Writing and new media

locEmotion 3: Saturday 9.45pm

2005-10-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

Well, i sent out an email in advance in the hope I could continue the little SMS experiment. Thank you again for your generosity in replying. I can't tell you how bizarre it was to get all these little sms in reply, to me, deep within the hellhole that was the Empire Hotel that night! It was a very odd feeling... taking the pulse of the night... Here they are in order.

xxxx6752: At star bar with work mates. Headache warning of potential hangover but the beer is so cheap! Wondering where boyfriend is. Oh, he just came. Oh well. Feel kinda down.

xxxx6405: I'm on my purple bed. I was praying and feeling perplexed. I was seeing what u see when u have ur eyes closed. Still perplexed and my throat hurts. Meh.

xxxx9805: the kransky sisters on sbs. my throat is dry and swollen, prone to dry coughs. perhaps i'm being punished by a greater power with a penchant for academic diligence.

xxxx6994: I'm at home. Sulking myself into a quiet saturday night in front of the tv. Feeling the guilt of not going to birthday drinks i was invited to.

xxxx9902: At empire, total mistake. Music all wrong, so bad its almost good. Gothabilly - how the hell did i end up here? Things i have to talk about with someone, later tonight... Feeling a bit worried but oddly free.

xxxx2260: I'm at the lansdowne with 2 aussie friends of mine. I'm staring at a juicy 5 dollar steak that i'm about to eat. I feel tonights going 2 be a good night.

xxxx8915: I'm at home, feeling hungover and sleepy. I can't wait to be asleep. I look around my room and see a trail of alcohol induced destruction.

xxxx4196: I'm at a family dinner, with my sisters dad and stepmother and their friends. We are having an awesome conversation about aliens creating humans...And now i am defending my use of the phone at dinner, doh! Just thinking about how nice it is to have family who might not be blood kin, but accept you as if you were..Aw.. Oh no, i have sparked debate over predictive text among the oldies, coupled with lessons on how to spell cat in half the time...

xxxx4785: I'm in canberra, i am drunk, everyone is dressed up as porn stars for a friend's 20th, tonight is fun hope i don't get sick!

xxxx8089: backseat driving down dew-covered blue quartz mountain/dancing blackdiamond light/hologram neons dressed in jewels/sparkling rhododendron/its his 8th birthday/he's dressed himself in a tiny suit with 'hidden pockets'/glowing/feeling all grown up/ we share a piece of rainbow cake/his little hand in mine/the look on his face enough to break my heart/stare out an open window/starshapes/blurry

xxxx3039: Sitting in the sun on sunday morning. Gorgeous day but feeling a bit flat. Drove my partner to a party last night. I didn't feel up to socialising.

locEmotion 2: Wednesday 6.45pm

2005-10-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

Last night I sent you all an sms for part 2 of locEmotion. It was great getting the sms's back - big variety of what people were doing and feeling. This has been really fun to do...I think I might try to build it into a visually more interesting webpage to show in the last week of class...

But also, we could possibly continue, building up narratives that crisscross the city over time...Could potentially do as a moblog- post sms from mobile direct to a blog...Anyway, more to think about. It's been great to get everyone's stories, so thanks for participating! I hope it's been fun for you as well! Now, back to Wed 6.45! Everything is listed in the order that they came back to me...

xxxx8915: I'm walking to the library. I feel tense because I have so much work to do there. My left eye is twitching, which always happens when i haven't slept enough. I'm worried it makes me look mad.

xxxx6405: I'm at the climbing centre and i'm totally pumped and ready to climb! The ledge at syd uni. Very excited!

xxxx4196: Oh how i love my wee computer. Its really the dominant feature of my room, the first thing i turn to in the morning, last thing i see at night. Which is kind of sad really. Its been filling my vision all day, but thats probably because i sit too close. I have been feeling awfully nostalgic today. Should stop listening to crash test dummies, and avoiding work, talking on msn and wondering about death and mum and school and starving and fat and mmm chicken.

xxxx6994: I'm at my mate's place in marrickville. I'm looking at a blank tv in a small but cosy living room. I'm feeling the slight disorientation of a new place combined with the comfortable familiarity of old friends.

