The Seaman reading was extremely hard to understand…. nevertheless I still took away some points from it which may or may not have been central to the piece.

– human processes of memory, thought, categorising, contextualising…etc are ‘potential variables for employmment in the creation of interactive works of art’, ‘databases derive from human activity’

– ‘every reception of a work of art is an interpretation and performance of it…the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself’

– configurations are formed when items are distributed within confines

– the combination/recombination of visual and sonic fields is not work of narrative, but a poetic approach -> arranged and group, but not consequential?

– recombinant poetics: characterised by interaction with a computer which allows the participant to engage with a combination and recombination of media texts

– set: separate, defined elements that still function as whole

Some notes from the Lev Manovich reading:

– database is an unordered list of items

– narrative: consequential

– webpages: are a form of database, have an ‘antinarrative’ logic and are rarely ‘finished’, thus is more of a collection rather than story

– computer games or interactive narratives: have well-defined goals, all elements are motivated and justifiable, follow algorithmic logic. To qualify as narrative – must have narrator and actor, text, story, and fabula (plot events), contents should be a ‘series of connected events caused/experienced by actors’ (so a ‘game’ like nyan cat probably wouldn’t be considered a narrative)

– but even within interactive or hyperactive narratives, there is an underlying database – only there is a user deciding the sequence of events.

– data structure is at the ‘centre of the creative process in a computer age’

– in new media database is material and explicit, while narrative is implicit

– cinema can be considered at the intersection of database and narrative – the recorded footage becomes the database which the narrative will be constructed from through editing

Something that really caught my attention at this weeks symposium was Adrian’s stance on evidence and critical writing. He talked about how being critical was not about being negative or opinionated, but rather making informed arguments supported by evidence. He continued to talk about how and what evidence can be used and this was the part that surprised me.

I had always thought that proper, scholarly, academic, statistical…etc evidence had to be used in these sorts of writings, but Adrian gave an example of how Homer Simpson could be used as evidence. Although he shouldn’t be quoted as an expert (for instance, Homer Simpson once said ‘blah blah’), you could say something along the lines of this issue was raised in an episode of The Simpsons, signalling its significance.

In hindsight, I’m not sure if this technique would cut it for other subjects or if I would use it myself, I guess I’m too much of a worry-wort to take the risk…

My take away idea from today’s symposium was the bit about how pages are ranked and credited. Although this is a topic thats been touched upon before, today’s symposium made things a bit clearer for me. Well that’s if I understood what was being said correctly.

From what I gathered, on the web everyone starts out with the same ranking; there is no hierarchy… yet. A site run by an academic will begin on the same level as a site run by your average student. These pages will probably experience some traffic, and other webpages may link to these sites. These other webpages, the ‘linkers’, will have been organised in  a hierarchical structure. A ‘.edu’ page will likely carry more authority than a ‘.com’ page, and so pages regularly linked by ‘.edu’ pages would be granted higher points and therefore seen as a more credible source, regardless of who the page is run by.

Adrian’s blog post ‘Unpicking One Tuesday‘ talked about the importance of relations ‘…that things are what they are not because they sort of lie there by themselves being what they are but they are always in these relations that really matter’. I kind of applied this to the online realm, where people come with their own histories, academic or not, and then the audience has the power to grant them importance. Tilly’s post also illustrated relations as being prime when understanding something. Hierarchies built on comparisons between sites, and quality of their audience, rather than the authors of those sites. Michaela’s post also discusses this, and when you take into consideration how the internet is a scale-free network, it makes sense to place more importance on quality of links and not quantity.

The Long Tail reading discussed the tail of the power law curve where all the ‘misses’ reside.

Anderson believes that ‘popular taste is an artefact of poor demand and supply matching’ and that people are forced to consume ‘manufactured pop’, blockbusters, and mainstream media due to lack of alternatives.

The ‘problem’ is that we live in a tangible world, and in the past media was distributed physically. This presented two restrictions. The first one was that distributors had to look to locals to meet quotas; a certain amount of locals had to be willing to watch a certain film or buy a CD, within specific time frames in order to cover the cost of carrying them. The retailers could not reach international audiences and therefore relied solely on the interest of those within, say, a 10 mile radius.

The second is that, physically, it is not possible to screen every single film, play an infinite range of tracks, or house all the CDs and DVD under one roof. Media was not readily accessible to be used whenever and wherever one felt inclined.

Even though those that are situated in the long tail may have been ‘misses’ at the time of release, or are no longer relevant to the masses, if they find consumers a few times a month it can amount to something substantial.

Anderson promotes the three rules to benefitting from the long tail. The first is to make everything available. Combining everything in the long tail and viewing it as one entity can place it on par or even outweigh the earnings from the hits. The second is to lower the prices of these misses and to ‘pull consumers down’ the tail. The less popular the content, the lower the price. This strategy can encourage consumers to keep buying more merely because of how cheap it is, and the cheap prices should be compensated by the volume of purchases. Finally, retailers must make recommendations and help consumers find less mainstream content, potentially awakening new interests and prompting market growth. It is precisely because these three requirements are met by sites like Amazon, that they are so popular.

The benefit of keeping the long tail alive is that it will nurture more diversity in society’s taste.

