I’m putting together a panel on technology in the classroom for an infamous conference called South by Southwest. My presentation’s called “Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow.” This thing’s BIG. And I’m trying to make it bigger.

I’d love to show the audience the potential and capability of students connected. The Internet is a grandiose machine. So I’m extending a hand to fellow students and friends to get the word out.

If you’re willing to help, go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1123, take five seconds to create an account, and vote on my panel idea. If you want to be more awesome, vote and then leave a comment, to get people talking.

This would be an awesome way to show that students, together, can break the system, be it a simple voting interface or the conventional, old-school methodology of education.

Visit the original Facebook note here and throw it around between your own group of friends.

Also, check out these other nibblets of amazing:

Christina Xu’s Behind the ROFLs: Next-Gen Conference Organizing While Broke

Tim Hwang’s The State of the Internet Memescape: 2008-10 and Obsolete?: A World After E-mail

In some ways, I feel like I’ve conformed to another hipster precedent that I’ve been resisting for too long. And yet even though I’ve finally caved in, I still reckon that I’ve stumbled into a secret cavern lit by candlestick glow. Like an dusty, Victorian house, but one quainter than those along Brattle St.

Anyway, check it out: geno.tumblr.com. The first post goes, of course, to Diana Kimball and her most recent essay, “In the Absence of Fiction,” which put me in such a mood today that I need to write about it soon (possibly tomorrow, secretively, during work). I blame her for getting me started on this compositional adventure. So inspirational, in fact, that she’s unintentionally getting her name out there: “Her writing is passionate, idealistic, reflective, personal and fantastically geeky.”.

In the creation of my new Tumblr, though, I had to come face to face with a situation floating around the skull as of late. Looking to Tim’s predictions, he hovers over the point of ever-increasing movement toward absolute identification (“information consolidation”). Compared to my early days on the Internet, when I engaged with the parental caveats toward personal concealment (even though my first username, Owl6887, clearly emblazoned my date of birth, like every friend at the time), my current Facebook profile prominently displays a full range of contact info and idiosyncratic characteristics. My resume sits on LinkedIn; my website URL remains a monikerized placeholder. I’m certainly not branding myself, but IRL Alex is approaching pure digital socialization. I look back at old usernames in awe of my referential mindset. CollegeBoard still waves _ (a misnomer of the treasure-hunting character, Graham _, from the SNES version of Tales of Phantasia) at me before I can access my financial PROFILE. All those old AIM screen names haunt the occasional memory.

My FC friends still try to retain that creative spark. Sleuth. Diana. Chrysaora. Christina. I could list more if I had an excuse to stay up later, but I’m already tired. But I’ve returned to the username graveyard to lay bouquets on the oldies and picked up Geno at the social security office. It’s homage to my nickname of four years from high school, Gino, but influenced by the fact that the name was taken already. Now, it’s a double salute, the secondary toward this guy from another RPG.

Look for the quotes.

When I was younger, I liked to brag a lot, until one day I realized I was gradually turning into “that kid,” which propelled me into a slow process of self-exoneration and forced-realization of the humble. But I’ll take a moment to plug two upcoming talks that I’m hosting at Connecticon in Hartford, CT, from 1-3 August, entitled “R-R-Remix! The Mashed Up Culture of Anime Fandom” and “State of the Otaku 2008.” I mention these because I have been reading through a book by one of my favorite beach-babe-turned-Harvard-professors, Chris Kelty, called Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, for a Harvard Free Culture mini-group project, which will henceforth be known as 2B2P for short, or the Two Bits Processor Project for long. This post will be a reaction and modulation of/against/for Chapter 1, Geeks and Recursive Publics, of Part 1, The Internet. I apologize in advance for this article’s long, rambling nature. If you comment, it’ll help me to organize my thoughts for the future.

Free software… to hormone-crazed, socially-bungling Japanophiles? Where’s the segue? On one hand, I could say the Internet (the title of Part 1, hey hey, coincidence?, I think not!) and only be half right. On one foot, I could say geeks, and become a tad closer to the answer. Doing a handstand, though, if I uttered “recursive public,” I just hit the bullseye. And on the topic of recursive publics is where I will tie in my latter, Connecticon-bound presentation. I want to bring in the demographic of fans of Japanese animation (also known colloquially as otaku), unrelated to any matter in the book, as an experiment in modulation: instead of responding directly to Kelty’s content, in this post I will try to flesh out, squish, and redefine the idea of recursive publics while applying the concept to another relevant population of geeks.

