Footnotes

by flashmemoria

 

 

 

Posted by: Chris

The project is done and submitted, the paper is away, and so it is time to rest.  I thought this would be a good (and belated) opportunity to display some concept work that we produced along the way in our efforts to settle upon a final design iteration for Circle. Here is the logo.  Not much changed here. As you can see, despite the name upon which we settled, the grid originally consisted of rectangular tiles, drawing inspiration from the Metro theme in Windows 8 – you know, that thing that everyone hates and ditches in favor of the desktop anyway.  Rectangles ended up being less modular for the purposes of a mockup, so we went for circles instead.  It was easier to produce, and I suppose it was more in keeping with our professed design theme anyway.

Here is the next layer.  The concept is much the same as the final form – nothing ever vanishes from view as you move through the layers.  Personally, I kind of like the rectangles – they might be a nice alternative skin to consider in a later iteration of the project.

Here we have the final layer.  Nothing much to comment on here that I haven’t already said.

That about concludes things here, for me anyways!  Only one question remains: should this blog have an expiry date?

Presentating

by flashmemoria

Posted by: Chris

I am aware that “presentating” is not precisely a word.  I used all the words up getting things ready this past week, so to produce any further blog posts, I’ll have to cobble together new words out of whatever lexical refuse I have lying about the place.  Because I’m less of a “capture-every-moment-on-film” and more of “just-live-your-damn-life-through-your-own-eyes” sort of fellow, I took very few photographs during the class wrap-up/dinner party chez-Marcel and the final symposium that followed two days afterward.

For reasons that presently escape me, I felt the need to sit right up and front with the presenters whilst they presented the final iterations of their projects and sampled some of the theoretical underpinnings intended to anchor both the final presentations and the final papers.  Ah, hold on, I do remember why.  It had been a long, long day, and nothing was going to separate me from the softest couch in the house.  That and I wanted a good view of everybody’s work.  Everybody did such good work, you see.  Nobody tried to shoehorn a papier mâché volcano into the class about memory, which was simultaneously a relief and a disappointment.  I’m sure it would have been a very creative paper.

 

The symposium was admittedly long (I’ve never been to anything where there were as many as 20 presentations, let alone 30), but satisfying and productive, though I have very little memory of the hour leading up to my arrival, since it transpired at a time of day for which I am only awake during the gravest of emergencies.

All that remains now is to produce a somewhat more formal version of my theoretical treatment of the course readings in relation to our project.  Since most of the work is already done, it should not take too long.  Perhaps I’ll have a few more things to say on this blog before that’s done.

Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire

by Cameron Butt

Well, it was quite a week leading up to yesterday’s student conference, “Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire.” But we managed to put together a pretty strong presentation, generating a lot of discussion (always a good sign). Which means it’s time to put Circle to bed, at least until the new year.

Though Isaac was absolutely drowning in deadlines this week (we also presented papers yesterday for our rhetoric course), we did manage to build a pretty good-looking Circle framework in time for Thursday’s seminar/dinner party (https://web.uvic.ca:8443/~cambutt/circle).  We also managed to put our heads together via Google Docs to co-write a presentation script. Mega kudos to Chris for getting us started with a detailed skeleton, as well as pruning the prose on Friday, while Isaac and I had our heads buried in rhetoric essays.

Looking back on the term, it’s quite a relief to have this object under wraps. There were definitely days when we weren’t sure how it would all come together, but it did. It would have been nice to have a functional network, though. Too bad that’s so complicated to do. Oh well. Patience is a virtue.

Just one more thing to do now: write an essay that comprises everything we communicated yesterday. Too bad we can’t co-write this one, too, eh guys? I think we make a fine team.

