Frankenfame

This, from the dailymail:

While soaking in the Pacific, Ireland wrote, 'The sun sets as I prance around in my @beachbunnyswimwear #neoprene fav bikini. #neonlove.'


These swimsuit photos come just one day after the aspiring model pouted provocatively in a topless selfie she uploaded yesterday.

She captioned the racy image: 'Had the greatest dream team yesterday who made it all possible last minute. #dontwannawashitoff #inwearingatowel [sic]'.


While they've been spotted on social media together, Ireland and her boyfriend Slater hit the red carpet at the 50th Anniversary of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue '50 Years of Beautiful' TV Event in Los Angeles on Tuesday.


The 18-year-old IMG model made quite the entrance as she arrived wearing a revealing low cut white dress to the event.


Dating Ireland since last year, Slater is is a teenage stand-up paddle surfer based in Hawaii.

A life form adapted to surviving over eons of drought, disease, war, famine, freezing, and predation comes to this: surviving anomie in a society flung apart by technology. Here we find a strange form of survival: a teenager making a living on her appearance in a social network organized around the potential for scaling interaction. Here she presents visual cues of her reproductive fitness to an itinerant online throng while dating an equally teenaged man who sells images of his fitness through the competitive form of a leisure activity. And they live in the social network, adding their faces, whereabouts, and ultimately their brand to an economy of body parts and buzz, interchanged as easily as so much DNA in a Monsanto laboratory. Frankenfame is a form of living. Ireland Baldwin and Slater Trout, as we know them, exist in this phantasmagoria of self-produced images, multimedia mash-ups, and dissociated words funneled into a configurable windowed interface, which constitutes the scrolling social mediascape, or the social network, as we know it .

The genre of the tweet puts a fresh new spin on ‘sentenced to death.’ With a peppering of functional hyperlinks tethering activity to watchable trends, the tweet is a hybrid of natural and machine languages, a new cyborg. The mark-up language employed by the tweet is a liminal entity contributing to both human understanding and the tag-sorted database of searchable content. In the tweet our symbolic codes, i.e., "#dontwannawashitoff," are also computer codes. The hash tag adds a contextual reference, operating in the flow of natural speech, as meta-talk, conversation about conversation; in this case, as in many, the hash tag is conversation about a state of mind, the aura of a good time being reflected upon. Contrasted with the tagged topic "#neoprene" we see the flattening potential of the medium that treats both a state of mind and a synthetic polymer used in clothing with the same status. On the machine side of this social network all these hashtagged words, like the "@users" themselves, become data objects that are sorted, searched, measured, analyzed, sold, gamed, and told in order to find marketing potential in even the most ephemeral states of our consciousness. While it may disrupt the flow of conversation at the sentence level, the proficient user of social networking argot, like any of her contemporaries, is accustomed to the conversational trope whereby one disrupts the flow of presentation with an "I was like ...". As I said, nothing new exists in this social network that hasn't already been cultivated by the ardor of the initiate, hungry to fit in, to a presumably larger, presumably cooler, presumably more knowledgeable group or movement. The hash tag, as a searchable entity, gives this somewhat contrived feature of natural language afforded by Twitter some rhetorical impetus. Now, it becomes a watchable trend, a persona fit for public consumption, or the seed for a new meme. The poesis afforded to users of this social networking technology move at its electric pace, and so users take part not only as creators but as participants swept up in a fast moving wave of word-trend hyper-awareness that is itself a central feature of the experience of social networking. As participants in the social network users try to either start trends or to move them along like people trying to make the wave move around the stadium at a baseball game; this level of mass interactivity has its participants playing dual roles as both the originator and its effect. Given the tendency toward the broadcasted interaction, the conspicuous conversation, in social networking the already-famous and the famous-because are closely intertwined as is the case with Ireland Baldwin who is the rich and beautiful off-spring of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. In the social network, cache like that rarely goes unused in the always-ground floor potential of fame provided by the medium.

