"-That social beings, people, exist by virtue of possessing biological bodies through which their existence is warranted in the body politic" the net could be a way to escape something you can't control, your physical appearance.

Today I fell asleep in the editing lab after class. When I awakened at 9 I felt like shit and decided to go home and sleep. Once I got off the subway near Allentown I proceeded to walk toward my place. I was dressed up because early that morning I had decided to combat my crappie physically exhausted feeling by dressing up a little, the old look good feel good philosophy. Well, hours later I was shuffling across main street with my bed and food beckoning me sweetly. A voice called to me from a car inquiring "You wanna make sum money?" I refused to acknowledge the question and kept my head straight ahead and went on my way.

I got one block down the road when a fat man in his car stopped at a traffic light yelled to me "You want to make two hundred dollars" by this time I had become agitated with these propositions(and perhaps by the fact that I genuinely need a job so a could make two hundred dollars) so I screamed at the man "fuck off." He then replied in a jolly voice "just thought I'd ask."

I can't imagine why in the world anyone would feel frustrated by the limitations of their body politic. Why would a woman possibly feel more comfortable conversing with other women? It occurs to me that the net is a great way to live an alternate existence but I unfortunately have a serious problem with managing my time in a way where I can keep up with my actual existence, so rather that escaping to a role playing fantasy actual social change in real life is a bit more important in my mind.

The psychiatrist in the article seemed like a typical stick in the mud in his real life whereas his alter ego Julie totally rocked, perhaps the doctor should have tried to make changes in his real life.
- posted by robin @ 4:20 AM

 
How critical are these computer games?
What does it mean, critical computer games? I guess they have had some kind of impact on me. I
remember Atari from when I was a toddler. I guess the sexism crap about video games is somehow
evened out when an 8 yr old girl continuously beats her teenage brother’s asses at the games. I
remember computer games like King’s Cauldron and Space Quest were my favorite as a child. I
was never upset about the gender roles in the games because I never had to play the female
character (no one did, well in Mario 2 the girl is the best)). Well, what about the nice meditative qualities
of games. I got trigger happy for a long time on the net this weekend, there is nothing else to get happy
about it seems. All that war game talk was interesting but blandly written. I played Doom often at
one point so I guess I’m a one woman army now. When Wark wrote “Breaking the cycle of
gendering in children’s relation to media technology will take a lot more than the reform of video
game content” I thought he was basically saying “they did it first” I guess that way of thinking fits in
with the whole gaming mentality. I wanted to play sissyfight pretty bad but my computer would not let me, well
it will for a second but then.... I think artist making games is a wonderful idea.
I’m an artist.
I could come up with a game easily, I think. Its the matter of getting it to work that would be the
problem but hey, art imitates life and life is a game so... I’m sorry more later
- posted by robin @ 8:16 AM

 
My problem with Internet art is that it’s wordy. Text is a valuable tool and the pen is mightier than the sword but I don’t know if clicking through page after page of textual semi-visual information is that interesting for me. One of my initial problems with Internet art was the fact you can view it from anywhere. That is fantastic if you live in Adairsville, GA I guess but if you live in a city it’s nice to actually go out to a place specifically to view or witness art. It adds to the “Aura” maybe but I guess photography has destroyed that already so it’s all right. I think that looking at internet art is a solitary experience, not because I’m the only person to look at the site (millions could have looked at it) its because I’m generally alone in my physical space while viewing the internet and if someone is looking over my shoulder it drives me crazy. It’s similar to reading a book. When I write that I think it’s nice to go to a gallery or club or whatever venue to see art I am aware that this already starts to exclude some people. Ippolito wrote” many artist who made the leap to cyberspace claimed to do so in reaction to the exclusivity and greed of the art market.” I think that’s a fine and admirable idea but I don’t think most artist exactly are running in elitist’s lines.

Most of the sites I looked at were politically or socially oriented in content. Are these sites art or are they current events? The fact that most of the sites take a liberal view on the subject matter is what I find to be the best aspect of viewing the work. Where is the abstract Internet art? Where are the purely visual sites? How much can a person do with rollovers, or what can they do to actually make them more stimulating to the eye?
?
one of my friends sent me this site because she thinks it’s interesting but I thought it was totally boring but maybe one of ya’ll will like it. I thought the idea was interesting but the actual place that the site is at now seems kind of stark. I'm sorry if I’ve been condemning or negative. It’s great whenever anyone makes something at his or her own initiative. I may be slightly bias in my opinion because I fell in love with video a while back. I think Internet art just needs to slap a person in the face more. It has valuable things to say but a person has to be interested in the first place to get the ideas. What about the unsuspecting person on the browser? Lets suck them in to the oh so moral and lecherously (some would say) liberal art world.

