Power Law and Social Media

I spend a lot of time with a biochemist, who is in love with proteins. Really. He spends more time fondly thinking about proteins, their structures and activities than anything else. Yes, there is debate about such things, and, yes, proteins actually do stuff. I am a little sad I know this.

Anyway, this perhaps explains why a particular passage in chapter 3 of Jill Walker Rettberg’s Blogging jumped out at me:

Simply put, the power law states that blogs that already have ‘power’ will get more. This is not a feature specific to blog or social networks; it is a feature of networks, as physicist and network theorist Albert Laszlo Barabasi explains:

A new node joining a network, such as a new web page or a new protein, can in principle connect to any pre-existing node. However, preferential attachment dictates that its choice will not be entirely random, but linearly biased by the degree of pre-existing nodes — that is, the number of links that the nodes have with other nodes.  This induces a rich-get-richer effect, allowing more connected nodes to gain more links at the expense of their less-connected counterparts.  Hence, the large-degree nodes turn into hubs and the network becomes scale-free — the probability distribution of the degrees over the entire network follows a power law. (Barabasi 2012)

So much for the freedom and egalitarianism of the web.

I have to admit, I did not understand all of the jargon in the above passage.  What the heck does scale-free mean? The image it brought to mind was fish scales.  Probably because I was hungry.  Luckily for me, I have the hub known as Google.  I found a nice (albeit lengthy and academic) Scientific American article through the University of Notre Dame’s website. Basically, previous theories looked at networks as random — each node in a random system has an equal number of connections to other nodes. Okay, then they studied the Internet. Barbasi and Bornabeau write:

So in 1998, when we, together with Hawoong Jeong and Reka Albert of the University of Notre Dame, embarked on a project to map the World Wide Web, we expected to find a random network. Here’s why: people follow their unique interests when deciding what sites to link their Web documents to, and given the diversity of everyone’s interests and the tremendous number of pages they can choose from, the resulting pattern of connections should appear fairly random. The measurements, however, defied that expectation. Software designed for this project hopped from one Web page to another and collected all the links it could. Although this virtual robot reached only a tiny fraction of the entire Web, the map it assembled revealed something quite surprising: a few highly connected pages are essentially holding the World Wide Web together. More than 80 percent of the pages on the map had fewer than four links, but a small minority, less than 0.01 percent of all nodes, had more than 1,000.

That was in 1998, when the world wide web was a bit smaller.  In 2005 it looked like this:

OPTE Projet Map of the Internet 2005

They called these systems “scale-free” to reflect the fact that some nodes, or hubs, have a seemingly unlimited number of links and no node is like any other.  Apparently these types of networks can be found everywhere, from cell’s metabolic systems to actors in Hollywood. In these systems a small percentage of nodes have the most connections and keep it all together.  Apparently these systems behave similarly — they are pretty immune to accidental disaster, but vulnerable to planned attack.  hmmmmm …

I also found this Popular Science article on Albert-Laszlo Barabasi which was interesting and frightening, all at the same time.  On page 2 Gregory Mone, the author of the piece, gets into Barbasi’s more recent work with “control nodes.” He has been studying just what percentage of hubs need to be manipulated in order to change, or control, a system.

Yikes.  I suppose this can be a good thing in terms of proteins and tumor growth, but the idea that a small percentage of websites are control nodes in the system of the internet, well, that is troubling.

On a lighter note:

This video is fun.  It is a look at how we see the world — the shift from the hierarchy of the tree to the power of networks:

There is more to say about all of this — beyond the research into what the theory is.  Hopefully I can wrap my brain around it and write more about it in another post.

 

The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Abjection, and the Body as an Envelope

I feel like all of my posts should have a nerd alert warning, but, well, this one really needs it. My inner nerd is coming out to play. Unrestrained. I have found that these posts are a way for me to try stuff out that I am thinking about writing. This is one of those.

I keep thinking about that 14 minute segment of Thomas Pettitt’s lecture I highlighted in a previous post (minutes 23 – 37, in case you missed it). He talks about words being restrained in the container of the book happening about the same time paintings start to be framed, fixed maps start to replace navigational directions, and the image of the body starts to be seen as an envelope. A container. That 14 minutes of video has been pinging around in my brain ever since. I am fascinated by this. Fascinated.

I study fairy tales, this is true. But I also spend a lot of my time with Julia Kristeva’s work, particularly her theory of abjection. My thesis, in fact, is trying to bring those two things together. As a result, sometimes I get lost in my own head. Anyway, this idea of the image of the body as an envelope corresponding to the Gutenberg Parenthesis really connects with abjection.

