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.

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.