If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology, hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology.

I found this quote from the other Week Six reading, ‘Books Without Pages – Novels Without Endings’ to be a great way to summarise the relationship and contrasts between the book and hypertext, and show how in Networked Media, we are engaging with, and studying, a technology that is still in its infant stage.

The reading focuses on the abundant possibilities of hypertext fiction, and the affect this would have on linearity and the good ole book. It quotes Michael Joyce saying “What if you had a book that changed every time you read it?”, and this is what a hypertext fiction can deliver. According to the reading, it would be an interactive, adaptive fiction that allows the reader to guide how and where the narrative goes, as well as when it begins and finishes.

This level of an open-ended story can somewhat be seen in computer games that are around today, with the likes of Skyrim and GTA featuring such expansive maps and AI that near-limitless possible narratives arise. This is a very exciting prospect for the narrative.

As the reading states, the book is characterized by fixity, no matter how many times you read it, the text will be exactly the same. Our own perceptions of it may change on each re-read, but what we are reading is unchanging. I’m sure everyone gets immensely angry at the decisions made by a character, or who the story chooses to focus on, but with hypertext, these aspects may well be controlled be the reader, signaling where and how they want the story to go.

The reading defines hypertext as “a tool that lets us use the printed word as the basis for a technology that considerably extends writing’s reach and repertoire – mostly by removing text from the single dimension it has on the printed page”. Hypertext fiction can have a plethora of voices, and this “plurality is virtually omnipresent in the hypertext”. It allows the author and the reader to interact as equals.

The reading claims that printed text acts in much of the same way as a legal decision: it settles the conflicting claims and the elaborate narratives constructed by each side with a single decision at its conclusion. It’s like an episode of CSI, at the end, the murderer is revealed, and everything goes back to normal; there’s no room for audience interaction or controlling of the story.

A quote that jumped out at me was: “Reading print can seem a tad like listening to a monologue or a lecture, where you basically have two choices: listen or leave”. This is an idea that has already been introduced by Adrian, and used as the justification for the symposium style lectures. I really like the analogy between printed text and lectures – they are both a very much so a one-way dialogue with clear authority and a very low level of interactivity. We’re doing these ‘unlectures’ to remove these problems, and to function that hour in a more hypertext-like fashion based on interactivity and engagement.

And just like hypertext fiction in general, it has a lot of potential.

The reading this week, ‘Reconfiguring Narrative’, focused on the impact hypertext has had on narrative and ideas of linearity, as well as some potential consequences.

The first thing that jumped out to my was the quote from Michael Joyce, described as one of the first major authors of hypertext fiction: “In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes”. 

Joyce describes how hypertext challenges the idea of a linear narrative, one where the author predetermines where the story will go, and how the audience will read this narrative. Hypertext allows readers to navigate their own way through a certain narrative, through links or searches, and this renders the idea of a linear story as troublesome.

The reading claims that hypertext narratives should be measured in terms of a number of axes, formed by degrees or ratios of:

1. Reader choice, intervention, and empowerment
2. Inclusion of extralinguistic texts
3. Complexity of network structure
4. Degrees of multiplicity and variation in literary elements, such as plot, characterisation, setting etc

A hypertext narrative that takes full advantage of the potentials of this technology would measure on the high end of most of these aspects, it would allow a high level of reader choice, would include extralinguistic texts and the plot elements would have a high degree of multiplicity.

The reading describes hypertext as challenging aspects of narrative and the literary form that have been current and relevant since the days of Aristotle.

Hypertext allows a story to become “multidimensional and theoretically infinite, with an equally infinite set of possible network linkages, either programmed, fixed, or variable”. The reader can actively contribute to the narrative in these stories, and subsequently become much more than a ‘reader’.

I found it a little strange that we were assigned this reading as it is entirely focused on fictional writing, and we aren’t really emphasising this in our blogs. But I can see how it relates to the course, with these ideas of interactivity and the absence of linearity in writing directly applicable to our blogs.

We can use the spectrum mentioned in the reading to measure our own blogs, in terms of  how much choice the reader has in what to look at (range of post etc), whether they are open to comments, how long the posts are and so on.

