Not to mention that he made my points a lot more eloquently than I managed to.

Trying to keep this discussion as academic as possible, I’ll argue this much… or this little: if you read Dick Hebdige or Greil Marcus, you’ll quickly come to see that one of the central characteristics of punk was (and is) the conflation of aesthetic and meaning.

Style is substance. The punk style was about aestheticizing everyday life. Making life art. And art is political. Life is political. Aesthetics and politics are both inextricably bound to everyday life.

Moreover, some people listen to punk rock and only hear noise. Others claim that the phrase was rendered meaningless before 1982, and the bands and scenes that have come to use the term over the years since are simply usurpers and corporate shills.

Let’s take the music out of the equation.

Instead, I’d like to talk about zines.

Punk zines– small, limited-run self-published magazines– were at the center of punk culture, music, and life from the very beginning. From the January 1976 debut of New York’s Punk until at least the year 2000, when the internet began to supplant many print zines, punk rock zines were at the center of the community. For a great look at some of the best (and many of the rest) check out Operation Phoenix Records’ punk zine archive.

Zines were always the best embodiment of the DIY ethos of punk, because they had the lowest barriers to entrance. All you really needed was a pen, access to a photocopier, and a stapler, and you could be a zine publisher.

Thinking about the notion of “edupunk,” thinking about what punk culture can teach us about instructional technology and digital pedagogy, I think zines are a natural place to start. So: what can we learn from punk zines that we can apply to edtech? What follows is a short sketch of some things that have occurred to me, trying to answer that question.

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All you need is Sharpies, tape, and a Xerox machine.

There’s actually two lessons here: first off, as I mentioned earlier, the barriers to participation in the zine community are very low. Likewise, it’s important for people to keep the barriers to participation in educational technology low.

But more important, punk zines made it obvious how easy it was to make one yourself. They left the scotch tape exposed. White out was obvious. Typos and spelling errors were prevalent. This was, in part, an aesthetic decision. And it has the effect of encouraging and creating a DIY community. These sloppy mistakes let readers know, “this isn’t hard. You can do this.”

I’m not arguing that edubloggers or people designing drupal or WordPress based course management sites should have spelling errors, or the like. But sometimes it’s good to “let the reader see the scotch tape,” so to speak. Let students know how you did it, that it’s easy, that they can do it themselves. Don’t try to make your site look like the slickest designers’ sites. Those sites look inimitable. Instead, use design to encourage your students to follow your lead, to be active content producers, and not passive consumers of web content.

Fast and ugly is better than slow and pretty.

While separating aesthetics and substance is impossible, content is primary, and style is secondary. Get stuff out there, even if it doesn’t look perfect. Regular content production is more key to success than producing pristine, beautiful sites. Besides, “pretty” and “well designed” isn’t as important as eye-catching and visually interesting. The best zines weren’t polished, but they used striking images, high contrast, strange juxtapositions, and other striking visual elements to add visual appeal and interest.

Don’t cover what your audience can find elsewhere.

Your zine is not going to be Rolling Stone. Create a niche by providing content people can’t find anywhere else. Similarly, don’t recreate the wheel with your educational website. If there’s already a perfectly good online archive related to your topic, use that, rather than recreating it. Cover highly specific topics that aren’t covered elsewhere, and cover them well.

And on a related note…

If there isn’t a scene, make one.

The word “scene” has gotten a lot of bad press lately. The term scenester has come to mean a poseur, a person who jumps onto the bandwagon, using conspicuous consumption and emulating a dress code to try to appear cool.

Scene, back in my day, meant the opposite of that. It just meant community. The punk scene was made up of people who went to shows, made zines, played in bands, and the like. And zines were a great way to help bolster, or even create, a scene. There’s only two punk bands in your little town? Start a zine. Highlight what all is going on with those bands, with their fans, speak to the interests of people who might want to be part of a scene. Zines help to foster community by letting people know all the stuff that’s going on.

Edtech has the same potential. Create a community of interested users– link people, get them passionate, get them to see how your subject is related to other topics in their lives. By thinking of a small town punk scene, we get a model of “community” that’s a lot more than Web2.0 hype.

Change things up when they get boring, but stay consistent enough that people can find you.

Zine makers don’t have a lot of pressure to keep things the same. They’re not answering to a board of directors, investors, employees, or anyone but themselves. This means that you can change things up whenever they get dull. But the most successful zinesters in terms of getting and maintaining readership are always the ones that keep things consistent, to a degree. Keep the title the same, use the same logo. Keep the format, or at least the general nature of the content, reasonably consistent. Otherwise repeat readers will feel cheated.

