Christopher Scott Rice

The Death of (Science) Fiction

2007-07-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

Over at Blinded by Science, Bruno Maddox has an interesting article on the Death of Science Fiction (tip of the hat to Bruce Sterling). Apparently, as we rush headlong into The Singularity, reality has caught up with the events of science fiction such that The Future is Now(tm)! William Gibson's recent books, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, seem to illustrate this point.

However, there was one particular passage near the end of Maddox's article that really caught my attention:

For one, it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Whatever the cause—dwindling attention spans, underfunded schools, something to do with the Internet—the fact is these days that if a Top Thinker wakes up one morning aghast at man’s inhumanity to man, he’s probably going to dash off a 300-word op-ed and e-mail it to The New York Times, or better still, just stick it up on his blog, typos and all, not cancel his appointments for the next seven years so he can bang out War and Peace in a shed. If one truly has something to say, seems to be the consensus, then why not just come out and say it? If your goal is to persuade and be believed about the truth of a particular point, then what would possess you to choose to work in a genre whose very name, fiction, explicitly warns the reader not to believe a word she reads?

Now, I hardly believe in the Death of Fiction, but Maddox makes an interesting point. Has the larger, non-intellectual-class public moved on from fiction as a delivery device for Deeper Meaning? I know my own Generation Y daughter leans much more toward MySpace, blogs and, especially, film as her primary delivery devices for Meaning. I have made a serious effort this year to increase my Fiction intake (before I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road this summer, the last piece of Serious Fiction (not including Science Fiction) I'd read was Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections), but find myself drifting towards Sci-Fi again, such as Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein or the aforementioned Spook Country.

And when it comes to writing, here I am banging out blog posts and academic papers. I'm hardly oriented towards sitting down and writing fiction about the rise of web 2.0 technologies in political activism (though, come to think of it, that might not be such a bad idea....), so maybe Maddox is right.

What do YOU think?

PowerPoint Slide Design

2007-07-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! Just found the slides from Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero presentation over at Slideshare.

This is helpful not only as a takeaway from the video I posted yesterday, but also because it is a great example of simplicity-in-presentation.

I've really been working on moving to this type of slide design over the last year or so. Academia is really wrestling with PowerPoint right now. More universities are "requesting" that faculty use PowerPoint, but most faculty - new and old - frankly have now clue as to how to use the damn thing. Largely you get slides full of bullet point lists, from which the lecturer reads directly. Boring. Students, especially Freshmen and Sophomores, are used to "Death by PowerPoint" from the way in which their high school teachers employ it, and often have difficulty adapting, at first, to a more visually oriented format. But my Teaching Evaluations from last semester contained several comments about the quality and innovativeness of my PowerPoints, so all hope isn't lost.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite PowerPoints from last semester:

This one wasn't too bad either:

Microblogging: Scoble Show Interviews Jaiku Founders

2007-07-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

As many of you are aware, I've been interested in the various uses for blogging in an academic setting, and have experimented with a variety of platforms for this (I'm looking into using Vox for a social blogging experiement in a political theory class this fall, and probably WordPress.com for a groupblogging project in a Kentucky Politics class).

One thing that has really caught my attention over the last month or so is the growth of microblogging: short messages (often as short as 150 characters or so) that are shared socially through one's network. Twittr has been the darling of this model of blogging since the SXSW explosion earlier this year, but other services - such as Pownce (where's my invitation! I wants it, my preciousss!) and Jaiku - have emerged as potential alternatives.

As part of ,my own research on this, I ran across this interview with the co-founders of Jaiku on Podtech.com's Scoble Show. If you know of any similar interviews with the Twittr or Pownce (the invitation, my Preciousss!) folks, please send it on to me. Thanks!

Faux News: Keeping it (Un)Real

2007-07-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

My dislike of Bill O'Reilly is no secret. After hearing Jenna Jameson spill about his between segment banter with her on a HTS special, it all made sense, that slimy, crawling-skin sensation that popped up whenever he was on. The condition was only worsened by that clip of his recent "interview" with the Miss New Jersey who apparently doesn't understand how Facebook and the Interwubs work.

At any rate, Steven Colbert once again gets it spot on (tip of the hat to Daily Kos):

Note: It continues to Piss Me Off that Comedy Central has an "expiration date" for its videos. Talk about a network with no clue as to how viral marketing works! Anyway, this clip expires August 25, so get it while it's hot! Comedy with a Freshness Date, Christ on a crutch...

Merlin Mann: Inbox Zero

2007-07-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Chris. I struggle with an overflowing email Inbox (have you seen my office, btw?). I am getting better, but still struggle with this terrible, terrible Affliction.

A friend turned me on to Merlin Mann's posts on managing your email over at 43Folders. Recently, Merlin did a presentation to Google about this, which I'm placing here, more as a memory placeholder for myself to get back to soon.

