Spam, Pornography, and Cancer as Anomalies
FINAL PAPER FOR PORTFOLIO
EMAC 6374 Digital Textualities
By John Kay
December 13, 2011
I went to my family physician in September, 2007, for my annual physical. I looked forward to the examination because I had lengthened my aerobic exercise to sixty minutes per day as she had recommended at the previous physical. Unfortunately, the results of the blood-work showed something “abnormal.” Follow-up testing revealed that I had multiple myeloma, which is cancer of the plasma cells. Normal cells contain 46 chromosomes, but the cells of multiple myeloma patients have 53 or more. The Mayo Clinic classifies cells that do not contain 46 chromosomes as chromosomal anomalies (Mayo). Here and in many other topics, anomaly connotes problem because such outliers sit in a danger zone; however, a dictionary defines anomaly as an “irregularity” or “deviation from the common rule” (Merriam-Webster). In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, editors Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson use the anomaly. Anomaly serves as an appropriate descriptor for spam, pornography, and computer viruses.
Academic study of a subject requires the suspension of value judgment. Emotions swirling around hot-button issues can distort or color the analysis. The words spam, virus, and pornography illicit strong opinions, which can prevent an objective analysis. As I wrote in the Text Object (“Terrorism and Spam”), when analyzing “things,” the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza would caution me that “things” are not “more or less perfect because they delight or offend the human senses, or because they are beneficial or prejudicial to human nature” (Parrika and Sampson, 11). As with Spinoza, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson want to move “‘beyond good and evil’ and instead focus on the forces constituent to such moral subjects” (11).
In some ways the book’s subtitle almost contradicts itself and their premise. They refer to anomalies as irregularities but then add the value-laden nomenclature “the dark side.” Spam, computer viruses, and pornography are anomalies in digital culture but not anomalies in the “dark side of digital culture.” They belong, rather, to the dark side of digital culture, where they are regularities. The authors solve this rhetorical confusion with the word from. Scamming spam, computer viruses, and pornography are anomalies from “the dark side of digital culture.” Such clarification might sound like an unimportant exercise in semantics but lies central to the argument that spam, computer viruses, and pornography are anomalies in digital culture, in whose dark side they reside.
Topological analysis shows that spam, computer viruses, and pornography are anomalies. The editors write, “we use the term topology to address the complex assemblages of network society, which … encompasses the complex foldings of technological components with other aspects of social and cultural reality” (5). The Internet allows international communication for profitable and non-profitable uses. People of varying societies, subcultures and cultures (including languages) around the globe may and do utilize this technology. To put it another way, topological analysis shows that the Internet is a system, not just of networked computers, but also, of international users. This complex system, which affords usage by many different types of people of different ideologies and pathologies, includes spammers, scammers, hackers, and pornographers: it makes possible their operation on the Internet. Spam, viruses, and pornography thus come with the system. By volume they certainly are not irregular or abnormal. Topological analysis reguirs the consideration of cultural and societal forces as well as of technologies. This perspective shows that spam, viruses, and pornography are anomalies, which “are understood as expressing another kind of topological structuring that is not necessarily derived from the success of friction-free ideals as a horizon of expectancy” (7). Therefore, glitched media objects also are anomalies. My Still Images Object (“Descent into Glitch”), for example, shows a progression from controlled, manipulated photographs in which the focus is on the finished picture to glitched photographs in which the focus is on the creative process. Instead of being considered as irregular or abnormal, the resulting anomalous glitches produce works of art.
After conducting a topological analysis, analysts may consider the ethics involved. Pornography can help adult viewers in practicing some sex therapies and in achieving semen samples for medical purposes, but such examples comprise only a minute fraction of porn’s uses. Watching pornography can give people, especially children and teenagers, an inaccurate understanding of body image, sexual relations, and interpersonal relationships. Porn can lead people to think of others as only sources of sexual gratification. Porn can hurt marriages by encouraging spouses to view it, rather than interact with each other, for sexual satisfaction. Porn consumption can harm one’s spiritual and emotional maturities. An analysis of the ethics of pornography needs to include its effects on those involved with its production and distribution. Young adults, especially women, wanting to land acting jobs resort to starring in pornographic productions. By actually doing what they are portraying, the “actors” subject themselves to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies and feel/are sexually, physically, socially, and spiritually degraded. They involve themselves in an industry replete with illegal drugs and criminal activity.
Spam and viruses can harm more than harddrives of personal-computer users. Malicious code can damage hard-drives of businesses and organizations. The damage can financially cost them for equipment repairs and personnel power of, not just repair technicians, but also, the users who lose productivity. Users of networks might include physician offices or law enforcement agencies or the military, for whom damaged networks could result in the communication of wrong information or no information in times of emergencies. Potential customers might switch to competitors if they have problems ordering from damaged websites. Employees lose productivity by sorting through inboxes clogged with spam. As some of the hyperlinks on the Text Object show, individuals have lost billions of dollars from scammers, such as from Nigeria. On the other side, scammers, hackers, virus distributors, and some spam makers are harming themselves and their families by participating. Thus, pornography, some spam, scamming spam, and computer viruses truly do belong to the dark side.
