I will never fall asleep around campus knowing that the Purple Cynic Kenton is on the loose, naming, shaming and even threatening to take photos as evidence. Another comical post from him, well done.

Kiralee believes a solid storyline and well-developed characters are much better in a film or TV show than aesthetics and production quality, and I think I agree!

Marcus thinks about the future and how technology is going to change the world. “Would technology bring peace to wars? Or would it be the very cause of our destruction?” he ponders. Let’s hope it’s not the latter! He mentioned the film ‘Lucy’ which interprets how science and technology may work together in the future.

So last week I accidentally wrote about one of this week’s readings. So this week I’ll discuss the other one.

This reading was about the 80/20 rule. Although I read the whole article carefully, I found it quite confusing especially talking about power laws and distributions and bell curves, a lot of mathematical kind of stuff that isn’t exactly my cup of tea.

What I did find interesting however was the basic concept of the 80/20 rule. It began when Pareto was gardening and noticed that 80% of his peas were produced by 20% of his pea pods. Similarly he noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 2-% of the population.

In terms of the internet, 80% of links on the web point to only 20% of webpages. Funny how such a simple rule can translate to something much more complex.

Blogs form an ecology
The way blogs and blog posts link together is just like an ecology..

The question was raised, how is it that assembling a large collection of components into a system results in something altogether different from just a disassociated collection of components?
Now, this sounds quite wordy, but Adrian showed us an example of a website (I’ve forgotten it’s name sorry) where you can write any story, and then label it however you like, such as that you’re a man in Melbourne writing a story about being a dad, and the website automatically generates a collection of all the posts with those same labels. Suddenly this single component becomes a large collection of other similar components. Is this kind of like a hashtag? Sort of.

The Oracle of Bacon was a pretty cool concept. Using any actor, you can find their link to Kevin Bacon, in a sort of six degrees of separation kind of way. Let’s use my future husband Dave Franco as an example. Dave was in the film ‘Milk’ with Cabran E. Chamberlain, who was in ‘Murder in the First’ with Kevin Bacon. So Dave Franco has a Bacon number of 2. Who’d have thought! Adrian said if we can find someone with a ‘Bacon number’ of more than 4 to let him know, it’s that hard to find one that distant.

Last night I spent a great deal of time YouTubing my future husband, Dave Franco. Here’s a video of an interview with him and my back up future husband Zac Efron discussing their film Bad Neighbours.

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you watch it, TONIGHT. It’s hilarious. Zac gets his shirt off, Dave gets his pants off. What more can you want? Also they do some very funny impersonations of Robert DeNiro which are a must see.

Living in a Frat house looks awesome. I’d have to live in a Sorority however, the girl version, but I think it’d be so much fun. Perhaps I need to go on exchange to America next year. Seriously. I’ll look into it.

A couple of things jumped out at me from this week’s reading.

The first was how powerful the internet can really be, in this instance, in creating an overwhelming amount of success for a decade old book. Amazon recommendations was programmed to notice patterns in buyer’s behaviours and determined that people purchasing the successful novel ‘Into Thin Air’ would like ‘Touching the Void’. So heaps of people started buying it, enjoying it, and writing rave reviews, triggering a chain reaction. A moderately successful book from 10 years ago suddenly spent 14 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. I hope author Joe Simpson is sending Amazon a Christmas card each year.

Also I was very interested to know that an average film needs 1500 people to see it in the first two weeks to make it worth screening but a record store only needs to sell two copies of a CD a YEAR to make that CD worth carrying – that’s the rent for half an inch of shelf space.

I need to make more friends in this subject, or at least know people’s last names.

I really enjoyed the quote Sarah mentioned in one of her posts from the novel ‘Gone Girl’, contrasting the technological world from the ‘real’ one.

Evan made a great point, “Anything that we consciously talk about or think about is influencing opinion and kickstarting a chain reaction of thoughts. If neutrality means no influence, then nothing we are consciously aware of is neutral.”

And lastly, I’m going to mention Rachel once again (I really do need more friends). The realisation that the keyboard we use today is the same one that accompanied the first ever computer sparked her attention too. Why is this so? Who knows.

The network is a disruptive technology. It challenges and threatens how we go about doing things.

In today’s symposium we discussed neutral technologies. Adrian was of the very, and I mean VERY, strong opinion that no technology can be neutral. Jason and Elliot argued that some technologies can be ‘more’ neutral than others. Adrian said that technologies have affordances and are better suited to doing some things than other things. He used the analogy of a hammer. Now, if I had a dollar for every time Adrian mentioned the word ‘hammer’ throughout this symposium, I would be eating a steak dinner tonight (Or at least a steak sandwich from Grill’d.)

Moving on we spoke about the difference between plot and story. Plot does not equal story. Plot is the order in which something is narrated, how it’s told. The story is what actually happens. Adrian said the plot is so much more important than the actual story. I don’t 100% agree. If the story is bad, it doesn’t matter how it’s told (aka. the plot), the whole thing is going to suck. True a well organised and thought out plot can enhance a story, but you need that initial basis to be solid in order to make the whole thing great.

I wasn’t in class last week because I was sick, so I wasn’t assigned any blogs to look at. So I’m just going to go with a few of my friends.

Tilly’s post about the reading was thought provoking but what mainly caught my attention was her newfound fascination with the television series ‘Masters of Sex’. I’m looking for a new series to divulge in, seeing as Suits is on hiatus until next year, so I may have to check it out.

Rachel analysed the reading also, bringing to light the idea that writing is a technology. Writing shortcuts and abbreviations have changed the way we speak and communicate with one another. Who isn’t guilty of a few spoken LOL’s in everyday conversation. Her blog’s background is also pretty kick ass. You go Rach.

Caitlin’s blog had incorporated many images, videos and GIFs which made it great to read. I particularly enjoyed the GIFs explaining her various emotions during the HTML test. Very funny stuff.

Something that jumped out at me from this week’s reading was the notion that technological change is autonomous, removed from social pressures, following a logic or imperative of it’s own. This is questionable. Technological change in my opinion continues to evolve as a direct result of human desire, wants and needs, as well as their collective determination to improve and build the world around us. This is a type of social pressure is it not?

 
Stephen Hill later in the reading disagrees, “technological change… is not, by itself, productive of social change.” Whatever you say Stephen. He puts it down to the alignment between the technological possibilities and the society and culture that exists, which I think is kind of a given. Of course technological change depends on the possibilities the society have to create such a change. Not everything is possible in the present. We have to work towards such things – technology is just one of many examples.

Another Tuesday, another symposium.

I’ll admit, I was a little naughty in this symposium, I was on my laptop discovering Seek.com for the first time. I’m looking for a job in Melbourne over the summer. But I digress. This is Networked Media we’re discussing after all.

So I was somewhat distracted.  However, the question of whether internet users have lost a sense of privacy was posed. And of course, they have. No doubt about it. For instance, RMIT could easily track each and every single one of us based on our wifi signals coming from our computer when we’re connected to their network. Creepy hey. I noticed this myself earlier today when I was in the IT guy’s office at college where I live. I’m having problems connecting to the student wifi. Anyway on his screen there was a massive list of every laptop, iPad or mobile phone that was currently connected and which ‘portal’ (or whatever you call it) they were connected to. There are many depending on what corridor you’re sitting in etc. Bit creepy.

Clearly we have lost a sense of privacy due to the internet; your computer can be hacked, files taken, passwords and money stolen, the works. This is why it is even more imperative we become network literate in this new digital age, to avoid such problems from occurring.

Until next time, stay safe amigos.