The same temptation is there in digital media– nothing has to be permanent. But to really get eyes on your page, and keep them there, it’s important not to change everything up too often. While making parts of your website dynamic and fresh is important to getting return visitors, it’s also important to keep enough elements similar and consistent enough to make people feel they know they’re at the right place and know their way around.

There’s always some lonely kid in rural Iowa who needs to hear what you’ve got to say.

Network. Promote yourself mercilessly. Work with a faith that, even though you’re only publishing fifty copies of this little zine about a band that only three people you know are interested in, there are people out there that care.

As much as local scene is important, punk has always been just as much about knowing that you are part of a divided tribe, an archipelago of like-minded souls, living in isolation, disaffected with and disenfranchised from their surroundings.

This feeling of being a member of a lost tribe bred a need to network, to promote oneself, to try to find readers anywhere you can find them. There were even zines dedicated to compiling lists of other zines with contact information and reviews. The best of these was the amazing Factsheet 5. F5 enabled people to connect nationally– even worldwide. People separated by geography were united by common interests. A teenager in rural Iowa could discover a hardcore punk group from Norway, and buy their self-released seven inch via mail order. Zines created a culture that could not be confined by geography.

This all sounds a lot like how its more utopian advocates describe as what makes the internet unique, doesn’t it? Digital technology allows us to pull from a community that is bigger than the classroom. You can connect with the small community of passionate experts and people who are engaged with the subject matter from all around the world, providing you can make the connection, can get the word out, can make your presence known to the people who want and need to participate.

Make friends with a disgruntled Kinko’s employee.

The easiest way to reduce the cost of producing a zine is to steal photocopies. If you can photocopy your zine in the breakroom at work or have a friend who hates his job at the copy shop who can make copies and not charge you, the price of production drops to nearly zero. It even was seen as something that added to your punk zinester cred.

Now, I’m not really advocating people in digital pedagogy steal from corporations. But take advantage of whatever free services you can from the for-profit sites. Video and audio hosting can be had for free. APIs allow you to harness some of the bandwidth and programming skills of the corporate sites. If you can get it free (and legal) why pay for it? If you have access to an API, why reinvent the wheel?

Likewise, steal (or rather borrow) code liberally. If you see someone else doing something interesting, whether it’s a piece of CSS, part of their layout, an interesting use of a Google API– whatever– try to look under the hood, and see how the other guy does it. Steal it. Make it your own. If it’s something that’s hidden on the user side, heck– drop ‘em a line and ask ‘em how they did it.

We’re trying to build a scene, here, and that requires dialog and cooperation.

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed is all about creating an engaged community of learners collaborating in the creation of knowledge, rather than the top-down “banking” model of education that sees students as passive receptacles of knowledge. I believe that new instructional technologies and digital scholarship really do have a place to play in helping to foster this liberating vision of the role of education.

The problem is that (while there’s definitely exceptions) educators and technology specialists haven’t been the best at fostering such communities of learning, that many people in these camps hold a strong attachment to their “expert” status. Addressing lay audiences in their own language, at their own level of understanding, is too often dismissed as “dumbing down” the material, rather than being clever enough to engage a broader audience in the discussion. This isn’t everyone, and many in both circles are actively struggling against such patterns, but the pattern persists.

With that in mind, why not try looking to more grassroots movements that have been successful at creating engaged communities of creator/consumers? It’s been rather famously said that only a handful of people picked up the Velvet Underground’s first album when it debuted, but that each of these people went out and started their own bands. The same could be said of many zines. Who knows how many young writers were inspired to write by reading Aaron Cometbus, or started drawing comics after reading John Porcellino’s King Cat. Zines have been great at building community, inspiring emulation, and making people want to go out and do something.

Yeah, the idea of “edupunk” may be a bit frivolous, but I think there’s something there. Punk culture does certain things well that the cultures of education and technology development haven’t always done so well. Maybe it’s not so crazy for a few of us to think about setting aside our tweed blazers and Bugzilla tee-shirts for leather jackets and Doc Martins.

The beautiful photos of the Papercut Zine Library in Cambridge, MA are courtesy of gruntzooki.

The best online projects are the ones that don’t try to mimic the functionality of any other medium– if your website could just as easily have been a book, you’re not adding much value by putting it online. I think an online database collecting early comic strips would be the optimal medium for such a project.

