The Zen Files

The Manovich reading for this week looked at the differences between narrative form and database form. (According to the reading database form ‘is defined as a structured collection of data. The data stored in a database are organised for fast search and retrieval by a computer…’)

It contends that narrative form (as commonly found in video and print mediums) belongs to the modern age and that database form (found in ‘new media technologies’ i.e. computers) essentially belongs to the post-modern age. These different forms of ‘cultural expression’ are starkly dissimilar due to the fact that databases ‘do not tell stories; they don’t have a beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise, that would organise their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.’ For example, the internet, or even a single web page encapsulates database form as they are simply ‘a sequential list of separate elements: text blocks, images, digital video clips, and links to other pages’. And because the internet always allows for users to add new elements to a page at any point in time, there is never one start, nor one end, only ‘middle’. This ‘openness’ differentiates it from film or print; because of the physical limitations these mediums present they must finish at some point and thus be ‘complete’ in themselves.

Ultimately the internet can be thought of as collection of information… a collection that has the potential to keep growing forever.

So for a way better explanation of the 80/20 rule than my pissy description in my post ‘The Death of ‘Traditional Media”, head to Nethaniel’s blog.

On a different note, Evan brought up some interesting points about Facebook friends in his blog post ‘Remove Your Friends and Hide Your True Self’. It made me think a lot about the 1000+ friends most of us now have on ‘fb’. I mean, come on! As if any of us actually have 1000+ people we could safely call friends.

But then I realised that the term ‘Facebook Friend’ is exactly that, it’s not an actual friend, it’s a person we have connected with online, no matter how fleeting the connection is or might have been. OK so maybe ‘friend’ isn’t quite the correct term either – but I think it’s another one of those cases where technology is developing at a faster rate than language itself. Thus, there is simply no appropriate word to truly explain what a ‘Facebook Friend’ actually is.

Evan asks himself: ‘is it time to rekindle old friendships? Or is it time to dump the unnecessary weight and delete the people I’m no longer associated with?’ Maybe. But, I don’t necessarily think we all need to go around deleting everyone off Facebook just because we aren’t associated with them in the physical world any more. This is really the beauty of the social networking site. It keeps the possibility for you to reconnect with people if need be. For instance, a lot of people I have met travelling I would rarely speak to (in fact Facebook messaging would be the only way I would probably come into contact with them at all). However, in the future, just say I find myself in Berlin, I’ll remember that I met that German girl in that club in that town in Croatia and realise that she lives in Berlin and, next thing you know I’ve got myself some free accommodation! All because of Facebook. Not only that, I actually like having a few random Italians come up in my newsfeed – these are some of the only glimpses that I get of the language I learnt throughout school in my day-to-day life.

Anyway pretty much what I’m trying to question is the notion of treating Facebook like real life, when it is not.

Also I agree with Ellen in many respects about the whole ‘handing in a draft’ aspect of the upcoming essay for the course. I didn’t come to university to be treated like a high school student either.

This week’s Networked Media Symposium helped me to gain a deeper understanding of last week’s readings on the 80/20 rule and ‘the long tail’. Prior to this discussion, I don’t think I completely understood how the 80/20 rule was linked to power law distributions. Adrian used the graph below with the example of the film industry, saying that if the ‘head’ was all of the cinema ‘hits’, which are roughly 20% of all films made, but make 80% of all the money in the industry; then the ‘long tail’ is the other 80% of all films made, otherwise known as the ‘misses’, which only bring in 20% of the overall market revenue.

Adrian also told us that ‘the most expensive thing in retail is shelf space’. Thus, it would only make sense for video rental stores to stock the most popular movies – the 20% that makes the 80% of the market’s income. However, ‘shelf space’ or even the idea of space in general, isn’t a limitation online (unless we’re talking hard-drive space). For example, it doesn’t cost iTunes any more money to ‘stock’ a Lady Gaga track as it does some obscure band’s psychedelic-indie-rock-hindu-dubstep-minimal track. It is for this reason that niche markets have flourished online and is essentially why ‘traditional media’ like newspapers, DVDs and CDs are dying out (have a look at the article Adrian posted about Music Streaming Revenues Overtaking CD Sales In The U.S.)

