Value: (40%)

Due: Friday, 19th February at 5pm

This task can be completed in pairs or individually. If a complete draft of the writing (minimum 1200 words) is submitted to your teacher by Monday, 9th February you will receive a bonus 5 marks. Work that is done in pairs is expected to be more sophisticated (writing, ideas, use of media, references) than work that is done individually.

Submission

Email the URL of your essay with a screen capture of all pages included in a .pdf attachment by 5pm on the due date.

TOPIC PROBLEM

Network literacy is not merely knowing about this, it is doing it. It is in this doing that we can understand that literacy is an applied knowing, or if you prefer a knowing through doing.… It is being comfortable with change and flow as the day to day conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, and recognising that all of this may change, and appear differently in six months. What underlies such change, however, are the principles of distributed content production and sharing, folksonomies, trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build with these varieties of content and knowledge….. Network literacy means recognising that there are no longer canonical sources and having the skills to find what it is you think you want, of being able to judge it, and then of being able to incorporate this, in turn, into your knowledge flows. Finally, networked literacies are marked by your participation as a peer in these flows and networks — you contribute to them and in turn can share what others provide.

Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30.

Your task is to compose and pursue a research question that will enhance your understanding of a topic area that is of key interest to you and will have direct relevance to your future career.  This should be explored in the context of Networked Media and must include a variety of different media.  The essay can exist across multiple webpages.

Take any of the ideas/concepts/arguments in the above quote to investigate and think about the possible implications of this for you as a future professional media maker. For example, what might you need to know about? How might this affect how you make media? Consume it? How it get used? Distributed? Could the media in itself (what sort of thing we currently mean when we say ‘media’) change? In other words take something from this to think about what it might mean for you as someone who will influence our future media.

DESCRIPTION

This essay is to be published as a page or pages on your blog or as a standalone web page/s published via themediastudents.net website.

It is to include:

• text
• image (photos or drawings)
• video and/or audio

The essay is to be around 1,500 words in length. It does not have to conform to traditional academic requirements and so can be

• personal
• use “I”
• finish with questions rather than answers
• be exploratory in its thinking and argument/s

However, it is still an essay which means the work must:

• make an argument
• explore or think about an idea or ideas
• use evidence
• appropriately cite that evidence

An essay is not an opinion piece, it is informed by research and thinking. This makes an essay critical, which doesn’t mean it criticises something negatively but that it interrogates ideas and assumptions to see what they are, what they are made of, and where they might take you. An essay is then a place in which you think through something, rather than reporting on what you already know or understand. This task is inviting you to treat your writing and making as more like a laboratory, where you state something, then think about what it means, its consequences or implications. In other words follow the idea where it leads you.

The essay can consist of more than a single page. The image/s and video/s and/or audio that you use are expected to contribute to the ideas being explored. They might reflect an idea, reinforce or endorse it, or provide a prompt or point of departure for your own thinking.

I just wanted to post the analogy I used in class to describe the difference between random and scale-free networks.  Imagine, if you will, that you need to roll a 12 in a game of Monopoly to get to the ‘Go’ square.  If you were using a twelve-sided die, you would have a 1/12 probability of success but because most games use two six-sided die then your probability drops to 1/36 simply because there are more possible outcomes:

For a twelve-sided die:

1|1

2|2

3|3

4|4

5|5

6|6

7|7

8|8

9|9

10|10

11|11

12|12

For two six-sided dice:

2|1-1

3|2-1, 1-2

4|1-3, 3-1, 2-2

5|1-4, 4-1, 2-3, 3-2

6|1-5, 5-1, 2-4, 4-2, 3-3

7|1-6, 6-1, 2-5, 5-2, 3-4, 4-3

8|2-6, 6-2, 3-5, 5-3, 4-4

9|3-6, 6-3, 4-5, 5-4

10|4-6, 6-4, 5-5

11|5-6, 6-5

12|6-6

With the introduction of more elements the bell curve becomes more pronounced.  This also represents an interesting feature of random networks.  In a random network, a key requirement is that – because they are random – each node is equally probable to connect to any other node.  As such, outliers will exist (such as rolling a twelve), though this cannot account for the extraordinary popularity of certain sites.  Hubs like Facebook and Google should have an equiprobable chance of appearing as sites with only one or two links.  Take the rolls as the number of links to a specific site – if the Internet functioned as a random network you would expect it to represent a bell curve rather than the logarithmic curve described by Barabási.

A scale-free network relies on growth and preferential attachment.  We can also use basic probabilities to account for these networks, though we must change the way these probabilities function.

If you roll a double in Monopoly, you get to roll again.  Your odds of rolling a double are one in six.  It is possible to keep rolling doubles continuously but the probability reduces dramatically every time. (Well, not really.  It’s the same each individual time but in terms of the calculated probability of all rolls it reduces exponentially the more you get.)  The statistics overlaid on the graph below indicates how many of all possible outcomes exist within each section (ie, 5/6 turns will only receive one roll, 5/36 will have two, etc.)

To demonstrate how this can account for scale-free networks, let’s take a different game of Monopoly.  In this game, every time someone lands on your property, you get a chance to roll again, acquiring more property and hence more chances to keep rolling.  How many rolls (or links) are you likely to acquire over the course of the game?  What if the game had potentially infinite players and potentially infinite squares?

On the Internet, each link to a website increases the exposure of that website and consequently the probability that other users will see and link to it.  Of course it does not function as a static, one-in-six probability.  There are modifiers based on the perceived value of the content that affect the probabilities of growth.  However, you can see how, based on simple probabilities, hubs can emerge naturally simply due to exposure.  To illustrate this, I’ve overlaid the graph from above over the power law distribution graph from the Barabási reading:

(Link)