Tag Archives: readings

it’s a small world after all

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one of this week’s reading, “six degrees” by Duncan J. Watts was an interesting read about the science behind networks themselves and the ever popular “six degrees of separation”. now, haven’t we all at times tried to work out how far our 6 degrees can take us? i know i do. we all want to be connected to someone famous, even if it’s just through the simple means of knowing someone who knows someone else. it’s a pretty cool idea, even if i do still find it kinda hard to believe that little ole’ me could be connected to those people who live in completely secluded tribes in random parts of africa who have never had contact with the outside world. i mean, come on, they’ve never met anyone outside their tribe?!?! how could i be connected to them. but according to Watts and another researcher named Milgram, i am. if only it was useful. but i guess if everyone is in the same boat, it doesn’t really make any difference to anyone.

onto networks! now, i would describe this reading as having three distinct sections. one useful one about networks, one at the end about the previously discussed six degrees of separation. and a random chunk in the middle about the author’s experiences in college, his professor’s experiences in college, repeated mentions of fire flies and experiments on crickets. poor little crickets, thinking some other cricket loved them but it was only just a machine. ok, i’ll try and stop getting distracted. the networks. the article revealed a lot about the sciences of networks, or, how there isn’t much so far regarding the sciences of networks, but there should be. i like this reading because finally it gave me something real to think about in regards to networks. i mean yeah, the past readings have too, but this was all “networks” in big flashing lights, telling me how we’re all connected.

i thought the story/metaphor about the blackout on the west coast of the USA was great (once i could get the image of bug on a wire out o my head, so much talk of electrical power wires). it just demonstrated how people underestimate the power a

connected network has. like in the human body, sometimes even if one tiny little element fails, it can bring down an entire system because the network relies on everything working together. the relation to the science of networks is concerned with working out how each individual element knows how to come together and work together so cohesively to produce an operating network. this again raises the idea that individually we are all part of one huge network that just somehow manages to function cohesively. i think it’s interesting that this is an emerging field of scientific research, presumably because the notion of networks has been taken for granted as simply existing up until now. i guess the current rise in technology, especially with the network of the internet, that people have begun to realise that networks are a huge factor in our lives and that understanding them could be extremely beneficial to the future of our society.

 

surviving the titanic

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so, i started writing this post 10 whole days ago. then i realised that i’d read the readings for the wrong week and left it to come back to on a later date. and then time completely got away from me and so here i am, ten days later, finishing off and posting this (hopefully) awesome post about the reading. and of course, now i actually have to read the reading again to make sure i remember it. but that’s not too bad.

so, this reading, “the end of books or books without end?” was pretty hypertext heavy. and it was the first reading i’ve read so far that made me intersested in the concept of hypertext. why? because of that one question that was asked: what if you had a book that changed every time you read it?

Now, to me, that sounds crazy. as you all know, i am a traditional book lover. and i will read my books over and over again. but to me it does get a bit repetitive and i often find myself wishing that the book could change somehow.

not to fear! hypertext is here! what do we mean by that? that author’s can create stories with an almost unlimited number of possibilities. and the best part is.. we are creating the story. the story of the book will be based on our choices so it is unique to each one of us. this kinda reminded me of those old goosebumps books we used to read as kids. you know, the choose your own path books? they pretty much all ended in the reader’s gruesome death. my personal favourite was “escape from the carnival of horrors”.

but then, aren’t we destroying the timelessness or changelessness of the book? or are we just making it better? how do you know when you’ve reached the end. how does the author know how to write an end, or where the reader will take themselves? i guess this is where hypertext comes in. as Douglas mentions in the reading, “hypertext it fluid. print is fixed”. where a simple book can sometimes just last a matter of hours (unless you’re reading a song of ice and fire. that thing is huge!), an interactive book or hypertext novel can last for over a week! now doesn’t that sound exciting? and as a bonus you get a brand new story every time you read it. but even for me, every time i reread a book, i tend to find something i missed the first time round. now maybe i’m just not paying enough attention when i read my books, but still, no matter how many times i reread harry potter (now keep in mind this is generally about 3 times a year for each book) i still pick up something i didn’t remember from the previous read. and i have a pretty good memory. so for me books are always exciting.

now, speaking of harry potter, another thing douglas mentioned was the interactive titanic adventure. lets be honest, it sounded pretty cool. surviving the titanic, changing history. where can i find this. but this concept made me think of something else, not quite exact but similar. and that was pottermore.

now if you haven’t heard of pottermore, i really urge you to check it out (click here for the link). pottermore was created by J.K. Rowling to give her fans a more in depth harry potter experience. in addition to an awesome online read along version of each book (in which every screen has hidden clickable goodness), readers can find out what house they would fit into by completing a quiz, earn points for their house which is combined with points from all the others online, they can purchase all their own wizarding goodies from diagon alley, make potions and even compete in duels against other readers online. so not exactly hypertext but getting there. the difference here is the story stays the same, you just get to experience the world of the story in a way that you couldn’t really just from reading the book.

i guess i’m not so against hypertext after all. as long as it doesn’t replace the book altogether. i’ll leave you with one more quote from Douglas.

