Words about yesterday: So yesterday we had a guest speaker who just so happened to be the preeminent human scholar in the field of on-line databases. And he also happens to be my advisor, so you can imagine the nochus I felt. His lecture was mostly about scientific citation indexing with a few keen asides about human nature and knowledge sharing re: lobster consumption. However, he also had the audacity to assail the authority of wikipedia (the free encyclopedia), and this after I had chosen the wikipedia website for the “What makes a good website” assignment (which we all posted on the webCT discussion board). You can imagine the tension. Okay, sure, I was analyzing the design of the site and he was attacking the authority of the information in the encyclopedia, along with its use for academic purposes. And he did mention that it was quite wiki wiki and all right for shallow searching. Still, I'm gonna have to pick a bone about his emphasis on these expensive high-powered academic indexes. Science is dead, along with God and Man, and while his criticisms of wikipedia are most likely quite accurate, I contend that this sort of open source knowledge sharing is the direction we want to head in. And criticism in this field should be constructive rather than destructive. And I guess we should keep in mind that the name of that particular site is wikipedia, and not scientificresearchpaperpedia. (It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from under.) Anyway he was good enough to put in a plug for this site here, using the words “comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges” (Jacso, 2005). "Uncanny," I thought, our database page is actually titled “Comparing Apples And Oranges.” And as we all know, the presence of just one uncanny effect makes for an entirely uncanny tale (Benitez-Rojo, 1996).

Words about today: Today is Friday.

DISCUSSION TOPICS:
1. Our consensual reality is defined by our technology.

2. The discussion of the paradoxical nature of the film image has been going on for quite some time. Theorists such as Bazin, Metz, and Manovich all speak of a paradoxical image of film as both real and unreal. A quote by Manovich, “[film images] are perfectly real – all too real,” while describing the nature of synthetically produced film, can also be applied to Bazin and Metz in their discussion of the photographic nature of film. Each of the theorists’ discussions of the paradox of film help give understanding to the issue of film spectatorship. (Rosen, 2000)