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GIST
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Welcome to "GIST": A Course about Gender, Information, Science and Technology, offered in Spring 2011 @ Bryn Mawr College. This is an interestingly different kind of place for writing, and may take some getting used to. The first thing to keep in mind is that this is not a place for "formal writing" or "finished thoughts." It's a place for thoughts-in-progress, for what you're thinking (whether you know it or not) on your way to what you think next. Imagine that you're not worrying about "writing" but instead that you're just talking to some people you've met. This is a "conversation" place, a place to find out what you're thinking yourself, and what other people are thinking, so you can help them think and they can help you think. The idea is that your "thoughts in progress" can help others with their thinking, and theirs can help you with yours.
We're glad you're here, and hope you'll come both to enjoy and value our shared imagining of the future evolution of ourselves as individuals and of our gendered, scientific, technological world. Feel free to comment on any post below, or to POST YOUR THOUGHTS HERE....
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Music out of noise: noise as information
Our conversations in class this past week reminded me of an installation I heard about at the SFMOMA called "Sonic Shadows." The artist, Bill Fontana, is a San Francisco-based "sound artist" who uses sound as a sculptural medium. The exhibit itself transforms the museum's circular skylight and fifth-floor bridge into musical instruments.
![smile's picture smile's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-877.jpg)
close reading and types of readings
I think that on Wednesday discussion we missed to talk about relationship between the types of reading and the goal of reading it self .Why we do we read and how do we choose our way of reading?
![Anne Dalke's picture Anne Dalke's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-39.jpg)
Ethnic Differences Emerge in Plastic Surgery
In y'day's NYTimes, Ethnic Differences Emerge in Plastic Surgery: "the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty....the results can seem less like science than like stereotyping....A century ago...the bulk of those operations were targeted at assimilation issues....Today...many immigrants reshape themselves to their home culture’s trends and tastes."
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Noise vs. Information vs. Labels
Noise vs. Information is an interesting idea, because it ties neatly into the label discussions we've been having; if you don't have a label for something, you don't have a translator for it. Does that make it just noise? If we achieve Haraway's utopia, murdering the Goddesses and championing the Cyborgs, will our own identities become so much static? Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a Goddess, but I'd pick the opposite. These women have exact labels, which is a sight more than the rest of the undecided world.
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Where/ How Do We Think Critically
I was very intrigued by our last discussion on the role of Critical Thinking, as provoked by Katherine Halyes' essay, "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine." Overall, I agree with Hayles; I do not think that close reading is necessarily the best way of reading. (As a side note, I really wished she had further defined the term "close reading." Is she equating "close reading" to critical thought? Or is close reading simply what it sounds like: reading slowly and paying close attention to all of the words?) While I think that there is a difference in the way that we read digitally and the way that we read physically, I do not believe that digital reading is necessarily a bad thing.
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Comic Strips as a Form of Information
Comic strips are short narrative drawings displayed in a sequence. Although they are usually intended for entertainment and quick comedic relief, they often portray important messages concerning issues related to employment, religion, politics, or everyday social problems.
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hyper doings
Generalized descriptions of reading styles are kind of difficult to grasp... Hyper reading might be different from ‘close reading’ but the definition of ‘close reading’ itself is shaky. If it means reading every word, can you both hyper read and close read a very short text? And can the outcome of ‘critical thinking’ then the same for both methods? Assuming critical thinking to be the formation of some kind of opinion of the text, another layer of variation is added due to the reader’s subjectivity.
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Information: a transactional process
I found this week’s classes to be particularly interesting. After reading both Katherine Rowe and Paul Grobstein’s essays I’ve found the concept of information to be more complex and abstract than I had originally thought. I found the notion of information’s transactional quality to be the most intriguing aspect as it introduced the necessity of a decoder in the processing of information. The idea that information requires a decoder reinforces its transactional nature.
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Thoughts on Meaning and Reading
Our discussion of information and meaning related to what I have been discussing in my social theory class. We have been reading the work of the early 20th century social psychologist Hebert Mead who posits “meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture.”[1]For Mead a gesture, or to put it in terms of our class a certain code, only takes on meaning when the person to whom the gesture was directed responds in an anticipated manner.
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Hyper reading
From the conversation we've had in class, I think that we are primed to hyper read, we are always in search for a "sign" to lead us to the right direction. Therefore, when we use hyper reading, we are in constant search for a key word to help us get to the main point we're looking for. From my personal experience, hyper reading has turned to something I automatically behave like, when looking through notes i took for a class, I always wish there was a way to type i the key word i'm looking for to make it easier and faster to find the information desired. Hyper reading has some advantages, however, that it leads us to more information and leads us to discover more areas to be explored, which adds to our knowledge.
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Cryptography - Hiding Information
Since we spent so much time in class talking about sharing information through coding and decoding, I thought it would be interesting to post about hiding information through cryptography. Cryptography is the conversion of data into an encrypted code which can then only be deciphered through a specific decryption key. This practice has present day applications to ATM cards and computer passwords, but cryptography was also being used much before the creation of the computer. Some of the earlier forms of cryptography were invented when more people became literate because before this time, simply writing down a message instead of speaking it would be encrypting information.
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Information Overload
My title pretty much expresses how I feel about the subject: there is way too much for me to process right now.
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Mindfulness
Not to jump the gun, but my post this week is intertwined with the book that I'd like to suggest we read, in whole or in part, during the last week of class. I was browsing the New York Times online when I stumbled across a review of a new "book on science" that could not possibly be more relevant to this class.
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Generational Multi-tasking Aptitude
Ahhh, where to begin?! This week’s transition from focusing on gender to information was a very demanding one for me. Thinking about binaries, gender identity and their relationship with technology feels more natural to me compared to making abstract philosophical debates regarding the processing of information. Both class and the Rowe, Grobstein and Hayles readings have given me a headache. (in a good way)
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Weekly posting (due 02.18): How humans acquire information changes as the forms of information change
Before talking about other forms of information, it is important to notice that daily conversations have been the most prominent form of information throughout the history. Secondary forms, other than communication between humans, have changed significantly over time. Before the development of computer technology, primary form of information was presented as a form of writing. Art and music definitely existed and some people might claim that they were forms of information as well, but the abstract definition of information makes it hard to judge if they count as forms of information. It is still not doubtable that writing was the most prominent form. After the development and wide spread of computer technology, most of the forms of information are acquired thru computer.
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The hedgehog and the fox
Last thought for the night....our discussion today of the distinctions Hayles makes between "deep" and "hyper" attention, and between "close" and "distant" reading, put me in mind of the famous line coined by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: "the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." We were talking about this idea in the evolution class last week.
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Watson Rules! Or; A Computer Learns to Decode Natural Language
A really interesting example and test case for our discussion, today, about what information is, was provided by tonight's Jeopardy. If you have been living in a cave, be sure to check out
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Urinary Signage/Segregation
I wanted to record a coupla' things arising from our class conversation today about "information."
First, I'd promised you some signage. I got interested in this question when I was on the Transgender Task Force a few years ago, and we were talking about (what else?) single use and gender-neutral/flexible bathrooms: