I would like to bring myself back in touch with my culture. But I have restricted means to do so. I thought America was the land where anything can happen. I thought cyberspace could produce a surrogate culture for me. I guess I will have to make do with whatever I can find – even if it is reductive and offensive to me. And kind of funny at the same time. Cinematically manufactured mythologies.
Locating the feeling visually, through cinematic and televisual detours:
Experimentation with the branching out stucture of (hyper)texts and signs is now commonplace in digital art practices (among other fields). Artists like Jeffrey Shaw use this metaphor to forge varying cosmologies of digital spaces. Such cosmologies consist of visual, textual, and aural spaces, which are meant to be traversed by visitors/ users (in the case of “interactive” installations) in non-linear ways. Art curator Soke Dinkla labels such works as “floating works of art” which create “the urban space of today not just as a moving, fragmentary and non-linear order, but also as a hypertext that can be perceived spatially and explored associatively.”
Urban spaces such as Tokyo have the capacity of turning the visitor into a traveler whose decisions structure the text/ space in new ways, depending on individual experiences, personal decisions, and associations. If we look at Tokyo as a floating work of art, then we can say that Tokyo as an experiential space negotiates between physical experience and intellectual cognition. Any good example of brandscaping taps into its consumers cognitively, viscerally, and emotionally. Even though branding can arguably be seen as a homogenizing act of product standardization – through, paradoxically, differentiation – it can also be a customizable consumer experience simply because consumer responses are not quite uniform. A brand’s polysemy is achieved through the consumers’ varying emotional, intellectual, and visceral responses. Like the immersive installations above, each set of eyes – and every singular mind – travels to different parts of the space. Of course, this semblance of diversity is counterbalanced by the homogeneity of the producer-directed [or desired] response, which is always the same: spend money!
” The city of today can only be known by an activity of an ethnographical type: one cannot orientate oneself in such a city by means of the book, the address, but by walking and seeing, by familiarity and experience. Here every experience is intense and fragile. It can only be rediscovered through the memory of the trace left behind: to visit a place for the first time therefore means: beginning to wire it: since the the address is unwritten, it needs to create its own script.” – Roland Barthes, Das Reich der Zeichen
Is Barthes’ analysis applicable to blogs and other kinds of websites? Can one orientate themselves by familiarity (of web navigation) and experience (both practical and emotionally-triggered) ?
Do blogs inevitably create precarious experiences which can only be rediscovered through digital traces? Is this the best response a blog can hope for?
A transient affective response
Can we google images without the use of words? How would visual tagging work?
How can the source(s) of these images be traced without the speculative use of keywords?
Blogo(s)centric
Q? What are the design implications for this study:
Efti: We need better processing of language models for foreign languages: For Greek, process and understand the greek.
Q: However, would the text processing overhead hurt or help
Google’s existing algorithm?
Efti: Also, another need is better crawling of the greek webspace. Almost half of the 70,000 greek sites (collected by Efti a few years ago) were not indexed by search engines.
Q1: Do pages in Greek lack the meta-data that helps search engines? That might be another issue. the act of adding metadata to a site might be affected by cultural aspects, rather than the properties language itself. For example,
there are findings that show that US pages use more metadata tags than other language pages.
Q2: How significant is this for search engines: do they use them to index anymore?
Efti: On a related note, HTML editors are often Latin character-based. This changes how Greek pages are authored and, therefore, indexed.
Q1: For example, often, people use jpegs of text instead of fiddling with character-sets.
Q3: Supposedly, these are issues are all addressed by Google’s methodology, which is content agnostic: relying on page rank and links instead.
The convergence of work and leisure - as well as the seemingly inevitable prevalence of work over leisure - provides the backdrop for the social commentary in Gary Burn’s film Waydowntown. The feeling of claustrophobia and the progressive suffocation of individuality gradually permeate the film – something that is further excacerbated by the thwarted development of the storyline. Even though Burns could have probably pushed the dominant themes in the film further and more reflexively, Waydowntown nonetheless provides insights into consumer culture, postmodern sensibility, individual decenterdness, and commodified experiences. Burn’s mall-slash-office-slash-apartment complex is the ultimate immersive environment that operates within the capitalist logic of the experience economy. The mall is multipurposed to the extreme, and all aspects of everyday life converge into one place. Waydowntown, even as an extreme example, makes me wonder whether people are indeed “longing for a more integrated lifestyle and places that facilitate a sense of community” (Jerde, paraphrased in Klingmann, 81). It seems that the proliferation of integrated places and immersive experiences try to force not just a sense of community, but also a sense of “human” interaction by forging precarious bonds based on the cultivation of consumer identities. Have we reached the point where human interaction needs to be artificially emulated?
Can we deem this increased focus on integrated lifestyles as a primarily American phenomenon? I don’t know for sure; I am only making this assumption based on my life experiences – having Europe and America (parts of them, at least) as my means of comparison. I am thinking in particular of things introduced to my country, Cyprus, that have been associated with the influence of a globalization that is a guise for Americanization: the multiplex, shopping malls, Starbucks, etc.
I don’t want to speak for the rest of Europe, but – at least as far as Cyprus and Greece are concerned – lifestyles are no longer as compartmentalized as they used to be as recently as five years ago. 
Quaint? Makariou Avenue – Nicosia, Cyprus
1. Cover by Manovich. Photo of Shanghai model by Adrien Hochet.
2. Cover by Cicero Silva. Software Studies Brazil: “São Paulo after Frank Gehry algorithm.”
3. Cover by Rosa Menkman: “The starting point was a still from my glitch-based music video Radio Dada. The still has been vectorized and rescaled so I am not sure if i would still call it a ‘clean’ glitch. But it still stems from a moment that I let Software Take Control, and then me taking it back afterwards.”
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Nearly democratized internet access (at least in developed countries) and easy to use web production tools (such as our very own wordpress) make it easier for the average person to make their mark on cyberspace. However, this also facilitates the accumulation of “webjunk” – new media objects that are just a waste of webspace.
But, one person’s junk could be another person’s treasure, right? So, what qualifies as webjunk ? How do we assign value to digital creations? Is there still an implicit hierarchy under which information and content usefulness are categorized and accessed (not just through search engines like Google) ?
What exactly does democratization entail? Free (?) access, free sharing, creative commons, collective [media] intelligence, a free flow of information, a free flowing exchange of creative input, democratization of production tools, globalization, etc …. ?
Ancient/ Classical Greek is not a dead language. At least not in the academia. Perhaps in parts of the the Greek academia it has already been buried, but not in schools in the U.S. and the U.K. This is not directly related to the ubiquity of the Internet, but it is nonetheless facilitated and accelerated by the advent of global and virtual networking. Now everyone can “speak” Greek thanks to electracy. You can google Greek, translate into Greek, and pretend you know Greek (or at least Greeklish).
But do you? I stumble upon so many misinformed definitions and uses of a language so close (yet so remote) to me, that I can’t help but wonder why some languages are conjured back from the dead. Does citing Plato and Aristotle or tracing Greek roots legitimize one’s accumulation of knowledge? What purpose does the Greek ancient civilization serve in the academia, besides adding to its pretentiousness? Does it really help “us” understand and explain better? And don’t give me all that “founding fathers of our civilization” crap. Yes, this crap is true, but it is also what is keeping Greek culture from being internationally recognized as part of a *modern* society. By remembering Greece, you are also forgetting it. Remembering means never knowing it at all.
I can’t really speak my language like I used to. The “native” has migrated to another language, another culture.
