Category: Readings

Databases as symbolic form

Databases exist everywhere, and plays a huge part in our lives. How else are we going to remember ALL of your friends’ details if not thanks to Facebook? Or all your contacts in your phone? All this information is stored in a database, what Manovich calls “structured collection of data.”

Some examples include the traditional CD-ROMs, floppies, and DVDs, which also inspired new database genres. According to Manovich, where databases really flourished is on the Internet. He explains,

“The open nature of the Web as medium means that the Web sites never have to be complete – and they rarely are because the sites are always growing.”

Web pages are ever growing databases – new links, images, audios and videos are being added to existing content. This form of data storage conforms to the antinarrative logic of the Web, meaning it is a collection, not a story. Some examples include the popular online audio distribution platform, Soundcloud, which allows users to upload and share their own content. Wikipedia, which allows basically anyone to contribute content to an ever-expanding database. The list goes on and on.

To explain algorithm, Manovich used an example of the classic game, Tetris. And in any first-person shooter games, how a player improves is by grasping the algorithms of the game itself, like under such-and-such conditions. The user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model.

“Any process or task is reduced to an algorithm, a final sequence of simple operations that a computer can execute to accomplish a given task.”

To further explain how algorithm works in a game, a genetic code was implemented to a game of Tetris, and it was endless.

“The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects that are complementary to each other:  data structures and algorithms.”

Data structure is, data organized in a way for efficient search and retrieval. Data structure of a computer and its algorithm works inversely. Together, according to a computer, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world. So, data structures and algorithms drive different forms of computer culture – databases correspond to data structure, and narratives correspond to algorithms. In computer programming, data structures and algorithms are both equally crucial for a program to work.

“Databases becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age.”

Could we ever live without databases? I doubt it.

Protocols

“…is a set of recommendations and rules that outline specific technical standards.”

In computing,

“…any type of correct or proper behaviour within a specific system of conventions.”

Galloway used the conventional road etiquette as an example of how computer protocols work, saying that protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulations within a contingent environment. Although the Internet is commonly perceived by critics as chaotic and lacks centralized command, there is actually more protocological control than it may seem. What makes it look like the way it is now is probably TCP/IP, which are the leading protocols for data transmission from one computer to another. I think that torrents are actually a really good example that contributes to the misconception of the Internet today. Probably because it is file transfer system that is very unpopular with copyright authorities, based solely on peer-to-peer network relationships.

Since DNS servers are structured like an inverted tree, a hypothesis was put forth saying that whole countries can be blacked out from the rest of the Internet by just modifying the information contained in the root servers. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is a type of attack that floods a website with relentless and useless traffic, causing it to stall or go offline. The incoming traffic originates from potentially hundreds or thousands of sources, making it nearly impossible to stop the attack by simply blocking a few IP address, or even to track down the attacker. Here is an article about the largest DDoS attack that China has ever faced. This further reinforces my stand – that the Internet is a large controllable mesh of networks.

Read Dana’s post on how the protocols undertaken by the Chinese government to restrict the use of Facebook, Twitter, and a number of  other social networking sites.

Technology, technique, and culture.

Today we discussed the notions of technology, technique, and culture.

Technology

By the 1860s, the interpretation of technology shifted from art and craft to the application of a body of knowledge to a specific field, or more easily put, the application of science to production. Over the past few decades, the word ‘technology’ describes overall system of machines and processes.

We are now said to be living in, or around, technology. ‘Technology’ is now an abstract term that suggests an overarching system that we inhibit. I personally agree, fundamentally because the basis of this speculation has stood firm since ancient Greece. The average modern day individual has in some way, owns or uses a form of ‘technology’ daily to keep themselves connected to the world.

Techniques

“… if our civilization were to lose its techniques, all our machines and apparatus  would become one vast pile of junk” – William Barrett, 1978

Technique, simply put, is the ability to accomplish something with the use of skill. Losing our technique would imply the sense that we could not accomplish anything.  But as Potts suggests,

‘… sometimes it seems as though we do invent technologies that can operate themselves’

Would this mean that the human workforce will eventually become obsolete?

