I started out life as a Latin teacher, and apart from being able to spend time poring over smut no one else could understand and being called a scholar and not a pervert –- it was long ago and in those days the former term was considered preferable -– the appeal was that the subject domain didn’t change very much. You could delve deep and really understand what you were doing.

Oh, Saint Heraclitus, where did I go wrong? I fell into the blogosphere, and I will never be the same again. Everything changes, and I have to hustle my abundant middle-aged hams to keep up. Right now I’m investigating a sea-change in our culture: blogging has gone from a dubious phenomenon to just another way of getting information. There’s less “It’s just a blog,” and more of people reading blogs, without even noticing they are getting their information in a new way.

Lots of people out there can’t tell Word Press from blogspot, but, thanks to the film Julie & Julia, blogging has become as familiar as email. The last time we saw a change like this was in 1989. That year, there was a new version of The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 movie about letter writers unaware that they are corresponding with a feuding co-worker. The remake was You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as workers in competing bookstores, oblivious of the identity of their email correspondents.

I began to ponder what the representation of blogging in a popular film said about our electronic communication. First a bit of background, in case you have been hiding out in a root cellar. For a year, Julie Powell wrote a blog (the Julie/Julia project) documenting the self-imposed challenge of making every recipe in the two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The project became a best-selling book and then the movie Julie & Julia with Meryl Streep. I’m going to quote a disconcertingly long sample of the blog that is essential to showing the endearing way Powell interweaves cooking and the more prosaic aspects of her life:

So while the veal was roasting, I trimmed the brussels sprouts.  Turns out my cat Maxine is buggy for brussels sprouts.  It’s kind of bizarre she’s only just now discovered this passion, but she’s made for them.  She chomped up all the leaves I tore off then started going for the whole brussels sprouts.  I’m sporting several scratches on the back of my hand this morning, the result of having to beat her off.

Fucking weirdo cat.

So I shred the brussels sprouts with the handy-dan slicing blade of my Cuisinart.  There is nothing much funner than slicing brussels sprouts, or anything else for that matter, with the slicing blade of a Cuisinart.

… It’s all good. I gotta say, though, I guess it’s just the Texas girl in me, but I’m not one percent thrilled with veal. It’s not the torture and premature death so much, I can handle torture, it’s the always-threatening possibility of dryness, and a certain non-oomphiness of flavor. Certainly I’ve had veal I’ve loved in my time, and will have it again – surely in the course of the dozen or so veal recipes I’ve got coming up I can manage to make some I love – but in my heart of hearts, give me a big dripping hunk of long-cooked picnic shoulder any day….

So y’all’s encouragement plus a good night’s sleep have left me feeling not at all whiny, but I were feeling whiny, I’d say this: So yesterday I … come home, via the subway Eric never has to take anymore, and he’s talking on the phone with his brother (hey, Ethan!) for like ever, and there are so many dishes in the sink I can’t start cooking, and the bed isn’t made, and it’s like and for this I have no dog??!!!

Then he comes and washes the dishes, and friends again.

Food porn it’s not. You can see right away, I think, that some aspects of this blog are not going to work in a Hollywood flick. Nasty bitch that I am, I found the transformation of the in-your-face blog into a sappy movie interesting especially in the light of the inherently dissonant characteristics of the endeavor.

In the first place, Child did not approve of Powell’s project. According to Publisher’s Weekly Child’s editor Juliet Jones read Powell’s blog with her, and “Julia said, ‘I don’t think she’s a serious cook.’” Blogger Kristen Michaelis also read the blog and wishes she hadn’t:

In one post, she says, “I was supposed to degrease the sauce, but f— it.” No wonder Julia Child said Julie didn’t “seem very serious” about it. After all, Julia had spent years of her life researching and writing utterly fail-proof recipes. And Julie waltzes in, disregards the directions, and whines about her failures on her blog.

Jones said,

Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn’t attractive, to me or Julia. She didn’t want to endorse it. What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt. She would never really describes the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned. Julia didn’t like what she called ‘the flimsies.’ She didn’t suffer fools, if you know what I mean.

Jones calls this a generation gap; to me it’s more like an instance of cultural dissonance. What Jones and Child think of as improper behavior really represents the norms on the Internet. Most advice on blogging will tell you that bringing your personality into a blog and being controversial are good, but they are not old school.

According to Roseanne T. Sullivan, the issue of Child’s rejection is even more problematic in the movie:

The actor portraying Julie’s husband has some tough lines to read when trying to console Julie after a reporter told her what Julia Child thought of the blog. The husband speaks a psychobabbly bit about how the Julia Child that Julie has in her head is a different person from the Julia Child who doesn’t appreciate the blog. And that somehow consoles the Julie character.

Trying to learn about the Internet from a popular movie is like coming to Casablanca for the waters. In the transition from blog to mainstream culture, the edgy personality of Julie Powell is somehow homogenized. Sure, there are plenty of bland blogs out there, but a blog is more likely to be profane, deliberately disjointed, and funky. In fact, it’s official: the standards for Internet blogging are becoming more relaxed. An LA Times editor acknowledged the distinction in 2008, noting,

A less formal voice may be appropriate in online stories and on blogs (as is often the case in feature stories too), but a conversational style is not an invitation to abandon The Times’ high standards by introducing gratuitous obscenities.

In other words, “… whether it’s on latimes.com or in print, curse words and crude language are supposed to be used only when they are essential to conveying an important point of the story.” Julia Child would not have approved, but our mores are changing.

In the light of Julie & Julia, a tounge-in-cheek article in the Guardian suggested that more popular films would be based on blogs. Its recommendations included: Girl With a One Track Mind (“The Diary of a Sex Fiend”), Stuff White People Like (satirizing yuppie values), and Pimp That Snack (elaborate homemade versions of fast food, somehow a memed-up descendant of The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project).

I know the Guardian article is a joke, but look at Mitzi Szereto, a blogger extraordinaire. The blogosphere is a virtual wild West for foot soldiers to rise from obscurity, remaking themselves as heroes and villains. Mitzi parlayed a career writing erotica (mostly as M. S. Valentine) into developing the genre of the erotic writing workshop.

I didn’t even know these things existed. This is what I love about the Internet. From the safety of my geeky armchair I can read about human vagaries heretofore unimagined. This particular one is a big treat for an aging devotee of Anais Nin. Mitzi (whose current last name is Hungarian for “lover”) has moved on to starring in a series of youtube videos about the “madness and mayhem” of London. Once a voyeur…

At the same time, Mitzi is still on call in her blog Errant Ramblings and she offers erotic writing workshops. When I see her being thrown into the air by Morris men (who are defined in her narrative as eccentrics), smutty-minded as I am, I can’t help wondering about the physiological concomitants of the experience. Will she tell us about it some day? Can a movie deal be far behind?

Concurrent with (and perhaps related to) the movement of the Internet blogging trend to the mainstream, there is a strain of thought that it is moribund if not deader than a doornail. You see this from wonderful writers like DiamondGeezer, who says the blogging has had its day, adding

Ten years ago, [it] was a little-known activity undertaken by the very few. Even when I started, back in 2002, blogging was still very much an inconspicuous overlooked activity. That changed, didn’t it? Once people realised that they could publish stuff, and maybe get themselves listened to, they started taking far more of an interest. And now if you say the word ‘blog’ in public people generally know what you mean. But they don’t get excited any more.

Don’t believe it for minute. Blogging is alive and well, and more interesting than ever, All the same, you can see the blogging-is-dying thread on personal sites as well as sites devoted to media analysis, like that of Meg Pickard, who says blogging has “penetrated mainstream web usage” and so people are no longer excited about it and consider it a failure.

Another way to look at the exaggerated rumors about the death of blogging is to observe that this activity is now in the area of the Gartner Hype Cyle called “the Slope of Enlightenment.” This means that business people have figured out how to “monetize” it by turning it into “Corporate Blogging.” So now the blog is worth buying and the opportunities are endless.

One practice affecting our view of blogs is astroturfing, a form of stealth marketing that simulates a grassroots campaign, disguising the commercial or political interests actually at work, and making them seem more representative than they are. This wonderful term is thought to have been coined by the redoubtable former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who in a Vice-Presidential debate said to a quivering Dan Quayle:

Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

Early astroturfing campaigns used letters and phone calls, but now there is a shift to electronic media, and blogging is one way to go.

According to the Guardian, China has been using astroturfing bloggers, the so-called “50-cent army,” who are paid 5 mao or 50 cents for each post supporting speeches by Chinese leaders, or defending China’s honor abroad. Sourcewatch.org reports that companies are also using paid blogging to hype their products. According to John D.,

The killing aspect of astroturf is that it poisons the well of discourse. Before this, you could at least have a degree of confidence that the stupid was authentic stupid. I’m not sure if I can deal with sorting out the fake stupid.

And there is something called niche blogging, “one of the easiest and one of the most profitable ways to make money on the internet today.” This involves creating blogs for particular, narrow audiences and linking them to ads peddling products related to the area of interest. Of course, as bloggingfingers points out, “every blog is in a niche,” whether the author realizes it or not, so the commercial possibilities are in this view boundless. Would you like to buy a meme?

Bloggers makemoney when readers click on the advertising placed on their sites. Maki, a Canadian college student, set himself the personal challenge of starting seven niche blogs a week. Examples would be blogging about robotic pets or bento boxes. I think stone-age memes need not apply. In any case, Maki sets up the blog, you and I provide the content, and if all goes as planned, Maki makes the money. What’s Maki studying in college? Well, philosophy, of course.

Although there is plenty of reason to be cautious about what you read on line, blogging is poised to give us information of the sort we need, especially as the realm of “objective truth” has yet again become tarnished in its turn. The New York Times reports this week that JAMA editors have found ghostwriting “rife” in medical journals. In the medical domain, the term refers to

medical writers, often sponsored by a drug or medical device company, who make major research or writing contributions to articles that are published under the names of academic authors.

So much for scientific objectivity and objective proof. You mean we have to read the stuff and figure out if it’s valid? English teachers need not fear for their jobs!

In reading a blog, you have to be aware of the rules of the game for bloggers. A favorite example of mine is the article Frank Fitzpatrick wrote in June about how bloggers reported an alleged assault on NBA referee Tim Donaghy and whether Raul Ibanez was taking drugs. Fitzpatrick quoted the editor-in-chief of the “wildly popular” sports blog Deadspin, A.J. Daulerio, as saying,

I’m just trying to kind of create some conversation, put some stuff out there … I think you can take the gossip side and the salacious side and the journalism side and try to make this whole neat product. . . . Maybe it’s complete horse- . . . but we can fix that later.