The always-media-present youth of today live through the functional wetware of their databased social lives. They adopt its argot for pre-sorting and searching as a database function. Theirs is a life driven by a public presence and an attempt to stay connected that concedes to the functionality of the tools used to remain public and connected. They dream of being 'followed' and of being 'watched.' They often take pictures and video of themselves and live in that pregnant moment of being 'almost famous.' They strike funny poses and make distorted grimaces as theirs is a life, as it exists in that social network, structured for the sake of public persona management.

New media, the newest media, democratizes fame, making anyone accessible to a public before others, each equally alone in the glow of their computer-phone-camera, trained to a vertically scrolling feed of posts to read, to respond to, to 'like,' to share, and to promote. And the statistics of watching becomes the strategy for assessing one's fame.

"How many views am I getting?"
"How many likes did I get?"
"Did I gain or lose followers?"

The official language chosen to describe social networking is an important place to begin an analysis of its function in a society. For instance, the journalistic metaphor of  "subscribers" hands us a model of readership around the daily feed of news and namely news that supports readers' interests and views. This model describes a plausible world, for lack of a better term, through which individuals imagine and practice their relations. The model provides a cause for action but not the form that this action will take. But this model reveals something about persona management. Because the model structures human relations around a one-to-many model it flattens the distinction one has of symbolic interaction between one-to-one and one-to-many. This gives online relationships a surreal flavor where little is real, everything is wagered, and tangible wealth gets funneled more efficiently to the few while the rest get free entertainment from each other.

On-line is like in-car; each provides a template for mediation around a rectangular viewing screen through which one experiences the world as a detached spectacle punctuated by distracted operation of a machine. Each also furnishes a metaphor for freedom through movement and access to the people from whom you became estranged by the very technology you've just adopted. If you've lost 'touch' with someone by this person's choice to adopt new media use and consumption practices at the expense of technologies and habits of interaction you had in common prior to adoption then you understand just how arbitrary and arbitrarily disruptive these technologies can be. Take note. The wars of the future will be fought like this. 

In some social networks people gain "followers." Before the adoption of this language to describe people who have subscribed to a feed from you the only people judged by their followers were clergy and the occasional cult leader. And that sets a tone for how one is supposed to 'think' about their relationship to others through a notion of popularity deeply embedded into our collective psyche. Unlike its more bureaucratically inspired "subscribers" the use of "followers" suggest that social networking could, in fact, be an occult practice, where the followers are the mind-controlled herd that does the bidding of a central figure. That two practices share the same name doesn't make them the same. Both are about human relations and while the existence of one, the cult leader, gets demonized, the other is simply attached to a clickable icon: "Follow."

Let's be charitable. These words used to describe the ways in which we relate to others are simply words. The baggage contained within any set of them is much harder to pin down so we can only speculate. A more important focal point than the words is to what they are attached, which are software functions.

Software functions are an essential aspect of computer programming. Software translates the raw and mute power of the computer into an interactive metaphor for some worldly activity. Here, software has translated computer power into a miniature (mostly print) media production studio before an audience established through search. Software functions have recently become vogue in mediating how we relate to others. These software functions manage the flow of information that others we know, "like," and "friend" produce into meaningful categories that structure our experience of social networking. From the thumb work of scrolling to the fast-moving pidgin of the multi-media meme, trends not only exist but are highlighted as a feature of passing all interaction through software functions. This is the most clever component of computer-based interaction, that we concede some public form of interaction to a choice built into the software's interface. We register our participation by clicking the available buttons.

The language of social networking can be coarse because the logic operations are primitive. Social networking software encourages users to count and subsequently use numbers to assess online presence. By placing oneself among others as a function of assessing a quantity the interface ties us to the psychological distortions of being a number. We use numbers to assess our fame or popularity. Numbers provide the conditions for this personal assessment, which implies objectivity. Because of this, numbers serve as a 'fact' about our and others' activity in relation to one another. Numbers become a means of relating to others in the social network. Numbers count the activity that others do in relationship to the content that one creates, be it words, image, or video. Bigger numbers of "likes," and "followers" conjure dreams of "going viral." Likewise, the same function can be used to assess that "nobody cares." But a "like" also double dips as a viewer count. One thing that a viewer count provides that a "like" cannot, which is whether or not someone knows that you exist or would have found you through a search term. Being searched and being sought are two uniquely different situations brought about by the social network.
 
