This internet stuff is serious business...

Considering the ways that social media opened communication/expression/information, it's not much of a surprise that it has gained a real-world presence. It isn't (and hasn't been for a while) news that online behavior can have real life repercussions. We're constantly reminded that an incriminating picture/video/status update/post can haunt you pretty much for the rest of your life. I remember fights between friends over passive-aggressive blog entries or away messages which have led to real-life confrontations.
It could have been teenaged ignorance. It could have been a naive hope. I just always thought the two worlds would/could/should remain separate, especially considering how easily you can get carried away. I mean, you're just sitting alone at the computer, right? There's no way this time spent in isolation can come back to haunt you. Online life and offline life are completely different things.
But that's never the case, and we now have a digital realm of expression to take too seriously. Like it wasn't enough to have to worry about what you do and say when you're actually in front of people. I think that there are plenty of positive things that social media has done for expression and the dissemination of information and ideas, but the way it's been handled by older media outlets is pretty depressing.
On the other hand, I think that this bleed over onto the real world has been pretty interesting--particularly, the cases in Mexico.
I was relieved to hear that the charges against the Mexican Twitterrorists have been dropped. I was also pretty impressed by the way people were using social media as a survival mechanism, in spite of the efforts to silence users.
Maybe it's just my concerns about the difficulty in establishing credibility, detecting sarcasm, and providing context that continue to fuel this mistrust of social media. Although it's great that just about everyone has a voice, it's still disconcerting that we haven't settled on what to do with it, or what it means.

Remember when I admitted to stealing my usernames from a song sub/titled “Failing the Turing Test”?

I’ll pause briefly to marvel at the coincidence. 

While working toward the end of Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, I kept thinking about/combining/connecting the initialed characters/locations (A., B., C., U., etc.) to the various implementations (A through Helen).  When I was trying to wrap my mind around why Powers was selectively leaving certain details out—giving only an abbreviation for names of people and places while using full names for others—I was reminded of John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse”. 
In Barth’s story, the narrative of a family vacation is interrupted by the commentary on writing fiction.  In the opening, after naming characters and locations with a first initial with a long dash (the town of D—, Maryland, a character named Magda G— …sound somewhat familiar?), Barth comments on this naming convention.  He writes that “initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality.  It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability.  Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means” (Barth 82).  By calling out this move, Barth shows that it only appears to make the characters, places, or time described in a story seem any more real. 
I don’t think Powers was withholding some of the full names because he wanted to take a 19^th century shortcut to an illusion of reality, or to avoid litigation (although making the first person narrator novelist Richard Powers bears an implication of autobiographictionality).  Instead of depersonalizing the characters, simplifying the story/making it less specific, the selective initial-ing of people, places, and versions of the ‘implementations’ made things a little more complicated within the novel. Sure it’s not too difficult to keep track of which capital letter is a person, which is a version of the machine, and which is a place, but you have to work a little to keep these letters organized.  I think the one that sent me on what I’ll try to dismiss as just my crazy-person take on this novel, was the choice to have implementation H be the one that fictional Rick Powers works with.

Before imp. H acquires a name, the line “H was a revision of the trainer” (171) appears to scream implications for the nature of the experiment.  I wasn’t really thrown by the quasi-twist—the machine is really training the narrator!?—but the re-framing of the experiment as “it was about teaching a human to tell” (318) was pretty interesting.  Lentz asks “Well, powers.  How far were we, again?  Imp H? You realize what we have to call the next one, don’t you?”  Lentz’s question only confirmed the first-person pronoun suspicions I had after H was introduced. We’d already met with implementation I on the first page, and had been listening to them the whole way through.

Blame the Media

I liked Ryan’s description of Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (31).  For Bolter and Grusin, “Every medium …is developed as an attempt to remediate the deficiencies of another medium.  Remediation is this ‘the mediation of mediation:  Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation.  Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media.  Media need each other to function as media at all” (31).  Looking at mediation this way shows the succession of media forms as a natural process in the development of media as well as a key feature of media itself.  Instead of newer media crushing older forms, these different forms of media co-exist, influence, and can possibly enrich each other.  The written word did not completely abolish the spoken word.  The written word wasn’t eradicated by the printed word.  The printed word survived its electronic/telegraphic transmission.  The radio star was not killed by video.  The internet has yet to destroy television, and I’m sure whatever is supposed to come next will fail to completely render the internet obsolete.

Digital media actually provides a new way of looking at its predecessors. According to Ryan, newer media forms provided “not only brand-new artistic media and modes of communications to investigate …but also old media to revisit.  These old media did not live in a digital environment, but, as they began to use the computer as a mode of production, they were able to achieve entirely new effects …virtually every ‘old medium’ has a new, digital twin” (30).  The digital incarnation of older media types allowed different approaches to these media, and brought the potential to breathe new life into them.  This sounds much more reasonable than “media form 1 is going to completely destroy media form 2! I am excited/upset because I didn’t really care for/really liked/based my career on/went to graduate school to study media form 2!”

