What "hip" now?

Several folks in the 805 seminar commented on the fact that Laurel, Poster, and Kaplan were all works from the early 90's, raising the question of whether the ideas they discussed there are relevant to digital rhetorics today.  Here's a talk from July 2010 in which the speaker, Seth Priebatsch, makes a number of claims about what happened during the last decade and where we're going in the next decade.

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html



What I would argue is that, although I share the excitement about using gaming principles to build "persuasive interfaces" (or what Alicia Hatter and I are calling "interpellative designs"), we're really not talking about new ideas.  Laurel's use of Aristotle's Poetics to make theater a metaphor for HCI isn't fundamentally different than talking about putting a "game layer" on the world in order to market credit cards more effectively.  More importantly, Poster and Kaplan provide us with the tools for talking about the hegemonic impact of doing that type of design far more critically than Priebatsch does (though he does make an a occasional nod toward the issue of control and power in interface design).

So in asking whether Laurel, Poster, and Kaplan are relevant to user experience design today, I'd ask whether or not they offer explanatory power into Priebatsch's talk (and I could have used Amy Jo Kim's work to make the same point [e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcZVHSBTc5k]).

Ruminations on Hoodoo Hounds' Music

I've been listening to the Hoodoo Hounds, trying to think how I'd represent their music visually.  I keep looking at the pictures on their website thinking that their faces might say something about "the blues" and the music, but the photos don't do it for me.  I keep looking at the faces of the members of the band, and what *I* see are the people I know.  I look at the pictures and remember real conversations I've had with Andrew or sitting in the football stands at Daniel High School eating boiled peanuts with Walt and his wife, Becky.  I realized that what's missing from the photos for an audience other than me is a STORY.  The pictures on the website don't tell a story for me; they don't narrate THE BLUES and the culture from which the blues emerged.  The picts satisfy someone's natural curiosity about "what do these guys look like," but they don't answer the question "what will the music on this CD sound like" because they're not telling a story.

I wonder what I will find if a use Google and Bing and do an "image" search for terms like "blues music" or "blues culture"?  Maybe:

A Portal to Ruminations on Digital Rhetorics

Welcome to the RCID 805:  Rhetorics, Communication, & Information Technologies!  This blogsite is primarily intended to serve as a portal to the reading responses of students in the seminar, so mainly what you'll find here are links to other blogs.