Thoughts

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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Reading reflections

Technology for the Mind

Vannevar Bush supports a very interesting contention that never even crossed my mind in his discussion entitled ‘As We May Think”. By today’s standards, advances in technology allow us to control so much of the material aspects of our world, while human knowledge and the mind is still something that is so uncontrollable. Bush points out that while scientific exploits have pushed the boundaries of human physical capabilities, the methods of reviewing and transmitting the results of research are still generations old, and by now “totally inadequate for its purpose”.

People who conscientiously try to keep up to date with worldly events through habitual readings will often not be able to recall the information they learnt the previous month. This is because we still use the same means to record the ephemeral experiences of human thought and action as we did centuries ago.

Nonetheless, Bush rebukes this by adding that we are at a frontier and that this kind of technological advancement for the mind is imminent.

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Random Philosophical Observations

Friends Forever

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The other day i was watching How I Met Your Mother, and it was the episode where Ted thinks he was rivalling with another guy for a girl’s attention without realising that he was actually gay. Toward the end of the episode, they were saying how they’d never seen most of the people from that day ever again, even though they were all really good friends at the time.

I’ve obviously already graduated from high school and therefore had to leave a lot of people who i can call my friends, many of which I will most likely only ever see once or twice again in my life. But my closest friends I still see on a weekly basis, but that makes me think, ten, twenty years from now, are they all going to be a distant memory of irresponsible, ‘invincible’, teenage banter? One of my closest friends is leaving for the army in New South Wales in 20 days, we can always drive up to see him when he’s free, but will that last very long? And how long before my other friends move to Thailand, and run off with rich men or become male escorts who travel around the world? How long before I’m gone?

Sorry for the deep post, there’s too much intellectual insight on network media in here!

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Thoughts

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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Reading reflections

Unintentional Liars – Mental Maps of How to Act

In the Chris Argyris reading ‘Theories of Action’ some very interesting psychoanalytic arguments caught my attention. Argyris presents two mutually inclusive theories of human behaviour that he calls ‘mental maps’, under the influence of which people would tend to act certain ways. These hardwired maps are supposedly what dictate contextual human behaviour rather than the actual underpinnings that that particular action may uphold. In other words, people are willing to simply act a certain way because they have been told that it is the ‘right’ thing to do, or because it is politically correct, rather than because they considered the ethical entitlements of that particular behaviour. This is what Argyris describes as ‘Theory-in-use’ as opposed to ‘Espoused Theory’, by which we tell people (or ourselves for that matter) what we would do in certain situations.

Below is a link to a video that I am using for my Broadcast Media assignment which pretty accurately describes these theories on camera.

Fuck the Poor – A Social Experiment

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Reading reflections

Network Literate

What does it mean to be ‘network literate’? Well apparently practically all of us born in the digital age are what you can call ‘network literate’. Much like being fluent in another language, being network literate means to have a profound understanding of the infinite compilation of knowledge that is known as ‘the internet’.

One point that Adrian makes in his discussion of network literacy which is particularly noteworthy is that there is a difference between being network literate and being good at network literacy. Outside of the (comforting) confines of the World Wide Web, our society thrives upon mindless consumerism; what does mindless consumerism inevitably lead to? A whole lot of waste… Being good at network literacy means that you put in what you get out, you contribute as much as you consume, so that none of this virtual consumerism of information leads to ‘disparate’ bits and pieces getting lost or buried with new information. Everything is recycled, classified and shared, so that new information can be born and grow organically through the intricacies of the Web. A post should not simply be read, understood, then forgotten about; it should be tagged based on your understanding of it, so people will find it more easily and shared through RSS to as many services as you want, as long as it’s out there, so the rest of the world can also benefit from the knowledge you have earned. That is my understanding of what it means to be network literate.

Is the net really ‘greener’ (conceptually at least) than the actual world? Wow!

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Thoughts

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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Thoughts

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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Reading reflections

Design Fiction?

Design Fiction: “An approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling.” I’d never heard of this concept prior to reading Slate’s interview with Si-fi writer Bruce Sterling, and it wasn’t easy to get my head around.
From what I read, I can define it in my own words as simply a thing, a concept (fictional) that is ‘designed’ to tell a story about change, or anything implicit of change being present in the world. Videos of future gadgets being used, abstract montages of the apparent computing of various CCTV clips, an instrument used in a 2001 movie, or even the simple concept of flying to the moon by flapping your arms can all be described as ‘Design Fictions”.
It was hard for me to understand at first because the term ‘design fiction’ encapsulates so many different concepts that vary greatly in degrees of abstractedness, such as the video clip montage of machines detecting and computing human movements and interactions through CCTV footage.
Ultimately, the goal of deign fictions is to steer away from great futuristic political hypotheses or evolutions of women’s rights but rather focus on the individual interactions between human and objects to “tell worlds rather than stories.”

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