Sue Thomas

'Nature and Cyberspace: The Wild Surmise' to be published by Bloomsbury Academic

Today I signed a contract with Bloomsbury's new scholarly imprint Bloomsbury Academic. Delivery date is September 2012 so i need to get my skates on - lots to do. I'm very excited to be working with Bloomsbury, since they seem to have the right idea about publishing in a new media world - they understand how open source works and they're prepared to experiment at the more risky end of publishing. I gather their new website will be launching soon, and there we will see the full glory of their intentions :)

As for The Wild Surmise - they want to switch the title around to 'Nature and Cyberspace: The Wild Surmise', and I can see how that makes sense because it's more explicit but retains the poetry of the original phrase. I'm keen to reach beyond academia with this book.

So now the idea becomes a firm reality. I'm really looking forward to it!

Bruce Sterling: Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

I seldom import whole blog posts but this is so good and so very sensible that I'm including all of it. It's from Bruce Sterling's great blog Beyond The Beyond

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
3. Intellectual property systems failing.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.
13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.
15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.
18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

'Transliteracy: A Unifying Concept', University of Nottingham, 6pm 28 May 2009

I'll be speaking about transliteracy on Thursday 28th May 2009 as part of the Generation Net: Arts and Culture in the 21st Century lecture series at the University of Nottingham.

Room A18 (Arts Graduate Centre),
Trent Building.
6pm to 7pm followed by wine and nibbles.
Admission is Free.
All are welcome.
To book a place email Iain Smith

Experimental Peer Review & Funding: We don't need people to take risk; we need people to manage it.

For a couple of years now Toby Moores and I have been trying to set up a project we call Open Source Thinking, based on Toby's desire to share failed and mis-directed projects with others who might be able to run with an idea that did not work the first time around. Here's a link I gleaned from Alex Pang to a similar topic - Eric Weinstein, mathematician and hedge fund manager, talking about The Importance of Risky Research. He suggests that science can learn from finance by applying methods of shorting, not to money, but to ideas and propositions.

Applied to science, shorting could reveal what the senior people actually think of the juniors. If you want to short somebody, and you do the calculation of what happens should their ideas take off, it can be frightening. It's not like losing an even-money bet—it's being on the hook for an unbounded negative experience. Imagine Erwin Chargaff shorting Watson and Crick on what he called their "extreme ignorance" in 1952.

So, asked the interviewer, should journals and funding sources should be more willing to take risks on young scientists, even if they might be wrong? Weinstein:

We don't need people to take risk; we need people to manage it. There are lots of seductive dumb ideas. If you start swinging at all of them, you're going to bankrupt yourself. The important thing is to assemble an ideas portfolio. That way, whether they mostly work and occasionally fail spectacularly, or rather mostly fail and occasionally work spectacularly, you are giving young people and their risky ideas room to work.

Makes a lot of sense to me, but achieving it would require a radical buy-in from academia and I just don't see that coming any time soon.

Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

from McSweeney's

INTERNET-AGE WRITING SYLLABUS AND
COURSE OVERVIEW.

BY ROBERT LANHAM

- - - -

ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham

Course Description

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

Prerequisites       Read the rest >>>

from Nick Carr's blog

"Economommies" find new ways to combine family life with employment

Here in the US, my neighbour and many of her home-schooling colleagues are becoming 'economommies' - that is, women who were 'stay-at-home Moms' before the economic downturn but who now need to supplement the family income with paid work which allows them to look after the kids too. See full blogpost at NLab.

Laid-Off Architect Sells Advice For 5 Cents

 

See full post at NLab.

Edible Books

A hungry student's dream debuts at City College

By COLBY FRAZIER — March 25, 2009 In the mass of inky words and pulp pages that is a book, an infinite number of people, places and ideas wait to be lifted from the page by a human eye.

Once this occurs, anything can happen. The reader is free to write a paper about the book, tell a friend about it, or better yet, make some food, as 30 Santa Barbara City College students and faculty members have done for the school’s first Edible Book Festival scheduled from 2-4 p.m. today inside the Luria Library.

