Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Lindsay Thomas, Collaborative Media Commons Team

 1. Harvey, David. “Freedom’s Just Another Word….” A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. 

In this first chapter of David Harvey’s book on the history behind the ideologies and practices we understand as neoliberalism, Harvey gives a survey of the transition from Keynesian economics to neoliberal economics in the 1970s and 1980s, including a focus on US imperial projects in these years designed to pave the way for the shift to neoliberal economics, and a general overview of the tenets and practices of neoliberalism. The most important parts of this chapter for our purposes are Harvey’s analysis of neoliberalism as a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (19). Harvey describes how “neoliberalization has been accompanied by a reconfiguration of what constitutes an upper class” and a restoration of power to this class (31). Harvey emphasizes that neoliberalization has meant that “stock values rather than production [have] become the guiding light of economic activity” (32) and that such a shift has created extraordinary wealth for the top one per cent of income earners in developed countries like the US and Britain. Such extraordinary wealth has widened the gap between the top one per cent and the rest of the population: as Harvey writes, “Small wonder that the net worth of the 358 richest people in 1996 was ‘equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the world’s population – 2.3 billion people’” (34-5). Harvey claims that the creation of such wealth is – indeed, has always been – a transnational affair and that such incredibly wealthy individuals “exercise immense influence over global affairs and possess a freedom of action that no ordinary citizen possesses” (36). 

This attention to freedom is important because one of the most basic philosophical tenets of neoliberalism, and one of its most seductive ideological attractions, is its emphasis on individual freedom above all else. Indeed, neoliberalism is founded on the idea that individuals should not be economically constrained by state controls on the market; free enterprise and private ownership have become essential to any understanding of freedom. Harvey is quick to point out that such utopian ideals are often contradicted by many practices of neoliberal economics; that “the only way this liberal utopian vision could be sustained is by force, violence, and authoritarianism” (37) and by the enhancement of the extraordinary wealth of those who least need such enhancement at the expense of everyone else.

2. Högland, Jonas and Anders Ottoson. Stixy beta. Stixy, 2007. Web. 9 Feb 2010.

Stixy is a free, web-based “personal productivity” or “project management” application that “helps users organize their world on flexible, shareable Web-based bulletin boards called Stixyboards” (“About Sixty”). Users can post notes, photos, documents, and to-do lists, all of which are called “widgets.” These widgets are located below the user’s Stixyboard, which is the main space in which the user works; to paste one to the Stixyboard, the user simply drags the widget onto the board wherever she wants to place it. As the screenshot I have shown here indicates, these widgets can be arranged in any order on the Stixyboard. The uploaded images can be up to 4MB, and uploaded documents can be as big as 50MB. A user can invite people in to share her Stixyboard on three different levels: she can invite specific users via email and can decide if she wants these invited users to have read-only or editing access to the Stixyboard; she can share her Stixyboard with all Stixy users on a password-protected, read-only basis; and she can share her Stixyboard with all Stixy users without a password, giving everyone the ability to edit the content of the Stixyboard. 

Stixy bills itself as simple and easy to use, and indeed, compared to Google wave (at first blush, at least), this is certainly true. The “About Sixty” portion of their website claims, “Stixy was created to serve people who need to organize their lives – that is, virtually everyone – but who don’t have the time or inclination to adapt their habits to a piece of software. Stixyboards are designed to be instantly familiar to anyone who’s used a regular bulletin board.” While Google wave allows the user to play back, archive, and organize waves in order to keep a running record of collaboration – and therefore to interact with both past and present collaborations – Stixy seems less concerned with collaboration or with keeping a record of collaboration and more concerned with information sharing.

3. Kirtchev, Christian A. “A Cyberpunk Manifesto.” 14 Feb 1997. Web. 9 Feb 2010.

An allusion to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” which has been an important influence on and, some might say, product of cyberpunk, Christian Kirtchev’s “A Cyberpunk Manifesto” is just that: a concise statement of the ideological foundations of cyberpunk. Section I, “Cyberpunk,” details who the cyberpunk is. Written in the collective voice, Kirtchev describes cyberpunks as “Technological rats, swimming in the ocean of information,” outsiders who “do not have many friends” and whose real friends are on “the net….on the other side of the line.” Above all, cyberpunks are associated with “free thinking” and are “offspring of the new age.” Section II, “Society,” describes the general condition of the society or that against which cyberpunks must fight. Kirtchev’s central claims here are that “we live in a sick society” which “is clogged with concervacy [sic] pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly in the quicksands of time” and that “the cure” for this sickness is “a change in the system.” This system is outlined in Section III, “The System,” and it is associated with the obfuscation of ideology; it “must impose its truth on us so that it can rule.” Cyberpunks must fight against this, for “freedom of information.” Cyberpunks must fight for a world where there are no restrictions on information, where information can flow freely, and in order to make this world possible, cyberpunks must change the laws of the system to suit their vision of the future. This vision, outlined in Section IV, “The vision,” emphasizes the idea that “the net” will swallow “everything in this world.” This is good for cyberpunks, though, because whoever “controls the net, controls the information:” again, Kirtchev emphasizes the importance of information (“INFORMATION IS POWER!”) in this new age characterized by technology, a benevolent ruler. Finally, Section V, “Where are we?” is a summation of the manifesto’s main points that ends with a call to arms and a call of community-building: “We build our worlds in Cyberspace. / Among the zeros and ones, among the bits of information. / We build our community, the community of Cyberpunks. Unite! Fight for your rights!” 

