Kimberly Lai

For our final Niki, my group and I have chosen to work on Julian Assange, the infamous founder of WikiLeaks. I’ve been doing some massive digging about Julian Assange all day, and to say he is an intriguing man (he even looks the part!) is a terrible understatement.

From a young age, he had already displayed signs of his passion for justice. In a biography, WikiLeaks: Warrior for Truth, it mentioned somewhere that Julian would be the kid to let the spiders run while others stomped on them. Perhaps it was genetic. His mom, Christine, was a hippie, a traveling puppeteer and an activist. She would participate in campaigns and protests she felt strongly for. She stood for freedom and even embodied it — she would wear a bikini all day if she felt like it. She was averse to “reductive and legislative systems” and believed any impediment to freedom kills intelligence and creativity. That was the wing Julian grew up under.

Today, he is sealed within the four walls of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, avoiding extradition to Sweden over sexual allegations. And that’s what our Niki will based around. We aim to write a feature article; a journalist’s memoir on a day with Julian at London’s Ecuador embassy. We’re going to reveal his beliefs and convictions regarding freedom and censorship through his actions and conversations. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think!

In the Manovich reading, the discussion on the proliferation of databases on the Internet reminded me of Facebook and the recipe/cooking blogs I frequent. On Facebook, we can catalog photos, our statuses, the pages we like, etc., which is so very useful. Blogs, as well, are able to keep an archive of their past entries. Cooking blogs in particular are able to index their recipes for easy referencing. Databases, essentially.

Further into the reading, Manovich speaks of the relationship between cinema and his theories on databases and narratives. Cinema is said to be a “linear pursuit” where one story is told chronologically at any given point in time. However, in actuality, it exists in the intersection between database and narrative.

I’m doing Broadcast Media this semester as well and have had to work on TV and radio productions. For the TV production especially, we had to film the various scenes separately, in a non-chronological order. But of course, the fine cut would have to be edited such that it is, in fact, chronological. In other words, we had first to compile a database – a collection of individual items – before structuring a narrative. It’s a very tricky matter and by no means easy.

Manovich also references Dziga Vertov’s film, Man with a Movie Camera, which you can find here:

In a way, Vertov has structured his film both as a database and a narrative – a skill Manovich thinks new media designers should master. Manovich states that in Vertov’s film, the new techniques used to obtain images and manipulate them can be used to “decode the world”. This database is accompanied with a narrative – which refers to the process of discovering these new techniques. In doing so, he made the traditionally “boring” database into a database-narrative hybrid that is more engaging.

It’s a bit to take in and I remain slightly confused, but I somewhat understand what Manovich is getting at. I just needed to rephrase and contextualize what he wrote, so it’s easier to digest. I’ll probably be clearer about that once I watch the movie in its entirety. Hope you enjoy it!

In the symposium and workshop today, we touched on DNS and IP servers briefly. The Galloway reading discussed this, but it was a subject too complicated and dry for someone as disengaged with computers as I am. If you have similar sentiments (hi-5!), you’d be happy to know that Tim, Dana and Mardy did a wonderful, un-boring Niki on this.

If you’re too lazy to read the Niki chunk, check out this fun, animated video on DNS instead:

DNS stands for Domain Name System. DNS turns user-friendly domain names like facebook.com into an Internet Protocol (IP) address like 69.63.176.13 that computers use to identify each other on the network. In other words, we would have to memorize strings of numbers if not for DNS. I did a Google search on DNS and someone actually described DNS as the system that keeps Internet users sane. Right on.

In other news, I just discovered Pinterest. I know, I know, I’m slow to catch on. But I have! And it’s so addictive; I’ve spent three hours this morning “pinning” images. If you don’t know what it is, check out Esther’s post on Pinterest.

A few posts back, I spoke about technological determinism and proposed an argument that stood for it. I also promised a counterargument, so here’s what I’ll be discussing today: cultural materialism and technology neutrality.

The technological determinism theory treats the development of technologies as “natural” and isolated from their social and political contexts. It has been known as a reductionist theory and it’s easy to see why. Technological determinism excludes “social need, economic interest, political control, specific decision-making, the design of content: in a word, intention”.

Raymond Williams coined the term “cultural materialism”, which examines the social and political climates in which certain technologies were introduced. The television, for example, was made commercially available from the 1920s, after the First World War. He theorized that larger cities, more mobile populations and a greater emphasis on the family home “necessitated more extensive systems of communication”. In other words, it was the changing social environment that prompted the TV’s invention, and not vice versa.

However, the TV became a very influential means of communication. It could not only disseminate information – technological determinists would argue it could also shape opinion, alter behaviour and affect culture.

