O/B: Week Three

Despite the warming weather, this week has brought with it a storm... of new projects, responsibilities, and learning experiences. Though I know much of the work I'm doing is rather menial, I find that I'm really enjoying my experiences with the magazine. I'm swimming in assignments, but I am staying afloat. It's an inseparable part of my nature that I can't help but feel invigorated by the stress of a deadline and motivated by the pressure from the editors to excel.

This past week kicked off with an art show at Sola cafe, to celebrate and thank the contributors to the magazine and also functioned as a meet-and-greet for all the writers and new staff, all focused around the issue-published art from the past 15 years of production (bonus: all profits went to Friends of Hyalite, local NPO, to help  keep the road accessible). I met Parks Reece, a local artist whose work was as energetic and vibrant as he was. The show was also a great opportunity to chat with the team outside of the office, and to get to know the editors a bit better over a few glasses of wine. Mike brought in a wonderful array of salads (roasted zucchini and goat cheese, yumm!) and lots of pizza, while Sola supplied us with beer, wine, or hard-cider to make the night seem even smoother. I can't speak for everyone, but I had a surprisingly great time in such a lively atmosphere and found myself reluctant to leave. 

Once we were all loosened up, the week at the office felt more natural than previous days. I'm spending 32+ hours a week in house and find it nearly impossible not to check my work e-mail even when I'm not. But on that note, I'm getting more and more involved and learning a lot about the way the magazine is set up. As a writer and editor, I'm responsible for proofreading, fact-checking, copy-editing my own work... as well as the 60 submitted articles for the spring edition. Heavy load? Yes. Looming deadline? Yes. Capable of completion? Yes. And as I found out today, hard work does not go unrewarded. 

I've now completed a blog post for Outside Bozeman online, and have turned in my first two articles ahead of deadline. I'm in the process of writing an additional five that range from charities to raptors (and beer), creative writing to infographics. Despite the stress from researching and writing, it's pretty cool to be able to have a finished product, however small the piece, and have it be yours- through and through. Too often for school projects it's easy enough to scrape by with something half-finished. But whats becoming clear at O/B is if I'm putting my name on it, it damn well better be great. 

In my first "this is where we stand" meeting with Mike, we went over to-do lists and he explained in more depth some of the tasks I'll have after we meet the deadline for the spring issue. My brain has mentally blocked out some of the tasks farther in the future, but some that I am excited for are the monthly blog assignments where it's mandatory that I have an "outdoor adventure". On the list is fat biking, ranger-guided wilderness walks, skydiving, Yellowstone snowmobiling adventures, and many other thrilling options. I couldn't be more excited! It's just now a matter of finding the damn time to adventure then write... 

At the same meeting, Mike also had edited more of my work and we were able to go through it together which was so rewarding. His feedback made a lot of sense to me, and I could actually anticipate some of the changes he was going to make, which means I'm progressing as an editor and learning to be a cleaner writer. Hell yeah! Some of the things we discussed were balanced personification, or the idea of feminizing the landscape to build a relationship if I also masculine it in places as well. The eco-critic in me cringes, but I see the relevance and utility of this decision. 

It became clear to me that I need to work on precise punctuation, since many of the errors were ill-placed semi-colons or dashes that had a large effect on the way the work read overall.

So much happens in a week that it becomes really difficult for me to sum it all up in a blog. Overall, the tone of the week was productive, with Tuck and Mike both checking like rather curt mother-hens to make sure I was on point with my work. I'm looking forward to reaching this deadline and moving on to new assignments, and excited to see what this next week brings since my writing will be on the line.

O/B: Week Two

There's a lot of fucking stress involved with this internship.

Week one can be summarized as... hopeful. Week two? Terrified. I have turned in a blog post for O/B that focused on the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Bozeman on the 21. There were a lot of potent editorial changes that helped strengthen my writing, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to grow in those ways. I know I need to be careful to always use the oxford comma, and I need to work on tightening up my language in many ways-- starting with OMITTING NEEDLESS WORDS. This work space will function as a practice field.

I still hold fast and strong to my opinion that the editors are on my side (in the end). Mike and Tuck both have been super helpful and thorough while explaining some of my mistakes, which I really appreciate.

So far this week I was assigned my articles for the spring issue. I have five main articles (I won't go into complete details here for fear of infringement). They focus on running, drinking, wilderness areas, raptor conservation and the outlook, which is a photo-accompanied piece. I should also have a gear review on the horizon, but I can't comprehend that quite yet. These are due by a deadline that makes me queasy, Feb. 2nd. With a full semester load, capstone, 2 jobs? Bring it...

