User talk:GABRIEL9

Underworld is a 1997 novel written by Don DeLillo. It is considered to be on of the greatest examples in postmodern American literature. The book is populated by a multitude of characters who are loosely connected in the individual point, and the overarching narrative element is a baseball famously hit for a home run during the infamous 1954 championship game between the Giants and the Dodgers in 1954. The title of the book has a metanarrative relationship with the title of a previously unseen Eisenstein film that is present in a chapter, and the 1927 Josef von Sternberg film with the same name. The term indicates the condition of the citizens in the great technological America and their condition of suffering, evoking Dostoevskij's Notes from the Underground. The many reflections of the characters cover various topics, from post war paranoia to installation art, graffiti art, modern art, and the omnipresent role of video in everyday's life, from the bloody images that are shown in news programmes to the Zapruder footage, the footage of the game between Giants and Dodgers, apocryphal pictures of the moon landing, the mechanics of cinema, memories triggered by Tv programmes, concluding that the common people are in a condition of submission. Great attention is paid to the incredible amounts of waste that society is producing, as a symbol of society's tendency to preserve its glittery facade in getting rid of all its putrescent features by hiding them underground, or in giant cargos, or at the bottom of the sea. DeLillo's novel was a bestselling novel despite its commercially daunting lenghth of 900 pages. The cover of the book has also become famous, a picture of the Twin Towers with a bird flying by and part of a church in the foreground below. The book was runner up in the New York Times' poll of the greatest American novel of the last 25 years ( the poll was held in 2013 ) and Harold Bloom spoke highly of DeLillo, considering him in the same category as Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. Underworld is considered an experimental novel for its narrative structure, that procedes backwards, through 50 years of American History, from Clinton to Eisenhower. The prose is also considered experimental, with free intertwining of direct and indirect discourse and an oniric and detached tone. As it is customary in postmodern tradition, the lives of ordinary people are intermeshed with the lives of historical figures, like Frank Sinatra, J.Edgar Hoover and Jackie Gleason. The book is considered prescient of some key thematics concerning the United States in the new Millennium, the unobtrusiveness of the media, the illimitate power given to money, the increasing gap between the upper classes and the lower classes, the psychological costs of war. The prologue and the epilogue are stylistically relevant: the prologue narrates the famous baseball game as perceived by the collective bodies and intellects of the 35.000 spectators, showing how the invidual experience molds into the collective and viceversa, while the epilogue is concerned with reuniting all the various thematics analyzed during the novel, and asks the poignant question about cyberspace, wondering if the actual space is containing the cyber universe or if the cyberspace is equally as real as the physical space. GABRIEL9 (discuss • contribs) 11:38, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

With the use of non-linear narrative and the dense presence of intertwined themes, DeLillo's ambition in this experimental territory has been acclaimed. On the other hand, the critics have commented on the lengthiness of the work, arguing it could have been further edited and therefore shortened. Would this suggested process of editing though have allowed for the proper development of the themes, the characters and the concepts (as the novel incorporates several important historical events and alludes to other works as well)? Juliabutgiulia (discuss • contribs) 14:03, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 1: Formative Feedback
Without wiki markup and paragraphs, this exercise can be quite difficult to follow Writing on screen should feature much shorter paragraphs than on page, and wiki markup you could also use wiki formatting to separate sections. Your discussion of Underworld introduces some of the important concepts within the novel as well as a synopsis, but this would benefit from critical engagement with the novel (particularly with reference to module themes, which could neatly be introduced by your final sentence). For this assignment, you have not commented on any other exercises. Remember that engagement is one of the core criteria to the assignment and try to critically engage with your colleagues' work in future parts of the exercises.

A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor: Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work. Sprowberry (discuss • contribs) 10:35, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

EDUCATIONAL ASSIGNMENT #2 My presence on Facebook, the only social network I use, is strictly personal and non-personal at the same time. On one hand, my interaction with the medium is very limited, I rarely share any content that has any personal connection to my actual activities that I carry on every day or to people I know, I rarely share any picture of me which show my face or show me in a recognizable situation. I am usually passive when it comes to interaction with other users on a public level, and performative acts that focus on me as the active agent are very sporadic. On the other hand, all the content sharing, that has to do mostly with music, snippets from films and news coming from other sites, are designed to keep in tone with a certain pre-constructed personal conduct that aims to achieve a purity of character, a combination of factors that shape a self-constructed image of identity. However, the identity to which the online content is referring back to is not a digital identity but a subjective self-conscious vision of myself that is projected on Facebook, but does not embrace the social aspect of it and does not necessarily utilize all the signifiers that would make me classifiable in a macro-group of sorts. So, Papacharissi and Mendelsohn are right for what pertains to conscious and unconscious project that define our personality, but I disagree with the concept of the self as the social object, a concept introduced by Lacan and Blumer as a progression from the introspectiveness of the digital experience and supported by Athique, I disagree that symbolic interactionism can be universally applied to every behavior observed on Facebook, like Athique suggests, because if it is true that the composition of a public self is a process that presents a conscious part, the images and the thoughts that we share can be easily manipulated to alter perception. The personality of a detached and conscious person remains non-derivable from its online presence. So I prefer Goffman’s notion of self-performance to a postmodernist view, I agree with Goffman’s theory, that surprisingly echoes Pirandello’s ideas, of a self that lives behind the performed self, the latter being the formal and socially acceptable elaboration of an identity. My private sphere is, I believe, very much intact, since I can play omit anything I want without being dishonest in my use of Facebook, because identity does not just transfer seamlessly from the non-digital to the digital world, and since everything is based on voluntary action, there is no direct threat to personal security, since we are in full control of the content.GABRIEL9 (discuss • contribs) 10:06, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

