Global connections

When I was reading Friction, one of the questions that resonated with me was the one about global capitalism. Tsing asks, "Why is global capitalism so messy? Who speaks for nature? What kinds of social justice make sense in the twenty-first century?" Then I remember how during my trip to Honduras this past summer while driving to see the Mayan Ruins, I saw a billboard that caught my eye –especially because I had been looking at some of the work by Fatimah Tuggar, who was going to be a guest speaker in my class. Anyway, the billboard showed an indigenous woman with a cellphone, and I was sorry I did not take the picture because it showed some of the contradictions of globalization but also because it showed the inescapable incursion of technology in developing countries. It showed both the conversation Tuggar wants establish, and some of Tsing's concerns, the friction of things, travel, movement, translations. When I boarded the plane to return to the States, I browsed the in-flight magazine and there it was, the same add. I saved the page and now here it is. The caption reads:

"Panana, millenary and modern. Panama is a land of unexpected contrasts, with a disposition open towards trade. Businesses here are of the most highest and sophisticated level. But it is in the human relations where more vividly the intelligence, and the profound and sublime nature of the Panamanian is reflected."

A Snapshot of US Culture

Cultural Poesis (Kathleen Turner) are vignettes on U.S. culture. The American dream dissected as people peer inside fancy houses, reaching for that something that it's not reachable anymore; playing driving or supermarket games to see who is going to turn where, or who is going to what register; homeless signs in your face; sitting at a biker's diner and listening to jokes about deer; the body culture seen through Body of Life; Laurie Anderson's songs. I finished reading it and thought I had been there: I look inside those fancy apartments, I make Myoplex shakes, and go to the gym in the hopes of reaching the Body of Life, and I feel that way when the homeless show their signs. Then I went back to the beginning and saw her explanations to write that way: "The subject I "am" in the stories I tell is a point of impact meandering through scenes in search of linkages, surges, and signs of intelligence. I suppose that the writing gropes toward embodied affective experience." The discussion we had in class about evoking experience became clearer to me. She writes that her piece "talks to the reader not as a trusted guide carefully lying the perfect links between theoretical categories and the real world but rather as a subject caught in the powerful tension between what can be known and told and what remains obscure or unspeakable but is nonetheless real." It is as if she went around with her camera clicking everywhere and capturing all these pieces of life. At the end I felt that she had capture something about the way one lives here and now.

Authenticity by getting closer to yourself and others

In Pedro Almodovar’s film All About My Mother, when Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) cannot come to the performance of A Streetcar Named Desire because of the problems she is having with her lover, her assistant Agrado (Antonia San Juan) delivers the message (apology) to the audience in the theater and starts improvising a speech in which she describes her physical transformation. She starts:
“Besides being nice, I am very authentic. Look at my body. Everything made to measure…eyes, eight thousand. Nose, two hundred thousand…tits, two…because I am not a monster. Seventy thousand each…Silicon…lips, forehead, cheekbones, so you add because I lost track.”
She continues describing her laser, and concludes:
“It cost me a lot to be authentic. But we must not be cheap in regards to the way we look. Because a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself."

Besides being a funny monologue, what really attracted me to the story, and why others have analyzed it, is the way Agrado deconstructs herself as some form of an ideal self. She has created an image of herself, something she wants to be, no matter what the cost. These physical changes made her more authentic and more real. I am referring to this because it is the way I started thinking about my Second Life avatar. I started to question the way that being a female in the virtual world made me feel.
I also thought about Lorca’s plays, and how the characters in his major plays are female. It has been said that Lorca creates a world that he wants to inhabit but that that he is incapable of doing since living as a homosexual man in Franco’s Spain was practically impossible. In fact –for Lorca –it was deadly. So in order to fulfill his desires, he creates his characters to question his sexuality and resolves it through his fictional imagination. He creates a world where a woman can’t have children (Yerma) or a woman that can’t live with the man she loves (The House of Bernarda Alba). I thought about this because the relationship with my avatar was one of creating a persona that I cannot have in the real world: someone who is feminine, who acts like a woman, and who is approached mostly by men (which has been the case so far).
One of the most interesting experiences in Second Life, apart from having this another gender persona, was the one that happened when I got close to someone, physically close. I went and got really close to an avatar, not emotionally, but rather close to the avatar itself. I must say that it was as if I was invading someone, and at the same time I felt almost as if I were getting physically close to someone in real life. It was as if I had suddenly “touched” someone. It was a feeling close to the one experienced in real life. It made me think about the extension of my physical real self. Now, after reading in Connected, how it is not necessary to have a face-to-face encounter to be geographically present, I understand it better. I felt it personally. As if an extension of myself was reaching into this virtual world, and I was having the same sensation proximity provided which until then I had only experienced in real life.
I am still exploring these sensations: extending myself, being someone that impersonates a different self, removed from the notion I have of myself, one that it is associated with a male. I am creating a self that it is interested in a different set to rules than the ones I am normally concerned with: looking like a female, with skirts, looking feminine, looking more like a woman and less like a man. It is the appeal of adapting a different self. It is the most intriguing and more telling of my experiences in Second Life, and also the most revealing about my psychological being.
I am then approaching that sentient world where my mind extends and experiences who I am in a more direct way. I am –like Agrado and like Lorca’s characters (or Lorca himself) –becoming something I want and something I closely identify with. It is surprising, and it is giving me grounds to explore parts of myself until now only suggested. This other being is perhaps what Agrado was saying when she talked about being more authentic the closer you were to your ideal –or idea –of yourself.

