Don’t mind me, just expanding on some notes I wrote down during the unlecture.
I liked how we got called out for likening hypertext to Choose Your Own Adventures. CYOAs aren’t exactly taking hypertext to the extreme.
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-We don’t have to read all hundred thousand billion poems.
-Quantity is not what’s interesting. It’s the capacity for the literal what-is-read experience to change qualitatively.
-Brian’s an OG. > link to urban dictionary
-Rhyme over reason
I’m a big fan of Cyanide and Happiness, and this comic seemed to have some relevance to the course, so I’m just gonna leave this here.
Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos from JustKiddingFilms’ side channel, JustKiddingNews, which consists of the JK crew of comedians and filmmakers talking about a bunch of random news stories that they find on the internet. When I watch them I’m not looking for well researched and thought out opinions, because these videos are basically there for their humour as well as ‘average’ people talking about the topic. Occasionally the group do discuss some thought provoking points in a way that seems genuine and relatable.
Anyway, in one of this week’s stories, JKN talk about a man inventing some sort of formula that can act as a food replacement. Apparently it’s nutritious enough that, if you’re not into the whole ‘food’ thing, you can just take this stuff instead and you’ll stay perfectly healthy.
(The specific story starts at 5:25. Or, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, skip to around the 8 or 9 minute mark)
Some interesting things were said by the guys on the topic of family meals, and in a lot of ways it can also be related to other aspects of life.
The first thing I want to talk about is the point that eating has, evolution-wise, always been a communal thing. Hunter-gatherers shared the workload in procuring food, and have therefore shared the spoils. Again, I don’t know if this was proven to actually be true, but if it is, it says a lot about who we are as a species. Collaboration and community had a massive part to play in getting us to where we are today (opposable thumbs as well), and it still does.
As covered in a Vsauce video discussing why animals don’t have wheels, humans were able to outstrip their competitors in the animalia kingdom through their capacity to build roads. Whilst other animals do congregate and collaborate, the things that they make are still in a sense made with ‘selfish’ intentions. From an evolutionary standpoint, roads don’t really make sense. ‘Why should I put all my time and effort into building a road, when some other organism or species can come along and use it without any cost whatsoever? If I did that, I’d just be putting myself at a disadvantage in the grand scheme of things.’
It is this kind of thinking that humans were able to overcome. People made roads and, well, infrastructure in general, not because it benefited themselves directly, but because it helped the community, and that would in turn pay dividends for them down the…road. It’s the same with taxes. ‘I’m going to give my hard earned money to the government with the understanding that they will invest it in something that will help me.’
Midway through this I just realised ants are kind of capable of this as well.
And termites.
Completely destroyed what I was trying to say.
Shut up, my other point, that community and collaboration is naturally healthy, still stands. I just haven’t really explained it properly. Sue me.
Or don’t, that’d probably be more preferable.
MOVING ON.
(They also completely missed the whole significance of calling the product ‘Soylent’.)
The other moment I liked from the JKN video was the discussion of those all-too-often ‘too busy to have a meal together’ situations. David (the big swearing guy with the cap) promptly calls out people who use this excuse, saying that you can never not have enough time to sit down for thirty minutes with a loved one and eat. I found this interesting, as often in this subject we discuss how technology is rapidly advancing and we are struggling to keep up with it. It’s often said that, with all this media and gadgetry around us, we’re living busier lives (in Western society) than people who came before us.
For a long time I thought this made sense, but all this talk about food (and the point I discussed earlier) has made me realise: for a lot of us, being ‘busy’ is bullshit. Does being engrossed with your smartphone and taking in information from everywhere necessarily count as making you busier than someone who’s spending their whole day hunting for food just to ensure their survival? Is taking photos of your food or watching random clips on Facebook at the same levels of importance as tending your land and livestock just so you can survive the winter?
Surprisingly, our world doesn’t exactly look like this just yet, so don’t act like it does. (Source: mikeduran.com)
This post isn’t about being negative or calling us spoilt or ungrateful (that’s a whole other discussion), but when you say you’re too busy to do something like have dinner, you’re not really. Maybe you work long hours or you’re far away from your family, and maybe that’s fair enough, but nothing in this life is so permanently fixed that you can’t shift it do something else. Shift dinner, shift work, shift the time you’re playing Candy Crush, whatever. Just remember that, in this culture at least, our lives aren’t rigid schedules in which we’re trapped. Call me naive and idealistic, but the ‘rat race’ doesn’t have to be one. Technology and progress shouldn’t dictate you, no matter how much it appears to be able to do so.
This be my 1:30 tute crew. They’re a bit special.
Anyway, here are our takeaway ideas from the reading.
Kevin saw blogs as a sort of time capsule, documenting our thoughts and lives as they go.
