A few moments ago I posted some thoughts on Ian Bogost's concept of procedural rhetoric, and whether it might be applied to programming languages. In this post, I'm going to dive right in to some examples.

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Procedural rhetoric, as defined by Ian Bogost in In Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), is "the practice of using processes persuasively." I'm setting out, in this post, to explore whether the concept of procedural rhetoric - which Bogost discusses primarily in relation to video games - can be abstracted and applied to programming languages themselves. More specifically, I'm interested in whether Bogost's work can be used to support my belief that certain programming languages, by design, argue in favor of Open Culture approaches.

It's been a busy 10 days...

• At the Free Culture Conference 2008, participants drafted The Wheeler Declaration, a huge step for their Open University Campaign. More to come...
• Lawrence Lessig's new book, REMIX, finally hit stores. I'll be reading it next week.
• The McCain/Palin campaign
  

While kick starting this new blog, I cross-posted two of my recent posts at gnovis which directly discussed Open Culture. However, I've also done a great deal of work over the last two years that, while less directly related, has led me to undertake this project, so I wanted to tie up loose ends a little and provide a little background on how I arrived at this point. I'll comment further on this at the end.

Some of the posts below come from gnovis, and others from my my personal blog.

• The Free Culture Conference kicks off tomorrow at UC-Berkeley. They've got an impressive lineup. I wish I'd learned about the conference earlier so I could have attended, particularly since they had travel funds.

  

I absolutely love this combination of Facebook updates. The first, "Brad is questioning the R in Revolution" is admittedly not too profound; it was just my state of mind at that moment as - in between two meetings with potential thesis advisers - I wrestled with questions about whether my topic was as subversive as I sometimes think it is.

What is Open Culture? Ask me that question every day for a week, and you'll likely get seven different answers. Why? Because this is academic work in progress, and it evolves and changes direction in every conversation I have.

This post was originally published at gnovisjournal.org, where I embarked on "a year long series chronicling the writing of my CCT thesis ... [and exploring the] ... thesis writing process in general, the particular challenges of interdisciplinary research, the intellectual community that is CCT, and my own specific trials and tribulations. I've now greatly expanded this undertaking and relocated it here at Open Culture, but will continue to cross post selected offerings at gnovis.

This post was originally published at gnovisjournal.org, where I embarked on "a year long series chronicling the writing of my CCT thesis ... [and exploring the] ... thesis writing process in general, the particular challenges of interdisciplinary research, the intellectual community that is CCT, and my own specific trials and tribulations. I've now greatly expanded this undertaking and relocated it here at Open Culture, but will continue to cross post selected offerings at gnovis.