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It's weird, because I actually started thinking about this class during the Marathon as well. I had to go to work at 9:00, all of State St. was blocked off because of the Marathon, and I had to cross State St. to get to work. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off, but even as I was 20 minutes late for work I started thinking about Jane Bennet. It's still strange to me the way networks reveal themselves when there is a failure within that network. I truly take the traffic system for granted almost all of the time, and it takes a real pain-in-the-ass controversy for  me to recognize what's around me all the time. Stupid race.

SLC Marathon

Hilarious. Had to throw in the Ryan Gosling picture. I ran in the Salt Lake Half Marathon last weekend, so I thought it was fitting. Since being in this class it’s crazy that a network can be seen just about anywhere.  I would have never noticed this had I not taken this class. Running, especially in a marathon, is totally a network. The organization that goes into having a marathon. Place is being occupied and there are effects because of it.  Roads are completely shut down for hours so runners can run.  Spectators come out to watch.  The whole city of Salt Lake it involved and connected, without many people even realizing it.

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Interesting Random Data From My Project

So looking through all of the Jomini Stroud data that I'm able to access right now, some interesting things are showing up. For instance, conservatives were (at the time of the study) actually more likely to read a newspaper that endorsed John Kerry than liberals were to read one that endorsed George Bush, but liberals were much more likely to be reading any kind of newspaper period. Eighty-Four percent of people who say that they get their news primarily through blogs say that they have a favorite news blog and that it shares their political persuasions. Also, there seems to be evidence that extreme partisanship actually drives people to be more likely to vote and to be more active in the election process. Everybody thinks that if they don't get out there and do something, the other side is going to ruin the world.

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Ted Talks wins again. I thought about this immediately when one of our presenters was talking about eating bugs for efficiency. Obviously she has already thought about it, but for the rest of us, this is a super interesting way of thinking about it. "A Locust is just a shrimp of the land." Love it. If you don't have the time to watch a whole 16 minute video, just skip to near the end and see the dutch bug-chocolates. Worth it, I promise.

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First of all, that's disgusting. Second of all, it brought to mind Latour's idea of controversies. It's just interesting to me that whenever some hidden assemblage is brought to light it's always at least a little bit unsettling. Even though, rationally, I understand that there are millions upon millions of these little guys inside me all the time, it take some sort of controversy (even if it's only internal) for me to come to terms with it and take a good hard look at what was there all along.

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A Book Without a Frame

Finally put down Cyclonopedia for the last time. I feel pretty confident in saying that I'm never going to be picking it back up again. I was thinking about all of the past readings we've been doing in this class, looking for some kind of frame to put the book in so as to make a good blog post, when it struck me that I may be going about things the wrong way. I suddenly thought about the Latour dialogue and realized that the whole point of the book was that it has no frame.

Latour says: "A frame makes a picture look nicer, it may direct the gaze better, increase the value, allows to date it, but it doesn’t add anything to the picture. The frame, or the context, is precisely the sum of factors that make no difference to the data, what is common knowledge about it. If I were you, I would abstain from frameworks altogether. Just describe the state of affairs at hand."

Doesn't it seem as though Reza took this just a little bit too much to heart? I can appreciate what he was trying to do (somewhat), but the fact is that if he truly wanted Cyclonopedia to be a novel, some kind of frame would have been really helpful. There was so much data, so much "picture" if you will, that accessing it all without any frame was almost impossible. I realize that (at least according to Latour) the frame may not have actually added anything to the big picture, but it at least would have made it less of a chore to read.

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Cyclonopedia and Oil

So I'm still having a hell of a time trying to figure out what's going on in Cyclonopedia, but I am interested in the huge role that oil is playing in the book.

"Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on Earth." (pg 19)

Oil is just very interesting in the context of what we've recently been talking about, specifically the agency of things. I mean, really, what other "thing" is involved in so many different networks or assemblages? I haven't even been able to come up with a single network in which oil does not play a pretty significant role. Seriously, if you removed all of the oil from the world tomorrow I don't think that there is a single person in the world who's life would be unaffected. That's why it's interesting to see oil take on such a personality in this book. It already plays such a huge role in everything we do, it's almost like it is a person that basically everybody in the world already knows.