 

The Writing Process

by flashmemoria

Posted by: Chris

I am presently writing the formalized script for our presentation of Circle at the symposium on Saturday (8:45 in the morning?  On a Saturday?!!).  Actually getting the thing started was uncharacteristically difficult for a guy that usually just sits down and produces.  I had to remind myself of Aristotle’s natural sequence of recollection (yes, I actually did that; no, it is not for blog-brownie points; yes, it felt a little weird).  Now that I’ve got a working draft, I have to stop myself from thinking too hard about whether I’m supposed to essentially write the exact same thing all over again when it comes time to hand in the paper.  I can see light at the end of the tunnel, but does that light cure or kill?  Is it the uplifting sense of peace in looking back and acknowledging that while this class kicked my ass up down and sideways, I really did learn (and even internalize) a thing or two of real value, or is it just the grossly incandescent lustre of my monitor boring a hole through my retinas?

 

Design Mockups Round 1

by Cameron Butt

During yesterday’s seminar, we shared our first round of layout mockups for our object to think with. We received some great feedback (constructive and otherwise) from our colleagues and are going to design a more “interactive” web mockup for next week.

The object, which we are calling Circle, is basically a small-scale photo-sharing social-network tool designed to question some of the assumptions held by existing social platforms. Chris explains it best, so here’s an adapted version of his now famous (in come circles) pitch:

What is Circle and what does it do?

Circle is small-scale. Rather than avoiding your parents like on Facebook, Circle is designed particularly for families and close friends, who form your “circle.” We don’t expect the typical user to have more than ten to twenty people in their circle. Circle is not a space to build a second life; it is merely a supplement to help you keep better track of your first.

Circle reduces information density. By reducing information overload, we want Circle to move away from what Nicholas Carr identifies as distraction. The home screen, the first level, is a collage of profile pictures. There is practically no text. When you click or tap on a profile, the profile window expands, but the main screen never fades entirely from view. In this second level, two smaller images appear: the person’s most recent photograph (as taken with the Autographer, the use of which is one of the constraints for the purposes of this course) and a map showing where that photo was taken. Clicking on the map will produce a larger image of the map (still in context), and clicking on the photo will show the third level of the network: the live Autographer photostream.

On this third level, the photos are updated in real time with a fade transition. This feature is not yet technically possible with the Autographer, but we’re secretly imagining that an actual build would use smartphones and tablets rather than the Autographers, which are still rare devices.

Circle also resists archiving. As new photos are uploaded, older photos are deleted. As Viktor Mayer-Shönberger would say, they have an “expiry date.” Users have the option to select photos to save to their own personal shoebox, where you can keep a limited number of what José van Dijck would call “mediated memory objects.” But circle keeps nothing automatically.

Circle helps you keep track of the people you care about, and it helps them keep track of you. It democratizes the Autographer’s surveillance potentiality, and so Circle implies and requires trust. When used in conjunction with an Autographer, Circle is low-maintanence. If we decide to adapt it for use with less passive devices like camera phones or, one day, Google Glass, that will certainly affect the ways in which it stands out from existing platforms.

So that’s the object, and building it has given us lots to think about.

We initially sought to create something especially for people with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease by subverting the existing notions of memorial archiving emphasized by other social networks (think of Facebook’s Timeline feature). In other words, we wanted to create a space that did not implicitly enforce remembrance. Some of our research shows that existing social spaces designed for people living with AD were not only clunky and memory-focused, but universally became spaces for the caregivers rather than spaces for people with dementia.

But building a space exclusively for people with AD is inherently problematic because of the stigma it imposes. Our preliminary research led us to expect people with AD to reject an assistive tool if it labelled them as a person with a disability. By designing a web app that can be accessed through devices that are already socially ubiquitous—like tablets and smartphones—we figured we could avoid part of that problem. But there is still the question of whether labelling the tool as “assistive” or “therapeutic” for people with AD would be met with resistance from some of our target users. So, paradoxically, if we want the social network to appeal to people with AD, we have to think about marketing it in such a way that doesn’t openly acknowledge its “assistive” or “therapeutic” nature.

