Author Archives: Antoine Terreaux

Thoughts

Peer Review

Jess talked about last weeks’ symposium which I couldn’t come to because of a BCNA event at the NGV (which was pretty cool btw). She discusses databases in terms of narrative, explaining that the two have been said to be natural enemies. This makes me think of something i read in the database reading saying how databases were in dialectical opposition with the other system (I forgot the name of it how embarrassing) that distributes the information stored within the databases.

It’s good to know that Seonaid is just as confused about the protocol reading as I am. She makes an interesting point, however, about internet not being hierarchical; indeed it can be described as a decentralised ‘horizontal line’, but what’s interesting is that Web traffic nevertheless submits to a hierarchical structure, such as DNS.

 

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Reading reflections

Protocol

This week’s reading was a little bit difficult to understand, but i got this quote from it which is a pretty succinct run-down of what this is all about. “Yet instead of governing social or political practices as did their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed to, adopted, implemented, and ultimately used by people around the world. What was once a question of consideration and sense is now a question of logic and physics.” Basically this quote is juxtaposing the original definition of the word ‘protocol’ (a piece of paper attached to the beginning of a diplomatic document that summarises its policies/arguments/discourse) with the new meaning of ‘protocol’ in terms of computers.

There was also a point raised that related to the previous reading about databases. It basically stipulated that there was a dialectical opposition between two principles within protocol (which is what makes the internet seem so chaotic when it’s not). The hierarchical organisation of data (databases) such as DNS, and the random distribution and transmission of this data between computers, such as IP and TCP.

If we want to get from point A to point B on a highway, that is through IP, which is located because of DNS, then the requirement to stay in between the white lines and stop at a red line is protocol. It all makes a little more sense this way.

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Thoughts

Peer Thoughts

In her exploration of the Manovich reading, I found Seonaid‘s explanation of building narrative in terms of databases really useful. I didn’t get through the whole reading myself, but she talks about how navigating through a database works as a way of creating our own narrative, which was an interesting point. George talks about a part of the reading which i didn’t get to. He talks about the limitations of the screen as being similar if not identical to those of a simple book, why is it any different to read off a screen than off a book? He questions how future media makers can possibly break through the ‘rectangular’ boundaries of the screen.

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Reading reflections

Manovich Reading on Databases

This week’s reading by Manovich discussed databases and their relationship with narrative. From my understanding of the reading, databases are organised lists of items about the world that completely contradict the cause and effect structuring of narrative. In alliance with these databases are algorithms. These work mainly within the realms of computer gaming, that is, they require the player to execute an algorithm in order to win.

Data structures and algorithms are then complementary. The latter encapsulates any process or task, any sequence of operations; and any object in the world is modelled as a database, meaning that it is organised in a way for efficient search and retrieval (linked lists, graphs). Together they have a symbiotic relationship, the more complex one is, the less the other needs to be.

Interfaces are a new way to handle databases and are really only applicable to the Web. In olden days, when someone made a painting, the interface and the work would be one, because the media used and the end product were the same thing. But with internet pages, different interfaces can be managed over the same material. Interface and content are therefore separate. Hence, it is possible to present different versions of the same work, using different interfaces over the same content.

The most notable part of the reading for me was at the beginning because it helped me think in terms of the creative essay.

“Indeed, if the world appears to us as an endless an unstructured collection of images, texts and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database, but it is also appropriate that we would want to develop the poetics, aesthetics and ethics of this database.”

and

“The open nature of the Web as medium (web pages are computer files that can always be edited) means that the Web sites never have to be complete – and they rarely are because the sites are always growing.”

I think these help to answer a few questions about change and flow on the internet, but I’ll discuss my thoughts further in the creative media essay.

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Thoughts

WIN – win

Last symposium we talked about Apple. Adrian used the corporation in terms of the Power Law graphs to give us a sense of their practical usage. As it went, individual popular music tracks that sold considerably more (and therefore formed the ‘head’ of the graph) were still less profitable than the aggregate of tracks that sold much less (and formed the ‘tail’).

This is the main reason behind Apple’s decision to preserve those tracks that formed the tail; it didn’t cost them more to store them (unless you’re counting up to well past ten decimal points), and it offered a continuous even if irregular flow of income to those who owned the rights to the tracks. As Jason put it, it’s a win win situation, except some win a lot more than others.

I guess we can try to change the analogy to suit the internet, if the funds received by each track sold equates to reputation or information being earned by each connection made. It works with FaceBook too, the millions (if not billions) of us ‘average’ people currently on FaceBook offer a lot more information than those few ‘important’ celebrities that reel in all the likes. But then doesn’t that demonstrate opposite reasoning with the argument behind the 80/20 rule?

To be continued…

 

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Thoughts

Classmate Thoughts

Alex is a bit mind boggled by one of Barabasi’s quotes about the 80/20 rule. ‘Millions of web page creators work together in some magic way to generate a complex web that defies the random universe’. The Barabasi reading talked about internet being a random universe and therefore needing to abide by the rules of the bell curve, which it doesn’t. I think Alex is just confused (and understandably so) about how the internet, with all its few ‘powerful’ nodes and millions of not so powerful nodes can detract so well from a system that already defines most of the universe: the bell curve. Michael revels at the discussion of the bacon number and how densely connected networks can be. I think it’s important to note however that the Bacon number is just an example to instantiate just how dense these networks really can be. It was done with Erdos in the past, and can be done with any celebrity, Kevin bacon isn’t some kind of Hollywood landmark (maybe to some). Seonaid talks about the discussion on egalitarianism on the web during the symposium. She reckons that this ‘utopian vision’ of the web, as she puts it, cannot be achieved. Nevertheless, with hypertext, she likes to think that if your content is engaging enough, people will link to it, doubling your chances of someone else reading it, and so on, which is always a nice way to look at things when it comes to scale-free networks.

