Google Wave and Ulmer: "Heureucs rather than Hermeneutics"

As I first saw the name of the book "Internet Invention", I thought it was some book talking about the Internet, culturally or techonically. As I read more, I found this book is more than just talking about the Internet, but the pedgagogy , or "the writing" with the approach of "electracy" (P.5). What is the meaning of electracy? I checked the webster dictionary, but found nothigng from there. Is it something related to the electric techonology? Why Ulmer call it as an approach rather than a tool? As I read more carefully, trying to make sure if it is the meaning as I guessed. Ulmer said "...I use the website as the medium of instruciton and learing in courses ranging from freshman general education composition courses...(p. xii)", which I think kind of explained the meaning of electracy: first, it has to be applied with the meidum of the Internet, the web; second, it has to be in some instruction or learning process. Or, maybe I should call it digital teaching. However, its meaning is more than these. Ulmer explained further that the purpose of using this approach is "trying to invent" (he also called it 'heuretics') rather than "interpret" (or "hermeneutics", as he called) (p.4). Then to invent what? What is his argument in this more than 300 pages' book? On page 6, he said "...the imaging condition of the spectacle therefore has a positive side, which is that the new media culturepotentially supports and could be designed to augment and enhance individual and collective creativity: that a wired community in princile may be fundamentally 'creativogenic' (p.6)".



So it seems pretty clear that it is a book talking about the application of new media in pedagogy (mainly English or Compostion). No offense, but I am not sure if I should call it an instructive book at this point of time because I checked the comments from readers and got some of these words "If purchasing for a class, I wish you the best of luck an advise you to develop an "Ulmer filter"; if you hang onto his every word, you will surely miss the central points to lead you to complete the project. If you are purchasing for your own personal edification, I simply cannot imagine why. I hope you enjoy media theory. (see amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Invention-Electracy-Gregory-Ulmer/dp/0321126920)".


Anyway, using google wave in/after class is an updating experimental practice to this book.I introduced this useful tool to some of my firends after the class. They all said they would try it but the funny thing is the friend who introduced it to me said he would not use it anymore. Any emerging thing has to experience the process from the weak to the strong, and the criticism is unavoidable. Google wave is a case in point. As a matter of fact, it is a good conceptual extension to the email, web forum, bolg, and discussion board, etc., even in practice they kind of have similar function. Also, compared with the chatting tools like MSN, Skype, OICQ, it does not require the conversation sides have to be online at the same time. People wrote down their ideas in google wave and leave. Then other people come, read what their group members wrote, add comments or anything they want to say, and leave. Then any other members could come and read and the starter could response them too. Conversation has been recorded for the future reference in text form. Even msn, skype and oicq has the same function in recording people's conversation in text, they could not do it so well as google wave does. Therefore, google wave is especially suitable to be used in the group projects that needs a lot of texts.

Verilio project in second life

Our group made three different kinds of buildings in
Second life and put these three buildings together

(My group members put theirs on the top of mine ).
It was not my first experience in second life,

so compared with my group members, I completed a

little bit faster. My building has larger size than theirs,

and its texture is brick. Walter's building is a round

room with glass material, while steve's is a castle with

the rock texture. Three buildings are totally different

in color, material, and style, but they are connected

closely with each other. I hope I had the pictures of

our buildings, but since they were located in a wrong

place, the owner of that place drove us away when

he/she found us there. It was a little bit ambarrasing

but a pretty fun experience, but because of that, I feel

sorry that I did not have a chance to take pictures

of our buildings.

Anyway, the experiece of building things in second

life is really a worthy trial for the understanding of

Virilio's ideas. For one thing, the modern digital

technology blurred the line between the reality and the

virtuality. Virtual world is no longer the simulation of

the real world, but the replace of it. Some people

claimed that virtual world grants insiders freedom to

do anything they can hardly do or not allowed to do.

It makes sense in certain perspective. Take second life

for instance, people can play differnt roles that they

been eager to become, or they can posscess many

skills they do not have in reall world, like fly, swim or

jump from high position, or change their appearance

like face, complexion, height, gender, etc., or, say, a

disabled person can become a healthy one like anyothers.

