Category Archives: Networked Media

List of References

Apostola, A. (2014). The Evolution of the Curator | Design Online. [online] Designonline.org.au. Available at: http://designonline.org.au/content/the-evolution-of-the-curator/ [Accessed 24 Oct. 2014].

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). ‘The forms of capital’. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood.

Landow, G. (2006). Hypertext 3.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lasswell, H. and Kaplan, A. (1950). Power and society. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture. New York: Penguin Press.

Nelson, T. (1992). Literary Machines 91.1: The Report On, and Of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press.

Watts, D. (2003). Six degrees. New York: Norton.

 

The original essay can be found here.

Active vs Passive audiences

Did you click on a link which has landed you on this page?

Congratulations, you are an active audience member.

I have used this as an example of what an active audience looks like, particularly in the online world. An active audience member is one who clicks and connects to discover more.

Click here to head back to the essay which this page originally brought you to.

Questioning questions

One kernel I took away from something Adrian mentioned was that a significant problem in an age of distributed expertise, is that if you can’t ask good questions, you can’t find good answers.

I have always been an inquisitive person – something which my parents will vouch for as they spent many, many, many years tirelessly answering my questions that sprung up continuously throughout my days as a young’un.

After thinking about it, I started to realise that questions are not as straightforward as they may seem.

More Questions Than Answers

Image via flickr

Good questions lie somewhere in between the search to know what and the search to know how. Adrian said that this is also the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. He suggested that traditional models of learning now need to be less about knowing what and more about knowing how. This is a tricky thing to do though, when most of our experience of institutional education concentrates solely on the knowing what part – with essays and tests focusing on the content, and not the act of forming the knowledge about the content.

Graham tells us in his reading on the essay:

High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association “formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course.”…It’s no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we’re now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.”

So what do we do about it?

In week 5, Adrian had some suggestions including teaching kids to learn by doing. I agree wholeheartedly, as a strong kinaesthetic learner myself.

We need to relearn how to ask good questions.

When we ask the good questions, we’ll get the good answers.

Trackbacks 05

Claudia with some useful notes on Symposium 11 (I was unable to attend as I was in Canberra with 400 other young people meeting with 100 MPs to discuss ending extreme poverty). Claudia found it a little difficult to stay tuned in for the whole lecture (don’t worry, Claudia. I think that’s basically the motto of Network Media for most students). She had some great notes about the idea of design thinking though. This is something I was first introduced to in my politics class Organisations, Politics & Economies. We learned that 21st century organisations must use design thinking, dynamism, and affective forethought in order to make themselves future-focused.

Future City Illinois

Professor Nigel Thrift suggests that organisations are less focused on singular products but more on the ideas and innovation behind trends that create the terrain for their products. For example, Nike are not just manufacturers of footwear and apparel, they innovate and design trends. Their motto is “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”, qualifying that “if you have a body, you are an athlete” (NikeInc.com, 2014). I am excited to see how much more prominent this kind of design thinking becomes, because I think it provides some great affordances for modern consumerism.

George writes about the 80/20 rule we saw in the Barabási reading. He also mentions the 90-0-1 principle, as cited by Jacob Neilsen in 2006. This idea suggests that there is a participation inequality on the Internet with only 1% of people creating content, 9% editing or modifying content, and 90% viewing content without actively contributing. I wonder how those figures have changed since 2006 and what they would look like in 2014.

Jessica writes about the database discussion from week 11’s symposium, focusing on the relationship between databases and narrative (which I agree there is none of – databases are not stories). I’m still trying to understand how blogs are a database though – I kind of wish I was there in the symposium to hear Adrian explain that one!

Trackbacks 04

Sophie with an amazing infographic about what a day in the internet looks like, which provided the following incredible statistics:

  • 294 billion emails are sent
  • 2 million blog posts are written
  • 172 million people visit Facebook, posting 532 million statuses and spending 4.7 billion minutes on the site.
  • 98 years of video footage is uploaded to YouTube
  • More iPhones are sold in one day than babies are born across the world.

Nethaniel with a surprisingly poetic image of a blog within a blog, creating what he calls ‘blog-ception’.

Caitlin with a story that spreads fear in the heart of any digital native: her iPhone has recently died. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read along, realising with each new word just how desperately crucial my iPhone has become in my life. It is all-but an extension of my hand. Like many, it’s the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning. I panic when it’s out of sight. I can’t fall asleep without it under my pillow. I once had a thirty minute tantrum on the Eurostar between London and Paris when I realised I had left my phone in my UK apartment and was not going to be able to document my trip using my iPhone camera! How laughable!

I’m sure we’ve all been in similar situations, when it becomes so very clear how much our relationship with a piece of aluminium and glass has developed into frighteningly dependent therapy-worthy patterns. But I couldn’t love that any more if I tried! For me, the affordances of these new technologies so far outweigh their downfalls, and I cannot wait to see what trends continue to emerge as they weave themselves even further into our lives.

Readings 08: Watts + our small worlds

Reading 08.1

In The Science of a Connected Age, Watts introduces us to the idea or small worlds, or as we will come to learn, small groups. He talks about the frequently forgotten enabler of our connectivity: the power system. This certainly made me chuckle, as I can certainly attest to taking this entire system for granted which allows me to perform my networked tasks which have engrained themselves in my day to day life. I don’t think I have physically looked at a power line in years. In fact, I grew up in a suburb in A.C.T where a key selling point was that the power lines were run underground and forced out of sight (and out of mind). But as Adrian has reminded us a few times this semester, we constantly bathe in an extraordinary sea of mobile data and radio waves. Just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. This Gizmodo article shows images from an artist who worked in collaboration with an astrobiologist to show us what the world might look like if we could see these wireless signals.

Image via Casey Chan

Image via Casey Chan

 

The power system is arguably the most essential technological feature of the modern world… Without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly more expensive and inconvenient.”

Continue Reading…

Symposium 09: The storytelling ecosystem

ecosystem services collapsing

Image via flickr user Martin Sharman

Stories in networked spaces can potentially be disparate connections of ‘bits’. The whole art of working in this space is to think about how these parts can come together to form something different that the sum of its parts. That’s what an ecosystem is: structures and patterns from individual parts – whether that be nature with its flora and fauna, or the online terrain of blogs or hypertext systems.

What’s interesting is that in these ecosystems, scale does not matter. Just because a tree may be the biggest in size, does to mean it’s the most important thing. Each part brings its own importance and diversity to the system. There is no privilege, no hierarchy, and most importantly, no centre. As Jason told us, we grow up thinking there is a centre to everything. This worldview is problematic, and makes it harder to adjust to the mindset that is more appropriate in understanding ecosystems. Everything intercommunicates in complex and interesting ways. However, there is no way of predicting in advance which parts will come to matter, and why this is the case. As Adrian reminds us, it’s only in the doing that these structures and relationships form.

In the symposium, we talked about Cowbird being a good example of the above.  This website, which is a “public library of human experience” takes individual’s stories and collates them into what Adrian calls a ‘soup’ of story, images and videos. These stories then shift from being a distinct island unto themselves, and start having relations with other stories. The story then grows as a consequence to these relations, out of the control of the author.

I asked whether this is similar to Twitter, which brings together information in a somewhat similar way. However, we discussed that Twitter is a timebound stream, which is more ephemeral in nature. You can aggregate and communicate with likeminded people, but it’s not a curatorial space. Hashtags, however, are a little bit more about curation and collation, but it is ultimately different from the above kind of ecosystem.