Through social networking, the user is no longer cloaked in anonymity but exists as his or herself. And while engaging in the social network, the user exists, in situ, anonymous to his or herself. The 'me' online just like the 'me' shot around the golf course becomes an important measure of who 'I' am in this context, at least for the time being. For those who concede the majority of their time relating to others through the social network that 'me' can be hard to separate from the 'I' prefixed before his or her phone. This role reversal is used to coerce us into selling ourselves as entertainment products for others. The dreams of 'being famous' are quite evident, and this inflates the 'me' to proportions that crowd out the 'I,' specific to how one invests time on-line and off of it. The social network allows one to 'level up' with a cohort in a structured setting that being in 'RL' does not provide. The form that this 'upgrading' takes fits the mass broadcast modes that entice so many to reach out. This form of fame relies on the function of an algorithm that leads from being found, rebroadcast, and subsequently snowballing into 'going viral.'

Now the boys and girls do the work of the advertisers, recommending products through beauty tips, style tips, lifestyle choices, exercise routines, morning routines, food and drink, hauls from various stores, before-school preparation, lip-syncing favorite songs, and 'unboxing' of often lucrative electronics products. They try to be public opinion leaders on the sundry details and choices in one's personal life. And they dream of frankenfame, "making it" online, because the software is programmed expressly to demonstrate this through a numerical abstraction of one's fame. Few if any recognize that this fame is one afforded by a free-to-use and cheap-to-exploit technology of participating in content creation for the sake of being before others along a numerical scale that slides to infinity.

Like the road connecting Baghdad and Kuwait in 1990 this stretch of the information superhighway is littered with corpses, burned out cars, and countless horrific scenes, just before dying, of online fame. And it all unfolds in our heads, a cognitive construct, a misleading belief that being perched upon a mountain of information could make one more visible, more widely recognized, a household name. That dream infecting all communication technologies, from the voice forward, is the dream of scale. To have one's voice heard outside of earshot is to be famous. To have one's voice heard after one is dead is to be immortal. And in social networking we have yet another malignant impulse well outside the practice of everyday communication. In the recesses of our social networking minds we think we could leverage the power of this medium to influence others and sup upon a most exhilarating feeling: being loved, adored, and looked up to by all. In the deep recesses of these social networking minds rests the imprint for such a living superlative: God.

preparing the field of technological absolutism

I am grazing my way through Lewis Mumford's "The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power." In it, Mumford makes a bold line of thinking from Descartes to his present day technocratic America. What he says started out as a clever, self-imposed pigeonholing of thinking about man by Descartes to avoid the wrath of the Church became a mistaken model of humans as machines. In effect, bleeding any soul and subjectivity from definitions of man founded the science of understanding life, in the abstract, in a mechanistic model. It gave Descartes the needed distance from Church authorities and unwittingly gave license to a mode of thinking more pernicious to life than otherwise recognized. Here, Mumford summarizes his effort to understand the roots of technocracy in Descartes' thinking:

Now the underlying implications of Descartes' baroque absolutism must not be forgotten. By accepting the machine as his model, and a single unifying mind as the source of absolute order, Descartes in effect brought every manifestation of life, ultimately, under rational, centrally directed control--rational, that is, provided one did not look too closely at the nature and intentions of the controller. In doing so, he set a fashion in thought that was to prevail with increasing success for the next three centuries. (p. 98)

fishing for jobs

A few years ago I was looking for jobs in my respective 'field' and came across a website that gathered the job calls from across the world for professional communicators. As I read through the job postings I came across a job call for an in-house news publication at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was the kind of job that spoke to me. There I would be around smart people with federal money. It was a dream job. In my application process I wrote the following 'cover letter' to accompany the documents attached in an e-mail to their recruiting office. What follows is how one puts heart into a presentation of self and completely misses the point of addressing what the job states that it needs. In short, I talked about myself without explicitly applying myself to the job description.

