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Artificial Culture (my first book!)

While I set up a page for my new book, and told Twitter and Facebook a while ago, I realised I never actually blogged about my book finally coming out! So, without any ado at all, here’s the announcement:

Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology, and Bodies (Routledge, 2012)
Tama Leaver, Curtin University

Amazon http://amzn.to/wRe4PN
Routledge: http://bit.ly/mivLzx

Artificial Culture is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, with a focus on science fiction films and novels, but also addressing digital culture more broadly including analysis of Wikileaks, the Visible Human Project and the emergence of synthespians. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationships between people and technology, with human bodies as a key marker of these symbiotic connections. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which it is possible in some respects to measure what it might mean to be human. More importantly, the artificial often blurs the boundary between humans, technology and the environment at large in often purposefully unsettling ways.

The core texts analysed in the book are: 2001 A Space Odyssey; the four Terminator films; Greg Egan’s novels Permutation City and Diaspora; The Visible Human Project; William Gibson’s bridge trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties); Wikileaks; The Matrix films and franchise; WETA’s digital effects in the Lord of the Rings films, with a particular focus on the synthespian Gollum; the Spider-Man trilogy; Wall-E; and Avatar.

Contents:

Part1: Artificial Intelligence
   1. Early Artificial Intelligence Films: ‘When are you going to let me out of this box?
   2. "I am a machine!": Artificial Intelligences in Contemporary Cinema
Part 2: Artificial Life
   3. From Digital Genesis to the Artificial Other
   4. Diasporic Subjectivities: Not Quite ‘Beyond the Infinite’
Part 3: Artificial Space
   5. The Fortification of Place in the Digital Age
   6. Resistance is Spatial
   7. The Infinite Plasticity of the Digital?
Part 4: Artificial Culture
   8. Matrices of Embodiment
   9. The Symbiosis of Special Effects
Part 5: Artificial Culture
   10. Before the Mourning
   11. Artificial Mourning: Spider-Man, Special Effects and September 11

For slightly more information (and colour versions of the images used in the book) please visit http://www.tamaleaver.net/artificial-culture/ . My apologies that the book on the expensive side; if you have access to a university library, perhaps recommend they purchase it in the first instance.

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The Ends of Online Identity?

In just over a week I hop on the first of three planes and head to Seattle for Internet Research 12. I’m looking forward to seeing many colleagues I rarely get to see in the flesh, and indeed adding flesh to many folks who I only really know as Twitter or Facebook profile pictures.

The paper I’m presenting is called “The Ends of Online Identity” and is the first step in a larger research project which looks at online identities before or after they are really owned by the person to which they refer. Indeed, the many varied responses to Facebook’s upcoming shift to the new Timeline which replace profiles with a curated historical story fits in perfectly with the terrain I’m exploring, which focuses on what happens to identity online when other people are responsible for shaping it (such as parents, before someone is old enough to really manage their online self, or post-mortem when someone’s profiles and digital shadow become the memorialised self).  The project itself is only in the initial stages and this paper is more about establishing the parameters and scoping out the field, but I think there’s enough in there to make it an interesting conversation.

For those of you who might be interested, here’s the abstract:

The Ends of Online Identity?

FB_BornWhile the early years of online interaction were often framed by notions of identity play, anonymity, pseudonymity and multiplicity, the last five years have seen many of these playful boundaries collapsing with online and offline identity no longer presumed to be easily separable. The dominance of Facebook as the social networking service, and their firm insistence on ‘real’ names and identities has been one of the clearest causes and indicators of this shift. However, once online and offline identity are more firmly attached to real names, an individual’s web presence becomes harder and harder to escape. Moreover, while notions like ‘Identity 2.0’ (Helmond, 2010), ‘the networked self’ (Papacharissi, 2010) and others tend to emphasise at least some degree of agency, the persistence of digital information and the permanence of names suggests it is timely to revisit the ends of identity where the agency of the named individual is less, if at all, applicable.

At one end, identity fragments can be created even before an individual is born, from Facebook updates, blogs and photos detailing attempts to get pregnant, through to ultrasounds images and the like. Early childhood too, can often be documented online by parents who embrace every recording technology possible, both capturing and often sharing online every smile, every outfit and all those initial milestones of development. While most parents consider some degree of security when posting information about children, many of these digital traces persist and can often be easily (re-)attached to the children in question later in life. This initial digital contextualisation and the power of parents and others to ‘set up’ the initial web presence of individuals before they are active participants online deserves greater attention. Victor Mayer-Schonberger (2009), for example, has proposed that information online, including social information, should come with an expiry date, after which digital identity fragments are automatically erased. While an admirable strategy, implementation of such a proposal in a widespread enough manner to be useful would be very challenging.