While this manifesto is simplistic and reflects the uncritical utopian bent of cyberpunk, it also represents many important ideas and themes of cyberpunk that appear in seminal works like “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” Neuromancer, the Terminator films, and The Matrix films. Perhaps one of the most important of such themes is an emphasis on the free flow of information, a utopian theme also present in perhaps the most powerful manifestation of “the system:” neoliberal economics. The relationship between the rise of cyberpunk and the rise of neoliberalism seems hardly coincidental.

4. Ramsay, Stephen. “In Praise of Pattern.” TEXT Technology 14.2 (2005): 177-190. Web.  26 Jan 2010.

In this article, Stephen Ramsay emphasizes the function of data visualization in literary studies as one of "noting," or making visible. His diction constantly returns to words and phrases such as "noticings" or "notice" (179, 180), "most of the visualizations one sees" (180), "display" (183), "look sensible," (188), and "move our eyes over Shakespeare's plays" (188). Ramsay's project is to link the "noticings" of data visualizations to the kinds of noticing literary scholars do every day when they close read. "Consider the following research methodology," he writes, "I read a novel. I notice things about it that confuse or intrigue me. I remember similar things in other novels, and before long, I am actively seeking further instances. I begin to suspect that there might be something to my original impression, and I start to think of ways to make sense of it all" (180). What is important for Ramsay about this familiar method is its dependence on "serendipity" and intuition: "My colleagues in English studies might offer a number of censorious assessments of my conclusions, but surely they would have no problem at all with my having stumbled, somewhat fortuitously, upon a pattern in Lawrence that I hadn't been looking for in advance..." (181). Ramsay's point is that data visualizations can work similarly; they can and should work "to offer the reader the open possibilities of interpretive insight" (180), an insight the scholar probably did not go out looking for when she started. Furthermore, such data visualizations can make visible further paths for research, insights the scholar never "intended," never saw. Finally, this emphasis on the insights the visualization of patterns in certain literary texts can make visible focuses on data visualization in literary studies as a method of research more akin to those already used in the humaniteis. It moves “the hermeneutical justification of the activity away from the denotative realm of science and toward the more broadly rhetorical and exegetical practices of the humanities” (177). Ramsay’s goal is not to make literary studies “more scientific,” but rather to use data visualization as a tool of inquiry into what it means to do research in the humanities.

5. Rasmussen, Jen and Lars. Google Wave Preview. Google, 2009. Web. 8 Feb 2010.

Google Wave, as Google describes it in their “Help” section of the wave platform, is “an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” A wave combines aspects of the instant messaging and shared online editing seen in Google docs with an emphasis on real-time collaboration in multiple media formats. As in Google docs, users must be invited to participate in waves (a particularly sticky problem at the moment, as, unlike Google docs, the whole of Google wave is currently accessible by invitation only). Google wave differs from applications like Google docs in that it attempts to make the integration of different forms of media and online collaborative editing and instant messaging as seamless as possible.  As can be seen in the screenshot above, the screen is divided into three columns. The column on the left lists destinations where the user can go – including “Inbox,” “Spam,” and “Trash” – a search function and a “Folders” function, which allows the user to organize her waves into folders. The left column also includes a list of the user’s contacts in Google wave. The middle column or section displays whatever destination the user has selected in the first column and the right column or section displays the currently selected wave. Participants in the wave (one must be invited to participate in any wave) can edit and reply to waves, as well as comment on certain content within waves by double-clicking on the text of interest and choosing “Reply” or “Edit.” These comments within waves are called “blips.” A participant can also embed or attach images, videos, documents and links to a wave. The history of a wave can be played back when the user selects the “Playback” button in the wave window: this feature allows the user to track the history of the wave’s development in order to access prior versions of the wave or deleted information. Finally, the user can archive waves until they are updated or mark waves as spam or as read, all of which will remove the wave from the user’s inbox. 

Perhaps one of the more interesting features of waves involves the attention Google has paid to the “personalization” of a user’s wave experience. One feature that works toward this personalization is the use of “extensions,” which Google defines as “add-ons that introduce new functionality to your account…. Extensions are usually used to do anything from automating common tasks to inserting gadgets.” Gadgets are shared applications to which all participants in a wave have access: the two pre-installed gadgets included in wave are a maps gadget and a polling gadget, and the user is encouraged to try other gadgets available in the Extensions Gallery (an automatic wave every user who signs up receives). Robots are another form of extension; they are applications that can be added as automatic participants in any wave. They will automate certain tasks (the “embeddy” robot, for example, which produces the code necessary for embedding waves – which, as Zach and I discovered, is confusing and/or faulty) and/or participate in conversations (the “Eliza” robot, for example).