I am writing in application for the position Communications Specialist 3. I am confident that you will find my skills, education, and experience commensurate for the position and its requirements.

My interests in science extend back to my first semesters at college where I studied on a pre-med. course track at Saint Louis University. There, I learned lab report writing and experimental design, the importance of demonstrative evidence, and the clarity of exposition. I took these ideas into my communication studies as I pursued a liberal arts degree the following year. After brief forays into business computing and computer science I finished with a degree in communication, focusing on communication technologies, computer based design, and creative and professional writing.

I was employed for 6 months by a pharmaceutical publisher as an assistant editor. There I learned the importance of proper formatting and pharmaceutical nomenclature. I was charged with integrating package inserts into digests sold on a subscription basis to pharmacists and nurses to aid in prescribing drugs. I was also charged with integrating FDA press releases concerning the bioequivalency of generics to their reference drugs in an ancillary publication known as Approved Bioequivalency Codes (ABC). I supplemented this trade knowledge with important organizational communication skills as I was charged with coordinating work flow among copy and layout specialists while integrating the judgment of pharmacists, concerning copy for publication.

After this employment, I returned to school in pursuit of a Master's degree in communication. There, I studied research methodologies, media history and technology, and organizational communication. My work culminated in a thesis, which was a rhetorical analysis of a film. In addition to my writing and education I began my training as a university instructor, earning teaching accreditation through the university and applying this to teaching a course in Computer-Based Media design.

I would continue my studies in communication through a doctoral program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I did not complete my degree but earned Certification in Science and Technology Policy through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science under the tutelage of Roger Piekle, Jr. I was also able to meet and discuss science and technology policy with Dr. Marburger, then Science Advisor to President George W. Bush. This culminated in a joint publication on the talk that Dr. Marburger delivered on the topic of science and technology funding in the Bush administration.

My research and coursework at the University of Colorado focused mostly on science and technology related issues. Applying both social science and rhetorical methodologies, I focused on technology use and computer-assisted decision making in the modern organization. My dissertation research focused on a group of cognitive neuroscientists using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study decision making, addiction, and choice-related mental processes using this brain visualization technology. I conducted the bulk of this research in the group's weekly meetings and so my focus was expressly on their preparation of fMRI images for the purpose of presentation and evidence demonstration. I focused on visual communication and public presentation as the basis of my initial writing.

In addition to my studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I taught courses in Organizational Communication, Public Speaking, Group Interaction, and a special topics seminar on Cultures of Innovation. As a capstone course, I created the seminar around major social theoretical approaches to technology such as the Social Construction of Technology and Actor-Network Theory. Teaching this course demonstrated the importance of how science and technology are mobilized in society and contribute to its organization. In addition, I focused on the skill requirements of technology use and the challenges that it can place upon democratic participation. During this time, I helped found the Communication Graduate Student Association at the University and accomplished funding a visiting lecture from renowned philosopher of science and technology, Langdon Winner.

I applied my subject matter expertise and my teaching skills in presenting science and technology related issues at Ball State University as an adjunct instructor. There, I taught Rhetorical Criticism, Public Speaking, Leadership Communication, and Organizational Communication to undergraduate students.

I currently teach Organizational Communication for the online university, University of Phoenix.

Through my scholarly activities I have the following publications:

Keränen, L., Lesko, J., Vogelaar, A., & Irvin, L. (2007). “Myth, Mask, Shield, and Sword”: Dr. John H. Marburger III’s Rhetoric of Neutral Science for the Nation. Critical Studies <–> Critical Methodologies, 8, 135-158.

