True Life: I can't Stop Cleaning

So recently I have discovered that I love cleaning. I know- weird, right? I was the biggest slob when I lived at home—my floor was just like another shelf to throw stuff on. In fact, you couldn’t even tell I had a floor. It also didn’t help that my parents are basically “OCD” about cleaning and organizing, so it always felt like you were walking onto another planet when you entered my room.

Then I came to college and had a double room in the fabulous Bradley Learning Community. And my roommate was a bigger slob than I was. She and I got along great and I really enjoyed having her as a roommate, but I think her messiness changed me. I would get so freaked out when our room was messy that I would move all of her stuff to the side (yea, I was one of those people) and would vacuum the rug twice a week. I would make sure my bed was always made and my books and clothes were always put away when I wasn’t using them. I couldn’t control her mess, but I had to eliminate mine.

Then this newfound cleanliness started to spread to other types of domestic responsibilities. When I went home, I would look forward to doing my own laundry because I got to do as many loads as I wanted. Despite the fact that we finally got a dishwasher, I would volunteer to wash the dishes by hand. My parents thought someone had replaced their daughter.

This year I have my own room, so I get to clean and keep it as tidy as I want. And you don’t want to know how excited I was when my housefellow said that they bought a new vacuum for our dorm. Whenever I finish cleaning, I always feel like I just accomplished something. It often helps settle my nerves when I’m really stressed out, and it helps me focus right before I need to study for a big test.

Next year, I will be living with six of my best friends in a house. And some of those girls are very skilled mess makers. I have pictures to prove it. You don’t want to see those pictures. When we spent a weekend at our friend’s lake house in the summer, I got the nickname, “Mom” because I was constantly cleaning and cooking. I realize that I’m being just as annoying as my parents, but I have to do it.

MUDs: New Technology or Avoiding the Real World?

We have been reading several articles dealing with how our identity fits into the whole network culture idea. The first was a chapter titled “Identity Crisis” from Sherry Turkle’s book Life On the Screen. It was about how many people now go online into internet communities, and create alternate personalities and identities. The second was from the introduction of Andy Clark’s book, Natural Born Cyborgs, which looked at how humans rely on technology and, how we are basically merging our minds with technology. We also looked at this website, which shows the work of STELARC, an “artist” that creates machine parts to put on his body.

In class, we began to explore the concerns that exist with our increasing dependence on technology. The Matrix is definitely an extreme example of what could go wrong, but I think that the STELARC guy shows how there is a fine line between using technology to create something new and exciting, and becoming too obsessed to the point that threatens one’s safety.

We also talked about how technology can potentially cause us to lose control or lose our sense of self and identity. We looked at the story from “Identity Crisis” about a woman that lost her leg and could not face the real world until she saw how people reacted to her in a MUD. I had never heard of a MUD before, but I think they are kind of like The SIMS, which my friends and I were obsessed with in middle school, only you can interact with other users. At first, I thought that it was kind of sad that the woman needed to use the MUD to find out how to live in the real world. I always thought that you should never use the internet to try to replace what is actually going on around you. But the more I thought about it, I began to think that the MUD just acted as a resource to the woman to get help. Rather than going to a support group for people with disabilities, she found support through the people in her MUD, which ultimately helped heal her.

I think that my initial reaction was probably normal considering that MUDs are a newer technology. I remember with I first started using instant messenger, my parents often criticized how impersonal it was, and how it would be much better to get together with my friends and talk in person. Now, most see that instant messenger and e-mail are just another way to communicate with one’s network of friends and coworkers.

I don’t think that I will ever personally use a MUD; I’m just not interested. And I think that, just like most things, it would not be healthy to become obsessed with a MUD and never talk to people outside of it. But I think that if it makes one happy, and if it allows one to have fun and feel comfortable to explore different aspects of their personality, who am I to criticize it because some say that it is not part of the “real world?”

