Authorship Unit

So the brief for my first unit is one on the topic of Authorship.

What is an Author? Foucault might ask you.. How do we know an author? We can’t know what went on in someones head at the time of producing a text so why bother? We can take what we want from it then. While there is a lot more to it I think part of me would like to contest this?? While we can’t know ‘exactly’ what was in authors head we can have some clue as to what was going on.

The authors intentions are a straight line.. and while our understanding will next be exact we can sometimes get pretty close with our own lines that we draw. When I heard this view however it I couldn’t help but wonder over the ideological presuppositions such a theory would carry.. of course I don’t know Shakespeare personally or Plato or whoever.. but I had some sort of idea about what was being talked about when I had to read Shakespeare at school or read the Republic. Why? Well I could discuss it with others to see it my views matched up.. did I get the right idea or did I miss the point? While this is a form of ‘truth as the most popular consensus of the time’ this isn’t the only method. I know a fact can be a fact such as water is made up of a couple of hydrogen molecules coupled with a single oxygen molecule.. now if someone wrote that in a book.. how do you know if I was right? or if I was wrong? You could go find out for yourself..

Aristotle was known to say

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”

And Thomas Aquinas likewise

“A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality”

But yeah.. I dunno, I sort of enjoy this.. it’s my favorite part of the course really. I’ve heard some critiques of the correspondence notion of truth but I’ve still got to read into them in some depth yet. We’re not perfect but like with most scientific findings.. the more they are independently tested as theories (or on the other hand the more we realize isn’t right) the more believable the said notion of truth is said to be.

Anyway! Phew

My new brief set by the neighborhood ideological state apparatus is to design a social networking site like facebook and I’m going to take a go at this whole U8 thing I’ve been mentioning.. the sky is the limit with that idea as it could just keep getting built upon. Yet I’m going to try and break it down to make something people can pitch ideas for research on areas in the 3rd world and comment on. I’m hoping to set up user accounts and a moderation feature so people don’t write.. crap up basically. But it quickly gets complicated and I’m still learning a lot with php (the code required) as it goes at the moment..

I designed the front end at least ready to be cut up in photoshop I would upload it but my image host is being a pain and I can’t access it.. so maybe I’ll show you later? I’ve also been looking at a lot of  sites in the way that help deal with the whole barrier between the first and third world in the internet. All this web 2.0 stuff is fine if you got broadband.. but otherwise you just arn’t going to get anywhere. My target audience ideally should be world wide.. so how does my website cater for those who have a 20k dial-up connection from their university in Africa?

This is something really interesting I find and would like to follow up.. the site www.aptivate.org has alot on this and it’d be quite interesting to see how this effects my project!

The U8

Well it’s year two and we have this brief to make some sort of social utility.. thing to do with collaborative authorship.. ie; something like face book? The years been pretty good so far but this brief has had more to it than ones I’ve looked at in my first year which is turning out to be quite interesting, for me at least.

A Guy I know at my local Church works for a group called the U8 which is a student organization which pitches and carries out research to do with the global situations from a third world perspective. It’s global and has people from quite different backgrounds, but they’re all students.. the only way they can contact each other in a big way is via the net.. which has been the inspiration for what I’m doing my brief on. I mean in short this is why I wanted to do IMP.. I’m the sort of person who can’t spend long in front of a screen, but I realize the importance that the internet and interactivity have on the global environment.

The other side is this guy wants me to manage content on the existing U8 website.. which is fair enough but it’s all done via open source on the back end which I’m having to learn. On top of everything else I’m a bit worried it’s going to eat a little too much time? I might be working on some other stuff with my friend Espen (The u8 Guy) in the future which will probably involve more Open Source.. but it’s really the thing I need to sit down and dedicate some time to.. and I’m finding that hard. I’m one of the leaders of the Christian Union at Uni and when I’m not working on Uni stuff I’m probably on something like to do with the CU and I don’t want to compromise either of those.. but I’m finding I don’t even have time to just sit down and play guitar for a bit, read or just go mess with mates..