However, Virilio contended that this freedom would
be more and more limited since the simulated world is

gradually replacing the real world and this means that

roles in real world should also be applied in virtual world.

We were drove out of that owener's territory is a good

case in point. They have rules here, so that this world,

though a virtul one, can still keep orders in this world.

we have some freedom, but they are all under the premise

of following the rules of the world.

For another, in virtual world, the distance between objects

and subjects, as Virilio stated, has been greatly shortened.

In real world, to construct a building, for example,

our chance is almost zero, unless we are the designer or builder

of this building. For common people, we could do nothing to

change the size, the appreance, or the height of the building.

In a virtual world like second life, however, we can. Any users

of second life, no matter you are a professional architect, or

a perosn who knows nothing about architecture, you can build

a big house or an apartment, a garage, a mall, whatever you like

and also, you could make it as strange as you can without the

limit of physical construction rules. Additionally, you are not

restricted by time. You may build up a skyscraper in just a few

hours rather than years, or you can spend a year to just build

a simple pool. The time requirement in real construction is never

a problem in virtual world. From this point, the concepts of

time and space are changed radically.

Mystory part 1 Career discourse

For my career discourse, I choose to make a website reviewing the development of online games, especially focusing on the online games in early phases. I made this website by the software dreamwaver. When I was making it, I suddenly realized that I was actually using a very outdated thing to work. Why? you may ask. Is the version of the software too old? Are there some other updated software than dreamwaver? Well, no. By saying "outdated", I mean the concept of making website.

I would like to talk something about the early computers in my memories before going to the website. I remember the first time I saw computers was in my primary school. It was in some extracurricular activites, the tearcher introduced those 286 computers with black and while color dos system to us. I did not imagine this is something I would use everyday in future. I remember the early chinese input systerm is "wu bi zi xing", a system that requires people to memorizes many codes to just input one character or several. I had difficult time memorizing these code and I remember I was not quite understanding why people choose this difficult way to write rather than just write with a pen on a piece of paper. And because this machine was so expensive at that time(almost ten thousand for one), no family could afford it or at least saw it as a worthy investment. I did not see any of my classmates had one at home until I entered the middle school. Computers had upgraded to 386 then, and I first saw it in one of my friends' home. She was so cherished it that she did not allow us to touch it. Her 386 was surely not connected with the Internet. What she could do then was playing some pc games (one of them is Heros of Might and Magic) or input some chinese characters for practice. Besides these, I did not see any more founction her 386 had to her life. But still, it was evitable to have a comupter at that time.



I get to know the Internet when I was in high school. At that time I remember people were using html to code webpages. As a comupter language, it is not very friendly to common people, and not everyone at that time knew how to make a website or even knew what is website.Then in recent 10 years, as the Internet and computers became popular, more and more languages such as C++, VB, VF, have been arranged as required courses for college students in China. Though as an art student, I experienced again the hard time of learning these computer language in college, but I did realize that the popularity of these computer languages is a good reflection of the graduall importance of computer.



In recent years, the website making became more friendly. A lot of people choose to use online templates to build up their own websites. They do not have to learn the specific design language or computer languages to build a website. Building a website is no longer something professional, and it could be accomplished by anyone. The fact that human-computer relaitonship become more and more homonious is the result of the technology advancement, but it is also a temporary phase for future computer development.

Mystory part2 family discourse

For my family discourse, I documented some happy sections in my childhood memories with my mom, my dad, my grandparents, my cousins, my uncle and aunt, etc. by making a video. Unlike most of others in the class who use static pictures as their narrative way, I feel like when I was doing this assignment, my meomries about my families are like a film, frame by frame reflecting in my mind. 30 frames per second, in movie making, it means 30 pictures connected in one second to express the moment. But for my memories, it is more than this number.I love using moving pictures to express thoughts, and a lot of times, I regret that I did not have camera to document those childhood moments, which once passed away, would never come back again.



