Archive of ‘Readings’ category
When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. . . .
The human mind does not work in that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
It makes so much sense that this way of thinking is what launched Hypertext in the first place. We do not think in straight lines, but in mind maps spreading like spiderwebs. Scrolling through pieces of information, we come across one that links to something else or reminds us of a past experience, and we either choose to follow down that path or we choose to keep scrolling. Choosing whether to click on the link that a page presents us with, or to persevere with the original page.
We make this decision constantly, so quickly that sometimes we aren’t even aware of it. And yet, when you stop to think about it, often the link from one topic to another is so unclear it seems invisible.
Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a friend when I realised that even though I still was listening to what they were telling me, I was also thinking about the way the sunlight had streamed through the trees in beams of light when I visited Hanging Rock two weeks ago. At first, I had no idea why I had started thinking about this memory, and I also wasn’t fully aware that I was even really thinking about it, until I realised that I wasn’t 100% listening to what my friend was telling me.
There was something about something he had said to me, that had brought me back to that moment. The link was so unclear that I was barely aware that I had even selected it, let alone known that it was there.
The other thing that Bolter’s piece made me think about, was my experience of travelling alone in Europe last year. After my phone was stolen in Rome, I arrived at my Paris apartment the next day with no ability to contact home, some passable French and ten days to spend walking the streets alone. My French speaking skills limited my possibilities to express myself orally, and with no one to share the experience with in English, I made best friends with my diary and the ten novels I devoured throughout my time there.
After ten days soaking in the beauty of cobblestone streets, pain au chocolat for petit dejeuner, afternoons spent in the library section of the wonderful Centre Pompidou and whole days spent in city gardens hidden in courtyards around Le Marais, designed to capture the sunlight and minimise the noise from the street, with Tim Winton, Ian McEwan, Helen Garner and my moleskin notebook for company, I felt like I was bathing in literary prose.
But as the days wore on, something strange began to happen. My constant exposure to literature and habit of writing down every last detail that happened each day was changing the way I was experiencing the world around me. Instead of noticing things happening around me arbitrarily, everything became inspiration. Everything.
The way the garbage man threw away his cigarette butt was suddenly loaded with poetic grace, as was the homeless man leering at me from across the street. A blue towel hanging of a balcony above me became bird like, a trapped animal desperate to float away into the dusk. Lying in a garden, I was moved to tears by the young boys kicking a soccer ball in the dust and the heat, and as the perfect blue sky was split in half by a ghost white aeroplane passing directly over me, as if trying to remind me in my loneliness that home was always just a plane ride away.
Not only was I constantly moved and inspired by the events around me, I was no longer experiencing them through a method of notice-react-move on, but instead as I saw each unfold around me, I experienced it in the prose that I imagined I would write about it in later.
I even thought of myself in the third person, as if I had stepped outside to see and feel myself for the first time in my life. I became ‘she’, or ‘the blonde girl’ in my own mind, and each line of prose came to me as if pre-written.
I understand how Bolter speaks of the writer’s inability to separate himself from his craft or his machine, and the exhaustion of such a difficulty. However, this bizarre and constant sensation brought about a level of surreal fulfilment to my experience that I might have previously thought impossible.
Bolter’s connection between writing and technology struck me after just watching an interview on The 7.30 Report with astronaut Chris Hadfield. Chris Hadfield is the guy that went into space and made this amazing video of himself playing the guitar and singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in zero gravity (among doing a whole lot of other cool sciencey astronaut for the world too).
In the interview, he made a really interesting point about science and the arts, when asked if the beauty and wonder of the universe could ever really be described by science, by poetry or simply through faith. Sidestepping that potential landmine, he instead commented on the response the world had to his video. Science and technology can only go so far, but when it comes to connecting and uniting the world you have to have the arts, be it music or poetry or writing, to get anyone to really pay attention on a deeper level. As fascinating as space exploration may be on a scientific level, it took the artistic expression of the song to really connect people to the experience in an emotional and meaningful way.
Science and the arts are inextricably linked in this way, and the dichotomy is such that as advancements are made in one element, it drags its opposing element forward with it. Writing is technology, as well as it is the antithesis of technology, and yet one cannot exist without the other.