Combining the topological approach with an ethical analysis yields a more-complete understanding of spam, viruses, and pornography. They are anomalies from the digital network culture but not benign ones. After learning that I had multiple myeloma, I traveled in 2007 to M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital in Houston. They confirmed my diagnosis but would not do anything about it. I switched to the Myeloma Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. My oncologist could have said, “Yes, you have a malignant chromosomal anomaly. It eventually will kill you, but we are not going to treat you.” Fortunately, he not only recognized the anomaly, but also, successfully treated it with tandem autologous stem cell transplants. The description of proposed treatment for scamming spam, viruses, and pornography extends beyond the scope of this paper and involves a thorough analysis of the structures that make possible their existence. I appreciate this book’s insistence on analysis.
Terrorism and Spam
DIGITAL MEDIA OBJECT: TEXT
Version 2.0
By John Kay
December 12, 2011
The Obama administration in April, 2010, placed an American on the C.I.A.’s “kill or capture” list. Anwar al-Awlaki grew up in New Mexico but moved overseas to Yemen. He became an evangelistic leader for al-Quaeda. His speeches allegedly encouraged a Pakistani-American to join and then botch a car bombing in Times Square in New York City. His messages also allegedly enticed a Nigerian young man to join the terrorist group and then unsuccessfully try to down an American passenger jet on Christmas Day in 2009 in Detroit. American officials say that Ibrahim al-Asiri from Saudi Arabia made the bomb for that attack. Another American, Samir Khan published an internet-based magazine called Inspire. This English-language media object promoted the ideology of al-Quaeda, such as by including articles like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
In September, 2011, from inside the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, C.I.A. personnel watched the movement of Anwar al-Awlaki half a world away in the African nation of Yemen. Undercover or embedded C.I.A. agents might have used their own eyes to keep watch on al-Awlaki, but they spied on him from aircraft high overhead. Personnel in Langley had reviewed the overhead images of where he was staying. Although these images might have resembled what a B-25 bombardier saw when he looked down to the ground from the plane’s glass bombsite in World War II, these electronic images represented what the twenty-first century drone saw and transmitted back to Virginia. In other words, C.I.A. personnel analyzed the situation by examining visual representations of what the cameras of an unmanned aircraft saw on the other side of the globe. When the C.I.A. personnel looked at the representational images, they spotted his riding in a car, and they ordered the drone to shoot a missile, which reached its intended target and killed leader Anwar al-Awlaki and publicist Samir Khan (Associated Press, October 1, 2011). Bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri might or might not have been killed in the air strike (Associated Press, October 3, 2011).
The C.I.A. used representational analysis to effect the assassination of a terrorist and what President Obama called “a major blow to al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate” (A.P., October 1, 2011). In representational analysis “any proposition that correctly represents the ‘real’ world is true,” and “knowledge, in turn is the compilation of correct propositions” (Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, p. 153); therefore, when C.I.A. personnel examined the visual representations of al-Awlaki’s movements in Yemen, they assumed that the images “re-presented” the actual circumstances overseas, that is, that they were seeing the “real” world in which the proposition that Awlaki was ripe for picking was true. The C.I.A. then acted on their knowledge of the correct propositions by pulling the trigger from thousands of miles away from Africa.
In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, editors Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson observe that scholars have used representational analysis for their examinations of spam, computer viruses, and pornography. Our nine-year-old son could explain that the now-ubiquitous reference to “the Dark Side” refers to the evil side or the side of the bad guys from Star Wars. I would classify computer viruses and pornography—things that damage equipment, networks, bank accounts, human models (mainly women), and families—as belonging to the dark side. But when analyzing “things,” the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza would caution me that “things” are not “more or less perfect because they delight or offend the human senses, or because they are beneficial or prejudicial to human nature” (Parrika and Sampson, p. 11). Representational analysis might consider perfection of the subject, for example, but like Spinoza, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson want to move “‘beyond good and evil’ and instead focus on the forces constituent to such moral subjects” (p. 11). As a result the dark side of the book’s subtitle refers to the representational analysis that many earlier scholars have used to describe spam (p. 5).
Parrika and Sampson prefer topological analysis to representation analysis when examining spam. Topological—in the sense of space and networks—analysis shows that anomalies in the digital environment are not abnormalities but part of the structure. Such a definition helps me study anomalies more objectively. Spam (although funny and unpleasant to eat or irritating to e-mailboxes) and porn and computer viruses (although still detrimental) are, therefore, anomalies in digital culture. As the power law depicts, most network nodes have few hits or links to them, while some (such as Google) have many hits. The “Google sites” and the pornographic sites are the “highly-linked anomalies” (p. 52).
Application of the topological approach to the subject of terrorism reveals some similarities to the issues of spam, pornography, and hacking. Terrorism functions as anomalies in the global power structure. That Yemen cell, acting a node in the terrorism network, was a “highly-linked anomaly.” As scamming spammers seek to extract money from recipients by creatively deceiving them, as operators of pornographic websites seek to take money from internet users by displaying tempting, titillating photographs and videos in order to lure them to pay to enter their site, and as hackers seek to gain notoriety, satisfaction, or sometimes money by exploiting weaknesses in the internet system, terrorists seek to violently exploit vulnerabilities of those people whose foundational, ideological beliefs differ from theirs. As scamming spamming, pornography, and hacking come with an internet system that affords generativity and profit-making, terrorism unfortunately comes with a global power structure in which some of the world’s marginalized turn to violent means to have their names, causes, desires, and beliefs known. Terrorism thus is an anomaly.
