digital digs

What do you use jott? (edited)

What do you use jott for? I'm not really sure what the answer is to this question yet. I was wondering if anyone out there is using Jott and can tell me what they use it for. It seems to me that you would use it to send a message when you have very little time or if you want to send something brief and you were away from your computer. You know, I don't know why you would use Jott to send a message to Twitter rather than just sending a text message; it would seem to make more sense that you  would do that. But I guess there could be instances where you would not be able to text and would be able to call into Jott instead. I guess that's a possibility; I'll have to think about that one. The other possibility here with blogging I guess again is if you were going to send more informal.. listen

Powered by Jott

How 'bout that? (edited)

How about that? So I'm not sure exactly how much time that was before it decided that it was going to cut me off. Yeah, so I guess I'll have to look online and see what the length it is in terms of how long a Jott can be. [Turns out to be 30 seconds I believe.] But that broke me off in mid sentence of what I was going to say.  If you're using this for blogging, you'd obviously want to send a fairly short message. I'm not sure how that will work for me, because I always write longer things, even if they're not necessarily all that well revised or anything like that. So okay, and I guess we'll see what I want to do with this. And keep trying it, and find out what happens. listen

Powered by Jott

Afterword: so from my perspective I certainly wouldn't use Jott to do the kinds of blogging I normally do. That shouldn't be surprising: different technology, different compositional context/practice, different result. The Jott blog post will need to be short. Even these start to get fairly garbled. Usually a short blog post would include link. I'm not sure how I'd do that in Jott. If I figure it out, I'll post about it.

Assuming I won't be linking in a short Jott blog post, I'll need to figure out a new genre for myself. Some witty aphorisms perhaps... maybe not.

microblog compositions

Following up on my earlier post on microblogging, I saw a thread on the TechRhet listserv regarding this subject: essentially how might one use Twitter in the writing classroom?

The general consensus in the thread was that there was a potential to teach concision in the 140 character limitation of the tweet. There was also extensive comparison to the haiku. Well, a tweet may sound like its a haiku on the classic subject matter of nature or spring, but that's about as far as it goes.

Writing a short message is not the same as writing a concise message or a haiku (btw, I would not characterize haikus as concise; there's a different aesthetic @ work there).

Fortunately our students don't need to be taught how to write short messages. They probably write more than their instructors. Obviously the 140 character limit reflects the important connection between microblogging and SMS. And as we know the point of texting is not to be concise! In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. In microblogging we say anything and everything b/c it's quick, easy, and free.

A couple other observations...

Jay Bolter, locative rhetoric, and eversion

Final post catching up on Computers and Writing on Bolter's keynote speech. The bottom line is that Bolter offers a vision of inscription (of writing/composition) that lies far beyond what any but a very small group of rhet/comp faculty, even within computers and writing, are able to engage. I think it shows us a world slipping away from us and really speeding away from what institutions are able to understand and do.

But I want to speak to some of the particular details. As I've mentioned before, in an interview with Arthur Kroker, Kate Hayles somewhat playfully identifies April 1994 as the end of postmodernism, signaled by the arrival of the graphical web browser. Bolter gives a related history, a history in which he played a significant role, in the development of avant-garde hypertext fiction and early web philosophy, inspired of course by William Gibson's kenning cyberspace. As Bolter notes, the early web articulated itself as a separate space whose utopian promise lay in its ability to allow us to leave history and materiality in meat space.

And I think we all know where that dualism leads, both practically and critically/theoretically. Nowhere especially useful.

making the e-book pay off

There's been much recent discussion of Amazon's new e-book, Kindle, on KairosNews, if:Book and many other places. Apparently the device has sold well here at the start and has received more positive reviews than I've seen for past e-books. Here are what seem to be the main issues for me:

• Cost: at $400, that's a steep buy-in for a device I'm not sure I need.
• Wireless web access: It seems like the main positive of Kindle is that you get free EVDO internet access. Unfortunately, the device is designed for reading electronic books, not surfing the web. It seems like the device missed its mark! I would pay $400 for a mobile device that would bring me quality, free web access. Who would care about reading books on it!
• Proprietary book formats: Do I really need to explain why this is undesirable?

Anyway, here's how I think you get this product out to a bunch of young, tech-loving consumers. If you have electronic versions of textbooks, give students who buy the device a couple hundred bucks worth of e-book textbooks. Most students will go through that in a year. Then they'll be back next year buying more. It's not unlike the way that Microsoft gives away its Office product to students (or at least they used to when I was working at Penn St).

Personally, I don't see buying this thing. I don't have any problem accessing books in their print form. I like the idea of digital ink making the screen more readable. I really like the idea of free, cellular web access included. Perhaps when the web access is better or when the device doesn't look so clunky or when e-books start to take better advantage of the fact that they are being published in a dynamic, convergent media network rather than on paper.

From Second Life to Metaverse

In Technology Review, Wade Roush offers an article on the intersection of Second Life-type virtual worlds and Google Earth-type "mirror worlds" that examines the potential future of such a mash-up combined with mobile networks. It seems likely that these technologies will combine:

• mobile networks and devices
• highly detailed 3-D maps of the real world
• geo-tagged, cross media, participatory databases
• virtual world ability to interact with simulated spaces as an avatar

As we think about these technologies coming together, however, one might imagine them as mixing in different amounts and ways for different kinds of purposes. The producers of the Metaverse Roadmap offer this schematic as a way of understanding the different potential trajectories of the web and virtual reality. The vertical line maps movement between technologies that emphasize augmenting our perception of the real world and creating simulations that might either model real world contexts or present alternate realities (a la Second Life). The horizontal line shifts between a focus on providing users with information about the external world and allowing users inttmate expression within an environment. I see this latter dynamic as roughly along the objective-subjective line.

The result are four different trends the roadmap details. It's not so much a question of which direction we'll move in, but understanding the dynamic relations between these technologies. One might imagine swinging from one space into another.