So after reading some of Ted Nelsons writings, I found to my surprise that hypertext is something thats been floating around for a very long time indeed, and that it had put to some shameful use, or rather lack of use. His project Xanadu ( reminded me of Xanatos from the Gargoyles heh) is a software which utilizes hypertext to navigate bits of data and interconnects them in a rather sophisticated and well thought out way.

I don’t see how this is any different from what our internet has manifested itself into today which I suppose shines a bright light on the importance of this mans work and ideas, however his project Xanadu seems to have fallen into the annals of time and is now long forgotten and in its place the World Wide Web has thrived. The driving idea behind Xanadu was just way ahead of its time(big surprise there),however Ted seemed to have this sense of urgency in that if this idea  didn’t set off right there and then all humanity was to collapse into utter chaos (he was very prophetic in his writing) but the truth is that trying to convince the entire earth to stop what they’re doing and start using computers during a time that computers were just not easily accessible or affordable to most people or even heard of was just not a realistic demand. He should have realised from the start that trying to make such a huge change would’ve required some coaxing into. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The internet as a culture is a strange thing. Trying to pin the needle on it is like chasing the magic dragon because of its ever changing nature, or maybe thats just it. There are no rules in webspace, only rules that we as humans can try to enforce on each other, but that can only do so much. No, what I find more fascinating is the self governing ability it seems to have.

As a resident of the interwebz for some many years,I can personally vouch that this is an everyday occurrence as I’ve been on both ends of the argument. What I find most fascinating is that its resulted in a sort of self directed behavioral management, for instance whenever someone claims “First Post!” they tend to get ousted for being idiots and having nothing better to do with their lives, or particularly the now famous internet meme “OP is a fag”. OP stands for the Original Poster and has become the subject of criticism simply for being one to post something.

   Not to be an ass or anything, but Ted Nelson starts off Literary Machines by being quite the OP    about hypertext. (just sayin)

Anyway back to my point about the interwebz, yeah, people seem to be policing themselves from unsavory behavior, which is pretty interesting – having bad grammar in a youtube post and you’ll get lynched publicly, a screenshot of your shitty english posted on a popular site like 9gag or 4chan and you’ll always be the guy that said that dumb shit. The internet hate machine is restless!

I can certainly see a massive change in terms of content and peoples intellect, the arguments are becoming much more substantial and not just absolute drivel (although drivel is ever present) and the internet isn’t just a stupid place with random shit anymore, people are learning how to behave themselves online and are taking their online identities more seriously without a government telling them what to do or how to conduct themselves (all attempts to try have failed miserably). I’ve only just started learning about politics, but isn’t that sort of like.. the ideal?

I feel like there is certainly a lot  more to say about this, and where its headed, the internet certainly has become a greater power than anyone could have anticipated.

This is probably the one of the best ways to visualize it

Laters

It’s been a bit of a hectic week, the Muslim fasting month came to an end this past weekend and as I’m the only non Muslim where I’m staying, by default I took part in the festivities and we had a little open-house and spent most of the weekend cooking and preparing for it. It came to my attention however that in Malaysia, any reason is a good reason to have a holiday. Due to the multi-culturalness of it all or we like to call it “Muhibbah”; the Chinese, Indian and Malay societies have their own very unique set of celebrations, and there is always a massive party almost every quarter of the year and they are pretty ridiculously festive and the best thing that comes out of it is that all the races have pretty much started celebrating each others festivities, like you’d find young Indian men dressed up proper good doing the Chinese Dragon Dance, and then at the end of the year everyone stops to celebrate Christmas. And honestly thats just the tip of the iceberg.

Over here when I found out that Raya wasn’t a holiday because [if I’m not wrong] I thought it was an international Muslim thing, and it was pretty much isolated to whoever decided to have an open house on the weekends. Maybe I’m just fishing for more holidays but I have to admit, it is pretty awesome to have so many celebrations in a single year.

But now I’ve let slip a lot of my work and need to do some serious catching up –

Just some thoughts about the “un-lectures”.