2008 Elections: Candidate YouTube Videos

2007-07-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

I've actually found the CNN/YouTube Debate to be an interesting step forward in terms of citizen participation in the debates process. To be certain, the weirder YouTube questions were selected out by CNN, but the ones that made it through were pretty interesting. I also think my wife's Favorite Reporter (Anderson Cooper) did a pretty fair job in putting pressure on the candidates to Answer the Damn Question (!), though he wasn't entirely successful. Check out the video of the debate here.

What's gotten less attention in this CNN/YouTube debate buzz are some of the response videos posted by the candidates themselves. This video, for example, is a response by the Edwards campaign to "HairGate":

Now I could personally give a $#@!^& about whether or not John Edwards received a $400 haircut. He's rich, and a $400 haircut to him is nothing. And it's not like there's anything wrong with being rich. Where Republicans have gotten this idea that liberals aren't allowed to be rich and talk about poverty, I don't understand. What, only poor people can talk about poverty now? I think it fundamentally conflicts with their ideas that Liberal Democrats are all Socialists, and that ipso facto a rich Democrat is an oxymoron. Understand - Edwards isn't saying everyone's wealth should be equal. He's just saying that we are wealthy enough as a country to work together to ensure that every American has access to healthcare, enough to eat and a warm bed to sleep in at night. It doesn't mean that no one will be wealthy anymore - just that the poorest of the poor won't be neglected and treated as subhuman by society. Is that a goal or a concept that's so difficult to get behind?

<AHEM> But I digress...

Anyway, I thought Edwards' response video manages to be humorous while turning the conversation back to topics that really matter. And in the world of Web 2.0 Politics, that's an important skill to have. Obama Girl, Hot4Hil and the Obama "1984" ad are just fluff or old media retreads. At any rate, the Hair video is certainly miles ahead of the Hillary Sopranos video:

Open Left and other progressive blogs

2007-07-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to give a shout-out to a new Progressive blog, Open Left. Open Left was started by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, formerly of MyDD. According to Chris and Matt, they left MyDD to start a site that would be focused less on party politics and elections, and more on building a broad progressive movement and , eventually, governing majority. Chris wrote an excellent article on the site here. I highly recommend the site for daily reading. It's become one of my must-read feeds over the last week or so.

I've grown really bored with a lot of progressive and liberal blogs recently. Daily Kos, frankly, bores the hell out of me, and when Bill O'Reilly decides to take you on, you know that you're not really subversive or relevant anymore. Bill only takes on the easy targets. Daily Kos, as a site, feels kind of fat, lazy and upper middle-class right now. I also get the feeling that Kos is spending more time on the new sports blogs network than Daily Kos itself. but, hey, that's his prerogative, and I'm sure as hell not going to begrudge him the money.

I enjoy Eschaton regularly, but I sometimes feel as if Duncan has grown bored with it all. I don't want to piss him off by suggesting what he should write about (one of his big peeves - about which, generally, he is Very Correct), but I just don't feel the energy there. Huffington Post is nice, as is the increasingly excellent Talking Points Memo, but they just don't feel very, well...bloggy. They're Official News Sites now. Firedoglake is really exciting right now, and Digby's Hullabaloo is always great for the commentary. But Open Left, as a combo activism and blog site...well, it just really grabs me right now.

Maybe I'm just picky, but I feel like it's time for Progressive Blogosphere 2.0, with fresh names and approaches.

I'll blog about Kentucky politics blogs tomorrow. Then I'll really feel like hanging myself. Come back, Mark Nickolas, come back!

Bush Administration as Feel Good, Inc.

2007-07-16T15:04:00.001-07:00

All I can say is...WOW. I think this about sums it all up.

Dan Pink on Choosing a Major

2007-07-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

I wish all of my students, especially my Freshmen and Sophomores, would watch this video when thinking about choosing a major. I think a lot of fellow faculty members would benefit from incorporating the "whole-brain" skills Pink mentions at the end of the video into their course design and assignments.

The Fuzzy Tail; or, the End of Disciplinarity

2007-07-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

Ran across this presentation on the front page of Slideshare today. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the application of Long Tail thinking to being an educator and a Political Scientist lately, and also what it means for political activism and campaigns. This is one reason why I've been reading Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan - to think through the implications of what John Robb has referred to as the Gaussian-Paretian Thinking Debate.

At any rate, I find this presentation on "Fuzzy Tail" thinking to be a nice corollary to The Long Tail. The university is still operating on a 19th century model of how to organize knowledge, which was reinforced by a drive for a certification process beginning in the late 19th-early 20th century. This is old thinking, a vestigial stump about as valuable as an appendix, I think. David Weinberg's excellent Everything is Miscellaneous really illuminates why we may not need to break things down in such a fashion anymore, so long as we pay careful attention to the metadata.