The primary advantage of an online database would be the ability to use multiple categories or tags as organizational tools. A single strip could be included in multiple categories. To take one example, a single strip from Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent, a strip about a European Jewish immigrant, a car salesman who was also vehemently and vocally opposed American involvement in what he described as “that Europel war.” One strip from this comic could be categorized according to the various newspapers that included it (it was notably more popular in urban costal cities, and not distributed to many middle-American small town newspapers), under King Features Syndicate, which distributed the strip, under the strip’s title, the cartoonist’s name, under “automobiles,” “Jewish characters,” “WWI”… the list goes on.

The ability to sort by a variety of means brings together the collection as a dynamic thing, a research tool in and of itself.

Omeka has two primary functions: collections management and exhibition. So far I’ve just been discussing the former. Now a few thoughts on the latter:

Once the collection has a substantial number of item/strips within it, I think it would be a great thing to have thematic essay/exhibits. An essay on the debate over neutrality during the Great War, accompanied by strips that reflect the debate. Another on issues of race and ethnicity in early comics. Another on the formal evolution of the medium, the gradual conventionalizing of things like word balloons, thought balloons, elements of visual storytelling, etc.

What makes these comics an invaluable tool for historical research is the multitude of voices, perspectives, and themes that they encompass. An online collection could highlight a variety of issues within this multitude, allowing visitors to follow their interests, rather than making some hierarchical linear narrative.

Comics history is an under-researched topic. Aside from the ghettoization of the medium itself, it’s commonly being assigned to the dustbin of kiddie fare and ephemera, what little attention the topic does receive is divided into several niche markets of interest. There’s the Nostalgists, the people who want to look at the history of comics fondly and rather uncritically. Then there’s the Cultural Historians, who want to look at the medium simply as a lens to broader social and cultural trends within society. Finally, you have the Artistic Formalists, who– inspired by the seminal works of Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, or Matt Madden, want to look at comics as an artistic medium, and to look at older comics as a window into the evolution of a symbolic system, an artistic code, a mechanism for storytelling.

All three approaches have merit.

All three approaches, however, also have pitfalls, blind spots, and difficulties. This fracturing of the already-small number of those interested in looking at this topic is a perpetual frustration to those of us who want to look at something approaching the bigger picture.

I think that an Early Comic Strip Archive could attract attention and use from all three groups, and that moreover, because the database format is well suited to multiple approaches, it could serve the additional function of bringing these three tribes closer together. Beyond this audience of enthusiasts, as I mentioned earlier, I think that an archive like this could be an invaluable resource to educators trying to make history more interesting to resistant or reluctant students. Comics have humor, visual appeal, and an ever-present iconoclasm that can make history more appealing to the same student who get bored with slogging through dry textbooks and memorizing dates and names.

Next: Potential Pitfalls and Possible Partners

…It’s the full text of Moby Dick.

I’m thinking about creating a digital archive of early newspaper comic strips.

Why Comic Strips?

A personal anecdote, before you dismiss the concept as purely self-indulgent: comics were what made me interested in history in the first place. I was a very visual kid. I loved drawing. And my hometown library had a decent collection of comics. But not too many of my favorites. After reading all the Garfield and Peanuts books in their collection, I started branching out. The library had a lot of “The year’s best editorial cartoons” collections. I started picking them up for the art. I kept reading them for the history. It was a unique window into times and topics I didn’t know too much about. The editorial cartoons led me to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Walt Kelly’s Pogo. To this day, my view of the political history of the twentieth century is shaped, in part, by political cartoons.

Comics are a fascinating cultural artifact. They can give a lot of insight into a time. And they’re a good inroad into history for students who may otherwise be resistant. They add a visual element, humor, and a window into how ideas and events were being received within popular culture. They don’t give a single view– reading a comics page from, say, 1911 can give you a great insight into the debates of the time.

Because of my lifelong interest in comics, I decided to do a seminar paper a few years back on the ethnic and racial images in early Hearst newspapers’ comics pages. I found a surprising heterogeneity of topics, portrayals, and ideas. In the years leading into the US’s involvement in WWI, I found that while Hearst demanded his editors toe a party line of German sympathy and non-intervention, the comics page of the New York Journal was actually the site of a rather lively debate. Some strips came down firmly for intervention, and mocked neutrality. Others were firmly opposed to American involvement in a European war, strongly advocating isolationism. While Hearst is famous for supporting his cartoonists, he apparently also felt they were unimportant enough to be allowed a greater degree of freedom than many of his prose journalists.