To begin, let’s simplify this notion of recursive public. Kelty’s definition essentially boils down to a population that deals with a content through a form, yet the content and form are the same thing. To develop it slightly further, a recursive public works through the form to protect the content mediated by the form. Kelty uses the Internet as his example, being the form that geeks use and through which geeks mediate. Geeks want to foster the Internet by coding the Internet to their own specifications (bounded by the geek moral order). Very meta indeed. Putting a quote against my simplification, “A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public” (Kelty 28).

Recursive publics are not limited to geeks or the Internet. Kelty does not provide examples of branches. One possible example: American Republicans and Democrats might be considered inclusive to the recursive public scene. Political subtleties aside, both parties exist as part of the government — the medium through which they operate and the content on which they focus their operations. Government also is the medium that allows the parties to “come into being in the first place” (28).

But there’s more to recursive publics, in fact another element entirely. Kelty discusses the concept of “layers,” regarding which he says geeks can identify and connect to create new structures to operate the form. He writes, “[Geeks] express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways” (29). This second element ties in with the idea that recursive publics “argue through” their medium(s)” (29). Kelty highlights the combination of Napster and network connections to form a miniature scale of the Internet at large. The layering process then provides additional support for the population of the recursive public to develop and protect the medium.

Otaku are part of a recursive public. However, the demographic of anime and manga fans interacting with their medium fundamentally challenges Kelty’s notion of the recursive public. Why: the anime fandom’s medium is, obviously, animation. However, most anime fans do not have the technical expertise or sometimes even amateur aptitude to interact with the animated medium. For anime fans, it is easy to “express ideas” yet difficult to “express infrastructures” (29).

I’ll step away from that difficulty for a moment. First, I want to tackle the ideology of the recursive public. In a long-winded explanation, Kelty basically argues that recursive publics operate through a type of morality, one that structures the goals of the community. To reiterate, geeks of the recursive public participate in “writing and publishing and speaking and arguing” but also make software for “circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability” of those forms of rhetorical communication. In total, arguments and the methods employed to sculpt those arguments evolve into a sense of morality which will govern future arguments and methods. It’s all very cyclical, but “the circularity is essential to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (48).

To return to the otaku: these geeks too share a moral ideology based in the medium of animation. Examples include the cease of the distribution of fansubs (subtitles added to the original Japanese animation, distributed for foreign audiences) once an animated series is licensed by a US company, or doujinshi (comic book remixes of series) that do not copy the original series but build upon it [this latter topic is discussed in Chapter 1 of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture]. This morality, then, continues on to affect what Kelty calls “changing relations of power and knowledge” (29). Japanese animation, particularly dealing with fans in the US, has challenged the current production market and copyright itself, particularly regarding Free Use. And although barely developed as that of the culture of free software, the power and authority in otaku culture continues to change, led by greats such as Toshio Okada and Takashi Murakami.

But I must return to and address the problem of the formulation of infrastructures when animation is the medium. Can a recursive public exist when a technical boundary is inherently set up in the public’s system? Let’s examine a possible route to the solution: topical and metatopical spaces. Kelty recognizes that geeks of free software do not congregate in topical spaces, meaning assembly in the physical arena, but instead “[knit] a plurality of spaces into one larger space of non-assembly” (39). Anime fans in the US, contrarily, began in so-called topical spaces (also known as mom’s basement), eventually immigrating to the Internet where the fandom now continues to thrive. Is it possible that because the culture of free software began online that its followers automatically shared the prowess necessary to participate fully in both argument and creation, and they shared such knowledge and capabilities between each other, while otaku might not possess these technical traits because they did not mature in the presence of the medium (layman’s terms: they weren’t animators, so should we expect them to animate?).

That’s certainly a pressing question to Toshio Okada, co-founder of Gainax (one of the original major Japanese animation production companies) and self-proclaimed Otaking. So pressing, in fact, that he has declared, “Otaku are dead.” What can he mean, when thousands of American anime fans are running around with their heads cut off at hundreds of conventions across the United States yearly. Just that: with their heads cut off, today’s fans have no direction.

In a public talk, recorded by Otaku2.com, Okada answered the following question:

You mentioned that there is a gap between fan generations, or yours and that of today. Can you elaborate on this?

Okada: I think there is a big difference that is clear in what is popular. Take manga, which is selling in the mainstream, and series popular with maniacs, which are not selling. “Clover and Honey” is a good example. Some people just buy it, some are fans and only a few are maniacs who really dive into the series, so it fails to move the masses. The manga becomes nothing but a topic of discussion among older men who compete on who read it more properly. When with others, these tangents don’t go well and a discussion never takes off. The media can’t talk about otaku as one anymore because we aren’t. There is no core literature or readership. I don’t think I can explain this well enought to convince you, but anyway.