When we met with Lisa from MAREP (Murray Alzheimer Research and Education Program), however, she encouraged us to think more about using the tool in a way that facilitated the externalization of memory, rather than minimizing it as we were intending. She wasn’t as concerned as we were about labelling our tool a device for people with AD. In fact, she suggested that more people would use it if we were clear about how it would benefit people with AD. For instance, she saw a potential use for the network as a supplement to “memory albums,” which are created to help AD support workers identify potential triggers for negative personal expression. By openly acknowledging the tool as an assistive/therapeutic device, we would open ourselves to that market. We’re expecting further feedback next week from some MAREP community members living with AD, but I expect it will confirm Lisa’s prediction.

Next, Lisa agreed that Circle would provide an impetus for social interaction, but not entirely as we expected: she imagined that family members could help prompt conversation about someone’s day without applying a potentially frustrating pressure to “remember.” For example, a person might say to someone with dementia “I see you went to the store today” rather than asking “What did you do today?” In other words, by playing up the archival function we would open our tool to a whole range of different assistive possibilities. We would, however, be sacrificing several theoretically provocative concepts.

Needless to say, we’re standing at a conceptual crossroads here. We can see two very clear directions for the product, and I think we’re going to try to strike a balance between them as we put together the interactive mockup for next week.

We’d love feedback if you have it.

Plotting out arguments

by flashmemoria

Posted by: Chris

So, in the last week and a half, the critical angle of our project has been complicated exponentially.  Shit’s gotten real.  Basically, we met with MAREP  and they wanted to take the project in a different direction.  Not necessarily a bad direction, but their mere calling to a direction made us realize that our work was at a rhetorical crossroads that needed to be explicated plainly, so that we might bask in some kind of intellectual incandescence.  Umm… what?  Anyway, we discussed a lot of crap and it was really hard to keep track of because I’m not that smart, so I insisted we take it to the board.  I took a snapshot.  Got a blog to update and all that, you know.

 

Building…

by flashmemoria

Posted by: Everyone

We’re plugging away at a mockup/prototype.  Somewhere in the liminal space between HTML, Keynote, and MS Paint (Or the liminal space between A+, B+, and double F-), we are plugging away.

The money on the table is for pizza.  The boxed copy of Windows 8.1 is for re-installation.  As in, the first piece of photo editing software I tried to find on the internet turned out to be a virus, and rather than go through the laborious gestures of virus hunting, virus killing, and virus never-sure-if-I-got-rid-of-the-bastard-ing, I just wiped the computer and started fresh.  I only got it assembled yesterday, and there wasn’t too much on it anyway.  C’est la vie.  But man, what a pain in the ass it was.

When I Was Young & In My Prime

by flashmemoria

Posted by Isaac:

Five or six years ago, friend of mine – initially, more mentor than friend – used to have this email domain name that, for the life of me, left me curious as to its origins every time we made an exchange in reconnaissance: from: [name]@Ostranenie. I could have just Googled the damn term, but there was something strangely compelling in it’s unfamiliarity. As I read Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young & In My Prime for class, the term suddenly showed up on page 71, complete with descriptor:

“The Russian formalist literary theorists have this word I love. Ostranenie. It translates more or less as defamiliarization. To tilt things at such an angle that we can see them new, beyond the patina bestowed by habit. Often the goal is to reveal a horror or hypocrisy we’ve become used to. Or to reveal a beauty we take for granted. Sometimes the goal is even more elusive – to steal a glimpse of the essential hard-to-get-at strangeness of being here at all.”

Sure enough, in spite of how the novel announces this process with all the sobering complicity of a categorical definition – an announcement that ought to make me all the more on guard of such a procedural gambit – it continued to humble me from page to page, reminding me of all the horror, hypocrisy, beauty, and strangeness that I think most of us think we’ve discovered and tucked away for the sake of some alien command to perpetually (out)enjoy ourselves. And yet I never felt like I was overly frustrated with Munce’s pacing or form, there wasn’t a disruption on the textual surface, even with the shifts between voice, prose, tense, time, etc. It was almost a kind of unheimlich-ness more sentimental than conceptual, if that makes any sense.