But Fitzgerald also suggested the distinction between blogs and journalism is “an internecine feud,” and quoted attorney Nathan Marinoff’s email to the Inquirer:

Are there excessive, irresponsible bloggers? Of course, … That said . . . one doesn’t have to look too far to find examples of similarly excessive, irresponsible figures in print and broadcast media. As with all things, the key is to read and think critically.

Sometimes journalism comes off a clear second best. In covering the recent murder of Byrd and Melanie Billings, the Pensacola couple who adopted a brood of disabled children, blogger Rick Outzen scooped the more established media. Citing anonymous sources, he blogged that Billings engaged in shady dealings and there was reason to think his death was by contract. He fingered Patrick Gonzalez, Jr. who in 1999 had worked for a used car company connected to Billings’ business interests. Damien Cave reported in the New York Times that the local sheriff, David Morgan, said the blog assisted the investigation and a grand jury indicted Outzen’s suspect.

Cave quoted the publisher of (the rival news source) The Pensacola News Journal, as saying that Outzen’s success was in part due to”his blog’s looser journalistic standards.” He did however, concede that

… in the eyes of many here, Mr. Outzen has become an example of civic journalism that trades objectivity for an argumentative love of place displayed online.

“I don’t always agree with him, but he is the conscience of the community,” said Mort O’Sullivan, chairman of the Pensacola Bay Area Chamber of Commerce. “People have come to trust that Rick’s going to be out there, pushing us in ways sometimes we’re not comfortable with.”

In fact the fresh energy brought to reporting by bloggers is increasingly being harnessed by conventional news sources. The New York Times sponsors The Lede, Robert Mackey’s news blog which

remixes the day’s top stories, adding information gleaned from Web sites around the world or gathered through original reporting by writers, editors and readers of The New York Times, to provide fresh perspectives on events and to draw readers in to the world-wide conversation about the news taking place online.

The name of the blog is taken from the journalistic word for the opening of an article which is designed to lead readers into a story.

Mackey says,

The Lede blog is the place for readers to start if they want to know more about a news event than what they’ve read in articles in the New York Times and links NYTimes.com to the rest of the world’s news sites.

This is tantamount to an admission that the newspaper is not sufficient, and the blog completes it. And yet the blog appears on the paper’s home page and as such represents a blurring of the traditional news source and the blogosphere.

Leonard Witt, Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, says

Is it journalism? Yes, half baked, but that sounds pejorative. Instead think of it as the raw materials that make for a truly robust, finished journalism. It is the perfect example of using the amateurs and pros to make a more perfect form of journalism.

No profanity yet, but just wait.

Note: After this column, Stone Age Memes will appear monthly (instead of weekly) at its usual time. ‘Tis the school year starting. Same nose, different (digital) grindstone. Don’t get me wrong. I love it.

I always liked that scene in Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise is lowered into the CIA computer. There’s all kinds of suspense having to do with external constraints like being suspended from a cable while hacking into the computer and not being able to make any noise and so on. As any computer user knows, though, what’s amazing about the scene is that Cruise manages to get the computer to do what he wants. All those external plot-heightening devices are nothing compared to the mundane suspense of going to work and trying to do something with a computer at all. Think about the nature of the hacking in this movie: it’s not chaos-loving mischief making. It’s trying to get control of the bloody thing: we all know about this. Yesterday it did what you needed and today you’re there with Cruise, hanging from the wire, and trying to break in…

I’m actually leading up to talking about the new social game on Facebook called FarmVille, so bear with me while I wend my way from the classy spy thriller to the compost-free fields of my virtual farm.

In 1984, my university sponsored a lecture by one of the architects of the computer revolution, who predicted that our world would soon resemble the GE Carousel of Progress that I had seen at the 1963 World’s Fair, but with personal computers everywhere, and we would all learn to program them, changing our lives for the better.

My dear colleague Jane Stellwagen fell asleep, snoring gently a few seats away. We had all heard this before, and computers looked different to those of us “in the trenches” of the computer revolution.

By then I had already been working for a couple of years to teach the use of PC’s to my colleagues; there was a strong core of “early adopters,” but most were resistant, even hostile. Computers were complicated and hard to use, and it was as difficult to get them to do what your really wanted as it was to want what they really did. As a writer of code and a teacher of documentation, I had struggled with the engineers who designed computers, so I knew that they weren’t really interested in solving these problems. Today these things are still true, though there are exceptions, and FarmVille may well point the way to their nature.

As we left that lecture in 1984, I said to the person next to me “People aren’t all going to embrace computers (as the learned speaker predicted), because they’re too hard to use. Instead, we’re going to put computers in everything. Your TV already is a computer. Soon your shoes will be computers. Your child’s teddy bear will be a computer. Your dog will be a computer. And there’ll be a computer in your underpants. And you’ll know how to use them because you already know how to use those things.”

It’s a big whoop how smart I was in 1984, but that’s not the reason I’m telling you this story. The point is what I wasn’t able to see then, even though all of my predictions have come true. Namely that, as a result of these changes, it’s pretty hard to tell which parts of our world are real any more, if you define “real” as not generated by a computer. When little Sluggo is hugging that computer-enhanced teddy Bear what is he reacting to? The ages-old maternal substitute or the clever interface?

There are actually name for the ideas I’m bringing up here. The field is called “ambient intelligence,” and refers to

… devices [that] work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way … As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.

The experience of using such a device is called VR Presence. The term was actually developed to task about how people interact with avatars, but I think the idea applies as well to (non-virtual) teddy bears. Here is how Matthew Lombard defines it:

Presence is a psychological state or a subjective perception in which the participant, although working with an instrument, fails to understand the role of technology in his experience. Although the subject might assert (except in extreme cases) that he is using technology, up to a certain point, or a certain degree, the subject gets involved in the task, in objects, entities and event perception, as if technology was not present.

This meaning of presence is derived from telepresence, an idea first depicted in Robert Heinlein’s 1950 short story Waldo. “Presence” was first used as a technical term by Marvin Minsky in 1980 to refer to the illusion of being in a physically remote or simulated site.

Show of hands now. How many of you still believe this column is about FarmVille? How many of you remember that I asserted that 700 words or so ago? I always like to play with people’s expectations, so if you still have any, here goes.

FarmVille does not by itself have VRPresence, but I would venture to say that as a module embedded in the social network, it contributes to the “presence” of participants in Facebook. And here’s how.

If you are not familiar with it, FarmVille is a game you play on Facebook. You have a farm and you raise animals, grow crops, pull weeds, and so on. You invite your Facebook friends to be neighbors and you exchange gifts with them. You send each other items that will help build a farm, mostly livestock and trees.

As a virtual farm it’s kind of lame, though it does have some charming aspects. The crops are beautiful, and they grow. For my first couple of times on FarmVille, I was mesmerized by the metamorphoses of my strawberries and soybeans. Fully grown soybeans are especially beautiful, though if you leave your strawberries unharvested, they wither repulsively.

Weeds, crows and the graphic death of neglected crops is about all the bad that can happen to you in FarmVille, though. I kept expecting Oregon Trail-like messages. I imagined “You failed to rotate your crops and so your fields are drained of nutrients. Your topsoil has blown away and you are now a character on the HBO series Carnivale. Hope you’re good on your back or strong with your hands.” But no.

FarmVille is not a skill-based game. You have to check back regularly and spend minor amounts of time caring for your farm, mostly harvesting and planting crops. It’s about nurture, not learning, and certain aspects of the farm experience are sacrificed to that, though there are people who “really get into it.” Here’s a quote from one:

avisatsuma: its not easy being a farmer. I’ve lost so many crops because I thought it was okay to go to bed, but it’s fine, I’ve learnt not to plant things until the morning so I can harvest them before I go to bed. My cows nearly readyyy! :) I havent been to school in 3 days. I’m not getting into college. Back to my farms. Goodbyeee.

Actually, FarmVille is more like a kind of Tamagotchi, the little electronic gizmo kids carried around with them and took care of in the nineties. They still exist; now you can get them with a touchscreen. In fact there has been a menagerie of programs to chose from if you want to nurture something: Nintendo Petz is an adventure game you undertake with a pet you design. Another game called Nintendogs allows you to train your pet and enter it into contests. In addition, there are web-based digital petsites where you can breed your pets and transfer the resulting animals to other sites to play in story-based adventures. You also find a virtual community who share interest in these activities.

FarmVille does a bit better with crops than with critters – at least you have to plow the land and sow the seed. But with animals, there is no cost for raising them but time– you don’t feed or water them! And the same now suddenly ominous-looking sickle appears for “collecting” animals as for harvesting crops. Are we gathering truffles or makin’ bacon?

Another of the missing elements is animal breeding. If you want your critters to do it “like they do on the Discovery Channel” you’re out of luck. As a result, you can’t have friendly veterinarian James Herriot come to the farm and turn that breech-positioned calf around while delivering words of wisdom. (See, I know a lot about real farming!) There is a minister on the web who has extracted moral lessons from FarmVille but these are more at the level of depth of All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten than what Herriot would say.

As with any new-ish thing, there’s plenty of puzzlement on the Internet about FarmVille and whether it’s worthwhile. It seems easy to participate, but people are ambivalent about the results. There’s a lot of discussion out there about the “premium” level, where you buy FarmVille money to acquire the best goods and the experience points that go with them.

The sale of “virtual products” may be unfamiliar to this community of more casual gamer, though it is well known in other groups, like those playing Sims, Warcraft and Second Life. It has also been a highly profitable area in Chinese gaming, which is reputed to be ahead of us in this kind of venture. On Facebook discussion pages, people seem pretty adamant that “its (sic) ridiculous that you have to pay with real money to get fake money!!” Yet the income of Zynga corporation suggests that there are many who do just that. As it says on mediahyperopia:

Zynga systems are not just providing the system out of the goodness of their heart, they reported $2 Billion in virtual goods sales (VGS / where players spend real dollars to buy virtual currency or items in the game) across their gaming line in 2008. FarmVille only launched in June 30 and the game is theorised to have catalysed higher consumer involvement than any previous Zynga development ultimately leading to increased VGS.