Gina felt that hypertext made for less subjective reading, comparing it to reading books. When you read a novel, your mind is allowed to stray imaginatively, whereas hypertext can lead to the author dictating what the reader is thinking, even if there are multiple paths.
Kylie recognised that since hypertext appeared, writers have to be more aware that they are writing in the presence of other texts.
All of the talk in this and last weeks’ readings about hypertext had got me to realize how much I underestimated its power and significance. Yes, I’m slow, shut up. I don’t mean that I thought hyperlinks and forking paths were useless and I never needed them, but at the same time it had become so ingrained and ‘natural’ in my activities that I didn’t notice how big of a change it was to the playing field.
Adrian likes to mention hypertext a lot and how he was one of the people to be working on it early on. For a long time I just thought, “cool story”. I actually wondered what was so amazing about it. Links and choose your own adventures? Meh.
After the readings though, starting with Nelson’s last week and then Landow’s this, there’s a bit more of an understanding.
Hypertext presented the possibilities of a fundamentally different way of reading, and in turn a different way of writing. While I still find actual Choose Your Own Adventure books kind of tacky, the ability to leave whatever text you were reading and navigate to something else to continue your line of thought is invaluable. A common and somewhat mundane analogue counterpart would be looking at an encyclopedia or dictionary entry and being told to SEE [DIFFERENT ENTRY]. If you were interested, you’d flick to that entry and keep on reading.
Now, the problem with that example is that it requires tremendous and time-consuming amounts of physical exertion to turn the page (looking back on this blog post I realise that the sarcasm didn’t translate to the page all that well), which is something that hypertext in its digital form skirts around. Also, hypertext connection isn’t limited to within the text itself, and can possibly link to an infinite set of other texts. This would be the same as reading an encyclopedia whilst having a possibly infinite library of other texts to look at if you wish.
In analogue form, this can prove a bit difficult, but with digitalization the possibilities are endless. A reader isn’t tasked with reading the text from start to finish. They are able to have a degree of agency and decide where their interest takes them, depending on what the author permits.
Sometimes I think it’d be good if this was how our readings were presented. Instead of giving students a wall of text to just chew through, maybe give them a starting point that tackles the main point or kernel of the topic, and then link out to other material so that students can gather and build information in a way that feels more intuitive and engaging.
Wikipedia (and other encyclopedia sites too, I guess?) does this extremely well. For example, if two users went to the hypertext entry on there (the one I linked to at the start of this post), they could peruse the text in different ways. Say one person comes across the term ‘HTML’ and wants to find out what the hell that actually means. They click it and the site starts them on their own separate journey to the second user, who already knows what HTML is, but is wondering what the hell some guy in 1945 is doing speculating about hypertext. Already, their paths have forked, their search for information has taken them in directions that they have chosen, not the author.
I was going to talk about another example, the evil black hole of procrastination that is TV Tropes, but I’m about to get off the train and I can’t figure out how to save drafts on my phone. Hopefully anyone reading this can see the power that links have with SUCKING THE LIFE OUT OF FOOLS LIKE ME WHO ARE CURIOUS ABOUT UNIMPORTANT CRAP. All the entries their are sinisterly constructed, bombarding you with links to keep you reading their site. It’s Landow’s network in its most insidious form.
Here’s a beautiful and romantic picture of Donald Glover/Childish Gambino/Troy Barnes because I need an image for this entry and I love using this photo everywhere I can. You can’t tame me, world.
First off, I got a lot out of the unlecture this week. Thumbs up. Maybe it’s because the first two questions were actually from me (Sorry, just had to get it out there. Call me vain.), and it felt like I was getting detailed and complex answers that directly addressed my thoughts about the course so far.
The most interesting part of the session though was when someone (I don’t know your name so I can’t link to your blog or anything, sorry!) brought up the fact that there will be plenty of kids who are capable of creating content that is potentially industry-level, yet they’re doing it without a university degree and are willing to do it for free, because it’s something that they love doing. If there are innumerable people like this in the world already, what is the point of us spending three years in a program learning how to make stuff when we’ve already been surpassed by someone who didn’t even need to do the damn degree?
I’ll admit, it’s something that’s been keeping me uncomfortable ever since I decided to pursue a career in media back at the end of Year 11. There are people out there making way better stuff than I can, and they didn’t graduate. Would I be wasting my time and money by doing this program at RMIT? Would I fail completely at finding work once I graduated?
The way that these questions were addressed by Adrian & Co. helped calm those fears a little. It’s not about ‘know-what’, it’s about ‘know-how’.
Still, I’d be lying if I said I was still hesitant about the future.