References:

Anderson, C 2004, The Long Tail Wired, Wired October, viewed 17 October 2014 <http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html>

The 80/20 Rule  reading was about how 80% of the time and effort we spend on things is ‘largely irrelevant’, pretty much fruitless. Well, that wasn’t the main point of the reading, but it was the point that resonated with me the most. I can see how it’s a pretty valid rule as it can be applied in the real world (if we ignore particulars, otherwise there’d probably be quite a few flaws). I find that every time I try to do work, 80% of the time is spent procrastinating and 20% is spent actually doing the work. Before my VCE exams, I spent 80% of my time stressing and worrying about it, and 20% studying. When working in groups, we all encounter that experience when the majority of the work is done by the minority.

“when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time”

— no (@tbhjuststop) June 20, 2014

I spent a good 5 minutes laughing at those posts. This is what I spend 80% of my time doing ahahaha…haha….hah……. I need to be more productive with my life.

Moving on, this 80/20 rule can also be observed in terms of networks. In last week’s tute, Elliot had pretty much summed up the reading for us which made the reading so much easier to get through. If the usual academic reading is like swimming through mud, this reading was like swimming through water. Woohoo. Anyway, Eliot had compared the train network to the online network with two graphs; a bell curve and a log curve.

On the net, 80% of links point to about 15% of webpages – the hubs/connectors. Under the power law system, or the scale-free distribution, the number of links and webpages grow exponentially and are limitless.

If we compare this to a ‘random distribution’ with train networks, we can see that most nodes have only two links with the outliers having 1 or 3. These types of networks have peaks and limits. ‘Nature normally hates the power law’.

Unlike train links, the online network is likely to continue garnering more and more links in a pyramid scheme manner. If we take facebook for example, if the probability of someone sharing a link that I’ve shared is 0.1 and I have 100 friends, then that’d be 10 shares. If the pr is the same for my friends, then that’s an additional 100 shares.

Below I’ve attempted to illustrate the two types of distribution

Small Worlds was like an extension of The Connected Age, and talked about clusters, connectors, as well as the importance of acquaintances. Additionally, Erdos-Renyis’ ‘random social world’ perspective is rejected.

The reading emphasised the importance of ‘weak social ties’ for a number of reasons. Weak ties enable us to communicate with the rest of the world, receive new information, hear about job openings, and link us to other clusters. Since people with whom we have strong social ties are likely to be apart of our own cluster, they are unlikely to offer us the kinds of things acquaintances are.

When considering the internet, we can observe some flaws in Erdos-Renyi random view. The web provides a platform for expression, but not equal opportunity as some people/institutions may be more connected than others. Sites that are frequented more often like Google and YouTube can be seen as hubs as people are more likely to consult these webpages than others. It reminds me of George Orwell’s quote, ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’.

This weeks reading, The Connected Age, talked about networks and how the individual components of these networks interact.

Networks were defined as being a collection of separates ‘that are actually doing something’. They are dynamic, evolving in response to these individual doings and therefore ‘what happens and how it happens will depend on networks’.

The author observed networks in a variety of things – power systems, crickets, joggers – and talked about synchronisation. How we may extrapolate collective actions from individual behaviour, and how we may be able to do the opposite – how we can predict the action of mobs without knowing the particulars of singular components within the mob.

He mentioned power outages that occurred in America due to the excessive and simultaneous use of electricity during summer. There was discussion about how crickets chirp in a synchronised fashion, and the authored pondered ‘who was listening to who’. He also gave an example of joggers and how the extent of their awareness to each other will change how they run, and sychronise.

What caught my eye the most, and found the most understandable was the last part of the reading which discussed Milgram’s small world and the six degrees finding. How people who were distant could be close through an average of six steps was surprising for me. It made me think whether that could still be applied today. Since the internet is so accessable nowadays, will that theory become obsolete? If we think about online profiles on Facebook or even this blog; it’s on the Web, ready to be accessed by anyone. It reminds me of McLuhans term ‘global village’, people around the world who have no mutual friends, nothing in common (other than the fact they reside on the net) can contact each other virtually. There is no need for the ‘someone chain’ either.

This ‘Collage‘ reading relates to what was discussed in the earlier symposiums about stories, narratives, beginnings, middles, and ends. It’s done in an fragmented way, similar to blogs  – it’s not so neatly organised or orderly, and doesn’t follow a conventional writing style. I wouldn’t call it a story, essay, poem… maybe an article? The contents consist of short paragraphs and sentences about different arts, paintings, mosaics, narratives, films and how these works can be considered a collage, in addition to other things. There are also a few seemingly arbitrary statements like ‘I hate quotations’, so I guess it resembles how the brain/mind thinks?

Theoretical Frameworks

This reading addressed several perspectives of technology and culture, and here are some points I’ve taken away:

– ‘Technological determinism refers to the belief that technology is the agent of social change’. This stance holds that technology is independent and has it’s own trajectory and consequences, removed from social factors

-McLuhan considered technologies as ‘extensions of human capacities’. He believed that the cultural significance of media is found in the form of expression, rather than the content. The term he coined, ‘global village’ attempts to describes the World Wide Web

– Meyrowitz proposed that age and gender divisions are obscured due to the accessibility of electronic media skills in comparison to literacy skills.

– Raymond Williams suggested social factors creates a need for technology, as does political and economical factors. Winston believed that this, ‘social necessity’ was the reason why some technologies fail while others succeed.

A quote by Mackenzie and Wacjman that resonated with me: “A new device merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter”

Something that confused me in this reading was that they didn’t define what ‘technology’ was. Language was considered a technology, but communication wasn’t?