Governments will continue have to battle terrorism as long as current global power structures remain intact. Governments such as those in the United States and Europe might value the current global power structure more than they abhor the violence of the terrorists. In other words, they would rather keep the current world order in which terrorism is an anomaly and they remain on top rather than change to a more-level playing field, on which all of the world’s players—including the terrorists—have equal playing time.
Reflection on My Remediation
FINAL PROJECT – REMEDIATION
PART III – REFLECTION
For Dr. Sara Steger in HUSL 6384 Digital Rhetoric
By John Kay
October 24, 2011
Because I had emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix, missed a month of classes, and took Incompletes in all three of my courses, I returned to my original essay long after I wrote it. Entitled “Watson to Watson: The Social Effects of One-to-One Communication Technologies,” the essay looked at how people’s use of telephones, pagers, mobile phones for speaking, mobile phones for texting, instant messaging on computers, and email. My later fresh set of eyes and additional studying during the interim allowed me to modify my original essay. For example, I removed a mention of technological determinism because I learned that I had taken a social constructivism approach by analyzing the social effects.
For Part II, I chose video ( WATCH VIDEO HERE ) as my medium because I wanted to use the affordances of video. This medium allowed me to incorporate written text, still visual images, moving images, and music. I could order and pace the presentation of the material. I realized that I could neither just restate the words of the essay nor cover all of the topics of that paper; therefore, I selected one main point, i.e., the overblown fears arising from society’s prevalent technologically-deterministic approach to understanding the social effects of new one-on-one communication technologies have existed since the introduction of the telephone. Video’s “hybridity” (Mary Hocks, “Understanding Visual Rhetorics in Digital Writing Environments,” 637) allowed me to show, for instance, a scene from the movie You’ve Got Mail, display text, and play music.
I wanted the construction of the composition to put the viewer in the “audience stance” (Hocks, 635) of seeing that movie clip, reading about fears of meeting someone on the other end of the one-to-one communication technology, and concluding that the discussion was about email and instant messaging while creating the tension of showing visual images from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s about the telephone and fears surrounding it. The reason for such juxtaposition was to illustrate and have the viewer experience the fact that the worries people have had about the social effects of email and instant messaging are nothing new. Video afforded me the opportunity to run two parallel vectors of rhetoric in ways that a strictly printed essay might not be able to do as effectively. Mary Hocks would say that video is a very “transparent” medium because audiences are very familiar with it and its use (Hocks, 632), such as for narratives.
The remediation of my essay into video altered my message because the affordances of video prompted me to emphasize the main point. It allowed the reader to become a viewer and hearer and experience the message in a new way. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 15). My video refashioned my initial printed essay, film, and music by including parts of them and placing them in the digital audio/visual environment. My final printed essay refashioned my ideas for the video because the video alerted me to my need to more clearly focus my argument. I thought that the experience of writing an essay, remediating it, and then reflecting on it was an appropriate way to bring a Digital Rhetoric course to a conclusion.
Part I of Final Project: Remediation Essay
The University of Texas at Dallas, HUSL 6384
May 10, 2011
A knock on the door announced an unexpected visitor to the home on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. Father arose from his favorite chair and answered the door. “Welcome Reverend. How good it is to see you. Won’t you please come inside?” “Family, the Reverend is here,” he bellowed. Father, Mother, and the children gathered in the foyer to greet their pastor. Father said, “Please have a seat in the front parlor.” The family and their visitor took their seats. Mother asked, “Can I bring you some tea or lemonade?” “Tea, thank you.”
Similar scenes took place in large metropolitan areas, county seat towns, and rural areas. Pastors, friends, family, and others stopped by houses unexpectedly, and the homeowners gladly welcomed them. An invention in 1876 threatened to curtail these social customs in the United States. From the time of the introduction of the telephone up to the advent of email, Americans have responded to the inventions of one-to-one communication technologies by allowing their use to impact society and by allowing them to act as extensions of themselves.
Certainly, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone would allow people to speak to people down the street or out at a farmhouse. People could quickly summon help during an emergency, place orders for home delivery, arrange meetings and visits, and deepen friendships by talking on the phone; however, not everyone appreciated Bell’s invention. Some Americans worried that this new technology would discourage home visitations. If potential visitors could gain the information they needed or could schedule visitation times by talking on the telephone, then fewer people would visit because they no longer could just stop by a home unannounced.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s in north Texas, residential architects designed the Dallas plan. The front door of the house stood in the middle of the one-story elevation, while large picture windows flanked either side. The door opened into a foyer, with a formal dining room on one side of the foyer and an equally-sized formal living room on the other side. The twelve-foot by twelve-foot formal living room resembled the parlor of Victorian homes. The homeowners knew that even if the rest of the house resembled a pigsty that the living room would remain clean and welcoming to visitors. By the 1980’s and 1990’s, many architects stopped designing formal living rooms because very few people still used those rooms, which had turned into closed museums. Fewer formal visits meant that homes did not need formal living rooms. People “visited” each other on the telephone; in other words, conversations on Bell’s invention turned the phone into the living room.
