Monthly Archives: September 2014

#blogreviews

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Ah yes, the end is nigh. Little bits of excitement creep up every now and then that this blogging experience is nearly over. Don’t get me wrong it’s not that I have hated blogging but it is annoying having to do the same thing every week to tick boxes it takes the enjoyment out of it- for me anyway. So who will it be this week?

Amy is first up because like Amy, I  too thought the example of Cowbird was interesting. I had never heard of this website before and I think the concept is quite different to anything else I’ve seen. Amy links it to cultural memory, this is her remembering information from elsewhere and linking it in, nice work.

Stefan shares the Oracle of Kevin Bacon, which until yesterday this was another website I had never heard of.

And finally, Neeve has a great summary of yesterday’s symposium. Recapping something learned from each tutor.

Upon reflection…

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Reflecting upon yesterday’s symposium I found some good points came out of it, in particular the discussions around this week’s reading. Expanding on the idea of the hub, Adrian explained that particular blog posts become hubs but you never know which ones will become the hubs. This is something that is not pre-determined, they simply emerge. So what makes people decide that they want to link to a particular blog? What makes that one popular? Is it trust, authority, enjoyment, relevance, the fact they disagree with what has been discussed? Maybe it’s some or a bit of all of these things. Then we could look at websites, this may be graded differently by people depending on the nature of particular websites. As Adrian mentioned educational websites will most likely be held in higher regard than others. 

Hubs and Networks

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This week’s reading discusses the 80/20 rule, an example being that 80% of links on the web point to only 15% of webpages, thus creating hubs that dominate the inflow of the links. Searching ‘hub’ on the internet brought up an article regarding ‘The Hub and Spoke Model’ for communication. Here, Armano discusses taking the traditional hub and spoke model and turning into something that looks more like a network which I found interesting. That aside I did think back to when we were discussing hypertext and how it only links one way- which is a problem with hub and spoke. If hubs are created with 80% of links pointing to a smaller number of websites, what happens if these websites are taken down? The information doesn’t feed backwards through the link to notify the source that the link that it is no longer available.

network

Sharing Sharing Sharing

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peer

Rachel makes a great point about our mindless addictions in life, and I admit since my nephew downloaded cookie jam on my phone I have become a little addicted. Jamie provides a nice summary of this week’s reading, recapping on Watts’ discussion on the power grid. Loving the yellow on your blog page too Jamie. And some thoughtfulness from Michael about setting up an Instagram account and wondering if he is the same person in real life as his presence in the digital landscape. Good question.

Symposium notes

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Today’s lecture began like most others do which is finishing off from last week, Adrian touched on the fact that the term Digital Media is actually an oxymoron, given that all media is now digital.

In a nutshell…

  • The notion of networking goes way back and the internet is one idea of networking
  • The original intent of a technology is not always how it is used
  • Technologies are not neutral although they may be geared towards a certain use over others they can still be used for other purposes- we should look at the relationship of a technology with other things and not just what we think it’s originally intended for. (This is in line with Raymond William’s idea that a technology isn’t a technology unless it’s being used, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using it for it’s intended purpose, if it’s being used it’s a technology)
  • Print literacy asks certain things of us- we will analyse things and situations in a certain way. Preliteracy thinks differently.
  • Nothing is isolated in society so why do we ask to ‘look at things individually’? In this week’s reading, Watts explains we can learn to understand individual behaviour but when it’s a collection it’s when it can be unpredictable. So we do or don’t isolate things in terms of research and theory?

Six Degrees- Duncan J. Watts

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First of all I must point out that the author’s name is Watts and for the first half of this article he gives examples using power grids. Anyway, this article was overall quite interesting as Watts discusses the topic of networks as systems and how we might understand the behaviours of component individually but collectively behaviour changes. I also learned where the term ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ came from, hence the title.

There were many points made in this article but also many questions were raised, such as ‘how vulnerable are large infrastructure networks like the power grid or the internet to random failures or deliberate attacks?’ Many questions Watts raised can’t be answered due to the fact they are still researching this area which is annoying as I’d really like to know the answer to this one. I’m pretty sure not that long ago there was talk about a terrorist act on the world could involve cutting the cables of the internet. I found this interesting article written back in 2012 ‘Four ways the Internet could go down’, although insightful I don’t think we could never really know just how vulnerable we are to these four problems.

Reading & Peer review

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Good on ya Amy for having a crack at the Symposium questions even though you were sick and couldn’t make it. Well said by Stefan who observed how difficult it was to review other people’s readings when we hadn’t done them. And finally a shout out to Alex who has a good post on privacy violation.

**This is where my notes on the reading would be.

A symposium reflection

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Hmmm yes definitely needing some motivation to get back into it after the break. So in yesterday’s lecture I was 100% physically present (yep all body parts were there) but maybe only 50% mentally present. I’m finding many points discussed in lectures are quite repetitive from previous weeks so for my personal interest I’d like a little more traction.

Adrian talked about how language cannot guarantee the intent of the message and how words only mean something by virtue of what it isn’t. He also discussed the ‘unconscious mind’ and how there is an element of us that has no control over what we do. Now I’m no Freud expert but I would have thought we may not have control over our desires but we have control over what we do? Psychoanalysis goes way too deep for me and there are conflicting views on this but I do find it very interesting.There is this idea called the Freudian Slip, where our unconscious interferes with our actions. I have no idea how this relates to Network Media but there you go.