Reading 04.2 amazed me for Vannevar Bush’s ability in 1945, to imagine a totally fantastical and likely preposterous (for the time) point of advancement of the humble camera, and yet without ever considering the then unheard of digital possibilities. It is incredible to think that someone could look so far ahead, considering and rectifying every possible technical impediment, without ever considering any other potential for digital possibility. It makes me wonder how far along the process of invention we must currently sit, and whether there is potential for some new, unimaginable dimension or way of thinking that will revolutionise our day to day lives.
Reading 04.3 reminded me of not only the endless positive potential of the Internet, but also of its dangers. Working in the youth sector part time, I am often witness to tales of cyber bullying, online harassment and exactly how easy it is to be somebody you’re not online. Being somebody you’re not online ranges from extremes as with the case of Michael Campbell, to 16 year old girls who present an image of themselves online so far removed from reality that they begin to get confused between which version of themselves is the truth, their day to day life or the characters they portray online.
It also reminded me of that website Second Life, where grown men and women have affairs, gamble their life savings and even take drugs through an online platform. What is the difference between a physical affair and one conducted online? Is the former really that much worse than the latter? Each represent a disconnect from reality, a checking out of commitment, and a need to distract from the mundanity of day to day existence. In a way, I find a physical affair is easier to understand, for its need to fulfil a carnal desire, rather than a fabricated, 2-Dimensional experience, a love affair with a screen.
Much like that film Knocked Up, where a woman is convinced her husband is cheating on her, only to find he is secretly part of a Fantasy Baseball league. How can these flawed attempts to replicate reality possibly come to fill the holes represented by the real thing?
The idea of talking to somebody I don’t know very well on a platform such as Facebook Chat makes me nervous. How do I convey tone, sense of humour, how much attention I’m paying, body language etc. etc. through text in a box? I don’t know how to put myself through the screen, to transport my body and my voice and my opinions through my screen, through the links and nodes and intricate networks of the Internet and present myself on somebody else’s. I have not mastered how to communicate with somebody when I cannot see their reaction, cannot read their eyes or listen to their laughter, watch their brain tick over as they come up with a response.
So while the Internet fascinates and excites and empowers with each new advancement, I also worry like many before me for the fate of human interaction.
To Be Continued, and hashed out properly…
The first thing that caught my eye in Nelson’s writing was the inclusion of this quote by Annie Dillard:
Whenever a work’s structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.
I loved the structuring of the book and the comparison it draws to hypermedia, the internet and the workings of the human mind. It reminded me instantly of VCE Psychology, and learning about nodes and neural pathways within the brain (although I seem to be able to recall very little of this topic..). My very vague recollection points to many varyingly discombobulated pathways that take us from one thought to another, and the idea that we can take many different pathways to arrive at the same destination, much like with the internet as a mode for gathering information.
What I really loved about Nelson’s writing however, was his ability to make computer programming seem sexy – or at least, sexier – a topic that (until this course), I had never given a second thought. The possibilities are urgent, exciting and personal and from Nelson’s perspective, present an opportunity for fulfilment of the individual; physically, psychologically and emotionally, rather than simply an opportunity for corporate advantage.
Nelson writes of three approaches to the oncoming computer era. There are those who like the incompatibility and complication, and say it is the new world and that we must learn to live with it. Others, already hating computers, correctly dread these matters and hope vainly to stop the computer tide. Nelson’s suggestion of a third approach, is one that unifies and organises in the right way, so as to clarify and simplify our computer and working lives, and indeed to bring literature, science, art and civilisation to new heights of understanding, through hypertext.
While it is difficult to imagine a version of myself alive in 1980 with an opinion on this oncoming computer tide, I can only imagine that a piece such as Literary Machines would have quelled any of my lingering doubts or apathy. As a 21 year old in 2014 whose mind instantly goes on holiday at the mention of anything vaguely scientific or technological, Nelson’s ability to focus on the advantages for the individual, particularly within other arenas such as literature or art, his ability to convey urgency and his expression of political frustrations may have been just the things to get me going in the early 80’s.
