As my paper comes to its end I've been thinking about Walter Benjamin's essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility". Essentially in Benjamin's theory art and politics are become intertwined in the age of reproducibility. When things are easily produced and shared there is no longer the sacredness of the original piece of work, it becomes unimportant when photography and film come into the picture. Benjamin states, "For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual". With photography and film there is no "original" and there is no inherent value in one copy of the photograph or film over the other. Benjamin theorized that as the ritualistic placement of art faded then art would become based on politics; in addition the barriers between artist and audience would in turn break down. Benjamin strongly desired to see new conceptualizations of the role of art and artist in society. Sadly, I do not believe photography and film ever caused the revolution Benjamin hoped it would.

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So, as my last post, I thought I would talk about twitter. As you may know, Twitter is having all of its public tweets archived in the Library of Congress database. I've been confused about this, but luckily, a FAQ was posted yesterday.

What first comes to mind for archiving tweets is, what about all of the bots? They post all the time and are essentially meaningless, unless of course, in the future we are studying early bot behavior.

My second question is answered, in that "linked information such as pictures and websites is not part of the archive, and the Library has no plans to collect the linked sites." I understand why they are doing this, but this will render most tweets meaningless. It's like taking youTube, removing the video and then archiving the comment section.

This is all very strange to me. Yes, I understand that it's an interesting resource for instant news, exemplified by the green party revolt in Iran, but also what about your tweets about what you had for breakfast, or things like that collar that tweets 500 random phrases to your dog's twitter account? On the other hand, if Mez hadn't made her twitter private, she would have all of her poetry enter the archive, which I think would be really beneficial. I guess I can't see into the future. What we study and deem important from this present will probably be our random musings on twitter. Hopefully facebook doesn't decide to donate their database to the library of congress (this would be really creepy), otherwise I'm going to have to start making things private.

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The end of anything is a strange and scary time. As I sit in the library with only my final paper in front of me; I have begun to feel the pull which the end always manifests. I have never been fond of farewells and it seems that my final push in college will not be any different. Sitting here I have realized that the end of anything produces the same feelings; every book I have enjoyed throughout my life has been painful to part with as the end came to pass. Though ending anything can be hard it is an inevitable part of our human existence.
There is however a silver lining to the end; the end enables each person to take what they have learned from a stage (or even a book) and use these skills and ideas in the next chapter. This semester I have realized that the end does not mean stop. Instead the end will only draw a pause or the opportunity to realize a new beginning.
Every stage in our life comes to some sort of end, while this may be the change from one stage to the next it will always bring about something new. The end will always be a mere moment, after which change or turnover, will be inevitable. Our life is in a constant flux, always changing, moving and speeding by while the end draws closer. When the end finally does arrive this abrupt change from the norm can cause unsettling feelings. This notion is nothing new we have seen the awkward feelings which the end brings about reflected in the literature we have seen throughout the semester. Each of the narratives we have been exposed to have mirrored the flux of everyday life. Each perspective from the various narrators reflects the same constant movement we experience every day. These characters and their stories were created to maintain and engage the reader so that the reader can experience the dizzying affects of life from a different perspective. What I have learned is that while these perspectives must come to a close, they never truly come to an end.

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As we hand in our final papers, there is one source I feel compelled to share with you all. Through LexisNexis (bless that beautiful database) I discovered a whole host of articles from a journal dedicated solely to Smart Card technology. One article mentions Washington state's move in 2007 to introduce a combined state driver's license and "border crossing ID." The card uses the RFID technology we first read about in Little Brother at the beginning of the year. A quick visit to Washington's Licensing Department web site shows that they have successfully implemented the program (for a few years now, at least).

The state website claims that the cards are being implemented "to preserve travel, trade, and cultural ties with British Columbia and increase security at the border" and so they "are offering EDL/EID Cards to Washington residents who choose to participate." While there certainly are benefits to the ID cards, there are also some serious loopholes and dangers - weaknesses that I would not have thought of on my own until this semester's course opened my eyes to the code all around us.

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After listening to Shannon's presentation at the symposium I was overtaken with questions for myself about my own views on art and aesthetics and where the digital entries fit within that spectrum. In my 295 class we were talking about Janice Radway who wrote an essay about how she wishes that academics would focus more on “middle brow” works rather than “high brow” because you get little pleasure from “high brow” works other than the bragging right of having completed them and they re just too threatening. Sometimes that is how I feel about “art” or what people define as art. I like going to museums and looking at paintings, but I hate that overwhelming feeling that I'm not understanding that deeper meaning or whatever it is that the art critics or historians have decided that I get from this. Now a days, so much is available online and, like Shannon articulated, it is so hard to tell or define what is art. Again, in my English 295 class we were talking about what fits in each category and how throughout the years things have moved categories and have fit in different areas. Art, just like everything else, is relative (in my mind). In this case someone brought up Blogs and where they fit. Prof. Richards said that he believes that currently blogs fit into the “low brow” sector, but he believes that within the near future that they will make their way to the “middle brow” and maybe even move into the “high brow” depending on the genre and the author**. He went on to say that he wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years Mary Washington offered a course in analyzing blogs. That got me thinking about this course and its location in the university. A lot of people hear the word “code” and think of computers or ciphers, but few people think of the art that is behind it.