I think there’s a certain arrogance in that “critical distance” Arnold asks of the theorist/academic/philosopher/worker bee. We have all these esoteric, linguistic, conceptual contortions as a means of apprehending the world and how it functions, and we’re constantly qualifying the limitations of our quasi-mystical schemata (phenomenology, empiricism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, dorsality, etc.) as if that might reveal some poetic residue of the [r]eal catastrophe of our cleavage, animus/materia. And, fuck, I’ve been a theory kid for as long as I’ve been (pretending to be) a remotely competent student. But this novel, for all its representationism and pithy parsing, somehow “gets it” so much better than anything I’ve read in a long time.

There’s a point at which Helena articulates (or at least alludes to) that kind of residual Ostranenie:

“Whenever I have to work a shift at the bar after a visit with Grandma, I always feel like a foreigner in my life. Invariably I drift through the whole evening at a slight remove – how odd, these people’s customs — though the distance is never quite as intense as it was the shift I worked after the day we moved her” (169).

When I first stumbled on the passage, I thought it was that italicized part that I identified with. We’ve all had that “don’t think about your own death” auto-pilot interrupted by some tragedy or relative, unfair, material shortcoming or tragedy via a friend, loved one, etc. But the velocity at which we forget those discoveries and those points in space so bodily mediated (you know, aside from La Petite Mort, and all that jazz) for the sake of.. well, because that’s the relief of forgetting.

It was a little frustrating to read the grandfather’s physical degradation receiving more presence in contradistinction to the grandmother, but that’s the bragging rights of a good yarn, it has to leave you frustrated, barred off from everything left out of the frame. 

Autograph-ing a PC Build

by flashmemoria

Posted by: Isaac and Chris

Isaac thought it would be neat to document my process as I assemble my first ever custom-built gaming PC.  I had to go back a couple of times and connect wires I neglected, and the power supply resisted my initial efforts to cram it into my mini-ITX case, but nothing blew up, and the thing did turn on in the end.  Here are some selected images from the build.

Interesting how shots line up perfectly by complete chance.  The camera was clipped to Emma’s hat at the time.  I’m more amused by how well the coffee cup holding my screws is framed rather than my face.

There is probably something witty and ironic to be said about using my iPhone camera flash to illuminate the cavernous interior of the case, but I’m not that smart.

This shot was Isaac’s idea.  The sun rises on my irresponsibly purchased GTX-770.

Isaac is barely visible behind the mountain of packaging that litters my living room.  Not autographed in these images is Emma, who spent most of the night playing Kirby’s Adventure on my AV Famicom, which arrived the same day as my computer case.

Internet: Good or Bad?

by Cameron Butt

At the risk of making it look like all I do is sit around and listen to CBC Radio, I’m posting yet another piece of their programming from 23 October:

Q Debate Special: Is the Internet Making Us Smarter or Stupider?

In this three-part interview, Jian Ghomeshi moderates a discussion that addresses the Internet anxiety we’ve been encountering in this course. Clearly, Nicholas Carr and Viktor Mayer-Shönberger are not alone. Participants include:

Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better.

Steve Easterbrook, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto

David Weinburger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, co-director of Harvard Library Lab.

Adam Hammond, sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto

and

Blair McMillan, patriarch of a family who has renounced all post-1986 technologies.

As discussion points, the debate includes audio clips from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Raffi (yes, Baby Beluga Raffi), and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

The whole program is about as long as a soccer game, including stoppages, so I’ve included a summary of the main points below.

Steve Easterbrook, arguing that technology makes us stupider, complains that his argument is more difficult to maintain because nobody wants to feel like technology is making them stupid. His opinion that technology is mostly harmful, however, seems to be the most widely accepted. Perhaps instead people are all too willing to blame their stupidity on the Internet. But never mind that.