______________________

Some things I'm learning:

1. Don't ask needless questions. If you can find the answer in some way yourself, do that. Always.

2. Don't assume you know more than anyone.

3. Anticipating something will only bring problems. Example: There was a clarification issue about the publication of an online article. After not hearing back from either of the editors for 30 minutes, and dealing with a time-sensative article, I published. Mistake. Not only did this bring me enormously spiked stress levels (on the night of my birthday, to top it all off) but it made me look like an idiot, sending out chains of inquisitive emails and finally taking the wrong action upon myself. Lesson learned, I suppose.

4. USE AND LOVE YOUR STYLE GUIDE: I wrote my first article and wanted to shoot myself when half the corrected errors from the publisher were right in front of me in the guide. Reliability-0.

5. The single return is the best keyboard short-cut in the books. Shift + enter. Badaboom.

Today we began looking at the beginning steps of copy-editing for the spring issue. Thank goodness for less OCD interns. And vodka.

Outside Bozeman: Beginnings

I am officially an intern with Outside Bozeman magazine. That's a pretty cool phrase to be able to say. This is truly the beginning of something, and as I have my first few "days" behind me, I can say I still remain relatively optimistic about this. 

Despite several... warnings about taking on this particular magazine and editor/publisher, Mike, I haven't felt anything more than nervousness upon my first day's completion. I think Mike is a great writer and editor, and a hard boss, which most likely will make me both a better writer and stronger person. Though I don't expect this to be easy in any way, my first few assignments have  been received with little to no kickback, and I find myself anticipating what's to come next. 

My first project was assigned by Mike upon accepting me as an intern -- I was to take a "How Far Will You Go" photo in the Dominican Republic (I was going for a few days) as well as submit ideas for the spring issue of the magazine. The next issue was set to be released in mid March, so the sunny environment of the Dominican helped me get in the mood to be thinking about spring in Bozeman. I submitted a series of ideas, of which I'm most looking forward to a running guide. It still seems strange, when paging through the most recent issue of Outside Bozeman, that the ideas I just submitted could be published, immortalized in print, on the pages I'm turning. My words may take up space there some day soon... that's the hope, right? What I find most appealing about the suffrage I know will go into these next few months, is that at the end of it all, I'll be a published writer. That's worth more than anything they can throw at me. 

Speaking of, my next few assignments have been tedious and, I'm sure, designed to inundate me with boring, administrative tasks. Chris, the sales manager, gave me the job of paging through the online edition of the winter issue and fault-checking the hyperlinks. I needed to consider both placement of the link on the page and the effectiveness of the hyperlink itself. After meticulously checking 128 pages of the issues (~140 hyperlinks) and having hand written their placements, I noticed an attachment on the email from Chris. I really wish I had seen it three hours earlier, as he included all the information I have been writing down manually, as well as specific locations he wanted the links to be. So, first lesson learned: always double check everything, or you end up wasting time. 

I met with Mike last night and got a key to the office, a work email, O/B swag, etc., but the most exciting moment was when we sat down and he ripped apart my resume and sample writings. I actually loved every minute of it because it's such an invaluable experience to be able to sit down with an editor and hear first hand what he liked and didn't like and be able to utilize his experiences to better my writing. Though he categorized much of my writing as verbose, he said he was willing to continue reading because he enjoyed my style (score!).

In this first and quick meeting, I learned the differences between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, and became embarrassingly aware of my tendency to be inconsistent in voice and tone. Mike helped me look through some of my writing about the Patagonian dam systems and pointed out choice words that were too strong, that carried too much of an agenda, and he helped me hear how words like beautiful and intricate carried two different implications. Honestly, I learned a lot in just this first meeting which gives me hope for those that will follow. I've started what I'm calling a "survival guide" to editing, and trying to update it each day when I learn something from this experience. Today I found E.B.White through the mouth of Zinsser to be most encouraging " You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And be willing to defend what you've written " (On Writing Well 298). 

Let the obsession begin. 

