gnovis - Georgetown University's Journal of Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT)

What can I do with Google Wave?

trish — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:55:40 +0000

Google Wave. I’ve heard people talking about it for a while now. Some have gotten invitations. I have not. For this week’s gnovis Round Up, I’ve compiled some info on what Google Wave is and what it can do. Now that it has been up and running for a few weeks, look over the reactions and suggested uses from around the blogosphere. Check it out. Let us know if you use it and why (Jason T: now we all know not to expect an invite from you any time soon ;) ).

If you have one, shoot me over an invitation and I’ll check it out myself.

Don’t know what Google Wave is? Neither did I. Luckily the site whatisgooglewave.com has all the answers:

[Google Wave] is a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking, with a strong collaborative focus, mixed with spellchecker and translator extensions, which are able to work in concert, in real-time.

Still not getting a clear picture? Check out this very cute video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo&feature=player_embedded

Zach Wittaker on ZDnet.com writes:
But maybe the long of the short of it is that it just doesn’t even feel slightly ready yet. There’s no particular way to get started, no easy way to begin, and I was immensely confused when features which weren’t available yet opened up a draft wave to explain it… [It] is too tricky and fiddly to get working with comfortably.

Chris Crum on WebProNews is generally positive but skeptical of the hype:

It seems cool and potentially useful. Worst case scenario, it is just another tool that you can use if you want, which may or may not make your life (and work) easier. Best case (for Google at least), it becomes like email (or to a lesser extent Facebook) in the sense that it is practically unavoidable to use because everyone you know uses it and if you don't you will be out of the loop. At this point, I'm just leaning toward the former.

On Neowin.net, Max Majewski sees faults but looks forward to future benefits:
Google Wave won't make the world a better place, or even reverse the damages we've done to nature. It can help inspire such thinking, though; since it makes spreading news and ideas easer yet…. As soon as people realize in what ways using a wave could render even the most obscure project crystal-clear, Google Wave is the refulgent victor.

Zombie Journalism explains 4 potential uses for Google Wave specifically for journalists:
1. It’s a newsroom budgeting solution
2. It’s a reporting collaboration tool
3. It’s a community conversation tool
4. It’s a public Wiki or crowdsourced story

Richard MacManus on ReadWriteWeb offers a few uses for Google Wave in the University:
Overall, it is clear that Google Wave has potential to be very useful in the education system, particularly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. Three students experimented with just that in a lecture; the resulting notes were said to be "more complete" than if Wave hadn't been used.

After sending out 9 invitations, the Electric Educator published the responses from several educators. This is just one example. Check out the rest:
One of the advantages of Google wave will be "Globalization". This way people from different cultures who speak different languages, can communicate with each other. Thus, bringing them closer to one another, another step in the direction of making this world a real "village".

Technophobia is Undead: (or was never dead and is actually a demon stalking your girlfriend.)

mollyshea — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:48:13 +0000

There is something refreshing about the technophobia latent in the Halloween blockbuster thriller Paranormal Activity. (Please note: This article contains spoilers) Perhaps the most timely component of the film is its technophobia, rather than its budget (Blair Witch Project) or no-name cast (Katie Featherston as Katie and Micah Sloat as Micah).

The film cycles as a metamovie with Micah's video camera and home recording studio the discovered evidence of the couples' own personal cinematic horrors, remediated into a projected experience for me and my own boyfriend watching it in a movie theatre in Brooklyn. The film's synopsis is as follows: Micah begins filming goings-on in the house because his live-in girlfriend Katie is having strange experiences that might be best described early on as a haunting. Katie asks Micah several times throughout the movie to stop his own filming because it is (obviously to audiences) making things much worse. Over time and after many hours of footage, the ghost becomes more like a poltergeist and then finally, a full on demon. Micah taunts the demon with the video camera several times, asking it to show itself, which it does via sound waves on his audio equipment. Micah even puts powder on the doorway to their bedroom, almost like putting movie makeup on the demon, who enters the room and scares the crap out of Katie but not so much Micah. Micah seems to think he can handle everything himself, that he is the man of the house and everything will be under control if they can just stay calm and continue to videotape the paranormal events. And everything ends up badly for the both of them.