It may be that this economic aspect of the game has annoyed people and turned them to hacking, or maybe it’s just that there are people who’ll hack anything. There is abundant discussion out there of how to hack FarmVille, but most of it seems to amount to lame tips. Facebook Hacker has a relatively good page called “FarmVille Tips, Hints, Cheats and Hacks” and Wonderhowto has a page of tips and hacks for the game, including videos on how to speed up the game, how to hack your money and experience. Some of these methods require the purchase of “cheat” software.

I tried one simple technique which involved trapping your farmer in an enclosure made of bales of hay so you could hoe, sow and harvest without her ambling over to each plot. It worked, but I kind of like watching her as she works, and I felt a little S&M locking her up like that. Zynga seems to patrol pretty regularly because a lot of the bugs people were exploiting have disappeared, and some of the (probably more successful) videos telling us how to hack things have been taken down because of a “copyright claim” by the corporation.

More interesting are the various analyses of profits per crop per hour. The best of these are “The Personal Economics of FarmVille,” “The Personal Economics of FarmVille, Part 2,” and “Posh Daddy’s Guide” (Excel required). Muskar also has a pretty good levelling guide.

The people why try to “achieve” in FarmVille miss the point, though. It’s a social network game, and the goal is to spend time with friends, not to reenact “he who dies with the most toys still dies.” These games in social networks are the up-and-coming thing, and they represent a changed model from the solitary gamer or even the band of Geeks giving up their lives to World of Warcraft. To explain the rise of these embedded games, Benedetti quotes Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of fast-rising game company Zynga which makes FarmVille:

… games used to be inherently social things – back when board and card games existed in the real world and we gathered around a real table with real friends to play them. … with the rise of MyFace and Spacebook (sic), all your friends are now gathered online in one convenient place.

The point is to build an experience economy, where what you gain isn’t outside of you: it’s a series of inner, mental events. What I find so interesting about FarmVille hacks is not that they are so lame, even lamer than the game. The hacking is just a misguided attempt to play FarmVille as if were a real game, and it is not. Farmville is an overlay on Facebook. That is, Facebook itself is a metaphor of sorts – it’s a cross between a database and a messageboard, where you participate to gain strokes from others – and FarmVille is a layer of metaphor on top of that.

Virginia Heffernan’s column last Sunday reported that people are getting fed up with Facebook, and FarmVille may be one of the attempts to correct the ennui arising from amassing hundreds of strangers who post stuff you mostly don’t care about, like my annoying constant updates that I won meaningless distinctions like the Treehugger ribbon in Farmville. (Annual report’s coming up: do you think I can put the ribbon in my resume?) I don’t know if social network games will revitalize an experience users are tired of, but it has to be better than turning Sims into zombies.

FarmVille reminds me of the old days where you stood around the water cooler on Monday morning talking about what happened on Bonanza the night before night. It was a chance to be part of a little community harmlessly swapping views and theories about what they saw. It didn’t change the dynamic between the participants, but it reinforced a small thing they had in common.

The burgeoning of cable TV channels means we don’t have that experience with TV any more, and maybe part of the allure of FarmVille is that it gives us a safe little community again. Lolfed has some similar musings in, “Measuring our GDP, in Sheep, on Facebook“:

Are we, as Rousseau might have liked to think, coming to the realization that the best path to bliss is to explore our peaceful agrarian roots? …Has the desire for stability manifested itself in some kind of desire for radical self-sufficiency, consisting of a barn and herd of cows and government-stabilized milk prices?

There by the water cooler, though, maybe you watched The Judy Garland show on Sunday night, so you tried to fake a response to the events on the Ponderosa. And in fact some of the so-called “social interaction” in FarmVille is actually fake. Supposedly your neighbors “ask you for help” with their farming problems, but actually it’s just the game asking for them. They could be lying dead while you wander through their fields picking weeds.

Not everyone noticed it, but the world ended last week. The Wikipedia model tanked. The New York Times reported that the English-language version of the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” would will soon institute the editorial review of articles about living people. So there will still be a Wikipedia but the revolutionary encyclopedia we have now will, in effect, cease to exist.

The changes Wikipedia is undergoing are likely to have broad-scale effects on the Internet and on information use throughout cyberspace. They are part of a trend in managing the encyclopedia and have been in place for a year in the German edition. Anonymous users have not been able to create articles for a couple of years now, but according to the Times, “[T]he new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon.” Michael Snow, the chairman of the Wikimedia board, is quoted as saying, “We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.”

Who can fault the desire for responsible management of a significant information source? Although I am well aware of long-time discussion of problems with the quality of the entries, I thought the old system worked just fine, and I respected it as a modest start on an annotated catalogue for Borges’ Library of Babel. At the same time, the travails of the free encyclopedia highlight the common failure to understand what research is all about, and how to “get the biggest bang out of your research buck.”

Now what I really love about Wikipedia is the “at your fingertips” accounts of popular culture. For example, if you want an extensive, in-depth discussion of the television series The West Wing, you will find it there. Each episode is summarized, its actors and its inaccuracies listed; the real-world events touched on are chronicled. Harry Potter is well described as well: the books, the movies and the difference between them. It makes engrossing reading and it gives good reference.

If you want to know more about a culture, Wikipedia may well give you things to think about. For example, I have been very interested in a kind of fan fiction called slash, and in yaoi, Japanese manga about male homosexual relationships, written for women. You may be more interested in Edgar Allan Poe or Troll dolls. In each case, the online encyclopedia is a great place to start.

Some articles are written at a very high level and well illustrated; the links to related material make Wikipedia an amazing tool for critical thinking. I regularly refer my Classical Civilization students to the entry on the battle of Thermopylae, which has (today) 146 footnotes, two maps, and an extensive comparison of the descriptions of the battle in Herodotus and in Diodorus Siculus. It is clearly a labor of love, and it has links to treatments of Thermopylae in popular culture, like the film 300, which my students love to read about. We can then discuss Frank Miller’s political views and how they affected his version of the events in the film.

Despite its strengths, Wikipedia has, in a sense, suffered from a kind of Catch-22. Its genius is that it uses the power of the community to provide the best version of the information available. The idea is if I start a new entry with a poor explanation of the topic, the next person who can write more clearly, or who has details I left out or misstated, will come along and improve my lame attempt. A formal study has borne out that this is exactly the process of article creation. Of the contributors, 70% don’t write their own articles, they improve (or “improve”) the work of others. But this iterative process of composition is just what causes people to distrust what they find. It’s like a version of Groucho Marx’ statement, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

In my line of work, Wikipedia is often frowned on, and some of my colleagues will not allow their students to use it as a source in their papers. I find this exasperating, because, as with everything else about research, it’s too easy.

No educated person believes that everything you find in a library, or even a scholarly journal, is true. Why should Wikipedia be any different? You have to read it, you have to notice what evidence it’s based on, you have to think about it, you have to cross-check it. There is no “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” when you’re doing research. Period.

Although there are plenty of skeptics, there are increasingly signs that in many cases, Wikipedia is the best basic source on the subject. In 2005, the journal Nature conducted a study that found the science entries in Wikipedia are about as accurate as those in other encyclopedias. A year later, Focus, a popular science magazine published by the BBC did a study that showed Wikipedia was more timely and more accurate than the leading print encyclopedias. Here is part of what the article said:

Our winner is Wikipedia which had the most detailed articles and was best equipped to deal with the ever-changing news about bird flu. While it was only marginally more accurate, it has close to 10 times more articles than the next biggest, all freely available. That means it’s most likely to have what you need.

Now I have to say there are some situations in which I don’t want Wikipedia in my classes either. I have had lazy students report material from it where they should have been using primary sources, or more nuanced sources from class. But this is the same objection as to any encyclopedia in relation to more technical material.

So really the issue is critical thinking, and the Internet is once again in a good position to make us smarter. It used to be you couldn’t get students to do research, now you can’t stop them from doing it.

The various Wikipedia memes are testimony to the ways people just like to play in the information fields, picking posies as they go. There’s an old one which has you pick and post events that happened on your birthday, and a current one that calls for creating your own band with a name and album title chosen from Wikipedia, with an album cover randomly chosen from Flickr (Wikipedia is notoriously short of relevant illustrations.) The birthday one allows you some choices, and so in your browsing, you can learn a lot while looking for events that reflect your self image.

The band meme is more constrained, but its results are no less edutaining. I just launched a rock band called Gamma Crucis, and learned the eponymous giant red star is only visible south of the Tropic of Cancer. That’s why it never received an ancient traditional name, and is named for its place in the constellation Crux. I had never heard of it before. Our first album? Conceal our Whereabouts, from a quote by Saki, the Burman-born British writer of “witty and sometimes macabre” short stories. I had heard of Saki before, but hadn’t known he was Burmese, or that his stories were macabre. I plan to read one soon. Here’s our album cover, the wonderful work of photographer Danielle Moody:

I especially like the conjunction of a star I’ve never heard of with a sardonic British colonial writer from Burma, and the photograph of a disgruntled but beautiful young woman sitting at the boundary of a beach and a parking lot. It also reminds me, by way of The Glass Palace (which is about Burma), of the additions I made recently to the Wikipedia entry for Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome.

I had just finished the novel and wanted to see what others said about it. The entry I found was by some students who had been required to read the book and were puzzled by it. I was disappointed, but my enthusiasm for the book made me decide to improve the entry. Looking up some scholarly sources, I used them to add points that would have helped the previous contributors understand the way fact and fiction are interwoven in the novel. I see that since I was there, someone has improved my formatting. The entry still needs work by a post-colonialist scholar, but it is much better than before.

There’s all this hand-wringing about the effect of computers on our intelligence, and none of it takes into account the spread of new enthusiasms and new literacies. The emphasis is all on what we have supposedly lost. In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic. He argued that

as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

But you know the old saw: “two men looked out of the prison bars; one saw mud and the other saw a teachable moment.”

One response to Nicholas Carr says,

Books built our culture, don’t get me wrong, and have provided wonderful wealth, but ultimately they also undervalued and ignored the natural ways that humans learn: through oral interaction and in a group.

The anthropology of human knowledge indicates the role of the community is not just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. My experiences using Wikipedia suggest it is part of the solution, not the problem. Getting information from the group is much more effective at engendering a fascination for research than is the 19^th century model of the scholar toiling in a solitary bastion of the ivory tower.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs should be rejiggered to feature another irresistible human drive. Who can resist drawing black curling mustaches on billboard pictures of beautiful ingénues and decorating upstanding pillars of society with devil’s horns and pitchforks? Photoshop has given us the power to satisfy this need and then some, but these days the influence of photo manipulation seems so pervasive and so powerful that its place in society is being debated in the British Parliament.