A Root Movement to a ‘Green’ Interweb

For years now we have been actively using the Internet, steadily learning to incorporate emerging technologies to ascertain levels of multimodality in our daily lives. In many ways, the Internet has redefined our landscape as writers... but it's important not to forget from where we draw our inspiration-- our real, tangible landscape, our environment. The organic world is a source of wonder, a space of natural phenomena, and almost always cognitively separate from the seeming sterility of the technological world. But with the evolution of our resources, technology has grown and is impacting the environment. As writers, we are faced now with more than the world, with cyberspace and multimodality. If the Internet is a space of intertextuallity, then why is the environment not yet a text? Our knowledge base has potential to become infinte and as our modern western society grows increasingly more digital, there are decisions that need to be made about the way in which we utilize these new tools in direct inter-relation to the living world around us.

Kevin Slavin said quite eloquently in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man, and now, there's this third corroboratory force". Slavin claims it's algorithms, but in a way it very much can be seen as technology as a whole. The Internet, multimodal education, new tools, and technologies are constantly shaping the way we view the space we live in. Not only do they shape how we see and interact with the world,but often silently, they change it.

Since the digital economy is already using a tenth of the world's energy, to avoid industrial scale damage to the environment we must ask questions now that will set media use on a sustainable path. How can we expect to see the Internet, and the companies that work within it, grow more renewable? We must ask what we are doing to head down a path of environmental consciousness, and what we will continue to do in the future as our world becomes more dependent on technology? 

Like any growing industry, profit will weigh in significantly for businesses and the scale will be tipped toward more development, leaving the environment to assume a heavy debt in the name of progress. That is, unless we become informed consumers, users and most of all, writers so we can use this connectivity to find voices to speak for marginalized entities. The use of multimedia is now an undeniable part of our lives, with the Americans not only watching an average of 5 hours of television per night, but 50 percent of them using another form of media while they watch (Marketing Land). 

Figure 1: Graph of multimedia use, 2014

With all of this multi-tasking (figure 1), consumption of media is at an all-time high. We, as a people, have more access to online tools and resources, and we, as writers, are not doing enough to use these resources to advocate for more environmental practices. The click of a mouse is no longer needed- phones have become just as powerful sources for information. But, what's in an iPhone? Apple released an environmental mission statement saying on their site, "We have a big responsibility to leave a smaller footprint". So far, the company has made (relative) good on this, and looking to figure 2 we can see that the amount of energy needed to run a mac today is 97 percent less than their first release in 1998-- a step in the right direction. On their website they go on to claim that they understand the scale of which their global product emits greenhouse gases contributing to climate change-- but as consumers, are we willing to let this be enough? At what point do we stop holding companies responsible for their products? And what about the mass amount of energy it takes to run something like the Internet in the first place?

Figure 2, Apple energy consumption 1998-today (apple.com)

Internet and media use is growing at such an exponential rate-- unlike any other industry we have seen-- that it is now critical that we demand companies and consumers to be actively liable for the unseen degradation,before action becomes virally overdue. We cannot separate our ability to be multimodal and the environmental consequences. 

To understand this paradigm, we first must ask what, exactly, is multimodality? How did this term come to be used, and why was there a vernacular need? According to the glossary of multimedia terms, it can be defined as:

Look very literally here at the use of the phrase 'spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and the relationship between these'. The glossary opens up multimodality broadly, including elements like environment that are often forgotten when considering implications of new ideas or methodologies. This is key to understanding the whole picture-- like any cultural shift, certain aspects become marginalized and in human history this has meant that the environment becomes nothing more than a commodity. Though there are recent efforts to reconcile this type of thinking on a small level, not enough is being done to prevent it from perpetuating. One of the largest contributors is a hidden one-- the Internet. No one 'owns' it, so who can we hold accountable? How about the networks?

The Internet, despite the way it often feels, is still ‘new’ in broad considerations. As Anil Dash explains in his talk at the Good Experience Live (GEL) conference, the Internet is a 'new' tool, and it connects us to widely better networks than we could ever manage without the World Wide Web. Dash is compelling, almost pleading with the audience, in an attempt to open the eyes of a world that has opportunity hooked, yet seems uninterested in reeling it in. It's with these new tools that we have the absolute privilege and opportunity to be informed, to know what is happening in the world around us. But what's really important here is that these tools also give us the chance and the platform as writers to demand more accountability, more responsibility for actions that may contribute to the destruction of the environment. To do this though, it is imperative that we fully understand the level of gross proliferation that our tools, namely the Internet as a whole, have already experienced, so we can prepare ourselves for the level of growth that is still on the horizon. If we can trace the roots of its past and fully grasp how much has changed at such a rapid pace we will be able to situate ourselves more accurately in the future, and partake in fundamental changes for the use and creation of multimedia. If we look to Figure 1, a timeline of notable contributors to the rise of the Internet, we can see how quickly multimodality emerged and locate the places where this technology has shifted shape over the infinitely small span of its existence. 