I never thought I would sink so low…But damn Bachie you got me good.

I was away last year when the Australian Bachelor was on and I’ve never had Foxtel so I’ve not had the benefit of watching the American version of the series. But this year it has become my guilty pleasure. This is definitely not due to the fact that I think any of it is socially correct…actually it is quite the opposite (its what makes it so funny). 30 women dating the one guy? And, come on, yes these women might be pretty desperate, but they’re not just on the show ‘to find love’. I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t be on the show at all if it wasn’t broadcast around Australia or if the producers casted an average looking, flawed but outspoken Bachelor.

Anyway, if you’re interested, check out this blog by Rosie Waterland which gives you a detailed scene by scene analysis of what The Bachelor really boils down to once you strip back the decent production values and vague interviews on screen.

Enjoy the finale next week guys *tear*, go Lisa!

These blogs have definitely been good for at least one thing: knowing that others who are in a very similar position as you are feelin’ your pain. The majority of us who are doing Networked Media at the moment are very similar ages, with very similar ambitions and have been through a lot of the same shit in life (i.e. high school, work, travel). Anyway, sometimes its nice to know that others are struggling to understand the coursework as well…

Or even just struggling to see how what we are learning is relevant to…well…anything. Take Kenton for instance, who wonders why we need to know about nodes, the 80/20 theory and bell curves, when we are studying under a communication media degree. Hmmmm, yeah, not sure.

Secondly, I think everyone’s going through a bit of that ‘post-travel depression’ at the moment… including me. Out of the people that I know in this course who took a gap year in 2013, every one of them has posted a photo from their travels within the last week (Nethaniel, Evan and Angus). I think it’s gotten to that time of the year, where we’re realising it’s almost been a good 12 months since we got back and reality is starting to set in that studying and work is going to be the rest of our lives and maybe those were the best days of our existence. Okay, that’s a little cynical, but at least for me I know last year was a very rare time in my life where I was still able to live at home (thus not pay any rent), work 5 jobs, take a rest from study and disappear from Australia for as long as I wanted really. And unfortunately that opportunity may never arise again.

There were a few interesting points that came up in this week’s symposium:

1. A person’s perceived ‘dominance’ in real life does not necessarily mean that they are dominant on the internet. A lot of bloggers proclaim that they are introverts and thus use online mediums to express themselves in a less ‘social’ environment. On the web, your dominance is not measured by how outgoing or authoritative you are, but how good of a writer you are and how good you are at tapping into the interests of your audience. Ultimately online popularity is measured by how many readers you have and how many links there are to your page.

2. The idea of power law distribution in comparison to bell curve distribution was also explained in more detail than in the Barabasi excerpt. When thinking about the internet as a network (the interconnectedness of webpages), Elliot claimed that the more people link out to a certain webpage, the more traffic it will get and the more other people will link out to it as well. Thus, the rate at which the webpage’s traffic will grow is exponential.

3. The discussion then lapsed into the idea of ‘dense connectors’, the nodes that connect separate clusters (essentially) in networks. Dense connectors are those types of people who have lots of acquaintances everywhere, or if we’re talking about the internet – Google. One example that was used was ‘The Oracle of Kevin Bacon‘. Bacon is an actor who has starred in many films and can therefore be connected to any actor through other actors, often only by 2 or 3 ‘degrees of separation’. We also conducted a quick survey of everyone in the symposium: Adrian asked us if anyone knew anyone in Lithuania – Betty and many others raised there hands. Thus, it was ‘proved’ that generally we can be ‘connected’ to any random person in any country somehow because most people know someone who will know someone from that geographical area.

 

 

I AM SO EXCITED. Well, maybe not as excited as I was when I booked my flights to Japan, but I am still over the moon to finally have a ticket from Tokyo back to Melbourne (I just booked it yesterday). I cannot physically wait to immerse myself within the crazy land of Japan – sumo wrestlers, culinary delights, robot shows, j-pop, dance machines, onsens… and well the list goes on and on.

