I recently came back from a camping trip in Traralgon with my family. It wasn’t in the woods. I had full access to an ensuite bathroom, a sizeable mattress to sprawl on, and, most importantly, decently fast 4G mobile data.

I used 1.5GB of my mobile data on that one rainy Saturday, simply because every time thought of a new lipstick I wanted to buy, or a random question I needed to ask, or when exactly a uni assignment was due, I, without hesitation, would go to Safari and start researching reviews, answers, dates.

To someone like me, raised with the network at my fingertips, it was instinct.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I grew up with the Internet and hence with networks. I played Dora the Explorer games on Nickelodeon, played dress-ups with online doll makers like The Doll Palace, and, of course, I played Club Penguin.

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In Adrian Miles’s ‘Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge’, he writes, ‘through such sharing the distinction between consuming and creating content dissolves so unlike books in network literacy we become peers in the system, and indeed to be ‘good’ at network literacies is to contribute as much as it is to consume’ (Miles 2012, p.204).

In my Club Penguin phase, not only did I stalk Mimo777’s cheats and hints blog every time an update was released, I even made Club Penguin music videos, where my penguin would ‘sing’ the lyrics to a Miley Cyrus or Avril Lavigne song in various locations and outfits.

Screenshot from my YouTube video ‘Club Penguin See you again’

‘Network literacy is, in a nutshell, being able to participate as a peer within the emerging knowledge networks that are now the product of the Internet, and to have as ‘deep’ an understanding of the logics or protocols of these networks as we do of print.’ (Miles 2012, p.203). Through these videos, I participated and hence I learned. I became literate.

Hence, I’m not as ashamed of these videos as I perhaps should be because without them, I would’ve never learned how to edit videos. It’s thanks to the Internet and the digital literacy of my 14-year-old gamer brother that I started playing Overwatch, navigated the chat system, knew how to use Discord, and eventually met one of my best friends.

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Information used to be tangible, linked to physical objects (like books) or locations (like libraries). It was limited by laws of physics, limits of human ability. Now, information sits in this amorphous space, invisible and omnipresent, here, there and everywhere, all impossibly connected and easy to access (reminds me of our own brains). This is the network of 2018.

My brain is wired to think in this network. People younger than me are even more wired. All the affordances of the network are like second nature; they feel natural. Which, yes, does prompt creativity, given the amount of tools and spaces available for creation, but do these affordances and growing literacy have a downside? Apps can tell you when to sleep and eat. When your aunt’s birthday is. What ingredients you need for tonight’s stir fry. Hell, they can even learn about the inner workings of your physical body and predict the due date of your period. Are the affordances and this literacy in fact spoonfeeding us, reducing our creativity by making us rely on external prompts for guidance?

I don’t know. But to this overabundance of information we can either be a slave, or be the general who weaponises it.

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In this week’s tutorial, Nash said my blog posts worked heavily with visuals. Apparently, the images in my blog posts have colour schemes.

…That was not intentional.

Similarly, my writer peers have said my writing has a strong sense of image. I always thought it was from my background as a dancer, an eye for the aesthetic and constructed performance of everything.

Now, I think there’s more to it.

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As Nash said in the tutorial, this generation has been ‘visually bombarded’ from a very young age. When he said that, I started instantly noticing the effects. When someone is talking, I process their words so much better if I am simultaneously reading them. I always watch my films with subtitles.

The visual is convenient. It’s fast. And though I still adore reading, I’m finding more and more that, when given the choice, I will choose a YouTube video over the next chapter of my book.

This affordance of the convenience of visual media has become a constraint, for now it is difficult to maintain people’s attention with some sort of visual–hence the rise of Instagram. Has this resulted in text-illiteracy for me? I don’t think so. In fact, I think heavier exposure to visual media has allowed me to better visualise scenes from novels.

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One quote I really liked from Miles was:

‘Network literacy is…understanding a kind of writing that is a social, collaborative process rather than an act of an individual in solitary’ (Miles 2012, p.208)

I’m still getting used to the fact that people (even if it’s just Nash) are reading my blog posts every week. I might have been network literate with Club Penguin, but there are still elements I need to learn in terms of blogs and the wider internet.

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References

Miles, A 2012, ‘Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge’, Soft Cinematic Hypertext (Other Literacies), RMIT University, pp.201-208.

“How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?”

This is the prompt that underpins this entire course.

Confession #1:

I have one post on my Instagram. I only have an Instagram account because my friends forced me to one night at a going-away dinner.