Sunwolf, Frey, L. R., & Lesko, J. W. (2008). Story as Medicine: Empirical Research on the Healing Effects of Health Narratives. In K. B. Wright & S. D. Moore (Eds.), Health communication: An applied sourcebook (pp. 35-61). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

In addition, I have published the following book reviews:

Lesko, J. (2008). Review of Devices and Designs: Medical Technologies in Historical Perspective, Eds. Carsten Timmermann and Julie Anderson. In Technology and Culture, 49, 55-56.

Lesko, J. W. (2006). Review of The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging, by José van Dijck. In Ethics and Information Technology, 8, 85-87.

Lesko, J. W. (2005, March). Review of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, by Alexander R. Galloway. Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp

Notable papers and presentations that I have given at national and regional conferences are:

Lesko, J. W. (2005, November). Paganini and the hackers: The cultural construction of ‘virtuosity’ and its implications. Paper presented at the meeting of the National Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Lesko, J. W. (2004, February). Defining the network: A postmodern interpretation of the discourse about university bandwidth and network use policies. Paper presented at the meeting of the Western States Communication Association, Albuquerque, NM
(Awarded top Debut paper at the Western States Communication Association)

As you can see by my past employment and scholarship that I have focused almost solely upon science and technology related issues. Therefore, I am confident that you will find my skills, knowledge, and abilities commensurate to the position of Communications Specialist 3.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

What I cleverly left out was the part where I spent all of 2008 drunk and online. 

what is a life worth

Really, what is a life worth?

A life can or cannot be meaningful to its possessor. From that an individual derives a  life's relative worth.

A life can or cannot be meaningful to others. From that an individual derives a life's relative worth.

A life has to eat in order to survive. A life must find an occupation that compensates it for its labors, its time, its mental and physical investment.

In the interplay of the three, the personal factors of self-interpretation ebb at a sense of identity by the minute, through the hours, day in and day out. Outside of the friends and social contacts a self keeps, there exists this sense of self, informed from without and projected from within.

Speaking as a person who is evaluating his life I have to wonder how in the world I can survive on my friendships. Because no job wants me. No, they want experience, hard work, physical ability. I have no experience outside the books I read and the classes I took. My hard work is dissolved by so many instances of self-doubt throughout the day that I merely struggle against it. My physical abilities are limited through age, body size, and self doubt, such that I cannot perform satisfactorily at the jobs most readily available.

Left to my own devices or to those furnished for doing a job I work amid a haze of thinking. So I spend my work day dreaming of being and doing something else. I fantasize. And that chorus of doubt echoes through my mind as I work.

What good is it to be intellectually gifted and physically fit in a world that wants results, experience, promptness, and the self-motivated applicant? The fog of self-doubt occludes me from any measure of success. Financially, I have nothing to show. Emotionally, I have nothing to give that I haven't already spent on pitying myself. Physically, I am wrapped in a ball, a fetus of self loathing.

In the world of "can-do" self-starters my life is an affront. It is an affront to those who share the economic realities of money, bills, and family support. "Snap out of it," they may say. Or "grow up." I despise any discourse, armed with medical science, that may want to materialize my own self-absorbed sadness into a treatable illness. I am not ill. I am.

It is unfortunate that I am in a world that demands "I do." Doing is something that I am participating in at the moment, but this, like most of my doing is simply for me, and provides no added worth, no skill, no demonstration of ability that the average employer has neither the time nor the inclination to assess in a job application.

What separates me from the employed? Not much really. I suspect that like my previous jobs, those who found jobs used what connections they had to support an assessment of themselves that made them appear 'reliable,' 'useful,'  and 'appropriate' for an employer. On this topic I have done something. I have turned my back on an occupation handed to me by my father and my brother.

They 'why' here is illuminating. I did it because it doesn't 'speak' to me, nor does any other occupation currently 'speak' to me. I've fooled myself in the past that I would enjoy this or that occupation, but the wisdom of hindsight showed that I simply squander my opportunities out of a self-absorbed self-loathing. I want to fail, over and over again.

