Near-neutral-buoyancy + Goldfish crackers = fun!
Feel bad I haven’t had time to do a decompress on the Internet as Playground & Factory conference recently put on at the New School. I didn’t feel much up for live blogging, for some reason, or even Tweeting, despite enticements to do so.
As a theme, it was intriguing. I was a bit concerned in the discussion that preceded the conference that there would be a particular focus on fairly abstract critical theory. Over the years, my enjoyment of super-abstract cultural theory has given way to tolerance. Too often, I worry that the language has obscured the precision of the ideas. Luckily, the pendulum has swung back from the extreme end of this, where verbal gymnastics was valued more than real ideas, and theorist rock stars attracted audiences not because of what they had to say but how they had to say it.
As I look back on the conference I am definitely glad I got the chance to go. I think that there were times when the very long sessions made me feel like I needed to escape, and there seemed to be too many collisions of speakers that I did want to see. Some of the folks I really wanted to see were actually speaking during my own panel.
(As a quick bit of navel-gazing, I think our session was one of the most interesting, precisely because we explicitly made it a discussion. We decided ahead of time to limit the presenters to a few minutes of introductory remarks and then bounce back and forth with the audience. Yuri did a very nice job of keeping things as on track as at all possible, but folks were not shy at all, and it was an interesting and wide-ranging discussion.)
Was also happy to get a chance to chat with some of my biggest inspirations lately. Howard Rheingold and @academicdave, as well as touch base with a bunch of folks I haven’t seen in a while. And that was great, though I wish I’d felt like there was more time to relax with them. Long sessions + shortish breaks made things feel rushed. This perhaps even more so because our pre-lunch session went long.
I don’t actually like people, though, so I often rate conferences by how good they are at making me think and get excited about ideas. This one did this well. I was particularly taken by a few of the presentations. I was very taken by Sean Cubitt’s presentation, perhaps particularly because I came in not expecting much “there there,” and was very pleasantly surprised, to find quite a bit of substance (along with the style). Still not my ball of wax, but a good presentation, and prod toward ideas.
I had expected to enjoy Fred Turner’s presentation, and was not disappointed. Not to say I agreed with it (a paean to bureaucracy seems to treat it as a real thing and not a model–a lens for interpreting social organization), but that is part of what makes for an intriguing and interesting argument. He came dangerously close to my back shelf project of resurrecting the cyberneticists for a conversation on the network society, but that’s OK–someone needs to do it.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the breadth and discussion around Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The Turk came up as an interesting synecdoche for many of the themes of the conference. The question of whether Turkers were an exploited underclass or were just engaging in an odd sort of repetitive play–or, most intriguingly, both–kept coming up in different contexts.
As I said, even though I was there, I felt like I missed as much as I saw. Perhaps it was just me, but there seemed to be a definite in-group out-group thing going on. Maybe that’s true everywhere, though. For me, the outgroup–the periphery–was particularly interesting. All in all, a thought-provoking topic, and a great group to address it. As much as I’m turned off by conferences lately, it was certainly worthwhile.
Will be interested to see where things go from here.
8 things
ReadWriteWeb listed 8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010. As if I didn’t already have enough things to do! Anyway, I’m giving myself a bit of a reprieve, and some of these will be done by February 1 instead of January 1.
1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships.
This one is easy for me. I practice radical transparency. If I don’t want the world to know about it, I don’t put it anywhere. So, yes, I’ve tracked on some of the Facebook concerns, but since my “friends” know little more about me than other publics do, I frankly am not concerned. If someone decides not to hire me because they’ve seen me being a bit nuts in a classroom, or a bit tipsy at a party, then I don’t want to work there.
(I won’t get into the larger argument. I think there are worthy reasons to pursue certain sorts of privacy, but I think a common understanding of the idea of “privacy” is part of the residue of mass society and now it’s, well… it’s complicated.)
Status: COMPLETE
2. Change your passwords.
This one is long in coming. I’ve had a poor password regimen, and someone has put in a malicious backdoor on my Dreamhost account somewhere that leads to access to this blog among other things. I don’t think that’s a password issue (more likely a poorly protected application), but the damage is done.
I don’t like password managers, but I do have a set of relatively default passwords that I reuse at various levels of security. I’ve started replacing those–even for the very basic ones–with a unique password arrived at algorithmically. Replacing all those passwords is going to take a while–and probably won’t be done by 2010. But I’ve gotten a good start on it.
Status: STARTED
3. Own your name.
I don’t think there’s much more I need to do with this. Nobody is likely to confuse this Alex Halavais with all the others out there.
Status: ONGOING
4. Prune your feeds.
Truth is, my feed reader has grown so out of control that I stopped using it this year. In large part, Twitter and popurls have taken its place.
Nonetheless, I want to be a little more ahead of the curve. I’ll go back to the system I had before, of organizing reads into first, second, and third tiers. I’ll update here as I decide what those waves are.
Status: STARTING SOON
5. Find a better mobile.
All the chatter about the new Google phone and iSlate isn’t compelling to me. I found the Droid I was looking for. I’m glad I waited. Though I hate being tied to the Verizon contract, and I’m a bit uncomfortable with how closely it clings to Google services, it’s very convenient, and it lets me run my own home-made apps. Even if I never have time to write them, I like the idea of having that option. Looking forward to more locative blogging.
Status: COMPLETE
6. Update copyright notices on your website.
RWW is mostly concerned with copyright year, which isn’t really a big deal, at least for me. But (see below), I will be updating the footer to more clearly indicate the Creative Commons License.
7. Revisit your blog.
This one is a big one. I’ve set up an action plan for this blog, which has mainly gone fallow, and will be starting a second site for a new project.
Over the coming weeks, I will:
1. Blog the creation of my new class, of the work I’m doing on a paper, and of my work with the DML Hub and a research network here in New York.
2. Create a research page outlining my scholarship and providing links to as many of my articles (in draft form) as I can.
3. Create a teaching page that does the same, and links to some of the class sites I’ve created.
4, Work through the categories and a tagging structure, as well as effective search.
5. Rethink the layout, and bring in better archives, searching, and my twitter feed.
8. Back up your data.
This has also been a long-time issue for me. I had a box that I was going to turn into a NAS using OpenFiler or FreeNAS, but because of a number of issues, I gave up on that plan, and realized that the (eminently hackable) DLink DNS-321 was on sale for < $100 after rebate. That’s been loaded with a pair of 2TB drives in RAID1. This is a backup system in addition to another server that’s simply set up with a bunch of old drives. Now that the hardware is sorted, need to get the actual backups going (including an offsite backup for the most vital chunks).
Status: UNDER WAY
As you can see: serious New Years Eve partying this year :). Hoping that “ten” is your best year so far.
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