You’re a skilled presenter – you lay ideas out clearly, you keep up a pace, and you are organized. Wark’s essay is very useful for thinking about different knowledges and new spaces of circulation (freed from the control of the vectoralists). I find very provocative your idea of collisions. It was harder to follow how you connected Wark’s concept of information with the various types/orders of information you gave as ethnographic examples (building, identity/avatar, process and not product) – I think you are onto something, but it needs better articulation. For example your ethnographic encounter with the English woman could have been more strategically used to elaborate on the difference between her view on education and that of this class/your experience in relation to Wark’s characterization of education as the commodification of knowledge.
I think your encounter with wolf man could as well have been more strongly articulated in Wark’s framework of virtuality, potentiality and pre-objectification – the moment before knowledge categories or identities are formed, labels wielded and experience delimited – another way of saying this, as I mentioned in class, is the queering of a shared space of encounter. Where there is no privileged set of categories and instead the Other can stare right back at you, making you feel completely Other, too.
I think a lot could be elaborated by thinking through ethnographic encounters in a more detailed manner, and finding ways to bring it to life for us. Finally, to say something about RL based upon the phenomena you are tracking in SL – is the revolution coming? Is information free? Is, indeed, everything “information”?
December 10, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I too thought your presentation was very engaging and interesting. I would have liked to have heard/watched your examples (the wolfman for instance) in more of a hypertext format so the ideas and not avatars linked up together.
December 11, 2007 at 1:26 am
I agree with Jason in that you’re a skilled presenter and you did a good job in finding interesting subjects – wolfman was scary!
T
December 13, 2007 at 3:30 am
One of the things I liked about your presentation was the fact that it made me think about SL in very different ways. When you talked about the space as a vector, it shift my conception from the abstract to the concrete. I liked other ideas but they did not stay in my mind as much as that one (vectors). If I were to have any observation on the delivery of the presentation it would be to read less text directly from your notes and speak more from what you’ve learned or what you remember.
-Juan
December 19, 2007 at 11:09 pm
I liked your presentation very much. I felt it was well structured and organized. My favorite parts were the interviews subjects and hearing your analysis of them. However, like jeffertz, I would have liked your presentation to be in more of a interactive/hypertext format. Overall, great job!