I must say the first day I walked into the lecture theater I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the speech that Adrian gave felt pretty epic and definitely made me look  forward to more of whatever this class could hold, but if time has taught me anything, its to be weary of everything and that I can’t always take things in for their face value. He pretty much talked about what we can sort of expect from the subject,  which seems to be something that defines itself over time, and is in a constant flux of change. What I’ve managed to pull out of it thus far is that we need to be more productive. -biglol- naw I kid, obviously there’s more to it than that. What I’ve managed to get from this Media course so far, is this idea of self driven and self directed work, and learning how to learn, or how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out things. I’ve recently taken a liking to Ken Robinson who is some sort of professional creative, I’m still reading into it, but watching his RSA lecture really got me thinking, what exactly am I capable of? The un-lectures seems to reinforce this idea of being able to appropriately utilize our minds according to the situation, which if I’m honest, has been a bizarre experience for me.

Growing up in Malaysia, we were pretty much brought up in the whole “factory” style that Ken Robinson talks about, where the book is the ultimate law, to go against the book is to go against everything we hold dear in this world. We were divided into two main streams in our final years which were the Science and Arts streams. If you were in the Science stream, you were looked upon greatly because you undertook difficult subjects which required a lot of reading into like biology, physics and chemistry. All the qualified teachers who knew their shit, were assigned to these classes, and the Arts stream is pretty much where everyone else got to go, and that’s where they sent most of their unqualified teaching staff who were not properly trained and were certainly not prepared. I can remember clearly one day in history class, our teacher walked in and immediately yelled at the class “You’re all stupid!”.

Arts students were pretty much left for dead and were assumed to be of no real value to society. I was in the Arts stream myself and I can say that I met some of the most extraordinary people there. Simply because they didn’t have a specific interest in math and science, they ended up spending most of their time at school getting demoralized and getting reminded of what they couldn’t do or achieve. Its sad to say that this is still pretty much the way things happen back home, and I’d very much like to contribute to changing that. I can honestly say it feels like I’ve learnt more in the past half a year in RMIT than in my entire life back in Malaysia.

I digress

So yeah, this whole.. unlecture thing certainly helps strengthen what I’ve already been learning here. I think they were meant to be more of an open sort of discussion, but first of all, its a little too soon for something like that as nobody really has any context to work with yet, so when it came to the second unlecture, it was sort of still just Adrian talking to us,  and second, maybe an hour is kind of a tight space to squeeze something like this into as its a big class and there may be many ideas that want to be thrown around.. so maybe we need to find our bearings a little quicker. We talked about being a boat in the midst of an infinite sea, and learning how to navigate our way through which reminded of something I heard somewhere once that went something like “If you throw a fish in the middle of the sea, its going to wonder what its doing there eventually”, however it seems more that the boat here is the entire classroom [which is a different ball game] and someone needs to be helping navigate this boat full of people. Or is that just the old me being used to having a hierarchy talking. Maybe we could be like a school of fish working synaptic-ally together with some sort of.. hive mind -haha- (or isn’t that what the internet already is?).

I guess its still a little early to say anything for sure, the pretext was good, so I’m gonna stick with it and see where it takes me.

Peace out.

Show the people that we can
Make our magic inescapable
Rewrite the master plan

Just a little hello.

So it seems that I’m confronted with another blog, only this time its much more of a necessity. All my past attempts only managed to end in failure due to straight up negligence and are probably still stored in bits of data on some server somewhere waiting to haunt me in the future. So I wish I could say this would be a good place for a fresh and new beginning but I’ve already made that speech – so no – the only reason I wont be able to keep this up isn’t because of anything other than straight up incompetence on my part, or a lack of interest which just means I’m wasting my time in this course in its entirety. “If you do what you already did, you’ll get what you always got”- Henry Ford or more like Einsteins definition of insanity “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results”. The problem, then, is just one of attitude.

As our course coordinator explicitly outlined in an email to me “You will have this blog forever”, even though this was kind of implicit in terms of whatever goes on the web; there is no real taking it back; it kind of suddenly struck me as to the significance of that permanence and how this blog is pretty much just an extension of myself, even though it is a requirement of a subject of a course in a university,  what it represents is much more than that (a requirement of a subject of a course in a university) because of where it stands in the world, (which is the internet) and the potential reach it has and if any good, to be of use to others.

We live in a wonderful and belligerent world with no defined or given purpose or meaning and potentially infinite possibilities, so might as well make a record of it as we go along, that way its easier to keep track of the shit we’ve already done so we can think of other shit to do.

For anyone who got through this post, although it took what felt like a long time to write, in its shortness, hopefully(ideally) my future posts will be more about not me and of more interest to us and  mostly, thanks for reading.

I’m still not entirely sure about the ethics of referencing things here. Will probably clarify that later today.

Some lovely music to end,
or begin.

Cheers.