Working with "automation":

In "Five Principles of New Media:Or, Playing Lev Manovich," Madeleine Sorapure offers interactive explanation and demonstration of the five principles of new media Manovich proposes, namely numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. You can access the interactive Kairos article at:

http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/8.2/binder2.html?coverweb/sorapure/index.htm

You can access a pdf or the article at:

http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/8.2/coverweb/sorapure/five.pdf

Let's follow Sorapure's students' lead by demonstrating the principle of automation. Her students foud this principle the most thought provoking and perhaps disturbing, because it challenged their views on questions of originality, creativity, and authorship. Sorapure explains: "...they were compelled to examine how their interactions with the computer influenced the work they were to produce."

For next week, each of you should create a visual representation of a four-letter word. (You might look at Sorapure's students' projects for ideas.) You may use the Flip cameras, Photoshop or Flash to do this project. If you have another idea, let me know what it is as a comment to this post so the whole group can respond.

about David Weinberger...

Weinberger celebrates the "new power" of the digital disorder. Certainly, his claim "Instead of everything having its place, it's better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously" (14). Clearly this is true for commerce and information, but what does this mean for writing?

As a thought exercise, locate two examples from Weinberger's text that make you nervous (or at least wary) about the multiplicity and the hyperconnectivity of knowledge acquistion and dissemination. In two paragraphs, demonstrate how third-order practices might actually fail. Or, show how drawing lines for and drafting hierarchies for knowledge might actually be preferable to Weinberger's observations.