And if disciplinarity is breaking down, then the importance of becoming a generalist, especially one practicing what Dan Pink would call "whole-minded thinking," becomes ever more important. I've tried to practice this in my own career, moving from Ph.D. student who skirted the research-activism border to Research Director at a university research center, to applied work at an economic development non-profit, and now back to a college Lecturer. In my teaching I've tried to "acquire" a variety of courses (American Government, Intro to Political Theory, Kentucky Politics, Appalachian Politics, Culture and Politics in the Third World, and soon American Political Thought) which may seem to be disconnected on the surface and structure them so that if you take all of these courses with me, they add up to a larger line of inquiry and thought. Even moreso within the classes I teach, I've tried to blur methodological and epistemological boundaries - using odd research techniques, critical sources, non-traditional texts (online readings, comic books, now video games) to really shake up what it means to be a student of politics. In a sense, acting as a multi-disciplinary/multi-media Political Scientist helping his students to prepare for a post-Political Science/post-disciplinary world. but it can be tough to build the future in a structure overdetermined by the past. However, this is the call of Long Tail, and "Fuzzy Tail" thinking.

Isn't that what being an engaged academic is all about? Not political indoctrination or careerism, but building the intellectual infrastructure of the future and watching what patterns emerge?

Happy Birthday, America...

2007-07-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

...you know I love you.

Tip of the hat to AndrewSullivan.com.

Dead Media and the Flavour of Cities

2007-06-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent presentation, and well worth going to slideshare.net to see the author's annotations. Nice design, as well as an interesting take on viewing cities as a text shaped by media flows and technologies.

If you've never been in a band...

2007-06-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

...you just wouldn't understand.

And with that, I'm off to dig the guitar out of the closet and rock out for Fathers Day. Rock on, Spinal Tap. Rock on.

CURRENTLY READING

2007-06-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb.

This is one of those books that I have a feeling will have a massive impact on many disciplines, though it will take a while for it to get under the skin of enough young scholars and practitioners to do so. For my part, I am fascinated by the implications for the discipline of Political Science, which has traditionally focused on Gaussian thinking, as opposed to Long Tail, Paretian thinking. John Robb has an excellent post on what this might mean for political practitioners at his excellent Global Guerrillas blog here.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be posting my thoughts chapter by chapter as I work through the book.

PS, Taleb had me at the mention of Eco's "antilibrary."

"There's nothing that's wrong with Kentucky politics that can't be fixed by what's right about it."

2007-05-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Mark Nickolas (of BluegrassReport.org) is leaving our fair state at the end of the month. As one of the pioneers of political blogging in Kentucky, I have to say his voice will be sorely missed. In a post earlier today, Mark had this to say about Kentucky politics:

There's nothing that's wrong with Kentucky politics that can't be fixed by what's right about it. Democrats should feel good about the big first step they took on Tuesday night. There's much to be hopeful about, but we always need to ask the tough questions, demand accountability from all of our leaders, and never stop shining light on every nook and cranny of our government and political system, regardless of their attempts to silence dissent or intimidate critics. Keep your chin up and keep fighting. Sometimes it feels like you’re climbing Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen, but usually you’ll be shocked by the impact a single person can have over time.

There's a revolution going on, if you hadn't noticed. We can't afford to simply stand on the sidelines and watch. There is too much at stake.

Truer words were never spoken. For an interesting take on the evolution of Kentucky politics and political blogging in Kentucky over the last few years, read the entire post. You'll be glad you did. So long, Mark, and thanks for all the fish...

Globalization and Homogenization

2007-05-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

I was over at Warren Ellis' website this morning and came across this video of a Spider Jerusalem rant from Transmetropolitan (which I'm using again for PS 240 this fall). I'm teaching PS 212 Culture and Politics of the Third World this summer, and as I prepare for the globalization portion of that course, this rant seemed particularly apt.

"Now let's all go out and celebrate by buying the same burger!" Indeed.

Eerie similarities to Student Course Evaluations

2007-05-24T07:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I suspect that this is what is really going on in the heads of many of my students during class as the semester goes on. ;)

How to be a Human Aggregator

2007-05-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

Whether you are a hard-core blogger, information blogger or just a person with a healthy sense of curiousity about the world (information addict ), learning to be an efficient user, reader and processor of RSS feeds is an essential skill. In the following video (tip of the hat to MicroPersuasion), Human Aggregator robert Scoble explains (in wonderful detail) his feed consuming process as it relates to his work as an information professional and A-List blogger. Well worth the view.

About Christopher Scott Rice

2007-02-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

Christopher Scott Rice is a Full-Time Instructor (Lecturer as of Fall 2007) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kentucky. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science with a Certificate in Social Theory from the University of Kentucky. His dissertation, Discourses of Sustainability: Grassroots Organizations and Sustainable Community Development in Central Appalachia, examined the work of several grassroots and community-based organizations in promoting community sustainability in the region. He has, in the past, worked as Research Director of the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Center and as Program Director of the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development. His current research focuses on the use of blogging, wikis, and other Web 2.0 technologies in political campaigns and activism. His writing attempts to blend the development of critical political theory with the construction of political ethnographies concerning issues of space and place. His teaching interests include modern and contemporary political theory, Kentucky politics and Appalachian politics. Currently, Christopher lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his wife, three children, a surly cat and a rowdy puppy.