Week 1 Sketch 4/6: Circles
https://vimeo.com/88645687
I noticed that the writing/editing tools for the site have a new look.
Good on you, guys. See? I know when you make the effort to try something new.
Feel appreciated.
Because I don’t.
Man that got really depressingly emo all of a sudden.
On to the next one!
Week 1 Sketch 3/6: Squares
https://vimeo.com/88645692
Fun fact: A square has four sides.
Incidentally, you should only have chips for sides in a meal if you intend to eat healthily.
Chips should never constitute a whole meal.
The more you know.
Then again, if you intend to eat healthily, you shouldn’t be eating chips in the first place.
Week 1 Sketch 2/6: Squares
https://vimeo.com/88645686
Did you know that for the whole summer, Mr. Blog, I did not go to the beach ONCE?
Appalling, I know.
But life goes on.
So here we are again Mr. Blog.
Sketch 1/ 6: Squares
https://vimeo.com/88645684
How was your summer? Mine was very nice, thank you very much.
Actually, it wasn’t very nice.
I mean, it wasn’t bad.
It was nice, but not, like, you know, VERY nice.
Glad we clarified that.
Disclaimer: I’ve been over 18 for only 10 months, which might explain why I find some of this stuff so mind blowing and amazing. Bear with me. I’m new here.
I just got home from a party where I had a tiny bit more to drink than I usually do. Naturally, when I get home an idea I get is to blog about it. May iPhone’s autocorrect guide me well tonight.
It’s no secret that when you get intoxicated, you do crap you usually wouldn’t do. Dancing, screaming, shouting at people that irritate you and threatening to burn down their homes. You know, the usual.
Some people are interested in getting acquaintances drunk because they believe it reveals the “true self” of a person, without inhibitions and reservations. This is bullcrap. The thing is, the removal of inhibitions does not constitute the revealing of a person’s 100% ‘true’ character. No. Those reservations (ha! Autocorrect wanted to change that to ‘desecrations’. Amusing) are actually part of a person’s identity. If not, you could basically say that every person’s true self was made of their primal desires and actions when not confronted with social norms or etiquette.
Instead of thinking of alcohol as a removing factor, that is, an element that TAKES AWAY things like fear or embarrassment, it’s actually an adding factor. Due to our society and generation’s perception of alcohol, drinking GIVES you permission to be a loud and obnoxious wanker on top of all the fear and reservation, which will return the following morning.
What’s the point of this post? Is it because I want to point out that the rise
of certain technologies and attitudes do not naturally reveal essences of human nature (technological/symptomatic determinism. I forget which one. My Networked tute finished 11 hours ago)?
Or is it because I’m trying to justify yelling at all of the birthday girl’s friends tonight for not dancing to the filthy bangers I was playing when I was DJing?
You decide.
Or not, you have some agency, after all.
Anna Akana, another YouTuber that I started following a couple of months ago, posted this video on Tuesday, and I felt it tied in nicely with the discussion about how technology has become so bound up with our everyday life. Detoxing from technology or social media completely for a period sounds cool, but something much more daunting is the challenge of leaving the house and going about everyday life (school, uni, work) without a phone.
This week’s reading explores the rise of the database as a challenger to the narrative. In the text’s opening lines it’s stated that narrative is the ‘key form’ of cultural expression, and this recalled something I heard in a Cinema class last semester: “narrative is the way humans make sense of the world”. In many ways this made sense. Whenever we think of a memory of the past, we think of that memory as a story, or an element with in a larger story. We recall things happening in a chronological order, motivating changes and leading to another set of things happening. It’s why, when discussing history, we often fall into the trap of explaining it as a linear progression of events that flowed from one to another in the way a story plays out. Germany-got-punished-for-WW1-and-that-made-them-really-mad-so-when-Hitler-came-along-they-were-down-to-start-WW2. That’s the kind of narrative logic that we impose on the world.
But Manovich points out that, as pervasive as this way of thinking is, it isn’t necessarily the only way of thinking. Rather, we can look at the world not as narratives made of things leading from one to the other, but as databases that hold everything as objects that are modular and can be completely independent of one another. Of course, there is still organization within the database, but the objects do not rely solely on linking to or being linked from other material. Even if no one lays eyes on an object, it is still there in the database, serving its purpose.
This kind of thing relates to stuff about the Long Tail that we learned about before. Take YouTube, which apparently gets 60 hours worth of content uploaded every minute. If we viewed these videos as forming a narrative, then that would imply that there was a start and an end, and we would have to experience everything in order in between for it to make sense. But really, if the videos on YouTube did make up a story, how would you watch 60 hours of material for every minute of the website’s existence?
Ain’t nobody got time fo dat.
Literally.
As stated in the theory of the Long Tail, what matters is that the content is just there, in the database. If someone wants to find and access that content then, by all means, go for it. A linear structure is not imposed on the consumer. The material is there for them to sift through and find what they want.
What to gather from this image: 80% of my subscriptions are dancers and in today’s society it’s okay to write “#Hashtag”
Still, there are guiding structures in place (related videos, subscriptions, likes, comments) that work outside of the search engine to influence what people will watch. Seriously, how many people would actually go to YouTube and click on ‘Browse’ and just look through every single video as a list of objects? YouTube doesn’t even have that option anymore, really. When you go to browse, it’ll show you which videos are ‘popular’. So, the most basic way of looking through a database isn’t really available anymore. Does this make YouTube something that is not a database? According to the reading, no. It is still a place that collects data and stores it to be perused at the discretion of the user, and that’s what matters.
More goodness from Cyanide and Happiness. This is one I wanted to post up a while ago. I may expand on some ideas I got from this a bit more later.
