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.
Tag Archives: Alexandra Race-Lyons
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”.
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.
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.