Some people—mainly for business or organizational purposes—have arranged conference calls or utilized automatic phone dialers; for example, principals at schools have recorded messages about the school’s closing for bad winter weather and then had the automatic phone dialer call all of the households of the students in order to deliver that recorded message. Most people, however, have used the telephone for one-to-one communication, in which one person calls another person one at a time. In broadcast media the message goes from the one to the many. The term “broadcast media” was synonymous with “mass media.” The masses of radio listeners, television viewers, newspaper readers, magazine readers, billboard readers, sign readers, and Web 1.0 readers all received the same message in their respective media. Until the advent of Web 2.0, it was cost prohibitive for individual people to use one-to-many communication, except for a newspaper classified ad or a “Nicole, will you marry me?” billboard.
The invention of the pager freed people from a landline in some respects. Physicians and employees who worked outside the office wore pagers so that the office staff or others could reach them wherever they were. Pager users were free to travel, but they were tied to a landline in the sense that they would have to locate a landline in order to return the call indicated on the pager. Even since the introduction of cell phones, some people have both pagers and cell phones. The one-to-one communication technology of pagers allows people to work in the “field,” to be contacted in emergencies (such as a fire for a firefighter) or urgent situations (such as the birth of baby for an obstetrician), and to be reached when needed. However, such access comes with costs. Pager users cannot truly relax when they know that they are “on call” or can be reached at anytime, including the middle of the night. Pages can call users away from their families or social situations and thus take a toll on relationships.
Cell phones have had even more social effects than have pagers. Manufacturers introduced $1,500 car phones in the 1980’s, when users could call anyone; on the other hand, people wanting to call car-phone users had to reach them when they were in the car. As technology improved, phones became much smaller, and prices dropped significantly, the “car phone” evolved in the 1990’s into the portable “cell phone,” which needed no automobile to work. Sales of cell phones have exploded to the point where more than 91 percent of Americans use them. Parents wrestle with the question of how old do their boys and girls need to be before the children are allowed to have cell phones. People from older children to senior adults have them. As with pager users, cell phone users can be reached at anytime and at any place that the device is working. Unlike pager users, cell phone users can call back from their mobile device.
Teens might feel like they have freedom with a cell phone because, like pagers, cell phones allow the users to travel and still be reached. Author Sherry Turkle says that teens have a “tethered adolescence.” They think that they have more freedom, but their parents can reach them wherever they are, and they might have to check in with them. She said that the use of cell phones is changing a rite of passage. Between the ages of 12 and 14, children began navigating the city and life itself on their own. They apply what they learned as children. However, they use their cell phones to contact their parents or friends in order to learn what to do. The teen might receive better instructions from their parents than they would have from friends or from their own education. But by being tethered to their parents, they might not have received a needed maturation experience, which would have helped them in the future.
As a feature of cell phones, texting has changed the way that youth communicate. A 2010 Pew Research study found that texting is the number one way that young people aged 12 to 17 communicate. Youth text more to each other than they speak to each other in person. Jennifer Valentino-DeVries of The Wall Street Journal comments, “Although e-mail is considered relatively informal by adults, teenagers in the Pew survey said they see it as formal, something used mainly by teachers and parents.”
The read/write web, also called “Web 2.0,” has enabled individuals to augment their one-to-one communication by producing one-to-many communication. Online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and many others and email blasts allow individuals to broadcast their news. But those sites allow one-to-one communication, such as instant messaging on Facebook and direct messaging on Twitter.
Teens might not prefer email, but millions of Americans use email for one-to-one communication. Email users can write a message right when they are thinking of an idea and send it at no charge to another person. The recipient can read it when he or she desires.
Some people have complained that the use of email has reduced letter writing, and thus recipients miss seeing the handwriting of the sender. People without computers or people who do not use computers or people who do not know how to use computers feel ostracized. They feel that they are not receiving the same news or conversations that email users receive. Such people might or might not be considered twenty-first-century Luddites; rather, they prefer other forms of communication. Famous writer Wendell Berry even declared, “I am not going to [buy a computer].” Those of us who prefer digital forms of communication need to be cognizant of the fact that not everyone has jumped online. If we want to communicate with them, we need to communicate with them in the manner that they, not we, prefer and thus follow the “Platinum Rule,” which declares, “Do unto others as they wish to be done unto.” We need to ask them for their preference.
Much current research describes the societal changes accompanying the rise of digital communication technologies. Numerous are their benefits: scalability, accessibility, transferability, low costs, ubiquity, and ease of searching, copying, storing, and archiving. Opponents cite the loss or devaluing of earlier communication technologies, the widening of the gap between the have’s and the have-not’s of digital communication technologies, the potential for cheating, fraud or terrorism, the increase of vice, isolation because of cocooning, the decrease of face-to-face communication, and the rise of secularism. Author Diana Butler Bass states, “The U.S. is no longer the exception to the rule that when a society acquires more technology it becomes more secular.”
Conclusion
From Bell’s saying “Mr. Watson, come here,” to digital technologies, represented by IBM’s founder Thomas Watson, Americans have responded to one-to-one communication technologies. Our responses have been that: our choices rather than technological determinism. “With the arrival of electric technology [including the original telephone ],” Marshall McLuhan writes, “man extended or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system.” We have chosen to extend ourselves. Since 1876, Americans have seen new technologies for one-to-one communication: telephones, pagers, car phones, cell phones for speaking, cell phones for speaking and texting, instant messaging, and emails. People have responded to the use of each one of these technologies by changing the way that they communicate. Some people have incorporated the new technologies into their communication repertoire, while other people have ignored them or reluctantly agreed to use them. In any case, most Americans have allowed these one-to-one communication technologies to serve as extensions of themselves.