Britain is considering a law making it illegal to photoshop ads in publications intended for readers less than 16 years old, according to Jezebel.com. There is concern that the pervasiveness of photoshopping –- some believe it is used in 99% of the images in the media today –- is influencing young people to damage themselves by pursuing ever more unrealistic body images.

The spread of pro-anorexia websites on the Internet is testimony to this trend, though many are disguised. “Thinspiration” is a word you can search on to find them. The sites you find will show you that the problem is real, and serious. The British law would also require a disclaimer on all photoshopped publications; the Web has featured witty suggestions for the wording, including “This image has been manipulated to harm your self esteem.”

I have to say, though, that photoshopping can be fun. I remember illustrating a newsletter with a picture of our newly-installed department head grafted to a snapshot of the Tower of London, where British kings were sent their enemies to die. He did have to explain it to some people: photoshopping was less common in those days. As far as I know, no one was outraged by the fraudulent photo. As photo manipulation goes, it wasn’t a masterpiece, but it wasn’t a hack job either. I guess my boss was lucky I didn’t do a picture of him seeming to have sex with a sheep, as suggested on DemocraticUnderground.com.

Such photo manipulation is much less acceptable if it is done to mislead us for political ends. In late 2008, there was the photograph of Kim Jong Il reviewing his troops. The image was presumably disseminated to counter rumors of the North Korean leader’s failing health. The London Times and the BBC reported that it was a fake and showed how it had been done. There was much discussion in the media about the ethics of the alteration. But commentary on the Internet can cut right to the bone. The website 4thpip posted a photo which clipped Kim Jong Il from the manipulated image and re-photoshopped him into a picture of Elvis impersonators.

Still, that instance seems benign in comparison with the manipulations that seem to have taken place of photographs from the 2006 Lebanon War. Wikipedia reports that a Reuters photographer was fired for “enhancing” images that showed Lebanese damage from an Israeli air strike, though photoshopping was only part of the issue. There were allegations that other images, of rubble with children’s toys, were staged. And Salam Daher, the head of the South Lebanon civil defense organization, admitted that he felt it was part of his job to dig the bodies of children from rubble and displaying them for photographers. True but false?

Another photo controversy from the same war involves a video of an ambulance allegedly damaged by an Israeli missile strike. However, bloggers who studied the photographs pointed to signs suggesting fakery: the damage was too slight for an air strike, and the ambulance seemed to be rusty. The website zombietime.com claims the incident was a hoax designed to pressure Israel into abandoning its military campaign, and urges the media to be more critical of the scenes they are offered.

In fact, the whole issue of photo manipulation has to do with understanding what we are seeing, and to the delight of us English teachers, with something called critical thinking. A whole new kind of visual literacy is being developed in the schoolhouse of the Internet: the critical decoding of images. This can be evidenced by the bloggers who carefully examined the Kim Il Jong photograph discussed above, as well as by those who posted the analyses of the Lebanon War photos. Across the Internet, these skills are also being applied to celebrity photos and other photojournalistic work.

Recently, the New York Times withdrew a picture essay about failed construction projects throughout America because an astute analyst showed one of the images had been photoshopped. The paper’s explanation noted the piece claimed the images had not been digitally manipulated. It’s part of my own pathology, I guess, that the denial of images like this triggers a frenzied search to locate them anyway, and the Internet usually satisfies my obsessive need.

In this instance, Kathy’s Remodeling blog provided a link to the disgraced pictures, as well as remarking sensibly that they really belonged in an art gallery. I still don’t see why the Times couldn’t just have corrected the introduction and left the rest as it was, but keeping them at a location Kathy can post has much the same effect. I am reminded of an old motto, “I am a virgin, but this is a very old t-shirt.”

The main point, though, is that more and more people are interested in, and able to spot photoshopping. In fact, there are website communities devoted to posting, and identifying instances of digital manipulation. You can try this web page collection of bad photoshopping: how many errors can you identify?

In some sense, pages like this represent the reemergence of the FAIL meme which allows us to glory in the inadequacies of others by labeling their pathetic efforts with the eponymous term. They also reveal in the old meme an underlying element of visual training. Without realizing it, when you looked at a FAIL image, you were learning to scan a picture to identify the endeavor it represented, and how it had come to ruin. In examining photoshopped images, you are closer to the “Where’s Waldo?” experience of working out a puzzle.

There are also websites where you can enter the community of photoshoppers and hone your skills. PXLEyes, for example, features tutorials and contests of various sorts. In some, you are given a theme to use while others give you an image you must manipulate. Members of the site vote on the submissions, assigning small prizes. Other parts of the site are devoted to tutorials, places to post images, and forums for discussion of issues relating to digital image manipulation.

Worth1000 is a site famous for its photoshop contests. In one calling for “placing Star Wars character, items, vehicles and scenes into classic art works,” I especially like the picture of Virgin Leia dandling baby Yoda. On WebUrbanist, a blog site cluttered with advertising, there is a page of “A Dozen Fantastic Photographic Manipulations.” My favorite is the Stonehenge made of Legos. The best of these images have an Escheresque quality that makes them memorable beyond their cleverness.

But is it art? In the old days, we used to transfer and combine images and it was called decoupage or at best collage, and it was considered a craft or an inferior art form. However, the cultural ascendancy of modernism has anointed collage and mashup the preeminent art forms of our time, and the Internet has danced in the vanguard. In a classic piece (going back to 2002) Stan Choe called photoshopping a subculture art form, saying, “Photo editing is a derivative form, but it’s much like hip hop, which has cemented itself in the past decade, proponents say. Like hip hop, photoshoppers take an original work and manipulate it until it becomes their own unique piece.”

The work of photographer Jeff Wall is a case in point. Wall began using photo manipulation in the 1990′s. Perhaps his most famous image is a homage to a Japanese woodblock print in a photograph called “A Sudden Gust of Wind.” The picture was created by the digital assemblage of over 100 photographs taken in more than a year. The gallery notes at the Tate Modern quote the artist as follows:

I have always considered my work to be a mimesis of the effects of cinema and of painting (at least traditional painting), and so the fictional, formal and poetic part of it has always been very important.

The website Art & Story says

Wall does not let painting-love trap his photographs. He takes inspiration from all over, giving his art enough metaphysical room to breathe; his compositional intensity helps ensure that he does not also succumb to loose pastiche. He’s a student of modern film and of the traditions of photography.

And I might add, he and others like him have changed the nature of what can be properly regarded as a photograph. As always, a phenomenon asserts its greatest power at the moment when it disappears from our sight and becomes just another tool, to be used well or badly. The work of Jeff Wall, then, is the best indication that photoshopping is no longer an issue, no matter how many picture essays the New York Times disavows.

Video provides an excellent vantage point for studying the Internet phenomenon, though it is also, oddly enough, where the Internet disappears. Hackers believe “information wants to be free,” but the suits have by and large been happy to charge for it, control it, own it. Case in point is the experience of what has been called the Kafka Lego video incident.

When I was little, we found it exciting to get flip books in our Cracker Jacks and watch the figures become “animated” as you rolled the pages with your thumb. Big whoop. In the eighties, there was a kind of “new era” when families often had camcorders and kids began to make videos for fun, unsupervised and after school. The rest, as they say is history, or else if you prefer, it is what populates the Internet’s YouTube and its lesser known kin. That’s when amateur video got creative, and we are the beneficiaries of all that weird, wacky stuff. YouTube is an excellent source for amateur videos of all sorts, and there is a kind of subgenre of stop-action videos made by kids (and others) with Legos.

As the New York Times notes, there’s something about the wholesome nature of Legos that invites mischievous youth to plunge them into gritty scenarios like those taking place in a Lego gun store, or, my personal favorite, Lego Jail Break, which dramatizes an armed rampage and features extensive creative use of ketchup. It has over a million viewings, several by me showing it to my friends. There are also “how to” videos, including those that show you how to make a Lego toilet, thus filling an important gap in the authorized use of the product. How else could you reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction?

One of those funky Lego videos was made by fourteen year old Coleman Hickey to the tune of Spinal Tap’s “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight.” The band saw the video, liked it, and used it in its latest concert tour. There was also a plan to include it in a tour DVD. Here come the suits: Lego denied permission for the use of its product in the DVD, citing the “inappropriate” lyrics of the group’s songs.

For those who have been hiding under a rock for three decades, Spinal Tap was incarnated for a parody movie and has gone on to achieve popularity beyond its fictional origins. You would think that the band’s parodic lyrics are protected speech, but the Lego spokesman was quoted in the Times as saying, “we are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand, and our brand values.” Spinal Tap decided not to pursue the matter, because of the expense.

Now I’ve always thought there was a kind of wtf divide between the English professor and the business executive. The Kafka Lego video incident confirmed that I needed a different mindset to grasp what goes on in corporate America. For example, I am no longer surprised when I see business types discussing “effective cultural change” on the Internet. Turns out what they mean doesn’t involve throwing teacups at the Mona Lisa or even convincing people who would rather watch Angelina Jolie to read Beowulf.

Apparently, to a business person, your culture determines whether you are ready to adopt social software, at least according to Elizabeth Bennett in Baseline, an online IT publication. And social software is one of those terms like customer service that turns out to have little to do with what it sounds like. Social networking software like Facebook can be an instance of it, but only insofar as it’s a business.

Social software actually refers to computer programs that allow you to share information with the people around you. Think about product rankings on Amazon.com or even the entries on Wikipedia: settings where you give and get information. An organization’s “culture” is not ready for such software if the people in it think information transfer should be all in one direction, or if the organization encourages them to hoard. And there are a lot of organizations whose instincts are to play it safe.

It’s not really their fault: ours is a litigious society. I wouldn’t put it past some parents to sue Lego because their child reenacts Columbine, and blaming the massacre on the viewing of Lego Jail Break. The company could be a target because it “allows” subversive use of its products: to its credit, Lego has not tried to shut down the YouTube videos I described, just the inclusion of the one video in the DVD version of the Spinal Tap tour.