“the book is a highly refined example of primitive technology while hypertext is a primitive example of highly refined technology”.

 

so, all my essays have been wrong?

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now, those first assigned readings are pretty lengthy and heavy. and i’m so tired that my eyes are turning each letter into some strange hieroglyph that probably wouldn’t even make sense to Cleopatra. so i decided to leave those nice long essays for another time and move onto to something a little nicer on the brain. and i’m glad i did. the age of the essay, by paul graham, was really interesting and has really changed my whole view on essays. unfortunately however, i think if i actually took any of this advice and wrote a proper “essay” for an assignment, i would prob fail. but, it’s interesting stuff either way.

it was interesting the way Paul explained how the way we write essays is similar to hows lawyers present an argument. even though i’ve never really watched law an order, i’ve seen enough law shows on tv to see how that makes sense. an opening statement, presenting the argument with evidence and witnesses and then delivering a closing statement. pretty much an essay word for word. also, i absolutely hate the conclusion of an essay. kinda like how Paul described, it’s pretty much just summing up the previous points but no new ones?? then whats the point of the rest of the essay? like he said, it’s just finding a way to smartly re-word the intro, and it’s often really hard to do, especially when you’ve already spent so much time smartly wording the intro itself.

my favourite part of the article was when paul tells us what a real essay is. essay literally means try. now, as i mentioned before, i wish essay we write at uni could be like this. when i was reading the stuff he was describing about a real essay, like, not starting with a thesis or definitive point to argue but rather going in with a thought or question and just exploring where it could take you, to me that kinda felt like my blog. i start to write something as a blog post and as i write i’ll realise something new or one thought will take me on a completely unintended path or thought stream. thats why half my blog posts end up so long! my mind likes to make weird connections that i don’t even realise until i’m half way through a paragraph that i had not intended in an way.  for a couple of my previous blog posts i actually had to go back and change the title or the first paragraph because the rest of the post didn’t follow it at all! but i could just be crazy. similarly, in high school i could never plan an essay, even in english, like for the final exam. like, i would write practice essays to prepare but i would never get to an essay and write out  plan and dot points on what i would say. because for me, each sentence would form the next sentence and these would often lead to new ideas that you just can’t think about in the pressure of giving yourself 5 minutes to plan an essay at the start. so when beginning an essay i was never entirely sure where it would end and often had to go back and change the introduction accordingly.

like paul said, a real essay is thinking out loud. and to me that’s pretty much what blogging is! it’s a search search for truth but is supposed to meander, not get straight to point. the random tangents we take are where the exciting stuff happens. the surprises. and these are our most valuable experiences. not only are surprises made from what we don’t know but often they contradict what we thought we knew. and that’s where we lead to new discoveries and ideas. they can’t just come from no-where. they come from the unknown or the strange and are built upon to create something great.

it was pretty good advice, that stuff towards the end. an interesting way to look at life. allow yourself to be wrong because what made you wrong could be interesting or surprising. don’t simply accept everything you have been told by society. search for the truth in what is usually a given fact but seems wrong or “off”. and then you can write an essay.

and now i know some interesting facts about vikings in the 900’s too. gotta love them vikings.

Kane’s mansion building the future of technology

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so, this week’s readings were a bit heavy, mainly because to me, they were so old and, lets say “outdated” technologically, that sometimes i found myself getting lost in all that talk of hypertext. i mean, i’m just assuming hypertext is a hyperlink coz i know what a hyperlink is (well,not really but kinda)

but i know its not. and then it just started talking about the Xanadu program and all i could think of was that huge Xanadu mansion from Citizen Kane because we were forced to watch that movie over 50 times in VCE for media. reading through the document and all the talk of introducing hypertext and saving files online, i was just thinking, “how old is this?”. then i passed the sentence saying that a new product called “CD’s” were coming out and i realised just how old it was, it’s really crazy just how much technology has changed in the last 30 years.

what was interesting was just the innovations and ideas that people were created based off this very, dare i say primitive, system. that already the ideas were being created of storing multiple files on a computer or online rather than on floppy disks, this forward thinking is what got us where we are in technology today. the predictions about the fate of print were interesting too, because although print is not completely dead, it looks to be heading that way with the advancement of our technology.

i think the main ideas to take away from the reading is not necessarily the technological stuff (because lets, face it, we’re way past CD’s now) but more the ideas behind it. how to improve and expand on what we have and make it better and more accessible and simple (yes bad grammar, but that’s the beauty of the blog). coming back to design fiction, its not what we can do with our technology, but what we could do that takes us into the future.