Figure 3: The Internet- A Timeline. 
Be sure to roll your mouse over each event, click individually and to scroll completely through the interactive features. Utilize hyperlinks by opening them in a new window or tab. 

(You can access this timeline externally here-- check out the list option on the bottom right to see the timeline displayed as an indexed record) 

Image sources actively linked. Stat. sources: Infoplease, UNCP
WC: 1081, created by  LBrayton

All these changes, all this growth, what does it mean for the environment? The unfortunate reality is expressed in the video below from Greenpeace, "How Dirty is Your Data?", and it's a shocking truth. Right now, as we participate in media culture, we are degrading our environment. As we write and post and blog and tweet, we are a part of the problem. Watch the video to hear to what extent.

On the timeline, take note of the entry in December of 1996, a mere 18 years ago was the now mega-mogul Google's inception. We see this same sort of 'boom' with popular sites like Facebook or YouTube in the timeline. But in less than 20 years, Google has expanded from a base of 10,000 queries per day to almost 47,000 searches a second today. The changes in the company have been immense, and the shifts in energy consumption had no choice but to grow with the brand. Within the last ten years, Google has made it a clear initiative (and business venture) to run their data centers off of sustainable energy. They claim "data centers are designed to use as little energy as possible" using temperature controls, recycling water for cooling, and renewable energy to help power their facilities (google.com/green/efficiency). In fact, the company has invested over $1.5 billion in renewable projects, like wind and solar energies. One of the most impacting projects that Google has taken on is their SunPower energy investment which helps install solar panels in residential homes so that the average American is more apt to act on green energy by making cost is less of a factor in decision making. Despite a long list on Google's website of their green efforts, only 35% of Google's total electricity is renewable (google.com).

Figure 4: Google Energy Distribution (Google.com)

With all the money and resources that Google is investing in other companies, why do they not operate at 100% renewable energy? They note that they offset or "neutralize" the remainder of their carbon footprint through some of the projects they fund, but is this trade-off fair to the environment? Can we shrug off responsibility through displacement?

It's easy to assume that technology is a relatively 'clean', after all there's no direct environmental harm, right? No, we're just using the Internet. We're just sending a text message, just googling images of David Beckham (Google even has a chart of global interest him over time...). But when four billion users are simultaneously browsing the web, the energy consumption is multiplied by that same 4 billion. If the video above didn't put it in perspective, the difference in energy globally between something as small as those who use Yahoo email and those who use Gmail is equivalent to the entire annual electricity consumption of the country Barbados (inhabitat.com)-- no small feat.

The type of scale we are considering here is so large, it's virtually unfathomable. Though these companies are keeping sustainability in the back of their codes of conduct, the truth of the matter is, as we can see from the recent past, the Internet and media as a whole is growing too rapidly for this to be sufficient; for these efforts to be enough. In order to be truly sustainable, leading companies like Apple, who supply the technology we use to connect, and Google, which dominates the form through which we share and receive information, have to be held accountable at the same pace that their field is expanding. This means no carbon footprint, 100% renewable operating systems, effort and innovation. And, as much as we don't want to realize it, we have to be accountable, too as consumers and participants. That means writers need to produce text that ask the kinds of questions we have been asking, and compose projects like Greenpeace's video that will get people, and companies, thinking. We need an environmental call to action. If we fail, and it's arguable that we already are, the environment yet again will suffer the consequences of human oversight. Surely, since we have the knowledge and the tools, and now thanks to the vast Internet, the networks, this will not remain an unresolved problem.

Ted Nelson once said "The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others". If are rooted in conventional thinking and boxed in by paper prisons, we have been handed the tools that can sever these restraints and immerse us in a wider world than we could have possibly imaged 20 years ago. But in this revelation and progression, we mustn't  forget our role as writers to speak for those who cannot- to give voice to environmental concerns and to rise up to ask for change when it is undoubtedly needed. Everything is connected: this Earth, this virtual space, this text: they are the words, they are 'the thing itself' (Woolf).  

Infographic Reflection

   As you can tell, the infographic assignment was close to my heart. I had jokingly responded to Cicily's comment about making hers on her English Bull dog with a quip about  my pitbull... but in the end I couldn't get the idea out of my head and the more I thought about it the more perfect it seemed. I incuded a pre-infrographic collage of my puppy, Badger, just to show that the ad was true! I really love the breed of dog so I felt compelled to speak for them in this case. 