Horror and sci-fi audiences are familiar with technophobia (a fear of technology) in the common narratives of machines usurping human agency. Think of the Terminator series, where machines are the catalyst for our destruction and then continue to hunt us down in the aftermath of our apocalypse. Or Bladerunner, which was pretty much the same thing. William Gibson's Neuromancer is an epic story of a super computer that has access to human subjectivity like a god.

Technophobia is not only manifest as cyberpunk proverbs but also in everyday society as well. The enduring hacker threat that saw Kevin Mitnick imprisoned for almost 6 years in solitary confinement is an example of how serious technophobia can be. But Paranormal Activity depicts a technophobia that is not simply a fear of technology but is perhaps an unconsciously articulated critique against allowing technologies to become ersatz witnesses for human experience. Or, even closer to the issue, to consider constant documentation as action.

Certainly, I believe documentation can be action, seen through the documentary as a film genre or investigative journalism. However, in the case of Paranormal Activity, Micah asserts his ability to see and thus comprehend the events that are happening to him and his girlfriend only through his recording technologies. It is his way of handling the situation, to document its existence as happening to him because without such documentation he is not so sure. The surreality of the events take precedence. And even after the vague harping of his girlfriend to stop (and of course he cannot, otherwise there would be no movie), he absolutely refuses. He can handle this himself.

In a vein similar to George Romero's Diary of the Dead, Paranormal Activity reflects our lived phenomena of "Pix or it didn't happen." There is a sense brought forth by the behemoth of techno-capitalism known as "globalism" that everything can be translatable, seen, understood. But when Micah's dead body is thrown at his own camera in the final scene and the Demon inhabiting Katie's body leers over the camera to smile, I see this as the Demon trashing the camera literally and figuratively.

This is the ultimate critique of our needling, do-nothing technologies - that they are still no weapon against the things that frighten us the most and in a growing information economy, the things that frighten us the most are the things that know but we cannot know them (terrorists, demons, hackers, the FBI). I am uncertain as to whether the director hoped Micah's body scene would be absorbed by the audience as actually happening to them, as if Micah's body is thrown against us as viewers, because in that sense the Demon would be aware of a potential future audience. Like the Blair Witch Project, the sentiment is that all documentation will at some point be found. But is legacy action enough? I am reminded of bystanders whipping out cellphone cameras during accidents rather than rendering aid (also known as the Kitty Genovese Bystander Effect but with the sinister addition of 2 megapixel cameras). Is this effect in some way an empathetic reinterpretation of Big Brother? Someone must have helped, someone must have seen, someone is witness to this because I cannot, have never been, the only one.

This is the movie for the modern-day archivist, the diarist bloggers, the collectors of our own lives. We are being asked how much of our lives can be documented and how much should be, or rather, I am asking that through use of this movie. But I think that's an easy question to ask rather than answer. Sometimes you don't really know what you're looking at until a dead body hits you in the face.

Meet our Growing gnovis Family

trish — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:58:04 +0000

As you may have noticed, gnovis blog has featured some new faces lately. For three years now, gnovis hosted diverse topics at the intersection of communication, culture, and technology, yet most of the writers were students at the same program, CCT. I am happy to say that starting this semester, the conversations on gnovis blog extend well beyond the walls of CCT.

gnovis now hosts bloggers from universities across the U.S. We have MA and Ph.D. candidates from NYU, Indiana University at Bloomington and the New School. Our bloggers are interdisciplinary, yet each of them brings a specific focus and expertise. Together, these bloggers are helping to improve the breath and depth of our interdisciplinary digital dialogue.

I am happy to introduce you to our Lead and Contributing Bloggers from near and far:

Gnovis Lead Bloggers:

Michael Davidson (Georgetown University, CCT) is deeply committed to progressive political issues. His research experience includes English and Composition and focuses on communication and rhetorical practices in social, political, and cultural contexts

Josh Scacco (Georgetown University, CCT) joins gnovis as a blogger with a passion for all things political. He has research experience in Rhetoric, Political Communication and Economics.

Contributing Bloggers from near and far:

Jason Turcotte (New York University, Media, Culture & Communication) has been a valued contributor to gnovis for over one year now. Jason’s disciplinary background is in both Communications and Political Science and focuses on political and persuasive communication.