“The idea is to celebrate our love of books and our attachment to food,” said Elizabeth Bowman, a campus librarian who organized the festival.

City College’s festival is loosely based on The International Edible Book Festival, which was founded in 2000 to celebrate the birthday of French author and gastronome, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

The festival’s rulebook is short: everything made has to be edible and based on a book.

Read the rest at UCSB's The Daily Sound

Historic Computing Calendar from 1992

Last week I interviewed Roland Bryan, one of the original Arpanet team, and we talked about this picture. I've never seen Leonardo this cool! Visit The Wild Surmise for the full story behind this image.

Attribution: The content of the ACC calendar was a collaborative effort by ACC staff and the artist Chuck Huckeba

My heroine for Ada Byron Lovelace Day: Stevie Vanhegan

Along with over a thousand other people, I have pledged to celebrate the first ever Ada Byron Lovelace Day by publishing a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire.  

My nomination is my longtime friend and former colleague Stevie Vanhegan, of Lady Bay, Nottingham, UK. Stevie has taught computing in the Dept of Education at Nottingham Trent University for longer than I can remember, and she was there when I began a Humanities degree as a mature student in 1985. By then I had known her for around five years - we both had small children and were members of the same baby-sitting circle. I was a customer of her small wholefoods delivery business, run from her garage. There was always something interesting going on at Stevie's yet she had time  to stop for coffee and chat in between tending to the chickens and rabbits in the garden or looking after the numerous kids always streaming in and out.

Stevie was the only woman I'd met at that time who had studied any kind of science - in her case chemical engineering. This was an unknown land to me - everyone I knew had taken arts subjects. But Stevie was of a different breed. For example, when a household appliance was ready to be thrown out, she would hand it over to her kids to take apart and figure out how it worked. She was passionate about understanding the world around her and made sure her kids continued that enquiring nature.

So in 1985 when I began my Humanities degree and chose English and History as my two core subjects, Stevie was quick to jump in with her recommendation - "You've got to take a computing option. Everyone has to know about computing. It's vital." I wasn't keen, I must admit. I had always been useless at maths and science and there was no reason to assume I'd be any better at computing. But I gave in under the pressure of Stevie's not inconsiderable persuasive techniques (i.e. nagging) and elected to take an option module called Humanities Computing. It changed my life.

In 85, those pre-web days, Humanities geographer Brian Dittmer taught bemused arts majors how computers worked and how to communicate with them via snippets of Basic. Stevie was not my teacher but she was always available to answer my questions as the whole notion of code turned into an enormous revelation  - not just technically but conceptually and philosophically too. Very quickly, computers became my muse. I started writing about them then, and haven't stopped since. In 1988 my Humanities final year dissertation, Close Encounters of the Machine Kind,  was about the relationship between computers and humans (later I would discover HCI but at that time I was working completely alone), and by 1992 I had published my first novel, Correspondence, a fictional extension of those first discoveries.

None of that would ever have happened without Stevie's very characteristic suggestion, and I know she has helped many others too, not least a fellow ABL poster. Despite that, she is very modest - I couldn't even find a homepage or a picture to include in this post, although amusingly this morning I received an email from her reminding me it is Ada Byron Lovelace Day!

Almost 25 years ago, Stevie Vanhegan opened the door for me to an entirely other world, one I would never have even thought of venturing towards if I had not known her. We continue to be good friends, and we still talk about technology, but I don't know whether she realises the importance of her influence on my life. Hopefully, today she will. Thanks Stevie!

I had a brain adventure in the Maker Shed @ ETech 2009, San Jose

O'Reilly ETech, social media, and non-profits

On Monday here at ETech, CEO Tim O'Reilly's keynote described the way in which the tech industry has been living in a bubble and declared that it should now turn its attention to the 'reality bubble' and work on 'stuff that matters'. For too long, he said, the industry has been focussing on pretty gewgaws instead of addressing problems that have been mounting for years whilst the best and the brightest have been preoccupied with throwing sheep at each other on Facebook. He emphasised the need to use our extensive skills to address the world's greatest challenges. This will, of course, include working with nonprofits, which statement rang a bell with me. A few weeks ago I interviewed Stewart Brand, who has a pretty successful record of persuading big companies to experiment with digital futures of all kinds. I asked Brand whether there were any examples of when his methods had failed, and he thought for a while then responded that he had failed to engage non-profits. The reasons, he felt, were cultural and related to the risk-averse nature of many non-profit agencies who are usually dependent on portfolios of funding from sources, often very traditional and not transliterate (the latter is my term, of course, not Brand's), whom they dare not offend.