Adrian’s essay saddened and excited me at the same time. It saddened me in the same way that the knowledge that I am a part of the last generation to have avoided having their baby photos taken on iPhones makes me weep for my parents’ quilted cover glossy albums soon to be a thing of the past. Perhaps as a result of being way too obsessed with Puberty Blues, there is this weird part of me that pines for a past analogue era and a 70s aesthetic. The increasing irrelevance of print literacy makes me want to revisit the library of my old primary school and relearn the Dewey Decimal System for the sake of preserving a lost language. (Let me take a second to note that the greater my exhaustion, the freer the cliches flow. I apologise.)
Having expressed my love for the old skool, let me make it clear that I also find the ever changing, connective nature of the topic and greater industry extremely exciting. The concept of the ‘produser’ clearly distinguishes networked media from any form of media that has come before it, and it is fascinating to consider the topic almost as its own living and breathing organism, that is changing before our very eyes. It is exhilarating to consider ourselves a part of this constantly changing hub of communication and connectivity, and to realise that we have the power to consume and contribute simultaneously. The below quote summed this up perfectly for me.
Through such sharing the distinction between consuming and creating content dissolves so unlike books in network literacy we become peers in the system, and indeed to be ‘good’ at network literacies is to contribute as much as it is to consume.
The essay also put Elliot’s description of the course into a little more perspective. It is scary to realise that by the time I will be graduating, much of what I’ve learned is likely to have become irrelevant. As such, I understand that the focus of the course will centre on becoming an effective “peer within the system”, a good “networker” if you will, rather than focusing solely on technical and potentially non-permanent aspects of the subject.
Creative Commons reminds me of when I was in high school and I got to stay at a friend’s house on the weekend whose mum was a “cool mum” and let us go to the parties my own mum banned outright (“Just let me speak to the person whose having the party’s parents and get a confirmation there will be enough parental supervision” – yeah, right.) I knew that my own mum was protecting me for a reason, just when she insisted on taking it that far it became pretty limiting and unnecessary. Having said that, a lot of the time the party wasn’t even worth the effort of convincing my mother to let me stay at said friend’s house, and I probably would have been better off home in bed watching season 1 of The OC for the millionth time.
Until this week’s readings on Creative Commons, I had no idea just how protected I actually was. I thought that whatever I posted on my (other) WordPress account was free to be stolen and/or manipulated by whoever saw fit and that there was little I could do about that. So it was kind of nice to find out that there are Internet Police protecting me from that kind of thing.
But the thing is, due to the extremely small pool of people who actually read my blog, (hi, mum), the idea that anybody out there in the Internet universe might have stumbled upon it and found anything worth reposting or referencing in even the most obscure way kind of appeals to me in a really big way. Of course, it’d be great if they did the simple thing and just asked for permission, but beggars/choosers etc.
So Creative Commons presents itself to me as a pretty efficient solution to my blogging mini-drama.
However, my next expression of apathy comes along as I question whether its really worth it acquiring a Creative Commons licence to plaster on my embarrassingly unused WordPress (when, lets face it, it’s never going to look as good as it did colour coded in texta to match the Kiwi bird it was representing). My blog stats show a solid 7 viewers over a 3 month period, so is this really something worth worrying about for me?
The first thing that came to mind when Elliot brought up HTML in the Week 2 tute was the 2 or 3 year period I spent honing the language to a fine art, without ever considering it may come in handy one day. This period refers to my early years of high school spent totally addicted to MySpace, but before I started thanking my 13 year old self for that surprising foresight I realised that every bit of knowledge I had gained about acquiring rainbow cursors that sprinkled fairy dust as you moved them across the screen had totally deserted me in the ensuing 8 years.
“Queen of MySpace” may or may not have been a term that was thrown around my year 7 cohort as I whispered magical proxy addresses to my classmates after our school wisely cottoned on and blocked the website. I was proud of my HTML, my fonts that flashed different colours in the early years and then the oh-so-cool minimalist approach I adopted towards the end. These days, influenced by the much less malleable Facebook I could barely insert a JPEG, let alone my once beloved GIFs.
As such, I highly enjoyed Week 2’s refresher on Hyper Text Mark-up Language, and can now:
Insert photos
Create links to other webpages/sections within the blog
Create a homepage
Upload videos
Maybe by next week I’ll even have my rainbow cursor back!!!