Brian Mehler (Georgetown University, CCT) has a BA in English and focused his studies on the role of new media in contemporary art, critical theory and digital poetics.

Greg Perreault (Georgetown University, CCT) is a Journalist by trade and passion. His is interested in the the influence of media on society. He has a particular interest in media influence on culture, especially religion.

Firat Soylu (Indiana University, Instructional Systems Technology and Cognitive Science) joined gnovis in September and has consistently been one of our more popular bloggers. His scholarship looks at how education, learning, cognition and neuroscience come together to meet the great challenge of understanding how humans learn and make sense of things in the social, cultural and physical contexts in which they are situated.

Mark Millard (Indiana University, Information Science) studies areas of social informatics, human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-mediated communication (CMC), and ICT literacy

Molly Shea (New York University, Visual Culture) received a Bachelor's degree in Art History at Smith College and has been exploring media studies as a way to inform her interest in contemporary video and installation art. Her current research interests include: cyborgs, transgender studies, memory studies, zoology, tactical bio-politics and apocalypse narratives.

Andrew Hare (The New School, Media Studies) received his BA degree in Film and Art History and his current work focuses on intersections between continental philosophy and new media.

Jack Harison (Georgetown University, CCT) is interested in Cultural Studies. He is most interested in issues of race and the hip hop community as well as a recent interest in technology and debates around authenticity and cyborgism.

I’m very happy to be helping to build this interdisciplinary discourse featuring such a fine cadre of scholars. Many of you may have thought of blogging or dabbled with it in the past, but lack of time, inconsistent content flow, and small traffic flow can discourage. By pooling our efforts as well as our social networks, we can create a rich and diverse community of scholars. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts!

Please contact me at pjf34@georgetown.edu for more information regarding academic blogging with gnovis.

Crunching the Numbers: The Media & Polling Spin Zone Meets Election 2009

joshua.scacco — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:38:56 +0000

As a political junkie, elections are the Superbowls of the year for me. Literally. So, it should come as no surprise that I have been glued to the television and computer for most of the night crunching the numbers on the "Big 3" races that are supposed to magically tell the future of President Obama's administration, according to the media pundits. One year on from his historic victory and speech in Grant Park, the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and the congressional special election in New York's 23rd congressional district are the equivalent of the Oracle at Delphi - forecasting fortune or doom going into the midterm elections of 2010. Maybe. The media may be wrong on this one and their incessant reliance on the election horse race.

First, the exit polls. Voters in Virginia and New Jersey (two states out of 50) gave President Obama approval ratings over 50%. These races were not about Obama, but very local issues - transportation and the economy in Virginia, the economy/taxes and corruption in New Jersey. Therefore, the Oracle is not so much of a truth teller as much as a mirage. The media can stop looking at it.

Second, the pre-election polls. The media make a living off the horse race. Bringing in pollsters and pundits draws in politicos (ok, I'll admit it - me too) and ratings. RealClearPolitics' polling averages in the Virginia gubernatorial race had Republican candidate Bob McDonnell ahead by 13.4%. He won the race by 18%. In New Jersey, RCP polling averages had Republican candidate Chris Christie ahead by 1%. He won by 4%. And finally in NY-23, the final Public Policy Polling showed Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman with a 17 point lead. He went down to defeat by 4%. In all of these cases, the media latched on to sparse data regarding a handful of election contests. Additionally, media organizations sponsored exit polls in New Jersey and Virginia that were reported shortly before the polls closed. They made up for a lack of information and generalizability by paying for numbers to report on for several hours before the polls officially closed. These exit polls, a surprise for an off year election, are used to "test the waters" for future election projections, according to Georgetown professor Diana Owen.

Third, the circus. In the absence of more races to cover, the media descended and perpetuated a story of Republican chaos in New York's North Country. The media coverage then drew in an ideological army of "out of towners" who drowned a far right candidate in funds. This caused the Republican nominee to withdrawal, further perpetuating the chaos. Polling data was skewed as reported on Twitter tonight by Public Policy Polling (PPP). PPP said they learned a valuable lesson from all of this: if a candidate withdrawals, ditch the poll. Instead, they went ahead with a poll showing Hoffman ahead by 17 points. Therefore, the few legitimate methods of gauging these races were quickly rendered useless by the media coverage.