Samples from Public Enemy and Beck

Our reading for Tuesday was focused on the art of and the controversy behind sampling. Jeff Rice, in chapter 7 of Writing About Cool, describes sampling as stringing together multiple parts of songs, that leads to either commercial or rhetorical purposes. Sampling brings about a lot of questions dealing with copyright laws and ownership. If you are using someone else’s music, how much of it can you use before it becomes stealing. If you distort the sample enough so that it is barely recognizable, does it even matter then?

My dad is a lawyer and mainly deals with boring stuff like nursing-home contracts, but in the 80’s he represented a client that sued the BeeGees for copyright infringement. His client claimed that the BeeGees used some of his music in one of their songs. I don’t know the exact details of the case, but in the end the judge ruled that the two songs did not sound enough alike to warrant the BeeGee’s guilt. My dad’s client felt that he owned the music and that it was stolen from him, but, in this case, the BeeGee’s sampling was deemed perfectly legal.

In class, we also talked about the different reasons why Beck and Public Enemy use sampling. I had never heard much from either of the artists but from the reading we deduced that Public Enemy had used sampling for social change, and Beck used it mainly because he could. Since I don’t really know Beck and Public Enemy’s music, I "youtubed" them. Unfortuantely, I don’t really know music in general, so I can’t really tell when they are sampling other artists, but their videos show sampling as well.

This one is kind of long, but right away you see that Public Enemy is sampling from images and a newscast from the March on Washington. They also show a clip of Elvis and John Wayne, and while rapping that they were both racist. From their video, you could tell that Public Enemy was using sampling to "create a sense of power in the African American community" (Rice, 60).



In this video, Beck does a little sampling of images too, such as the car race, the girl playing the drums, the guy fishing, and the two guys dressed as astronauts. However, this sampling doesn't really seem to have a reason behind it. It seems that Beck just stuck these images in his video because he could. I do not know if they really have a rhetorical value, but the samples just add to the overall oddness of the video.

It's all about who you know...

I had never heard of the “Keep Austin Weird” campaign until class on Tuesday, but I find it really interesting. I’m all for keeping the integrity of small towns, but I also love the fact that when I’m at home, I have my choice of three Targets in short driving distance. In my hometown, despite the fact that we have two Starbucks a block away from each other and a Subway right next to a Quizno’s, there was a heated debate over whether or not a Borders should be opened. The fear was that it would out-compete a locally owned bookstore. Personally, I wanted the Borders because I don’t like the locally owned bookstore—it’s over-priced and they wouldn’t offer me a summer job.

Anyways, I think that the PowerPoint presentations we made really highlighted the importance of connections in a network. In Austin, it was very beneficial to the people who were starting off the campaign to have a lot of important connections. Without those connections, they would not have been able to spread the word or expose their merchandise, such as the bumper stickers. The use of the internet was definitely a catalyst in the spread of the network because, without it, it would have taken a very long time to gain support for “Keep Austin Weird.”

Although those Texans were able to use connections for a good cause, Albert-Laszlo’ Barabási mentioned several negative outcomes of living in such a highly connected society in his book, “Linked: The New Science of Networks.” Barabási looks at the example of how the spread of HIV in North America was partly due to the promiscuity of one man, Gaetan Dugas. Barabási uses the term, “hub” to describe Duga’s role in the HIV “network” since he seemed to have spread the virus through over 2,500 sexual connections.

Barabási compares the spread of HIV to the spread of computer viruses through e-mail. Once a virus hits a hub, or a person that has a ton of links in their address book, the virus can be spread to hundreds, and then thousands of computers. It is for this reason that it is difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of even the least contagious viruses.

I think that it is kind of scary how fast anything from a simple e-mail to a fatal virus can be spread today. It is also scary to think that you don’t really have control over what networks you belong to. I have no control over who puts my e-mail or screenname in their address book or buddy list. Also, I have no way of knowing if one of my “connections” could be considered a hub in a network. I think that we are so quick to assume that being so highly connected as a good thing, but I never really thought of the consequences until I read Barabási.

Hunting for Cool

I think cool was taking a vacation from Madison today because my “coolhunt” did not turn up much coolness. Also, my camera is MIA, so I was not able to document any of the cool that I did find.