At the other end of identity, the question of what happens to our digital selves when we die is also increasingly important. While our corporeal forms are subject to entropy and decay, the same is not necessarily true of online identities. From blog posts and social networking profiles to photographs and more personal files, the need to ‘do something’ with digital identity fragments is increasingly pressing. In some instances the keys to digital identities (our passwords) are being left in wills as part of individuals’ estates, but far more often this question is left unasked until an individual has died. Facebook, for example, had to institute the possibility to allow family members to memorialise or delete the Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones after many people reported Facebook suggesting they ‘reconnected’ with recently deceased relatives and friends.

FB_LostALovedOneThis paper will outline some initial ways that our ‘ends of identity’ might be conceptualised, including a brief review of current approaches, with the intention of outlining an emerging research project which examines the impact of digital identity creation which is not readily controlled by the individual whose identity is being created or transformed.

References

Helmond, A. (2010). Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software. www.annehelmond.nl , PDF: http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf.

Mayer-Schonberger, V. (2009). Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age . Princeton University Press.

Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites . Routledge.

My presentation is part of a four-paper panel entitled “Coherency, Authenticity, Plurality and the Trace” which also features papers by Erika Pearson / @erikapearson (University of Otago), Stephanie Tuszynski (Bethany College) and Brady Robards / @bradyjay (Griffith University). Our panel is currently scheduled for Tuesday, 11/Oct/2011: 4:00pm – 5:30pm in “South” if you’ll be at IR12. I hope to post the slides before our panel session and, if I get the chance, I’ll try and capture the audio and post it some time shortly thereafter.

Any comments, thoughts or questions are most welcome! 🙂

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Understanding Creative Commons for Education

Late last year I was interviewed about online teaching by the team UNSW’s COFA team for their Learning to Teach Online project which aims to build a rich library of resources for teachers working online in various forms.  You can find my talking head peppered throughout a number of their video episodes, but the main one, and one I’m really pleased to see up, is all about Understanding Creative Commons for education. I’ve embedded the video below, but you can also get a printable resources hand-out over and the Learning to Teaching Online page.

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning that this video is about both how teachers and use Creative Commons licenses, but also, and quite importantly, about how students can use CC licenses when producing their own worth, be that text, photos, video or other combinations of media. If you’re an educator interested in this area, you might also enjoy the short paper I wrote a few years ago called ‘The Creative Commons: An Overview for Educators’.

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The Anti-Social Network

I’ve got a new column up over at Flow called ‘The Anti-Social Network’ about The Social Network film and how Zuckerberg is treated as a metaphor for all Facebook users.  Here’s the introduction:

A film about writing a piece of software and two lawsuits about who really owns that software doesn’t sound like blockbuster material, but that’s exactly the premise behind The Social Network (2010) penned by Aaron Sorkin, of West Wing fame, and directed by David Fincher, best known for Fight Club (1999). Despite the seemingly dry premise, powered by Sorkin’s amazing dialogue and Fincher’s eye for pacing and casting, the film has done remarkably well, largely embraced by critics, and for a film in which nothing blows up and no one gets shot at, it has taken an impressive $175 million (U.S.) at the global box office thus far. Of course, the real story is about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator and co-founder, and how more than half a billion people have voluntarily used the software he wrote to share their personal details and lives, in the process making Zuckerberg a billionaire many times over. It’s fair to say that the portrayal of Zuckerberg is far from sympathetic, but what’s a little more disturbing is how the depiction of Zuckerberg’s social awkwardness and moral ambiguity seems designed to paint all Facebook users with the same generational brush.

If you’d like to read the rest, it’s here.

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Digital Obama


Obama’s victory has people celebrating across the world for so many reasons, but given my preoccupations, it should come as no surprise that part of my joy comes from his decidedly forward-thinking policies toward digital culture. As, for example, Barry Saunders has argued in his ABC story:

The exemplar of a successful political campaign’s use of social media is … Obama’s campaign. Foregoing public funding and the big money of lobbyists, Obama has raised enormous amounts of money from primarily small donors, at last count over $US390 million. Obama claims this will allow him to reduce lobbyist influence in government, though inevitably, the truth is somewhat more complex than that.Obama’s campaign has also make powerful use of social networking tools such as Twitter, MySpace-style social networking sites and even an iPhone application. This commitment to using tools to engage with a primarily younger, tech savvy audience, combined with an commitment to Network Neutrality and a progressive tech policy (Barack Obama on technology and innovation – PDF) has certainly helped his support amongst younger voters. McCain’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use a computer hasn’t helped his regain any of that support.