The idea linearity is also very important for our blogs, as we have no real idea how readers will find our work, or where they will begin. A reader may reach our blog through a google search, or through a link, or any other possibility, and this may not be to the latest post. We have to ensure that our blogs are coherent and readable from any point, and we also can’t control which post the reader will go to next, if any.

As the reading identifies, with hypertext media, the reader decides when the narrative finishes, merely in not being interested enough to continue, or thinking they have found a certain closure, and it is our aim as bloggers to hold the reader’s interest for as long as possible, to engage them with what we are writing, and encourage them to interact with this.

In this week’s extra reading, Paul Graham’s launches all out war on the educational essay.

And he makes a number of fine points.

Essays are a constant presence through all of our education after primary school, and Graham argues that this form of the essay has made writing “boring and pointless”, and result in a “miserable high school experience”.

He quite accurately claims that writing an essay is, most of the time, writing an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. An essay will hardly ever tell a tutor or a lecturer anything that they don’t already know or believe, and this is exactly what they want to read.

Graham states that a ‘real’ essay should convince the reader due to it having the right answers, not because the rhetoric and argument is strong. In your typical high school or university essy, we are given are set topic, a set argument, that we have to base the whole essay on, and we obviously don’t have the chance to alter the question.

Graham says that instead of opening with an argumentative assertion, as we have been taught for countless years in education, an essay should begin with a question, and uses the metaphor of noticing an ajar door, and opening it to see inside. An essay should start with an interesting question that we don’t actually know the answer to, and the actually writing should involve us trying to find this answer, or something close to it.

I found this quote most applicable to our Networked Media course:

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud.

Graham also acknowledges that we write differently when we know there will be someone reading it, this forces us to write better.

We should, then, be writing essays not because we have to to pass a subject, but to form our ideas and thoughts into a cohesive whole, and allow us to expand on this ideas.

I think this serves to justify the heavy emphasis of blogging in the course, and it could be argued that we’re constantly writing this ‘true’ essays of sorts in our blog posts. We aren’t told exactly what to write about, and the blogs give us a chance to express ourselves and our thoughts on the subject as a whole. Having it as the primary assessment also forces us to actively engage with the content: in other subjects I may do all the reading, but not actually take much in or interpret it for myself, but in this course, I have to do the readings properly and actually somehow make an interesting blog post out of them.

I also found the second-to-final sentence interesting and thought provoking:

The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.

I found this week’s reading, ‘From Text To Hypertext’ by George Landow, very interesting for the most part, especially when it related directly to our blogs and the different styles of blogging.

The most relevant parts that I found in the reading was when Landow describes how hypertext, and specifically blogging, has completely transformed the ideas of a ‘reader’ an ‘author’, and a ‘text’, and these are ideas that we have to understand in order to actually participate in this blogging process.

Landow states that a blog is a “new kind of discursive prose in digital form that makes us rethink a genre”, and identifies the fact that this style isn’t a new one, it’s existed ever since there’s been diaries and journals. It’s the online, interactive format of blogs that make them so intriguing and important, they directly allow for an active and participatory relationship between the author and the reader, and encourage hypertextuality.

The author sees there being two different forms of this hypertextuality in blogs: linking chronologically distant individual entries to each other, which allows stories and articles to be put into historical and social context without the author repeating themselves, and through the comments on posts, which provides a space for people to respond and offer their own opinions.

We’ve already discussed the dangers of allowing comments on blog posts, and the issues of liability that Adrian has raised in the lectures, but I think if the comment’s are moderated for dangerous content, rather than differing opinion, they can be a useful and engaging aspect of any blog.

These blogs serve to blur the line between our online and offline lives due to its immediacy and accessibility: nowadays, we are going around a device in our pockets that can post to a blog, read a blog, and comment on a blog in seconds, it is now a constant part of our lives.

I found the statement that “we must write with an awareness that we are writing in the presence of other texts” particularly insightful – we can either choose to embrace this and provide links and references to supporting or contradictory texts, or we can ignore it and waste this opportunity.