xxxx9902: I'm at home, Concord. In bedroom for 10 snatched minutes sending sms's, but before that cooking dinner + even muffins for my daughter- very unusual! She is battling homework and on verge of a fuss... I'm feeling good, pretty happy and just a bit sneaky...

xxxx6752: In the living room talking about travelling with my gorgeous friend, feeling very content and at peace. Bellies full of food and our lives ahead of us.

xxxx9805: I’m at home physically and in germany visually and aurally. i am feeling happy, a good friend from school and I are having a webcam conversation as she is too far to see face to face. This is the next best thing. Advice, jokes and gossip across oceans, made almost instantaneous by a media once deemed loveless.

xxxx4785: Level 19, tower, german class, everyone chatting through mid-class break, we just discussed exam schedule, 2 + half wks left of 2nd yr. I feel tired and anxious.

xxxx8089: Twinkling fairylight fireplaces shrine/ new years eve 3 years before / we lay face to face on her bed without sheets / the sky outside the window was a silk screen skirt/ one hundred thousand firework sparks scattered like red diamond dust/ I cut his hair in the dark with my head to one side so it turned out assymetrical / couldn’t stop smiling when he said my name / again/ again/ his hand on my skin / everything still sparkling / and sigh

xxxx2260: I’m in tempe playing ultimate Frisbee. I see a bunch of people in red shirts ( they’re the other team). I feel frustrated ‘cause we’re losing.

xxxx3039: At home on a Wednesday night. About to go to bed. My partner is waiting. I’m feeling…

Alternatives to and purchasing Dreamweaver software

2005-10-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

UTS has a site that allows students (and staff) to buy software for cheaper prices. The link is:

http://www.itd.uts.edu.au/itpurchasing/spectrum/staff.html

Dreamweaver (educational version) is available here for $134.00 (plus postage and handling, which is a hidden cost and is about $15.00).

Dreamweaver (educational version) is also available at the Coop Bookshop, Broadway, crn Harris Street, for $174.00 (with the member discount).

If anyone knows of a shareware version of Dreamweaver please reply to this post with the name and the address of the website from which it can be downloaded. I think I heard someone from the class talking about using a shareware version for their group project.

Holly, I sent you an email about Dreamweaver but it bounced. I'll try to send it again or contact you by phone but perhaps you could provide me with an alternative email address. The information I've provided here is an addition to this email.

Hope someone finds the above info useful, Kate

locEmotion: location + emotion

2005-10-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

Locative SMS writing exercise:

The class finds a location at UTS where something meaningful happened to them, a site resonant with traces of their own emotion, or experience. They return to their own special location at 12.45pm on Tuesday October 18, recording the place, what they are seeing, what they were feeling when the experience occurred.

Thanks to someone in the class for using the word "locEmotion". I've shamelessly plundered it as the title for this exercise!! Most people came in anonymously so I've stuck with that for now... here they all are... the traces of your location: emotions.

xxxx6752: Female toilets on level 5 building one. A girl in the cubicle next to mine tries to purge as quietly as possible. It makes me sad to think that most people sit on toilets to get rid of waste, while others spend hours in here after meals to throw up.

xxxx8915: I'm standing at the first set of escalators in building two. This is where i saw a man humiliated by his friends. As he stood on the moving stairs, they pushed him. He became trapped between the unmoving rail and the moving rail. I remember feeling horrified that they had pushed him, then laughed.

xxxx6405: I'm in rm 432. Bon Marche. I'm looking at the table and thinking of how my great grandmother's spirit is no longer here on earth. But her memory lives on.

xxxx6994: I'm at university hall. It is quiet and smells of carpet cleaner. I'm looking at the doors of the lecture theatre - empty. I remember the soft nervousness of my first lecture. Everything seemed weighed down with anticipation.

xxxx4785: Toilet CB 3.3 starkwhite porcelain + regimental blue cubicle, i recall 2 hrs of misery, spewing and crying, i heard claps and laughs as i missed my sis' map screening.