It’s being made increasingly clear as the weeks of this course pass by. The network is growing. Other forms of media are stagnating or receding (though my Broadcast Media teachers would say otherwise). I’m guessing that in the not so distant future we’ll be working to make material primarily for the internet. As exciting as this is for many, this worries me. I know how hard it is to be heard online. Sure, it’s great that it’s incredibly easy to put your voice on the web for everyone to hear. It’s incredibly easier for your voice to get drowned out by all the others.
Socially and morally I prefer this as being somewhat more democratic than a centralised media system like broadcasting, but at the same time, if I were to look at things solely in regards to my future career, it’s actually really daunting. Previously, if I managed to land a job at a TV production company or station, I’d be pretty satisfied. My foot would be in the door and I could work my way up in the industry. But with the rapidly shifting media landscape, that might not be the case soon.
This is the way I see it: If a person with twenty years of experience in film making tried to make a 7 second film, the odds are that his product would get less exposure than that of someone who haphazardly put together an amateur Vine clip. For all the creativity and experience that the professional brings to the table, if their work doesn’t hit the ‘sweet spot’ in social media, it is very possible that it will get lost in the abyss of ignored material on the internet. Sure, they might still get way more exposure than if they only tried to show the film at festivals or on TV, but relatively speaking, they might as well have just recorded their cat screaming and they might have gotten an even greater crowd.
That is a future that we could be stepping into right now. I hope I’m ready.
If not, I could always double back and just film enough random clips that one of them eventually becomes viral and I become an internet sensation. That could work.
Deal with it.
(Source: argorine.deviantart.com)
This is the reading I read today. In it, Dr. Vannevar Bush of 1945 speculates about the future of scientific in a post-World War II setting. What could scientists set their sights on in peacetime, since they wouldn’t be pushed to design weaponry and other technologies to help in wartime?
Before continuing, I think it’d be best to acknowledge this person’s name again.
Vannevar.
Bush.
Vannevar.
Hey Doc, what vehicles do you drive to the lab?
A truck most times, but a Vannevar.
I like how the readings Bush students to speculate.
Okay, moving on.
My ‘take away idea’ from this reading, or what stood out to me most, was Dr. Bush’s extended speculation into the future of photography and camera technology. His ideas were centered around the notion that cameras could be as small as walnuts, and could be stuck to the forehead of a photographer and would be able to focus at nearly any distance, auto-adjust exposure, and produce images in full colour.
What was interesting about this speculation was how good old 1945 Vannevar had both tremendous foresight and was able to influence the development of technology greatly, yet at the same time still get things completely off track. The Big Doc Bush claims that this is the ‘logical. if not inevitable’ fate of cameras, and while he gets a lot of things uncannily correct (focus, exposure, colour, stereoscopy), as people living in the twenty-first century, we know that the state of camera technology now is vastly different from what was thought of as the unavoidable and ultimate outcome.
Firstly, VanMan believed that photographers would be walking around with things this size stuck to their foreheads.
You’re nuts, man.
Sadly, our society has not evolved in such a way that it was a trend to walk around with metallic cysts coming out of our faces.
Or your nuts, man?
Or has it?
Now people can watch me trip in the mud from MY perspective!
Nevertheless, it is still evident that V. Bush’s (#innuendointheresomewhere) vision is still being held back by the world he was living in at the time. His dream camera still needs a string to activate the shutter, and a dark room is still needed to develop the images. Digitization flies completely under the radar as well as the fact that ordinary people can take high definition photos of everything, especially food.
I’m looking at you, Kevin.
So a doctor with an awesome name left out smartphone cameras, Instagram and hipsters brandishing DSLRs in his otherwise very influential and visionary piece of speculation from 1945. What does this mean? For me, it says that speculation can give you a window far into the future, but at the same time it will probably end up being a future far different from the one you will actually end up in. Nevertheless, despite any speculation becoming bogged down by the limitations of a mind living in the present (it is extremely hard to let go of the technologies that exist around us, as our projections of the future build on what we have now), that speculation will still shape what happens, and will better prepare you for whatever world in which you find yourself.
And I guess, when you’re thinking about what the future might hold in store, take the advice of a grenade-launcher-wielding-dream-thief-with-a-brilliant-accent.
You have no idea how much weird fan-art I had to scroll past just to find this picture.
“You musn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
Sup peeps. Just casually posting this from my WordPress app on my phone because I want to feel special.
We’re thinking of questions to ask in the next unlecture, by the way.
One problem that I have with this method is that we’re formulating questions before we’ve had a chance to do next week’s reading, which means we will have to wait till the week after to get our questions about it answered.
Just to really emphasize that I’m on my phone right now, here’s another photo.
And another one.
Booyah.
Something I found intriguing from this week’s lecture/unlecture was the discussion about the nature of our tertiary education, and the similarities and differences it brought up between enrolling in a uni course and engaging in a business transaction.
