Category Archives: Thoughts

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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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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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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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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Thoughts

Technological Neutrality

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This week’s symposium was a bit of a mind warp. The idea of technologies being neutral, or not neutral, was the driving idea of the discussion. As it went, Pott and Murphy identified some technologies as being ‘neutral’, but how can a technology be neutral if it was built for a particular purpose?

Firstly, I think Jason’s idea of some technologies being more neutral than others makes the most sense. He thought about it in terms of the internet; since it has so many different ways of employment, it must be MORE neutral than technologies with specific purposes.
Secondly, neutrality is a difficult word. Saying that a technology is ‘neutral’, to me, isn’t etymologically correct unless we are talking about war or someone’s opinion. For this statement to make sense, I think we need to say: “This technology is neutral in terms of […]“. If we continue with the symposium’s hammer example, surely a club hammer is more neutral than a claw hammer. One has a single purpose whereas the other has two.

Neutrality is a point on a spectrum, what that point is is often very ambiguous. But I don’t think it’s correct for Adrian to say that there simply are no neutral technologies, because that undermines the very nature of the word ‘neutral’.

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Thoughts

Peer Thoughts

Following last week’s symposium, Alex leaned more toward Adrian’s perspective on the use of the word narcissism as inaccurate to describe bloggers and the blogging practice. She believes the words are too harsh and says that human emotion isn’t always 100% apparent online. Michael agrees, saying that services such as FaceBook are full of narcissist comments and posts. He reckons that some of the features are only a reflection of people’s desire to be noticed by their friends. Seonaid makes use of an interesting image to convey the meaning behind technological determinism as discussed in the Potts and Murphie reading.

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Thoughts

Narcissism and Privacy

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During last week’s symposium, Betty and Adrian began to argue about the true meaning of narcissism and if it was really applicable to online bloggers. Adrian argued that narcissists do not communicate or feel empathy, yet blogging is a means of communication, and most bloggers tend to reveal some kind of empathy even if for the most meaningless things. Betty rebuked by saying that narcissism was an accurate term to use, explaining that she felt the word wasn’t being used in the psychological context.

I would veer towards Betty’s point of view; in the social context, narcissism describes a person who is self obsessed. Blogging is a social platform, so it makes sense to appropriate the meaning of the word that correlates with its context. On a side note, as discussed in the lecture, words are complex, and we can only understand their meaning by virtue of what they aren’t. Everyone has a slightly different understanding of what each word means.

An interesting point was raised in terms of privacy. With smartphone usage proliferating at a ridiculous pace, we see more and more photos of meals, private events, and even intimate moments being shared all over the internet. Adrian argues that this is due to the fact that everyone assumes there is some kind of privacy systematically attached to whatever they post online. But this made me think, even if people naïvely believe their content is protected, what it the difference between going to a restaurant and sharing a picture of a meal, saying it tasted amazing or awful, and telling all your friends about it back in the days where internet wasn’t around? Either way you are affecting people’s opinions of a particular place, thing or idea, the only difference is that internet makes it spread faster. But word of mouth is equally powerful; the people of the French countryside during 1789 who had become possessed by the idea that the nobility were plotting to take down the revolution spread this idea all throughout France like wildfire. Isn’t this practice equally as defamatory?

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Thoughts

Peer Review

Alex notes in this blog post about the ‘produser’ that no longer are audiences passive consumers of the internet, but they are now (we are now) contributing ourselves to the rise of more and more media texts. Even though journalism still works as a very powerful tool for audience influence, she explains that the days when we used to receive information through TV and radio are gone, now not only do we receive this information tenfold with the internet, but we also create our own. The produser, alex explains, is a widely embraced term that is the result of the combination of the words “producer” and “consumer” and encapsulates this new form of audience. Seonaid discusses the idea of transclusion and inclusion. Using the example of wikipedia, she says she doesn’t understand how some systems can be both closed, yet never ending in and of itself. I think she has got the main idea, but only needs to realise that wikipedia is bound to expand only within the realms of itself; wikipedia pages can be created infinitely, but all they will ever be are wikipedia pages. FaceBook, by contrast, allows us to share pages, link, advertise, play, like and post, among many other possibilities that the open FaceBook system offers.

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