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The Tumblr Network

This doesn't have a whole lot to do with what we've recently been discussing, but I thought it was very interesting. I had almost forgotten that this blog that we all write in was not created for this class. Everything that we write is available to everyone else in the world with the click of a mouse. So when one of my posts received two "thumbs up" or whatever they are for this site, I naturally assumed that they were from people in this class. I checked it out though, and they were actually from complete strangers, with no connection at all to this class. They were simply fans (I'm assuming) of the TV show from which I had borrowed a video. I'm sot sure why I found this interesting, except for the fact that it illustrates that we are always connected in ways that we probably don't realize or don't bother to think about. My new goal for my next blog post is to receiveat leastone thumbs up from somebody outside of this class. I imagine it will probably have to be some kind of video or picture. Or maybe it has to do with finding the right tag?

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The Essence of Latour's Argument

After plowing through three and a half chapters of dense theory by Latour, I was surprised to realize that his argument could really just be summed up in this one sentence that I noticed in chapter four:

"The social has never explained anything; the social has to be explained instead. It’s the very notion of a social explanation that has to be dealt with."

Everything else that we've been reading, as far as I can tell, has only been an effort to provide evidence for, or examples of, this one relatively simple claim. The beautiful part is, after seeing the argument made so plain for me, it has become really easy for me to buy into what Latour is arguing. I was having a bit of trouble understanding, and therefore believing, some of the finer points of the earlier chapters, but this is one claim that I can wholeheartedly buy into. This has made it far more interesting, and fun, for me to read Latour, so I'm really happy that I've had this little "aha" moment.

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Latour Reading

Because I have been working on my paper for the last few days, I've been thinking a lot about Rainbows End again. So when I came upon this quote in the Latour that's immediately what I thought about:

"No one knows how many people are simultaneously at work in any given individual; conversely, no one knows how much individuality there can be in a cloud of statistical data points."

I just can't read this passage without thinking about Robert, being controlled and manipulated by both Rabbit and Vaz, and his son as the Commander of the night watch, sitting as a single personality at the center of so many analyses and so many data points, while still worrying about his wife and his daughter.

I understand that the example is a little bit too literal, but its still helpful for me to think about when trying to grasp Latour's argument: that it truly is getting nearly impossible to neatly separate the individual from the forces, objects, and institutions around it. One can't change without changing the others as well. So the one burning question that's left in my mind is whether or not it has always been this way, without a clear separation between actor and person, or if it is only in our modern, heavily networked society that this phenomenon is taking place.

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I immediately started thinking about this scene when we started talking about the physical make-up of people. I love how we keep getting the switch from the chemical breakdown of a person to the bits of this actual person that Walt is digging through. This is from the TV show "Breaking Bad," and I apologize for the slightly graphic nature.

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The Durability of The Rhizome

I was thinking about the rhizome as an actual, literal plant, and I started wondering what the major advantage of such a structure was. The most obvious that I could think of was that if a part of the structure is damaged, the organism lives on. Unlike a tree, which is fairly easy to kill with a few strategically placed strikes, a rhizome is too dispersed to be killed easily. Obviously I started thinking about the Gallison essay at this point, and have been working on the implications of the metaphor. I imagine that in the corporate network, the internet age has made it far easier to fire and hire people quickly, even in other countries, which is kind of similar, but I'm still struggling.

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Idea

I am probably going to end up just doing a paper for my project, and I'd really like to combine the two earlier papers that I wrote for this class. The first talked about niche blogs and their effect on society, and the second will probably be about Robert's isolation as a result of his ignorance. I want to show how in each case it is access to technology that both frees and traps curious minds.

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The Origin of Good Ideas

Of all the network concepts that we've been working with throughout the semester, my favorite so far has been Steven Johnson's idea of where good ideas come from. I just love this idea that real innovation does not rely on one single Einstein type character, but from a collective of reasonably smart, creative, educated, and, most importantly, uniquely interested individuals. It's a very freeing thought for those of us with serious interests and a desire to do something profound, but to whom the term genius will never apply.