Simon mentioned that technology is always created by humans, and humans have absolute control over it. Jake says that we, as humans, are also created and ‘programmed’ by education but still have independent control over ourselves and he could see that being inherent in technology. Mardy talks about the notion of nature and technology, where technology has somehow coexisted with nature. For example, back then a stick and a rock could even be considered as technology.

Culture

This brings us to culture. Culture is dynamic because it changes over time. Culture is unpredictable – technology is being used in ways never foreseen by their inventors. So, it is safe to say that culture evolves with technology.

Rich get richer

From what I understand from the Barabasi reading, the sentence ‘rich get richer’ points to how a senior node is collectively gathering more links as time passes, compared to a new node that just joined the system, with only a few links. In his terms, real networks are governed by two laws, growth and preferential attachment. In 1999, 3.2 billion dollars were spent by small scale companies on online advertising alone. The reason? Trying to attract more links and hits to their website in lieu of the SuperBowl. As stated in my previous post, distribution of links per site follows a pareto style distribution.

According to the random network models, we would randomly link to any of the nodes.

Is it, really? An example here is when I search for ‘bpl (Barclays Premier League) updates’ in a search engine, my obvious choice would be ESPNfc.com because I am familiar with the channel. They more they are linked, the easier they are to find on the Web.

They are hubs. The better known they are, the more links point to them.

It is obvious people prefer hubs. It is true that it is an unnoticed bias. This is what Barabasi calls preferential attachment. He also goes against the Erdos-Renyi and Watts-Strogatz models where there is no difference between the nodes of a network, saying that “In real networks linking is never random”.

Network evolution is  governed by the subtle yet unforgiving law of preferential attachment.

So how does a node become a hub? Growth, seniority, and preferential attachment. Early nodes have more potential to gain links compared to the latecomers. Therefore, when they gain a lot of links they will eventually break off from the pack and form a hub. Using this simple observation, Barabasi was able to conclude in terms network topology, that the Web is indeed following a power law.

Also check out Tim’s post.

Pareto’s Law

Well, Pareto never actually used 80/20 in a phrase. The term came in later when Dr. Joseph Juran attributed the 80/20 rule to Pareto. His principle was known as ‘the vital few and the trivial many’. In Pareto’s understanding, it meant 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people.

This 80/20 rule applies to most parts of my life. 80% of my calls are only from 20% of people in my contact list; 80% of my Facebook messages are from 20% of my friends; 80% of blogging comes from 20% of my time. The theory suggests that we focus more on the 20% and make our time more worthwhile. However, as F. John Reh suggests, the theory is flawed. He says, helping the good become greater is, better, than helping the great become excellent.

Power laws formulate in mathematical terms the notion that a few large events carry most of the action.

Even so, it is surprising that there is a power law distribution behind every webpage. Smaller events, like webpages, coexist with larger webpages which are called nodes. In the Barabasi reading, it says that a random network is like a highway system, where the nodes are the cities and the highways are the links. In a scale-free network it is like a flight route, where the nodes have a few links, and are held together by a few highly connected hubs, which is similar to the power law distribution. According to Huberman here, he analyses several activities:
1. Distribution of pages per site follows a pareto style distribution

2. Distribution of links per site follows a pareto style distribution.

3. Number of clicks per session follows a pareto style distribution.

4. Distribution of visitors per site follows a universal power law. Pareto is omnipresent.

We would come to see that power law distributions determine structural stability, dynamic behaviour, robustness, and error and attack tolerance of real networks.

“The fact that the networks behind the Web, Hollywood, scientists, the cell, and many other complex systems all obey a power law allowed us to paraphrase Pareto and claim for the first time that perhaps there were laws behind complex networks.”
 

We now know that the discovery of hubs are a consequence of power laws. But what are the mechanisms behind it?

Re(tail)

Chris Anderson outlines that the Internet is changing the way how business is done. I mean, it is undeniable how the Web has truly made an impact to the economy. So a general description of the ‘long tail’ by Anderson,

In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

As he suggests, we are not all as mainstream as we thought. I might find myself spending countless sleepless hours on YouTube just because I clicked on the next recommended video, and I only stop because I realize I am in the weirdest parts YouTube where it is filled with nyan cats, Barney the purple dinosaur, and Zach Galifianakis at the ‘Suggested Videos’ sidebar. So, there is incentive for businesses to cater to the ‘long tail’, with new distribution channels like digital marketing and peer-to-peer downloading. I agree on his point that many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching.

