.

And so they did.

For a copy of my presentation, drop me a note.

:: Let it snow! ::

I love how the light looks on an evening when it's snowing. It's brighter outside then usual for this time of November night, almost as if there is a bit of sparkle in the sky.

And the snow! It's so beautiful right now, before the people start marking it with footprints and the cars start churning it into grey-beige furrows. Everything is cloaked in this light fluffy cloud of snow, edges softened, colours muted. The trees look like they're wearing a light coat of starry whiteness and there is the smell of of crisp winter in the air, tinged a bit with the scent of woodsmoke from my neighbour's wood-burning fireplace.

Nights like this make me want to be a kid again, whose only care is whether or not Mom would let me take my Crazy Carpet out to the dike behind my childhood home to zoom and swoosh down the steep hill, over and over and over again.

Wonder what the neighbours around the street would say at the sight of a woman making snow angels in front of her condo building at 10:00 at night?

:: Presenting...the blogosphere! ::

As part 1 of the two part project for which this blog came into existence, I did a presentation in my COMZ class tonight on blogging as a form of resistance against the corporatized Internet. I promised a few people that I'd post the links to the blogs I showcased in my presentation, so here they are....

• Anil Dash


• Asymmetrical Information


• The Bitter Shack of Resentment


• BookSlut


• GeeGaw


• Literacy Weblog


• Little Green Footballs


• Mikel.org


• ni vu ni connu


• NoWarBlog


• No Watermelons Allowed


• Rc3.org


• StarkDavingMad


• this boy is toast

And the 15th and final blog shown was this one… I-Space.

It was a weird thing trying to sum up the totality of experience and activity from the blogsphere in a mere 10 minute presentation. Even with keeping the screen snaps of various blogs down to a mere 15 and showing them for only 4 seconds each (paltry and insignificant exposure given their scope), I walked back to my chair feeling sort of...let down, unsatisfied, deflated. So much more to be said. Guess that means I need to keep blogging even after the professor's vote on my scholastics are in. That way I can keep on thinking about all of this and keep on participating in the medium that is the blogging.

If any of you reading this are fellow Concordia students who were in class today...welcome! I recommend sideways-surfing through the sites above, at left or through any of their link lists. I also urge you go to Blogger.com and get your own blogspace. Doesn't matter what the topic is -- be it based on your knowledge or interest in shark attacks, truth in advertising, gender and identity, rap music, graffiti, 'zines, or whatever. Get online. Create your own meanings and pleasures. Keep the word alive.

Peace! out...

:: Perfect ::

Ftrain: 'Log Frenzy (Abstract)

What more needs to be said?

:: This meaning is obvious ::

While I don't know these two bloggers personally, the power of the blogging medium has affected them both in a rather personal way.

This is, apparently, the first known wedding between bloggers who met in the blogosphere.

The "meanings and pleasures" in blogging for them seems obvious enough.

Congratulations to them both.

[ Found via Asymmetrical Information ]

:: Online Advertising - Art or litter? ::

In my daily wander through the blogosphere, I came across a link that lead me to a site called "The Banner Art Collective" in which the site's managers/writers choose to highlight and extol the virtues of banner advertising.

Here is an extract of what they say about their site's purpose:

By creating and distributing art within the limitations of WWW advertising, net.artists are forced to work under stringent rules. In that regard, banner art follows in a historical tradition of working against and within the limitations of a strict, sometimes arbitrary, form. In exploring this form, they also explore the marginalization of net.art; in banner art, this marginalization is quite literal.


Banner art also forces viewers into a position of empowerment; as they discover banner art, they will become aware of the both the pervasion and possibilities of advertising space on the web, experience new art in new contexts, and be granted a sort of patron status, as they can host on their own websites work they find compelling.

This struck me because it seems to me that the writer of this text is trying to make the same kind of argument for banner advertising that I make for blogging, but is turning the argument on its ear. Normally, I would argue against corporate anything and for independent, grassroots efforts, online activism and netizen empowerment. The Banner Art Collective however, employs the same type of language I would use for those purposes and shoehorns it to justify or glorify an online strategy that has created gigabytes, nay terabytes, of Internet litter.

I take particular issue with the second paragraph quoted above, in which the writer has claimed, "Banner art...forces viewers into a position of empowerment". I'm not sure of their take of the term empowerment, but in my reality, that word means, "actively having and employing power". I would argue that banner advertising does the opposite. It intrudes on my consciousness, it forces its way into my line of vision, it demands that I view it and notice it, regardless of my wishes in the matter. Some of the more offensive advertising online, the popovers and "subvertisements" to use the Collective's own terms, is particularly onerous, because it literally takes over my computer and my online browsing experience. It forces me to click the ad in order to rid my screen of it, so that I can go back to reading the content I was trying to absorb. It takes my eyeballs hostage (and sometimes my ears too) and doesn't let them go until I give it back whatever it wants - be it a click or just a few seconds time to let the banner's message worm its way into my brain.

I do not agree that online banner advertising is a poor, beleaguered medium that requires artistic examination or fresher viewing, which, upon a thorough browsing of their site, seems to be the purpose of the Banner Art Collective. The ads presented aren't so much ads as un-ads -- the purpose of them is unclear, their sales message distorted, murky or just plain absent. Of course, this is part of an online advertising trend I've noticed in the last few years: Don't tell me what your ad is about. Instead, just put up something obscurely artsy in the hopes that I will click it and you can "claim" my eyeballs as proof of a visit from my demographic when you re-sell your services to other advertisers.

(I'm getting ahead of myself -- I'm going to deal with the corporatization of the Internet in a different blogpost, tomorrow or this weekend)

In an absence of hard information on the site telling me what the true purpose is underlying this site, I can make many assumptions, the most convincing of which is that the people producing these ads are actually looking for jobs as banner ad creators for actual corporate campaigns.

I guess I'm starting to rant a bit now, so I'll stop here. As always, note that this is my opinion and yours may be different. Thus, I urge you to take this post however you will -- ignore my framing of this issue and site and create your own meaning based on your own visit to the Collective's site.

[Banner Art Collective link found via the Creative Generalist]

Have an opinion on this post that you care to share? Send it!

:: Exams ::

The Christmas exam period began officially for me tonight, with the mid-term exam for my full year social psychology course. After writing 2 essays on Irving Goffman's Dramaturgical Analysis model and Erik Erikson's psychosocial life stages theory, 10+ pages each, longhand, I wanted to come home and kiss the tan-putty exterior of my spiffy PC. Thank goodness for keyboarding! How did I ever do school assignments back in the pre-PC days? Sheesh -- I shudder to think about it.

As such, I'm more than a little hand-sore, brain dead and body-tired. I just want to plop down on my green couch and watch Kiefer Sutherland live his way through another hour on 24. There is no original thought or concise analysis left in me to share with you here, tonight.

Until tomorrow then...