Gypsysavage’s Weblog

Vincent Campbell’s Information Age Journalism is an intelligent examination of the purposes of journalism in a new era of electronic communication. From the processes of the dissemination of news, the values of sources and news gathering, to the ideal of objectivity that is most times (if not all the time) lacking in the field, Campbell calls for a new working definition of journalism, a rare request these days.

With such a great sense of how news and information is selected for public consumption, and after urging the wider intellectual world to rediscover the use of journalism and to begin a new conversation about its current state in relation to its political reality, Campbell fails at his task in one huge way: there is no discussion in his book about electronic news media. If the issue of newsprint media in the “information age” is a task worthy of a book, then why would Campbell miss the mark completely by avoiding one of the greatest forces in the information community?

Campbell makes use of his book in specific instances as he points out the decline of newspaper audiences worldwide, supported by formidable and unnerving evidence that readers are disappearing by the thousands, but he does not speculate just where these people are going, or whether they are even reading news at all. One suggestion – and a natural inclination – would be to say that these vanishing acts are reemerging in the most independent news forums to date.

If Campbell, a lecturer of political communication at the University of Leicester, took on the issue of electronic media, he would have had one of the most complete studies of journalism I’ve read.

It appears that aside from being one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century, Norman Mailer was also quite the stud.

Harvard University, Mailer’s alma mater and a shinning paradigm of academe, has apparently reached a new low, dredging the bottom of the shithouse ’til metal scraped wood as the school purchased an entire collection of writing that chronicled the novelist’s epic philandering.

Awesome.

Included in the purchase is a 20-page sex-scene detailed by Mailer’s mistress, Carole Mallory, with whom he had an affair during his sixth marriage, and her unpublished novel based on their unscrupulous relations, according to the New York Post.

Harvard, now a manifest player in the porn industry, is said to have purchased the material after Mailer snubbed the administration by selling his archives to the University of Texas for $2.5 million. Great googly-moogly.

The new format of the dashboard in WordPress is overly difficult. It’s frustrating to add images and videos and create tags, and the features that were in the former “presentation” “New Post” and “Presentation” categories are scattered throughout both pages. I want the old version back. The overall usability of the new format makes me want to pull my hair out. Great googly-moogly.

I would like to volunteer for a discourse on Internet English with members of the graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities. At some point during the second half of this semester I think we should have a discussion about the impact of electronic communications on a constantly evolving, scarily malleable English language.

With the inclusion of modern, internet-related vernacular, most of which has been adopted from the writing spaces of texting, instant messaging and emails and integrated by a younger generation, the question arises: in what direction is our language headed? Will our spoken and written language be truncated by abbreviations and hip techno-babble (parsed from existing words and prefixed with “i-” or “e-”)?

I remember being tickled by Van Halen’s cagey album title, 0U812, but now with linguistic anomalies like “NE1”, “LOL” and “L8r”, I am literally at a loss for words.

A defining characteristic of a community or of a culture in general is a shared language. Dialect, idiomatic expressions, etc., are crucial ingredients of a people’s identity. So what happens when humans communicate within the constraints of electronic media over a period of time? Do we begin to lose part of one identity and gain another?

Professor of Linguistics David Crystal wrote volumes on the subject:

Many of the expectations and practices which we associate with spoken and written language… no longer obtain. The linguistic consequences of evolving a medium in which the whole world participates – at least in principal, once their country’s infrastructure and internal economy allow them to gain access – are bound to be far reaching.

-from Language and the Internet, 2005

I would ask members of Writing for Electronic Communities for their thoughts on this subject, especially those in the education field – have you found evidence in your students’ work suggesting a change (for better or worse) in their writing skills that can be credited to their usage of electronic media like texting or instant messaging?

I look forward to hearing from you guys. L8r.

The following are questions are intended for members of the Rowan graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities.

On Bush:

1. In the author’s quest for the “great record”, he virtually prophesies the creation of the internet. Relative to writing for electronic communities, what invention do you propose that would enhance our record of knowledge and our ability to communicate efficiently (your invention can be as crazy or impossible as you like). I propose that we invent a lens with which we can project our ideas onto a medium, and communicate at the speed of thought. In terms of individual achievement, check this video out (dude’s a nerd but he’s awesome). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

On Dibbell:

2. After a virtual rape, Dr. Bombay’s community scrambles for identity, defined solely by the execution of one of its members, the perpetrator. Just like the author, I have a hard time taking this bollocks seriously (it did take multiple violent rapes for the VR community to become more self-aware). But she does bring up a central point: where lies the theoretical boundary, all but non-existent for non-MOO-users, between RL and VR? Consider this:

Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.” Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player’s life, limb, or material well-being… (Dibbell)

3. Within this virtual community (of practice?) psychopaths and newbies are the two types of users who view MOO as a place where they can act without censure. The potential anarchy of MOO is what’s most appealing. The rest of the users, says Dr. Bombay, “tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character’s reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood.” So, answer me this: what’s the point of a virtual existence in which you have unadulterated freedom at your fingertips if all you’re going to do is be as self-conscious and restrained as you are in real life? What’s the point if you are going to employ government and regulate the goings-on of the community?

On Turkle:

4. Can you think of problems with an alternate version of your “self” displayed in virtual rooms or in video games? In other words, in generations to come, will a human being’s identity be so fragmented that the self will be utterly indefinable? What would be the consequences of turning ourselves over to the “psychology” of a computer, as Turkle puts it?

On Kelly:

5. Kelly says we little notion of what the web really is. Can anyone really define it (for real, this isn’t rhetorical), keeping in mind what it could become by 2015?

The following are questions about the Learning Record, a method of tracking students’ progress in a particular field of study:

1. The learning record could easily be broken-down into two parts: (1) Stated goals pertaining to the course material, and (2) Have I reached these goals? Why does the learning record have to be so complex? Read the rest of this entry »