All the same, it’s interesting to watch the business of the Internet conflict with the anarchic nature of the product itself. I went online to see what the business folks thought about the role of video. One of the main models used to determine the business value of a technology is Gartner Inc’s Hype Cycle curve, which is updated yearly. Here is the 2009 model:

You see, the curve represents technological advances with a dot coded to the time when money can be made from them. Notice that “Online Video” is on the downside of the big curve, moving from the Bunyanesque “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and soon on to the “Trough of Disillusionment.” The model predicts that from there, it will enter the “Plateau of Productivity” in two to five years. But, as I suggested, there’s a “culture factor” that needs to be taken into consideration.

It comes as no surprise that, except for the graph, the Gartner people are not offering us their findings for free. I looked up one of the reports they produce and its cost was over $1,500.00. Nevertheless, I think the idea of the Hype Cycle is very useful. For me, though, it represents a concept rather than a predictive tool that can govern how I will invest my money. In the latter vein, there are people who want to modify the model to their own purposes. A blog from Tippingpoint Labs, for example, argues there is another curve under the Gartner curve that can be used to better explain what happens when “investors start to inquire about how they can monetize the new platform or channel.”

According to Gartner’s analysis, online video lags behind the degree of acceptance achieved by the tablet PC or corporate blogging: this seems incorrect to me. I think that the analysis is able to appreciate an innovation more if it seems more orderly and manageable. The Hype Curve also has critics, unlike me, who actually seem to know something about business. Sarah Lacy, writing in TechCrunch (“a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies”), call the Hype Cycle “one of the most destructive things about Silicon Valley” and says that in its thirteen years of being documented, it has “spun ludicrously out of control.” Of course these are all people who think monetize is a word, so it’s hard to choose between them.

The thing I think these pundits miss is the energy of YouTube and other Internet video. Lego Jail Break one has four responses, including the less sophisticated, more talky JAIL OUT BREAK. This one is not so much a fine creative product as a young person experimenting with an idea. It’s much less watchable, with too little action, and a more meticulous effort at psychological motivation, a kind of Lego Lars von Trier.

Every popular video is part of an intertextual multimedia conversation, the whole comprising an enormous multidirectional (not hierarchical) flow of creativity. One of my favorite such threads involves showing people lifting, or claiming to lift, weights (or ladies) with their penis, Jackass style. Now that’s using your head. But wait, that’s actually not a thread; it’s just a group of videos I found amusing, though the playlists in YouTube suggest that other viewers saw them as a group as well. That’s the energy of the user, and that’s part of the YouTube universe.

Another great place to see online video is on current tv, a cable TV network founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, a businessman. The network is available wholly on the Internet and its programming consists partly of short programs (“pods”) created by users (“VC² Producers”). The pods are then winnowed on the network’s website by the vote of registered users. The content on current tv is so much fun!

As I write this, there is a series of VC² pods on hair: “Why We Wax Down There,” a “Flick Knife Haircut” (a haircut with a switchblade), “Le Tigre Haircut” (an interview with a musician who also styles hair). This is followed by an Infomania (that’s a current tv-produced show) short based on an ad for a Chia Obama. The plant comes in two forms, a happy face, and a determined face. You can watch the programming on TV; on the Internet you can see comments, and click away to related videos, or other work by the VC² Producer. And there is a page on how to make and upload your own pods.

As you look at current tv, you are actually seeing the disappearance of the Internet. It doesn’t matter whether you access this content on your computer, your TV, or, like Maxwell Smart, on your shoe. It’s not a show, not a website. It represents a different model entirely. This is what I always loved about folk music. You go to a concert at a smaller venue, you’re likely to find yourself on the same line for the Port-A-Potty as the talent. We are all talent. Well, maybe not all, but a lot more of us than you’re going to find on NBC. Yet. Put that into your Hype Cycle, please!

As I swim my laps a couple of times, a week, I think about copy and paste. On the computer, if you type out a text once, you can copy it and paste it into all the places in your document where you need it. You don’t have to type it over each time. The teachers’ old punishment of writing “I will not chew gum in school” one hundred times loses its edge through copy and paste. But laps don’t work like that. You swim a nice first ten laps, and the you have to make the next ten, one lap at a time.

That seems so odd to me because in the rest of my life I don’t have to perform simple repetitive motions. There are other such tasks, of course, like swimming laps: gardening, and knitting and cooking, for example, but for much of our efforts, we can just copy and paste.

In Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which we all know better from Fantasia, the apprentice addresses the magic water-broom that carries water over and over, flooding his house, “O, you ugly child of Hades!” and says:

No, no longer
can I let him,
I must get him
with some trick!
I’m beginning to feel sick.

Now that sick feeling is more likely to strike me if I have to do something over and over. Pondering this has made me think about the ways the computer has changed our sense of what is normal and reasonable.

Any new medium changes us. Plato was right to issue this warning in 370 BCE:

[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. (Phaedrus 275a).

And that was my question about the computer: are we diminished by our animated brooms? Are we losing ourselves in using “signs that belong to others”? So many things we deal with today are no longer concrete. We speak of documents, files and archives, but the “objects” we describe are ethereal, or, if you prefer, a fantasy. We speak of our Facebook friends, but the word means something else now, doesn’t it? I remember an entry on Live Journal in which the writer described throwing a party for her LJ friends — she had hundreds. One person showed up.

I wish I still had that entry, but it is lost for ever in the ether that constitutes Live Journal, where I hardly ever post any more. By the way, that too is a change in how we live: parts of what we knew disappear and are unrecoverable. As Plato predicted, I don’t remember who wrote about her party of one, but it does suggest that we have redefined what a friend is on the computer.

Of course, there are still people who “friend” their “real-life” friends, and there are people who turn virtual friends into real-life friends, but the term does not apply in the same way to the dozens if not hundreds of people some people have as “friends,” stockpiling them like objects.

Despite its government origins, the Internet is certainly a capitalistic enterprise, and Karl Marx suggested that in capitalism, we become alienated from the product of our labor, and fascinated with, or even enslaved by commodities, instead of just using them. In addition, we turn relationships into commodities. The result, he argued, is a kind of universal alienation. I don’t know if Marx was right, or if the alienation came first and the friends we like to collect as commodities came later, but the Internet sure does have a lot of social networking, where friendship means something other than what it used to.

Though some resist the sick feeling Goethe complained of, we are increasingly particles whose movements cannot be tracked by the naked eye. We have become motes in cyberspace, which Gibson defined as a

consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions … Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

There can be a kind of anarchic pleasure in these mote-like motions. In this sense, there is a change in our sense of what it is to be a member of a community. Before the Internet, we were separate entities that operated through our own individual choices, now we have chosen to be moved by the wave, to be jostled and pummeled and carried in the mosh pit. One of these amusing waves is the flash mob, a kind of improvised one-night-stand organized via the Internet and repurposing a mundane location into a work of art. A fine example is the freeze at Grand Central Station.

Of course, some of the new forms of activity do not involve creating works of art but bringing participants into contact with the worst traits of human nature. Megan Meier, the teenager who committed suicide as a result of cyberbullying by the mother of an acquaintance, is perhaps the most notorious example.

And then there are the activities in between. I recently had a look at Second Life, which was touted a couple of years ago as a place all faculty needed to be familiar with for the good of our university. I didn’t get it then and I’m afraid I still don’t. I dropped in at a random point in that universe, and found myself surrounded by nearly naked people and weird creatures with miscellaneous body parts.

The creatures I saw were a little like Horace‘s fantasy of joining

a human head to the neck of a horse, and spread[ing] feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends up below in a black and ugly fish.”

It was not comfortable there.

I was no more comfortable in my own skin: I had selected a body from a palette of choices, and struggled to make it more familiar, which I am sure was not what was intended. I figured out how to make it fat but I couldn’t easily get it to have white hair, and I saw that I would have to work to acquire less stylish and more comfortable clothes. I was able to make the pants looser and so I set out for a look around, leaving the chimeras to their amusements.

Eventually, I found Drexel’s dragon-shaped island with only a couple of trips to the bottom of the sea as a result of poor landings. Much of what I saw was off limits and that seemed to be part of the point, like those Hungarian neighborhoods where you walk along the street, passing pretty little houses with charming gardens, and at each, a snarling, roaring locomotive of a dog throws himself terrifyingly against what you hope is a sturdy gate. Despite the immersions, I found that I was neither drowning nor waving in my travels.

In my experience, Second Life seems like an intersection between a marketplace and a videogame, though it does have an amazing handicraft and design component. It seemed homogeneous, and not very interesting, at least to the casual visitor. The one insight I gained was that, as “real” life is not quite what it used to be, maybe Second Life isn’t a bad approximation of the life we are actually living and haven’t yet noticed: isolated and a little frightening.

Murakami’s After Dark explains the tenor of modern life as I see it. In it, we are

a nameless part of a collective entity, while also being a human being with a different face and mind. … The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.

This sounds like a bleak vision, but the dark perspective merely underscores the importance of the ethical choices to be made.

There’s a web page that discusses the contributions Murakami’s message can make to business startups – I guess it’s one step short of “What would Murakami do?” On this site, Merredith says,

What I take away from Murakami … is to have perspective, let your knowledge and memories instruct you, and not lose sight of any beauty that gives your life meaning. In “After Dark,” one of the heroines points out that memories “are the fuel that life burns on,” and without the time to make them, we literally and figuratively lose ourselves.”

But I don’t want you to think that computers make me queasy. I have a great time in cyberspace though I probably don’t understand the half of it. My pleasures are in seeing the changing shapes of an ever-evolving and dissolving polity. To me, the Internet is like the campground at the Philadelphia Folk Festival (it’s weekend after next, by the way) at night: a magical impromptu village of color and light, built for an instant.

All kinds of people camp at the Festival and the campsites are decked out with every important aspect of civilization. You see finery of every sort and you are witness to negotiations accompanying all kinds of relationships. Some are terrifying, and you scuttle away. People touch each other in various ways, fleeting and lasting. Music, of course, is at the heart of it all, and as you walk around, you traverse a kaleidoscope of sound. My favorite was the guy who had a grand piano in his campsite and played Elton John songs all night. There seem to be a thousand fiddles and a million tambourines. The astonishing drone of bagpipers pierces the morning haze. And then it is all gone on the last day.

Until Second Life can give me that feeling, I’m not going to get queasy over the Internet.

