Category Archives: Thoughts

Random Philosophical Observations, Thoughts

MIchio Kaku on the Internet

Michio Kaku, a famous Japanese physicist breaks down civilisations into three types (type 0,1,2 and 3). He describes a type 2 civilisation as one that is stellar, and therefore immortal. A type 1 civilisation is planetary, which means that it can manipulate anything that has to do with the planet. Kaku believes that we are currently transiting between a type 0 and type 1 civilisation.

He argues that the internet is what we can call a “planetary” telephone system. Through other examples such as the English language, music culture such as youth music, and even economies such as the european union, the physicist explains that all of these things know no boundaries around the earth, and are therefore classified as type 1 technologies and ideologies. The internet knows no boundaries, it is not a caged like MySpace, it is bound to thrive and survive.

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The Worker Ants and Hypertext

In the symposium, Adrian refuted the claims that most of us born in the digital age are network literate, which surprised me because I too had come to that conclusion. Adrian argued using the example of FaceBook that simply because we know how to use it doesn’t mean we know how it works.  FaceBook exploits people by letting them unveil personal information about themselves; who they are, where they go, what they like, and then sells that information to other parties. In this sense, we are what he coins as “The Worker Ants”. “Just because I know how to change the wheel on my car doesn’t mean I am a mechanic.”

Most network literate individuals are self-tought, and maybe that is because we never really learned how to ask good questions. As Adrian said, ambiguity is often more helpful for learning outcomes. But for those who don’t take it upon themselves to question and find answers, they end up having no literacy to know otherwise, and end up being just a part of “the system” as we so often hear it being called.

If, on the other hand, we do delve deeper into it, we can begin to understand that no longer can we say “I didn’t get to the end”. That logic becomes obsolete with the invention of hypertext, the individual parts are interconnected and there is no end to it in sight. This is also why, Adrian remarks, that gated services such as Myspace cannot survive. It is those (such as FaceBook) which allow for growth and exploitation that will inevitably succeed.

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Jessica’s Views on Internet Validity

Jessica shares an interesting story of her “first brush” with internet malware when she inadvertently downloaded spam sent from her friend’s “older sister”, inevitably leading to multiple viruses. This experience has lead her to question the various misinformation being spread all over the internet. While she reckons that she can tell fact from fiction, she provides several instances in social media history where other people did not share her common sense.

Ultimately, it all comes down to personal experience, and maybe a little bit of common sense, but judgement is paramount she explains.

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Why is Coding Even a Thing…

I’m definitely just going to vent here…

I’m not the most patient of people, some might argue that my Sagittarian tendencies are to blame. Whatever it is, there’s no way I can sit in front of a computer screen looking at symbols and making sure that everything is in the right order and that it ‘makes sense’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Basically I hate HTML. I’ve decided, just now. I hate it. During class when we were learning it, it might as well have been explained in Chinese because I think I would have understood just as much. I Don’t have an eye for detail, and I got really angry (scared mostly) when my hyperlink on page two didn’t bring up the first page, and that my pictures weren’t centred because, obviously, they’re not meant to be centred, they’re meant to be centered (bloody Americans and their silly spelling).

And the straw that broke the camel’s back must have been when I decided to stay behind, determined to resolve my hyperlink issue, only for Betty to notice that I had saved my Fetch document entitled ‘index’ with a capital ‘I’ instead of a lower-case one.

HTML reminds me of the Chewbacca defence, as mentioned in South Park.408x300px-c3ea1e0f_chewbacca_defense

 

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The Pages, Not the Book

This may have been a few weeks ago, but Adrian spoke about a very interesting concept that i think is valuable both in terms of network literacy and life as a whole. Using the analogy of the book, he tried to explain that it was the relationship between each page that creates our understanding of the whole book, and it is this relationship between parts that is essential. The network of relationships (or ecology) that results from this is so much more important than what it represents as a whole.

Without getting too philosophical, I think this is a great way to look at life. I feel that people are always wishing things were better without ever stopping to think about how good things already are; they overlook the pages, some of which are filled with excitement and joy, to focus on the book, which they see as a failure.

It reminds me of a video I saw a long time ago; it’s a university professor’s graduating speech discussing life and work, and how we can choose to feel like everything is in our way, or “experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell-tight situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that makes the stars”. Professor David Foster Wallace reminds us sometimes even the most boring book about 8 hour jobs day after day can be filled with beautiful epiphanies of life’s beauties.

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The Truth

“That’s what fictions is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” – Tim O’brien

This is a bit of a sidetrack, but still somewhat relevant, I promise. I really like this definition of what a ‘story’ is. As adrian said in his lecture, there is no such thing as an ‘accident’ in a narrative, which would mean that every story ever created is technically what we can call ‘fiction’.

Regardless of whether or not stories do have ‘beginnings, middles and ends’, people think up stories to make a new truth, because their truth isn’t satisfying enough, or as a way of making explicit the fine prints of a current truth, or even to create a new truth that helps to conceal another (for good intentions or not).

Why does it matter if stories no longer have beginnings, middles and ends, as long as the grass is greener on the other side, people will find ways to communicate their ‘truths’.

 

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Afterthought

Now that I look back at the first symposium/lecture we had, I’m beginning to understand a little more about the design fictions and why I felt confused about them. At one point in the lecture, Adrian used an analogy or example to do with the cinema, explaining that story telling is not and should not be consistently associated with videos. He argued that stories simply colonised the video camera and hence its story telling potential to create what we now know today as the ‘cinema’; and that videos stripped from any plot or narrative do exist and are still a powerful concept.
This is quite obviously explored in the design fiction interview when Sterling shares his favourite design fiction videos, one of which was the CCTV computer montage which made no sense at all and was most likely not trying to. The video only represented a relationship between humans and inanimate objects and services. This offered new perspectives on habitual activities, thus characterising a sense of change in society, solely by focusing on singular object/service to human interactions.

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