I contend that today’s digital communication technologies are not the only one-to-one communication technologies to have opponents as well as proponents. Some of the same arguments or variations of them could be used for or against each technology, beginning with the telephone. I agree with Fischer when he writes, “I chose to focus, however, on a technology [i.e., the telephone] that people used daily in private life, a technology that may have affected social relations, community, and culture.”
WORKS CITED
Berry, W. “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html
Butler Bass, Diana. TCU Magazine, Spring 2011, p. 14.
Fischer, C. S. (1992). America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kindle version.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/wireless-survey-91-of-americans-have-cell-phones.ars
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/04/20/omg-teens-now-text-more-than-talk-face-to-face/
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Teens-and-Mobile-Phones.aspx
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/dayintech_0310
Marvin, Carolyn in Fischer, C. S. (1992). America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kindle version.
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis.” Understanding Media. 43.
Turkle, S. (2007). “Can You Hear Me Now?” Forbes. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0507/176.html
EMAC 6374: Digital Media Objects
DIGITAL MEDIA OBJECT: TEXT
Version 1
By John Kay
October 3, 2011
The Obama administration in April, 2010, placed an American on the C.I.A.’s “kill or capture” list. Anwar al-Awlaki grew up in New Mexico but moved overseas to Yemen. He became an evangelistic leader for al-Quaeda. His speeches allegedly encouraged a Pakistani-American to join and then botch a car bombing in Times Square in New York City. His messages also allegedly enticed a Nigerian young man to join the terrorist group and then unsuccessfully try to down an American passenger jet on Christmas Day in 2009 in Detroit. American officials say that Ibrahim al-Asiri from Saudi Arabia made the bomb for that attack. Another American, Samir Khan published an internet-based magazine called Inspire. This English-language media object SPAM promoted the ideology of al-Quaeda, such as by including articles like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
In September, 2011, from inside the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, C.I.A. personnel watched the movement of Anwar al-Awlaki half a world away in the African nation of Yemen. Undercover or embedded C.I.A. agents might have used their own eyes to keep watch on al-Awlaki, but they spied on him from aircraft high overhead. Personnel in Langley had reviewed the overhead images of where he was staying. Although these images SPAM might have resembled what a B-25 bombardier saw when he looked down to the ground from the plane’s glass bombsite in World War II, these electronic images represented what the twenty-first century drone saw and transmitted back to Virginia. In other words, C.I.A. personnel SPAM analyzed the situation by examining visual representations of what the cameras of an unmanned aircraft saw on the other side of the globe. When the C.I.A. personnel looked at the representational images, they spotted his riding in a car, and they ordered the drone to shoot a missile, which reached its intended target and killed leader Anwar al-Awlaki and publicist Samir Khan (Associated Press, October 1, 2011). Bomb-maker SPAM Ibrahim al-Asiri might or might not have been killed in the air strike (Associated Press, October 3, 2011).
The C.I.A. used representational analysis to effect the assassination of a terrorist and what President Obama called “a major blow to al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate” (A.P., October 1, 2011). In representational analysis “any proposition that correctly represents the ‘real’ world is true,” SPAM and “knowledge, in turn is the compilation of correct propositions” (Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, p. 153); therefore, when C.I.A. personnel examined the visual representations of al-Awlaki’s movements in Yemen, they assumed that the images “re-presented” the actual circumstances overseas, that is, that they were seeing the “real” world in which the proposition that Awlaki was ripe for picking SPAMwas true. The C.I.A. then acted on their knowledge of the correct propositions by pulling the trigger from thousands of miles away from Africa.
In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, editors Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson SPAMobserve that scholars have used representational analysis for their examinations of spam, computer viruses, and pornography. Our nine-year-old son could explain that the now-ubiquitous reference to “the Dark Side” refers to the evil side or the side of the bad guys from Star Wars. I would classify computer viruses SPAM and pornography—things that damage equipment, networks, bank accounts, human models (mainly women), and families—as belonging to the dark side. But when analyzing “things,” the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza would caution me that “things” are not “more or less perfect because they delight or offend the human senses, or because they are beneficial SPAM or prejudicial to human nature” (Parrika and Sampson, p. 11). Representational analysis might consider perfection of the subject, for example, but like Spinoza, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson want to move “‘beyond good and evil’ and instead focus on the forces constituent to such moral subjects” (p. 11). As a result SPAM the dark side of the book’s subtitle refers to the representational analysis that many earlier scholars have used to describe spam (p. 5).
Parrika and Sampson prefer topological analysis to representation analysis when examining spam. Topological—in the sense not of a three-dimensional geographical map but of space and networks—analysis shows that anomalies in the digital environment are not abnormalities SPAM but part of the structure. Such a definition helps me study anomalies more objectively. Spam (although funny and unpleasant to eat or irritating to e-mailboxes) and porn and computer viruses (although still detrimental) are, therefore, anomalies in digital culture. As the power law depicts, most network nodes have few hits or links to them, while some (such as Google) have many hits. The “Google sites” SPAM and the pornographic sites are the “highly-linked anomalies” (p. 52).
Terrorist cells, such as those of Al-Quaeda, function as nodes in a network. Their decentralization makes it difficult for American military leaders to locate and defeat them. Hopefully, that Yemen cell SPAM was a “highly-linked anomaly,” one which has collapsed more than would have a lowly-linked cell.
