Looking for a new home

This is an open call to any web designers/blog virtuosos looking for opportunities to help out humble writers like myself as I try to squeeze life back into my writing routine and transform this blog into one I can be proud of. I’ve secured employment for now to handle post-university life, but am committed to pour every ounce of my energy into this outlet. I love writing and am deeply saddened by how far I’ve let it fall by my life’s wayside.

As part of the rebirth, I am looking to move this blog to a hosted service while sticking with the WordPress platform, and would welcome any recommendations as to what would suit my needs. While I enjoy the designs available at wordpress.com, I find them increasingly inflexible as my online life expands and becomes evermore integrated. So an integration-friendly, powerful, and professional design would be right up my alley. Consider it a chance to showcase your skills, help out an aspiring writer, and be part of what we can turn this into.

Please leave a comment with your info (I have to approve it so it won’t be disclosed publicly) or send me a message on twitter

Can’t wait to hear from you!

The Next Web

This article hit the upcoming section of Digg earlier today, and I thought I’d post my 2 cents here after leaving them in the comments.

It asked, “What will replace the Internet?”, and in my humble opinion, is quite colourful and speculative in answering.  While I think some of the ideas have merit, I opted for a shorter term, less sci-fi take on the future of our beloved WWW.

The Internet was initially developed @ CERN for the purpose of facilitating scientific data transfer. It later trickled down into corporate and public uses, where its technology was built upon (the WWW), expanded, and participated in on worldwide scales.

Internet -> The Grid, developed @ CERN to facilitate collaborative processing in order to manage the massive amounts of data being created by the Large Hadron Collider. It won’t just use the information present on the network, but the computational abilities of the members of the network itself (processors, storage, I/O). Imagine the Web that we could build on a system like that.

It will be cloud computing in the truest sense yet, and will be to information processing what the social media explosion has been to traditional modes of circulation: computers won’t be dumb terminals of data, but active participants in the whole process.

I would venture that the development and implementation of the Grid’s next-gen WWW platform would give rise to and/or facilitate the semantic web, as information processors would finally have access to new perspectives and massive statistical banks to help distinguish how different pieces of information are related to one another.

These perspectives would go beyond the number of link hits and keyword searches, and allow critical evaluation of the relationships between data through the conversation enabled by the Grid’s collaborative protocols.

This is why I liken the Grid’s introduction to the social media revolution: look at what conversation has done to us (as info processors), our information, and our information habits.  We may not *actually* be any smarter, but information networks like the Internet have made us far more resourceful, and continue to accelerate our ability to find, understand, and apply knowledge.

I am treading into some future post material, so I’ll stop here.  Stay tuned.

What do you think?

A Wee(zer)Mix

Always a tongue-in-cheek group of musicians, Weezer has released the video for their latest single, Pork and Beans, and it bleeds remediation like no other.  A collision of viral internet personalities, memes, and parodies, the video delights as much as it speaks for the “don’t give a hoot about what you think” theme through the lyrics.  Valleywag is putting the video allusion count at 24, albeit with a few possible misses.  Check it out below.

It certainly got me thinking about the role of producers, remix culture, and branding.  By referencing all the memes, and adding their music, Weezer has succeeded in creating something that is both familiar and unique.  The song’s product-placing lyrics mocks the promise that consumer culture makes us: the power to reinvent ourselves in accordance with our own desires.  What actually transpires, however, is a cross-breeding and mish-mashing of particular brand identities that again, produces something familiar and unique.  While the realm of the music video limits itself in time and content, the remixing of consumer identity is a far more complex domain, and one always worthy of further thought.

How do brands mediate your day to day existence? In the last ten minutes, what brands have you encountered? Were they obvious/non-obvious to others?  How and what are the privately mediating brands (of shampoo, contact lenses, email provider, etc) interacting with your self-image? How about the publicly mediating brands (clothing, shoes, beer)?

jon.

Decompression Sickness, Distributed Knowledge

hey all,

there will be more coming on what i’ve been up to during the absence (which mostly involves a lot of moving, working, and sleepiing), and the exciting changes in store for culturshock in the near future.  For now, I want to jump right into a topic that I’ve spent a few days pondering about.