The media coverage of these races, it seems by preliminary examination, had little impact on the final result in Virginia, some impact in New Jersey, and a great deal of impact in the New York congressional election. New Jersey was covered more frequently because the polls were closer and President Obama made more frequent trips. The New York race was covered because of the bizarre nature of the contest. Once Virginia became a lock for the Republican ticket several weeks ago, media coverage dropped off the radar. The media aggregator at RealClearPolitics listed eight stories related to NY-23 on the Monday before the election and four "general" stories regarding the elections as the all important Obama Oracle. Obviously, media coverage on rural, upstate New York paralleled that of rural Iowa before its presidential caucuses.

Wednesday November 4, 2009 will be remembered as the day the campaign for the 2010 midterm elections began. On the heels of strong Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey, a surprising Democratic victory in New York, and a narrow victory for Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City (the polls were wrong there too), the pundits will crunch the numbers about suburban voters in Fairfax County, VA who supported Obama last year and Republican McDonnell this year or Bergen County, NJ voters who voted for Obama last year and Republican Christie this year. I will keep in mind that generalizing these results is risky business (and not in the Tom Cruise sense).

The electorate that elected Obama last year was decidedly younger and more diverse than the older, whiter electorate this year in a handful of contests. Not to take the wind out of the Republican sails. They had a very good night and elections are about who shows up. But that is why you cannot read this year's results into next year's: elections are about who shows up. Republican efforts to reach the voters who did not show up are not the subject of this post. It is about the numbers and tonight they favored the Republicans. Next year is yet to be determined.

One Year Later: The Social Implication of Barack Obama and the Power of Possibility

Akoto1983 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:55:20 +0000

As this week marks the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama's victory, pundits, journalists and the like are sure to share with the public assessments of the president's political performance. Certainly, both sides of the isle will have much to say of his actions on health care reform, the war in Afghanistan, and the ever-looming economy and recession. But, putting his presidential prowess aside, there is much to be said, and seen, of the social implications of Barack Obama's election and its potential affect on the Black America.

From the time he announced his candidacy, black leaders and scholars pondered the obvious: Does his nomination and subsequent election mean the end of racism in America? What will he need to do as president to alleviate some of the conditions that disproportionately affect blacks? Would his election mean the end of the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton brand of black politics? Some black leaders have taken issue with the president's handling of race, criticizing him for not addressing the issue as they think he should, an approach they view as a potential hindrance to achieving racial justice. I too have grappled with these questions in discussions with my peers over the past year, debating whether or not the president is doing enough.

CNN's special entitled Black Men in the Age of Obama offered up insights and some potential answers to that question. The roundtable, moderated by Don Lemon, featured black men from all isles- business, education, church and hip hop. They contemplated the affects of some of the president’s actions, each with differing opinions. Where they seemed to find common ground was in the president’s role as a symbol of possibility, potentially evidenced by a comment made by a young black student who Lemon interviewed for the program. When asked what kinds of change the president’s election has brought to his life, he said:

“My mom sends me text messages that read 'Hey Mr. President.' She believes that I will be president one day.”

It’s in statements like this where black leaders may find Barack Obama’s biggest contribution, as a voice, image and reference point of what could be. The power of that statement is immeasurable not because it’s deeply profound. Rather, its value is incalculable because the possibilities it suggests are now backed by reality. In his book, The Politics of Recognition, philosopher Charles Taylor wrote “a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” Ken Tsutumabayashi expounds on this in The Fusion of Horizons, explaining that this is especially the case in long suffering, exampled by black history in America.

The reverse of what Taylor described might be true as well, that a people can experience healing, clarity and worthiness when persons belonging to their group mirror back to them a positive image of themselves. If this is true, then the sociological realities begin to change. Black men who have been pierced disproportionately by certain social conditions can internalize the image of Barack Obama as an alternative to their current realities. The deteriorating black marriage and relationship can be rejuvenated through the example of the Obama union. And the black family, which has experienced significant decline since the 1950s, can ingest the image of the First Family as an example of cohesion and togetherness.