Whether you trace ethnic images, political debates, class sympathies– the early comics page was one of the most multivocal sites in the newspaper business. And they drew readers. People sometimes picked their newspaper based on the inclusion of their favorite comic, just as others might choose to read a paper because it sympathized with their political beliefs.

And best of all, these early strips, from 1895-1932, are in the public domain.

Part Two: Why a Database?

The whole pre-press peer review process is based on a different model of the economy of publishing. Review after the fact can be better used online, where we have the ability to keep everything in a perpetual beta. (And I’d argue that there’s a difference between the feedback of blog comments– which one commenter aptly likened to responses at a conference panel– and an actual critical review, like one finds at the ends of most scholarly journals.)

But this brings one to the question of how post-publication review could best be disseminated, etc. More scholarly, critical reviews of online scholarship are definitely a must, but where would they best be published? To put them in traditional print journals gives some name-brand credibility and authority, which online scholarship could definitely use. But publishing reviews in such journals closes off the dialogical potentials of digital scholarship.

Blogs published by individual scholars would seem a good vehicle, but there are many scholars who might be capable of producing great critical review pieces who don’t have the time or the inclination to maintain a blog, to foster the audience that grants individual blogs status, etc.

And then there’s the option of online journals, which might resist some of the problems of the previously-mentioned formats, but bring up a lot of their own issues. Many (most?) are too new to have built up a sufficient academic cache, especially among those resistant to digital scholarship. Many online journals don’t benefit from being indexed in subscription-based journal databases, like JSTOR, rendering them invisible to less-net-savvy scholars. Moreover, the ability of an online journal to be responsive, dynamic, and dialogical– the very advantages they possess when compared to print journals– pose a further question: when would these things really be done? Some of the advantages of review articles– that they’re relatively quick and easy to write, for example, and thus good CV-fodder for newer scholars building their publication lists– would be lost if one had to perpetually update, constantly adjusting a review to the most recent revisions of the site’s content or design.

No answer is ideal. Perhaps best answer would be a new model, some format not yet in existence. Barring that, maybe we should think about how best to use all three in tandem. The AHA’s Perspectives has both an online and a print presence. Magazines and journals like that could serve as a good bridge, giving the prestige of print with the capacity for online revision.

By my friend Andre Collares, a graphic designer outta Florida.
Just thought it was cool and thought I’d share.

Image search technology just keeps getting cooler and cooler. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when there’s an image search site that allows you to draw a simple shape or symbol and search the web for other examples. That doesn’t seem to exist, but there’s still some exciting developments. The facial recognition search that Dave discusses in his post is a great example. Here’s two more.

I recently came across TinEye. It’s still in private beta, and has a fairly limited pool of images (although surprisingly large…), but the functionality is really exciting.

Tineye lets you take any image you come across on the web, and search for similar images elsewhere. They even have a nifty Firefox plugin that lets you search with just a single right click. TinEye’s search isn’t limited to finding the exact same image in multiple URLS, though– to quote their FAQ,

TinEye frequently returns image results with colour adjustments, added or removed text, crops, and slight rotations. TinEye can also detect images that are part of a collage or have been blended with another image…

TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks. TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.

All this got me excited, and I immediately decided to take it for a test run. I wasn’t disappointed.

I was trying to find images that were going to be all over the internet. My first thought was the classic poster for Star Wars:

I found many exact matches using TinEye. But as I got to the eighth page or so of matches, that’s when it really got interesting. Posters for Star Wars in foreign languages. Covers of books that used cropped versions of the art with writing in very different places. Even a picture of someone standing in front of a poster, an obstructed image that also cuts off the top of the poster:

This was pretty exciting, so I looked around for the image of the most beat-up copy of Action Comics #1 I could find. (It’s the first appearance of Superman, for those who didn’t spend their childhoods drooling over comic books like me.)

Tineye immediately brought up images of the famous cover in much better condition. But the most exciting hit was the cover of a later issue of Action Comics, from a little more than a year later, where artist and creator Joe Shuster rather obviously recycles the iconic image:

Pretty remarkable that TinEye could spot the similarities, given both the obvious similarities and how very different the images are.

I’d like to nominate TinEye to the long list of “Sites People Think Will Be The Next Google Acquisition.”

The other site I wanted to mention, which I haven’t had as much opportunity to play around with*, is WhatTheFont. WhatTheFont lets you upload a logo, and will tell you what font or font family is being used.

It’s a remarkably useful tool for designers, assuming it works as well as advertised. the unofficial Google Operating System blog gives it good marks.