Something I’ve been intending to do since Week 2 or 3 and also discussed in my blog assessment essay was to write some posts about a very important part of my life: dance. As I kind of tried to justify in my essay, I always put off doing these posts not because they were hard to write – far from it – , but because they always seemed like the easiest and least important task set for the week, and I would push it to the bottom of the list every time.
But now, after missing my train by two seconds, I decided I might as well do something somewhat useful. My brain’s still not in top gear yet so I’m not really interested in talking about networks and hypertext at this very moment, but dance comes easier, so I’ll go with that.
Why do I dance?
I first danced because it made my friends look cool, and I wanted to look cool like them. I danced because I didn’t want to become a stereotypical geek. I wanted to have something the school kids would remember me for.
I also wanted to get girls.
Well, I dance for different reasons now, but I’ll talk about them in later entries. Right now I’d rather talk about my experiences with dancing from when I first started. I’m not really doing this because I think anyone will be interested to read it, as I know my blog has a readership of about, like, one, but it is interesting to look back over the past through writing about it. You immediately put memories into a sort of story, which is kind of cool.
I first tried out dancing in Year 6. My friends had just performed a breakdancing/hip hop set at the talent show at school camp and, although they were really quiet guys back then, everyone all of a sudden had this newfound interest in them. I wanted that. So, later in the year my friends got invited to perform at our primary school graduation dinner and I joined up with them. They taught me some breakdancing basics and we learned some choreography off the special features from the You Got Served DVD. We performed and, although I’d cringe so much if I watched that performance again, everyone absolutely loved it. For those last few days at primary school everyone knew us as the breakdancers.
It was a great feeling, and since we were gonna go to the same high school, I expected we’d come in and instantly become awesome badasses that everyone would look at in awe. Of course, I had forgotten that the transition from Year 6 to Year 7 brings you back down to the bottom of the food chain. I remember saying on my first day to the rest of the class – quietly but confidently – that my favorite hobby was breakdancing. While I did get the “oh wow, he dances” kind of interest from my peers that I initially wanted, there was now a label on my head. I had set an expectation for myself that, when asked to show some moves at orientation camp, I got stage fright and ran away after doing like three seconds of dancing (literally).
So that label quickly washed away as people realized I actually wasn’t that good. To add to things, my friends’ breakdancing teacher actually attended the same school, and he and his group of mates always performed at school events to raucous cheers. We didn’t perform that year. It was too intimidating
The next year my friends and I decided to have a go at performing at the school’s annual charity concert, which is a relatively small event. Another friend had joined up with us and I guess he was more confident, which caused us to try dancing again. We practised for ages in my friends’ living room, making up choreography and learning some more bboy (breakdancing) moves and stunts.
On the day, we got seriously pretty damn nervous. The breakdancing teacher was performing at the concert too, and, as supportive as he was of us, we were afraid he’d upstage us and we would look like fools. Nevertheless, we had spent a lot of time and effort on this set, and we persevered.
Somehow, our performance got an amazing response from the crowd, perhaps an even better one than the teacher’s. I think there were a lot of reasons. We were still really young, and therefore small and cute. Our song choice was a bit more mainstream (“Low” by FloRida. It’s only been six years and I’m already looking on it like its some retro classic). Maybe it was because we combined breakdancing with hip hop choreography, something that the other performance did not.
Whatever it was, our confidence was back. Well, it was back for most of us. I had still felt somewhat insecure about my dancing, especially as a couple of people had straight up said that I was the weakest one of the group. I decided that I didn’t want to weigh down my more talented friends, and quit dancing forever…
…or so I thought.
P.S. Shut up, that was not a corny ending/cliffhanger at all. It’s my blog, I do what I want.
Though this week’s reading did give me some unwelcome memories of Year 12 Math Methods last year with its talk of normal distribution curves and exponential functions, I did feel that it illustrated quite well the nature of online networks, so that was nice.
These ‘hubs’ that the reading describes – nodes (or sites) with an anomalously large amount of links to and from themselves – do dominate spaces such as the Internet. Looking at the tabs I have open on Firefox now demonstrates this. Facebook is always at the far left, then YouTube, then Gmail, then a bunch of tabs for random sites that I’ll open and close intermittently. The way I navigate the Web is basically dictated by the hubs that I choose to hang around. Facebook, Youtube or Google will be my home bases, where I will spend 80% of my time, and every now and then I’ll encounter a link that will take me out into that seedy, unknown world that is, you know, the rest of the internet. I’ll spend a bit of time out there, exploring, but I’ll always end up closing that link and returning ‘home’, to my hub. Of course, for other people their hubs may be slightly different: Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, whatever, but I feel the experience is the same. Stay at the hub, go for a walk, come back soon.
The fact that these hubs have so many connections to and from themselves means that it gets pretty hard to not become anchored to them, which does restrictively shape the way we explore the internet. It might be a bit cynical to describe us as dogs on a leash or children under strict supervision, only being allowed to go and find the places or people (those ‘many’ sites with few links) as long as our owners/parents (the giant hubs/nodes), but I guess that’s the nature of navigating the network (dat alliteration doe) via links. It could possibly make for a lot more lost wandering through the wilderness if every page had the same amount of links (following a bell curve or normal distribution), and there weren’t home bases which we could consistently return to and expect to find some sort of direction (even if that direction is towards the realm of procrastination and random seven second videos). What other choices do we have anyway? Should we be just sitting and typing random addresses into the URL bar, in the hope that we’ll eventually happen on something interesting or useful?
I seem to be lacking in the poignant closing sentences department, so I’m just gonna grab the last picture I looked at before typing this post and put it up. What is relevance?
It’s a picture of a tank top I was considering getting for the gym on Etsy.