Oh Mrs. Dashwood is that a bottle in your hand?

Jane Austen and Flaubert used it: free indirect discourse. As Hills writes, free indirect discourse is a "language that comes from the narrative but takes the attributes of the character described." In the case of Flaubert, Madame Bovary say things that are sort of in the middle. She says things without directly saying them, and they aren't things said by the narrator. "Was Flaubert identifying with Emma's fantasy or merely reporting it?" That comparison takes us, of course, to the affinity (identification? possession?) we have with our avatar. Think of the avatar as a form of "ready-made or customized form of representation" and it becomes our voice, our interpreter in the virtual world we inhabit. And when we log off, isn't it still an abstraction we created? Every choice we make is an "indirect representation of the self." I think that the mere choice of not choosing something is already a choice, a way of saying something. Leaving something out is the same as putting something in.

Hills continues: "An avatar, to the degree the author sitting in front of the screen relies on a one-to-one correspondence between him or herself and the online icon, is often an actor with a closer, more direct persona-like relationship to the author than the multiple characters populating most novels." Well, perhaps that's going a little too far. But, yes, I agree that it is a persona, a representation of the author, anyway we look at it. He explains the ability that the graphical chat interfaces allow their authors to create a "halo of meanings." The way I see it, the avatar is a symbol of oneself, it is a fictional extension of the self. Hills talks about this "second skin" and writes that the "avatar, like the masquerade, reveals as much about the individual 'behind' it as it conceals."

Tension - Real and Second Life

Magic and Literal. I thought about something that had to do with my SL avatar and my the RL person. So I combined two different worlds in this small video. Despite the effort to create a world outside our real one in Second Life, there is no escape and the SIMS resemble and cannot be completely detached from our own reality.

Out of Paper - File copying failed

Further discussing interface design, Paul Dorish writes about a different kind of tension: "the traditional process-oriented" and the "emerging improvisation-oriented" interface. What he discusses is the redesign of computational systems that react to certain unpredictable system functions. Consider, he observes, the simple process of making paper copies. We've all experienced it: several pages of the document we want to copy are placed in the feeder tray, we ask for 3 collated copies and we press start. Then in the middle of it, the copier runs out of paper or there is a paper jam. It is then our task to see how far the job was completed. How many pages of the first copy, second, third, etc do we have? Depending on the machine or settings the process could be different and we could just have one complete copy and a third (or a quarter?) of the second copy. Dorish then discusses the design of systems that respond to these types of unpredictable outcomes. He articulates a new design based of the interaction between the components of the system, the system as a whole and the functionality of it. If each component were to be separated from the copier: the tray and the feeder for example. And such component was capable of providing feedback -separate from the whole system -then then interaction and responses to the user will reflect better the process completion. The interface will move from being concerned with the overall process towards the components that make up the function. He calls for rethinking this process through the use of "accounts." Separating the process or the components that account for the functioning of the system. These accounts will not only provide for the reporting of behavoir of the function but will also control it. He elaborates on this concept by using another real life example: we are copying a file from one disk drive to another one residing on the network. The percentage done indicator displays (PDI) as the file is being copied. It reaches 40% and then it fails. The interface returns the message "drive unavailable." Dorish asks then, where did it fail? What does the 40% mean? Couldn't we take that 40% and continue copying the file instead of starting all over again. With the use of accounts this could be accomplished, reporting on every stage of the process, reporting (accounting) for each step towards the completion of the function. He is concerned he says with the "problem of connection between system components." Wouldn't that be great? Designers - programmers - thinking in these terms and create products that are easier to understand failures. We wouldn't have to count pages or copy the file from the start.

