And these social messaging feeds are now becoming so ubiquitous, we are now seeing a number of applications emerging that are aimed towards aggregating the daunting task of these frequent updates, such as Twirl. Additionally, the latest cell phones are making it easier to connect (and completely migrate) to all these social messaging utilities (i.e. iPhone).

I know I’ve got one blog foot in the grave.

But even when I am able to stay online and seated for a while, I find the conversation almost impossible to follow. In addition to fading voice chat, text-speak scrolls up the side of my screen in rapid succession, disappearing before I can wrap my brain around the moving sentence. Some presentations are better than others, of course. It just seems there would be a better way. I’m sure there are some folks that have no problems at all, but I can’t be the only one experiencing difficulties, either. Although I have a new computer, it’s not the most powerful or has the ultimate in graphics, so I’m sure that’s part of the problem. On the other hand, virtual environments should be more accessible to those of us who aren’t high-tech enabled. This, of course, has been my primary complaint with Second Life for educational purposes, because I (with my average new computer) represent the majority of my students, I think, not the minority. But if SL is ever going to be truly productive for the average educator and/or student, I think these issues need to be addressed.

I’ve also got a new avatar. I was getting tired of my old one, and I also wanted one that was more specifically defined within an educational context. So Professor Neox is my new SL name. Iggy O. (Ignatius Onomatopoeia) also did a nice little write-up in his blog, In a Strange Land, about my class. So - I’m excited to get the semester started!

One thing I would like to do, however, either for this class or one in the near future, is find a way to do some collaborative work (i.e. having students from my class and another create projects together, have an in-world seminar/discussion with another class, or find a way of pairing up students from across the globe in a project or assignment). Since I’m working from a cultural studies perspective, I think bringing students together from various backgrounds - from different places of the globe - could have some real educational benefits. I know that I have benefited greatly from discussions with faculty around the globe, many of whom have different educational and pedagogical perspectives that I otherwise would not have been exposed to. I imagine some of the problems, of course, might be in working around time zones and separate course goals, but I think almost any set of classes could work together and benefit from the collaborative process - even if for just one assignment. I’m thinking, for example, about what kind of project a marketing class could complete with a cybercultures class or how students from a course on political economy could work together on a project with students from a course on gender.

This is one of the things I liked most about Columbia College Chicago, where I previously taught. With the wealth of creative skills and abilities available there, so many collaborations were possible - and just as I left, departments and students from across the curriculum were just starting to realize this collaborative potential. I’d like to see this happen more in Second Life. I think the faculty have been great about sharing ideas; I’d like to see how we can bring students together more, as well.

I’ve already been assigned several readings by two of my professors and have started to dig in. I just finished reading Geertz’s “Thick Description” and “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Though I’m already familiar with many of the concepts within “Thick Description,” it’s certainly useful to get a background/historical perspective on some of the earlier debates around anthropology, ethnography, and the various processes of cultural analysis, which is, of course, the point (since the class is entitled Histories of Cultural Studies). Alison Landsberg, who got her PhD at the University of Chicago (where I also attended graduate school), is teaching that class. Her bio brings to mind Lauren Berlant (thus I wonder if she worked with Berlant while at the U of C).

I’ve only recently begun to realize the significant role that Lauren and her class on embodiment played in my own research interests and intellectual development. Sometimes connections and intellectual revelations are immediate and seem to, as Susanne Langer suggests, burst upon the scene with their own powerful, clarifying force; while others often linger within the shadows, simmering within the subconscious, and only rise to the surface after they’ve been well-marinated by time (although I hate to admit it, this sounds so Freudian). The latter process is actually most powerful and lasting for me.

No wonder, then, that humans have ceaselessly been in search of the “ideal” body, in search of ways and methods through which to rid the organic body of all that makes it powerlessly organic. The Greeks envisaged their ideal human figure in sculpture: an idyllic structure of proper proportions. Men feared (and in many places, still do) the power of a woman’s body. The legacy of male domination is replete with ignominious and abject representations of the female body. Women could give birth, produce life; thus many feared their ability to also take life away. The woman’s body is more mysterious, its organs of reproduction and sexuality less visible, and thus more powerful in its obscurity. Therefore, the need for domination of the female body became most urgent.

Skin color has also been heavily coded. The white (and whitest) body indicative of a body unsullied, pure, innocent, and incandescent, while the black (and darkest) body is inscribed as soiled, evil, calamitous, infectious, and sullen. The colored body has inherited a history of shame, inferiority, and contempt; it is also an enigmatic body, powerful because perceived sinister, threatening in its darkness. And attempts to dominate, enslave, and render powerless the dark body saturates human history.

Within the Holocaust, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Darfur, human modernity culminates in the massive consumption of (sometimes less visible) bodily inscriptions that are so sinister, so contemptible, so feared, that genocide, torture, and persecution are the only means by which the body so inscribed (with such power) can be utterly destroyed.

And yet the organic body contains the power of life. It is vigorous in its consumption of desire, food, drink, and oxygen. And the organic body fiercely resists anything that threatens its survival or its genetic proliferation.

So what do we make of the virtual/digital body? A body that has now saturated the performative theater and is free from the incarceration of gender and race (for we can make the e-body anything we want); a body that has no organs, no mess, and is impenetrable? The virtual/digital body has no fluids, is not vulnerable to disease, cannot be consumed by war, and is free from physical harm. It is a body through which we can play out our most secret fantasies, upon which we can inscribe our deepest desires, with which we can confront our subconscious fears, and in which we can often locate our true identities.

The virtual/digital body is certainly not without history. Indeed, its narrative is deeply rooted within the organic body, established in myth and grounded in Utopian idealism. The image of the virtual body began as soon as we were able to put chisel to marble, paint to canvass, and hands to clay. Contemporary society is saturated with the proliferation of images of the ideal, virtual body via advertisements and the media. Indeed, the virtual body appears to be the final solution to the problem of the organic body. But is it?

Many of us believe we are finally escaping all of the mal associations of the organic body with the advent of the virtual (and technological/cyborg) body. On the contrary, the virtual/digital body serves to continually remind, reinforce and further highlight the limitations of the organic body, because it continually reminds us of what our organic bodies are not. We are both fearful and envious of the virtual body.

The virtual body is the consequence of our dis-eased history, an ideological manifestation that is simultaneously visible and invisible, real and virtual, empowered and disempowered, present and absent. The virtual body acts as a sort of inscribed tabula rasa, appearing, on the surface to be empty and devoid of narrative, though heavily encoded by its mere presence.

“I’d like to see them add some kind of search engine that hunts down the needed rss or atom feed once you’ve indicated the website. Bloglines has this feature, which I like very much — keeps me from having to hunt and peck and click into infinity searching for the right bloody url.”

I’m happy to report that they fixed this! Now all you have to do is put the blog url in the search box, and presto! I’m not an advanced web designer, but now I’m wondering if it’s at all possible to just type in a blogger’s name and have a search engine pop up possible matching blogs (and then you could just click on whichever one you want)? Could the search link be attached to a google search of blogs in that name?

They are also creating a new blogger’s directory (a “guide to user blogs” according to Shyftr team member, Andy Suggs), which will be cool. I did find searching for other Shyftr blogs a bit cumbersome, so that’d be a great addition. I hope to get more into the reader when final exams are over, but so far, I’m pleased that the team is responsive to comments.

Now . . . back to grading.