Whether it’s right or wrong, the reality is that Obama’s chosen brand of politics may never allow him to overtly dedicate himself to the kind of sweeping reform and legislation that some black leaders are looking for to improve Black America’s current state. But if statements like what Bishop Eddie Long said on CNN are true, that Obama’s election inspired more black men in his congregation to seek a college education, perhaps Obama’s ascendance to the oval office alone will serve as enough to unlock the potential, opening the possibilities. And if President Obama does nothing else, perhaps just being there is enough.

Weekly Round Up: Twitternactments

trish — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:31:09 +0000

During last Spring’s gnovis ‘retreat’, Brad Weikel and Ashley Bowen shared their interest in reenacting the Lewis and Clark Expedition on twitter. After some initial skepticism, Brad and Ashley’s idea really began to fascinate me. What would a re-enactment on twitter look like? Could it be used to both teach something about history and rouse excitement in learning history?

This week someone provided a partial answer. St. Martin’s Press and Gingrich Communications announced that a historical re-enactment would take place on Twitter. The announcement reads:

To celebrate the launch of Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) and Bill Forstchen’s new book, To Try Men’s Souls, about the Christmas Night 1776 crossing of the Delaware River and attack on the Hessians stationed in Trenton, NJ, St. Martin’s Press and Gingrich Communications are excited to announce the first ever twitter reenactment of the crossing!

After a little investigation, I found that this was not in fact the first “Twitternactment”. Historical tweeting has been attempted by various organizations since the beginning of 2009. As this specific use of the technology is so new, few people have expressed critical or developed opinions on the use of twitter to retell our history.

Instead, I found more unanswered questions and a general curiosity. Below, please check out the examples of twitternactments and historical tweeting that I found.

Examples of twitternactments and historical tweeting:

1 - Gingrich and St. Martin’s twitter the Battle of Trenton,

2 - Massachusetts Historical Society twitters John Quincy Adam’s journal,

3 - Twhistory has tweeted two: Gettysburg and Cuban Missile Crisis ,

4. CryForByzantium is the history of the Byzantium empire,

5. The Berlin Wall Twitter is unique in that it is becoming a archive of collected memories and emotions surrounding the historical turning point.

Also, please review the questions and predictions of some initial reactions to twittering history for pedagogue:

Tom’s Two Cents writes:

Twitter provides all the necessary elements for a recreating a historical event: actors, communication, and relationships. Followers of Twitter reenactments get updates in real-time as the characters of a particular historical event communicate, or “tweet” about what is happening.

Research is needed to understand what effects historical reenactments using Twitter could have on student engagement and learning, but anecdotal evidence point to positive outcomes. Open social learning may be a challenge to harness or control in a formal learning environment, but it is an area that is highly relevant today and should be explored.

SJ Lee’s Bog on eLearning and Tools reviews an article about twitter in higher education:

More than half [of] respondents have not used [twitter] because some don’t know how to use it and others don’t have time to do it. For those who use it, Twitter is a way of staying on current news and networking with other people. Not many people are using it in classrooms. They will? I don’t know.

Professor Carrie Bishop on A Little Learning: The weblog of the Center for Teaching and Learning at University of Georgia writes:

I’m already convinced that Twitter is a great thing in my personal life. In my work environment and in the classroom, I’m not sure I’ve seen a really great use for it. But the number of students who are already on Twitter and using it daily for conversation and information is growing. I think it does make sense to explore it, test it out, and see how innovative we can be in using this powerful communication tool.

On Academhack the blogger outlines 13 uses for twitter in the classroom and a sample twitter assignment.

Karrie Smith on You are Never Alone questions how instructors assess twitter assignments:

I found a rubric for assessing the use of Twitter (see below) on an American teacher’s blog. Harry Grover Tuttle is keen to use web 2.0 tools in his teaching and raises some interesting questions about how we assess student’s learning in web 2.0 based environments.

So far I'm seeing lots of curiousity and more questions than answers. On gnovis, with the help of Firat and Mark, we have discussed the impact and function of technology more and more in the recent weeks. How does twitter fit into the classroom? Would my undergrads get excited about an assignment on Twitter? More importantly, would they learn anything? I have compiled some of the initial responses from the blogosphere. What does the gnovis community think about twittering history?