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Reading reflections

The 80/20 Rule

80-20

Vilfredo Pareto noticed one day that 80 percent of his peas were produced by only 20 percent of his pea pods, he then made an interesting link between this observation and other sociological aspects of life (much of which is identical to Murphy’s Laws of Management). 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the Italian population, 80% of profits are produced by only 20% of the employees, 80% of the customer service problems are created by only 20% of the customers and so on.

The reading goes on to use the example of America’s highway maps vs America’s plane routings to instantiate the difference between a “random” network, which abides to the rules of a bell curve, and one that follows the Power Laws, which describes an ever decreasing curve. As such, the connections the highways made from city to city ranged from one to three, with no particularly better connected “nodes”, whereas the plane routings sketched out a few cities with a huge number of connections to other smaller cities (or nodes), and many cities with only those larger nodes as connections.

If we look back at last week’s symposium, we talked about how there could not be a ‘centre’ in the web. Even before the internet grew to be what it is today, people had predicted that, like most things in nature, information dissemination would follow a bell curve, so even then, people knew no node could be the centre. I think that this Power Law kind of shows us that where there can be nodes with extraordinarily large numbers of links, no node will ever connect to everything else in less than one step or link on the internet. As Watts argued in previous readings, our social circles’ makeup has created a small-world problem, and we are no further then 3 steps from more than half of the population on earth, but there is no way a single person is exactly one step away from everyone else, this can easily be applied to the laws of the web.

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Thoughts

The Centre Cannot Exist

During the symposium, Betty talked about the theory that individual behaviour aggregates to collective behaviour. She used the example of indigenous cultures who still understood and worked around a sense of social network and community even without internet connectivity. This goes to show that networking isn’t something that was determined by technology, it’s been around for millenniums, the birth of social media helped us put a name on it.

My story grows because of the relationships around it, and i have no control over that. This story then becomes the aggregation between the parts. I am no longer the forest with each part of my life, each person met, memory, and experience representing a tree, but my own life representing the tree in the forest of humanity. And it doesn’t matter how big the tree is, how many branches it has, how big of a ‘node’ it is, because there is NO centre in the internet.  It is important to realise this because if we don’t we aren’t being network literate. Google isn’t the centre of the internet, it’s just another node; just like Kevin Bacon isn’t the centre of Hollywood, any actor is around three steps away from another.

The egalitarian equation that has been prompted upon the internet makes it that this centre CANNOT exist. Almost everybody’s online presence contains a link between something else, and since we all have a say on the internet, there simply isn’t space for an entity to auto-proclaimed itself the ‘centre’.

Now for an interesting video that shows us the power of individual behaviour, aggregating to collective behaviour.

 

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Thoughts

Peer Thoughts

I really enjoyed reading Seonaid‘s thoughts on last week’s symposium. She too agrees that no technology can really be impartial, and therefore ‘neutral’. I think we have a similar view on this. She argues that some technologies lend themselves to more uses and affordances than others, therefore making them less biased, and more neutral. She draws her point back to the idea of technological determinism which i hadn’t thought about; technologies with less affordances may appear to be more ‘determinist’, but in the end society chooses which technologies to innovate and which to rethink or reject. Alex reflects upon the Watts reading “Six Degrees” as she comes to the conclusion that networks are made to seem unnecessarily complex. A network is a multitude of threads that connect objects together, and nothing more. Neeve, unlike me, saw the hammer analogy as a real eye-opener. Technologies are much more complex than we give them credit for, and when we see a hammer, we tend to forget that it has particular affordances that are suited to us, it’s not ‘just a hammer”.

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Reading reflections

Erdos Number and Clustering

Thoughts based on the Barabási reading.

The Erdos number. Each person who coauthored a book or article with Erdos (a great mathematician) has an Erdos number 1; a person who coauthors with one of Erdos’ coauthors has an Erdos number 2, and so on. In the end, we discover that the people of the scientific community are remarkably close nit, with people such as Bill Gates boasting an Erdos number 5, and he is more of an innovator than a scientist.

Even then, they discovered that those scientists should have had a relatively large Erdos number if they had picked their coauthors randomly, but their small Erdos numbers points to the fact that they did not pick them randomly, but that they did in fact cluster.
Clustering is the social practice of maintaining relations with people who maintain relations with each other. When we cluster, we dramatically heighten the chance of two people knowing each other. In fact, clustering is the only way that the six degrees of separation can even exist. What does this mean in terms of network media?

Our strong ties are often rendered useless in a practical sense. They move around the same people we do, and therefore rarely are the ones to offer us job opportunities and the such. It’s our weak ties that we need to take advantage of. Fortunately or unfortunately, someone already has. FaceBook and other social media networks are most likely the first to jump up at the opportunity. How does this interrelation with everyone in the world affect us? How does the fact that I am no more than 6 steps away from any given person on Facebook change anything?

Well, if the strong ties are useless for information spread, then this means everything. Think about it, what are the odds of the first degree of separation being a strong tie, someone you are friends with, quite low, so the second is already quasi inexistent. This means that by the first or second degree, you already have thousands of weak ties begging to be exploited, used for rumour spreading, information flow, commercial practices such as “Tell a friend and get free [..]”. I never even realised the extent of the power of our networks!

And now, a video example of synchronised clapping, the human brain’s subconscious need to synchronise itself with others around us. (it’s sort of relevant, kinda)

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