As Pettitt points out, etiquette of the time starts to become very concerned with keeping the envelope intact. Cover your mouth when you yawn or cough, cover your nose when you sneeze, don’t eat with your mouth open, keep your legs and ankles together, and so on and so forth. According to Kristeva, when anything leaves the body it becomes abject. If we didn’t view the body as an envelope, a container, if we weren’t so concerned with categories and compartments (another aspect of the Parenthesis, according to Pettitt), we wouldn’t have the abject.

Would we also not be as concerned with the differentiation of self and other?

How much does materiality affect cognition?

Could abjection be the result of the Gutenberg Parenthesis?
I can’t stop thinking about it.

 

(Frozen Text)

“He threw whole handfuls of frozen words on deck, and they looked like striped pills of different colors. We saw words of mouth, green words, blue words, black words, golden words.  When we warmed them a bit in our hands, they melted like snow. Then we really heard them!”

— Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

From the University of Guelph’s collection

I always enjoy having disparate paths of inquiry come together.  Or maybe it just seems like everything is coming together and making sense, and I really just need to lay off the DayQuil. Anyway, I read fairy tales.  I study them, I read about them, I write about them.  And, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have a speecher working on a speech about fanfiction.  And then this week I started reading about changing media and the Gutenberg Parenthesis.  How did these come together you ask? Well, it might just be the DayQuil, but it seemed like they did.

The same week I was reading about the advent of chapbooks causing a huge shift in oral fairy tale tradition to a literary one, my student was telling me that fanfiction didn’t come into existence until print and the copyright (in other words, before there was a fixed version and owner of a story, it wasn’t fanfiction, it was just fiction,  See Shakespeare). And then I started reading Jill Walker Rettberg’s Blogging.

In chapter two she writes:

With every media shift there have been skeptical voices lamenting the loss of whatever characteristics the previously dominant medium was perceived as promoting . . . Plato famously argued that writing had great disadvantages in comparison to oral dialogue. (49)

From Caroline Sumpter’s “Book Culture From Below”

In fact, the notion that print — and the newspaper in particular — was a killer of the oral fairy tale was a claim frequently made by Yeats himself, and one which resurfaces (from a Marxist rather than a nationaliast angle) in Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller.”

Oh, the horrors! However, If Thomas Pettit’s is right, then we are returning to a pre-print mentality and understanding of communication.  Rettberg introduces Pettit on page 47:

Before the introduction of print, Pettit argues, literature and art were seen as malleable, flexible, and changing.  A story would be performed again and again, told by a storyteller or enacted in a theatre. A song or tune would have no owner, but be played in different ways by different people. With the introduction of print, we began to think of literature as something that could be fixed in time and space. (48)

According to Pettit, this is something we are returning to with the decline of importance placed on fixed print in the digital age.  Bring it on, I say. This is an intriguing idea, and one I was unfamiliar with.  Cue the research.

What I found:

• A rather lengthy lecture by Thomas Pettit at MIT on the Guttenberg Parenthesis.  Feel free to skip the first 2 and a half minutes of intro, and then the important part is really the half hour after that (yes, it’s long, but worth the time. Seriously). If you are really pressed for time, the really interesting bit is from minutes 23 to 37. He talks about the parenthesis regimenting words so that they are contained — to stop them from “getting out,” and the effect on cognition.

• This lecture is summarized in writing here.

• A prezi on the Guttenberg Parenthesis by Amy Burvall

If you don’t feel like looking through all 191 slides, 8 and 9 are the most relevant to understanding Pettit’s perspective (8 is a video of Pettit), and 87 is my favorite.  Slam poetry, from television’s perspective. Slide 125 is a hoot — a professor from University of Argentina describes why they started a Facebook project there — because they were sick and tired of their students looking at them with cow faces.  Yup, I know that feeling.  Slide 142 is fantastic and presents guidelines from the Steal Like an Artist site.

In fact, that is so fabulous, it warrants its own image.

And the author, Austin Kleon, has a TED talk.. Yay!

I may be developing a little intellectual crush on this guy. It happens. Don’t judge.

But, I digress, back to Burvall’s Prezi. I highly encourage you to watch the whole thing and be open to it.  It is a work of art, and though I have isolated certain bits, it is understood best in its entirety.

• A paper about digital literacy and new paradigms in media and learning. The authors begin this paper with an examination of the differences in attitude toward digital media between teachers and students.  Particularly interesting to think about how beliefs about whether knowledge is owned or retrieved may be impacting classroom contexts and (mis)communication between instructor and student. Reminded me of the Argentinian professor’s cow faced students.