Video Games: Entertaining, Educational or Dangerous?

firat.soylu — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:33:46 +0000

Video games are fun and addictive. I cannot argue against this. I have my own troubled past with them. When I was in college I wasted enormous amounts of time playing games. Later, this interest with games became a professional interest and I began graduate school with the hope of doing research on how computer games can be used for educational purposes. Ironically, the graduate school experience entirely transformed my perspective about video games. As I learned more about human cognition, I realized that video game playing might have some long-term unwanted effects.

When we play video games, especially first person shooters, we couple ourselves with the avatar in the game. The avatar runs, jumps, drives cars or shoots monsters, while we push buttons or move joysticks. In authentic human experiences the physical world provides us with a certain level of consistency and authenticity among multiple modalities the experiences are lived through. For example, walking is always experienced with legs and with certain muscles. There is no settings panel where you change the muscles you walk with from legs to hands. In addition cross-modality interactions are consistent, when something seems like an apple, smells like an apple, feels like an apple, it most likely tastes like an apple.

Linda Smith and Michael Gasser, Indiana University researchers, propose six lessons from babies as to how the embodied mind develops. One of these lessons is about how during multimodal physical experiences different modalities educate one another. Gerald Edelman in Neural Darwinism calls this reentry. Reentry, is the explicit interrelating of multiple simultaneous representations across multiple modalities. For example one’s experience with a cup of coffee is not only visual but also involves smell, physical properties of the cup, such as the texture and temperature, motor movements for moving the cup and drinking it, and finally the taste of it. All experiences related to a cup of coffee with different modalities are time locked. Multiple maps are formed between the physical properties of the cup of coffee during the experience: one map between physical properties and the visual system, a second map between physical properties and the haptic system and a third map between the smell and the olfactory system. At the same time reentrant maps among the visual, haptic and olfactory system are formed. These independent mappings of the experience become interrelated real time, thus educating one another. This allows the system to recognize higher-order regularities that transcend particular modalities. Through this mechanism when we hear someone ripping a paper when we are blindfolded, we can visualize what is actually happening. Studies conducted with monkeys actually show that after exposing the monkey to the sight and sound of ripping a paper multiple times, when they hear the ripping sound, there are activations in visual areas as if they are seeing such a scene/event.

The point I am trying to make here is that you do not have these types of multimodal experiences in a video game. There is only sight and sound, in addition to the motor movements for interacting with the controller and even with those three, you still don’t have a consistency among what you see, what you hear and how you control the character. Depending on the game, objects seem and sound differently. You also control your character with different combinations of key and joystick movements. Apart from the developmental problems coming with the lack of modalities in computer games, the lack of consistency among the involved modalities is unlike anything we experienced during evolution. This means that we do not have the mechanisms to cope with such inconsistency.

Michael Arbib and Nathan Mundhenk in the 2005 essay Schizophrenia and the Mirror System propose that schizophrenia is actually a deficiency of knowing the agency of an action. They ground their argument on mirror neuron research and Michael Arbib’s previous theory about the evolution of language. They argue that there is a common neural circuitry that we use both when we do something and when we watch other people doing it. This is how we understand the actions of other people. We put ourselves in their places. This system is proposed to be the basis for empathy, parity in communication and complex human languages. While the mirror system helps us simulate what others’ do, it at the same time allows us to imagine doing things, think of hypothetical situations and plan actions. But, how do I know it is not me jumping when I watch someone jump, if I simulate the jumping action in the motor circuitry that I use for jumping? Why don’t I think that it is me who is jumping?

In his book Mirroring People, Marco Iacoboni proposes that there is a super mirror neuron system, which makes it possible for us to distinguish between what we do and what we observe or imagine. Arbib and Mundhenk argue that, this system for self-monitoring and attribution of agency, is deficient in schizophrenics. According to their theory “verbal hallucinations occur when an utterance progresses through verbal creation pathways and returns as a vocalization observed, only to be dismissed as external since no record of its being created has been.” The same applies for visual hallucinations.

Going back to my criticism about video games, I propose that playing games regularly for extended amounts of time may disrupt the self-monitoring and attribution of the agency mechanism. What you do in a first person shooter game is to couple the self with an avatar. The avatar becomes you. However it is still something you see from a computer screen. Unlike watching TV in a relatively more passive way, in the computer game you control the avatar. Sensorymotor systems for authentic movements are used to play, however the modalities are mixed up, for example you use your fingers on the controller to walk. Again, this is something we have never been faced with during our evolution.

