Here we go again, Jackie is about to ramble about art and visual diaries…This reading definitely calls for it though, talking about the relationships between artists and technology, and the things technology can offer. One particular quote grabbed me:

“Whoever works with a computer on a daily basis, at least for a few years, will soon realize that his own computer resembles more and more to its owner. You share everything with your computer: your time (often even for 13 hours a day), your space (desktop), your culture (bookmarks), your personal relationships (e-mails), your memories (photo archives), your ideas, your projects, etc. To sum up, a computer, with the passing of time, ends up looking like its owner’s brain.”

This goes for a lot of things I find, not only with a persons computer based on how they use the internet, but I think over time if you spend enough time doing something it will emulate your own personal style. For example, our blogs do this. This also goes for artwork, journals, photo albums, houses, and yes, of course, because I’m Jackie I have to bring this up, visual diaries.

On Friday I attended my former high school’s art exhibition with some friends, to see what our younger friends have been doing, what the year 12 students came up with, and to offer our wisdom as past art students. When I saw the works, before reading the names, I was able to recognise whose work it was, and the style of their visual diaries (which were also on display) really did reflect their own personalities and style. They included things that they were interested in, and arranged things in a style that made sense to them. I can see myself using this same method when using this blog and my computer, it does reflect me (although I cant choose a desktop image at the moment because my computer is being a dope.)

My goodness this reading used a lot of long words.

I pulled up multiple Wikipedia pages and blog posts in an effort to understand, and luckily Memphis had an attached video which cleared some things up and made my brain hurt a little less.

So to begin with, Actor- Netowrks may not have strategically placed nodes and paths, it is not concerned with social networks only related to humans, rather the nature of societies and natures in general, and networks do not have spheres, categories or politics, they are fibrous and capillary-like. In short, Actor Network Theory acknowledges both the technical and social aspects of networks and technologies, and suggests that they do not function independently, basically finding a middle ground in the whole technological determinism arguement.

Connections through networks are stronger than close proximity connections. I could be standing next to a stranger, but my connection to my friend who is kilometers away is stronger, so the connection of proximity is not important in ANT. I thought that was pretty interesting.

Networks cannot be ‘bigger’ than other ones like is suggested in social theory, but they can be more intensely connected.

An actant need not be human, it just must act, or be granted activity by others. So I guess the activity would be granted by the humanistic actants if they are unable to act themselves. But many human actants are unable to be actants on their own, as they require non-humanistic actants to form/ maintain a network… I think.

The talk of collections of things in the Manovich reading reminded me a bit of the concepts of mosaic that i have been pondering as it is one of my niki topics. The idea of a collection of many things building one big thing, like a mosaic or a database was familiar. The reading touches on the experience of video games and how they work using algorithms and create their own logic, I have already talked much about video games before, but it was interesting to have the idea of “What is a Video Game?” revisited in this reading.

The reading then goes on to discuss how new media is redefining basically everything, or at least, forcing us to use word out of context. From creativity to the definition of narrative, apparently we are using the word narrative more loosely, which i can recognise. I found this idea particularly interesting though, that perhaps new media is advancing so quickly that we are struggling to define it or figure it out even as we are creating it. Not to mention the idea that it is so foreign to us we are desperately attempting to classify it using words such as ‘interactive narrative’ inappropriately, just because we need to make sense of what has taken over the world and media these days.

This relates to an idea touched on in the opening of the Seaman reading, that, like databases, humans wish to define, categorise, contextualise, etc. I think these ideas link very nicely.

As soon as I got through he first two pages of the ‘Culture and Technology’ reading and immediately was like, yes, this is interesting, this is going to been a good reading. “…not so interested in how things work technologically, as how they work culturally.” Now that’s always fun to discuss. I like the description of technology as ‘the application of science to production,’ as it really sums it up well. We discover new things and require new things, and design new things, then produce them in new was to create new technologies.

As i progress further into the reading, it is beginning to sound a lot like a reading from ‘communication histories and technologies;’ another subject i am doing at the moment. Particularly what we were discussing in the first few weeks of semester, regarding the difference between techniques and technology, and their relationship to each other. I found it particularly interesting reading about how people interpret the word ‘culture.’ Because cultures can be small, large, based on any demographic collection, and some consider fine arts to be culture, but others consider aspects of working class living culture as well. People use the word culture to describe so many different things, so it is difficult to talk about culture as a thing, we must accept that culture is dynamic and broad.

What i understand from this reading, is that it acknowledges that networks don’t form hubs, hubs form networks over time. Like the way that the internet continues to grow and new nodes are formed. For example, first there was the networked media blog, then all of our blogs were created and linked from it, and now we continue to link out and between each other, and create now posts and pages, so the network becomes bigger, and the networked media blog becomes more like a hub, at least for our little network.

So, in short; Networks don’t emerge from disorder into order, they organise themselves as they build themselves and hubs form as networks have growth, and nodes have preferential attachment to hubs.

So networks tend to have power centers, as explained in this reading. I thought about this idea last week, that although networks have many different parts and links, they usually form around, or many of them link back to common places. This is because networks form by power law. All of our blogs link to different things, but they all link to/ from one bigger blog called ‘networked media’ as well, and would not be able to hold a strong network on their own, as the ‘networked media’ blog is the thing that connects many of them, by providing common ideas and interests, as well as hyperlinks to all of our blogs. I told you guys, in this blog post. I knew it.