Okada is famously known for his participation on the infamous otaku commentary, Otaku no Video, a major yet sardonic commentary on the state of otaku in Japan. As a producer, though, Okada exemplifies the paragon leader of the otaku recursive public: one who comments on and comments through the form. He sees, though, a major change in generations of otaku, which leads to his harsh declaration. Describing his own generation of anime fans, Okada said at MIT in 2003: “These were fans who were so passionate and enthusiastic about anime that they became vocal and informed critics.” Speaking of the modern anime fanatic, he stated, “Unfortunately… the latest generation of anime viewers in Japan are not true Otaku. They may be anime fans, but they lack the deep, passionate connection to the medium, and many of them seem to have taken up anime fandom because it’s cool or “fashionable.” Rather than being active critics of anime, they are content to be customers, or consumers.” Okada is right about many viewers even five years later, today, as teenagers attend anime conventions with nothing short of shoutouts to Naruto and Bleach. Still, there are some fans that put their critical eye to work to uphold the name of otaku, but cannot argue for anime through the infrastructure of animation. How should they be considered in a culture that began as a recursive public yet has in recent times reverted to a mere consumer culture? A younger Okada, seeing no good animation after the end of the original Gundam series way back when, participated in the creation of two original animated shorts, Daicon III and Diacon IV (the latter of which, if you watch it quickly, contains a homage to Star Wars of all things). The importance of these novelties remains the fact that the recursive public protects the content by arguing through the form. Okada’s message to young fans rings with Keltyism: “Just make your own anime, in English, by yourself.”

I’m not depressed. The phrase “All is not lost” is too drastic to use, yet it would encompass a little bit of the situation. But only a little, because the situation is improving. Paul “Otaking” Johnson recently published on YouTube a criticism of the online fansubbing community, a five-part video series which begins here. It’s just one example of the recursive public finally taking a stand once again. In an interview not too long ago, he stated, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. My video was free and I got paid nothing, but it didn’t stop me researching translation theory for a year or hand drawing and animating the cut scenes just to grab people’s attention (they certainly wouldn’t stick around for my voice, that’s for sure!),” which exemplifies exactly what Okada wanted out of the new otaku generation. Other models include Makoto Shinkai, who animated his own story, Voices of a Distant Star and went on to produce a number of other anime, or even the father of Japanese animation, Osamu Tezuka, who copied Disney’s style to form the foundation of what would compose anime fandom today, who animated for entertainment yet still included his own acute commentary on post-war Japan.

Back to the issue, though: What happens when a fan simply can’t do this sort of high-caliber work?

Layers. The second element in Kelty’s concept. What does Japanese animation become when applied to new intrastructural models? Doujinshi. Anime music videos. Cosplay. Fansubs. Remixed comic books. Reworked animation set to music. Dressing up as characters. Subtitling original show material. All these examples are miniature structures of the animation scene at large, yet do not require the ultimate technical expertise vital to the production of genuine animation. But Kelty does not approach the potential for layers to avoid manifestation as the actual infrastructure (eg. Internet) and instead form new forms of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, for free software in relation to the Internet, no new form of the infrastructure exists, because there is only one Internet. For anime, though, animation exists as media with many offsets. Anime fans congregate in topical and metatopical spaces. Otaku participate as much as possible as the true nature of the recursive public has begun to resurface over the last decade. Hopefully as technology advances fans will be provided a more accessible platform to evolve the recursive public and resurrect the name of otaku.

Please comment on this second post in the Two Bits Processor Project, and please visit the blogs of my friends who are participating with me on this most excellent project:

Tim Hwang, blogging at The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches
Christina Xu, blogging at ComPromise
yours truly, blogging at DianaKimball.com
Mike Wolfe, blogging at Machinations
And me, Alex Leavitt, blogging here

Chris Kelty. Teaching at Rice University as a professor of anthropology. Visiting Harvard to teach History of Science & Tech. Popping out of a small beach top.

Actually, this is not Chris Kelty. This picture just so happens to be the first result in a Flickr tag search for “kelty.” However, it’s not unfortunate that Chris isn’t a black-haired, bikini-clad bombshell, because he is, in fact, the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (read it here or buy it here).