• A less wonky explanation of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, viewed through a journalistic lens, can be found in The Guardian.

• And a blog! Dedicated to examining the Guttenberg Parenthesis! Ok, it is pretty brief yet, she might think the Internet is a new god, and we don’t seem to have a lot in common, but it is an interesting endeavor.

For more information about fairy tales and chapbooks (because who doesn’t want to know more about that?):

• From the International Library of Children’s Literature, information about the rise and popularity of fairy tale chapbooks.

• Also, I am super excited about this project (and not-so-slightly jealous).  Students at the University of Guelph are digitizing a collection of chapbooks, archiving and curating them for a digital collection.  These are all Scottish chapbooks from the 17th and 18th centuries and contain romances, comedies, political essays, information about social customs, and yes, fairy tales. I can’t wait to see what they the end result of this project is.

 

Reflection 1

For the past two weeks I have tried to blog and tweet at least once a day. That did not happen. I read blogs and tweets at least once a day, but realized anew what I already knew: time management is not my forte. Neither is generating a lot of writing in a short amount of time. I tend to ponder and let things percolate for quite awhile before I commit anything to paper, or in this case, screen. So, here I am. The trying was valuable, and I haven’t given up hope just yet.

As I drove home from teaching a bunch of grumpy students today, I listened to The Circuit with Kari Miller. She had on as a guest this morning Clive Thompson, who was making the case that rather than making us stupid, technology is changing our brains for the better. You can listen to the interview here. As I drove home pondering this post and listening to Thompson, I am glad I took on this challenge.

Anyway, the blog, though slowly moving and still finding a focus, has been rewarding. Twitter is a little less so. Too much of a blending of selves. As in, too many (high school) students out there following, retweeting, having no filters. It is not entirely comfortable for me. I honestly am still trying to sort that one out.

I also ventured into RSS universe via feedly. I have not become enamored of it, yet. We will see how that one goes.

SO, my plan for the next week:

• give up blogging once a day and work on a chunk of blogs during the days I have more open-ended periods of time.
• increase my comfort level on Twitter ever-so-slightly.
• download the Feedly app and see if that makes the RSS heavens open and light shine down upon, well, something.

What I did manage to do on this blog this week (in case you missed any of it):

• Disney, Fairy Tales, and Nazis
• Just How Important are those Hoops?
• Creative Commons
• Spreading the Love
• About Me

 

Creative Commons

This is something I have been swimming around in for the past year.  Textbooks.  College textbooks are horrendously expensive.  I have a hard time justifying the cost of some of the Composition and Argument  textbooks that students are required to buy.  Especially when the binding falls apart two months into the semester.  I mean, really, Aristotle hasn’t come up with anything new in the past few years (okay, that was snarky and reductive. There is more that goes into these textbooks. I know that). Also, my disclaimer: I am pretty tough on books I am teaching out of:

Still, I think a textbook should hold up to some pencils, post-it notes, coffee spills, and wild gesturing.  I mean, really.

Anyway, this semester I just required a handbook, Writing with Sources, 2nd edition, by Gordon Harvey:

Or as I call it, How Not to Plagiarize. It is inexpensive — less than $7 on Amazon.

Beyond that I am using Open Source Textbooks in the class.  It is an experiment, so we will see how it goes, but so far so good.  I have spent quite a bit of time hunting around for chapters, essays, and texts that are useful for my particular purposes, but they are out there.  The concern I still have is that the readings will lack continuity. Cue the teacher.  I am just going to have to be the bridge between the stuff I am making them confront through the readings and the stuff I am asking them to confront through their writing.  We will see how effective of a bridge I can be.

Texts I have found, am using, might use (it’s all an adventure):

• Writing Commons’ Academic Argument, by Joseph Moxley, University of South Florida

• Claims, Claims, Claims, Courtesy of the Odegaard Writing & Research Center, University of Washington

• Finding the Good Argument, or the Importance of Logic, by Rebecca Jones

• Backpacks vs Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis, by Laura Bolin Carroll

These are all open source texts, so you would think that I already knew something about Creative Commons.  Honestly, other than my understanding from reading the license information, I don’t know as much  as I should. This is what most of them have on the front page somewhere:

*This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the

Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative

Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105,

USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.

org/terms-of-use.

I have read enough of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License to know that I can use the texts for class, as long as I am not selling them or using them in any other commercial way.  Also, I attribute the work to the author.  That is as far as I went.