- posted by robin @ 11:49 AM

 
The problem with globolization is money and greed. I’ve always dreamed of the barter system
coming back but that seems highly unlikely but wait...just read that the barter system still exist
in international trade. I meant the barter system on a smaller more accessible scale. When
you try to look at the entire world holistically things get out of hand. It seems nice to think of
a world where everyone gets along and the society is completely non-violent but violence occurs
on small scales (individual murder) as well as large
scales (war) so how could any society destroy masked violence. Now I'm sure plenty of people
have jobs where they are organizing the lives of thousands of others but do these people actually
know what they are doing? No Way! The Sassen article points out “part of the challenge is to
recognize the interconnectedness of forms of violence that we do not always recognize as being
connected or for that matter, as being forms of violence.”
Globalization is unavoidable but so far its been done the wrong way. The right way is hard to
say. Money stacks have been built on profit and labor. The wealth is poorly distributed. How can
I use another person to profit myself? Urban Economics and Fading Distances is all about the
placement of money and labor as well as the effects of the free trade and all that. yep. This had to
be my least favorite read this week. I didn’t get much out of it so I’ll move along to Under the
Shade of the Banyan Tree. This article is particularly sad because Alam writes about a little girl
he meets. Her and other kids were locked in a factory and one kid died in a fire. My granny
worked in a factory in North Carolina from the time she was 12 until she was 76 as far as I know
they never locked her in but my Grandpa(who worked in the same place, had a massive heart
attack and died in 1950 leaving Granny to raise four kids alone). In the small Georgia town
where I was raised most people worked in carpet factories. My uncle Wayne made ball bearings.
I think one hundred years before that most people around there had small farms. Back to the
subject, Alam points out that “the [free market] economy encourages the mobility of goods, but
the flow of people only works in certain directions.” Cultural imperialism is evil in an oh so bad
way.
What about RTFM (Read the Fucking Manual)? “all the meetings and decision making
processes that took place in the camp were made on a consensus bases and avoided people
adopting representational hierarchies.” That sounds fantastic the ideals of the group seem to be
very noble but I’m not sure if I appreciate the attempted organized structure of the camp (like
waking up to an intercom at 8:00 in the morning.) I guess it would be good for a short time.
Consumerism Verses Citizenship makes the argument that the movement is changing to embrace
globalization but they want to get it out of the hands of “the multinationals.” Well, I don’t know
if I trust that. I think every society should be able to make decisions for themselves but if a
person wants to leave there society they should have that right to. I’m all for helping people but
I’m not interested in the idea of forcing changes in cultures that are not my own.
- posted by robin @ 2:00 PM

 
Weblogs: a history and perspective by Rebecca Blood

Blood asks why weblogging should be “of interest or importance to anyone who does not produce one?” Then she answers her own question. Blood is enthusiastic about blogging. She suggests that it can help you become popular. “A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts.” She suggests that weblogging can help you increase your self-confidence. “He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead.” Then Blood suggest that weblogging can help you to enlighten others. “Reading the views of other ordinary people, they will readily question and evaluate what is being said.” She also suggest that weblogging can help expand your ability to write creatively.
Blood is obviously against mainstream media and she states this by defining “audience” and “public” for us. The audience is passive and the public is active. “Our strength—that each of us speaks in an individual vision—is, in the high-stakes world of carefully orchestrated messages designed to distract and manipulate, a liability.” This is a challenge for weblogging social reformist, I’m assuming. I’m not sure what Blood means by this. In what world is strength a liability, the media world? Are all the two year olds going to grow up and be as brainwashed as their parents? I guess that’s what we need intellectuals. I believe in evolution.
Blood argues that we need to “cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract out self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.” I agree with this statement but I’m not sure if sitting in front of a cold computer screen is the best way of remembering what it means to be human. If you prescribe to one thing you can easily prescribe to another. There are certain things that bother me about Blood’s opinions, like the more “skillful editors” manage to get more across with as little words as possible. This phenomenon of cutting things down has been becoming more and more exaggerated since the invention of the typewriter. She writes that the “typical web user” is to busy to do more than scan the news web sites so they are better of going to individual’s blogs with links but is a person who is to busy to scan these sites going to have the foggiest notion what a weblog is?