These ideas are especially relevant to journalism and the reporting of news online. We can link directly to past stories, profiles on individuals and anything else, meaning that not so much backstory is necessary in a story, and we can get straight to the point. This is something that some, but certainly not all, news websites are embracing, and it creates a more engaging dissemination of news for the ‘reader’.

In the blog world (I refuse to call it the ‘blogosphere’), there is no longer such thing as a ‘reader’. Anyone that actively makes the choice to read, post, or comment on a blog post is an active participant in this world. They now have the choice of when to start reading a post, when to stop reading, whether to leave a comment or a useful link, and whether to share this blog with their own followers. They are now just as an important figure in blogging as the original author.

I loved the way Landow described the reader’s presence as being represented by the mouse cursor or that blinking line – it is a constantly intrusive presence in any hypertext, but this can be a positive thing.

I found this reading to be quite interesting, and definitely applicable to our own blogs, especially the ideas of including our readers in the blogging process, and creating a network through various links and references in our own blogs.

I found this week’s reading by Jay David Bolter very interesting and easy to read. Entitled ‘The Computer, Hypertext, And The History Of Writing’, it details how writing is a technology in itself, the development of writing and writing mechanisms across history, and the revolutionary nature of the computer in terms of writing.

Writing is not something that is typically thought as a ‘technology’. Instead, the things that display and facilitate writing, such as computers, laptops, and phones, are widely seen as technologies, and writing as more of an innate, regular thing.

The reading opens by contradicting this beliefs, with Bolter stating that “writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience…[it is a] sophisticated technology” that requires skill. Writing is a technology through its very etymological basis: the Greek root is ‘techne’, a “set of rules, system or method of making or doing, whether of the useful arts, or of the fine arts”. Therefore, writing itself is a technology, and writing in different forms requires different skills, and as Bolter says, “all writing demands method, the intention of the writer to arrange ideas systematically in a space for later examination by a reader”.

The reading details how these brand of technologies gradually become internalized by its user and are eventually ‘second-nature’, and in terms of writing, it is often hard to detach from the skill. Although we aren’t writing 24/7, our “technical relationship to the writing space is always with us”. Through avenues such as speech and reading, we are still practicing and utilising our writing skills.

Bolter states that “writing is certainly not innate”, and this is obvious by the fact that we must be actively taught how to write, and the specific and strict guidelines to do so.

Bolter identifies ‘economies of writing’, the materials, techniques, and uses involved, and how they have developed and adapted across time. Beginning historically with stone and papyrus, humans have developed the likes of the printing press and the type writing.

Word processing has revolutionised the technology of writing, and the ole pen and paper is slowly and gradually becoming obsolete, but this will be a very long process.

Bolter identifies hypertextual electronic writing as a “thorough rewriting of the writing space”, and a technology that includes the best components of previous techniques, including the idea of rapid change from the wax tablet, and  the typewriter’s keyboard, discrete selection of alphabetic elements, and a machine-like uniformity.

In great contrast to previous technologies, computing does not allow a direct connection between the reader and the words, with these words being stored as electronic thingos that must be translated by a machine. I think this is one of the reasons why so many people are averse to the idea of e-readers, as it no longer feels like you’re actually holding a book in your hands. There is now a middleman of sorts between the reader and the words.

If writing itself is a technology, then it is a skill that needs to be honed and constantly practiced. Writing for our blogs is an entirely different skill than writing an essay, and we have to be able to adapt these skills to fit this new means for publishing our work.

Our blogs in themselves are networks, we can create links to other blogs or to anywhere else on the internet, and it takes skillful writing to effectively and fully utilise these newfound abilities regarding hypertext.

When it starts with the claim that “there is a Chapter Zero, several Chapters One, one Chapter Two, and several Chapters Three” you know it’s not going to be your average uni reading.

I definitely didn’t understand close to everything in Theodor Holm Nelson’s ‘Literary Machines’, but what I did get was just how revolutionary and forward-thinking this article was, originally published in the 1960s.

The first thing that resonated with me was the acknowledgement that the reader “may or may not feel that you understand it fully”, and this proved to be true for me.