   I was conflicted at first on whether or not to make it an Adopt-a-Pit spiel or something that just proved wrong the many myths surrounding the breed, or something simply educational. In the end, I tried to make a mix of all three, which I think sort of convoluted the graphic in a small way. I made a list of some of the things I really wanted people to know-- like the different kinds of pitbulls that make up the breed, but I also wanted people to be able to relate to the ad if they still didn't care for pits. The most common anti-pitbull argument is that pitbulls are violent and aggressive animals, which could not be more false (they are the most cuddly breed too but no one bothers to acknowledge that. They have up to thirteen different dogs categorized as a Pits which make them statistically easy to blame), so I wanted to go about proving this 'wrong' and that's why I included the sidebar on ridiculous things that would kill you first before a Pitbull became a threat to your life. I thought the formatting on this section was understandable, but Doug mentioned that it seemed broken up for the readers eye and after this was pointed out I can understand how that would be the case. 

  I'd never made an infographic before, and there are so many online resources that really made it a breeze, though formatting the actual aesthetics and making decisions on where to put text and how much, when to choose between image and text, how to balance the overall result, were all decisions that are very similar to those made in the writing process-- or even more complex! I really enjoyed this assignment and am happy overall with the work I did. 

Anderson, McGonigal, Priebatsch, and Dash- Video Networking

I've grown up to be technologically challenged, for this generation at least. My boyfriend frequently plays Grand Theft Auto (GTA) where you literally run around with an armory of weapons, killing civilians and stealing their wheels to outrun the police. I've been 'game' enough to attempt a few rounds, and just recently I was able to use my left and right hands independently from one another to successfully choose an grenade launcher, blow up and murder a woman on the sidewalk, step over her bloody body and steal her Ubermacht Oracle. What an accomplishment. I am NOT by any means 'a gamer' or someone who is drawn to spending my time in that manner-- but I don't attribute this to the concept of video games, instead, to the genre they've constructed.

It seemed to me that video games tended to fall into a few categories-- violent 'war' games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends, 'Epic Quest' games like the popular Skyrim and time-passers like Nintendo's Mario Brothers. But, before you jump down my throat, I'll admit games are evolving, and apparently evolving us right along with them. While I was constructing this blog post, I came across a wikipedia article that you can read HERE  that took me on an enlightening journey through all the incredibly detailed genres of video games (seriously, from Beat 'em-Up-Hack-and-Slash to Christian games). This got me thinking, what is it that I missed about the video game craze? Where does my aversion to gaming come from? Have I been conditioned to view it as a time waster? Is it because I'm a female? Is it because of the kind of learner I am? Because I just wasn't exposed to them in my childhood? Because I'm not good at them now and feel discouraged?

I really don't have the answers, but when thinking more critically about it I think the popularity has something to do with the same reason we love movies and books, the stories they tell-- only in the online game, you have the ability to manipulate those stories and essentially, create them. Huffington Post has an interesting article on the benefits of gaming, which has been popping up more and more in all social contexts lately. This article  is really, really worth the time reading through: there are some shocking benefits that line up very closely with what McGonigal had to say in her TEDx talk. She mentioned that gaming could be the "future survival of humankind" and sited a really interesting mythology of Herotitus and what games were potentially able to do for his community so long ago. McGonigal was engaging and worked well with the other talks we were to watch and learn from. I particularly liked Anderson, who claimed the opportunities we have gained from Dash's 'better tools, and better networks' have allowed for massive spread of ideas through the flexibility of medium on the web. He says, "that primal medium that your brain is exquisitely wired for has gone global", imagine that! From the 'evolution of dance' via the internet, to scientists on Jove spreading experimental details, to the other thousands of people spreading data and responding online, that internet has opened (and that's his key word) a full cycle of learning framed by the presence of our ever growing population.

In an attempt to better understand the potential for gaming and the influence gamers could have on our global community, I thought I should prode a gamer myself and see what I could discover and learn from their experience. I talked to Montana State University student Dillon Bauernfeind, a junion in Sustainable Bioenergy systems, and a 'former' gamer.