xxxx9805: come on baby, do the locEmotion with me:
in the loft looking at cheap coffee stained suede.

i've always felt lost in groups and you'd think a cafe would allow me the solitude a young poet thrives on. it seems i'm not the only one who sees the connection between coffee and writing. all of last year was spent being interrupted midthought, yet every spare moment i returned. perhaps location is a drug? atmosphere counts for a lot these days.

xxxx2260: I'm outside the entrance 2 the Great Hall in the tower blding. Be4 semester started i had 2 meet here 4 intn'l student orientation. I remember feeling excited 2 meet new friends and also slightly nervous what people thougth abt americans. More than anything though, i was stoked i finally made it 2 Australia.

xxxx3039: Sitting at my desk in the international office UTS, where i work, and if i wasn't looking at my phone i'd be looing at my computer remembering the day steve who works here was walking down the hall throwing an orange up and down and he threw it up too high and it hit the light fitting and smashed it out. Gave me a fright and a laugh.

xxxx9902: I’ve been here such a long time the place is thick with memories. It’s hard to isolate just one… Walking around I try to catch glimpses …when I first started teaching it was in the dread Tower, on floors 16 and 17, windows forever locked. Offices like high cells, terrifying late at night. Other jumbled up snatches… pushing my daughter in a pram, or carrying her as a baby down endless stairs in the Tower to the child care centre, now demolished… walking corridors with a huge pregnant belly… or the traces of a lover’s embrace, very late…

One of the most vivid was in my first year of teaching, first week of semester. A rowdy class, me young and nervous. An old friend happened upon the classroom, he had tracked me down to deliver terrible news - one of our best friends had died in a car crash overseas. I had to continue the class, wait until 9pm, and then make the phone calls, endless phone calls from a tiny office hidden on level 4. The funeral was the next day, and I had to call everyone, all of our friends, the same awful news, over and over, till around 11.30, when I dragged myself home to an anguished, sleepless bed.

xxxx4196: Since i stupidly forgot my phone today, and had no credit anyway, i am sending this message now. Clearly it is way past 12.45, but its ok, i think i only runied the experiemnt slightly. Using my amazing survival skills, i tracked down a public phone and sent this to myself, which i now forward to you:

Well i forgot my phone. At phone box out the front of tower where there is nothing to see except the asian girl who just fell over being ignored by everyone on the street. The most vivid memory i have of this spot is from just a week ago, when i came to use the phone and a guy trying to sell the Big Issue from the wall out the front of UTS. he told me that UTS had refused to let hime sell on the grounds and the council had told hime to keep off the street. Since this was his designated selling block he had no choice but to be on the wall. He sold two copies in six hours...

xxxx8089: Corner of 4th floor architecture building / humming plastic playbunny look but no touch organs on tile / he said i reminded him of the pretty girls in europe in the 1950s / its yr eyes he said kissing me on both cheeks / he talks in his own language thinking i can understand / moths without dust, particles of white, wanting to be back there with myself, where we both know me.

An interesting precedent

2005-10-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

I found this in the SMH on the 7/10:

"US court rules in favour of anonymous blogger
Dover, Delaware
October 7, 2005 - 10:00AM
Page Tools

In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court has reversed a lower court decision requiring an internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.

In a 34-page opinion, the justices said a Superior Court judge should have required Smyrna town councilman Patrick Cahill to make a stronger case that he and his wife, Julia, had been defamed before ordering Comcast Cable Communications to disclose the identities of four anonymous posters to a blog site operated by Independent Newspapers, publisher of the Delaware State News.

In a series of obscenity-laced tirades, the bloggers, among other things, pointed to Cahill's "obvious mental deterioration," and made several sexual references about him and his wife, including using the name "Gahill" to suggest that Cahill, who has publicly feuded with Smyrna Mayor Mark Schaeffer, is homosexual.

In June, the lower court judge ruled that the Cahills had established a "good faith basis" for contending that they were victims of defamation and affirmed a previous order for Comcast to disclose the bloggers' identities.

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One of the bloggers, referred to in court papers only as John Doe No. 1 and his blog name, "Proud Citizen," challenged the ruling, arguing that the Cahills should have been required to establish a prima facie case of defamation before seeking disclosure of the defendants' identities.