A Primer on The End
By John Kay, Master of Divinity, Master of Business Administration, Ph.D. student
May 21, 2011
Christians who are followers of 89-year-old Harold Camping, the founder of Family Radio Worldwide (not to be confused with the Family Radio Network), have declared that May 21 is Judgment Day and the Rapture. I think that they have studios on Tollroad 190 at Jupiter in Plano, Texas.
Many religions (not just Christianity), sects, and cults have had prophecies about The End for millennia. I am reminded of the Doors’ song, “This is the End.” We remember the tragedies in Jonestown (“don’t drink the lemonade”) or Heaven’s Gate. These groups were cults, but the subject of the end is important to Christian doctrine. Christ tells us in the Gospels not to predict when He will return, but still some Christians will say, “I know that, BUT I think that He will return [on a specific date].” You can impress your friends with the fifty-cent word “eschatology,” which is the study of end times. Large books could be written about this vast subject, but here is a primer.
In the last century in America, premillennial dispensationalism, especially of the pretribulation variety, has been the most popular eschatological view. Movies and books such as the bestselling Left Behind series have espoused premillennial dispensationalism, which has been championed by a certain seminary (i.e., a school where pastors train) and a certain Bible church right here in Dallas. They say that God divided time into dispensations. We now live in a parenthetical time called “The Church Age,” that is the time since the Church began in the first century. Christ will return with the Rapture. He will not fully return at the Rapture; rather, He will appear in the sky (in a kind of Second Coming Part I) and rapture (i.e., snatch) Christians dead or alive and take them back with Him to heaven. The people at the time of the Rapture who are not taken are “left behind,” thus the title of the book series.
A time of great Tribulation will take place around then. Pretribulation, or pre-trib, folks believe that the Rapture will take place before the start of the literal seven years of Tribulation. Those whom Christ raptures will be spared the Tribulation. Believers in Mid-Tribulation, or mid-trib, believe that the Rapture will occur in the middle of the Tribulation; in other words, three-and-a-half years into the Tribulation, the Rapture will happen. And Postribulation, or post-trib, folks think that the Rapture will take place—you guessed it—after the seven years of Tribulation. All of these three views of the Tribulation fall under premillennialism.
Premillennialists believe that the Rapture will arrive before the seven-year Tribulation, after which the Second Coming (Part II) will happen (i.e., Christ will return in bodily form), the dead will be raised, and the Millennium will begin. For Premillennialists, the Millennium will be the literal one-thousand years when Satan will be thrown into “the Abyss” (Revelation 20) and Christ will physically reign on earth. After one thousand years, the Final Judgment will take place.
Premillennialism is not the only Christian view of eschatology. Post-millennialists believe that the Millennium will be a time (whether a literal or not-so-literal one-thousand years) when life on earth will improve, such as by people’s practicing Christian ethics. After the Millennium Christ will return in the Second Coming. Final Judgment will follow. This more-optimistic view lost favor partially as a result of all of the wars of the Twentieth Century.
I prefer the third major view. Amillennialism does not have a literal one-thousand year Millennium. The Latin mil means thousand. The Hebrew language does not have superlatives. Instead, Hebrew repeats the word; for example, holy holy means holier and holy holy holy (like the hymn) means holiest. Something to the third power is the most that that thing can be. The number 1,000 is 103. For Amillennialists 1,000 years is a superlative number of years symbolizing a long, complete time. The Millennium began sometime after Christ’s First Coming, will end a really long time later, and will be followed by Christ’s Second Coming. Final Judgment will follow. There is no Rapture in Postmillennialism or Amillennialism. Unlike Postmillennialism’s optimistic Millennium, Amillennialism’s “Millennium” sees the world as becoming more corrupt. Amillennialists find some verification of the increasing corruption in the genocide and other atrocities of the recent centuries.
We find the good news of eschatology in Revelation 21, in which the writer John envisions the following scene:
1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; 4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ 5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new’” (Revelation 21:1-5, New Revised Standard Version).
Keep up with the Changes
Blog 2011-0427
By John Kay for HUSL 6384
A love of mine during my high school days was audio equipment, what we called, not “wi-fi,” but “hi-fi,” because my friends and I wanted to hear the clearest sounds. I saved money from my work at the Clock Castle in Promenade Center in Richardson to buy a $300 Technics SA-300 35-watt-per-channel receiver from the stereo shop in the late Prestonwood Mall. I later added a Technics direct-drive turntable, a Sony three-head cassette tapedeck, and a pair of Ohm speakers. Before going off to college to study Business Broadcasting, I taped many of my records in fear that a roommate would break a needle if I took my turntable to college.
One of the reasons why I returned to college to study Emerging Media And Communication was that I realized that the digital revolution had left me in the analog past and that I needed to get up to speed, although my analog audio skills came in handy last week in class when no one could figure out how to connect the speakers in the Mac lab.
Did I violate copyright law when I recorded my vinyl 33’s and 45’s onto more-durable audio cassette tapes? Does my wife violate copyright law when she records compact discs on her iPod? We owned most of the LP’s and CD’s that we recorded to other media, whether analog or digital.
We did not know what user-generated content was. The closest that I came was when I changed the order of the songs on my Lionel Richie album when I created a date tape. I transferred the record to tape so that the music became more and more romantic as my date progressed and we listened to the songs in my 1978 Volkswagen Scirocco.
