Technology
International Reprints and Australian Writing
One important item to come out of the recent controversial Productivity Commission report is the recommendation for revised statistics on the Australian book trade. This article reviews the reprinting of Australian writing around the world.
Twitter and Oz Lit
I don’t know diarist William Bunn personally but I know that on February 6 he was “Reading Sunshine and Snow” and that he had “read it nearly through”. You may wonder why someone would care what Bunn had on his bookshelves at the start of February, but Bunn felt it important enough to record this [...]
eLearning: Fleshpots and Gunsights
Like Mark Twain’s stroll through Australia’s abbreviated history, the Internet has ‘acres of the most strange and fascinating things’.
Critical Foresight: What is Time?
During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?
Articulating Our Selves Online
A mate and I had recently completed another quest in a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). Or more accurately, I spent some more time in front my laptop clicking the left mouse-button and moving a collection of pixels that I had named as a character through a sequence of pre-configured animations (walking, running, charging, fighting, etc). This I did alongside another collection of pixels that my friend had named and because I could see his formation of pixels alongside my formation of pixels on my personal computer screen, I filled in the absences and tricked myself with the illusion that my mate and I were working pixels “together” on the same virtual space; like two people sharing a desktop but without requiring the physical presence of the other. I’m certain he felt the same 5,000 kilometres away.
Learning the Interface Value
Recently, I was introduced to the latest version of the massive multiplayer online product, World of Warcraft, and have occupied a few hours here and there late at night participating in gaming strategies which have involved rather odd tasks like “kill the mine trolls” or “collect eight red bandanas from the bandits”. For the uninitiated, World of Warcraft is not your standard addictive shoot-em up or racing-car game, where you might install software on your desktop, compete against the computer to finish certain missions and then connect to multiplayer servers where you can also play with or against other people in anonymous “death-matches”. Instead, World of Warcraft hosts a persistent, hugely populated (9 million users to date), enormous 3D synthetic world, with entire continents and cities themed in the fantasy genre, and people from all around the planet participate online by piloting their own individual computer-generated body.
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