Everyone knows when we post online, we’re being watched. The NSA, the FBI, Google, Facebook, Apple, Visa, ModCloth–they monitor our online activities for patterns that indicate danger or that can teach them to market directly to us; they monitor for … Continue reading →

Big Brother: 9 Ways You’re Being Watched We’re pretty much already transparent in so many ways. But, is it really a bad thing?Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: advertisers, big brother, cameras, capitalism, companies, dave eggers, government, grandparents.com, homeland security, link, next … Continue reading →

Watching Each Other: Foucault’s Panopticon and Confessional in Online Sharing I. Intro a. Thesis: The internet, especially social media, can be read as Foucault’s confessional-turned-panopticon, in which people expose and put into language (text, pictures, videos, music) their experiences and … Continue reading →

Tentative Thesis: The internet, especially social media, can be read as Foucault’s confessional-turned-panopticon, in which people expose and put into language (text, pictures, videos, music) their experiences and stories, the process of which makes them subject those experiences to social discourse, … Continue reading →

This article explores the use of social media as a way to motivate/shame yourself into meeting a goal, like losing weight, monitoring your spending, or quitting smoking. The author looks at one man who lost weight by tweeting his caloric intake, … Continue reading →

This short blog post appears to be part of Richard Joyce’s blog for a course at Bowdoin, and, similar to this blog, he’s thinking through some of his own thoughts in relation to what he’s read. The thrust of his thinking … Continue reading →

Last year, Because I said I would, a website that helps people post a commitment they are making, posted the above video on YouTube, featuring Matthew Cordle confessing to drunk driving the wrong way on a highway and killing a … Continue reading →

An interesting read about humanities research, the academy, and the ways in which the accessibility and openness of the internet begins to deconstruct the Ivory Tower. Kee reflects on his experience in the 1990′s, breaking into the academy through publications … Continue reading →

Rajagopal’s essay considers the relationship between information and knowledge through a Foucauldian framework. This was a complex, dry argument, so I’m going to try to communicate what I understood, and what I might continue to think about. In the knowledge/power … Continue reading →

I was sent Michael S. Rosenwald’s “Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say,” and Steven Poole’s “The internet isn’t harming our love of ‘deep reading’, it’s cultivating it” by a friend who I’m going to … Continue reading →

This short blog post on the Moonbat (Big ideas, big politics.) makes the same, limited move that much of what I’ve read before does: Copland begins with a nice little summary of Foucault’s confessional, and then turns to apply it … Continue reading →

Special Interest Group discussion in another class, Critical Issues in the Teaching of Writing: Histories, Theories and Practices of Writing Centers and One-to-One Teaching, brought me Stephen Davenport Jukuri’s chapter in Stories from the Center, “Negotiating the ‘Subject’ of Composition: Writing Centers … Continue reading →

Turning from panopticism (which I’m still unsure is a word) toward Foucault’s confessional, I look at Mitchell McInnis’ blog post from Hoboeye.com, which seems to be a possibly-temporarily-defunct online publication about wandering. I annotate this because the beginning raises an interesting lens for thinking about Facebook–a similar lens to the one I am thinking through–though it […]

Looking around a few different electronic scholarly editions of authors’ works this week, I came across the Geographic Chronology project, which maps American author Willa Cather’s life and travels, in order to think about how they relate to her writing. Willa Cather, known widely for  O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark, according to Wikipedia, […]

I would have never guessed that this article was post-9/11, but according to this vaguely-identified HTML version of it, it was published in 2002. I don’t know why no one has considered the panopticon and the internet more recently, but maybe that’s why I have to bring it back to the fore. I’m so noble. […]

Originally posted on Rebecca Frost Davis:
Crowdsourcing could be a silver bullet for integrating digital humanities methods into the undergraduate curriculum.  Why? “Crowd” by flickr user James Cridland Crowdsourcing means getting the general public to do tasks. Jeff Howe explains the phenomenon in “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Wired Magazine, June 2006) by analogy with outsourcing. …

Jeez, I thought the last article I read was too old. This 1997 article applies a somewhat Foucauldian framework to thinking about the “Holy Trinity” of the internet in its adolescence–three ideas which have had a profound impact and may be seen as foundational to today’s internet culture: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around […]

This 2005 article is based on a study of UK post-primary schools: the researcher observed and interviewed students, teachers, and staff about methods of monitoring what students do on school computers and students’ resistance of these methods. He begins by establishing a framework based on Bentham’s panopticon, which, importantly, works via the prisoners’ perception, but […]

Thank you, Google! This is such a neat tool, and if I had a project that involved more intensive big data-type research, this would be amazing. Google Ngrams allows you to enter search terms, and then it graphs the occurrences of those terms across all of Google Books’ holdings. For now, I played around on […]

I only read the intro to this book, because who has time to read more?, but Lessig sets up an interesting argument here. He begins with two stories: that of the Wright brothers and the subsequent Supreme Court case in with the Causby brothers challenged airlines’ rights to trespass in their “property”–the airspace above their […]

I need to go out into the world and do some reading, but for now, for the Daily Create assignment, I’ll lay out a plan for attacking this thing. 1. Gonna do some reading–I have my crazy to-do list calendar. All that dark green is time I’ll be spending reading so that I can coherently […]

Today we’re gonna learn about Creative Commons. I had a general idea of what this term meant before–something about granting license to use or not use creative works online in certain ways. So, a quick Google search brings me to Wikipedia which brings the details into focus: Creative Commons is a non-profit which developed and […]

That’s a tentative title, of course.   For my final project for English in the Digital Age, for the sake of this blog and all of you, my lovely followers, and for the sake of knowledge and communities of critical thought, I will be developing a critical, multimedia essay reading social media through a Foucauldian […]

Just finished. I’m still reflecting, and I don’t often write reviews of books right after I finish them–gotta let it marinate. This one is certainly still marinating. But, if I don’t force myself to write it now, I don’t know if I’ll care enough to when I’m five days out. Overall, I like it much […]

‘Okay, with that kind of thing, one of two things will eventually happen. First, we’ll realize that whatever behavior we’re talking about is so widespread and harmless that it needn’t be secret. If we demystify it, if we admit that it’s something we all do, then it loses its power to shock. We move toward […]

Filed under: Random Tagged: 836, community writing center, dave eggers, Rhetoric of Respect, Rousculp, the circle, writing center, writing program

Reading a physical book means I highlight differently. Reading a physical book means I can’t just drag my finger over a moment that fascinates me. Instead, I have to unsettle myself, find my pen, underline, attempt to annotate legibly, and maybe flip to the front of the book for a sticky tab. Reading a physical […]

I found this passage that seems relevant in Suzy Anger’s Victorian Interpretation, in which she quotes George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss: All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by […]

The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dystopian story of a young woman, Mae, who gets a job at the premier, most widely-used, wealthiest technology company (monopoly), The Circle, which seems to have so much power, and penetrates people of the developed world’s lives so deeply, that it becomes like an oppressive government, like that […]

It’s really lovely to read something that isn’t griping about damn-kids-these-days, always-plugged-in. Farman lays out the claims of those who argue we are disconnected from experience and others because of the pervasiveness of technology, then brilliantly tells the history of this crisis (reminds me of the regularly-occurring crises of writing!), going all the way back […]