Indeed, Obama’s use of digital networks wasn’t just an organizational tool, but an avenue to encourage the creativity of his supporters, as Sarah Lai Stirland noted in Wired a few days ago:

Obama’s online success dwarfed his opponent’s, and proved key to his winning the presidency. Volunteers used Obama’s website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race — and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web. … In many ways, the story of Obama’s campaign was the story of his supporters, whose creativity and enthusiasm manifested through multitudes of websites and YouTube videos online. It even resulted in volunteer contributions like the innovative Obama ’08 iPhone and iTouch application that enabled owners to mobilize their friends and contacts in battleground states through the Apple devices.

On the digital front, Obama’s administration is already looking very promising from an open access perspective, and, as Barry notes above, may actually enshrine Net Neutrality, too! Given the deft hand the Obama team have used in engaging with young voters via digital tools and communities, it’s probably no surprise to hear that Obama’s victory speech has already clocked over 100,000 downloads via Bittorrent networks!

Meanwhile, Republican party insiders seems to be falling over themselves to point out how ‘ignorant’ Sarah Palin really is, but what does that actually say about the presidential candidate that chose her as a running mate? Oh well, it really doesn’t matter any more; I can’t really see predictions of Palin 2012 being much to worry about.

Perhaps of more concern for the hip and ironic youth of today is a piece by Dan Kois in the NY Times’ Culture Vulture asking ‘Can ‘The Daily Show’ Survive the Barack Obama Presidency?‘ What will Jon Stewart and his team satirize in a hopeful, forward-thinking, globally-minded American under Obama? I suspect there’ll still be a few things worth making fun of, but I’m sure Jon Stewart would agree, if it came down to The Daily Show or Obama, Stewart would still be voting Obama! Besides which, plenty of Americans are still doing really stupid things; drowned out by all the celebrations was the fact that in the same electoral process, Californians voted to remove the rights of gay people to marry; I think The Daily Show team might just have some new targets!

The video, though, that really caps the viral video war which has been one of the most engaging elements of the presidential campaigning, the video that shows behind a sexed-up meme can be real joy, is this little capture of Obama girl celebrating becoming President-Elect girl in Times Square

[Via] [Image: ‘Barack Obama: A mosaic of people‘ by tsevis CC BY NC SA]

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The Big Announcement

joy

I haven’t been blogging much recently, but I have the best reason of all: Emily and I are absolutely delighted to announce the arrival of our son, Henry Alexander.  He arrived in the world a tiny little thing, but he’s the most amazing sight we’ve ever seen and, as I’m sure every parent thinks, he’s the most beautiful little man in the entire world!  The word hardly does the experience justice, but we’re are both euphoric beyond belief! 🙂

Oh, and blogging may just be a bit sporadic for a while!

[This photograph is © All rights reserved, and is an exception to the Creative Commons license otherwise covering this blog.]

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Where is the History of the Amiga?

Commodore AmigaYesterday I was part of a team presenting a lecture on the History of Computer Games (a nice small topic) and we chose to structure the lecture via our own gaming histories, so I touched on Defender in the arcades, the Vic 20 (and cassette tape drives!) before spending most of my time talking about the Commodore Amiga computer. The Amiga was the significant computer of my youth (late 1980s, early 90s) and as it seemed to have a similar importance to a lot of my friends. Being new to games studies at large I presumed there would be articles on the history of the computer, the games, the role of software piracy (a big issue, even then, long before the interwebs were there to blame) and the graphics power of the platform. To my surprise, there is almost nothing written at all (hello graduate students of the world, are any of you writing this history right now??).

I did find a few things, though, and thought I’d collate them here. Firstly, Jeremy Reimer has been slowly writing a column on his version of the Amiga’s history over at Ars Technica, with seven parts so far: Genesis; The Birth of the Amiga; The First Prototype; Enter Commodore; PostLaunch Blues; Stopping the Bleeding; and Game On! so far. Reimer’s history is very producerly, but nevertheless well written and an engaging read.

An important parallel to the production narrative is the emergence of the Amiga demoscene and game piracy, a history often linked but not always. This history is much, much harder to find although exotica (not a porn site, I should add, but rather about exotic computers) has collated a fantastic scene history, year by year, which you can access through their site. In some ways the demoscene is one of the most significant ancestors of both the open source, public domain and other freeware movements of today, and the great media bugbear, the pirates (although obviously mainly in terms of videogames at this point).

