the people formerly known as the audience

"The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about."

the workshop is over...

and so more on that later and me coming to realize (once again) the limitations of throwing one's all into something to the point of becoming tired beyond the reasonable.

But, in the meantime, until I have some words in my head again, here is, via feministing, Joss Whedon on strong women characters.

You could call it...

a June swoon, except it started, well, in December or in 2003, depending on what markers you want to use.

But we are back from RSA and have mowed the lawn for the third time this season, a record -- but is it an indication of an upturn in our cultural embeddedness that we have mowed the lawn three times or an indication of a global warming-ed upturn in grass-encouraging temperature and wetness?

I am hoping, however, that -- regardless -- there will be an upturn in my email responsivity. May was pretty much a wash -- as was this whole past semester -- because of travel, which both broke down my tenuous discipline of response and also removed any reliable connectivity. (Having to stand at the counter of the Algonquin Hotel in order to pick up the lobby signal, with the hotel people cheeringly asking me about my mail and talking about how Dorothy Parker would have used email, was a fun but not productive point of the last several weeks.)

At the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, however, along with the ducks and other conference quack-stuff that others have mentioned in their always-ahead-of-me timeliness, there was (after we called down to the front desk every day for a new code to connect) strong signal in our rooms. There was also a paper to finish and much abuzz.

Last Monday at 8am I and a few others had the pleasure of seeing Collin Brooke awake and speaking not only coherently but also crowd-pleasingly humorously, on a panel with Dan Smith, Jeff Rice, and Jodie Nicotra on various new media issues. Collin asked after Manovich on the whole database versus narrative distinction (and Collin also embedded into his talk discussion of our discipline's current issues with disciplinarity, which he just ought to make its own paper, darn it, Collin.) Dan gave a very coherent presentation on Spinoza, one of those talks that sets all kinds of ideas spinning (including my memory of reading Spinoza in the early mornings in a high reading room of my college's appropriately Gothic library): it was very hard not think back to Collin's presentation on database narrative without using immanent relationality as a way in to conceive of the back and forth between the two -- among other sparks. Jeff continues to spin out his thinking on Ka-knowledge, with fresh moves between hip-hop and theory bites, and Jodie laid out folksonomy. That's my fast memory, which slowed down on the plane back home (needing to digest the barbecue from the airport pit probably helping).

It was a good panel, and -- like the other good ones at RSA -- should have had a meal afterwards for slow discussion. I'll be chewing on it (but the barbecue, I am thankful to say, is long gone).

One little thing that did come up during the panel was a comment (agreed to by many) about the sucky design of del.icio.us (for example). Not only is del.icio.us visually awkward, but it is awkward in the using, in the ability to categorize and compare and move among. This morning, WIRED has a link to del.icio.us.discover, to someone doing some play with what is possible with all those other del.icio.us people making their preferences visible to each other.