My only post is a photo of my pasta from that dinner.

   

Images from my personal Instagram

Confession #2:

Way back in around 2011-2012, I had an Instagram account. My cousin forced me to make it (are you seeing a pattern here?) and I only agreed because of the filters. I thought it was a photo editing app. You can’t blame me; at the time, I was 13-14, I had a Nokia phone, and photo sharing was still a new thing.

Why was it new? Because smartphones were expensive. And because the network was decentralised.

I had a FanFiction.Net account when I was around 13-14 (apparently a very formative period of my internet existence). I wrote tiny little one-shots in the Harry Potter universe and my audience consisted of maybe ten readers who randomly stumbled across my fics along with my cousin, two high school friends, and one primary school friend.

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My archaic Instagram account and my cringeworthy FanFiction.Net accounts did not share the same audience. They were individual spheres, orbiting in their own tiny universes.

Nowadays, the network is far more centralised. I can sign up to everything from Snapchat to Candy Crush through my Facebook, my Twitter, my Google account. My YouTube account is directly linked to my Gmail. Tinder can connect with Spotify can connect with Facebook. Everything is connected. But now, everything looks the same.

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Even though I have barely touched the Instagram of 2018, I could probably just figure it out by applying my knowledge from other apps. The heart icon probably means ‘like’, something I learned from the now irrelevant We Heart It. Those bubbles at the top of my feed are probably some variation of the ‘stories’ found in Snapchat and Facebook, collated photos and videos that last 24 hours. If it’s like any mobile app ever, I can swipe up and down to scroll through posts. Slowly but surely, apps are beginning to look more and more like each other.

If design is contagious, are individual designs like diseases? Is the lack of innovation a bad thing? In terms of progress and creativity and originality, yes. But in terms of usability, perhaps no. Apps copy each others’ designs because they have been tried and tested. Additionally, by having similar designs, skills are transferrable from one app to another, offering instant familiarity to users, negating the awkward, fumbly learning stage.

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Confession #3:

To this day, the numbers on a TV remote baffle me. When I was younger, I had an old box TV in my bedroom and one day, I just decided to press a bunch of numbers. All I got was ants on my screen. So I pressed more buttons. More ants. ‘Without feedback, one is always wondering whether anything has happened…Feedback is critical.’ (Norman 1998, p.xii) I still don’t watch TV. Now I wonder if it’s because I never figured out the remote.

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In Donald A. Norman’s ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ (1998) it was strange to read about the early computers and how unintuitive they were. A blank screen with absolutely no indication of where to start or what to do? That would paralyse me too.

Norman (1998, p.82) writes that ‘problems occur whenever there is more than one possibility’, and this quote reminded me of about two weeks ago when I played my first game of Dungeons and Dragons. I felt so out of my element, so unsure of my actions, because the possibilities were endless and the game’s design was not very friendly to the new user. No UI. Lots of jargon. All the abbreviations on the character sheet alone was like learning a new language. When our party came across a snare, even though I told the DM I walked around it, apparently because I hadn’t been at the front of the line when we saw the snare, I didn’t know the snare was there (rhyme) and hence couldn’t walk around it.

…Well how was I supposed to know that? Nothing on my character sheet, in the 30 page ‘condensed’ rulebook I hastily skimmed, or in the DM’s instructions had warned me that what was seen and heard by one member of the party, and hence announced to the entire table, was not automatically known by other members.

By the end of the session, I was passed out on the couch just from the stress of making decisions. Poor design, really. (I was actually just sick but shhh.)

 

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The idea that people were once so baffled by computers astounds me, but that’s my youth and upbringing talking. My dad is an electronic engineer so I grew up with computers. I have had my own computer since I was about seven years old. Norman (1998, p.180) writes ‘the best computer programs are the ones in which the computer itself “disappears”, in which you work directly on the problem without having to be aware of the computer.’ This is how it has always been for me. I remember telling my dad once how using a mouse felt as natural as using my hands. Now I realise, this is not the case for everyone.

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Everything I read this week about human-centred design and constraints and affordances is taking me back to Year 12 Product Design and Technology (or Textiles, for short). When you get down to fundamentals, designing a steampunk Alice in Wonderland costume really isn’t that different to designing a photo-sharing social media app.

From D&D to Discord, design concepts like affordances and constraints, feedback and visibility, are everywhere. But being aware of them can not only help explain the increasing centralisation of the network, but also why navigating the intricate, invisible internet is somehow easier for me than navigating an IRL conversation.

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References:

Norman, D 1998, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York.