Lauren on the ‘specular economy’ which is not only about how we think we want to present ourselves but also how extensive networks now are. If as we saw with Kevin Bacon it is easy to get from one person to another then imagine how trivial it is for someone you say something unpleasant about to actually hear about it.
Small World Networks, Scale Free, Kevin Bacon
My riff in response to Brian’s comment that the 80/20 stuff isn’t what really matters in the reading.
- the internet is scale free – you can add and add to it and it doesn’t fill up (unlike a room, a book, film, and most other of our media)
- it is made up of nodes (in social networks outside the internet these are people, in social networks inside the internet like Facebook these are generally people), which are small ‘things’ that can have connections to other similar things (friends, acquaintances, links from one web page to another)
- preferential attachment means that some nodes are more likely to want to be connected to other nodes (in my academic hypertext essay one node got more links in and out because it turned out to the heart of the argument I was making, because it is was an essay this was why this one node was preferred, in a blog you might link to a blog that is authoritative (you value) in the field that you also write about, you might just link to a friend’s blog)
- as a result of these three things hubs form, which have lots of connections in, and often out
- interestingly hubs have very weak connections – you don’t know them (a strong connection)
- and so a small world network arises
So it isn’t random, it isn’t disordered, it isn’t chaotic. A structure emerges that is understandable. But it emerges, the shape isn’t known in advance. This too, in many ways, is the opposite of what we think the world is.
A small world network means that because there are links, and hubs, it is quite simple to get from one point in the network to any other. Because there are densely connected hubs links follow a power law. A power law tells us that a few have a lot, but also that most of the material is in the tail, which is why niches now really matter.
Blogs, Opinion, Knowledge
Opinions, argument, the university and the coffee house. Read some interesting things in the blogs about the blogs and the encouragement of opinion and reflection. These are good conversations to have, and while these sorts of questions get discussed earlier in the semester they really don’t make much sense until we’re in the thick of it. (We really only learn by doing, to think otherwise is to think you can teach someone how to ride a bike by talking about it, so too with blogging, you need to do it to begin to understand what the issues are.) Anyway, the blogs. Let’s be blunt. Everyone has an opinion, and with blogs everyone has an opinion that can be broadcast. We don’t use blogs for this. As a university with you in a degree program while you can certainly happily express opinions, what we are wanting to develop, model, and endorse, is what I’ll call scholarly opinion. This doesn’t mean essays or objective third person writing (bugger that). What it does mean is to discuss things driven and informed by ideas, with evidence. This is what you do when you write or talk about things you know about. If you know about cycling you don’t just say Eddy Merckx is a better rider than Peter Sagan, but you make an argument for why. We all do this for the things we know and care about. As knowledge makers and users we need to do this too with ideas, so the key role of the blog – from the point of view of the subject – is to think about things. This means ideas, with evidence, that make propositions. This is different to opinion (I think Essendon sucks versus ‘there’s a cultural problem at Essendon because). One is (dumb) opinion, one is research, argued, and evidenced. We’re not journalists, but we are knowledge creators, and knowledge is not opinion.
All the Faces on Facebook
Have a look. This is what happens when we make networks of bits and loose connections. Services are porous to each other, so someone could make a service that pulls this data from over there, and does this with it.
10 Reading (for Week 11)
Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been mentioned in passing a few times this semester so let’s get our hands dirty here. This is Bruno Latour outlining via a very influential new media/internet studies email list, what ANT is. It is dense, difficult, full on high French post humanities theory. So, if you can’t get through it, it is imperative, essential, heck even demanded of you, to read the first section which runs over the first three pages and ends with the line “In this sense ANT is a reductionist and relativist theory, but as I shall demonstrate this is the first necessary step towards an irreductionist and relationist ontology.”
required reading
Schultz, Pit. Latour, Bruno: On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications 1/2. 11 Jan. 1998. E-mail. (PDF)
Unsymposium 0.7
Last week Brian left us with the intriguing “the 80/20 stuff isn’t what I think really matters in the chapter”, so we will begin this week with this prompt about what does then matter from the chapter.
And then:
- We often forget that technological inventions are made within a society that has particular values. How does this context get embedded into the technology and shape the way it is used?
- Does technique drive technology or does technology develop technique?
- Are there limits to what we define as technology?
- 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?
Great questions, Buckley’s of getting through them in the 50 minutes.
Mixing
Kaifeng on Bolter and Grusin (“remediation”) on technology. This is the same Jay David Bolter we met early in the semester. Presumably this a reading for another course? Good to see the cross overs.
Gaps
Kate picks up that hypertext structures are about the gaps between things. Networks are defined by gaps, so the recent readings have been all about why these gaps seem to get joined. And the next step, not only joined, but evolve to regular, recurring, common shapes.
Galloway, Protocol
I think this is the key point that I took out of this reading (most of it I didn’t fully understand), the idea that although the internet is commonly viewed as this chaotic, ruleless utopia/dystopia, there are still a very stringent set of protocols governing how we act on the internet and contribute to the network that it creates.
This is a good place to begin from. Galloway also argues from this that ‘protocol’ is how all of this is controlled, and that ‘protocol’ is how things get controlled today. He’d argue society, not just the internet, and at this point it is like the internet is the manifestation of a lot of other changes and ideas. Which I suppose begs the question of whether the internet has caused or accelerated this, or whether the internet responded to a cultural change?
Holly has an outstanding post that begins to think about protocol, lots of nice examples from outside the web to contextualise why and how protocol matters. Olivia picks up the tenor of ‘control societies‘ and worries about what that might mean.
Anna D has a fantastic post joining Galloway to the stuff about scale free networks, so that decentralisation doesn’t equal lack of strucure, and that what Galloway shows is how important protocol is (I’d suggest technical and social) to making this structure sensible to us. Protocol as an economy and ecology of control is ‘flat’, decentralised and possibly more democratic. I don’t know, but its structure is flat and there aren’t really centres, just processes of agreement that are in turn highly ordered (protocolesque) events. For instance anyone can write a RFC, and anyone can join the W3C and have a say in what protocols are defined for the internet. Anyone.