Firstly, WOW! Before I came into this lecture I had spent a good 15 minutes trying to find either my face, or the face of someone I know on this. These are the faces of Facebook. The number as I am writing this post is 1,278,837,969…. and continuing to grow really fast! Apparantly this would take 36 years to look through! Miami-based “creative technologist” Natalia Rojas is responsible for this creation- maybe she has a LOT of time on her hands, but either way, snaps to her- this is pretty cool!

This is what it looks like on the home page….

This is what it looks like when you click one tiny little pixel!

🙂

Moving on…..

This “unlecture” continued to improve my understanding of the Latour reading;

– The internet is scale free, it doesn’t have edges, it can’t fill up

– It is made of nodes, which can be thought of as ‘things’ and they can connect to similar ‘things’

– Because of this we get hubs

– It is not random, a structure will emerge

Then…. another cool app thingy! The Oracle of Bacon (Kevin Bacon, American Actor).

This app lets you put in a name of a movie star, and shows you the connection that they have to Kevin Bacon. They may not have specifically starred on the same movie, but they starred in a movie that had another actor that starred in a movie with that actor… For example: Reese Witherspoon was in Twilight (1998) with Giancarlo Esposito, who was in Enormous Changes at the last Minute (1983) with Kevin Bacon. So Reese Witherspoon (Legally Blonde) has a “Bacon Number” of 2.

Then we talked about technology and technique:

– Technology has agency; it can act

– Media is not just about meaning and representation, you also have to conform to certain rules

– Technology designs the technique

– Technology is now the air we breathe. I challenge you to think of a situation where you are not in any way influenced by human creation. Camping I hear you ask? How did you get there? Drive? What did you sleep in? A tent, a sleeping bag, a tarp? How did you get those things there with you? How were they made? Did you see any planes flying overhead? Did you light a fire with matches or did you go caveman style with a couple of sticks?

Fun Lecture! 🙂 Sorry, Unlecture 😉