Does such an activity tell us anything about my sense of worth? Sure. But it is framed by a world that requires us to present ourselves by a criterion of worth to an employer who seeks employees in specific occupations. This spiritual death that I feel, this empty feeling of complete uselessness is shaped by my actions to find meaning and worth through an occupation. Yet none of these occupations speak to me.

Jobs, occupations, and applications depress me to the greatest degree imaginable. They force me to take stock of myself, and I have done so on many occasions in order to frame my experience and abilities for a cover letter. The way that occupations are mediated by a vast bureaucracy of clicking, filling in fields, and sending documents to addresses amplifies my solitude. And for all the self-negating hatred and doubt that each job, in its endless variety of phrasing how I am not qualified, I am pushed further into a state of self-doubt and depression.

finding time

Time is hidden. It's a meta-condition of any sequence of events; and it requires itself to be regarded by a consciousness, which itself was shaped by a time much longer than its thought process or the biological ones that gave rise to it, individually.

Where do we find time?

We substantiate it in the clock. And we work with it to organize a society. We define it from without in order to establish proscriptions that effectively segment and order activity. To determine what worth one's hour of labor is is but one peculiar and representative manifestation of time as a means through which power is administered to the 'realities' of people's lives. Time gives meaning, albeit unfairly.

Without identifying where time is we may all be sure in our own pedestrian understanding when it is, now, yesterday, and tomorrow. Time is but a segmentation of an eternity, which cannot be measured, and which does not exist in reality.

Consider the choices that a general makes or a head of state or a pilot handling a foundering plane. The choices are simple enough that anyone could make them. A general may move a specific direction in a battle, something that anyone can do. A head of state may choose to raise or lower taxes, a decision not far out of the ken of any of us. A pilot, and here's the kicker, may adjust the throttle, yaw, and rudder controls to fix a rapid descent, and those actions are simple movements of hands on devices that any grown person could reach and manipulate. Sundered from the specifics of person, action, and context they're simply movements. Read against the situation in which they occur, they become examples of wisdom, leadership, quick thinking, bravery, heroism. On the one hand you have the big story and on the other you have the actions that anyone could have done. So the actions of peoples are orthogonal to the story told of those actions; they're merely incidental to the substance of events but an instrumental aspect of the narrative. Stories take time to tell, planes and nations take time to build, and the words we use to participate in or describe our world are also old luggage, still functional but belonging to no one person or no one time. Time in this sense is like a residue covering everything, which cannot be washed off. As sure as we can be of existence, so to is time; yet we only see its traces, its effects.

Time exists as a property of every thing, from the whale in the ocean to the atoms that currently constitute its body. Time is an essential category of life itself. The complex helix of proteins that instruct a cell contain a history of interaction with an environment that both shapes the cell and allows the cell to shape its environment. Time exists in the peculiar arc of development and organization of life and through it we find an unbroken chain of life-events from the earliest strings of proteins awash in a primordial sea to that ocean inside of us all. Our bodies and their homeostatic conditions are living memorials to a billion year old ocean that contained the mere and quite incidental conditions for giving rise to molecular complexity and eventually life.

Now let us retract a statement previously made. Time is not a residue on things. Things are a residue upon time. Why a molecule could substantiate time by retaining a 'memory' of its own replication is hard to grasp. How it does is the easy part, but what is it about the peculiar arrangements of molecules, which are themselves beholden to the physics of attraction, repulsion, and atom-level connectivity, that allows time to become a condition of all substance to begin with?

I leave this half-thought only to state an obvious but sacrosanct idea; intelligence is an emergent property of organized complexity. And all organized complexity, outside of the abstractions of people, is literally stuff--surfaces and shapes, which, through time have sundered the incidental features of form from environment to establish a motive over the course of time. In its final overture, what intelligence does is create and maintain the internal environments that allow its molecules to continue working to keep that internal environment in existence. The selective membranes surrounding genetic material are but one materialization of stuff with motives elicited by a much smaller and uniquely organized category of stuff--genes. Life is how time goes from being a non-dimensional property of a physical world to one that is of that world in full dimension.