I noticed this quote in the beginning of "Rainbow's End," and thought that it very nicely illustrated this point: "In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population and providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom."(emphasis not added by me)

Then, as I continued reading, I became more and more convinced that this was a central theme of the book. Except that, instead of being freed and excited by the amount of educated peers around them, most of the characters are made deeply insecure by this. Many of the characters in the book (Juan and Robert most importantly) are bright, interested people who are stuck wondering if they will ever be smart or interested enough. This is most interesting because on the one hand, connecting with a lot of other people is supposed to alleviate individual pressure by making the individual a single cog in a greater whole, but on the other hand, the increased competition and the over-abundance competent people with the same interests increases pressure on everyone to be even better than before.

I obviously haven't thought this all the way through, but this is definitely something interesting that I'm picking up on as the book progresses.

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Shaviro VS Jeter

So do you suppose that Jeter would like to apply a .357 Magnum to the head of Shaviro for his excessive sampling of "Noir?" It seems as though Shaviro doesn't even really push the bounds of fair us law with any of the other pieces of fiction that he discusses, but "Noir" gets referenced in every three or four sections of the book. Would Jeter be okay with this because it's only to make a larger point? Do you think that he might have possibly been excited about the extra exposure for his novel? Or do you think that Jeter has secret fantasies of making a piece of toast with Shaviro's tortured nervous system?

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Commodified Oxygen

When Shaviro first brings up Steven Landsburg's theory that many of today's problems could be solved by allowing the air around us to be bought and sold like any other commodity I, like most everyone I'm sure, thought that the idea sounded absolutely ludicrous. Upon reconsideration however, It truly doesn't seem to me to be much more ridiculous than some of the other things we buy and sell. We already have made a commodity out of water, land, and every other natural resource you can possibly name, so why not air? Just as Landsburg says, it would force companies to monitor their pollution, and beyond that it would also get individual more involved in the maintenance of air quality. If the air above your home actually belonged to you, and you had some sort of legal recourse when people began to muck it up, then everyone around you would be more actively involved in keeping the air clean. I'm trying hard now to think of the downsides of privatizing the air. The biggest one that I can think of is simply the fact that a person who owns the air in a certain area has an unreal amount of control. If someone were able to gain control of too much air, it could be a serious problem. What are some of the other problems that could arise from the privatization of the air?

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Legal Action

During the movie we were watching on Thursday, everyone kept making such a big deal about how clearly illegal it was for Girl Talk to be making the music that he is. This, obviously, begs the question why hasn't he been sued yet? If his music is as obviously illegal as everyone claimed, and the music industry is as overly litigious as its reputation would have us believe, then why would they hold back? After talking with friends and searching the internet, I decided that the most plausible explanation is that the music industry knows that copyright law in this country is due for a change and they worry that if they bring Girl Talk to court he may be just the martyr that the opposition needs. As one website put it, "Gillis would be a ready-made hero for copyright reformers; if he were sued, he’d have some of the best copyright lawyers in the country knocking on his door asking to take his case for free."

The cynic in me also feels the need to point out that the lack of lawsuits also probably has a lot to do with the fact that there's simply not a lot of money to be made with a lawsuit. Girl Talk is not wealthy, and each label could only sue for the money owed for the songs it owns, making it a poor decision economically. However, I can't believe that this is the only reason no one sues Girl Talk when there are children and lower-middle class mothers being sued y the record companies. There can't be much money there either.

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Remix vs Appropriation

In the Varnellis reading for today I was struck by the distinction that was made between "appropriation" art that marked the era of post-modernism, and the "remix" art that defines the network culture. I was most intrigued by the idea that since "the nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone," "the elements that artists choose to remix. . . tend to be contemporary." In my experience this has not been the case at all.

As a huge fan of all kinds of hip-hop, when I first read these passages I started thinking about all of the very recent songs that I could that utilized this remix mentality, and the ones that came most readily to mind (Flo Rida's "Good Feeling," Blueprint's "Stole Our Yesterday," etc.) all used samples from 30-100 years ago. Old, swing music, big band sounds, and heavy, jazzy brass are very big right now in hip-hop. I can't really say much about paintings, movies, or tv shows, so I may simply be limited in my understanding, but this passage felt strange to me.