A magical desktop

Using the physical metaphor of picking up objects and throwing them on a surface, the ARK (Alternate Reality Kit) allows users to work with an interactive simulation. The objects can also be manipulated to have different characteristics such as gravity and motion, and all the functions allowed by the Smalltalk-80 programming language with which the ARK was written. In his paper, "Experiences with ARK" Randall B. Smith overviews the interface as it relates to this metaphor but more importantly how it relates to the tension between what he calls the literal and magical features. He refers to literal functions as those that are "true to the interface metaphor." In this case, the fact that the user can pick up and throw an object. Smith then defines magical features as those that move away from the strict literal interpretation of the interface and provide a different kind of functionality, "those capabilities that deliberately violate the metaphor." These magical capabilities have more to do with the interaction of the user and the interface than with the actual obvious intention (literal) of the interface. After separating these two different features what interests Smith is what considerations must be taken when designing an interface. He compares the literal and magical functions to analyze the ease of functionality vs. the learnability of the interface. Observing users interact with the interface he concludes that the magical features of the interface are more helpful in regards to the functionality of the interface, whereas the literal features create more "impact on learning time." The question is, he concludes, "How does a designer decide when to implement a capability" that it's magic instead of literal. Think of the desktop on your computer and question how perhaps the metaphor of a desk and paper spread around can be improved to provide a more magical interface without sacrificing the functionality of it. What Smith proposes is a new approach to computer interface design that can lead to more friendly and intuitive systems. Systems that are easier to learn while functioning the same.

The following sites are similar to the ARK interface (especially the first one), and will allow you to see the magical and literal features that Smith discusses.

Soda Play

Yugo

Play Create

The usual suspects

Moving through the usual suspects: Warhol and his fifteen minutes of fame remark, the Empire State film, Warhol watching Taxi, the woman: “this is Warhol voyeurism at its creepiest; Borges “The world, unfortunately, is real”; George Berkeley, a favorite of Borges; Phillip K. Dick novels; conceptual art installations such as Prosthetic and Dancing with the Virtual Dervish, Bjork, etc., Shaviro maps the postmodern and virtual world. He explains this world in relation to finances, global economy, money, memory, the mind, and the body. He does this by discussing philosophy, art, science, mathematics, and the working of the finance world. He is trying to connect every possible world in order to explain the posthuman and the world that according to singularity will one day take over the human race. He writes about how a corporation creates an elite, and how they maintain the employees under control by building dependency. He then moves to film noir (my favorite part) to explain how today’s reality is just an echo of fiction. “I am totally screwed, therefore I am.”

Then there’s the “proximity no longer determined by geographical location” which I immediately relate to my experience in SL.

Can I be personal?

I am pleased to learn that a new approach to academic writing and research is being proposed, an approach that takes into account things that until now have been overlooked by scientists and researchers: emotion, participant experience, subjectivity. "I start with my personal life. I pay attention to my physical feelings, thoughts and emotions. I use what I call systemic psychological introspection and emotional recall to try to understand an experience I've lived through," Ellis and Bochner write. “In the writings of certain postmodernists and particularly within feminist and queer theory you see a renewed appreciation for emotion, intuition, personal experience, embodiment and spirituality,” they continue. Of course, it is not easy to be personal, and God forbid you should show your emotions. “[I]f you’re not willing to become a vulnerable observer, then you ought to reconsider doing autoethnography,” Ellis warns.
I like to write short stories, and can see the work facing an autoethnographer. It is not easy to be introspective, to be emotionally invested. It is draining to reveal your soul in writing. It is a very intimate experience that takes a lot of courage but also a lot of psychological work. Writing on this blog - for example - has not been easy for me. Sometimes I am revealing more about myself than I want to. That previous sentence - not to go far - was revealing and also hard to write, but also harder to make public, to share it with a group of people. I can then see how it is that Ellis compares autoethnography to therapy. “Of course, I agree that our stories should have therapeutic value,” Ellis tells.
This hard work, however, can lead to insightful analysis. It can perceive properties of the research until now ignored that can also give more understanding to why and how I (others) do things they way they do it. If in the process, I arrive at a conclusion that helps to better understand my world and then the world of others, then the method has been valuable and useful. There are of course considerations to keep the work “analytical” as pointed out in the article by Ellis and Bochner. It is the challenge: how to include subjective, emotional analysis while at the same time producing objective, unbiased, scientific results. “The article I wrote on stigma convinced me of the benefits of moving between narrative and categorical knowledge, though I don’t think that is necessary in every study,” Ellis tells her aspiring student.
I was watching a program about a book called The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, and the author talks about how art, literature, and poetry adds value to society. It might be hard to measure, he says, but they add to society. He ends his interview quoting a sign that was in Einstein’s office that read, "There are some things that count that can't be counted. And some things that can be counted that don't count." His interview resonated with me, and the quote from the Einstein’s sign made me think about the autoethnography article I had read and how it proposed a more intimate personal approach to research and writing. “[I]t will be difficult to wean scholars and the American public from a view that measuring and, comparison and outcomes are all that matters,” Ellis and Bochner conclude. Academics might start to write from the heart and open the “discussion of working the spaces between subjectivity and objectivity, passion and intellect, and autobiography and culture,” they continue. I hope the discussion continues and these new approaches are adapted. I also hope that in the process academic writing becomes less, well, dry.