An Interview With a Gamer: Dillon Bauernfeind, MSU student

1. What do you like best about gaming? What's your favorite game?
D: It [gaming] helps me to pass the time and it's amusing. It can be really interactive, too. I really like the motion games like 'Connect' on Xbox360 that lets your body be the controller. It lets you be active and gets you up and burning calories. I like both types equally, but Call of Duty is my favorite. Shooting and killing is fun in the game because it's sort of outside the normal realm-- that sounds sociopathic- but it let's you do things in another reality.

2. At what age did you begin playing video games or online games?
D: I got a original Nintendo when I was 8, that had fun games that required movement like Duck Hunter where you shoot ducks that fly across the screen with a plastic gun. It was pretty cool but I didn't play it a lot, I was outside a lot as a kid skiing and what not. I wasn't huge on gaming then but then I got a PS2 for Christmas when I was 11 or 12, which had racing games like car racing and dirt bike racing and a James Bond series of shooter games. Those were my fucking favorite. It was first person shooter so you got to pretend to be 007.
L: What is 'first person shooter'? 
D: First person is the perception of you being the person, the character, the guy with the gun. Third person shooter games like Halo are third person shooter where you control the character but you watch from a removed aspect.
L: When did you get more into gaming? Did you collaborate?
D: When I was 15 or 16 in high school I used some money I made over the summer to get an Xbox360 console with Call of Duty 1-6. I played with friends that I would see at school and we'd set something up after [school] to play together. Most of the time we would be problem solving because we would have to come up with solutions to tactical scenarios like if the enemy is coming one way, we needed to decide if it was worth it to walk around and flank them from a different side. It's pretty social. I was less into it after high school though, played a little in college but not as frequently because I didn't have a lot of money to buy new games and there was a sort of fading of interest too.

3. How do you feel when playing your favorite game? When you are winning? Losing?
D: Games for me are pretty mindless, I don't really get emotional. There's a small bit of gratitude and disappointment when I'm playing but I don't notice it too much.  I actually think I'm emotional watching movies. I'm not super invested in the game, but enough invested that I think it's worthwhile to play. Like, if you're going to watch TV anyway you might as well play a video game and be more engaged than just observing.

4. Do you ever think about other things you could be doing while gaming? Does it help you relieve stress, organize your thoughts, ect.? Do you ever experience the opposite (more stressed, more chaotic)?
D: I can definitely see how some people are but I'm not invested enough in the game to feel that emotional pull. It does chill me out sometimes though. Some people take it really seriously, probably because they really like it and it's a good escape, an alternate reality.

5. Is the plot of the game an important aspect to you? Does the story-line matter to you as a gamer?
D: Call of Duty has a really complex story. It helps give me reason to be playing, keeps it addictive because you're working toward a goal and you want to reach it. Only trouble is, like with Skyrim, that game is too long, too complex maybe, and I get burnt out and it's not really fun anymore.

6. Have you ever been in a situation where gaming has helped your everyday life? 
D: Games are nice because you can be isolated in your room but still sort of be socializing. The ultimate laziness- you can be kicking it with your friends in your boxers without having them see. I haven't ever really felt like games have really helped me, but I've never thought about it before. I think they do help you socialize though because you're interacting with people in an intimately removed way... talking and using a simulated character to portray your actions. Kinda cool.

7. Will you encourage your children to play the kinds of video games you play?
D: Ehh, no. They games I play are violent. I won't encourage it but I won't restrict it. I'll definitely stick to the guidelines, the rating system of ages on the games. I didn't start playing "kill games" until I was 12 or 13 which are rated T for thirteen and up. I would let my kids play those when they're old enough.

8. The company Leap Frog makes "educational" video games for kids ages 3+. Do you think there is an age where it's 'too early' for a child to play a video game? -->  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pov3VnPk_BY )
D: No, I think they are really an educational tool. The educational games I've played like the school sponsored ones we would play in class were pretty entertaining and helped me focus with my ADHD. I think the games that are meant for these kids are great, but they need to be intermixed. Like if you're helping teach your kid to read, it shouldn't be all of one or the other.

9. If you could give one reason to encourage others to play video games, what would it be? Any negative reason you can think of? 
D: Video games can be addicting. Play in moderation. Too much is too much, and just right is optimal- when you're not thinking about the game outside of playing it.