In a sense, every cemetery is virtual, because we bury cadavers in graveyards, not people. As Mary Roach says of her experiences after her mother’s death, “My mom was never a cadaver; no person ever is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull.”

As we walk the paths of a cemetery, we interact with the dead through our personal cognitive interface with the person. The site is merely a liminal space that allows us to step out of our everyday lives and into the world of that relationship. All the same, the Internet abounds in all kinds of opportunities to wander through a graveyard, for all the complicated reasons that people do so.

In 1947, Evelyn Waugh lauded Forest Lawn cemetery as reversing a trend in the treatment of the departed. “The wish to furnish the dead with magnificent habitations, to make an enduring record of their virtues and victories, to honour them and edify their descendants, raised all the great monuments of antiquity, the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, St. Peter’s at Rome, and was the mainspring of all the visual arts. It died, mysteriously and suddenly, at the end of the nineteenth century.” The Internet has endowed us with Forest Lawns for everyone. In fact, if you don’t mind that your plot is a tiny one, you can even memorialize your dead on the iPhone.

I’ve been thinking about our interface with death for a variety of reasons. I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and I’ve also been teaching my Young Adult Fiction class about zombies. Oh, yes, and I was so intrigued that I picked up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you think that I’m going through a morbid spell, you may be unaware that these days we have reconfigured the dead, the undead and the post-dead to be charming and interesting.

Not Your Mother’s Vampire explains that with Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, the representation of the undead and their little friends has changed. In Rice’s work, vampires are three-dimensional individuals, each with his and her own character and morals, not just generic bogeymen with a marginal role, jumping out once or twice to scare the humans. The undead are front and center in newer vampire novels, and their most important roles are motivated by their complex interactions with human beings.

Our modern vampires are also rich and powerful, and their lives seem attractive and desirable, notably in Stephanie Meyer’s incredibly popular Twilight series. Bella, Meyer’s heroine, spends the better part of four thick books wheedling a way to be made a vampire. In effect, the vampire is our new superhero, all the hero we can stand in our violent, cynical age. It seems, paradoxically, that these stories about death give us the courage to be alive.

The Graveyard Book works much the same way. Gaiman wrote it as a version of The Jungle Book, so his cemetery is the functional equivalent of Rudyard Kipling’s jungle. In fact, when the foundling is delivered to the graveyard, the dead agree to care for it and give it “Freedom of the Graveyard,” the ability to share the powers of the dead. As the residents of the cemetery work out the complicated tasks involved in taking in baby Bod, one says, “It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will … take a graveyard.”

The dead raise the baby, but the effect of Gaiman’s book is not ghoulish, it is, in a sense, freeing to see death as a positive force in our lives. One Internet commenter notes, “… your perception of cemeteries will likely be altered by the Graveyard Book.” Originally Christians buried their dead in graveyards attached to their churches, and so churchgoers at least would interface with them regularly. But as the hosts of the dead became vaster, we park them ever farther from our usual circuit, and commune with them less.

Some Christians hear on Ash Wednesday, “Remember man that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return,” but the smudgy thumbprint they receive is pretty abstract as a memento mori, when you can take a walk in atmospheric Highgate Cemetery West, courtesy of YouTube. This cemetery inspired Gaiman’s depiction of his graveyard. I found two wonderful YouTube journeys through it, a lyrical one accompanied by the music of Danny Elfman from Edward Scissorhands. This one had some great comments that well represent the complexity of visiting the dead (all sic):

• I went to Highgate in the early 1990s and it’s an amazing place, such incredible atmosphere. Hammer Films used the West part of the cemetery in some of their horror movies.
• i h8t this vidio who likes death thats dum fuck sake thats fukin dred blud
• What a beautiful cemetery. I don’t know why I love cemeteries so much. I think it’s because of my connections with the angel of death.

The other Highgate West tour I liked on YouTube was rather creepier, done with a hand-held camera and sporting a soundtrack of “Masked Ball” by Jocelyn Pook. That’s the ominous music from the climactic scene of Eyes Wide Shut.

Of course, if your interest in the dead is specific and you’re not just looking for the atmosphere of a cemetery, you can visit Highgate West on Find a Grave, a fine resource for touring cemeteries, and leaving “flowers,” as comments are known, on individual graves. Michael Faraday and Christina Rossetti are buried at Highgate West, and you can find Charles Dickens’ family there, but the author himself is in Westminster Abbey which has rather siphoned off the crème de la crème. On a family trip to London, it was there that we found Dickens, and my son, no fan of Great Expectations, executed a sprightly soft-shoe on his grave. The website does not as of yet have a virtual way of doing that.

Still, I have had some fine times on Find a Grave, visiting the graves of some of my heroes, including Judy Garland (the “flowers” include: “Some where over the rainbow ~ I hope you are resting in Heavenly peace. Thank you for your beautiful music”) and Walt Whitman, who designed his own memorial. If you become a real devotee (I have not gone this far), you can also buy a Find a Grave t-shirt at the website’s store. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Highgate West cemetery reminds me of the one in the Great Wood of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. My father was laid to rest there in a small grave rather crowded with our relatives. He is under great old trees near atmospheric statues of angels and impressive obelisks. I haven’t yet added his grave to the Find a Grave database, but I did look up the cemetery on Wikimapia, and though it is only a blurry aerial view, I find looking at it comforting, a way of thinking myself onto the pebbled lanes so far away, clutching a bunch of carnations and thinking back on times worth remembering.

And I am not alone. Radio Prague has provided a virtual cemetery to honor the ages-old custom of visiting the dead on All Souls’ Day for those who are far from the resting places of their loved ones on November 1st. On that site, there is streaming audio which characterizes the paradoxical nature of the event in the Czech Republic as follows:

In communist, atheist Czechoslovakia there was virtually a cult of the tombstone, especially in villages, with families vying with each other for the biggest, most monumental, and best kept grave. With the fall of communism the Christian element of All Souls’ has made a comeback, and attempts by some would-be Czech Celts to introduce the rather more pagan festival of Hallowe’en have also met with some success. So just like Christmas or Easter the feast survives here as a quirky mixture of the religious, the secular and the pagan.

In the treatment of the dead you can see in microcosm the history of a people. The dead are the ultimate other, what we are not, and in this view cemeteries are a way of forging connections between the living and the dead, and making contact with our ultimate humanity. Liminal spaces. At least that is how I have always thought of them.

Gaiman seems to agree, as he has a scene called the “Dance Macabray” in which the living find true peace in dancing with the dead:

They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance. … The music filled Bod’s head and chest with a fierce joy, and his feet moved as if they knew the steps already, had known them forever. … He saw the living dancing with the dead. And the one-on-one dances became long lines of people stepping together in unison, walking and kicking (La-la-la-oomp! La-la-la-oomp!) a line dance that had been ancient a thousand years before.

I have a cousin Sanyi whose line of work is the investigation of Jewish heritage, largely for those who lost relatives in (WARNING: don’t click the next link unless you are able to deal with gruesome material) the Holocaust. He will track down the records of a family, go to the cemetery and bring back pictures of the gravestones, where they exist. He also takes pictures of other remnants of Judaica. My cousin is not yet on the Internet, but Israel Pickholtz, who is, has produced a Virtual Family Cemetery in which he has been able to reunite his family. In microcosm, the history of a people.

In fact, genealogists of all sorts have found the Internet a useful resource, for researching and sharing representations of their own families and those of others. You could say that this is the semi-pro and professional end of Find a Grave. I don’t think you can be a community on the Internet without having your own memes, and theirs include Tombstone Tuesday (it can also be Tombstone Thursday) which was actually the inspiration for this piece, although you’d never know it.

The idea is that on the given day, genealogists post a picture of a gravestone from their research, with or without a narrative to accompany it. I found this meme and began to think about how we all have our own Tombstone Tuesdays, whether we want to or not. Although I lack the genealogical impulse, it is actually kind of comforting to think about all those tombstones we are connected to.

I have to say, though, that my favorite of all the Internet cemeteries have been the ones where owners can honor their pets. The “flowers” there are often quite wonderful. Here is a nice one by the Harbur family lamenting the loss of a parakeet, “A Poem for Emerson“:

Emerson, you silly bird…you’ve left us in the lurch!
You only lasted three days before falling off your perch!
At first it was a crushing blow (though now we are much calmer),
And still we have your cage-mates: the feathered “Lake” and “Palmer”.
So Emerson you leave behind this simple legacy:
a deep appreciation for the “Pet Smart” Guarantee!

Do you suffer from what my husband calls Pollyannoia, the irrational belief that no one is out to get you? Both this coinage and pronoia, the official term for this condition, are modeled on “paranoia,” the opposite affliction. You see little pronoia on the Internet, where, as Hesiod said, Strife rules and “potter hates potter … beggar strives with beggar and poet with poet.” On Avenue Q they say “The Internet is for porn,” but I think it’s actually for conspiracies fueled by Strife. The medium lends itself to sparking tiny flames amid the unsuspecting and blowing gently on the fragile human tinder beneath until they are engulfed in the resulting bonfire.

In a sense, conspiracies are built into the genetic structure of the Internet. Or at least into its memetic structure. The idea goes like this:

Real world : Internet = gene : meme

Richard Dawkins, who coined the term meme, defines it as follows, “self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own.” By synecdoche, the word is used to refer to the Internet meme, a clever idea or a hoax that spreads from person to person and can create a feeling of cleverness or trendiness among those who spread it, as Wikipedia says.

It has been argued that the nature of a meme is to be selfish, as a gene is selfish from the perspective of gene-based evolutionary theory, also Dawkins’ idea. This view argues the nature of organisms (us!) is to a significant extent determined by social characteristics which are not inherited, so evolution is best understood by studying the gene, and not the organism that results from it.

Genes are selfish: their aim is to continue to propagate (make more genes) and optimize themselves at the expense even of the organism as a whole. And in the view of some discussants on the Usenet memetics discussion group, discussion can be seen as a competition between memes which, like genes, can combine and mutate. For example, the JFK assassination conspiracy (on which more in a minute) has been “a source of inspiration for the development of other conspiracy theories,” enriching the “conspiracy meme-pool.”

The assassination was the first time I was aware of the kinds of coincidences that feed conspiracy theory today. In 1964, Jim Bishop wrote A Day in the Life of President Kennedy which listed coincidences between the deaths of presidents Lincoln and JFK. William Hanchett notes that Bishop had already identified the death of Lincoln as a conspiracy, so the parallel was obvious. These “remarkable facts” somehow melded with or even triggered the ongoing dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission’s 1964 report that the assassination was caused by a lone gunman, not a conspiracy.