The Supreme Court agreed, reversing and remanding the case to Superior Court with an order to dismiss the Cahills' claims.

"Because the trial judge applied a standard insufficiently protective of Doe's First Amendment right to speak anonymously, we reverse that judgment," chief justice Myron Steele wrote.

Steele described the internet as a "unique democratising medium unlike anything that has come before," and said anonymous speech in blogs and chat rooms in some instances can become the modern equivalent of political pamphleteering.

Accordingly, a plaintiff claiming defamation should be required to provide sufficient evidence to overcome a defendant's motion for summary judgment before a court orders the disclosure of a blogger's identity.

"We are concerned that setting the standard too low will chill potential posters from exercising their First Amendment right to speak anonymously," Steele wrote. "The possibility of losing anonymity in a future lawsuit could intimidate anonymous posters into self-censoring their comments or simply not commenting at all."

The standard adopted by the court, the first state Supreme Court in the country to consider the issue, is based on a 2000 New Jersey court ruling.

Under the standard adopted by the Supreme Court, a plaintiff must first try to notify the anonymous poster that he is the subject of a subpoena or request for a court to disclose his identity, allowing the poster time to oppose the request. The plaintiff would then have to provide prima facie evidence of defamation strong enough to overcome a summary judgment motion.

"The decision of the Supreme Court helps provide protection for anonymous bloggers and anonymous speakers in general from lawsuits which have little or no merit and are filed solely to intimidate the speaker or suppress the speech," said David Finger, a Wilmington attorney representing John Doe No. 1.

"Delaware cases are generally respected in other states, and we'll have to see if this trend continues with these types of lawsuits, but I expect the decision of the Delaware Supreme Court to be influential," Finger added.

Robert Katzenstein, a lawyer representing the Cahills, did not immediately return a telephone message left at his home.

"This is the first state Supreme Court to squarely decide the standards to govern John Doe subpoena cases," said Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for Public Citizen, a national, non-profit consumer advocacy organisation, who helped argue the case for John Doe No. 1. "The court's determination to require sufficient evidence before a critic is outed will go a long way toward reassuring citizens that they remain free to anonymously criticize public officials."

Steele noted in his opinion that plaintiffs in such cases can use the internet to respond to character attacks and "generally set the record straight," and that, as in Cahill's case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.

"Given the context, no reasonable person could have interpreted these statements as being anything other than opinion. ... The statements are, therefore, incapable of a defamatory meaning," he wrote."

That's the full text of the article from the SMH site.

It is definitely an interesting ruling which will hopefully be upheld. It's also interesting to note the judges' opinion of the internet as a "unique democratising medium unlike anything that has come before".

I guess the issue here, if /when it arises here, will be the fact that we don't have a "first amendment" to protect out right to free speech - not that the amendment guarantees anonymity anyway, but that it does entitle one to the freedom of expression that anonymous posting gives us.

The other interesting point which I was considering was the fact that online identities aren't exactly anonymous anyway - people use them as alternative identities and build an online or "virtual" personality which is just as real to them as the one they use in "real" life. Since people can be known online, and even have an amount of power as a spokesperson etc without their "real" identity being revealed, I think this precedent will be set and re-set in coming years as each case brings a different outcome.

a couple of things that might interest you

2005-10-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

hi everyone,

here are a couple of things that might be of interest:-

empyre (online list)is focussing on digital writing this month . subscribe via:-
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre

google are planning to start a digital library- scanning millions of books and make text fully searchable on the net. europe is planning to follow...and publishers and authors are freaking out... what do you think??

electrofringe- intersting new media rts festival happens every Oct long weekend in newcastle. the NYWF stages talks and events there- national young writers festival. heard of it? www.youngwritersfestival.org

Writing and New Media

2005-08-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

This is the class blog for our Writing and New Media class. We will be doing exercises and posting to this blog at various times. You may also use this to alert other students to interesting sites etc.

This morning.

2005-08-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Interesting Stuff

2005-08-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

We can post stuff to each other here. Interesting links etc