1. First I started out in the library. I went to the Open Book Café, got a Chai tea, and sat at a table. However, it was only 3 in the afternoon, so there weren’t many people there. The few people that were there, were just studying, which isn’t particularly cool.

2. After I finished my tea, I decided to venture outdoors and walk up State St. What I found was perhaps not cool, but definitely cold. I saw a couple of people who some might call “rebellious” (I would prefer “stupid”) because they were not wearing coats! Yes, despite the fact that it is early March, we live in Madison, Wisconsin (latitude: 43.073N), and it was about 30 degrees out, I witnessed about five people wearing t-shirts. Maybe these brave people were trying to convince themselves that it is really Spring, or perhaps they are innovators, trying to start a new, “cool” trend. However, I think that Barabasi, author of Linked: The New Science of Network, will agree that the “threshold” for this trend will never be met because most will not be convinced to pick up on it. The “spreading rate” for not wearing a coat in the middle of winter, in the Midwest, when there is still about five inches of snow on the ground, is very low (Barabasi 131).

3. While continuing to walk up State St., I noticed that most people (about 75%) were either talking on the phone or listening to their ipod (or some other music player). Perhaps the coolness of having and using these gadgets in public is wearing off because I think that this trend has reached the “late majority” that was mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in his article from The New Yorker. To not have a cell phone, or at least not use one, is kind of innovative now since it is rare not to see someone chatting away no matter where you are.

4. I also noticed that several stores had St. Patrick’s Day decorations in their windows, and my two very Irish friends were talking about how excited they were for it. I have never really “celebrated” St. Patrick’s Day before, but I feel like I am missing out on something “cool” when I see all of the t-shirts and other merchandise that stores are selling and my friends are wearing, and when I see the pictures of the St. Patrick’s Day themed “Unofficial” party that all of my friends at University of Illinois put on Facebook. I don’t think celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is very innovative since people have been doing it for several years, but I was definitely convinced today to adopt the idea.

Those are the results of my coolhunt. Unfortunately, I think that maybe I couldn’t find very many “cool” things because of one of the rules of cool presented by Gladwell: “….[cool] can only be observed by those who are themselves cool” (Gladwell 155).

Defining a Network

In class on Tuesday, in response to Mark C. Taylor’s chapter from The Moment of Complexity, we tried to categorize different types of writing into either “grid” or “network.” Initially, one would think that academic writing, what I always think of as English essays or research papers, belongs under grid because it follows Taylor’s definition of an assembly line: “Separate individuals, entities, and events are joined in a predictable chain where effects are proportional to causes” (Taylor 29). In order to produce a piece of academic writing, the author must follow certain guidelines and the paper is almost always organized in the same way. However, especially if one looks at research papers, it is difficult to say that academic writing belongs only in the “grid” category. For one, several people might contribute to a paper, either through writing or editing, or references could be added to the end, which can be considered “network” attributes.

It is easy to classify non-traditional writing, such as blogs and wikis, as belonging to the “network” category, because they often seem so different from academic writing. The fact that they contain links to other people or other sites is what sets them apart. However, blogs and wikis still have a certain form, and they usually have to follow grammatical guidelines. Should they also be considered grid-like?

I think that we should just forget about trying to categorize writing as either grid or network because there is no clean break. However, I think that looking at the idea of emergence, brought up by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees, is a good way to determine what could be considered a network. Watts says that “emergence” comes about when “the interactions of individuals in a large system can generate greater complexity than the individuals themselves display, and sometimes much less” (Watts 27). In class, it was brought up that neurons working together in the brain, or the expression of several genes to create a functioning organism, are examples of where emergence is happening. Individual behavior aggregates to collective behavior, without one individual standing out as the leader. Maybe I just like this idea of emergence because there was a way to tie genetics into it, and I’m a genetics major, but I think that it really shows the importance of the idea of a network.

If you look specifically at blogging in this class, my individual post is connected to the posts of everyone else, and all of our separate ideas come together in the network in hopes of obtaining a higher level of understanding. This would not happen in a regular English class where all of our assignments would be turned in directly to the instructor. Let’s just hope that our network can create “greater complexity,” that Watts wrote about, instead of something “less.”