By:
On:
In: Technoculture
Tagged: , ,

Today I opened something somewhere online and got another nag message from Google about its new privacy policy. The nag message invited me to “dismiss” it, a language choice that reflects a mildly amusing and disturbing political and interpersonal frame that we’ve developed with internet computing. Perhaps my amusement about being nagged over privacy derives from my almost-divorced status, but that is neither here nor there. I’m not going to waste time knifing through the current policy change. The short version: it will consolidate the privacy options for multiple Google services into one statement for the user to accept or reject with one click ofRead More →

By:
On:
In: Rhetoric and Communication, Technoculture
Tagged: , ,

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death makes a perfect reading for Introduction to Humanities this semester, particularly Chapter 4 (“The Typographic Mind”). Unable to find a free PDF or DOC version online, and unwilling to scan one myself, I opted for the Sparknotes because I am a lazy, bankrupt educator. But SparkNotes are better than a YouTube claymation right? I ran into this amusing, ironic, and depressing exchange on a forum. The exchange is started by a desperate student trying to locate a free copy of the book. The haters accuse him of thievery, point him to the library, or recommend he ask a cuteRead More →

By:
On:
In: Gratitudes, Technoculture
Tagged: , ,

(In no particular order) 1. Droid I bought my Droid in November 2009 and it has changed how I interact with people, sometime for the worse, but usually for the better. On the one hand, even though I’m a technophile, I really don’t like the 24/7 culture of new communication technology. I used my first cell phone only to call out and for emergencies. On the other, the convenience and entertainment value of a smart phone make me wonder why I went so long without one. I still have a bad habit of leaving my ringer off, missing calls, and forgetting all about the phone’sRead More →

By:
On:
In: Technoculture, This Internet Life!
Tagged: , ,

My first version of VoXYgen was posted in 1996. It was fun building the most rudimentary webpage and exploring what could be done on the internet. Since then, things have changed, and I’m suffering from “information fatigue” sans the extreme levels of anxiety or sleeplessness that it presumably provokes. I have noticed, however, that I can’t keep up with Facebook. I bookmark sites that friends post and then waste time deleting them without reading them because the list is obscenely long. I skip surfing my usual reading spots. RSS readers have made blog surfing incredibly easy. The downside, however, is that with a simple clickRead More →

By:
On:
In: Pedagogy and Teaching, Technoculture
Tagged: , , , ,

New technologies erode the boundary between the personal and the public, as Joshua Meyrowitz observed about television in No Sense of Place twenty five years ago. Since displaying ourselves is de rigeur, thanks especially to Facebook and Twitter, I feel less guilty about doing it on my blog, even though personal disclosure was never my original intent. In class, students appear to enjoy my disclosure. Still, there’s an art to disclosing appropriately in the classroom, one that has taken me years to balance comfortably. As one friend put it, it’s easy “to hold your students hostage” to your personal narratives in class, which is anRead More →

By:
On:
In: Generational Divide, Pop Culture, Technoculture
Tagged: , ,

Mix tapes are dead. Among the many dead technologies, I miss the mix tape. The death of a technology and its associated objects and habits can bring regret or relief. Think of letter writing. Often, the only clues to women’s history or the only insights into a previous generation’s thoughts and emotions are found in letters. Writing letters was a habitus, a way of being and doing. Today, our digital documentation is excessive, often thin, and shallow. A constant stream of 140 characters fails to capture the nuances of a traditional letter. Perhaps 19th century upper-class women writing about their tea service (see Veblen on spoons;Read More →

By:
On:
In: Technoculture
Tagged: , , ,

I now own a brand new Amazon Kindle, acquired just before Thanksgiving in a recent tech splurge. Reviews all over the net are fairly accurate. The weight, screen’s readability, size, forward and backward buttons feel great. I don’t like the five-way toggle button or the lack of lighting to read in the dark. I don’t care about lack of a touch screen since I despise fingerprints and smudges in almost OCD proportions. I found a cute Vera Bradley bag that fits the Kindle perfectly. I’m happy. DRM is an annoyance. It’s true, you give up “owning” the book due to intellectual property rights. It’s inconvenientRead More →

By:
On:
In: Technoculture
Tagged: , , , , ,

I’m posting from my new Motorola Droid. It’s frustratingly wonderful. Or wonderfully frustrating. The WordPress app seems to be working well; the keyboard is easier. Immersion seems to be the key. My typical typing speed is 125-150 words per minute, not as fast as sentences form in my head, but fast enough to prevent frustration. Blogging on Droid is painfully slow. It is helping me improve texting skills, though, as a latecomer to that game. The new iPhone commercials inspired me to give up the granny phone and enter the new century. In particular, the ad for an augmented reality app caught my attention. YouRead More →

By:
On:
In: Gratitudes, Pedagogy and Teaching, Technoculture
Tagged: , ,

Today I am grateful for copy machines. I have to return comments on group projects to students today, and I don’t have to rewrite the comments for each student. I can simply copy each group member’s copy on my magical combo printer/fax machine/copier/scanner. Once, this sort of task was impossible. I remember carbon paper, ditto machines, and mimeographs. Members of the academic generation before mine shared stories about typing their dissertations on carbon paper, and storing copies in the freezer to ensure they would survive a fire. Editing and revising under those circumstances were herculean. Carbon paper gave us the origin of the phrase carbonRead More →

By:
On:
In: Pedagogy and Teaching, Technoculture
Tagged:

There are an amazing amount of student speeches on YouTube. There are not many examples for public speaking students to watch for class, though. I’m looking specifically for examples that don’t have that polished, produced look common to publishers’ supplementary materials. Unfortunately, most of examples seem to be videos of students delivering their speeches to their sofas. Clearly, this is the product of online public speaking classes, something I have mixed feelings about. Ever since I taught an Intro to Women’s Studies class through distance learning about fifteen years ago, I’ve been wary of online teaching. An MSN Money article talks about whether or notRead More →