But there is a catch to it, in order for the ‘long tail’ theory to ‘work’, niche markets have to outdo the hits. That is statistically impossible. Sure, everything sells at least once, but is it financially viable? Anderson admits,

“The further down the long tail, the more the need to keep the day job.”

The 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s Principle, applies to most of the statistics in Anderson’s book, which states that 80% of revenue generated in the market are from 20% of the products available. I could go on, but this requires another post.

Here is a video for insight on the tail,

Six Degrees of Separation

This was my sole understanding of subject matter, before I read Six Degrees by Watts, and also Esther’s post.

 

Right, a ‘degree of separation’ is a measure of social distance between people. I am one degree away from everyone I know, two degrees away from everyone they know, and so on. So, the theory proposes that I am actually just 6 introductions away from Emma Watson, which is sweet because Microsoft proves the theory actually stands. Watts himself also conducted an experiment, called ‘Primetime’. It was a test that pitted real people against each other in a race to see who could connect themselves to a random third individual in a non-conventional way (obviously). 60,000 people participated, and of the hundreds of chains that have been completed, Watts says the average link is 6. Kevin Bacon also has a website, called Six Degrees, dedicated to donations all across the globe.

download

 

In his paper, Six Degrees, along with his mentor, Steve Strogatz, he mentioned that they often came back to the question of how individual behaviour affects collective behaviour. In page 24, one of the many question he proposes,

How is it that assembling a large collection of components into a system results in something different altogether different from just a disassociated collection of components?

 (Please forgive me if my usage of the term ‘football’ is different, but from where I came from, football means soccer) An example here would be the basic structure of a football team – goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders, and forwards. If these components are not properly associated together, they would just be footballers without a role. But if these people are sorted based on their skill set, they would form a team.

Watts also mentioned synchrony in terms of how scientists from different fields struggle to understand one another. Same goes to a game of football, the forwards definitely don’t have the mindset of defenders, and a goalkeeper doesn’t have the mindset of a midfielder, but all of them are needed to win a match. In order for a team to be successful, it does not depend entirely on their individual skills, but also other components in the system to compliment it. Watts uses an example of a group of runners,

In oscillator terms, the pack represents a synchronized state, and whether or not the system synchronizes depends both on the distribution of intrinsic frequencies and on the coupling strength.
 

This is where a manager comes in. He carefully picks players that he’d think will work really well together and ultimately win them matches.

End of books or books without end?

When I was in elementary school, I came into contact with what was known to me as the interactive book for the first time. I was quite lucky, to be honest, to be exposed to computers at a young age. So, the principle of hypertext fiction didn’t seem new.

Despite being fond of the formalities of hypertext, I didn’t sway from printed literature. The difference is apparent. Printed literature offers a static plot and a fixed sequence, and the principles of a plot do not apply to hypertext. Landow quotes Aristotle’s definition of a plot,

Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and also has another after it. (1462)

Aristotle also said, “a well-constructed plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described.” I find this true because due to the immensity of the World Wide Web today, there is virtually no end in hypertext. Linearity is now an option. As Robert Coover says,

“Hypertextual story space is now multidimentional and theoretically infinite, with an equally infinite set of possible network linkages, either programmed, fixed or variable, or random, or both.”

Coover also mentions that hypertext is a form of active reading experience, in which the reader can also contribute to the story. For example, choosing alternative routes or approaches, taking a character’s side, and so on. But the form of hypertext that he proposes in the Landow reading are the kind that are only possible with systems that allows readers to add text and links to the narrative. There are works that were created in the past by students at Brown, like Hotel, where users can add a new room to the fictional structure, and also the ability to delete the work of others. As we can see from a modern perspective, these sort of works are subject to vandalism, but currently there are a considerable amount of works out there that implements this system. Here is a different form of hypertext but similar to Coover’s notions of an active hypertext reader,

I’d like to think that hyperfictions are perceived to provide you near infinite amount of choices on how to comprehend it but somehow there is still some sort of imperceptible boundary that exists within. There are other views on this topic, read Anna’s take on this.

