The 11th Symposium

Today’s lecture was opened by Adrian who told us about an app he purchased for $4.50 that produces posters, and how, as a result of this app, he is satisfied with the results and doesn’t require a graphic designer to do the work for him. I thought this was really interesting –  that an app can produce quality and take away the job of a professional. When you think about it – that’s what mosts apps are. They take away the “physical”. Maps App means you don’t need to carry a map around. A pay wave app means you don’t need to carry credit cards around, and the Passbook app means you don’t need to take your passport around. Sure, it’s streamlined, but hey, we’d all be in a difficult situation if we lost our phones.

The focus of today was “DATABASES” which Aravinda described as “An organised collection of information that otherwise has no meaning”. All of our blogs are nothing without their Database. They are the structure that makes things work.

Adrian also spoke about stories and how they have an amazing ability to colonise. He said that as a species we make all these eccentric assumptions that stories are culturally fundamental and that they account for all these other shapes and structures in the world. He said that there is nothing wrong with books but they are different to networked media. The way I interpret this is that we tend to allow stories to be reason why “things are the way they are” – like what happens in stories can be an explanation of the structure of our world. I couldn’t agree more. I think anything that’s fictional is totally unrealistic and unreliable and is indeed a “fairytale”. We’re all in search of our own prince charming, but it’s sad to admit that’s wishful thinking in reality.