If you’ve been turned off to this post because I have disappointed you with dreams of scantily-clad ladies, I apologize. To make up for my indiscretion, I present to you the real Chris Kelty, to provide an introduction to what will henceforth be called the Two Bits Processor Project:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdGBxCqDLJ8]

Chris explains Two Bits as a toolbox for asking questions. A quote that acts as a perfect segue into explaining the methodology behind the *echoing announcer’s voice* Two. Bits. Processor. Project. Essentially… Five people. Five blogs (FYI, each letter of the word blogs is a separate link). Nine chapters, one introduction, and one conclusion. One section per week. Compose and comment and collaborate. Chris calls this modulation (I call it awesome). Hopefully our endeavor will succeed more fully than a two-bit processor would ever operate, but I have much confidence. For a much more starry-eyed and reflective introduction to our (Tim, Christina, Diana, Mike’s, and my) project, check out Diana’s post.

Following is, first, a reaction to the Introduction of Kelty’s Two Bits and then two lighthearted rejoinders in light of the book as a book.

一番：前置き

Two Bits is an anthropological ethnography, which might also be known as a description of the customs of a people. Example: puking into their children’s mouths might be a topic relevant to a penguin ethnography. Together, these multiple customs equal a culture. For geeks, the focal group of the book, Kelty describes their culture in terms of, in one light, “figuring things out… in discussion… designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and fixing” (Kelty 18). Since Two Bits comes off as a more anthropological text, Kelty writes that a lot of stories will “illustrate what geeks are like.”

But where do geeks stand as a culture in society? I think this is necessary to understand before tackling a book of this caliber (unless Kelty explains that in Chapter One and thence I am hosed). Bluntly, he emphasizes geek nature: “vocal, loud, persistent, and loquacious” (19), a strange dichotomy compared to a backdrop of popular opinion regarding ’80s and ’90s high school kinetics (à la Sixteen Candles. A couple of decades later and geeks are getting more press than getting shoved into lockers. Basically, geeks have a voice. A statement that leads into a revelation of my own English-major-based nerdgasm when I spotted a convoluted reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). In her treatise, Spivak defends what she terms the subaltern, associated with the regional persons or groups outside of the hegemonic structure of power. Specifically, she argues for a dominant voice not to represent the repressed classes of the Indian subcontinent, but for some utterance to escape these peoples’ mouths, to speak for themselves by themselves. The remixed allusion that Kelty creates is that “The superalterns can speak for themselves” (19). In the twenty-first century, geeks have leapt up the social ladder in measures of numerous rungs. We geeks have a voice that others listen to in society. And because we have a voice, we can initiate what Kelty describes as the “reorientation of power and knowledge” (6).

Because geeks have a voice, though, it seems that Kelty finds this fact to be a barrier in the composition of the book. However, it is not a hindrance. Instead of having to explain geeks as a people, he can use them to explain themselves, since they are so prominent on the Internet that it’s impossible not to find the unavoidable information. He elucidates, “I am less interested in treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they are not the objects of its analysis” (19).

The wonderful thing about geeks becomes their habitation: the Internet. Kelty explains the benefit: “[A] very important aspect of the contemporary Internet… is its singularity: there is only one Internet” (9). Tim highlights in his modulation that Kelty’s ethnography isn’t localized. We don’t see a professor exploring the forbidden highlands of Southeast Whoknowswheresia. Instead, Kelty deals with people, what they do, and how they do it, via the Internet. But the point that the monopoly of the Internet exists solely by itself goes beyond possibility and potential of geographic limitation or liberation. Just like geography, geeks work in one space and work for that space. Proud, Kelty says, “The outcome of [the decisions to create certain configurations, standards, and protocols to make the Internet work] has been to privilege the singularity of the Internet and to champion its standardization” (9). The convenience is simply that the world’s geeks live a beep and a click miles away from each other. It’s glocalization on a metaphysical (both senses) scale.

二番：題名

I want to have a bit of fun trying to dissect Two Bits. As an English major, I take pleasure in titles, so I want to examine what the moniker suggests as we move into the text.

An excerpt from Kelty’s website explaining the cover art of the book:
“The cover of Two Bits features one panel from a series of paintings by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), a symbolist painter from Lyon and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The series is called The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit, the Harbinger of Light and decorates the entrance hall of the Boston Public Library. The particular panel on the cover is called “Physics: By the wondrous agency of Electricity, Speech flashes through Space,” and represents the telegraph. I’ve heard it said of this panel that it is colloquially called “Good News and Bad News.” Hence, Two Bits” (http://twobits.net/cover/).

So, good news and bad news. Is that what I’ll have to expect from the book? I wasn’t foreseeing a Zittrain in the least. Personally, the first impression of the title alluded to the phrase my two cents to refer to a unique opinion, namely Kelty’s. Considering the idiom, would such a cheaply-priced opinion be of any worth? A minimal amount of sleuthing revealed both value (importance of putting a stamp on your letter) and aquality (disrespect for pennies as currency).