Although this alleviates the doom-and-gloom view of emerging media forms, I still have to admit my bias towards print media’s style of narrativity.  I can’t help but think of cable news/online news outlets and new media when Ryan notes “the coverage of a time-consuming crisis must begin before the crisis is resolved, and the daily reports lack the completeness and retrospective perspective of other types of narrative.  All these characteristics suggest that newpapers indeed support a distinct type of narrativity” (18).  Newspapers and other forms of print media lag behind the newer forms of electronic media because they are not as instantaneous, up-to-the-current-second bursts of information.  The slowed pace/delayed delivery allows print media to give context to and perspective on new information.  Print media also demands solitary/isolated reading and attention.  It’s hard to multitask when reading a book.  Sure, you can stop reading and do something else, but the activities remain separate.  Who hasn’t changed channels (to see what else may be on) while watching a TV show, opened a new tab or browser window while something was loading, or checked their email/facebook/twitter in the middle of composing a blog post?

My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

It looks like I have a Twitter account and a new blog.
My name is Tony.  This is my third (and hopefully last) year in the English Graduate program at Saint Rose. 

I more or less grew up alongside the evolution of social media.  In high school, a friend on my "buddy list" had a livejournal link in their AOL Instant Messenger profile.  I found out about Friendster through another friend's livejournal post.  Shortly after starting college, someone on Friendster mentioned Myspace in a "shout out."  I hopped from platform to platform until Facebook started to become the cool new thing.  I didn't have an .edu email address, and I was okay with missing out.  By the time I transferred to a school with student email, Facebook was opened to the public anyway, and it was starting to become the preferred method of communication.  I drew the line when I first heard about Twitter.  I'm probably not the best/most active Facebook user as it is.  I've decided to avoid taking the "cool guy" route of dragging my feet when presented with a course Twitter requirement.  I have doubts that I'm going to become a devoted twitterer, but there's no reason to act ling I'm tweeting begrudgingly/under duress.

The username "If I Were A Luddite" combines my love for stealing things from lyrics to songs I like, my quasi skepticism of technology, and the grammatical anxiety I feel both being an English Major and writing to other English Majors.  The line is from a song by Robot Goes Here, which was a music project of Harvard Post-Doctoral Fellow David Rand.  I've seen Robot Goes Here a few times, and I'm pretty sure that this video of a live performance can explain Robot Goes Here better than I ever could. 

The song that inspired my usernames is "01001010 Failing the Turing Test" and you can listen to it here.

The lyrics have been changed a little from the version I'm transcribing:
Robot Goes Here: 01001010 (Failing the Turing Test)
"I can no longer think the things that I want to think.
The things that I want to think have been replaced by moving images.
I can no longer think, the moving images have replaced the things that I want to think.
I can no longer think the things that I want to think.
My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
I can no longer think.  I can no longer think." (Alexander Duhamel, 1930)
We've seen half this country, but it's all been air-conditioned, rolling by through tinted glass.
Those clouds look so crisp they must be computer generated.  That music is played so well/sounds so good it must be synthed.

Ever am I realizing how thick the byte is in my blood, crawling under my skin and digging like a chigger (can you feel it?)
If I was a Luddite, I'd have to learn to live without myself.  If I was a Luddite, I'd try to destroy myself.
Where will people like me fit in, in the world of "small is beautiful"?
Where will I fit in? Where will I fit in?

Just another place in my thought-space where the idea goes down much better than the instantiation.
I can talk the talk, yeah, I can get excited.  But if I am really honest with myself I'll see that the times when I am truly happy, when my excitement is bubbling and overflowing, these times are few and far between.  And happen almost exclusively alone with my computer in the middle of the night.

Ever am I realizing how thick the byte is in my blood, crawling under my skin and digging like a chigger (can you feel it?)
If I was a luddite, I'd have to learn to live without myself.  If I was a luddite, I'd try to destroy myself.
Where will people like me fit in, in the world of "small is beautiful"?
Where will I fit in? Where will I fit in?

I ask myself "What makes me truly happy?" and the half-answers I get are suspect.
I can't tell how much is "I could make a convincing argument for why this should make me happy,"
and how much is "this really makes me happy." What really makes me happy?
I've been working on a computer program to tell us what is beautiful.
I think it's time to pull the plug. 

I'll avoid a lengthy exposition of the meaning of this song and say that I like the line as well as the idea of using Ludditism to inspire an online username.  When I gave the song a few extra listens to make sure I was borrowing the right words, I started to panic about subjunctive/conditional verb tenses (if I was vs. if I were).  
I just hope this doesn't lead to any future problems with Dr. Rand.