"Something in the present environment triggers a memory (punctum), information from the past intrudes into the present, leading to a hammered thumb (p.76)". A lot of "past" things could remind people of past stories, like a song. For me, the song in the video belongs to my past stories. The background music I choose named "mom in my dream" (but it is funny that all my memories about it is related to my dad), it is an old folk song sang by an Inner Mongolia kid. My dad is a lover of Mongolia songs. In my childhood memory, he sang a lot of such songs, when we took a walk after dinner, when we had a picnic in parks, when we had a break during the morning execise. I could not hear him singing anymore for some reason, and this makes me always have some special feelings to those songs, because they are not just songs, they are symbols of some emotions to the past.



Ulmer discussed "homesickness" in his family discourse (p.76). He said "The homesick person is not so efficient. A symptom of homesickness is the cognitive failure known as absentmindedness". I had been living with my families in Dalian for all the time before I came here. You could not imagnine how strong the homesickness I had in the first semester. We had familiy party almost every weekend and festival in my grandparents' hourse.My uncle's family, my aunt's family, my family, and my grandparents, a dozen or so of family members getting together, they all are the components of my familiy memory.

Baudrillard, part 1

When reading this book, I feel like wandering between the real and the virtual. I think people usually do not think too much of the differences between dissimulation and simulation, and of course, one of the reasons is they think they could use them properly in their daily life. But actually, they have obvious difference which according to Baudrillard “leaves the principle of reality intact (p.3), ” and which “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘fause’ (p.3).” I like his definition of simulation, “to feign to have what one doesn’t have (p.3)”. In light of this definition, the object that is simulated is something that one doesn’t have, and the simulated image of the object is also something unreal, then what one does have? In a society that is constructed by more and more simulated symbols, the objects in real sense are left fewer and fewer for the society. The whole world, as Baudrillard pointed out, has been simulated, including history (historical events he mentioned, like strikes, crisis, demonstration), politics (Watergate), culture (mass media) and economy (Disneyland). “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible (p.19)”.
One of the direct results of this ambiguity is the confusion of morality. An organized fake holdup or hijacking, how to punish such simulation of virtue? They “renders submission and transgression equivalen, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based (p.20)”. In the end, “it was capital that first fed on the destructration of every referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power (p.22)”. The ambiguity also leads to the confusion of the “real” process of work and the “objective” process of exploitation. The whole world is still producing, but the spark of production and the violence of its stakes no longer exist (p.26). Simulation of virutality covers the previous naked production relationship, and replaced it with images of “social needs and demands”, and occupation in the work place.
Then what kind of a world it is? If there is no “real” as reference object, how to tell “virtual”? Why we use symbols created by ourselves to confuse our own world? Is simulation a praise or a disappointment to modern technology? Baudrillard reviewed the history of simulation from renaissance to industry revolution, from industry production to market production, from market-oriented modernity to symbol-oriented deconstruction. Reality during these phases has been gradually broken up, until the end, leaving the whole simulated images to uphold the mind and body of the society. Then what is the future of it? Where the society would head for? Utopia in fictions?

Mystory entertainment discourse

I made this website http://linmystory.yolasite.com/about-us.php for mystory, entertaiment discourse. Ulmer's assignment in this chapter is to do a website that documenting a movie or a TV that one watched during his/her childhood. It seems that by doing this, he tries to use a potential analogy to connect entertainment discourse with cerntain periods of memory. Is it a way of doing a conceptually spacial conversion like what virillio do in his book? I could sense what he is trying to make his students feel here when I was doing this assignment. My entertainment discourse documented a Chinese TV series, which has a special postition in my childhood memory:Dream of the Red Chamber, which was adapted from the novel with the same title. As one of four China's great classical novels, Dream of the Red Chamber has been adapted to movies and TV series many times. But the one I introduce is generally acknowledged as the most successful one which created great sensation in the 1980s in China.

This TV series was produced in 1985, and it almost has the same age as me. When it was first shown on TV, I was too young to understand it. The only vague memory is my family sitting before TV together, having snacks while watching it, a cozy picture. Then the memory jumps to the middle school. I had a lecture of this novel after school one day. I was moved almost into tears.I set up my mind to read it. It has five volumes and almost 200 chapters. Plus, it is written in classical chinese (before 1919, all the chinese writtings use classical chinese). It is a challenge for me at first and I spent alomst a year to finish it. Then I found that it is such a brilliant work that you would never feel boring no matter how many times you read it. It is like a deep hole, you can never reach the bottom. The research of it has become an independent field (called redology). The whole book includes 30 main characters and 400 minor characters. Each of them has distinct features and detailed psychological description,which makes you feel like they were live people around you.