So what is Creative Commons?

I started with this website:

The US Creative Commons Website

This describes what the creative commons is. Which is, according to their website:

“Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.”

It includes a handy-dandy choose-your-own-adventure flow-chart to find what cc license works for you. From this, I found that for most of the work I do on the web, I want the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

They further state that they do not replace copyright, but work alongside copyright.  That is where things get a little muddled for me. So, what’s the difference?

I found something of use on this page: Fair Use, Public Domain, and Creative Commons:

… CC creates a zone inside copyright ownership for owners who want to be generous and give their works away. All CC licenses impose some conditions, and some impose more than others. (Some people ignore this; owners of CC licenses sometimes complain that people do not honor the conditions.) This makes CC a copyright-light zone rather than copyright-free zone, and of course it does nothing (and doesn’t pretend to) to loosen long and strong copyright policy—rather, it depends upon it.

I did try reading the government’s copyright information to try to figure out exactly what is going on there in light of web-based content, I really did.  They need to read their own Plain Language Guidelines.

The Frequently Asked Questions Page was much more helpful. This was interesting:

When is my work protected?
Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

So, I guess what I got out of my information hunt is that fixed, tangible work is protected under copyright, and Creative Commons strives to give people more concrete information about how the work may be used, shared, modified, or not.  It seems like it is an ethical and legal guide to fair use, which is a rather ambiguous term.

What do you all think? I still feel a little muddled …

But! Here’s a useful site for anyone looking for Open Educational Resources.

 

Disney, Fairy Tales, and Nazis

So, I always thought Disney was the worst thing to happen to fairy tales (Sorry, Jen’s Quill Pen!).  Then I read this book:

image from Google Books

As it turns out, the Nazis may have been worse when it comes to nefarious use of fairy and folk tales.  According to Zipes, in the Nazi era “folktales were considered to be holy or sacred Aryan relics.  Therefore, the classical fairy tales of the Grimms, Anderson, and Bechstein were promoted as ideal on recommended reading lists for children.” Yikes. He goes on to quote Christa Kamenetsky, author of Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany,  “The innocent folktale was transformed into an ideological weapon meant to serve the building of the Thousand Year Reich. Thus party official Alfred Eyd announced in 1935, “the German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young.”” Those bastards.  

Now we are getting to the part that makes me a little uncomfortable (instead of righteously indignant, which is a pretty  comfortable feeling for me):

If I understand Zipes correctly, to accomplish this they did not rewrite the tales stressing Aryan features and so forth, rather there was “an enormous effort made by educators, party functionaries, and literary critics to revamp the interpretation of the tales in accordance with Nazi ideology and to use those interpretations in socializing children.” The most popular tales of the time were used to stress the importance of large families and fertility, purity, an authoritarian male at the head of each family, and a young woman seeking salvation through her modesty, industriousness, and virginity.  Likewise, for the male protagonist to achieve his goal he must demonstrate strength, loyalty, and at times the ability to kill that which threatens the stability of the “rightful” order. There was absolute loyalty to the state, at the expense of even the family unit if need be. This socialization through interpretation was an explicit policy of the Third Reich.

Here’s the problem. This mutable ability of the tales, this capacity to be analyzed, interpreted, reinterpreted, to mean different things to different people at different times in their lives is one of the things I love about fairy tales.  It is a question of what the tale is essentially about.  Is Red Riding Hood about not talking to strangers, not straying from the path, staying true to yourself, the danger of being consumed by some elemental force in the woods, be afraid of the wolf, or sexual maturity, or something else all together?  The discussion is endless and fascinating. Who decides?

The fact is it’s the storyteller.  Every storyteller takes the tale, combines it with some social aspect of self and audience and produces something new.  Even the Grimms did this.  When you look for it you can see evidence of their desire for German unification and self-determination all over the place.  Frankly, this is the fun of telling stories.  When the storyteller is controlled by the state, or by the market, we have a problem. Because every storyteller has an agenda.

I guess I would rather the agenda be an individual one, rather than an institutionalized one.

I think what makes me uncomfortable about the Nazi agenda is that their interpretation of the tales that I love was based on the text, which has always been my defense as well — and ultimate question: Can it be supported with evidence from the text? It bothers me that their answer to that was “yes.”  They didn’t rewrite anything, just looked at them through a different lens.  The Nazis put themselves into the history of the discourse surrounding these tales, and the stories feel all tainted now.  Yuck.

Anyway, I guess the Nazis were worse than Disney.  But that doesn’t let Disney off the hook, especially when they do things like this.