For example, the TV has been blamed for desensitizing our culture to violence. We grew up watching cartoons such as The Road Runner Show – basically about a bird and a wolf desperately trying to kill each other – so really, is it so surprising to hear about a 14 year-old stabbing her kid sister forty times to her death? Maybe she thought her sister wouldn’t die; after all, the Cayote (re: The Road Runner Show) resurrected every single time.

On one end of the spectrum, we have technological determinism; on the other, cultural materialism. But what sits comfortably in the middle is technological neutrality: the opinion that technologies are neutral and it is how we use them that matters. We didn’t have to use the TV to perpetuate violent behaviour, and even if we did, we could choose not to watch it. We didn’t have to use the TV for political or advertising purposes either – we chose to.

I personally think technological neutrality makes a lot more sense than its counterarguments, technological determinism and cultural materialism. As the saying goes, a bad workman always blames his tools. Ultimately, the onus is not on the specific and individual technologies that affect our lives and culture, but on us and how we choose to use them to our means.

Have you ever wondered how Google search works? How and why certain links are on the first page instead of the second or the third?

If you’re curious, the answer is PageRank.

PageRank is essentially an algorithm, and was developed in 1996 when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford. At that time, search engines typically linked to pages that had the highest keyword density, which meant people could exploit the system by repeating the same phrase over and over to attract higher search page results. Page and Brin decided that was a no-go and developed PageRank as a solution to that problem.

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

—Facts about Google and Competition

There are a couple of websites out there, such as PageRank Checker, that can help you determine your website’s PageRank.

But PageRank isn’t entirely bulletproof; smart alecks have all the same managed to game the system. A good example is Google bombing. Google bombing involves linking to a site by a key phrase and artificially elevating a website in the Google search results for that particular phrase.

Apparently, the most infamous Google bombing incident involved the phrase “miserable failure” and a certain former U.S. president called – no points for getting this right – George Bush. For a period of time in 2003, the link to Bush’s White House biography was the first search result for “miserable failure” on Google search. Haha!

To wrap things up, your life would basically suck without PageRank.

And that’s all for now, folks! I hope you’ve gained a little more insight into what goes behind the works of our indispensable search engine. Until next time!

Six degrees of separation is the theory that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Incredulous, right?

I mean, how often have you had this happen to you? You meet someone new at a social event of sorts, add him/her on Facebook only to find out you have a handful of mutual friends – exactly what happened with Dana and me. Dana and I are international students from Singapore and we met this summer only to find out we had 25 mutual friends on Facebook! 25! That’s a solid amount!

“Oh! You know so-and-so!”
“Yes, I met her in secondary school!”
“What a small world!”

(By the way, the dawn of Facebook and other social networking sites has reduced six degrees of separation to 4.74. Amazing.)

Watts, however, noted a particular problem called clustering. Clustering means “most people’s friends are to some extent friends of each other”, hence resulting in redundancy. Maybe clustering can explain why Dana and I have an astounding 25 mutual friends. We were from different schools, neighbourhoods and social circles (kind of), but when I examine the profiles and backgrounds of our mutual friends, most of them seem to be involved – in some way – in the media and communications industry. So if we are all part of the same industry, is this truly considered networking? Or are we simply clustering?

To be honest, I don’t quite know what to make of this topic. It’s thoroughly fascinating – in fact, it’s probably the fascinating topic thus far in Networked Media. With the Internet, it is so easy to get “connected” these days. Technology is advancing so rapidly this course probably reviews its content much more than others. While I am skeptical about being six connections away from Angelina Jolie, scientific breakthroughs and technology advancements seem to keep proving that nothing is impossible. It’s almost on a daily basis that I’m getting stupefied by all these new inventions and breakthroughs – look who’s bringing 5G network to mankind by 2020. I wonder what this means for the science of networks, but one thing’s for sure: the world will keep shrinking. I’m just so excited to see what’s in store for our future.

Yet another Niki subject I have no clue about: PageRank.

But nothing fazes me when I have the Internet (also known as the Wise One).

PageRank is another one of those Google inventions. It measures a webpage’s importance using an algorithm. Webpages with a higher PageRank are more likely to appear at the top of Google search results.

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

Random trivia: did you know the word algorithm is a synonym for death? And I’m not even going to pretend I know what those colourful circles mean.

Sorry, further explanations on PageRank were full of math and science and induced headaches. But I promise I’ll brave the alphanumeric storm and produce a godly Niki on this. Stay tuned.

Lastly, on a side note: I’m perplexed as to why we have different Niki groups for each entry. Is this meant to be a form of networking? I’m more than happy to work with new group mates, but with the extremely limited amount of time Summer school affords us, communication would be far easier if we were in the same groups for each entry.