This week was our last symposium; an eventful, solemn yet exciting time that demonstrates our Networked Media journey coming to a close (in this course that is). I definitely enjoyed the ceremonial closing theme to the lecture as it felt like the end of an era not just a lousy week 11 lecture.

Firstly was the blog database program which was an amazing non-fiction text that really demonstrated the network and its vastness. You could search emotions à gender à age group à weather à country to find a very specific blog post of your desire. Pretty neat hey! But to be honest it did make me a little scared and sad that there were so so so many blog posts out there that are clearly so important to that person but are the tiniest blip on the blogosphere and network radar.

Here are my notes from Adrian’s powerpoint:

• Again, we must become active knowledge creators, not slip into being passive consumers
• Journalism à what’s it for? It was originally created for an economy of scarcity but in today’s online world that’s been completely diminished; so what can journalism do to stay afloat?
• Triple R was created solely because there was no other place to listen to alterative music on the radio; every other station played top 40 crap. The thought of having no access to a certain type of music these days is totally mind boggling. The economy of scarcity is gone. So what’s Triple R now?

Networked Media has been experimental learning which is easy enough to assume seeing as there’s so much debate about what the network even is!

Our journey:

• Double loop learning à our assumptions are what need to be recognised and reworked; what need to be less passive with our learning and thinking
• Design fiction à looking backwards only gets you so far; looking forward is when you learn the most, particularly in the digital age
• Hypertext à we’re so deeply immersed in print, so hypertext is a good way to introduce disruption and change and make us question: what is a writer? What is a text?
• Networks à scale free, dense nodes emerge that make it easy to get from any node to another, and a describable and understandable structure emerges because some nodes become more connected than others
• Protocol à about communication between peers à there is no head office or centre to the Network or permission needed to say what we say; we must engage and participate and learn the social and technical rules to the game.
• Databases à how we store lists of things; stories have an order; databases separate content from presentation and do not have to use or rely on cause and effect

And finally Adrian’s closing points about the network:

• We are not the centre of anything
• We share agency with non sentient things
• Meaningful structure always emerges
• Communicative relationships are at its heart à between parts of a single text, between texts (blogs, emails etc.), between systems and services (Twitter – Instagram), between people and communities

This is my last symposium blog post; a truly bittersweet victory.