However, two bits may also refer to the equivalency of twenty-five cents. Hey, that’s one pay phone call, or used to be. Lack of value now that we’re all on cells?

I’ll tell you what gives value to the phrase, though. Apparently two bits is a response to the idiom shave and a haircut, which isn’t an idiom at all but a tune with which we should all be familiar. If you peruse that Wikipedia entry, you’ll discover that the equivalent of “two bits” in vulgar colloquialisms equates to “You bastard!” I have no idea how this fits into Kelty’s vision in the least, but if you’re ever reading the book on the T and someone insults you, shove the text in his face. Maybe Free Software will make a small impact on that SOB’s life.

三番：本か画素

Another influence of the literature concentration on my approach to texts is to view the content in terms of the form. I attended the talk that Kelty gave at MIT to announce Two Bits, and in the Q&A session an audience member inquired as to the benefits and consequences of the book being released in PDF form online for free. Thus the room gave birth to a discussion concerning the value of books. In the end, it really comes down to paying for a physical object that satisfies the carnal needs in our fingertips. Kelty did succeed in arguing that bookstores in most rural communities across the U.S. would probably not carry the text due to its highly technical nature, not relevant to the general populace in the area. The PDF online provides the opportunity for individuals in these communities to check out the book with the potential for them to purchase it post-skim.

I bring up the argument, though, because the circulation of a text online satisfies the criteria of an instance where the attitudes behind the Free Software movement transfer to another realm, namely market politics. Two Bits in PDF, as a form, reflects the practices that Kelty enumerates in his arguments. The book online also mirrors what Kelty explains as part of the “spectrum of political activity” in which geeks participate: “[Geeks] can both express and ‘implement’ ideas” of Free Software in Free Software.

I’ll end this post with some of the other excepts that I marked off whilst reading through the Introduction that I felt were necessary to mention, if not explicate, and to which I might return in the reading of Two Bits:

• “By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system…” – When we approach the concept of a culture, do we not consider it in light of its traditionalism more than its fluidity?
• “‘For more people, the Internet is porn, stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail, online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc. etc.’ It is impossible to explain all of these things…” – Can these items actually be explained?
• “Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify, mash-up, remix, or reuse.” – Which media are difficult to [verb]?
• “Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free press.” – It seems as if this statement was more applicable a few years ago…
• Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture) finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, what does its temporality look like…? – No comment. This deserves it’s own future post.
• What does it mean to plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? – I wonder how many people would comprehend the potential to/for remix.

I, along with my benevolent colleagues over at the Two Bits Processor Project, always encourage commenting on our modulations, or creating a modulation of your own.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, I pieced together a video encapsulating the momentous occasion:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UdGX6kMaeY]
Notes:
- Pictures of the Zuneral preparation are borrowed from Christina Xu’s Flickr.
- The marble engravings are from the JFK memorial fountain inside JFK Park.

You can browse the Zuneral photographs tagged on Flickr here.

Also, take a look at DRM is Dead to Me, featured in the video, for the community’s perspective on the life and times of DRM.

I’ve already discussed the social tools used (or overused, or underused?) during Berkman@10, but of course as at any conference much real networking occurred as well. Not one particularly adept as networking in any sense, I did meet an excellent bunch of new contacts and friends. I didn’t speak with many adults — probably a mistake on my part — but I did make the acquaintance of Jeff Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education; Miriam Simun, the coordinator of research in the Digital Natives project over at the Berkman Center; and recently-graduated Andy Sellars. Of course, I’m extremely sociable with those my own age, so I spent a good deal of time speaking with and hanging around Diana Kimball, Tim Hwang, Dean Jansen, Greg Price, Christina Xu, David Edelman (from Oxford University) and Rob (aka. moot, of 4chan). I have to admit: I’ll probably be attending more Harvard Free Culture events than those of BUFC in the future. On the other hand, two pieces of really good news: First, I spoke with Miriam about participating in the Digital Natives project next spring as an intern, after I return from Japan, and the potential looks good. Second, after talking at length with Christina and Diana, it looks like I may have a spot on the team of ROFLCon 2008. All in all, I took away a bunch of real-world connections from Berkman@10 and now I’m hooked on attending conferences.

If anyone’s willing to help me fund a trip to Washington D.C., I really want to go to Beyond Broadcast 2008 at American University on June 17th. Maybe I’ll get some cash from my 21st birthday on June 8th *hint hint*.