Sunday, July 23, 2006

Meal Ideas

Figures that the last week of July would be my week for groceries. I'm heading to the store in a few minutes, until then, preparing mentally for the mealy week ahead. Here's what I've got so far:

Day One (Monday): Ph. has a soccer match at 7:15. In the mosquito hatchery that doubles as Wetlands Soccer Park. IOW, we'll be the dinner. Home by 9. Actual dinner: microwave popcorn with popsicles for dessert (only if it's a win).
Day Two: Our third wedding anniversary. Celebrating a superfine three years. D. and I eat at a respectable restaurant, while Ph. sits at home, playing PS2 and eating graham crackers (relax, they're honey graham crackers).
Day Three and Four: Where have the appetites gone? Y. (who reminds me more and more of a junkyard Snoopy) is still sick. Poor lil' guy. But damn! Nobody's hungry.
Day Five: Creamed corn casserole. Too hot to bake, so I put the microwave to work. And work. it. does. Which is more than we can say for the washing machine or dishwasher. Hey Maytag, are we unlucky or should these rusty &^% appliance go to the scrap-heap?
Day Six: Nearing expirations on the many milks in the refrigerator. Dinner idea: dairy consumption contest. Vanilla soy milk, 2%, skim. Oh, and why not: yogurt, sour cream, half-n-half and cottage cheese.
Day Seven: It's the end of my week, which saddens me just a little bit. For a mood-lift, we splurge on double-toasted everything bagels and cokes (Coke floats if I pick up some ice cream).

For breakfasts: Cinnamon Life, wheat germ and PB toast.

I'm gone to the store.

Turkle, "Identity Crisis"

Turkle, Sherry. "Identity Crisis." Vitanza 57-76.

Turkle begins by suggesting that metaphors for pshychoanalysis predominate in every era.  Fluidity and stability contend, increasingly, in the high tides of postmodernism.  Turkle examines the implications of MUDs and other online domains for identity play: "Online switches among personae seem quite natural. Indeed, for [Emily Martin], they are a kind of practice. Martin would call them practicums" (58). Citing Gergen, Tukle invokes his phrase, a "pastiche of personalities" to describe identificatory play and experimentation (^liken to tourism in Nakamura).  Generally, she gets at the tension between unity and inner pluralism or inner multiplicity--differences that are primarily metaphoric (and these metaphors are amplified by material technologies and language).

"I am not limited in the number of links I can create" (61).

"At one extreme, the unitary self maintains its oneness by repressing all that does not fit.  Thus censored, the illegitimate parts of the self are not accessible" (63). Turkle's insight here is fairly balanced, and her perspective magnifies the limitations of both perspectives, while still acknowledging that, good or bad, online technologies make play possible.

"We are encouraged to think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in process" (67). Or, on the other hand, as...mannequins?

"Emergent or not, when reduced to our most basic elements, we are made up, mind and body, of information" (69). ^Provocative claim. Turkle goes on to explain why it's complicated, controversial.

"As we stand on the boundary between the real and the virtual, our experience recalls what the anthropologist Victor Turner terms a liminal moment, a moment of passage when new cultural symbols and meanings can emerge. Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity" (71).

"pastiche of personalities" - Gergen (59), "languages of the self" - Gergen (60), "continuum of dissociation" - Hacking (63), inner diversity (64), "liminal moment" - Turner (71)

Related sources:
Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1990.

Rheinghold, "Smart Mobs"

Rheinghold, Howard. "Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many." Vitanza 89-120.

"Smart mobs are an unpredictable but at least partially describable emergent property that I see surfacing as more people use mobile telephones, more chips communicate with each other, more computers know where they are located, more technology becomes wearable, more people start using these new media to invent new forms of sex, commerce, entertainment, communion, and, as always, conflict" (115).

An virtual enthusiast, Rheingold covers a range of issues related to wireless, handheld and portable devices (wearable computing) while considering the potentials of digitally enabled collectivity. His examples are primarily political and popular press (news items). He recounts the power struggle of Philippine President Joseph Estrada and the impact of "smart mobs" in toppling the regime. Because cellular phones are so inexpensive, the citizen (peer-to-peer) journalism they enable is potentially a major force in social and political change. Rheinghold the technical infrastructure as "a social instrument" (93).

"Examples later in this chapter demonstrate that smart mobs engaging in either violent or nonviolent netwar represent only a few of the many possible varieties of smart mob.[...] Networks include nodes and links, use many possible paths to distribute information from any link to any other, and are self-regulated through flat governance hierarchies and distributed power" (96). Rheingold goes on to clarify--is this a given yet?--that networks and networking technologies are neither inherently good nor inherently bad (97).

Rheingold's discussion of "personal awareness devices" is very interesting--related to "reputation systems" (98) and GPS. Basically, the locative devices enable real-time social positioning notifications. ^I still find it fascinating that such devices might be used to observe patterns at an academic conference, such as the CCCC.

"What if smart mobs could empower entire populations to engage in peer-to-peer journalism?" (101).

"'Mobile ad hoc social network' is a longer, more technical term than 'smart mob.' Both terms describe the new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication, reputation, and location awareness. The mobile aspect is already self-evident to urbanites who see the early effects of mobile phones and SMS" (103).

"The research is as much behavioral as it is computational, beginning with simple experiments matching properties of mobile computing with the needs of social networks" (104).

"Trust means a distributed reputation system" (106).

"The coordinated movements of schools and flocks is a dynamically shifting aggregation of individual decisions" (110).

"Oscillation is one of the standard and simplest emergent phenomena" (111). ^ Connect this with Lanham in Economics of Attention?

Terms: Goffman's "interaction order" (105), "epidemics of cooperation" (108), "synchronization of brain processes" (111),

Related sources:
Ball, Philip. Critical Mass. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959.
Granovetter, Mark. "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior, " American Journal of Sociology. 83.6 (1978): 1420-1443.
Huberman, Bernardo. "The Social Mind." Origins of the Human Brain. Jean-Pierre Changeuz and Jean Chavaillon, eds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995: 250.