She figured out how to embed ASL responses in the area of comments on her vlog about two months ago.

It is really cool. I believe that she is still seeking some solutions that will allow ASL commentors to leave vlogs without her doing the work. Do check it out. Her vlog is really interesting and the design is so beautiful. She seems to know a lot about programming and coding skills including designing.

http://www.terisentelle.com/vlog

Interestingly enough, Turtledove has a degree in Byzantine history, which is what I specialized in college.

But I do see your point. Relentlessly improving technology all the way to the Singularity, eh? I share your optimism to a certain degree, but, this is all assuming that this isn’t a giant simulation a la Nick Bostrom, and that we don’t perform an extinction level event on ourselves.

That said, I prefer Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross (you remind me of him with that dome of yours), Alistair Reynolds, and Iain M. Banks.

This reminds me of a series of novels (called the WorldWar series) by author Harry Turtledove. It’s sci-fi, so if you don’t go for that kind of thing, consider this fair warning, ha… but the basic idea of the series was:

An alien race invaded earth just as America was entering World War II. And the invasion changed history as we know it. That’s the primary message of the series. But the secondary message is this–the Race (that’s what they’re called) finds US as alien as we find THEM. They CANNOT understand how we can move so recklessly and quickly ahead with our technology and ideas. Every other race in the galaxy that they’ve conquered (three so far besides us) thinks the way they do… slowly, meticulously. They’re far in advance of us in 1941, with space-capable vehicles and lasers and computers. But they thoroughly test everything first and solve ALL problems before advancing to a new thing. In other words the discussion we’re having here might take us a few years but it takes them centuries. And they make sure technology advances in their society evenly, with all groups having access, and nobody falling behind…

Meanwhile our reckless innovation pushes us to get an edge on them, and in that alternate history we advance to where we are in this one (in 2007) by the early 1980s, with the internet, fast computers, etc. We have supersonic jets in the late 1940s instead of in the late 50s and 60s. We have intrasolar planetary travel by early 2005. And in the last book we have extrasolar planetary travel (2015) and one other nifty surprise that I don’t want to tell you about (cuz it spoils the book) but it puts in IN ADVANCE of the Race for the first time.

I think Turtledove was trying to make a social statement about how technology advances. Here we’re using the internet and in Africa we still have people living in grass huts. Yet we won’t wait for them to catch up. We believe that the fastest advance possible in developed societies is what will pull the grass hut people up more quickly. And whether or not that’s true, that’s pretty much how we’ll keep doing things, I think. So the people with cable will keep ruthlessly pushing ahead to improve on what you can get with cable, and the dial-up people will be left blowing in the wind. Harsh? Yes. Nonetheless, it looks like that’s what’ll happen.

Now, I don’t use ASL, but I do understand it. I’m generally in favor of inclusion, whether it be oral, ASL, SEE, cued, or whatever. So I think it’s an absolutely great thing that Chris is bringing up. We should not be so reflexively insular as to ignore pepole with different languages, communication skills, and thoughts.

I can see some problems with incorporating vlogs with this (or another) blog, but I don’t think that these problems are insuperable. I don’t know about a lot of people using DeafDC or elsewhere, but I suspect a lot of people during the day are reading DeafDC during the day while at work. There are places, like parts of the federal government, where streaming media of all kinds is strictly forbidden. So that’s one group of readers that won’t click on vlogs otherwise get firewalled and reported to the IT police — at least during the day time.

Another problem that I thought of — vlogs are for people with high speed bandwidth, like DSL, cable, T1, or whatever. I imagine that it would be especially painful to try to watch a vlog over a dial-up. While a lot of folks have high speed, I would imagine there’s a portion that is still in dial-up land. How many folks is that, I don’t know, and wouldn’t venture to guess.

Setting the problems aside, I really like Chris’ idea of incorporating vlogs and blogs in one place.

I would favor an approach instead of just linking to a site like Youtube, that the vlog get “thumbnailed.” So essentially, what you see, scrolling down are comments, like this one, but people put in video comments which are recorded in vlog format, and shown in a postage sized box with a subject header so that the reader could know what the commenter was discussing. Scrolling down, the reader would have the option of clicking the text or the vlog comments. (Well, I’m confusing a vlog itself with video comments, but you get the idea.) Depending on bandwidth, that thumbnail sized picture could be still or moving. Well, this may not be feasible right now, but, that’s one approach to melding vlogs and blogs. Vlogs are already halfway there since there are often comments posted below, such as Carl Schroeder’s site.

But I might add, to be a genuinely successful endeavor, you do not need to censor every comment that is negative. That’s a particular pet peeve of mine, and I will not visit those sites that censor everything so that it is all a giant echo chamber with little or no independent thought.

Yes, Chris, I’ve imagined, and you’re onto something. Keep up the good work!

Ah, but you know what? My very good friend, who is Deaf-Blind (John Lee Clark) was telling me about the tools that HE uses to read things on the internet. I was utterly fascinated (let me get some more info from him so that I can describe this stuff better). Our conversation reminded me of an article I read on a machine being developed to press “______” (I forgot what word was used) against the skin of a blind person (his chest believe it or not) so that the tactile “flash” of the image travelled to the brain. It’s not “seeing” per se, but it’s … what? Tactilizing? It’s not the same thing as “feeling.”

Sounds like science fiction at this point, doesn’t it? But really it’s no more unbelievable than the story about that person who made a glove with sensors on it that would “read” a sign and print out the English version of it. I was just taking about this with a guy named Der Sankt a few months ago… I’ll dig up the link to the article.

My point here is we can make the internet accessible in ways we could have only dreamed of a decade ago. Imagine it. And the push forward for greater accessibility, for more language, for more options, will only drive up the demand for yet MORE accessibility. So by heading in this direction, aren’t we moving towards an era where even Deaf-Blind readers will have access to a vlog? Not necessarily sight-based access, but a type of tactile access we can today only imagine.

I think that there’s a difference between “literacy” and “literature.” I define literacy as the process of reading, of understanding text. And I define text as a wide–indeed a vast–variety of things. So on that we agree entirely. I think literacy is MUCH MORE than what is “spat out of a typewriter.” The problem is that both of live in a world where a great many people disagree with both of us.

Now literature I define as something closer to what you’re talking about (alphabetized language, etc). So here we’re also in agreement, because you’re right, Stone Age art I wouldn’t necessarily define at literature. But the process of understanding it, the tools we use to decipher it… those skills and processes would fall under literacy.

So with that in mind, don’t you think that we’re limiting ourselves by continuing to think about literacy and text in terms of one “primary” language (usually by default the native language of a given country) and about the medium used to convey that text as a medium that can only do a few limited and highly defined jobs? For example a piece of paper can’t do much by itself, but the internet as a medium is like comparing God to an ant. So shouldn’t we be exploring what we can do with this new medium we have at our fingertips?

Would a site become messier and have more problems? It would depend upon the design, wouldn’t it? Look up. What’s there? A toolbar. Why couldn’t a site have a toolbar where you just click on the language you want? If you only want to see vlogs and block text, you can do that. If you only want to see text and block vlogs, more power too you. But the sites themselves would have as much as possible embedded, SO THAT YOU *CAN* make those linguistic choices.

Imagine what we could do.