Easterbrook’s concerns are essentially rooted in the argument that the rate of technological change is now faster than our ability to adapt to that change. By the time we figure out how best to teach children about technology, for example, the next technology has already made the new curriculum obsolete.

But Clive Thompson doesn’t buy Easterbrook’s claim that we can’t adapt to these changes. New tools may let us (even force us) to develop new patterns of thought, but he says “we’ve conquered this stuff before.” He gives the example of the first coffee houses, which were met with resistance from scholars who feared that nobody would ever get anything done because they were just sitting around chatting all the time. “It was the Facebook of its day,” Thompson laughs. He even suggests that the telegraph may have destabilized society more than the Internet has.

In response, the ‘acceleration of invention’ position held by Easterbrook warns that “we won’t have time to catch up” to these newer, rapidly developing technologies. Though the invention of writing, coffee houses, printing presses, and telegraphs all produced similar anxieties, the slower rate of technological change for these earlier technologies allowed for time to pass and people to get used to them. If technological development continues to accelerate, the argument goes, we won’t have time to socially or biologically accommodate these changes.

Here, however, the debate falls into a perpetual loop. The rate-of-change argument contradict what we know about brain plasticity, that our brains change depending on lived experience. Both Easterbrook and Thompson admit to knowing little about neurology (and I probably know even less than either of them), but I’m still comfortable saying that our neural networks change depending on which neurons fire: survival of the busiest. Doesn’t that mean that our brains will adapt to accelerating technological change, even during a single lifetime, a single year, month, or week? Won’t our changing brains allow us to adapt socially to these new conditions of human existence? I guess I should let someone else conduct the study that answers that question…

The reason we fall into a loop is that people use the plastic brain model to argue both sides of the debate. On the one hand, the Internet is changing our brains and that’s bad. On the other, the Internet is changing our brains and that’s good. When questioned by Ghomeshi, Adam Hammond cites Nicholas Carr to explain how, as a literature scholar, it now takes a “superhuman effort to do [his] job and read literature.” According to Carr, who bases his argument on the plastic brain model, surfing the web changes how our brains process information, disrupting our ability to focus deeply for a long time. That Internet technology changes the way our brains think is therefore construed as a negative thing.

But if the Internet is changing our brains, doesn’t that mean that we are adapting to these new conditions? As David Weinberger joins the conversation, he wonders whether the debate is actually concerned with whether the Internet is “making experts stupider or making us stupider about things that we don’t need to be smart about.” With the Internet, Weinburger says, we are gaining many things, including the ability to look up information that we don’t need to know. He seems most excited, however, by networked information and its tendency to develop personal knowledge in a way that always concedes that public knowledge is “bigger than” the individual. These sound to me like promising developments for the self-obsessed, personal-experience-driven human brain.

Thompson adds that while these new tools let us “develop productive patterns of thought,” the old patterns can still be productive. Hyperlinking may encourage skimming, but that doesn’t mean that we have to abandon deep reading. “It’s simply wrong to assume it’s impossible to do these things,” he says, proudly recounting his personal successes reading long novels like Middlemarch and War and Peace on his smartphone. He quips “If you’re having trouble reading, work harder at it. It has always been thus.” True, after reading for lengthy periods of time, our brains will, according to the plastic model, begin to strengthen the connections that allow prolonged moments of reflection.

But alas, these optimists are met with imperial opposition. Hammond speaks of “good literature” as if there is such a universal standard, and Easterbrook actually makes the cliché Baby Boomer complaint that children today just don’t spend enough time outdoors. Is this really caused by the Internet, Thompson replies, or is it because their parents won’t let them?

The debate circles ’round to a number of other interesting topics, but I’m running out of energy here—and I’m sure the reader is too, if you’re still with me—so I’m gonna come to an abrupt halt.

Please be sure to the conversation with a comment below!