Notes on the videos:

McGonigal-

3 billion hours a week of gameplay for the future survival of humankind
Idea of constant feedback- collaborative online environments (satisfaction of virtual world)
Evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species (10,000 hours 'theory of success' virtuoso)
What exactly are gamer's getting good at? -- McGonigal argues Urgent Optimism (desire to act immediately combined with the hope that you can be sucessful)
Social relationships (playing games with others makes us like them better)
Blistful Productivity (happier working hard, optimized as human beings)
Epic Meaning (awe-inspiring missions)
Trying to make the real world work more like a game -- Herotitus (famine in the kingdom of Lydia)-- trying to escape real world
gamer's as a real world resource

Priebatsch-
"This world is social, the next world is gaming"

Thompson 6-10

There's so much to talk about in these chapters from Clive Thompson's book, Smarter Than You Think. Thompson moves sequentially from examples of progressive collaboration to the benefits of incorporating multimedia and technology in schools, an effect called 'ambient awareness', to the collective unification of the world via the internet. Thompson very clearly is advocating heavily for the incorporation of multi-media and cites many examples of positive change due to technological interaction. Though I agree, mostly, with his points I can't help but desire a concession to the 'other side'. Plenty of groups advocate heavily against advancements in technology and there is a particularly large movement to dissuade the incorporation of technology in school environments. Not to mention the significant implications that technology as a whole has for the environment and both human social and physical health. ( check some opinions on that out here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26295-is-modern-technology-killing-us ) I think by choosing to not encompass the entirety of the situation, I think Thompson weakened his argument. How would he dispute these arguments? Since technology is fairly 'new' and ever-changing, is it safe/fair to say the benefits out way the negative effects when we aren't fully sure of what those may be, 100%, yet?

I pulled out a lot of quotes while reading, but I wanted to share a few and the questions that they sparked me to ask: 

"When you gaze with wild surmise upon the Pacific of strangeness online, you confront the astonishing diversity of human passion"(153). 

- Thompson talks here about how the online community allows us to foster "strangeness" in the sense that we have more freedom to express obscurity and find acceptance. In a way, the internet allows us to have a world without boarders and an environment that is malleable. With increased connectivity and collaboration, our sense of place is infinitely larger. What sort of environmental implications does this disconnection with our tangible place create?

"But a strongly worded opinion-- the core of an op-ed-- is not subject to consensus. This is why collective thinking online also tends to fail when it attempts an aesthetic creation"(159). 

- How interesting to think that creativity tends to be opinion-based and therefore nearly impossible to collaborate for efficiency.   

"They assign videos to be watched at home, then have the students do the homework in class, flipping their instruction inside out"(177). 

- I'm struck by how much sense this system makes. Though, I see the same sort of loop holes that we see with our current system: kids would still go home, and blow off the videos, then come to class unprepared and need to play catch-up. I see the connection to multi-media here with the flexibility of the video assignments, but I'm not sure this holds enough weight-- what if the children don't have computer access? Some of these solutions seem to really play into a certain demographic... rich, anglo-saxon suburban families... 

"How much should you credit someone else if you use a bit of their code? Or a 'sprite' from their game? What constitutes a contribution so creative that you can put your name on a remix" (194)?

- Brings me back to the conversation in class about plagiarism, and Johnson-Eilola's astonishment at the editors request that he cite even a single word used. The lines are finite, and becoming more and more blurred as we continue into untouched territory and collaborative words. I don't even know how to begin thinking about code and how the citation or ownership would work for something that appears systematic in my mind. 

"His hypothesis is that language, one of our signal intellectual gifts, evolved precisely to allow us to socially 'groom' one another, in the way that primates groom one another physically"(222). 

"Actually, one of the best ways to grasp how political change happens is to study how it doesn't"(251). 

Johnson-Eilola and Kohl et. al.

Johnson-Eilola in the text The Database and The Essay; Understanding Composition as Articulation ( a misleading and rather dry title, if you ask me) lay out what, I think, is the very purpose of our course in digital rhetoric: "I'm not arguing that this postmodern shift erases traditional texts or narratives. Instead, I'm trying to make clear that our traditional texts are changing, whether we like this our [or?] not. We must work to understand the transformations and fragmentations taking place so that we can work within them"(207). This change that J-Eilola is attempting to make clear is not a new one, nor one that shocks me as a reader. I'm less interested in the aspect of the essay where he segments and differentiates between kinds of writing, which to me, seemed to function as a weak attempt to strengthen his argument, and more interested in the implications of these shifts.