The coincidences identified by Bishop are today explained away by a wide variety of websites including Greyfalcon, which notes, “It is always possible to comb random data to find some regularities.” The site adds:

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was in Marilyn Monroe

But coincidences are not sufficient for conspiracy theory: there needs to be a certain sentiment that accompanies them. I was in high school when JFK was assassinated. On the day of his death, I thought back to the Democratic Convention. I remembered whirling around our living room with a Kennedy for President sign I made from my hula hoop, while my father put a Stevenson sign on the floor mop and waved it at the TV where the convention delegates rendered their votes. Devastated by the events in Dallas, I crocheted a black ribbon and tied it into a bow which I pinned above my heart on my school uniform.

I still remember Joanne Di Martino coming up to me between classes one day, asking why I wore “that thing,” and, cracking, upon my answer, “Looks to me you’re wearing it to call attention to a place no one would look at otherwise.” Ouch. I don’t know what happened to Joanne after high school, but I think she had great potential for stand-up, instant delivery of a line that was painfully nasty but funny too.

I assume she and her family were Republicans. Or maybe she just hated me, though there was no especial sign of that, before or after. In any case, the exchange must have been enormously satisfying to her, and to anyone else like-minded who was listening. I’ll never know who was there because I was so devastated I virtually reeled.

I think we’re increasingly experiencing the kind of frustration Joanne voiced at Mater Christi H. S. in 1963. This sentiment is inseminated by violence and now, as then, nurtured by extensive media attention, but today it operates on a much larger scale and in an exceptionally well-suited medium.

The frustration behind what I would call the flash-conspiracy has shown signs of developing for quite some time. For example, there was the wonderfully prescient 1976 film Network with Peter Finch’s wonderful speech that chronicled the woes of modern times and urged everyone to go their window and yell “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”

One discussant on the Transhuman Space Game Forum agrees:

Conspiracy theory is a cop-out/escape, in two different ways. Firstly, if all the world’s problems are caused by a mysterious group of “Them,” then all the world’s problems can be solved if we can just discover and destroy “Them.” Secondly, since “They” are so powerful and diabolically clever, Regular People (“Us”) can never find out who They are, what They want, or how They work. Ergo, the world’s problems cannot be solved by regular folks, so that means its perfectly okay to set back, watch the world go to hell, and do nothing.

And I would add, launch a website.

Even a casual observer can see the Internet is full of sites where conspiracies are touted, espoused, nurtured and spread. Conspiracy Planet is one such place. I like to think I can figure out what a web site is about, but with my first look at Conspiracy Planet, I was not sure. It didn’t seem to come down on one side or the other that I could see, it just wanted to see conspiracies everywhere. Some of the time I thought the stuff I was reading was a joke, but probably not.

The site lists 82 different topics, if I counted right, everything from moon landing coverups, to 9-11 conspiracies to discussion of the “Bush/Clinton Crime Family” and something called “Criminal Government” which had a story denouncing Hillary Clinton because she “gave off mixed signals” about recent events in Honduras.

This article was called “Hillary Moves State Dept to the Right of Rice” and included a denunciation of Clinton because her father had been known to use the word “nigger” and Hillary had allegedly responded to this by becoming a Goldwater Republican. All of whom presumably  approved of such language, I guess. I should ask my colleagues in the Philosophy Program if they use such sites as examples to mine for fallacies in their Logic courses.

The place where I got really worried was when I saw the article stating that the U. S. Constitution was a conspiracy because it had been signed on the day of the summer solstice. I guess that pages like Conspiracy Planet are libertarian in their underlying structure, but I think really the point is to be angry all the time. Here is a passage from the site on the murder of Dr. George Tiller:

Just who defends what George Tiller did for a living? What kind of people are they? They’re all over the Internet defending him. Politicians in the Democratic Party … doctors who went to medical school … they’re everywhere it seems … no shame, brazen even. What is the rationale for their viewpoint? “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” as the old song says.

The truly amazingly great Mr. Obama, while still serving in the Illinois State Legislature, was deeply involved in a late term abortion political controversy. Why do the Democrats always seem to get caught up in these things? Do they support this in their heart of hearts? What drives them to be involved? How can they sleep at night?

Are they confused? Sold out? Is this a “must do” tenant (sic) of Satanism –blood sacrifice? They’re uninformed about what’s really going on? King Herrod (sic) complex? What …? Probably they see all abortion as a zero sum game and they feel they have to defend all of it or none of it.

I’m not Miss Pollyanna, but there must be more therapeutic ways to pass your time. I mean some of these people could probably benefit from giving themselves a pedicure or cleaning the black stuff from the grout of their bathroom tiles. Myself, I find that if I engage in either of these activities, I achieve a Zen-like peace that results in the inability to criticize anyone for hours. Some of that may be the Tilex, but still…

At their best, though, conspiracies can be fun to look for. The best one I know of on the Internet right now is about Howie Long and the Chevy commercial. I mean the one with Maggie, “the smart little girl” who wants the Chevy because it’s the “big girl car.” Now the commercial would raise the hackles of everyone who hates smart-ass kids, and, like others in the series, it plays fast and lose with the facts with respect to the comparative superiority of the product in question over and against its rivals.

All the same, I think it’s interesting that the commercial has raised such ire and been the source of a conspiracy theory. I have seen this reaction in a couple of places on the Internet:

… the Chevy commercial with the little girl that feels she deserves a ‘big car’ leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Especially when her finger is positioned as such as to be pointing right at Howie’s unmentionables.

Here’s a still captured from YouTube:

So do you think Chevy is using taxpayer dollars to fund a conspiracy to insinuate child pornography into our mainstream media? Even relatively silly conspiracies like this are, I believe, fueled by anger. I’ve wondered where all that anger comes from, and some of it I guess is just disaffection with the pressures of post-industrial society. We strongly suspect our lives don’t have meaning, or at least that every aspect of our existence is conspiring (see there’s that word again) to take it away, as in The Matrix, and it makes us angry, rubs us raw.

I don’t want to go all socialist on you, but there is a sense in which all of our activities have been turned into commodities, and it’s more than we can take. I still remember the scam perpetrated on Denny Crane, the wonderful lawyer played by William Shatner on Boston Legal. One night, Denny is out on the town and discovers that his date is a hooker who wants to charge for going down on him (“Beauty and the Beast”). He goes along, even finding the event titillating until he discovers she’s actually an undercover cop wanting to arrest him for soliciting.

These days we are all a bit like Denny Crane, finding out that behind every sincere effort there’s a commercial scam, and we are the dupes of it. Internet conspiracy theories allow the dupes to feel like tricksters in their own right.

As far as I’m concerned, bibliophilia is idol-worship, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with the book memes on the Internet. There’s everything from annotating and commenting on the BBC’s Top 100 books, to listing your 12 favorites in Flickr with appropriate photographs, to the five most frustrating books on Biblical exegesis.

This week I participated in a meme that has you take the book that’s nearest to you when you get the message, and write down sentence 5 on page 56 as your Facebook status. Then people can guess what it’s from, make them into a story, add their own or whatever. I guess it’s just another “icebreaker” to get us to talk to each other when we have nothing to say, community building from scratch, as it were. This one, though, got me to thinking about computers and books and all the different things we do with books when we’re not using them to adjust the height of a table.

A great many scholars are bibliophiles, but not me. While I love to read, I don’t actually care much about the medium. The thing we call a book, or codex, is a recent invention and before that people read books on long scrolls, or wrote them down on wax or clay tablets. Machine readable is just the latest medium to me, and I could care less about reading books on paper.

I’ve always thought everything should have an index, not just reference books. I like to think back on different ideas as I read and I’m not that happy searching through the paper thing for what I want. I even teach my students this way of reading, so we can have 20 of us in a  room riffling pages and looking for an idea somebody brought up. It’s not that easy without an index. So when I recently discovered the text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone online, unauthorized of course, I was grateful to have it for my Young Adult Fiction class, and having it online made it easier to search.

As an alternative to having the book on my computer,  I’ve been using Amazon.com as a search engine. It works pretty well. Amazon will have the book and you can only see a limited number of pages, but it will search the whole thing. If you have the book actually in your hand, you can look up the pages the items are on, and take it from there.

Speaking of taking it, I recently read Cory Doctorow’s Overclocked on my iPod, downloading it from his website, where he offers it for free under a Creative Commons license. I own a copy of the codex, and will be using it in class in the fall, when it will be required reading for all incoming freshmen at my University. It’s a fine collection of short stories in the science fiction genre, and Doctorow’s idea of what a book is clearly more fluid than most.

I do like to mark up my books, but you can do that on a computer. I don’t like to get books with anyone else’s writing on them. If they are interesting, they’re fine with me, but usually the things I find in second-hand books I get from Half.com are to my view inane, or wrong. My propensity for marking up books means I don’t like the idea of the Kindle, because you can only do limited note-taking on that, and one of the joys of a “real” computer (instead of a half-assed special use one) is that it will accommodate any length of comment.

Ever since I was a student, I loved the idea of scholia, the comments you find in the margins of ancient texts. They can be like elaborate discursive footnotes or simple one-word glosses on the meaning of the word. The same text can have scholia from multiple sources. The work you read then is enriched or enlivened by all those comments.

My hero has always been Servius, who wrote scholia for Vergil’s Aeneid. This is a wonderful and quite serious story about Aeneas, a hero from the Trojan War who voyages to Italy to found what turns out to be the Roman Empire. The scholiast, though, focuses on the doomed love between Aeneas and Carthaginian queen Dido. Now this is a version of the Aeneid quite different from anyone else’s: Servius spins the heroic epic as chicklit. His may be the first recorded opposition to the view that “A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop,” in Virginia Woolf‘s description.

I knew I wanted a Ph.D. the moment I got wind of that contrary style. I wanted to write a dissertation that played out in the footnotes, where the marginalia as it were had their own agenda, playing with what was going on in the text. I wanted to write Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but lacking the talent, I wrote an obscure analysis of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. All I can say for it is that it made me happy at the time…

The most famous marginalia in the world, of course, comprise the Talmud, which was perhaps the first instance of “poor man’s hypertext” in the world. That phrase from R. John Brockmann refers to the computer documentation book he wrote in which the marginalia contain definitions, organizational matter, competing views and other delightfully enriching material. I taught from Brockmann’s book for years, because it represented the web of connections I felt students needed to understand the material. I also like hypertext fiction because I’m not that in love with the continuous plot: as a reader of fiction I’m more about ideas than action.

