Will go ahead with Elliot.
Self Assembling Robots
These are small robots that have the capacity to self assemble into ‘architectural’ forms. This is a very big change, and while we can get all whatever about tech determinism the key thing I’d take from it is that it is a networked/distributed model of organisation. Small pieces that only know enough to do enough, rather than our older intellectual models which assumed you needed to know all of something to be able to do anything. For example software companies once thought you needed a very strict design document to write code, but agile development showed that wasn’t the case. Then software companies thought you needed centralised command and control to write any major software, open source development demonstrated that that is not the case. Companies once thought that the top of the organisation had to be in charge of all, and that is no longer the case, and in education we once thought the teacher had to know all and somehow just communicate this to students. Likewise, the internet as a scale free network just happened, and just happens, with no central command and control decision making. This is a big theoretical change in how we understand the world, a move from centres (the brain, one part of the brain, some sort of dominating ideology or institution) to realising that there aren’t really centres (to the body, to the brain, to the world).
Unsymposium 0.8
Carry over questions:
- (from a couple of weeks ago): Why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web?
- We’re used to the idea of the internet being characterised as a democratic, open, non-hierarchical technology and space: is Galloway arguing something that fundamentally challenges this?
- Galloway notes that the future is already here but not uniformly distributed (paraphrasing William Gibson). How does this apply to a network like the internet?
This week’s new questions:
- Do the algorithms of a database change the nature of what is defined as narrative?
- How are databases changing notions ‘traditional’ narrative?
- How can narratives emerge from databases?
- Why do some media objects explicitly follow database logic while others do not?
- Can the paradigm and the syntagm be more the same than opposites in new media?
11 Reading (for Week 12)
A speculative piece that comes from the point of view of art to close out the semester:
Dietz, Steve. “Ten Dreams of Technology.” Leonardo 35.5 (2002): 509–522. MIT Press Journals. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. (PDF)
Why art? Because artists know how to think about the materiality of the digital, that it isn’t just virtual and abstract, that it has concrete qualities that matter. Why does this matter to you? Because to ‘get’ the network it is not enough to play on it, or use it, but you need to understand it in a deeper sense.
Weird examples to help explain. Do you know of any racing car driver who doesn’t have a deep understanding of cars, engines, tyres, and of course driving – they don’t just drive. Do you know of any dancer that doesn’t have a deep understanding of different sprung floors, points, slippers, shoes, ankles, knees, their own bodies and muscles? Do you know any film maker who doesn’t have a deep understanding of composition, miss-en-scene, light, space, time, and performance? It is part of trying to move past thinking that doing something on the interwebs means we understand the interwebs. In the same way that just because you know how to drive a car doesn’t mean you ‘understand’ cars.
Black Boxes, Algorithmic Decisions
Nice article in The Atlantic on recommendation algorithms and those that rely less on social endorsement than automatic other things. The important thing is the bias that systems always exhibit, and that we treat these as black boxes. (I described our approach to our learning as a black box in the first lecture, same idea.)
More Symposium Take Aways
David D on the Facebook hack, Kevin Bacon, why not become a hub, and that you need to do it. (Related to that thanks to Boglarka for this gem.) Denham on the Facebook hack, making, and the new world order. Boglarka concerned about sitting in a sea of media signals. Ditte using Castells (one of the key writers on the internet as an information economy come technological ecology) to think about technical come cultural determinism. Kevin on, well, Kevin, Facebook, and listening to your writing talking back to you. Lauren wants to keep technology under control. Jackie on creative freedom (I think creativity is defined and enabled by constraint, not the other way round, and while the sic-fi example might not have worked the question I think is who can you make something that is outside of ‘codes’?) Louisa has long bullet point list. Danielle has a good culled set of observations. Rebecca on whether technology controls or not (I don’t think it is about control, control assumes direction, a centre and decision, the view being described is that there isn’t a direction, or a centre, and that lots of technologies arrive that don’t yet have a purpose – cars being my example (but you could easily add the Xerox, the telephone, and the typewriter), so if they aren’t thought to be needed then why or how do they come to be?).
Paul Revere, Social Graph, Speculative Writing
The readings about networks and graphs. Facebook has what it calls a social graph, which is the data it maps about all our connections. I can’t do the mathematics behind it, but it is potentially very powerful, as this post from Ditte shows. In a similar vein when the Snowden story broke recently there were arguments that if the government harvested all this information about you, and you weren’t doing anything wrong, then what was the issue. (We’ll put to one side questions about sovereignty, privacy, the assumption of privacy and so on.) Sociologist Kieran Healy, using a social graph, wrote an extraordinary (speculative – note it is framed as if written from London in 1772, calls its data set Bigge Data – as in ‘olde worlde’ – and mentions an upcoming EDWARDx – TedX – talk) blog post that used this same mathematics and theory to ‘prove’ that Paul Revere was a terrorist. For those that don’t know, Paul Revere was the person who rode through Boston (there is literally a line painted on the road, in Boston today, so you can retrace his famous ride) yelling that the “British are coming!” and alerting the American patriots to the oncoming British soldiers in the American Revolution. He essentially set up an intelligence unit. He is the American hero (patriot, solider, prosperous silversmith, Bostonian, subject of a famous poem), and as Healy shows, by using the social graph (nodes and links) you can demonstrate that Revere was a hub, and therefore a terrorist. As Healy writes:
What a nice picture! The analytical engine has arranged everyone neatly, picking out clusters of individuals and also showing both peripheral individuals and—more intriguingly—people who seem to bridge various groups in ways that might perhaps be relevant to national security. Look at that person right in the middle there. Zoom in if you wish. He seems to bridge several groups in an unusual (though perhaps not unique) way. His name is Paul Revere.
Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any) or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations.
The point he is making is that just based on social links a lot of information is known, but then add one or two assumptions (as he points out, he knows nothing about these people) and it is easy for this information to shift from being information, to knowledge, to an exercise of unreasonable power.
Voxies
Daniel J on notes from the first part of last week’s unsymposium. Ditte has stuff on data mining and how a shop could know if a customer was pregnant, and Tamrin went seeking out more information about small world networks, and was successful.
Big Lev
Dominic on Manovich on stories and databases and long tails and YouTube. Courtney on database, narrative, games. Boglarka and databases and narrative. Samuel picks up the semiotics of Manovich with the paradigm versus syntagm discussion. Isabella has a good gloss on Mr Lev Manovich’s essay. Brittany links to a biography. Tamrin discusses narrative and database. Tom on games, database, narrative – friend or foe? Courtney has a YouTube clip explaining what a database is and why they’re useful. And Courtney on the reading and how for Manovich the world is just a big collection of stuff (a database). Begs the question, is narrative then a less ‘authentic’ depiction of the world than a list? And Rebecca on games, narrative, databases, lists and stories.
This Week Was Bought to You By…
Shannen digs up some supplementary reading on technique and technology (well done). Anna C with notes. Victoria L, with streamed notes that seems to have kept up well. Brittany has dot points, and Patrick writes about codes, making, and rectangles. Tiana received chocolates, and thinks about nature, technology, culture. Tess on Bacon numbers.