Moving Along To Other Readings

I sound negative but I’m impressed with the blogs. The political aspect is one of the most intriguing but all the blogs I’ve looked at were almost tame as far as content goes, sure most were liberal but I’m looking for something revolutionary like Robyn Greenspan suggest in Blogging By The Numbers. I’m not sure about the English speaking upper middle class. It seems that that’s who has the bulk interest in blogs right now. I guess reading blogs beats watching TV. I haven’t done much of either the past couple of months so I must be out of touch with reality. I went to Read Me and came across an overload of general and little known information. They said coke-a-cola is going to track winning cans through satellites next summer. That’s crazy but what does it mean to you and me? Should we be terrified of strangers with the ability to track us from outer space? I read about the deer slayers but I’d already watched the people involved with that on Howard Stern a few months ago. That’s one of those shows I love to watch and everyone thinks I’m sick for it. I guess if you read the same information in a webblog you can be more objective because you are just exposed to the idea and not the actual human beings associated with the idea.
The video blog was interesting but your technology access can limit you in this area. I watched a video about Michael Moore from a conservative's perspective so that was weird. It made me think of the time I videotaped myself shaving my pubic hair and I teamed that image up with the idea of removing Bush. It never came to be but with the election coming up soon I think I should start searching for more Bush removers. The Government information awareness page is a good resource for those interested in American politics. The information seems a bit generic but I didn’t dig very much. I looked at the House of Representatives and the Senate and found one elected official from an independent party. I didn’t find any elected people who were agnostic or atheist so that was sad but not surprising. It’s so confusing the way the information is displayed. You click on an issue and your confronted by all these statistics. Why doesn’t someone write “This guy totally hates abortion so if you are pro-life vote for him” or “This lady is a pistol packing mama so if you love the N.R.A. you should so vote for her”? Why is it necessary to make things generic in order to be taken seriously?

On Speaking the Truth to Power
When we had a discussion on this material in class I became very stressed by the hostility caused by the mere word intellectual so I took a short break and went to smoke a cigarette. While I was outside I ran into an undergraduate friend and I asked her “What do you think of intellectuals?” She replied "Well, they’re either right on or way off.”
I appreciated her view and half-heartedly agreed with in. In the Edward Said article Speaking the Truth to Power he addresses the role of the intellectual in contemparary society. He writes about how it is good to be unprofessional so you don’t have to conform to the views of a particular group. He also writes about morals and justice and he also goes into human rights and hypocrisy. "Freedom of expression cannot be sought invidiously in one territory and ignored in another.”(Said 89) He writes about the gap between paper and life about how no one follows the things agreed upon by all. Speaking the Truth to Power is speaking out about out things that are wrong despite the difficulties you may suffer as a result of that speaking up. (97) He also writes “Opportunism dictates the west” (102) and I am forced through personal observation to agree with him.
In the article Portrait of the virtual intellectual by Geert Lovink Said's definition of intellectual is critiqued as being noble but short sited. Lovink writes about the changing social spear and the zombification of the public. Then he goes into the CAE’s theory that to successfully contest complex forms of power and control you must “locate the arena of contestation in cyberspace” (Lovink) this statement is troublesome because“ the VI also lacks any sentimental drive to represent unprivileged off-line groups.” (Lovink) What is a virtual intellectual? I’m still not sure. I know that I generally agree with Edward Said and I don’t necessarily think that he was shortsighted but yes he is idealistic. It’s important to be idealistic. Lovink did say that being an intellectual by Said’s terms “requires a [constant alertness] and [steady realism]” and that is an uplifting outlook on intellectualism.