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*In part, I haven’t played with it as much because it doesn’t have the nifty FF plugin– something worth noting to anyone trying to design and promote a web ap– integrating search into the browser makes habitual users.

While I find the pre-WWII Superman very interesting– back when he couldn’t fly, didn’t have heat vision or x-ray vision, when he was just an enormously strong man who jumped around, and meted out social justice…

Superman gets enough attention already.

I want to talk about black superheroes.

Now, it’s no secret that comic books have, historically, been kind of horrible in terms of race. Even the great Will Eisner gave his detective character the Spirit a sidekick named Ebony White, who while he was quite human in his portrayal (especially later in the comic’s run), was little more than a manservant in blackface.

There weren’t any black superheroes for nearly thirty years of the genre’s existence. Eventually, in the sixties, black heroes started appearing. And they were very creatively named! In the next few years, you see the appearance of such heroes as the Black Panther, Black Goliath (especially creative, as he was a black man who took on the powers and costume of the superhero Goliath), Black Vulcan, and Black Lightning… More on him in a moment.

To add insult to injury, many of these black superheroes were not only ridiculously named, but were basically just patently ridiculous. In the competition for Worst Superhero Ever, two serious contenders come from this first wave of black superheroes in the late sixties and early seventies:

In one corner, you have Jack Kirby’s Black Racer, a black guy in a ridiculously colorful costume who serves as a harbinger of death. (And yet he’s not a villain.) Oh, and did I mention he gets around on cosmic skis?

In the other corner, you have the inimitable Mal Duncan, who has the dubious honor of being one of the few superheroes I remember thinking was stupid when I was five. Mal was an inner-city teen who became a member of the Teen Titans, basically the League of Superhero Sidekicks. Mal, however, wasn’t a sidekick. He didn’t have any powers. He didn’t have any demonstrable abilities, for that matter. Moreover, he didn’t even have a costume or a secret identity. He was just the Teen Titans’ token black friend, basically. Eventually, they gave him a magic horn, and he became the incredible Hornblower. Worst name ever. One of the worst powers. And still not much of a costume.

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But still, it could have been worse. I recently encountered this article in Neil Polowin’s The Hembeck Files!, reprinting a column by Tony Isabella, creator of Black Lightning, the first black superhero to have a solo book published by DC, the publisher of Superman and Batman.

The name’s a bit of a stinker, yeah, but Black Lightning had some things to recommend him. Electrical powers are pretty impressive. He kept most of his adventures in his neighborhood– he gave back to the community. Moreover, dude was a teacher! How cool is a schoolteacher superhero?

Moreover, he was a lot better than the original idea the editors proposed, the Black Bomber. I’ll just quote Isabella on this one, he says it better than I could:

I will say that I created Black Lightning after convincing DC not to publish another “black” super-hero on which they had started work. The Black Bomber was a white bigot who, in times of stress, turned into a black super-hero. This was the result of chemical camouflage experiments he’d taken part in as a soldier in Vietnam. The object of these experiments was to allow our [white] troops to blend into the jungle.

In each of the two completed Black Bomber scripts, the white bigot risks his own life to save another person whom he can’t see clearly (in one case, a baby in a stroller) and then reacts in racial slur disgust when he discovers that he risked his life to save a black person. He wasn’t aware that he had two identities, but each identity had a girlfriend and the ladies were aware of the change. To add final insult, the Bomber’s costume was little more than a glorified basketball uniform.

DC had wanted me to take over writing the book with the third issue. I convinced them to eat the two scripts and let me start over. To paraphrase my arguments…

“Do you REALLY want DC’s first black super-hero to be a white bigot?”

I’m coming a bit late to the party, as the term was coined almost two weeks ago, which in the blogosphere seems to mean a thing’s ready for its postmortem… Well, unless it’s LOLcats. LOLcats has legs.

If you’re not hip to the right circles, or just behind on your feed reader (I’m both), click around these entries. Follow the hyperlinks. Check out the blogs of the people posting replies. Make sure you’ve got a couple hours on your hands– for such a new concept, it’s generating a lot of dialog. Which is awesome in and of itself, honestly.