Maybe it will get easier as I get my head round it but it’s a double edged sword. I really like the idea of the U8 and what it can do but I always used to tell myself I would work to live not live to work. It’s still early days yet so it will probably will just smooth over but it is a bit of a shock to some degree because it’s all established itself in a something like a few weeks? I’ve only been on this properly for a few days now too.. hah.

Maybe this is a learning curve? I don’t know where it will lead me though, it’s going to be interesting.

The Summer in Brief.. Well not so much.

Well I didn’t blog all summer but yeah.. I’m still around.

The summer was pretty cool and a lot happened but I can pick out a definate few highlights. In June I went out to Kenya with a few friends from the Christian Union on a trip we had arranged ourselves. I nearly didn’t go originally, I had done that sort of thing before and didn’t have a great deal of money but due to some unexpected reductions in flight costs I was persuaded. We worked with a childrens home my friend had links with from when he had done his work experience out there in Mombassa. After awhile we headed on to Tanzania where we stayed with a local pastor in the capital of Dar Es Salaam, we were put up on his floor and stayed with his family while they showed us around the town and helped out with some youth work. It was the first time I did anything remotely linking my faith and my travel bug.. but I realise last year I didn’t really have much faith, either way the context and air of it all was very different.. I learnt a fair bit about people in retrospect. The witness of some of the people we met who despite having some of the worst dealings in life I’d encountered put me to shame really.

I went to Egypt later on and that was with my family which was cool. I spent most of the time on a boat going up and down the nile checking out ancient Egypt and that was pretty touristy.. but I learnt a lot about the country’s more recent history and the culture which proved just as rich.. after awhile the ruins just seemed to look all the same so I guess its that which leads your mind to turn on other things after awhile.

When I got back I got a place at a Graphics Design Company in Watford near where I live back home which taught me a fair bit about design and such. The hours were great but the pay wasn’t so much despite the time spent on some concepts, though at the end of it they offered me a full time job! That was cool but I wasn’t going to give Uni a miss for it.. I learnt a lot in a short time but I still need that qualification on a CV to really set a foundation under me I feel. I went later on to talk to a few Christians involved in different occupations in the Media, Fashion and Arts ’spheres’ on how they related their faith and occupation as part of me considered looking at a Christian Company.. but professionally that seems suicide atleast if thats what you open on the job market with and you ever want to consider later working in a secular field. I got offered a internship in central london after speaking to a guy who runs a group promoting and integrating christianity and contemporary culture, it would of been 20 hours a week but I would of had my own flat in central london thrown in while I was there which would of been cool.. they mentioned they were bringing out a online magazine which I could of had first dibs on.. that or graphic design again. But I’m still thinking about it, i’d rather work in a secular field to be honest now I think.

Other than all that though I did do some reading too, the most memorable for me being “The Irrestible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne. Who lives and works in a community in philadelphia, sort of like a commune but in the heart of and open to those who live in the ‘ghetto’ around it. It’s basically about.. communal living, charity, working out social justice, ethical standards and I guess actually taking what Jesus said a little bit more literally than some other folks had done in the past. I found it challenging but it was nice to read about a Christian who didn’t come across as some mystical nutter or some bible bashing republican. He lived with Mother Teresa and worked briefly in a leprosy colony in Calcutta before going over to Iraq, taking part in the battle of Baghdad.. as a civilian and connecting with the native Christians and church of the country who have been around since.. well close to 2000 years I guess. He does a lot of stuff like Desmond Tutu in trying to build bridges between Americans and Iraqis.. the cool thing was apparently that all the money off his book goes to everyone mentioned in the book.

One of those mentioned was a travelling band of ‘Psalters’ who are a body of musicians who take a lot from middle eastern and eastern european instruments and song construction and add this to I guess what might of once been Punk Rock. They’re all Christians and are ‘nomadic’ living in a big black old school bus. They have a lot of music to check out on the website.. which is pretty bizarre but they’ve been around quite a lot of the world and talk about it. A guy I knew actually went to Norway this summer and saw them and got both of their albums which is pretty bizarre because we’re both pretty similiar in tastes and yet had heard about these guys at the same time through completely different ways..

but yeah I thought I’d post something..