I'm sure this is something O'Reilly will be thinking about as they move towards their challenges, and especially in relation to the first upcoming  O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC this September.

I'll be posting more about ETech and San Jose when I get back to Santa Barbara. Am about to hit the road. One word though - I met quite a few O'Reilly people this time and found them all very friendly, energetic, and interesting. Quite an impressive mini-ecology going on in that company!

Wolfram Alpha - next big thing?

Noticed in a tweet from Tim O'Reilly quoting a message from Tim Berners-Lee regarding possibly 'the next big jump in capability' - see this article by Nova Spivack about a different kind of knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha

Spivack writes:

Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database.

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.

Presumably if this takes off it will once again change the ways in which we obtain and process information. Just as we got used to searching, maybe now we will have to learn the skill of questioning...

How do you buy your books?

You’ve heard about a book which sounds vaguely interesting, so when you have a spare moment you search for it on the web. What form does your actual purchasing behaviour take from there on in? I have to confess that my usual method is to look on Amazon and if the book’s available new at a good price I often buy it there and then.

I prefer to get it direct from the Amazon store but sometimes I buy from the New and Used section.  If it’s only available from a high-price reseller, I often assume it is out of print, move on and forget about it.  Unless I’m really keen, I’m afraid I probably won’t look anywhere else.  I do also buy from bookshops, but these days that tends to be a special trip where I set aside some time for serendipitous browsing. I keep a list at the back of my notebook for things I’ve been looking for and I consult that when bookshop browsing, but for targeted buying I always go to Amazon first.

While I’ve been here in the USA on a temporary stay, my book acquisition behaviour has changed a bit, but I’m gradually swinging back to Amazon. The current picture is that first I visit the university library, with mixed success. Second, I visit local bookshops in Santa Barbara – there are quite a few and it helps me to get to know the area. I start with Borders in Goleta, then the Borders on State Street, then maybe Barnes and Noble, then move on to my list of used bookstores (which involves a fair bit of driving around). But sadly the result is nearly always the same – nobody has the book I want. They offer to order it, but I usually decline in the hope that the next shop will have it. An alternative would be to sit and ring round them all, but that can be time consuming and I don’t enjoy the tedious business of doing call-arounds. When I get home, I pull out my dog-eared list and sit down with Amazon. A few days later, I have what I want, sometimes new, sometimes used.

But these are titles I need for my research, books which I have to pursue. But idle purchases, for general pleasure and interest, are at the mercy of Amazon. If Amazon has it I buy it. If it's not there, or relegated to expensive used copies,  I’ll probably never look for it again unless I remember to add it to the list in my notebook.

How do you buy your books?  Have you, like me, grown to be largely dependent on Amazon for information about what’s available?

Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman - 1997 but could be 2009

I've been reading quite a range of books during my research for The Wild Surmise but I've especially enjoyed Ellen Ullman's 1997 Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents. Eugene Miya at the Computer History Museum was keen I should read it as a commentary on life in Silicon Valley in the 90s, and it is certainly hugely informative about those early days of startups - the uncertainty of tech companies rising and falling on a weekly basis, the role of venture capitalist, and the nagging doubts of a generation who began as left-wing idealists and ended up with stock options that made some of them very rich.

The danger of Susan Greenfield

Once again Baroness Greenfield has been giving evidence to the House of Lords about the dangers of computers and social networking. I would like to know who else is giving evidence to them? Is hers the only voice? If so, I fear for their ability to make reasoned decisions about this field. This time she claims that "Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity", warning "It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world."

