Half a year, already?

My last blog post was immediately after the birth of our son, Gus. That was just over six months ago. Clearly the timing of my return to blogging couldn’t have been worse.

I am still interested in keeping a blog to collect my media and technology studies thoughts. But it will have to wait until the always-on madness of being a guy in his early 30s—with an infant son, a challenging job, and a house in constant need of repair and upgrade—calms down a little. I’ll leave you with a link to a new media studies syllabus written by Christina Dunbar-Hester and published in the Atlantic. There’s a fantastic reading list attached:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/beyond-mcluhan-your-new-media-studies-syllabus/63061/

Until next time!

Blogging from C.H.A.T. 2010

This week I’ll be attending the C.H.A.T. Festival (Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology) at UNC-Chapel Hill and blogging on what I see. Serious gaming will figure prominently in the festival this year. A few of the events I plan to attend, with descriptions from the C.H.A.T. site:

User Driven: Does Size Matter? Audience expectations are driving trends in technology, and size is one area feeling the impact: What is the ideal screen size for a device, for content, for literature, and more? Wednesday, 11 a.m.

Scientific Method and Narrative Form. What happens when you combine an electronic literature expert with a computer scientist who uses algorithms to generate narrative? This conversation will explore the intersections and the opportunities. Wednesday, 1:00 p.m.

Serious Teaching and Learning in Serious Games. Gaming has taken a serious turn in many classrooms as educators discover the effectiveness of games as teaching tools. In this discussion, experts in K-12, higher education and industry discuss how pedagogy is embedded in serious games. Thursday, 2:00 p.m.

Changing Forms of Publication. New technologies have made possible mass publication on a scale never before encountered in our culture, breeding new possibilities for—and questions about—authorship and form. This panel examines how technology has transformed the practices of publication. Friday, 11:00 a.m.

Game as Medium. Game engines, the software systems designed for the creation and development of video games, have made their way into a variety of uses and fields. This panel will discuss some alternative uses of game engines, as panelists present their current game engine research in art, art history and mobile computing. Keynote speaker Jesper Juul will join the discussion, offering his theoretical perspective. Friday, 4:30 p.m.

Rebooting

Well, the home renovations have never really settled down, and probably never will, but this blog has laid dormant long enough. Perhaps I'll even get around to creating an original design for it someday, but for now I'm using one of the standard Blogger templates so that I can focus on the writing.

On hiatus for home renovations

Around the time of my last blog post, my wife and I bought a “fixer-upper.” Blogging to resume after fixer-upping.

New feature

Instead of link roundup posts, I’ve decided to stream my most recent tech-related links on the sidebar to the right.

This should see quite a bit more activity than the mainbar. Given the subject matter and my actual posting frequency, I’m beginning to think that my initial goal of three posts a week was too optimistic. I can see to it that the links list is updated more or less every workday, and I will continue with my roughly once-per-week posting frequency.

No sunlight, no motivation

Blogging to resume after the New Year.

Link roundup: surface computing

In the interest of posting more frequently, I've decided to start posting link roundups. On any given day I run through 50+ rss feeds and news sites, and compile lists of links that I think might be of use in writing future columns or blog posts.

Here’s the first batch: links dealing with the recent explosion in surface computing and multi-touch interfaces. I think there’s a widespread sense that this represents the first viable update to the basic computing interface since the popularization of the mouse.

Like that device, multi-touch interfaces allow us to interact with simulated space in the same way we interact with real space: by moving our bodies. Surface computing, however, represents a much more elegant way of doing so. By combining the point of physical contact and the point of visual representation, simulated objects become more phenomenologically material.

Jeff Han’s early (Feb. 2006) multi-touch table is now available in expanded form at Neiman Marcus for a cool $100,000 (found at Techdirt). Throughout his demo, Han emphasizes the intuitiveness of the interface, going so far as to claim that the interface has disappeared. Multi-touch computing is the rare example of a technology that seems to have arrived fully naturalized: it has appeared in our world as a new and fascinating species of cultural object, instantly graspable.

This effect may help explain why it’s already showing up in the toolkits of the barkeeper and the musician.

Invocations of the computing interface from “Minority Report” are becoming cliché, as in this examination of Microsoft's Surface table.

A couple more: Sharp combines multi-touch with optical scanning and, of course, Apple's iPhone—the most commercially successful implementation of multi-touch to date.

Edit: Somehow I missed this massive history of multi-touch computing from Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton.

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I’ve just got too much going on. Blogging will resume next week.

