When Alan Turing proposed his test, there was no question that the computers would be tested based on their ability to perform in the same language as the interrogators. As a result, the test was also a bit of an English exam — and indeed many bots fail on the basis of their grammar and, […]

To mark Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, here is a new video (or a video response to Michael Wesch’s “A Vision of Students Today”)
Wesch.png

The video collaborates with Michael Wesch’s Kansas State students, who, according to the megapopular video, used Google Docs to collaboratively edit a document, essentially conducting a survey and, presumably, designing the video itself.

Wesch’s students’ video offers itself as a glimpse of today’s students. However, unlike Wesch’s even more famous Web 2.0 video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” which seemed to both capture and promote an image of technoculture, this video offers itself as an image of contemporary students (not “KSU Students Today” or “American Students Today”) without reflecting on its own particularity, its own demographics.

The latest version of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (Winter ‘07, 04) hit the webstands recently, and in it you’ll find “a little show of hands,” a short story adaptation excerpted from my adaptive hypertext novella “a show of hands.” The story continues focuses on a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles and the forces that […]