(I do realise those examples are highly stereotypical, but it kind of makes me even more eager to get over there… my expectations of foreign places are never right, but are always exceeded).

Anyway, I managed to find an awesome blog on Japan, by Tim Urban, which included the video below. OMG.

 

Yesterday’s symposium seems to have made quite an impression on our cohort. Everyone has been bringing up different debates and theories on how to tackle the question of whether or not technology can be neutral.

Let’s start with Angus. His post ” talks about how the English language (or any other language I suspect) creates difficulties in explaining what the word ‘neutral’ actually means. When writing about technological neutrality on my blog, I also struggled with this concept because the word ‘neutral’ is used in many different ways, to mean different things, in different contexts. For a political example, Switzerland was ‘neutral’ during World War II. But how can we apply the meaning of neutrality in this instance to that of technology… it just doesn’t quite compute.

Kenton, Evan and Giorgia also discuss this topic, with varying different examples (Kenton illustrating his point using the Jack Fruit as an artifact – very amusing; Evan with day versus night; and Giorgia with the internet)…

Interestingly enough, everyone seems to be coming to the same confused conclusion – technology cannot be neutral.

 

Well that symposium was a little confusing to say the least. So I think it was definitely beneficial to re-discuss the issue of technologies being neutral in our tutorial.

I came away from the Potts and Murphie reading believing that ‘neutrality’ was just kind of the mid-point between technological determinism and cultural materialism. In very simple terms technological determinists would say that technology affects culture and conversely, cultural materialists would say that culture affects technology. Thus I thought that the theory of neutrality meant that technology neither affected culture or was affected by culture.

But then I thought of carbon neutrality; the only instance where I would probably use the word ‘neutral’ in an every day situation. If a house is carbon neutral it essentially means that it is creating just as much energy ‘naturally’ (for instance using solar panels) as it is consuming. So in essence, the word neutral in this example almost points to the idea of the ‘number’ zero (i.e. -1+1=0). But isn’t zero nothing? And isn’t nothing impossible to explain because it is…nothing? In trying to apply this example to technological neutrality, I gathered that this would then mean technology and culture had equal influence on each other. But no. That was slightly wrong too, because the definition of neutral is ‘impartial’ and if technology was impartial doesn’t that essentially mean that technology wouldn’t have an effect on anything and nothing would have an effect on it?

So trying to round this up – nothing in this world is independent of anything else. Nothing is completely unconnected to anything, thus nothing, can be neutral. Or can it?

This week’s reading by Duncan Watts looked at the idea of networks in general, reaffirming the idea that ‘the relationship between the parts is more important than the parts themselves’. The first example he used to demonstrate the unpredictability and interdependence of network structures was the power system, i.e. the electricity network. However, what I found most interesting about this example, was Watts’ position on electricity in general. He states that: ‘the
power system is arguably the most essential technological feature of the
modern world. More pervasive even than highways and railroads, and
more fundamental than cars, airplanes, and computers, electric power
is the substrate onto which every other technology is grafted, the foundation
for the grand edifice of the industrial and information ages.
Without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and
everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly
more expensive and inconvenient. Electricity is a fact of life so basic
that we cannot imagine being without it.’

And in many ways I agree. Without electricity, my proposed career would be somewhat non-existent – anything to do with digital film or computer editing/animation would be impossible. Nevertheless, what intrigued me was how this idea contradicted what Murphie and Potts discussed in last week’s reading on technology and culture. Lewis Mumford claimed that the clock was the ‘key machine of the modern industrial age’. This era seemed to be obsessed with the idea of speed and efficiency…and of course to increase speed, you must be able to measure time. Mumford states that ‘a desire to increase speed…lies behind all politics, all wealth’, but then doesn’t electricity as well? So maybe both technologies, clocks and power stations, are to thank for ‘driving this relentless engine of civilization’.