There are hundreds of brilliant poems in this book. One of my favorites is "Song of the Burial of Flowers" (葬花吟). I found the English translation of it (Please see the second subpage of mystory web http://linmystory.yolasite.com/about-us.ph) I do not think this translation accurately reflects the poetic imagery it describes, but I still want to express some of my own feelings based on this translation. I especially like this sentence: "I hold a burial when you die today, But there’s no telling when I pass away.Others laugh at me that have buried thee, Who will be the one that shall bury me?". Sadness, everything around us is "Nichts", no matter how glorious they once were. I did not understand this when I first read it. But as time goes by and my experiences get enriched, I find that many shining things are like shooting stars, shifting fast and finally are not there anymore.Like flowers, they bloom and wither, or the earth, the galaxy and even the whole universe has a day to end. People's life, compared to them, is nothing but a moment. Humans, from this sense, have nothing different from other beings. I see an obvious Daoist spirit from this poem.Chinese Daoism pursues "Nature and Man in one". It believes that humans as a part of the nature would return to the nautre when we die.All the rules of the nature apply to us no matter how strong our self-awareness are. Thus, nature was positioned highest (even higher than gods), unlike western culture, which stresses the importance of spirit, such as Descartes's "I think, therefore I am", Nietzsche's will to power, Hegel's absolute spirit,etc.

Actually, when I was doing this assigment, I suddenly realized what Ulmer wants us to feel. I was recalling my past with my present thoughts, but my present thoughts are based on my previous memories. I was documenting the memory about a digital formed TV series, but I was storming my mind by the undigital formed mental action, and the sparking point could be anything including an entertainment work. Thoughts can run through the time and space,

like shadow, the further you are from the light source, the longer the shadow could be.

week 9

If time is matter, what is space? (p.5) Virilio discusses “space” in terms of relativity of time and nature at the beginning of the book open sky. If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does life-size. Without weight or meausure, these is no’nature’any more or, at least, no idea of nature. Without a distant horizon, there is no longer any possibility of glimpsing reality...(p.6) In some classic physicists’ eyes (like Newton), time and space absolute existence, which means all the matters and events are being measured on the dimension of transcendentality (see wiki). That seems pretty simple that people do not waste time thinking the fourth dimention of time and space. However, when Einstein proposed the relativity, we are introduced into a “expanse of real world”(p.15): in this world, when we reached the speed of light, we could catch up with the time. In other words, when we get to the limit of speed, we could see the end of time. Could we say, at that moment, that we win the time, or we maybe at the same time lose the space? Then what is the nature, or our life would be? And how do we measure things then? In light of Bergson (see wiki), time is a kind of inner experience, a psychological time that does not depend on clocks in physical world. It is a time that instinct by our own heart. Thus, philosophers like Bergson, or Proust (see his In search of time) believe that it is hard to say space and time which one is more essential, but our own spiritual activities, our own psychological peace seems more important than them.
It seems to me that Virilio uses this relativity of time as a metaphor to reflect the obscurity that exists between virtuality and reality caused by modern technology or civilization to human beings’thought (p.13). “ Speed enables us to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely(p.12)...but it is not so much light illuminates things(the object, the subject, the path)...(p.13) Distance, speed, geography actually lost their meanings in traditional sense, and instead, they are equipped by modern technology and obtained the power of simulating real world. “The question is then no longer one of the global versus the local, or of the transnational versus national...to gain real time over delayed time is thus to commit to a quick way of physically eliminating the object and the subject and exclusively promoting the journey...”(p.20). Therefore, not just time, but space/distance is also granted a relativity. If we follow this logic, many art majors, like literature, philosophy, logics, psychology, etc., they all go in for pursuing the relative infinity of time under the context of the relative finite space, and one of their ways it to close the door and read all day long, like Kant, who spent like 80 years staying at his hometown: though he was invited to teach in some university at other places, he refused for the reason that new environment would influence his thinking. So from the perspective of space, he had not been to anywhere, but from the perspective of time, he became the explorer of the eternal spirit of human beings.