Personally, I find the concept deeply intriguing. Ultimately, a lot of what people are talking about as being “edupunk” is very similar to things I’ve been trying to express for a while. An appreciation for the DIY ethos– the concept that fast, quick, and handmade is better than slick corporate cookie-cutter product any day of the week. A desire to get people to get their hands dirty with all the new tools available. The understanding that sometimes you need an Allen wrench, and sometimes you need a sledge hammer. Advocating that educators going past the standard classroom interaction is the essence of “best practices.” The concept that being in a classroom shouldn’t keep students from being autodidacts, but should rather encourage it. Using Web 2.0 tools (when appropriate) to make students interact more, participate more, and allowing them a greater amount of ownership and stewardship of their work. Acknowledging that Blackboard is too badly designed and inflexible to be the killer ap of courseware it’s become.

Of course, I’ve been a big fan of and advocate for punk, DIY, zines, and the like for– wow… over fifteen years. So this sort of thing has an intrinsic appeal to me. Something that co-opts the DIY ethos and combines it with new media and progressive/radical pedagogy? That’s just custom-tailored to my tastes.

The term’s a bit silly, of course. And the term’s too new to really indicate any real community or cause. But I’m glad the term’s been coined. Ultimately, if the meme gathers enough steam, and actually comes to be a real thing, a movement, philosophy, praxis, approach, critique, whatever… It will have come out of Jim Groom coming up with a term that provides an umbrella of linked concepts under which different people can gather.

I hope it does. I’d gladly call myself edupunk if that came to pass.

Even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely come to generate a really interesting conversation.

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One qualm I have to express, though, related to an association made by several critics of the not-yet-extant “movement,” as well as some of its advocates.

Punk was never, ever, only about anger and nihilism.

That’s an impression that comes from too many people painting with much too broad a brush, and the overstatement of the impact of the Sex Pistols.

The Ramones had an edge, but blind, dumb joy drove their music, just as often as anger. The Clash had more righteous indignation than undirected anger. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers are, to my mind, totally punk rock– and JR writes songs about romantic awkwardness and being a baby dinosaur. The DIY ethos that has driven so much of the last thirty years of punk music and culture found its incubator in the garage bands of the sixties. Listen to the Shaggs singing (with no sense of melody or harmony, let alone any sense of irony) about how great parents are. Listen to the One Way Streets singing “We All Love Peanut Butter.” You can’t hear anything but sheer joy in these songs.

I thought Bob Mould proved conclusively in 1984 that punk had a lot more emotional depth and complexity than angry adolescent rejection. Why does this impression persist?

Assuming that punk– and anything that, like the notion of “edupunk,” draws on the legacy and ethos of punk– has the emotional complexity of the Incredible Hulk is just patently wrong.

Sure, punk is often about smashing the “system.”
And sometimes anger makes you want to smash things.
Sometimes, it’s political– the system is too broken to be repaired, and needs to be cleared away before new options can thrive.
Sometimes, it’s just the sheer joy of breaking things.
And other times, you’re motivated by a sense of play and fun– detourning the mechanisms of a system, subverting it, disrupting its self-seriousness, and trying to provoke positive change.

To this end, I’m trying to use all the social networking tools I can.

I’m contacting the admins of Mozilla-related Facebook communities.
I’ve created a Mozilla DMB Livejournal account to contact communities there.

I’ve even created a Youtube account, and posted video ads for the site, trying to get users to submit accounts of their experiences with Mozilla Products:

…I’m trying to come up with other social media that I could use to increase the profile of the site– the more eyeballs we get on the site, the more people will submit. It’s a numbers game– if one person out of fifty people who find out about the database actually submit material, it’s still worth it to try to get several hundred people to find out about the site.

Any suggestions?

Perhaps the best part of the entire article is the definition of squirrel “kissing” as “oral contact that doesn’t lead to bickering.”

Also interesting (though less amusing):

Manno tested what would happen to the squirrel network if individuals were removed. Random removals didn’t disrupt the network much, but if more than 10 percent of the colony’s important members were taken out, the network fragmented, leaving it vulnerable to collapse.

If, as many have suggested, most people use internet Social Network Systems not to increase our base of friends (actual “networking”) but to suplement or complement existing social networks, can this be taken as a survival instinct? Is the social disconnect of the postmodern age, the breakdown of community and kinship ties, encouraging us to resort to SNS technology out of an instinctual desire to preserve and foster social systems as a method of self-preservation?

____________________________

Second item: this Newsweek article from 1995 insisting that the internet is mostly hype, and unlikely to change much of anything:

Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

As much as proponents of new technology get sucked into the same irrational enthusiasm that captured early proponents of the stereoscope, the motion picture, and countless other technologies, being too quick to poo-pooh the new technology can leave you sounding pretty unimaginative, even ten or fifteen years later.

Which is why I’m not giving up on flying cars.