Well, it may be hard to see, Baroness, but why don't you give it a try? Yes, the human brain is sensitive and yes, it may be changing. But in the year of Darwin's anniversary, why should we assume this is a Bad Thing? Couldn't humans do with a bit of tuning up?

Her remedies are, forgive me, intensely naive if not insulting to earlier generations and present non-literate cultures. She claims that there is "a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less.". I wonder what kind of era she comes from? Novels have been around for 400 years maximum - what did children do before then? Were they not intelligent? Did they not develop talents in rapid response / high concentration activities such as hunting and fishing? I could go on spelling this out, but I don't think I should have to.

The danger of scientists untempered by Humanities knowledge of history, anthropology, sociology and culture is once again rearing its head. Baroness, it's not enough to measure brain activity, we must understand it in the wider context of human culture. Please, get some experts with a wider range of viewpoints on your team, including some who really know about education and social networking. You are in urgent need of a transliterate perspective. Without it you are a danger to society.

x-posted from transliteracy.com

UCSB English Department / Literature.Culture.Media Center Talk 24th Feb 2009

I'm giving a talk about my Wild Surmise research in the Literature.Culture.Media Center at the University of California Santa Barbara on Tuesday 24th February 2009, from 3.30pm-5.00pm.

When Geeks Go Camping: Cyberspace and the Outdoor Life
This talk examines the evolution of nature metaphors in computing and cyberspace via some examples of the influence of Californian outdoor life on computer culture in Silicon Valley and beyond. It is drawn from research for a book-length study, The Wild Surmise: Nature and Cyberspace, which discusses the many ways in which we use our experiences of nature to situate and comprehend our experiences of cyberspace.

More information on the UCSB English website.

Obama - now we will see

I got up in the dark this morning to drive to Santa Barbara's Arlington Theater for a free viewing of Obama's Inauguration. I finally made it after getting lost yet again - the streetmap of SB still defies me - but I was so glad I went to be part of it. On the way I picked up a nonfat latte with this patriotic sleeve :) (Took a couple more for posterity)

The theater is built in Spanish colonial style, with dim orange lighting via electrc coach lamps, and it was impossible to get any decent shots to show you, but I can convey the sense of noise -  big cheers and claps for Carter and the Clintons,  boos for the Bushes, and even more boos for Cheney.. Big claps for a shot of boxes being moved into the White House.

Throughout the ceremony, we all stood when they stood and sat when they sat - there was a real sense of everyone watching together.

As for Obama - he looked incredibly tense as he waited to walk onto the platform, and when he screwed up the words of the oath I felt relieved to think that this smooth calm guy might actually be nervous - and then another part of me wondered cynically if that too was choreographed to remind people that he is human. But then his speech swept away my doubts once more - it was so impressive and direct, and I will even go and re-read it to check whether it really was as outward-looking as I remember.

But, as I left, I heard a man say 'Now we will see..' and someone responding 'Yes. But let's just enjoy today'. And that seems to be the mood around here. Today is fantastically uplifting. But now we will see.

Will Change We Can Believe In come to Obama's news media? A lesson taken from John Steinbeck

I first learned about life in the United States in the 1960s through reading John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. I was a twelve year old Dutch girl growing up in England and trying to get a sense of what it meant to belong somewhere. It is a furiously bitter book, telling the story of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s when the exhausted farmlands of the American Mid West turned to powder, and millions of people set out to create new lives for themselves in California, suffering much hardship and disillusionment along the way. I've never forgotten crying into my pillow at the last few pages when young mother Rose of Sharon, bereaved of her stillborn baby but with milk still coming into her breasts, suckles an old man dying of starvation. And it wasn't long afterwards that I was weeping into my pillow again, first at the assassination of Kennedy [1963], and then at the death of Martin Luther King [1968]. So it was that my early encounters with America showed it to be a proud and idealistic culture which could also be savagely vicious and self-harming.

Today, it's Martin Luther King Day, a public holiday, and I am living temporarily in the sunshine state of California and working on a book. Everyone is very excited because the Inauguration of President Obama will take place tomorrow, a serendipitous piece of calendaring. Yes, everyone is very excited. Sunday's LA Times headline proclaimed: 'From sea to resilient sea: there's much 'hurting and hoping' across the land'. But I am wondering how much is really going to change once Obama is King of America? To my mind, the news media has a key responsibility here.