Oh yes, they Kan

The Christian Science Monitor published my letter in response to Dinesh D’Souza's “What atheists Kant refute.” D’Souza is a conservative author who, like Ann Coulter, uses over-the-top controversy to sell books and land College Republican speaking engagements.

His op-ed piece is based on a reading of the early sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While it's probably not fair to refer to D’Souza as a pseudo-intellectual, he clearly hasn't done his homework here. Of course, his reason for taking up Kant is not to engage in serious and fair-minded Kantian scholarship; it’s to cherry-pick the philosophical tradition for arguments that may be made to serve the cause of social conservatism. D’Souza’s arguments rest on two fallacies.

The first is the alleged authority of Kant. D’Souza asserts that Kant has never been refuted. It's true that no work has ever been produced which is universally recognized as a refutation of Kant’s Critique, but philosophy doesn't really work that way. A lot of philosophers never saw Kant’s arguments as an adequate rebuttal of Humean empiricism. Others took the Kantian paradigm as far as it could go, but a critique can only bear so much fruit. There are certainly elements of Kantian philosophy still in currency, and I sympathize with quite a few of them. But unreconstructed Kantians are rare in the academy.

The second fallacy is inappropriately using the noumenon-phenomenon distinction to place one’s confidence in the existence of God outside the reach of human reason. Had D’Souza read the second half of the Critique, or perhaps read a commentary on it, he would know that Kant himself argues against this approach. When we’re debating whether or not God exists, we’re taking up an idea of God—a phenomenon—for consideration. D’Souza is arguing for a noumenal God. If my reading is correct, Kant allows that his Critique can free one for such a belief, but denies that it can be used in defense of such a belief. A noumenal God is not one that D’Souza would much care for, anyway: it would be unknowable, featureless, and unrelated to human life.

Note: This is a bit more purely philosophical than usual; I’ll get back to the tech talk soon!

Dedication

text–script–machine is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Anderson, SJ, my friend and advisor, who passed away in June at the age of 57.

Ron was a Jesuit priest and held PhDs in physics and philosophy. His research involved applying the techniques of literary analysis to 19th century scientific texts, in order to better understand the development of electrical theory. He was also deeply interested in how the Catholic faith might respond to the challenges of postmodernism.

It was Ron who introduced me to science and technology studies, and I will sorely miss not being able to correspond with him as I set out on this endeavor.

about that official launch...

I had intended to do a sort of “grand opening,” including a mass email announcement, a new design, and a rigorous posting schedule. But I seem to be easing into things—collecting notes for good topics to write on, letting people know one-by-one, and so on. This is working for me so far, and I think I’m going to keep it up.

I’m a trained graphic designer—if not a practicing one—so using the default blogger template bugs me. There will be a new design along at some point. I’m also going to do my best to post at least three times a week from here on out, though life will get in the way at times.

If you have a Google account, please feel free to log in and comment on or argue with any post you see here. If you’re just tuning in, the original post features some brief notes on what this blog is about.

official launch in July August

I am hoping to have enough prep work done to begin posting regularly in early- to mid-July August. I hope, too, to debut a unique visual design for text–script–machine at that time.

In the meantime, this space will serve primarily as an archive for my technology columns appearing on McClatchy newspaper websites.

Technology is a humanism

text–script–machine is a blog dedicated to the premise that the boundaries between our physical, mental, and representational life-worlds are dissolving, giving rise to a new, emergent reality. This reality is prefigured, but not entirely realized, by such twentieth-century concepts as Gibson’s cyberspace and Derrida’s “enlarged” textuality.

The name text–script–machine is meant to draw attention to the script, i.e., the computer program, as a paradigm for the entities which will inhabit this new reality. The script dwells at an intersection of the previously distinct categories of text and machine. A work of both literature and engineering, the world it invokes is both fictional and real.

In particular, the “object” of object-oriented programming, which by virtue of its opacity gains metaphysical substance, has begun to serve as the building block of simulations which are more than simulations, enabling such characteristic developments as science in silico and a brisk commerce in virtual goods.

Meanwhile, computing is transforming our experience of physical space, not only through the influence of its output devices—screens, speakers, printers, rapid prototyping devices, and so on—but also by changing our habits, expectations, social interactions, and theoretical categories.

text–script–machine will take it for granted that engineering cannot be allowed to stand separate from humanistic questions; in particular, the methodological abstraction of “how” from “for whom” must be regarded as a mistaken notion from a now-fading historical era.

This will probably suffice for introductory remarks. At any rate, the character of the blog will be determined less by my mission statement for it than by what trends emerge as it develops. This is very much an exercise in exploration, and it’s far too early to determine what that exercise might turn up.