The most important aspect that I took out of this reading, and why I believe it to be relevant to our course, is just how revolutionary Nelson’s idea of ‘hypertext’ was back when he coined it in 1960, something that we now have complete access to, and is fully utilized in Networked Media. Through our blogs, we can link to other information, either more of our own writing or someone else’s, and this can lead the reader on a voyage across the internet if they wish.

The author, who himself coined the term, defines ‘hypertext’ as “non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choice to the reader – best read at an interactive screen”, this is the World Wide Web that I am currently using, and our blogs typify this newfound freedom and abundance of opportunities.

Nelson goes on to state that “there is at present no way to gather, and save, and publish, the many documents and scraps that people are writing on screens and sharing through an immense variety of incompatible systems”, but now, in 2013, there definitely is.

Nelson envisaged the Project Xanadu, a hypertext system designed to support all the features of these other systems, and many more, but this still hasn’t eventuated. Nelson’s future has, however, been somewhat achieved through Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, based around Hypertext Markup Language and the sharing of information across the world.

Many of the statements regarding the affect that this hypertext would have on society are clearly applicable to our course, and how we have to adapt to its new teaching style. Nelson says that “if you don’t get it there is no persuading you; if you get it you don’t need to be persuaded”, something that Adrian said in as many words in the third ‘unlecture’. Similarly to Adrian’s points, Nelson also states (correctly) that hypertext and its effect was a “manifest destiny” where there was “no point arguing it”, just as this new way of teaching may well become the norm in the near future.

The standout quote for me was far and away:

Education can leap forward into new curricular structures that eliminate sequence and promote initiative and understanding

In my view, this is exactly what Networked Media is aiming to achieve, with it utilizing this hypertext and the boundless opportunities that accompany it.

The second of this weeks readings on ‘design fiction’ is the intimidatingly titled Design Fiction As Pedagogic Practice by Matthew Ward.

Despite its title, I found this article reasonably easy to understand, with it detailing how the concept of design fiction can be utilised in education.

I found the opening line of the featured Fictional Futures to be especially noteworthy:

The transformative potential of Utopia depends on locating it in the future, on thinking through the process of transformation from the present, and identifying the potential agents of transformation. (Dark Horizons)

We’re not looking at things like Star Wars, but rather speculative, possible things that education can be. The Networked Media course is based around a ‘speculative design’; it evolves and adapts in a way that we as students can influence.

Design, by its very definition, deals with the possible future, it involves designers and innovators sharing what they think the future could hold.

Because of this, fiction is so much more than just meaningless fairytales. In many ways, works of fiction can be a more relevant and effective means to convey new ideas and social transformations, just look at something like 1984.

In the world of this course, our blogs are our opportunities to practice this design fiction. Through this avenue, we have the opportunity to openly criticise and offer constructive advice for the course as a whole, and this is something we definitely don’t have in any other subject.

These blogs are also areas for us to experiment with different designs, through posting in different ways and focusing on different ideas.

Ward goes on to list many ways in which education can utilise design fiction, many of which are in practice in NetMed.

The first one that stood out to me was “Normalise to persuade…new ideas, objects, and behaviours are difficult to imagine and assimilate into our view of our everyday lives”. This subject is undoubtedly different to any other that I’ve undertaken, and for many, including myself, this has been slightly difficult to adapt to. Through blogging and explains these ideas, they can slowly become more ‘normal’ for us.

Number 6, “Make space for experimentation” obviously calls on our blogs as areas for this experimentation, for us to speculate on how we want the course to go, and what we would like to achieve.

The writer also identifies that “Things that work don’t create interesting stories”, as evidenced by the popularity of dystopian films and books. The NetMed blogs actively encourage criticism and advice, and this has ensured an interesting and productive discussion across them.

He says that design fiction creates a “sandpit for reality…a safe ground of play and opportunity”, and this is the exactly what I believe our blogs are for.

Finally, the article states that “people are the protagonists in the production of reality”, and in this course, we have been put in control of its direction, with our blogs providing the area for experimentation with design and speculation on what the subject should entail.

This week’s readings revolved around the concept of ‘design fiction’, which, as sci-fi author Bruce Sterling defines it, is the “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change”.