This also suggests that these networks are not randomly formed, neither is the formation of the internet itself. The idea of atoms being like a community threw me off a bit though. I studied Chemistry in VCE and never once did I ever picture them like that… Except for one video we watched where the atoms all had houses, friends and personalities… yeah that was weird.

Man, after the Watts reading, i realised how screwed we are if electricity somehow goes out or messes up or even just cuts out for 25 hours, like what happened in New York in 1977. It made me realise that possibly the most dangerous thing if that happens wont be food production, heating, communication etc, but I’m just scared of the reaction from people. The riots that happened then cost 350 million dollars in damages, and the power was only out for 25 hours. People be cray.

The part about networks made me think… If we picture networks as the electricity grid, which can go out if the one source/ core of the grid malfunctions, can this happen with networks also? I think yes, because typically, really dense networks are based around something similar; many people connecting over their love for a specific author for example. If that author suddenly stopped writing, and told everyone they should never speak of their previous books again for whatever reason, what happens to the network? Sure it will be there, as the network is also linked to things around it, but it can no longer grow, and the links will begin to weaken as people lose interest in this past author, whose works can never be found or discussed again. This is probably true for most networks when they start out. If two weeks into the semester the networked media blog, or media factory somehow disappeared, how would we connect over ideas and readings that none of us have been exposed to because they were on the blog. We would stagnate (unless we found other things to blog about.) (This was definitely a tangent thought xD okay, back to the reading…)

So, ‘6 degrees of separation.’ I had heard of it before, and i had always thought, “Yeah, i can see that, people have weird connections.” but if everyone has roughly 100 friends that they know on a first name basis, then in 5/6 degrees that definitely should cover everyone on the planet, that is, assuming most people don’t have the same groups of friends… I guess it only works with strangers/ acquaintances. If you asked one of your friends, 80 of their 100 friends might be mutual friends, so your not getting as far. So i guess its impossible to determine how big or small that world is. Everyone has different connections and they all cluster differently, I have probably about 20 close friends, someone else may have 100 close friends, or 2 close friends, but that doesn’t mean one of us has a better chance of finding someone on the other side of the world, because what if those 100 close friends are all only acquainted with each other and don’t know anyone else. Is the world bigger for them, or smaller for them? Is the world of the person with 2 close friends bigger because one of those friends knows 200 people? I guess that’s how the theory is rather flawed.

The idea of stories that interact with our choices from the Douglas reading is awesome. Not just ‘choose your own adventure’ style, but a book that is different each time you read it. Until now this was impossible, as books are bound in their physical form, paper etc. But hypertext opens a new possibility for this. Hypertext does not take up space, it is just available to be chosen and redirect you to another piece of writing. But the idea still needs to be worked on, and many stories will probably not lend themselves to this format well. Still, it could be something interesting to explore. It would mean that the ending is different all the time, or this could potentially create stories with no ending. What would that be like?

However,  people enjoy reading for more than just interactivity, so this hypertext style of storytelling replacing the book altogether is highly unlikely.

Paul Graham’s ‘The Age of the Essay’ makes me wonder a little bit. Particularly in this semester, I have been hearing that in high school, people were taught to write essays in a way where they would make a point then argue for or against it, and honestly, I haven’t been able to relate. I haven’t thought of essays in that way since year 9 or 10. In year 10 and VCE, I started writing essays for all sorts of things, not just English, but Art, History, and even creatively. In English we  learned how to write an essay as a creative piece, only a short time was spent writing on literature, in the traditional sense. Particularly in Art essays, I found that they were not about convincing someone of something, they were more like reflection on your own ideas, with visual evidence supporting these ideas, but there is no right or wrong interpretation of art, so it was never about using the visual evidence as factual evidence. So to me essays didn’t really carry the connotation of  ‘an expository, argumentative piece of writing.’ actually much of the time, I don’t settle on a strong point that I argue in my essays, which is fine because from what I have heard, that would be wrong. Maybe I just went to a good high school.

The hypertext reading by George Landow was interesting. It pointed out concepts surrounding hypertext that I hadn’t really considered. Instead of thinking about hypertext as just clicking on something and it directs you to another page, ideas about ‘choose your own adventure’ style text were new to me. Like how hypertext makes online text differ from books, which are linear, have a distinct beginning and end and the physicality of the text is more separate from us than it is online. Due to hypertext, each texts borders are far more open, and all that is related to a topic is not required on one page. Books would generally provide a short explanation for everything so one is able to understand the main topic better and how they fit together, but if we look something up on Wikipedia, it saves time by just linking to the direct page to give us the information.

This reminds me of the very first unlecture, where we were encouraged not to repeat information that already existed. With the use of hypertext, the same explanation of something is not needed on countless Wikipedia pages, the one explanation of it can just be hyperlinked on all of the pages that require/ reference it. So although hypertext makes the spiderweb of pages and knowledge seem broader, it really makes it more concise. The spiderweb has more connections, but it is a smaller web in comparison to the world of books and encyclopedias.