The one source that I couldn’t access in time, but I’ve not ordered and can’t wait to read, is a history of Commodore (mainly the C64 and Amiga) called On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore (which you can also get from Amazon). The book seems to have gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon, so I have high hopes but I try and post something more once I’ve had a read of it.

Beyond that, though, Amiga fans of old should probably take a look at the emulators of the world (for Windows users, WinUAE works rather well) although you may have to once again resort to piracy to get a lot of your old favourite games – there doesn’t appear to be many other options right now! If you want to remember those amazing visuals and sounds, you can find videos of a lot of demos and games captured on YouTube. Zipping through 23 minutes of Defender of the Crown certainly fires a few old neurons!

One hope I do have is Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s new game studies series Platform Studies from MIT Press. Platform Studies looks to be an exploration of the affordances of computer platforms as part of contemporary history (so, looking at what the technology of certain platforms actually allowed programmers to do, what it stopped them doing, and how that influenced software design, among other things). A Platform Studies book on the Amiga must surely be on the cards somewhere in the rapidly emerging world of game studies! (I hope!)

Update: The Classic Amiga website has a huge archive of old Amiga demos, music and some games well worth checking out if you’ve fond memories of the Amiga years.

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The Wired Everyday: Blogging (Lecture Slides and Notes)

Hello to anyone visiting from the Self.Net: Identity in the Digital Age course. The slides from my guest lecture are embedded here:

If you click the link and follow back to Slideshare, you’re welcome to download the slides for your own uses if that would be helpful.

Some of the links discussed today that you might want to explore:
* Rebecca’s Pocket (Rebecca Blood)
* Dear Raed (Salam Pax)
* http://jilltxt.net/ (Jill Walker Rettberg)
* Larvartus Prodeo (Mark Bahnisch et al)
* The Daily Kos

Comments or questions are welcome!

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World of Workcraft

What if World of Warcraft was real? What would people play to relax and escape? World of Workcraft is the answer …

Watch more WoW Videos
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Dr Horrible’s International Debut Debacle

302010nothing. That’s the experience fans outside of the US had earlier today when Joss Whedon’s web-based musical webisode experiment Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog went live using Hulu, a video-streaming service geo-locked to stream to US IP addresses only:


Now, it’s not unusual for content to be limited to US internet addresses, especially television, but Dr Horrible is a different kettle of fish. Joss Whedon has done an amazing job of courting the fans and getting them on side to view promote (and eventually buy) Dr Horrible’s adventures, so it came as something of a shock to most international fans (with whom Whedon usually has a pretty good rapport) when discovered they weren’t able to get the free stream of Dr Horrible’s first act (or even buy the episodes on iTunes).

On Whedonesque – the main Joss Whedon appreciation blog (to which Joss posts from time to time) – the thread initially celebrating Dr Horrible’s release was inundated with international fans lamenting the fact that they couldn’t view the new web-based show. Dr Horrible’s Facebook page and MySpace page similarly received a vitriolic helping of international fan dismay!

Now, if Dr Horrible was an NBC or Viacom property, that would be the end of the story. However, given Joss Whedon’s track record, it seems reasonable that the geo-blocking was unintentional or accidental. And now we can see that’s exactly right … on various forums Whedon’s team have posted that they’re trying to get a globally-viewable version up. It seems that this may very well be the case that the tools for online distribution simply aren’t quite up to the demands being put on them by content creators. Ironically, this experience might actually lead to more fans working out how to circumvent Hulu’s geo-restrictions as Whedon has sided with the fans once more and in the short term the official Dr Horrible Twitter feed has linked to instructions on how to circumvent Hulu! Indeed, for long-time Whedon fans this might be reminiscent of a moment in 1999 when Whedon encouraged Canadian viewers to “bootleg that puppy” after Fox postponed the season three finale due in the wake of the Columbine shootings.

For Dr Horrible, it has been a rough start, but Whedon’s track record and the excitement from US fans who’ve already enjoyed Dr Horrible leave the rest of us waiting eagerly, knowing that Whedon and his team are doing all they can and will surely learn a lot from this experience. (And thus, I should add, we can reasonably expect that acts two and three of Dr Horrible will, indeed, get a simultaneous global release!).

Update: Drs Horrible (aka Mutant Enemy) have risen to the challenge, and the first act of Dr Horrible is now viewable by everyone! Go watch Act One (’tis funny!).

Update 2: It seems that Dr Horrible’s first day had one more obstacle: popularity.  Dr Horrible’s servers were completely overloaded and the site diappeared for a while, but now they’ve moved onto “monster servers” so all should be good … or is that evil?

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