As a class, we've been able to look at various forms of 'text', and have gravitated around a similar conceptual pondering of "originality" in both creative idea and writing that J-E's Intellectual Property questions. He looks at this further, prodding into WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)  , a new type of organized legislation that would "permit firms to 'own' facts they gather, and to restrict and control the re-dissemination of those facts. The new property right would lie outside (and on top) of the copyright laws, and create an entirely new and untested form of regulation that would radically change the public's current rights to use and disseminate facts and statistics (n. pag.)"(210). As an aspiring author, I see the implications of such law reaching far beyond 'facts and statistics'. One day, if WIPO were to come into effect, anything published online-- like the work on these blogs, or essays published in an online composition, even Facebook walls-- could, essentially, need to be patented. And this process is a business of profit like any other. There is a cost (of 1,330 swiss francs plus the filling fee of up to 2,300 francs- a sum equivalent to almost 4000 U.S dollars), naturally, to patent an IP with WIPO. Though, for now, Intelectual Property seems to be relatively restricted to larger scale, corporate business but that is by now means a guarantee.

While browsing to better understand the work of IP, I read from the Journal of Advanced Pharmaceutical Technology and Research that "IPR (rights) is a strong tool, to protect investments, time, money, effort invested by the inventor/creator of an IP, since it grants the inventor/creator an exclusive right for a certain period of time for use of his invention/creation"(Saha: Introduction). I wonder, what happens at the end of this period of time? Will we end up seeing Owell's 1984 republished under another name? Will all of language need to be locked down to a single 'owner'? Now that this claim game has begun, like everything else wrapped up under our umbrella of modernity, it will not stop. 

You can actually visit Johndon Johnson- Eilola's 'workspace' here where I found this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU to John Oliver discussing some further implications of the HyperWorld we are now undeniably immersed in. This video is so worth the time, and really, a quite witty compliment to his text.

I've sort of ignored Kohl et. al.'s History Now; Media Development and Textual Genesis of Wikipedia and their commentary on collective, or collaborative, writing. The collaborative element of, to borrow Kohl's example, Wikipedia is interesting when thought of in terms of IP. Wikipedia functions as a site with no true ownership since the authorship is anonymous and constantly shifting (though the form and media PPR is attributed to Ward Cunningham) so it offers a unique opposition to the very core of IP. Reading History Now and discovering a bit of the foundations of Wikipedia made me smile. Key elements are 'openness' and essentially, simplicity of use. How often in a day do I "wikipedia" something (yes it's a verb-- much like 'googling') and thank my stars that in the first paragraph I can extract a meaningful understanding of a concept. In essence, what Kohl et. al. seem to be wanting us to understand, is that Wikipedia, and maybe even all collaborative texts, are the ultimate Hypertext. There are some kinks-- like contribution and scientific authority-- but those will work themselves out eventually.

Sometimes it scares me to remember we've only been at this for 14 years. What will happen in another 14? The post-modernity that Eilola talks of really needs to be redefined as we slip and slid through the Hypermodern world.
It's here. It's now.

Infographic

This is Badger! He's a great snuggler, a blanket theif, and an avid hiker. He loves his ball, napping on the front porch and playing with his buddy Tukka. He always greets you with a smile- literally- to show you how much he loves you. He's my best friend, the inspiration for this Infographic and he's a Pit Bull.

Critical Essay- Proposal

For the Critical 'photo' essay assignment, I'm interested in understanding more clearly the history of hypertext. I'm curious to develop how hypertext came to exist. Where did its roots emerge in literary history? And, how do we see those roots shift to create the kind of hypertext we mingle with today?

I've been studying eco-criticism for several years now and have come to better understand the paradigm of modernity that we are operating within, and I'd like to extend the deconstruction to hypertext. Though I don't necessarily see multi-modal use of language as a bad thing, I'm interested to know why and how this 'new frontier' developed. I think if we can better trace the path of emergence, then we, ideally, will be able to more effectively utilize this tool.

There's a sort of inevitability that surrounds technological evolution in our modern world now.
Kevin Slavin said in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man and now there's this third corroboratory force" he claims it's algorithms, but in a way I think it's just technology as a whole. I'd like to explore this idea, and look at some of the implications (both negative and positive) of interacting so frequently with hypertext.

The sort of reseach I will need to conduct for a project of this sort is vast. Ironically, I think a lot of the 'historical' information will need to come from more recent sources, so I imagine I'll utilize textual research. I'd like to uncover the foundation of this shift, see if I can pinpoint when and why we made the move towards hypertextualization. I'll start by looking into Ted Nelson's life, the man who coined this phrase in the first place. We will see where this goes!