What I wrote here are speculations, and maybe it is a stretch to relate video game playing to schizophrenia. Nevertheless, it is a fact that our experience with video games is fairly new and nothing like what our ancestors experienced. I think we should not hurry to use video games in education until we know enough about how it affects the embodied mind, especially during the crucial developmental stages.

For the academically inclined, here are the references for the studies I mentioned :

Arbib, M. A., & Mundhenk, T. N. (2005). Schizophrenia and the mirror system: an essay. Neuropsychologia, 43(2), 268-280.

Edelman, G. M. (1987). Neural Darwinism: The theory of neuronal group selection: Basic Books New York.

Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring People. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Smith, L., & Gasser, M. (2005). The Development of Embodied Cognition: Six Lessons from Babies. Artificial Life, 11(1-2), 13-29.

Part 2 of my Conversation with Firat Soylu: gnovis and the Role of Blogging in Academia

MikeDavidson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:25:05 +0000

Firat Soylu is a doctoral candidate in Instructional Systems Technology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Here is Part 2 of my interview with him; you can find part one here. In this interview, Firat talks about his experiences publishing with gnovis, writing his first blog ever, and the critical role of blogging in academia:

Switching gears a bit, I’m interested in your experience publishing with gnovis. What is it about gnovis that made you think your research would be a good fit for our journal?

gnovis is obviously a very interdisciplinary journal with high quality content. In gnovis I have read articles discussing the social and cultural implications of emerging Internet and media phenomena, like Youtube and Secondlife, from a critical perspective. This made me think that my study may fit to gnovis. In addition, I liked the fact that the journal is run by some very enthusiastic graduate students. I do not know if it is the design of the website or the people who contribute to it, probably both, but gnovis radiates energy. This is something that most academic journals lack.

What did you value most about your experience publishing with gnovis?

Among many things, I valued most how diligently gnovis editors edited my paper. The editing was superb and improved the quality of the paper to a great extent. I would like to thank the editors from here. They did a wonderful job. I learned a lot from them.

To close, I want to ask you a few questions about your recent blog entry—which was great by the way. I was surprised to see, at the end, that it was your first attempt at blogging. So, how did it go?

It was great. I was always a little bit skeptical about blogging. I think the problem was that I did not know what to write about and who will read it. In gnovis I know both. I would like to share my ideas about our use of technology, and how it affects us by incorporating some cognitive science research. gnovis has an established reader base from different universities. It is nice to know that what I wrote will be read by people from different fields, which, hopefully, may lead to an interdisciplinary discussion.

What do you think about the practice of “academic blogging”? Should academics have blogs? Why or why not?

I think they should. It helps to test the waters before you jump in. What I mean is that blogging gives academics the opportunity to share ideas with an academic community, as well as the public, before these ideas are expressed in a scholarly article. With an academic blog you can test people’s reactions to certain ideas and perspectives before you conduct research on them. These reactions may help you see the issue from a perspective that you have not considered before. In addition, with an academic blog you can write about issues, which are not directly related to your academic field, but somehow you have an interest in. For example, I would love to write a critical blog about how inhumane our work environments are and how this is based on designers & architects assumptions on human cognition and what generally humans are. I am not an interior designer or an architect but an academic blog can allow me to write a semi-academic article on this issue without forcing me to review previous interior design literature and relevant paradigms. This would not have been the case in an academic journal. To publish an article in a certain field, you need to know the field. In an academic article you need to review all the previous studies conducted and views expressed on the issue. Not knowing a lot about interior design and the fact that there is probably considerable research on how offices should be designed, does not change the fact that I do not like most office environments. In my opinion, interior designers and architects make some assumptions about human cognition without being aware of it. An academic blog allows me to express my opinion even though I do not belong to a certain field. I think the overall point is that academic blogs can remove the thick walls among fields and provide an open sharing environment.

As what is in it for the readers, since academic blogs are generally written with a more jargon free language and accessible style it opens the doors of an, otherwise inaccessible, field to readers who are outsiders. This can encourage interdisciplinary efforts, as well as a wider public interest in academic/scientific issues.

What a great way to close. You have done an excellent job of articulating what we are trying to do here at gnovis. Thank you again for your time Firat and good luck with your studies!