It took me quite a while to get my head around this concept, but I think I’ve worked out that it involves using fiction to speculate on how the future will be, or to experiment with new ideas.

The first reading is a simple, and mercifully short, interview with Sterling, where he details this intriguing concept. He identifies the fact that for something to qualify as ‘design fiction’ there must be “serious design thinking behind them”, rather than just showy drama, such as zombie movies.

Design fiction can often be seen in the smaller, background pieces of information in fiction, and as Sterling states, a relevant example is that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where characters are shown to be using what resembles an iPad.

The film was released in 1968. The first iPad was released in 2010. Director Stanley Kubrick was speculating on what direction technology could practically go, and he got it exactly right. He got it so right that Samsung attempted to use its appearance in the film as evidence as prior art before Apple’s patent.

I can’t count how many times I’ve watched/read science-fiction and thought “that would be cool if it existed”, and this is an example of the effectiveness of design fiction. Sterling labels it a “new set of tools that…[are] giving futurism a second wind”.

There are numerous examples of design fiction featuring in movies and short films, such as this one, Fly Me To The Moon.

This short details possible developments in electronic payment; it has obvious, and very real potential to be exactly what happens in the very near future, but it is still viewed as ‘sci-fi’.

The thing that first jumped to my mind while going through the reading was 1984. The iconic novel is the most obvious example of design fiction, showcasing a dystopian future of constant government surveillance. Now, unfortunately, it seems as possible as ever, with recent NSA developments and the like.

Unfortunately, one of the most promising and exciting pieces of design fiction, the hoverboard in Back To The Future, has still not come to fruition.

I think this the idea of ‘design fiction’ is crucially relevant to the course of Networked Media, as this is the way that it will be taught. It is run on a ‘speculative design’, one that will adapt and alter itself with how we interact with it. In many ways, it is a practical, and grounded-in-evidence, vision of how media course will be run in the near future.

Who knows, one day, maybe our blogs will be looked back on in the same vein as that iPad in 2001, as a precursor to the norm?

This reading, ‘Theories Of Action, Double-Loop Learning, And Organizational Learning’ by Chris Argyris, was very broad, and was a bit of a struggle to get through, perhaps in part due to constantly being reminded of the movie ‘Looper’.

I think the main message that I found in the reading was that of the distinction between the so called ‘single-loop’ and ‘double-loop’ learning, with the former described by Argyris as “like a thermostat that learns when it is too hot or too cold and turns the heat on or off”. Single-looping is when the given plans or rules are adapted to the situation, rather than being question.

In contrast to this, ‘double-looping’ involves questioning these variables specifically, and subsequently leading to improvements or alterations.

I think it is obvious that the intention of Networked Media is to encourage us to utilise this ‘double-loop’ learning rather than ‘single-loop’, through creating our blogs, actively questioning the content, unlectures and readings, and changing and adapting these things to suit what we want to get out of the subject. As Adrian stating in the first unlecture, much of the content for this forum is as-yet undecided, and based around our own questions and issues.

A robot or machine can easily and simply be programmed to perform single-looping learning, as emphasised by the thermostat metaphor, but we us humans can fully utilize double-looping when we think for ourselves and actively scrutinize things, even the course itself.

This reading uses abstract metaphors to detail the intention of the course, and the means by which to get the most out of it.

The course of Networked Media is described as a “certainly not a big” boat, one that is sailing in an “ocean of ideas”. This “boat” “seeks and follows eddies of the breeze”, and “bobs, floats, and weaves”.

The main thing that I took away from this reading is the idea that while we still have some control over where we go in the course and what we discover, (after all, there is still a mast on our boat) we also have to ‘go with the flow’ as it were, and let the course, our lecturer, tutor, or peers guide us in the right direction.

It definitely seems like a course that is meant to be more about the journey to find knowledge rather than the end results, as there “is no shore” in sight.

This is certainly a different way to describe and introduce a subject, and contrasts greatly with the usual stock-standard and formatted course guide that every other class has.

I suppose the typical university course could be described using the allegory of a speedboat, racing from one shore to the other, going so fast that it hardly touches down on the sea of ideas, while Networked Media is intended to be a slow, calm journey through this “ocean of ideas”.