EDUCATION ASSIGNMENT #3
Turkle is really critical of digital media, painting an apocalyptic portrait of reality and its symbiosis with the media, the notion of total connectivity. She claims that the virtues of multitasking are non- existent and only consist in a neurochemical trick played by our brain, then proceeds to describe a dystopian world that seems taken from a Ray Bradbury novel where the students do not listen to classes but only care about online shopping and Facebook, and a woman loses her voice for the stress given to her by answering her e-mails, all of us are turned into “maximizing machines” and social media slaves.

Turkle’s assessment of the media is reduced to observing people whose life is symbolized by a Blackberry and people who answer to 500 mails every day. What about a person like me, that uses the Internet to research Icelandic literature, buys Finnish vinyl records from the 1980’s on the Internet, or DVD’s of hardly traceable Taiwanese films, or learns about reads up about Peruvian culture, maybe finding inputs and interests that can be exploited in a social and non-cybernetic context? Am I distracted, just like any other? Yes, indeed, only in a more peculiar way, but it means that I find a way through a series of strata of information to reach a particular and personal niche that was not evident to a distracted view, so the consumption of the online connectivity is actually an active and critical consumption, is fluid, just like the source itself. I try to read and look at what I am interested in, actively, I do not believe in the zombification of people caused by online connectivity, I do not think that communication is now considered a superhuman phenomenon, and it is merely accessory, like Lanier argues, but I do believe that everything is more fragmented. Lanier talks about how a file is based upon a philosophical idea, the idea that human expression can be divided into chunks like leaves on an abstract tree. Everything is more fragmented, even time, from a subjective point of view, we are more likely to divide our experience of life in numerous micro-experiences that lead to a loss of focus and possible lack of productivity.

De-centralization is the great heritage of connectivity so far, life is everywhere and yet nowhere, so the physical moment we are living might not be the most crucial thing happening. This leads to complaints, for example in the education field, and Turkle speaks a lot about this where attention to classes is considered lower, even though we simply evolved from what we were doing in the 1950’s, where the only answer to boredom was looking out of the window, to this technological era where you have new instruments to ignore the lesson. If anything, connectivity exposes the limits of the linearity of the educational system, that gives students the task of listening to two hours of a person dispensing pre-packaged notions in a way that could be interesting and though provoking but also really schematic and boring and ultimately useless It is not true that listening carefully will lead to better learning. The same can happen during a conversation with a friend in a bar, when a lack of interest can lead to a few minutes checking our phone, just because there is nothing better to do. My take on the connectivity era is to look always for what is more intellectually rewarding, and embrace de-centralization, because if we do not passively interpret the information that are thrown at us, we can be enriched, instead of being distracted. We do not need to encourage a sort of pro-life movement 2.0 to support real interaction, because the people who have control over their life can always shift from one dimension to the other.GABRIEL9 (discuss • contribs) 09:30, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Education assignment 4
My experience with the Wikibooks project lead me to considerations on the role of collective intelligence. The main question that I asked myself, was whether the collective process had enhanced my capacities and therefore improved the quality of my work or lowered it, and if my individuality was sacrificed or empowered. Levy makes the case that collective intelligence is not the cult of hypostatized communities but an area of knowledge where individuality is constantly legitimized and encouraged, and the “participation” is the biggest asset.

I would say that the collaboration in an open source project like this was basically through superposition ( Howison and Crowston ), although we had chances to meet, as a group, and the fact that we were still being evaluated as individuals but in the context of a group got us closer to the concept of collective intelligence described by Levy. I would say that, even if we indeed did our part in harnessing the hive, I disagree with Shirky’s concept of cognitive surplus, and I don’t think that the result amounted to more than a sum of its parts, and this is not a critic to the quality of the work done on Wikibooks, which was not damaged, but rather a political point on the nature of cognitive surplus.

I think that the need for a “reward”, which in this case is the grade, undermines the effect of cognitive surplus since everyone is not acting in a completely spontaneous and interest-free environment, and an incentive is needed, I think that we effectively took advantage of everyone’s capacities, but never put the group first, and therefore did not elevate our work over a sum of individual efforts.