- posted by robin @ 11:21 AM

 
Man made vs. organic.
I like organic. It’s nice when things aren’t quite symmetrical. Technology entrenches the lives of millions possibly billions, I guess, but what does it matter? Go on and let people do what ever they want. If you want to have a chip installed into your brain so you can more easily surf the web, go for it. It would indeed terrify me to do something like that mainly because I like my privacy or at least the illusion of privacy and the thought of people hacking your actual brain is indeed terrifying but also exciting but in the end more terrifying. If people all die and the machines carry on then humanity lives on. Man made machines are still pretty useless without the human operators, maybe the machines are a little smarter than their human operators but they are still pretty stupid, its kind of a subjective thing. Sure, I’m one of those people who if stranded on a desert island I would go through serious technology withdrawals but I think I would miss my personal hygiene products most of all. The article made me think about how nice is to have this organic machine I call my body. Its so nice to be able to soak in a tub, feeling the water, smelling the soap, tasting a cigarette, seeing the light reflect off the water, hearing the tiny droplets that linger on the faucet finally break free and fall to the collective. I don’t think anything made of metal is going to fully appreciate an experience like that if it did it would be just as superficial and materialistic as the greater part of humanity, so what would the improvement be? This article hasn’t enlightened me but it’s nice to hear an optimistic perspective for a change. The idea of the mind escaping the body is an amazing feat to contemplate but I’ve known to many people whose minds are corrupted by their body’s bi polar disorder and shit like that. If you start building machines around individuals’ brains how are you going to protect it from things like that? Today my friend told me about this guy who got a letter in the mail. The letter said to spend an hour in a closet every day at sundown so the man started doing it. After a few weeks he started hearing voices of people in closets all over the world. I asked my friend what the voices were talking about and he said I don’t know, maybe it was like a chat room. Chat rooms are different though, because you don’t actually hear things, you just see them then translate the symbols into words. I wonder what the difference is between the way our brains comprehend hearing and seeing symbols. So, yeah, cyborgs. Lets all meet up at my house and watch star trek every Wednesday. We can examine Data’s behavior and consider the various fates of human machines. What about ghost? When we all become machines when our minds are encompassed in electronics where will the spirit world get energy to make ghost. What about the ghost in existence right now? Will they transform and join onto the electronic bandwagon. I guess gender is going to go down the toilet when people become machines. The dichotic ideas of my culture will be completely rearranged, thank your god for that. I was looking at my cat last night thinking about what a great organic machine he is and also thinking about how humans and domestic animals have evolved around each other. The cat depends on me for food shelter and companionship and I depend on him for companionship alone, I think. He is a sensual animal and his attributes (fluffy fat coyness) endure him to me. Remember digital pets? Now its digital us.

- posted by robin @ 10:31 PM

 
A Take on The “Typewritter”

All these women became typewriters but “being able to read was not
the same as being allowed to write.” (184) It made sense. Recording was a
simple job that even a woman could do. It didn’t exactly require ladies to
think for themselves so it seemed innocent enough to maintain the
standards of “an omnipresent metaphor” that “equated women with the
white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then
inscribe the glory of its ownership.”(186)
The whole women's suffrage thing started because of a few less phallic
symbols in the world. “mechanized and automatic writing refutes the
phallocentrism of classical pens”(206) but then all the missing phallic
symbols where replaced with skyscrapers, lipsticks, and monuments. What if
Kittler dedicated an entire chapter to a compelling history of the vibrator? Its almost as old as the typewriter. What does the plastic penis mean to women's liberation and the fate of all humanity?
Kittler points out Nietchze’s problems with the ladies.“Our writing tools
are also working on our thoughts.”(200) “writing machines and writing
women." (210)Women or objects such as writing tools were working on the
“master of media”(211)’s thoughts. How did that happen? “Computers
themselves become the subjects.” (258) That’s nice. The computer’s are the
subjects and the women are the objects. Watch MTV and you’ll see some
fetching young objects.
The nut, Freud overstepped boundaries when he said”women possess
as part of their genitals a small organ similar to the male one.”(215) Why
didn’t Freud go into the sex act itself. He should’ve told the students what
those body parts were for if they were to ignorant to even realize they had them. Why didn’t he say “Typically the male inserts his penis into
an opening called the vagina. This orifice can be found just below the clitoris.
Once the male has inserted a thrust repeat action occurs. Generally the
female’s role in this consensual act is submissive.” The problem was not being
able to separate the different roles assumed in activities. Sex and life are complicatedly intertwined. Has technology enabled women to better assert themselves? How has this
affected human’s primal sexual instincts?
Carl Schmitt’s essay on “the Buribunks” was the highlight of this
chapter. “no one who would not have been proud to have served Schnekke
as the impetus for his artistic achievements and thus to have enjoyed the
most gratifying award of her femaleness.” (238) That’s funny. It challenges
the traditional standards of monogamous relationships. It made me go back
to the whole Don Juan discourse. The way Schmitt sets up the story as
history is unnerving. The parallel between buribunkdom and
bloggerdom is troublesome.
Gender wars could be the underlying theme of Kittler’s book but
political wars are the bigger issue in the book. Kittler points out how the
entertainment factor of media is merely a distraction from the real point,
which is how to more efficiently kill ourselves. I’ve never read technology’s
link with war so directly spelled out. We have women’s liberation in one hand
and complete destruction in the other.
- posted by robin @ 3:11 AM