But today most young people understand user-generated content. The Wikipedia article offers the word “appropriation.” People appropriate material, much of which is copyrighted, for their own use. The article alerts us to the fact that we did not need the internet to have appropriation. Famous artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, and others whom I studied last semester in John Pomara’s class “Glitch: From Analog to Digital” all have appropriated existing materials and works of art.
Digital media—whether in audio, video, text, or graphic form—are much easier to access on the internet and are easier than analog material to manipulate and appropriate.
The “Remix” video shows the inconsistency of copyright-law enforcement. The film documents how one man named Girl Talk takes copyrighted music and masterfully edits bits and pieces of it to create new music. Thousands of people pay money to attend his high-energy concerts. Certainly, such professional use of other people’s music constitutes a violation of copyright law, but he keeps doing it. A colleague and friend of mine, Reverend Don Smith, the former senior pastor of Stonebridge United Methodist Church in McKinney, appears in the film and tells how some youth at his house downloaded some music onto his family’s computer. He was charged a $9,000 fine for copying copyrighted music.
The authors of “Manifesto: Technorhetoricians and/as Copyright Activists” propose a manifesto to deal with these inconsistencies while addressing the needed changes to copyright law now that we live in a digital age. The write, “We must engage ourselves in the legislative process … as an avenue of battling harmful legislation against creative remix and nuanced, appropriately complex and fair understandings of digital authorship.” I would like to know the status of this needed copyright manifesto.
The most famous American activist for changes in copyright law, Lawrence Lessig states the following observation in his TED Talk:
In my view the most significant thing to recognize about what this internet is doing is its opportunity to revive the Read Write culture that Sousa romantized. Digital technology is the opportunity for the revival of these vocal cords that [J.P. Souza] spoke so passionately to Congress so passionately about.
“Who are you?” on Facebook, that is
Blog 2011-0328
By John Kay for HUSL 6384
Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
“Who Are You,” composed by Pete Townshend
In reference to Facebook, scholar Nicholas Carr referenced the personal life of singer Bob Dylan. I did not know that he used to be Robert Zimmerman before he changed his name. Carr surmised that Zimmerman would have a difficult time in the twenty-first century changing his identity because so many users of the internet, especially of Facebook, would have seen Zimmerman’s “myriad indelible photos, messages, profiles, friends, and ‘likes’ plastered across the Web” (Carr, p. 2). Carr declares in the following quotation:
Facebook saddles the young with what Zuckerberg calls “one identity.” You can never escape your past. The frontier of invisibility is replaced by the cage of transparency (Carr, p. 2).
In other words, Facebook locks in the identity of its users and thus effects “radical transparency.” Chris Poole in a similar article says that people carry this online identity wherever they travel in cyberspace (Jackson, p. 1).
Nicholas Carr, instead of mentioning Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone,” could have referenced The Who’s “Who Are You” because these articles deal with online identity. By its half-a-billion-people size and the profile questions it asks, social media giant Facebook has the power to lock in a user’s identity, to answer “who are you?”
In a very-well written article for a college freshman, Emily Rutherford does not like what-she-perceives-to-be-a-limited selection of answers that a Facebook newbie may choose while completing a profile. She thinks that Facebook’s having various possible answers gives the only the illusion of freedom. If I were Facebook’s designers, I too would not have included “genderqueer,” “pansexual” (I never heard of those two words), or a gender/sexual continuum. These groups do not have a voice because they cannot select their correct identity, she contends. However, I appreciate her observation about generational differences:
We [18-to-25-year-olds], by contrast, seek to broadcast, to declare, to pontificate, to make some statement about who we are and what we value. Interpersonal communication is secondary. We are all about one-to-many, not one-to-one (Rutherford, p. 3).
Young people are concerned more about their identity than are Facebook users of their parents’ generation.
Possibly alluding to the thoughts of Marshall McLuhan, Gustav Foray believes that Facebook’s organization on the page “seems like an extension of our personalities” (Foray, p. 2). Facebook’s use of the third person supports the idea that the profile that the user creates could be a fabrication, but the security questions help prevent lying. Foray thinks that the users’ answers do not “accurately represent their character” (Foray, p. 2).
Such questions about identity might prompt me to ask some Facebook users, “Tell me, who are you?” (Townshend).
A Little Birdie Told Me
Blog 2011-0321
By John Kay for HUSL 6384
As an undergraduate at Baylor, I double-majored in Business-Broadcasting. The name could have been “Marketing-Radio/TV.” I took courses in radio, television, and journalism. I learned that the writing style for broadcasting differs from that of a newspaper. For example, a newspaper article about a major car crash would focus on what happened, while a news report for broadcasting would take the current angle of the status of the accident victims or the road closures. Radio and television stations wanted their news to be up-to-the minute so that listeners knew that they were hearing or watching the latest news rather than reading old news, as found in a newspaper.
My preaching professor in seminary years later told me that my earlier radio/TV classes taught me not to leave dead air. Radio listeners might switch stations if they heard silence for any length of time. He said for me to work on the timing of my delivery by speaking more slowly, elaborating more, and creating pregnant pauses. Now, after preaching seventeen years since then and incorporating his advice in my weekly sermons, along comes a website called Twitter that limits my writing to 140 characters and encourages me as a user to post the very-latest news. Different media require different styles of writing.
