Sample Reality

Jets! Bombs! War! A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum!

We went to the National Air and Space Museum today, thinking it’d be a lark for our 16-month old son, who loves planes and anything else that makes a lot of noise and moves through the sky.

I’d forgotten, though, exactly what the Air and Space Museum memorializes: jets, bombs, and war.

Truly, the history of flight is the history of war in the 20th century.

Political aggression and state-sanctioned bloodshed were the twin engines that powered the technological advances which made dying, death, and destruction, all wrought by aircraft, both quicker and cheaper, and ultimately, easier in the modern age. Obliteration from on high, cities reduced to blips on radar.

Even space, the final frontier, is now essentially a battlezone, a militarized nebula of satellites and payloads. This, at least, is what we learned at the museum.

Next week, no kidding, we’re seeking an antidote to all this flag-waving glorification of war, something not so exuberant and triumphant. Something a little more, uh, aware of the follies of greed and rapacity.

Maybe some Bosch at the National Gallery of Art?

The Pros and Cons of Life Hacking

I’ve been meaning to blog about Clive Thompson’s NYT Magazine article on life hacking for a week now, but, as it happens, I’ve been operating on “continuous partial attention” myself since, oh, I don’t know, weeks, months, maybe years even.

While the science Thompson describes is fascinating—when is the perfect moment to interrupt someone at work?—I tremble thinking how this science will eventually be put to use: making us more productive workers.

Taylorism was nothing compared to what the good people at Microsoft are cooking up, with their studies of attentions spans, interruption cycles, and multitasking management.

The whole idea behind the anarchic-sounding life hacking, it seems to me, is to simplify your life, not so you can enjoy it more, but so that you can increase your productivity. Even the famous hipster PDA presumes that efficiency and work are the most important things in your life.

I don’t want to hack my life so that I can work more and work better. I want to work less.

Play is an endangered species.

Some of the best things in life are classified

What I want to write is so confidential, so classified, I can’t even write it. It has something to do with the Pentagon the government. That’s about all I can say. And that people involved have signed non-disclosure agreements. Which have been broken. Apparently. Maybe not. I don’t know. The lawyers are deciding. The key word, though, is threat analysis shambles.

Using Understanding Comics to Understand New Media

A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts about the rhetoric of the hyperlink, which I was working on with my Textual Media course. I’ve complicated my students thinking (I hope) by suggesting that we can use Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud’s wonderfully insightful dissection of comics (itself in comics form) to understand new media.

Among the many useful keywords and concepts McCloud provides is a rubric of panel-to-panel transitions, in other words, techniques for tying together two distinct panel frames on a page. Inspired, I think, partly by an awareness of how cuts work in film, McCloud gives us these six categories:

1. moment-to-moment (showing the passing of time)
2. action-to-action (showing cause and effect)
3. subject-to-subject (in film, an example would be a cut to closeup or a wide shot)
4. scene-to-scene (shifting the action across significant time and/or space)
5. aspect-to-aspect (what McCloud calls a “wandering eye”; these transitions are rarely used in Western comics, but they appear much more frequently in Japanese comics, usually to evoke a mood or atmosphere)
6. non-sequitur (with “no logical relationship” between panels)

Now, I wonder — and I’ll be asking my students this soon — what are the new media analogs of these transitions? How, say, can simply using text and hypertext evoke these different transitions? Some are easier to imagine than others. Hypertext on the World Wide Web makes it incredibly easy to create non-sequitur links. But what would an aspect-to-aspect link look like?