And I like it when a story meanders all over the place: Ovid’s writing is a great favorite of mine. In the Metamorphoses, he uses so-called “slippery transitions”: just when you get into a story, it changes into a different story. Does he ever come back to the first one? Yes, and in surprising ways. Here for example, is Perseus in the middle of a great battle with Andromeda’s former suitor Phineus; he is in danger of death:

And then warlike Minerva came to shield
her brother with her aegis, giving him
fresh courage. Now there was an Indian
among the guests-a youth called Athis, one
who had been born in Ganges crystal stream;

(Metamorphoses V 43-47)

With “Ganges’ crystal stream,” we shift to an elaborate account of Athis’ parentage, his appearance, and his love life, all as Perseus smashes his face and crushes his skull. Then we’re back in the battle, as Perseus kills Athis’ lover, and sundry other folk. You either like that kind of storytelling or you don’t. I glory in it, as I am delighted by the modern linkages in hypertext stories.

The delights of hypertext are different from the joys of reading an action novel. As Anja Rau says in Tekka,

Hyperfictions may not be for the literary gourmet who likes to indulge in a piece of prose in the figurative bathtub. Hyperfictions are for the addict to whom the sight of the fridge is the promise of a bowl of mousse. Who cannot pass the candy-shop. You don’t read a gripping hyperfiction like a thrilling novel: preferably in one session. Instead, you return many times, sometimes after hours, sometimes after months, and the icon that sits patiently on your desktop soon teases as much as a wad of paper with the bookmark far to the left.

The trouble with hypertext, though, is that it makes readers nervous. You start to read the story and then you have to make choices: are you getting the “real story”? Is this what the author intended? How can you keep all those choices in your head? And how can you discuss the novel with others if they’ve followed a different path, a different novel? Readers aren’t used to thinking about the way every writer manipulates her readers, no matter what her chosen output medium. Hypertext makes you aware of the choices a reader makes, it lays bare the artifice of the medium, and that can annoy the uninitiated.

Over time, that problem will disappear, because who we are as consumers (and I use that word advisedly) of fiction is changing. Now, for many readers, books are commodities: how are you coming on that BBC list? How many have you read? Have you read all of Anthony Powell? Or Dostoevsky? Or Jodi Picault? Why waste your time reading something that takes many times as long as a “real” book?

But these days media are educating us to appreciate more complexity, and to be willing to spend more time exploring a story. This I think is at the heart of Steven Johnson‘s observation that today, TV shows have more story lines and movies like Memento are accustoming the general public to appreciate postmodern techniques. You wind up watching a show or film more times, replaying scenes, talking about them, thinking about them. As we learn to do this with our visual media, I think we get more comfortable with “multiple threading” in our literature as well.

In fact, we have been being trained to jump back and forth much better, from the time of Homer who is supposed to have invented the flashback. I bet when he first laid it on them, the ancient Greeks were like – “What’s he up to? I can’t follow this damned Odysseus story!” But they got used to it.

PowerPoint is passé, in my world at least, but does it deserve to die? It has been faulted for taking away our creativity and inhibiting communication, but that is not the real problem with it. The presentation software has been blamed unjustly for the lack of creativity that, unfortunately, riddles our culture. PowerPoint will be used for a long time to come, especially in business, but gradually the Internet will nibble away at the domain of the well-entrenched presentation software, replacing it with more interesting, and interactive ways of conveying our thoughts.

If you work at a university, as I do, you see a lot of PowerPoint used badly: slides in all caps and no bulleted points, tables with a sea of numbers. Passing by the door, I look in and wonder that the students haven’t fallen out of their seats, dizzy from looking at the screen. Of course they’re busy buying scented soap and sexual aids from Amazon.com, so the teacher reading the slide in monotone doesn’t disturb them much. Even when the presentation isn’t done this badly, research shows that students remember 15% less of what is said during a PowerPoint presentation than in one without the software, but (and here’s the interesting part) they prefer that a teacher use PowerPoint and ask for it when it is not used.

Yet the coolest people at the university (and elsewhere) refuse to use PowerPoint. It has become known as the communication technique of drones. It is the medium for canned messages; its use inhibits discussion and conversation, we are told.  My colleagues have internalized, or recognized on their own, what Clifford Nass of Stanford said in a 2003 article in the New Yorker:

What you miss is the process. The classes I remember most, the professors I remember most, were the ones where you could watch how they thought. You don’t remember what they said, the details. It was ‘What an elegant way to wrap around a problem!’ PowerPoint takes that away. PowerPoint gives you the outcome, but it removes the process.

Let me give you an example of the kind of baby that drowns in the PowerPoint bathwater. When my husband and I married, over twenty years ago, the minister of our church, the charmingly reserved John M. Scott, our longtime friend, subjected us to premarital counseling. Despite his low-key demeanor, John was a firebrand of the civil rights movement and ran his West-Philadelphia Church like a smoothly oiled liberal machine, shaping a congregation who were involved in the community and cared about each other. After the first counseling session, we were given two questions to discuss for next time as “homework.”  Teachers both, we knew what to do with homework. It was 1987 and we were Macintosh users, and Apple developers.

We went home and designed a computer application in HyperCard that allowed us to “talk” to each other on the screen, storing the results in a web that showed the branchings and connections between our entries in the discussion. Before our next session, we printed out the individual screens in a larger format and the entire web in a smaller one, so John could view our primary processes as well as the structure of our thinking on the topics he had assigned. We came into his gothically panelled office in the Christian Association at Penn, and spread our work out on the table, guiding him through our discussion before he could say a word. “So is what we did all right?” I asked. “Were you expecting just a transcript, or notes?”

John looked up at the large modern painting on the wall behind his desk. “Most people just discuss the topics for next time,” he remarked mildly. But John’s dry comment is just an aside: the point is, you couldn’t have done what we did, weird as it was, in PowerPoint. To use PowerPoint effectively, you already have to know what you think. If you use it as a discovery tool, you have to fight the interface, and you get a messy presentation. You have to know what the main point is, and what the minor points are. In the presentation Carl and I did for John, we represented the development of the exchange we had had about our relationships with parents, former spouses, children and step-children. You could see who brought up which topic, how the issues were linked to the discussion of particular loved ones. There was not one central concept, though the conversation included several threads worth exploring. You could have made a PowerPoint of the result, but not the process.

Does that mean PowerPoint can’t be used creatively? Of course it doesn’t. Musician David Byrne has made himself a kind of spokesman for the creative use of PowerPoint. He started as a skeptic and a critic, but then developed a book-with-CD that shows PowerPoint can do the most amazing things in integrating music and visuals. And it can. You can see some of what Byrne is talking about without buying his book on the series of  websites that wax evangelical about presentation software; they are studded with astonishing examples of what seem a lot like music videos. My personal favorite is “Flight of Serenity” by diyufeixuan. This soaring animation plays to MIA’s “Paper Planes,” as Pinklaura says, “a super poppy song that’s all about being a hustler.” In the video, diyufeixuan makes connections between skateboarding and Prometheus, the Greek Titan who created humanity.

One problem with these presentations is that you have to download them to your computer. Also, they are so complex and labor-intensive that you and I are not likely to create one. The original impetus of PowerPoint is to allow ordinary people without design talent to create presentations without the intervention of designers and programmers. When I use PowerPoint, my efforts are usually on the level of four or five points with a photograph from my digital collection on one side. I am not going to tinker with slide element timings to produce gorgeous films. Even with respect to web design, I always say that my students are like the shoemaker’s children who have to run around in flip-flops while she teaches others to fabricate less shoddy gear. And for sure there will be no animations of winged sandals – it just takes too long.

The most powerful feature of PowerPoint is not the hierarchical structure or the corny templates. It is the slide-show component, and that has been replicated in thousands of forms by a large variety of Internet sites and local programs, from Facebook to Javascript. Because of issues with where files are located, it’s actually relatively difficult to use PowerPoint to stitch together multimedia presentations. It may seem easier to start in PowerPoint, but if you consider the headaches associated with porting your presentation so you can show it to someone, it’s actually easier to store your files on the web and use a web browser to integrate the parts.

And increasingly we are not satisfied with just chaining our thoughts together in a single order. When you were a kid, did you use to read those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? While you were trying to survive on Sugarcane Island, you were learning a new way of organizing concepts. The structure wasn’t really all that complicated, but it sure beat the Back-Next organization of PowerPoint. Video gaming and the Internet have been teaching us this kind of many-directions-at-once mental model, and now there are tools out that that allow us to organize our presentations to match. So now I can show you my photographs by putting them on an interactive map courtesy of Google Earth, add voice-over, link to YouTube presentations, and even include some bulleted points in PowerPoint if I want. See what I mean about nibbling away at its domain?

Perhaps the biggest problem with PowerPoint has not yet come up, though. The presentation software is invasive, isolated and isolating. Its message is “Welcome to my world,” not “Let’s build a world together.” The dominant model for Internet use today is the social network, not the pre-fab presentation. The model is the new incarnation of Space Invaders sweeping the world. Launched by the artist Invader, this phenomenon involves the installation of mosaic works of art based on the villains of the seventies video game Space Invaders.

There is a website dedicated to the Space Invaders project. On it, you can look at a world map chronicling the rate of world saturation, as well as see interactive slideshows (yes, slideshows!) of individual incursions. In the slide show of Bangkok, you get from slide to slide by clicking on the space invader: the first slide is easy, the second less so. But the point of the project isn’t the slideshow; it’s the experiential aspect of the project. You can find the Space Invaders in your neighborhood, or plan your vacation around looking for them. We all walk in the world of the presentation; the show reconfigures our world with us in it as participants.

Is this art? It is certainly in the spirit of Victor Shklovsky‘s view that art makes the familiar magical again. But more interestingly for our present topic, space invaders is open-ended. No one knows what it will become. It is a web, and you can interact with it. The rules are evolving: it is not clear who can be deputized to add to the web, and what figures can be incorporated with it. Most figures are shaped like Space Invaders, but not all. The canvas is the world, the model is the web, the rules are evolving, and the point is communication: useful heuristics for a new world of presentation software beyond PowerPoint.