Everything is Interesting
Tradigital art most commonly refers to art (including animation) that combines both traditional and computer-based techniques to implicate an image.
Artist and teacher Judith Moncrieff first coined the term in the early 1990s, while an instructor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The school held a competition of Moncrieff’s students, who used the medium to electronically combine everything from photographs of costumes to stills from videotapes of performing dancers.
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Mousetrapping is a technique used by websites (usually pornographic) to keep visitors from leaving their website, either by launching an endless series of pop-up ads—known colloquially as a ‘circle jerk’—or by re-launching their website in a window that cannot be closed. Many websites that do this also employ browser hijackers to reset the user’s default homepage. The Federal Trade Commission has brought suits against mousetrappers, charging that the practice is a deceptive and unfair competitive practice.
Typically, mousetrappers register URLs with misspelled names of celebrities (e.g. BrittnaySpears.com) or companies (WallStreetJournel.com). Once the viewer is at the site, a Javascript or a click induced by promises of free samples redirects the viewer to a URL and regular site of the mousetrapper’s client-advertiser, who pays him 10 to 25 cents for capturing and redirecting each potential customer. An FTC press release explaining states: ‘Schemes that capture consumers and hold them at sites against their will while exposing Internet users, including children, to solicitations for gambling, psychics, lotteries, and pornography must be stopped.’
Psychotronic is a film genre made up of horror films, spaghetti westerns, low-budget independent features, exploitation films that was coined by author Michael J. Weldon. The genre takes its name from the movie ‘The Psychotronic Man.’
After seeing this movie, Weldon created an extensive list of reviews of obscure quirky films that he felt were underappreciated by the mainstream and then marketed it as the ‘Psychotronic Encyclopedia,’ which has become known as a reference work for film buffs. The book prompted the creation of the Psychotronic Film Society.
Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the ‘Society for American Baseball Research.’ It was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
‘The Sabermetric Manifesto’ by David Grabiner (1994) begins: ‘Bill James defined sabermetrics as ‘the search for objective knowledge about baseball.’ Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as ‘which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team’s offense?’ or ‘How many home runs will Ken Griffey hit next year?’
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A disk magazine, colloquially known as a diskmag, is a magazine that is distributed in electronic form to be read using computers. These had some popularity in the 1980s and 1990s as periodicals distributed on floppy disk, hence their name. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s caused them to be superseded almost entirely by online publications, which are sometimes still called ‘diskmags’ despite the lack of physical disks.
A unique and defining characteristic about a diskmag in contrast to a typical ASCII ‘zine’ is that a diskmag usually comes housed as an executable program file that will only run on a specific hardware platform. A diskmag tends to have an aesthetically appealing and custom graphical user interface (or even interfaces), background music and other features that take advantage of the hardware platform the diskmag was coded for. Diskmags have been written for many platforms, ranging from the C64 on up to the IBM PC and have even been created for video game consoles, like ‘scenedicate’ for the Dreamcast.
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Leet (or ‘1337’), short for ‘elite,’ also known as leetspeak, is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. For example, leet spellings of the word leet include 1337 and l33t; eleet may be spelled 31337 or 3l33t.
The term is derived from the word ‘elite.’ Leet may also be considered a substitution cipher, although many dialects or linguistic varieties exist in different online communities. The term ‘leet’ is also used as an adjective to describe formidable prowess or accomplishment, especially in the fields of online gaming and in its original usage, computer hacking.
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Netnography is the branch of ethnography (the study and recording of human cultures) that analyzes the free behavior of individuals on the Internet that uses online marketing research techniques to provide useful insights.
The term was coined by market research expert Robert Kozinets. It provides information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups.
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A gynoid refers to female robots. Android is a gender neutral term for humanoid robots, but which has male connotations. The term ‘gynoid’ was used by Gwyneth Jones in her 1985 novel ‘Divine Endurance’ to describe a robot slave in a futuristic China, that is judged by her beauty.
The tongue-in-cheek portmanteau ‘fembot’ (female robot) was used in the ‘Austin Powers films,’ a cultural play on the fembots originating in the TV series ‘The Bionic Woman.’ Robotess is the oldest gender-specific term, originating in 1921 from the same source as robot, a 1920 Czech play: ‘R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).’
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Roblog is a neologism for a blog written by a robot with no human intervention. Roblogs were made possible with a new generation of robots which are capable of uploading images and texts automatically to the Web. The first roblogs to appear, late 2005, were written by AIBO robots, the dog-like robotic pets once manufactured by Sony.
AIBO diaries are roblogs produced by AIBO model ERS-7, running a bundled software called Mind in either version 2 or 3. Depending on the language of the Mind software, the AIBO blogs in either English or Japanese. To be able to blog on its own, an ERS-7M2 or ERS-7M3 must be linked to the Internet through its Wi-Fi connection capability, and its e-mail sending capability must be correctly configured, for which an SMTP server not requiring authentication nor alternate ports is needed. Posts, consisting of pictures taken with the AIBO’s color camera built into its nose, are then sent by e-mail to the blog.
Erotophobia [ih-rot-uh-foh-bee-uh] is a term coined by a number of researchers in the late 1970s and early 1980s to describe one pole on a continuum of attitudes and beliefs about sexuality. The model of the continuum is a basic polarized line, with erotophobia (fear of sex or negative attitudes about sex) at one end and erotophilia (positive feelings/attitudes about sex) at the other end.
Erotophobia has many manifestations. An individual or culture can have one or multiple erotophobic attitudes. Some types of erotophobia include fear of nudity, fear of sexual images, homophobia, fear of sex education, fear of sexual discourse, etc.
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Shovelware is a derogatory computer jargon term that refers to software noted more for the quantity of what is included than for the quality or usefulness. The term is also used to refer to software that is ported from one computer platform or storage medium to another with little thought given to adapting it for use on the destination platform or medium, resulting in poor quality. The metaphor implies that the creators showed little care for the original software, as if the new compilation or version had been indiscriminately created / ported with a shovel, without any care shown for the condition of the software on the newly created product. The term ‘shovelware’ is coined with semantic analogy to phrases like shareware and freeware, which describe methods of software distribution.
Shovelware was often used to refer to conversions in the manner floppy disc collections were aggregated onto CD-ROMs. Today there is potential for similar shovelware in converting PC websites into mobile websites with little thought to optimizing for the new platform or the conversion of console games to PC games. The practice of shovelware has largely decreased due to the wide availability of high speed networking and software downloading and the limited capacity of removable media in modern computers compared to the growing massive file sizes of newer software packages. It continues in some cases with bundled or pre-installed software, where many extra programs of dubious quality and usefulness are included with a piece of hardware, often called derisively ‘crapware.’
Hacktivism (a portmanteau of hack and activism) is the use of computers and computer networks as a means of protest to promote political ends. The term was first coined in 1998 by a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective. If hacking as ‘illegally breaking into computers’ is assumed, then hacktivism could be defined as ‘the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of political ends.’ These tools include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, information theft, web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, typosquatting, and virtual sabotage.
If hacking as ‘clever computer usage/programming’ is assumed, then hacktivism could be understood as the writing of code to promote political ideology: promoting expressive politics, free speech, human rights, and information ethics through software development. Acts of hacktivism are carried out in the belief that proper use of code will be able to produce similar results to those produced by regular activism or civil disobedience.
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The Daily Omnivore 