Across the street from my apartment is parked a vintage truck, a registered Californian Historical Vehicle. It doesn't seem to have moved for a long while, and is gathering leaves in what passes for winter here. Every time I walk by it it, I'm reminded of Steinbeck's Joad family. The vehicle they piled all their belongings into seventy years ago when they set out for a good life in the West could have looked something like this truck. They made an optimistic start, but had to endure terrible hardship, degradation and loss.

This week it feels like America is gearing up for another enormous migration, this time cultural rather than geographic. She is piling her hopes and dreams into the vehicle of an Obama presidency and setting off towards the sunshine state of Change. But does she really understand what lies ahead? The Joads thought they'd succeed because they were prepared to work as hard as was necessary, but they didn't know the bigger picture. Today, for America, knowing the bigger picture means humbly taking its place as a part of the rest of that very diverse habitat known as Planet Earth. Recognising that the rest of the world exists would be a good start, because much as I love and respect this country, and I do, I despair of its insularity. Since arriving two weeks ago I've watched a lot of CNN and MSNBC - both great news machines employing highly intelligent people (of whom the most notable and interesting is currently Rachel Maddow - check her out) But all they ever talk about is themselves. Hey! There's a world out there!

So I have one request for Change We Can Believe In: that Maddow and her network colleagues, and their comedy mirrors Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, spread their impressive intelligences a little wider. I suggest they begin by allocating just 10% of their daily programming to investigating the rest of the world with the same high level of critical insight and rigorous enquiry they apply to internal affairs, then maybe as time goes on they could even increase it just a little bit until there is finally some global balance in their reporting. The news media simply must take this responsibility, or respect for the United States will continue to sink even after Obama-isation. It will feel strange at first, but America will eventually get used to the fact that there are other people living on this planet. After all, as Tom Joad said when faced with the reality of a desperate situation: "It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do."

Living in California - driving, waste disposal, and the postal service

One of the things I enjoy most about being in the US is learning about the small differences in the practice of everyday life. This week, as I set up my temporary home in Santa Barbara, I've encountered quite a few. Here are some examples:

Transliteracy Lecture

Transliteracy lecture by Sue Thomas from IOCT on Vimeo.

This talk is drawn from the article Transliteracy: Crossing Divides, written with my DMU colleagues and published at First Monday in December 2007. I've presented it numerous times over the last year and now have this video version. But be warned - the lecture covers a lot of ground and it's 42 minutes of me talking, so not for the faint-hearted. Maybe one day I'll have time to slice it into bite-size chunks but for the moment I'm afraid there's only this long version. It was delivered to a mixed group of postgraduate students from the Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media, the IOCT Master's degree, and students working on Music Technology, in the IOCT on October 24th, 2008

Credit: the video was filmed and edited by Adam Weikert, IOCT.

Brown pelicans dying in California

I took this photo yesterday on Goleta State Beach. It was one of three dead brown pelicans I saw at low tide that day. These glorious birds are dying all along the coast, and they are also exhibiting odd behaviour, as The Los Angeles Times reported:

It's a mystery with no answer yet: Why are California brown pelicans turning up far from home, and in many cases confused, fatigued and with bruised pouches?  The Times' Louis Sahagun reports:

    In the last week, the big brown birds known for flying in formation over beaches have been reported wobbling across Culver Boulevard in Playa del Rey and on a Los Angeles International Airport runway. Two dead pelicans were found on the 110 Freeway. Elsewhere, one smacked into a car.

    "We're a little freaked out by this," said Rebecca Dmytryk, spokeswoman for the nonprofit WildRescue. "We've never seen anything like it."

Wildlife rescuers and biologists are stumped; domoic acid, a neurotoxin sometimes found in algae, is a known threat to pelicans and other marine animals, but this isn't the season for it.  So what gives?

    "We just became aware of this problem a few days ago," said David Caron, a professor of biological sciences at USC who was analyzing pelican blood samples sent to him from throughout the state. "By the end of the week, we'll have information that should tell us whether or not these animals test positive for phytoplankton toxins."