Journalism professor Jay Rosen, whom I have followed on Twitter since I began the Emerging Media And Communication program, compares Twitter to radio.[i] Twitter is “more like radio than [is] any other media form.” He means that both media send out or push their messages to their public audiences. As one of his guidelines for writing on Twitter, he compares its “@feature” to a “shout out” on the radio to one person. He prefers not to address one reader/listener with a public message unless he wants to be overheard.
David Carr (the New York Times reporter, not the N.F.L. quarterback), like Jay Rosen, waited a few months after Twitter’s hatching in 2007 before actively Tweeting because Twitter meant another interactive website to feed. Both men rightly limit their Tweets to their professional disciplines rather than communicate the mundane, what Jennifer Van Grove labeled as “pointless babble.” As a result Twitter subscribers know that when they Follow them that readers will find cogent, worthwhile information about new media.
As part of Web 2.0 in which users can read the writings of others and post their own thoughts, Carr emphasizes listening. He writes, “I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.” Before the rise of Twitter and other related micro-blogs, media consumers had few outlets in which to congregate as a “wired collective voice,” especially one of a global size almost one third the size of the entire American population. Reading the Tweets of various cultures, writes Jennifer Faye Carter, offers users the benefit of authentically listening to other cultures.
Twitter was hatched only four years ago and has flown to new heights. Users are learning how to write for this free website and how to best utilize it.
READINGS:
o http://www.samplereality.com/2010/12/03/twitter-is-a-happening-to-which-i-am-returning/
o http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
o http://mashable.com/2010/10/14/twitter-cross-cultural/
o http://435digital.com/social-media-icon/3335/social-media-icon-jayrosen_nyu-explains-how-he-tweets/
o Aline’s reading: http://mashable.com/2009/08/12/twitter-analysis/
ADDITIONAL SOURCE:
o William
[i] In an age of music lovers’ downloading songs from iTunes, F.M. radio seems passé, although radio has seen (or heard?) the emergence of high-definition radio and subscription satellite radio.
When I read I begin with…
The codex was a new medium at one time. Click here for video.
PART I: HOW DO I READ A BOOK?
How do I read? That question is easy to answer, or is it? I place the book with the binding on the left on a flat surface and open the cover. I start reading on the first page. I might just skim the first few pages; however, I have assumed that I am reading a book that the author wrote in English. What if author wrote the text in Hebrew? Assuming that I actually could read Hebrew, I then would start at what we consider to be the back of the book and read what we consider to be backwards.
When reading a book, I begin at the top left corner and read from left to right and go down the page sentence by sentence. But if the book were written in Hebrew, I would have to read from the top right and read from right to left.
Assuming that the author wrote the book in English, I would start at the front. I might read the table of contents if the book has one in order to discover the number of total pages, the number of chapters, the chapter titles, the organization of the material, and the overall subject(s). I might find that the book includes color plates in the middle or appendices, a glossary, and the author’s autobiography at the back.
What if my reading material were not a codex? If I were reading an ancient scroll, I would have to make sure that I opened the scroll at the beginning of the document. I would unroll the scroll as I linearly read the words. Scrolls have the disadvantage of the reader’s being unable to go directly to a page. Unlike with a codex, I as the reader of a scroll or microfilm have to painstakingly unroll the document to reach the desired page.
PART II: HOW DO I READ A WEBSITE?
Our readings for this week ask me, “how do I read a website?” I start at the top left, read left to right, and then read down the page, as I would with a printed page. The use of the word “page” in “webpage” metaphorically alludes to pages in books. The primary page of a webpage is the “desktop,” another familiar book metaphor. Both Anne Frances Wysocki and Christine Boese tell me that I do not have to read all websites the way that I read a book in a linear fashion. They created webpages that allow me to read them in various orders and thus change my reading experiences. The hyperlinks allow me to follow different reading orders. Both sites are hypermediated, as Bolter and Grusin define the term, in the sense that they encourage me via their nonlinear, hyperlinked design to notice the media.
Article author Mary Hooks provides a three-fold taxonomy to “describe how visual rhetoric operates in digital writing environments”: “audience stance, transparency, and hybridity” (Hooks, p. 632). The design of Wysocki’s essay on her “Monitoring Order” website “invites readers to think beyond the familiar linear structure, to playfully reflect on the self-consciously linear structure” (p. 636). The audience stance of Boese’s website jumps out at me when I open the webpage as “music, images, text, and hypertextual structure all set the stage for a highly interactive experience” (p. 639).
“Transparency refers to how the writer designs a document in ways familiar and clear to readers” (p. 636). Hooks sees Wysocki’s design interface as “fairly transparent” (p. 636) and Boese’s as “not very transparent” because I the reader have a difficult time deciding how to navigate the site (p. 640). Hooks sees the direction-finding of Boese’s site as pleasurable, but some people might become frustrated because the navigation is so unfamiliar. Most authors of printed books attempt to make their books transparent, while many designers of webpages do not.
Both sites utilize hybridity to combine texts and images. Boese’s webpages go even further by adding music.
I can read websites with an understanding of these how these three terms “describe how visual rhetoric operates in digital writing environments” (p. 632). I appreciate how Mary Hooks has written this article with an enthusiasm for visual rhetoric. This article exemplifies the subject of this course: Digital and Visual Rhetoric. Writing in 2003, Hooks believes that she stands at a unique time of transition. She wants to get out the word about the time (i.e., the kairos) and the subject. She inspires me to learn more about this developing discipline.