It’s no secret that technology has changed the very fabric of our world, how we interact with it, how we model it, and how lives are built around it.  The original example I came across while chatting with a friend was transportation. Namely, how the transportation technologies that have permeated our existence have radically altered human perceptions of distance.

CBC Net Neutrality & Media Charter

In light of the imminent debate on CBC’s Spark on Net Neutrality, I have made a public copy of the Media Charter of Rights & Freedoms available. Initiated by a Media Studies class at the University of Guelph, this document has been one of the projects that has emerged, willingly, from the collective voice of our classroom. Please feel free to contribute suggestions, clauses, or thoughts, whether independently or in response to the CBC Radio discussion.

Google Document: Media Charter of Rights & Freedoms

Please also check out my previous post on NN: Net Neutrality: The Crash Course

jon.

An Experiment in Remediation

First off, after all my rants about design and interface really mattering to me, WordPress goes ahead and updates their dashboard. Horrah!

Second, enclosed here is an experiment for you to take a gander at. It is what I’ve called an “enhanced” version of my term paper, complete with colour, formatting, pictures, and typos! So check it out and see if it does anything for you. By that I mean, does the hypermediation of my term paper in any way assist, facilitate, augment or detract from the subject matter? I thoroughly enjoyed designing the experience of the words, and hope at the very least, that you enjoy reading it.

Newseum & Remediation (Enhanced)

jon.

The Triadic Media

Hey all

I’ve done some thinking lately in making connections between the hectic media landscape that we currently occupy and what I consider to be an incredibly useful theory that I learned about in a cognitive science class. It’s called the tri-level hypothesis, and while originally applied to information processors and found in cognitive research, its theoretical basis helps to frame incredibly complex systems in a way that simultaneously preserves their entirety and divides up the constituents that make it possible. It is most easily illustrated by way of the metaphor of chess.

Remediation as Control

I’ve done some thinking recently about the possibilities of the practice of remediation being at some levels a practice in control, whether social, informational, or legal. This ties with the all-important question that we raised earlier in the semester (and that we should discuss in the Media Charter) of asking “who has the right to remediate”?

Net Neutrality: The Crash Course

Today I wanted to join Dave on the soapbox and voice my extreme concern over the issue of net neutrality. He has written a fantastic post on his blog laying out some of the key threads of the debate. I want to endorse what he’s said and also provide some of the examples that I’ve stumbled upon in my own research in hopes of spreading awareness of not only the players involved and the current state of the debate, but also shed some light on precisely what is at stake.

A bit of a disclaimer before we jump in: Most of the information surrounding the issue comes from American sources and deal specifically with the American political and corporate infrastructure. Despite this, and independent from the systems responsible for the outcome of the debate, the philsophy behind network neutrality is a position already starting to be eroded by Canadian corporate interests. So, whatever you watch, whatever you read, I hope you realize that the war on the internet is already in full swing on Canadian soil, so be wary.

The Crash Course:

Keep reading!

Design Constraints -> A Piece of My Puzzle

hey readers

First off, let me apologize for my extended absences. It happens to be that time of the semester where the total hours needed to complete assignments and readings seems to exceed the amount of actual hours available to complete them!

Anyway, some of you may have noticed the schitzophrenic changes that culturshock has been going through lately. Themes of all varieties, colours, content layout, the works! I’ve stumbled upon the logic behind this madness, and it pertains directly to my own media practices.

WordPress.com is a fantastic, free service with tons of options to choose from, and some pay-for upgrades available to enhance the blogs that would rather not go elsewhere. While they offer some incredible services, I’ve recently started bumping into its limitations, specifically with regards to the delivery of the content on my blog, in the way that I want it delivered! Here’s the scoop: I love the ability to have my RSS feeds of my Digg and YouTube activity link directly into the sidebar, so you can see what I’ve been up to and check out any stories that you may have been interested in. There are, however, a select few themes to choose from in WordPress that support RSS feeds in the sidebar. They are also themes that, by and large, don’t coincide with my purpose or content/design philosphy as well as I like. So call me fussy.