It's estimated that about 70,000 breeding brown pelican pairs live in California and Baja California, although they're still listed as an endangered species .

See also this BBC video report

On my first visit to California I was captivated by hosts of pelicans gliding low across the water as they followed the resident dolphins across the ocean at Zuma Beach, diving with huge splashes to grab fish stirred up by their companion species. I hope that whatever disease they have will soon work its way out.

Life in California and problems of pronunciation

Today I'm setting off on a four month research trip to Southern California.  I've been funded by the British Academy to write about the history of cyberspace - most specifically, the history of the use of nature metaphors in computing and the internet. I'll be  visiting libraries, museums, research centres and corporate campuses, and interviewing people working in the industry as well as the writers and observers who have documented the phenomenal development of online culture in the forty years since the first two nodes of the internet were connected in September 1969. There's a website for this project, The Wild Surmise, and I'll be reporting on my progress there. I'll be based at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).

On a more personal note, I'm looking forward to being American for a while. I'll be living in an apartment complex in Goleta, close to the UCSB campus (above), and of course I'm very excited about being in the US on 20th January when President-Elect Obama is sworn in. On a micro level, I'll enjoy learning about day-to-day life in California, and will keep an eye open for bloggable items of interest.

Here's the first one: the prevalence of automated telephone systems means I'm going to have to get used to pronouncing English words the American way - something which feels very strange! Calling Cox to arrange my broadband involves telling the machine that I am calling about 'high-speed innernet' - if I say 'internet' it may not understand me. But I guess that is nothing to my past experiences of waiting staff not understanding the word 'banana' until pronounced in nasal American with a short 'a' in the middle rather than the long ban-ahhh-na I'm used to. So if you happen to be standing behind me when I struggle to pronounce English the American way - please be patient. I'm trying my best to make myself understood in a foreign land!

Smiling online nourishes our relationships

My watchword for 2009 is 'nourish' - relationships, oneself, and one's community as a whole. And yesterday turned out to be a good example of nourishment in practice. My family held a little farewell party for me because tomorrow I'm departing for a four-month research trip to California.  Most of us are pretty connected and in touch a lot by email, Facebook, texting and phonecalls, but it's a long time since we were all physically together in one person's home and it was a really lovely and warm occasion.

I was reminded of it today when I saw a tweet from Tim O'Reilly pointing to a post by Stowe Boyd commenting on research on Social Networks and Happiness conducted by Nicholas A Christakis and James H Fowler reported at The Edge.

It explains how posting smiling pictures of oneself strengthens online interactions. Here's an excerpt:

The figure below is a map of part of this Facebook network in 2007. It contains 353 students, each represented by a node; each line between two nodes indicates that the connected individuals were tagged in a photo together. Students who are smiling (and who are immediately surrounded by smiling people in their network) are colored yellow. Students who are frowning (and who are immediately surrounded by such serious looks) are colored blue. Shades of green indicate a mix of smiling and non-smiling friends.

Notice how strongly the blue nodes and the yellow nodes cluster together, indicating large-scale structure of smiling in the online network. Moreover, people who do not smile seem to be located more peripherally in the network. In fact, statistical analysis of the network shows that people who smile tend to have more friends (smiling gets you an average of one extra friend, which is pretty good considering that people only have about six close friends). Not only that, but the statistical analyses confirm that those who smile are measurably more central to the network compared to those who do not smile. That is, if you smile, you are less likely to be on the periphery of the online world.

It thus seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you.

This makes a lot of sense, so in the interests of nourishing my social networking practice I'm replacing my Facebook profile picture with one which is almost embarrassing in its smileyness...

Greetings from William Blake alive in cyberspace, Christmas Eve 2008

Good Morning, my fellow artists!

I am writing to let you know that Bill Thompson breathed life into me through the Blake Netbook. Then very early this morning, as the ghosts of Christmas flew above the city, Sue woke me into cyberspace. I can now be found at Blogger, Flickr and Twitter.  I am written into Googledocs . I will be with Sue until she departs for the exotic landscapes of California on Monday 5th January. Wish us luck.
wmblake1757@googlemail.com

Songs of Imagination and Digitisation was launched at The Poetry Society Cafe on National Poetry Day, 9th October 2008. View video.