In the Douglas reading, he says,

Today our representations of the world have been shaped by philosophical relativism and, in areas like quantum physics and chaos theory, we increasingly embrace a world infinitely more complex, unpredictable, and indeterminate than anything our nineteenth-century forebears could imagine.

He also added, saying Socrates disparages writing as a form or representation, and our own, where the arrival of hypertext enables us to deride the printed word for roughly the same reasons. We shouldn’t be surprised that hypertext has, in some way, had an impact in the relationship between text, reader, and world. Readers now have the liberty of making choices and decide what deserves to be a ‘good ending’. They can have their personalized ‘closure’. Easily put, readers don’t really have a choice in printed literacy because it is the authors’ domain. In hypertext fiction, the authors only have that much control over their content because even they themselves may never experience all the possible permutations. So, you can see how the arrival of hypertext has reconfigured the roles of readers, and writers alike.

Here is a good example of hypertext fiction, Blue Lacuna.

Average Thought Provoking Wednesday

I have to be honest, a sort of anxiety ran through me right after Elliot said that we are to form groups and are to review a specific blog post of our choice. I did. I really did. But I didn’t let it bother me too much as I had a task in hand.

I reviewed Jame’s post, which was a summary on the topic of design fiction. The readings were analyzed in a spot-on fashion and comprehensive manner. (I’m not saying the readings are hard to understand, it’s because I have a very short attention span) I quote James:

Ward then goes on to make a very real and thought provoking point, that designers are never in the here and now, that that they are always designing for the future. Now this notion made me think that if they are never in the here and now, then should there be any need to teach them about design fiction as their line of thought would already be on the outer?

The point that caught my eye was his question regarding Ward’s claims, in which I agree upon. The purpose of design is, in literal and altruistic terms, for the future. However, it all comes down to practicality and temporality. Coming to a point where Elliot said that if society needs a piece of technology, then they will find a way to build it. If a design is not practical in the now, then it will be, some day.

His blog featured a picture of the characters of the Star Trek franchise using specific types of communication technology that weren’t invented during that time. Subsequent years passed and eventually the pieces of technology were invented and commercialized. I am astounded by the ability of the Star Trek producers to predict the future so accurately. (whether they realize it, or not)

This brings a thought, we are all in dire need of flying cars, but why don’t we have them yet?

“So – is innovation dead? Coming back to Peter Thiel’s catchphrase, we DO have flying cars. The first ones flew in the 1930s, in fact. But, using the much-lamented flying car as proxy for expectations of the future that didn’t happen as planned, we see that achieving success demands more than just showing that something is technically possible.” – W.Patrick McCray

This all comes back to design fiction, and practicality, and temporality, and practice. We may not have flying cars yet, but visioneers are inventing a new future.

Noticing the Notice

“A succession of experiences does not add up to an experience of that succession and indicates why intentional noticing is necessary.” – Immanuel Kant

Mason suggested that reflection plays a big role in the art of noticing – to notice the succession of experiences. The “reflection” mentioned here is not as palpable as you think. Instead, it is a learning process that is based on experience and more. We always notice things, things that we see daily, like say, a billboard on the way to work or university. But this billboard would only come to existence if it is brought up “intentionally”. Take note on the “intentional”, it is only when mentioned, be it verbal or visual, that we recall certain things, certain things that are stored at a secluded corner of our minds. If, and only if, we live in our experiences, and not just physically being there, we might notice something different in our everyday routine.

Professional noticing, however, from what I understand is both similar and different to intentional noticing. Professional noticing is when we intentionally heighten our noticing capabilities because the setting demands us to, or it is just because we put ourselves into those situations. Mason says in his article, ‘Perhaps when reading a book or article, something is described or suggested and we can see ourselves ‘doing that’ in our own way in our own context. But all too often we put down the book or leave the session, the thing which seemed so salient and important at the time recedes into distant memory, perhaps never to re-appear.’

The statement could not be more well put and defined.

For a more personal review on the application of noticing, check out Kimberly’s post.