deuxlits

my dream spring quarter

Originally uploaded by cupcup

here are my books on tap for next quarter. i imagine this being the syllabus for my dream class about anthropologies of open source and development. anyone want to start a reading group with me?

the vietnamese government has recently decided to crack down on bloggers. following the release of a government circular laying out the new official stipulations for blogging. much like anywhere else, the rubber hits the road not so much in the articulation of law but more in its implementation. so this alone doesn’t necessarily surprise me. what’s interesting about this is the underlying metaphors that frame the justification of these legislative controls. speech in blogs has been cast as a damaging kind of communication that diseases a cultural body. these so-called offensive blog are described as “black blogs” and are somehow contrary to vietnamese customs and habits. i also read somewhere that south korea intends to move in a similar direction and the kind of language they used to justify these measures entailed some kind of perilous “infodemic.” does anyone know where this term “infodemic” comes from? who originated it? i’m just a bit confused about this disease metaphor and information. i suppose what’s most fasinating for me is that these disease are interna, that they originate from within rather than being brought from some external force. has anyone else seen this metaphor in other places?

dong ngo over at cnet has been blogging about technology in vietnam lately and recently blogged about dating and the new digilanguage of love: emoticons. now, my vietnamese is just so-so i will admit. and while i grew up speaking vietnamese, i was born in the states and am only now just learning how to read and write properly. so this blog post was a nice schooling session into a world that i’m barely tapping into.

he writes in his post:

“Though most Yahoo IM emoticons are designed to mean something that’s widely understood, there are some that are interpreted here entirely differently from what they are originally designed to mean.
For example, the “time out” smiley (formed by :-t characters) is used by some to actually mean “I am going to hammer you on the head”. The “talk to the hand” and “bring it on” smileys (formed by =; and >:/ , respectively) are sometimes used to mean “bye bye.” And the “not worthy” sign ^:)^ is used to mean “po’ tay”, which is a trendy not-in-the-dictionary Vietnamese way to say “You are too much, I give up.”"

for me it was interesting to see how emoticons become appropriated and assigned new meanings. is something in the visual display of the emoticon that gives it new meaning in the vietnamese context? something as seemingly minute as a simple emoticon has a new kind of life as it moves from english to the vietnamese. it makes me wonder what other kinds of reinterpretations of emoticons exist in other languages. or what is an emoticon in chinese? does it work in the same way?

Somehow during finals week, I managed to find some time to work on some fun stuff! Along with Mark Hansen, Sasank Reddy, Jerry Mascia, and Alberto Pepe, we came up with TwitFlick for the Webbys. It pulls real-time feeds from both Flickr and Twitter to create micro-narratives that represent the current digital pulse. Digital Kitchen worked on the visualization. Peep it!