Removed: Connected, Disconnected, Addicted

Sample from Removed Exhibit by Eric Pickersgill

I recently discovered Removed, a photography exhibition by Eric Pickersgill. In this collection, Pickersgill digitally "erased" the smartphones and tablets from the hand of his subjects in the images. To me, the resulting images were humorously discordant - and then, obtusely disturbing.

Pickersgill relates an observation that informed his work:

Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY... Father and two daughters have their own phones out. Mom doesn’t have one or chooses to leave it put away. She stares out the window, sad and alone in the company of her closest family. Dad looks up every so often to announce some obscure piece of info he found online. Twice he goes on about a large fish that was caught. No one replies. I am saddened by the use of technology ... (from Eric Pickersgill's website)

 The photographs in Pickersgill's collection (http://www.removed.social/) may serve as a treasure trove of evocative connections to thinking about communication, dystopic futures, digital technologies, Third Sense meanings, and more.
Look. Enjoy. Think. Write. Reflect.

Your Accent Gives You Away

After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, “Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away.” Then he began to curse... - Matthew 26:73

One thing this story makes clear: if you want to maintain anonymity and not be seen as an outsider from a dominant group, (an Other,) then you might wanna keep quiet in their company.

For those of us who study issues related to discourse communities and language groups, neglecting the impact of "accent" can leave a lot of meat on the research bone. You might appreciate this clip from the BBC's Channel 4. (It might be considered a companion piece to my blog entry on the ESPN commercial on Manchester slang.)

This could enhance discussions of language as an instrument of: power, segregation, ethnic identification, character assessment, etc. It may even tie-in to teaching about RP (received pronunciation), conformity and globalization, etc.

And, no, I am not a Southerner. Why do Y'all ask?
DOH! Dadgum it! *&^%#!

ThingLink: Connecting Internet Materials Visually!

Below is a photo of me.
Not a particularly flattering photo.
Not a particularly interesting photo.
Not a particularly useful photo.

But... with a little application called ThingLink, it can become a gateway to a plethora of resources! For example - look at the photo and see the difference an app can make. Notice how clicking on the 35mm camera takes you to a world of legal-use, free photography you can utilize in your classes? See how clicking on the video camera links you to digital video clips you can incorporate in your video editing projects? Observe how clicking on the headphones leads you to lots of usable audio, including music, sound effects, etc.? (Even clicking on the goofy-looking guy will reveal his website.) And clicking the bulletin board will take you to the program that makes this visual connectivity possible: ThingLink!




Try out this free app to spice up your blog or enhance your web site with a fresh new way to link students to web materials visually. You can find it at https://www.thinglink.com/

Slippery Slope and Cable TV

In my Critical Thinking class, we deal with "Fallacies that Masquerade as Logic." If you teach Rhetoric or Forensics or Writing or Speech, you may deal with the same issues - like, for instance, the "Slippery Slope" argument. You know - if you give them an inch, they will take a mile, etc. I found some of the most entertaining examples for this logical fallacy in the Direct TV commercials below...

Don't Have a Grandson with a Dog Collar:

Don't Wake Up in a Roadside Ditch

 

While these examples "make visible" the rhetoric of such arguments, it might be prudent to note that some slopes actually ARE slippery, too.

Standing Out

This summer I saw a 3-story tall ketchup bottle outside City Hall in New York. I noticed. Because you don't see a 30-foot tall ketchup bottle everyday. Sometimes you want to stand out like that.

Like when you are submitting resumes or cv's and cover letters to places where said correspondence will join hundreds of other similar pieces of correspondence on the desk of potential employers. You would like to stand out - but in a good way, of course.

I've recently shared links to sites like SlideShare's collection of visual resumes, and other resources - but I just ran across this very interesting letter by a job seeker that definitely stood out - but not because of hi-tech creativity. This job seeker stood out by his use of words. Read his job-seeking letter here. (It is interesting to note that this writer was trying to get the attention of famous movie directors and producers.) In a world where attention to writing seems to be getting rarer, deft utilization of creative vocabulary and imaginative correspondence may be just what you need to "stand out."

**"I Like Words" from the "Letters of Note" blog

Tim Berners-Lee on the Web Today

Tim Berners-Lee’s "Manifesto on the State of the Web" begins with this: "The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer."

OK, so I stole the title "Manifesto" from other reviewers. The piece at issue here is actually an article titled "Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality," and ran in the recent issue of Scientific American.

But "Manifesto" sounds so much more dramatic, yes? And the issues raised in the article have very dramatic implications - though they are treated in a very measured and logical way by Berners-Lee. I find one of the most intriguing discussions is that of the balance of control and freedom. Simplistic, one-sided arguments are much more likely to generate passionate responses. But they are also much more likely to generate naive, short-sighted and generally useless responses. And, according to Berners-Lee, the issues are too important for such responses:

"The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending..."

You can find the article here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web&page=5 - Enjoy!

Facebook Killed the Blogger Star

Those witty insights that formerly appeared as brilliant, though pithy, blog entries have been commandeered in service of Facebook wall postings. Such is the excuse for lack of attention to my blogs.

I have a suspicion that my case is not unique. So I wonder what this all means.

Why do I post more on FB and neglect my blog? Is it possible that the "audience" is more immediate? or that the audience is more familiar?

In moving more of my comments to FB, am I robbing the rest of the "non-friend" universe of my gifts of erudite banter? Am I becoming isolated and insular in my communications? Like an island? and if no man is an island - am I becoming "no man?"

Will the trend toward talking (if blogging or FB posting is indeed talking) to only "friends" serve to close down social networking that the web promised to open up? Or is it making the social networking of the web more vibrant, less shallow, more real, less intangible?

Enquiring minds want to know.