Although quite cynical, this view permeates human interaction, as demonstrated by the progressive interests that are creating divisive situations in Web 2.0. For everything concerning the way we communicated on the Wikibooks pages, I think that the condition that Jenkins lists for achieving an ideal participatory, because the environment was not completely pressure-free, as the evaluation and the assessment of the material shared was constantly going on.

In addition, although it wasn’t the case in our project, the tendency of human beings to create hierarchies and a rigid division of roles suggests that the strive for a better and more efficient producing system implies the shift from a fully participatory culture to a culture that is more oriented towards consumption, both active and passive. The one thing that I though was missing from the project was the sensation that this little knowledge that we were building was going to matter on a bigger scale and that the project was not just a university project and wasn’t just being shared in our small circle.

I think that even the fact that our content was initially blocked by Wikibooks admins and that we had to describe our content as “Education assignment”, highlighted that Web 2.0 has a hierarchic structure that is much more rigid than what is generally perceived, and I felt that our content was less important, when compared to other content, and that took some of the creative energy out of it.

We, and I am speaking the entire multitude of contributors to “An Internet of Everything?” did not really behave as a smart mob but stayed relatively secluded and external to the true core of Web 2.0, despite using one of the most important sites in that regard. I think that the Wikibooks was positive and interesting but I still wanted to point out the limitations that our personal sphere has to take into consideration when engaging with the Web. Also, the efficacy of user based content can be very circumstantial, since the ideal participatory culture that Jenkins supports is possible in a vacuum but more difficult to achieve when other factors come into the equation. GABRIEL9 (discuss • contribs) 08:54, 6 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi, I think you covered some points that are greatly related in assessing the nature of this project. For instance, I share your concerns over the pressure-free and spontaneous environment that surrounded this project, unlike the ideal content-creation that surrounds usually the writing and editing of Wikipedia articles. Indeed, the grade, our own form of reward and especially an individual one constituted our incentive. However, the goal of this project, and ultimately our evaluation, was based on the engagement that we were supposed to have with our peers so it's not possible to say that the prompts were exclusively individualistic. On the contrary, I would say that while our intrinsic motivation might have been based on the individual, the means of realisation had to go through a redefinition acted out by other users. Most of the issues all groups encountered lay in the dichotomy between the individual and the community. For what concerns hierarchy, a term that seems to come up a lot in all the reviews I have been reading so far, I appreciate the fact that you centred this issue not within the groups themselves but the whole wiki community. Indeed, we found some issues in that and in some chapters people found their content delated as "spam" by admins. However, this type of misunderstandings are accidental and more importantly the admins are in place to control an ineffective use of wikipedia. Regardless, I do disagree that the content we produced belongs to a small circle and the corner of the collective intelligence. This is because at the moment, or at any moment for the matter, we do not know who is going to read and learn from what we wrote once it does come out in their google research thanks to key terms. For instance, I did go and had a look at past projects on the Digital Media and Culture yearbooks that were written by students like us, and they did help me sometimes with content and sometimes with structure for our own page, and I doubt that those students will ever know that someone learnt something from them. This is to say, that we don't actually know who, but once content is added to the collective thought everyone, certainly someone, will benefit from it. In this case, we could say that us, as students of this course in 2016, are a singular entity adding content to the group-knowledge of Wikibooks, even tough you, me or someone else in this project didn't actively wrote this or that piece or chapter. --Everynameistaken15 (discuss • contribs) 16:23, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
Your contributions show a good level of argument and critical engagement with secondary sources but this then drowns out your own view in some places (e.g. some of the exercises appear to be entirely discussing other theories rather than your own reflections). There is less eivdence of engagement in your chapter's discussion page and many instances of erractic wiki markup.

Content (weighted 20%)

 * Your contribution to the book page gives a satisfactory brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is a fair range of concepts associated with your subject, and an effort to deliver critical definitions. There is evidence that you draw from relevant literature and scholarship, however your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is slightly lost, perhaps due to a variable depth of understanding the subject matter or over reliance on rote learning. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover a somewhat circumscribed range and depth of subject matter.

Understanding (weighted 30%)

 * Reading and research:
 * evidence of critical engagement with set materials, clearly grounded on close familiarity with concepts and ideas encountered on the module
 * evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material through evidence of close familiarity with a wide range of evidence
 * Argument and analysis:
 * well-articulated and well-supported argument featuring appreciable depth of understanding
 * good level of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position in discussion);
 * good level of evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections in discussion);
 * evidence of appreciable independent critical ability

Engagement (weighted 50%)

 * Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content suggests minimally sufficient standard of engagement (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
 * Acceptable engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
 * Limited reflexivity and creativity, and a somewhat insecure management of discussion pages

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 3 May 2016 (UTC)