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Personal identity has certainly played an important aspect throughout the semester. It is through the evaluation of personal identity, in the form of a literary narrative, where readers are able to gain an understanding of the words and their meaning in a story. Personal identity has transcended from the written word and is now expressed through varying mediums in present day society. Celebrity culture most accurately portrays this expression of identity as well as our culture’s perversion of identity expression.
Our society is obsessed with the value of personal identity; each person in our society is encouraged to build a personal identity and share it with others. Because of this tradition we have also come to value of how others perceive your personal identity. Today our society has valued personal identity to the point that people have designed elaborate and extensive measures in order to protect or exploit identity others. This is most apparent in celebrity culture, where personal identity has molded or overlapped with professional identity. This intermingling of identities has caused celebrities to be confused with their fictionalized or exaggerated public identities. The media adds to this confusion by harpooning celebrities for acting in accordance or against their public persona; this unfortunately perpetuates the cycle of both the secrecy and exploitation of personal identity.
Millions of dollars are spent in the entertainment industry in order to create a marketable public identity for a celebrity. Teams of people are congregated in the efforts of make one person exude certain aspects of their identity which will make the consuming public interested in him or her. Money and time is spent so that a celebrity will be viewed in a certain way. Building these public identities are often a detriment to a celebrity because unlike normal citizens a celebrity’s every moved is followed by the media.

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So, the botnet took control of my gmail account on Monday night from 9:18-9:19pm. I'm not really sure how or why (I still don't really understand the reason behind the botnet, maybe we will find out come 2012?) the botnet seized control and spammed everyone that I've ever sent an email to, but it's made me rethink the importance of my digital identity to my everyday life.

Before all of this, I thought of my internet life as sort of superfluous and separate from my real life. On the internet I can talk to random people and share ideas, but I can also do that in the real world, which seems more important. I have accounts all over the place: multiple gmails, forums-galore, social networking everywhere. But being taken over by spambots changed the way I think about my digital identity. It actually plays a major role in my everyday life. Hell, half of this seminar class is based on what we do digitally on this website.

Part of my blog entry last week on dealt with spampoetry. Unluckily, I was not used to send these strange messages (I wish, if the botnet would ask me, I would write poetry for them. I'm going to tell my parents that's what I want to do with my English degree from now on. It's better than "I have no idea."), instead "I" (they) sent out randomly generated names for the subject header and a simple randomly generated link in the email body. This is strange, because I often send emails like this to friends, just to share an interesting link with them. Is the botnet mimicking me?

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Secret Codes You Aren't Meant to Know

As a novel reader, I have a tendency to get lost in the narration; at times it is difficult for me to realize when I should take the narrator’s word as truth or question the account. A well written perspective can have the power to completely override a reader’s personal sense of a story; narrators can bewitch to the point of misjudgment by the reader. Narration, in literature and beyond, has become a powerful tool in human existence. Each human being is only given his or her own personal perspective in life; so in our lifetime we will only experience the world through our own eyes. With the introduction of literature mankind has been granted the ability to share the vantage point of others. Narratives have been utilized as a means for others to understand the perspective of another. However, narration has also become a double edged sword; narration can supply a different perspective but this perspective should not be considered the “truth”. Narrators, like those made of real flesh and blood, also have the tendency to provide a truth that will align with the narrator’s best interests or perspective. This means that narrators, like humans, may also be unreliable when chronicling a series of events. Human nature has proven that men and women are inherently self motivated beings; due to this need to fulfill one’s own desires both the narrator and a person can create unreliable narratives. These variations of the truth though, should not be categorized as lies; instead these narratives are the compilation of a personal perspective, which in turn becomes truth. Narration, unreliable or not, is essentially the retelling of one person’s personal perspective of an event. Regardless of whether or not the narration is the actual “truth”, it is someone’s truth and understanding the perspective of another is truly the goal of narration.

While perusing the Only Revolutions forums I ran into a post that suggested that the double parallel lines that are displayed on the binding and other places in the front of the book are connected to Java Boolean Logical Operators.
I don't know if any of you are computer science majors or know anything about Logical Operators but, I know very little. Still, I was fascinated by this idea because it connects the book more closely to code and the idea it is trying to emulate the digital in some way.
In Java Boolean Logical Operators the || symbol is the short-circuit OR (as in "a OR b") operator there is also a | symbol that is the regular OR operator. From the site I linked to above, "if you use the || operator instead of the | operator and if A is true then java will not evaluate B(assuming it is a expression)." So if A is already true in the expression then java decides there is no need to look at the second variable, B. The reason having a function like || is helpful in coding is if you run into a situation when B depends on A being true or false to function properly.
If we apply this idea to the novel we see that the stories are not OR (|) in the way you can read just Sam OR Hailey. In a | situation it doesn't matter if one is true and one is false. When we subject their stories to a short-circuit OR (||) then one story, if it is true, automatically pulls in the other story with it as true. If we start on Hailey's side and determine it is true then Sam's must all be true following the logic of the function through. The same goes if we switch around the order (Hailey's true-ness being contingent on Sam's story being true). The value of the second story is contingent on the first story. Even more crazy is the fact that if the first variable is true there is no need to evaluate (read?) the second variable.

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