Adrian highlighted how education was far from simply consisting of us students as consumers, paying teaching staff to hand us information and knowledge as a service. It is not a transaction in which we get to be passive and let everything come to us. It requires action and our own end to drive our learning and experience, especially in a course such as networked media.
Cue talk about not knowing where we’re going and everything’s speculative. Oooooh.
Afterwards, Eliot somewhat sheepishly discussed how education was, basically, a transaction. We pay for something with money, and we expect to get something out of it.
Education is still largely based on a conveyor belt system built for the industrial revolution to churn out bodies able to contribute to society and the economy. We enter the system at prep and things are constantly added to us (information, experience, skills) until we pop out the other side -be that at the end of Year 10, Year 12, an apprenticeship, or a TAFE or uni course with the expectation that we will be functional in the environment that we find ourselves in. As students, we’re even separated into batches which dictate how far along we are on the conveyor belt, and these are defined (arbitrarily, some might say) by our age. Should age really define the levels to which a students’ abilities develop at any specific time? I don’t have any suggestions for any radical changes to the education system just yet, but it’s worth remembering that the stuff kids are going through today are still aimed at producing what the world needed a hundred years ago.
Source: Check the corner of the picture, fool.
The conveyor belt’s still a hell of a ride, though.
I read Matthew Ward’s writing about design fiction and his ideas about using it more widely in education. I took it in.
What stood out to me most were a few points in his ‘manifesto’ that deal not only with design fiction, but design itself and speculation in general.
1. All design is ideological.
In my last post I started wondering about the implications of having glass technology become three thousand percent more pervasive (or invasive) in our everyday lives. The video that was shown in the first reading depicted possible tech that, though extremely cool and useful, did make me feel a little uneasy and uncomfortable.
I cut my wondering off though because I felt I was digressing and, even though it’s been hammered in that our blogs are our own and we can write whatever we want on them, I did want to focus more on the reading and not let the post become overly long.
I’m digressing.
Anyway, after seeing the first point on Ward’s manifesto, it’s made me come to reexamine the Corning video. Is this really the “near future” that designers and corporations see us moving into? Is this the world which we are expected to embrace?
The video presents a capitalist, almost utopian society in which everything is fluid and connected. The family members are in perfect harmony with each other, the technology, themselves and life in general. Come on, look at those smiles.
Look daddy, we’re smiling at these stupid shoes like the director told us to!
Now, I’ve just finished my readings in Communications Histories and Technologies about ideologies, cultural codes and signs, so bear with me if I seem to be digging too deep here.
What I’m seeing is a depiction of a “perfect world”, thanks to the help of this new glass technology. In this perfect world, there is no trouble or conflict, as the technology has made everything smooth and seamless. So, what else can we see inside this utopia?
-A nuclear middle/upper class family (the ‘perfect’ family) with a husband, wife and two kids. A symbol of harmony that every citizen should aspire to achieve (‘when I grow up I want to have a family like this’). The implied notion that this is the ideal to live up to is reinforced by how easy and happy their life seems thanks to the technology.
-The wife is a consumer who spends her day shopping. This is perhaps another stereotype of the nuclear family: The man is the breadwinner and does all the work. Wait, maybe it’s just the weekend or a public holiday? Nope, because the…
-Kids are going to school. Private school. I’m not saying this as a knock on private schools or anything, but I’m just pointing out that the world seems to hold this type of education in higher regard, since it is the choice of the ‘perfect’ family.
-The husband has a job paying him enough to be able to afford all this fancy glassware, and is therefore probably educated. Also, he’s reading H.G. Wells.
-Advertising seems to be much more pervasive. Aside from the massive glass screens in the shopping complex, the wife seems to be getting fed personalized alerts from retailers straight to her phone. Brands in this world have much more reach and influence in this consumerist culture.
In summary, what I’m getting from this video is that the world Corning’s designers are designing for is one privileging the higher classes, stereotypical families and consumerism. As a result, what is designed and ultimately produced will shape this society into one that may privilege the higher classes, stereotypical families and consumerism. It becomes a cycle, where designers’ foresee a world in the possible future and adjust their craft to cater to it. In doing so, the designers can end up creating this world, which may not have existed if they didn’t think it would exist in the first place. The factors that influence what worlds these designers will think of stem from ideology and cultural expectation.
In finishing my reflection on this point, it also brings me to one more:
4. The decisions you make have consequences. Prototype them in the stories you tell.
As I just discovered, speculation is not completely harmless. We have to be careful and aware of the ideas we create. Throwing them out into the world in full form, without paying attention to possible effects (that could’ve been found through ways such as design fiction) or discussing and speculating amongst peers, could have negative repercussions.
Adrian called our generation a “vanguard”, and while I feel somewhat honoured to think like that, those words do carry some weight. We are responsible for the future, and we can’t go headfirst without some measure of awareness and deftness.