Arranged Delirium

The Blanche Ames National Juried Art Exhibition begins today and White Sands is showing there. The exhibition is help in the Ames Mansion a bit south of Boston Mass. As always, you can find info/examples of all of my artwork at my photography web site.

Occasionally, and all too infrequently, I get asked questions about Google Earth and archaeology. In many ways it is a good thing that I get the question irregularly, because I do very little field work nowadays and I don’t understand everything well enough to explain it effectively. I typically go on about GIS and how you would need that technology for any real analysis, but then explain how you can do most of what you might actually want to do (getting started) with Google Earth. It’s not too long after this point that people’s eyes glaze over and I realize that I’m talking to myself - what is also probably a good thing because I no longer know what I’m talking about.

Fortunately, RR has written up a very nice explanation over at Whitewashed Tomb. Now when people ask me, I can just say “Have you been reading my blog?” and leave it at that. They won’t need to go through the physical exertion of eye-glazing, and I won’t need to go through an explanation of something I understand only tangentially because I never really do it anymore…win!

Thanks to Midge for sending along this article form the LA Times: Too much Facebook time may be unhealthy for kids. Of course, now that I read it, I think the title should have been truncated to Too much Facebook time may be unhealthy.

One quote from the researcher is particularly telling:“kids have been raised on the concept of connection. To them, it’s not the quality that’s important, but the connection itself. Phone or face-to-face conversations allow for a minimal number of connections, while other tools let them connect to the world.”

Of course, this is nothing new - we’ve been saying this for years. But the problem in my mind is the same one we’ve faced with numerous technologies: the concept of quantity over quality. I see this in undergraduates’ ability to think. There is no shortage of idea or opinion; but the quality of that thought is often suspect. Just because you have more of a thing (like information) does not mean that the knowledge produced is better. A lot of something does not = good, it only means there’s a lot of it. In this instance, a lot of connections doesn’t necessarily mean they are good connections, but may likely infer that they are superficial. My question I guess is: if they are superficial, why are they so important? And why do we spend so much of our time on them?

As I’ve become increasingly enamored of my iPad as a reading platform, I’ve also found it to be a very handy tool for collecting numerous reference texts I use for courses. Often I need to look up a specific command or the syntax of a CSS statement, and I love being able to carry around my tablet instead of 3 or 4 textbooks. It doesn’t take much in terms of extrapolation to see the advantage of having certain textbooks in electronic format. Here’s a link to an AP article discussing that very topic: school districts replacing multiple textbooks with iPads. The benefits? Information is more timely, there is the added opportunity for interactivity with content, and most pragmatically - it’s cheaper.

Now, things will really start getting interesting once Amazon
releases their tablet. But I’ve read that’s it’s based on a slower version of RIM’s Playbook which means it’ll be DOA for most consumers. Although with an expected price tag of $250 it might be enough of a trade off for some, and likely a real substitution of for school districts.

While not necessarily recent, we’ve seen a bit of controversy in past months regarding Limor Fried’s Wired cover. And, its a great example for my New Media and Digital Imaging courses. Not in the traditional form - usually we are critiquing the over-ambitious or questionable Imagery edits - but this time we see the lack of editing that was critiqued in ignorance by GOOD.is editor Cord Jefferson. Of course we should be thoughtful about media representations and how they affect us - after all, that’s the whole point of several of my classes. But it’s similarly important to know your facts before you write something - even if it’s an opinion piece. In this case, the cover was produced with lighting and some basic tonal adjustments that I would suggest any photographer would use.

The Mary Sue has an article with all the details, and Wired has a nice Q&A up for Limor Fried if you are not familiar with her or her contributions. You can learn more about the photographer, Jill Greenberg, and her work through this post illustrating some of her past work and detailing a talk she gave recently…