Finding California in Cyberspace + Bruce Sterling and the SoCal DigiCult

See full post at The Wild Surmise

Time travel, sexism, and Marks & Spencer

My daughters were born in 1976 and 1979, which means it's around 30 years since I have made any serious baby/toddler purchases. Now that I have 2 new grandsons I find myself shopping for baby toys and clothes once again, but the whole experience is some kind of bizarre time travel experience going back to the years when I myself was a toddler in the early 1950s. Why? Because the world of children today, far from being the ungendered paradise my friends and I worked towards so optimistically in the 70s and 80s, is now much more riddled with sexism than it was even before we started. I've been struggling with it for a while - it's almost impossible to buy clothes for my grandsons that are not blue, for example - but the sight of these toys in Marks and Spencer today completely enraged me. In the Daddy and Me range we find a bulldozer and toolkit, whilst in the Mummy and Me range you can get a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, and myriad other domestic tools.

How has this happened? Only last year a report came out (only one of many) showing that nothing has changed in the 30 odd years since my kids were born:

Women are still the victims of persistent gender inequality in the workplace, with very little change in their working conditions in Britain for almost two decades, according to a landmark report on Thursday. Women are working longer hours because they are still shouldering the bulk of household duties like cleaning and childcare. (Women stiil face workplace inequality, Reuters, December 2007)

What on earth is going on? I know from my own sons-in-law and their friends that men today are individually much less sexist than men of my generation, so how come the shops are still peddling these reactionary ideas? Do people really subscribe to these damaging ideologies? And if not, are they voting with their pockets and refusing to buy such damaging nonsense?

It's not often that I blog as personally as this but I am depressed and demoralised by such sexist marketing. Come on young parents, do something!!! Make a stand!!! Let's travel towards the future, not the past!

Vision of Students Today (with thanks to mwesch)

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing items in a set called ENG1009. Make your own badge here.

I taught a session about collaborative writing for my colleague Kathy Bell today. The students were a great bunch and I hope they'll produce some collaborative Googledoc pieces as a result. I also showed them Michael Wesch's video A Vision of Students Today and invited them to produce some responses on the fly. We were very short of time and I'm afraid some of my photos are a bit blurred, but they came up with some excellent work in only ten minutes. Click here, view this slideshow, or browse through the Flickr badge above to get a sense of what they produced. (apologies for my appalling camera shake - I blame the Nokia N95). I promised them a copy of the slides for the talk and attach them here. Download ENG1009 2008

Seth's Blog: The high cost of now

Seth's Blog: The high cost of now. This post by Seth Godin reflects my increasing irritation at the amount of time Twitter is taking up in my life. He says: "The closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs." In this case I think he's mostly referring to money, but it's true of time too. Twitter used to be fun, but now it has become an essential element of my communication portfolio I can't afford to miss a single tweet in case I lose out on a dinner invitation, a meeting date suggestion, or an important piece of research. I'm forever checking Home and @Replies to stay on top of information that used to arrive by email, and I'm tired of it.

Please everyone - if you want to contact me do it by email, and save Twitter for updating me on the important stuff like where and when you're having your next latte!

Slides and links for British Computer Society talk 2.12.08

Thanks to all those who attended my talk last night, and thanks to the BCS for my commemorative blue-sky coffee mug! Here as promised are slides plus a list of links to the videos and websites I discussed:

• Medieval Helpdesk
• Howard Rheingold A (re)slice of life online, part one: Introduction
• Transliteracy Research Blog
• Michael Wesch The Machine is Us/ing Us  (for university teachers I also recommend Wesch's chilling A Vision of Students Today)
• Chris Meade Digital Livings
• Noon Quilt
• A Million Penguins
• Staying Single
• Anietie Isong
• Streams, rivers, torrents and clouds @Amplified08 (CreativeCoffee Club)
• Inanimate Alice