Tag Archives: symposium

Progress

This week in the first half of the symposium, Adrian went through tips on how to write a critical media essay and how to inventively integrate footnotes as links and so on…

Then the entire second half (perhaps longer than that) was dedicated to one question that was posed from the class: How does The Long Tail affect the music industry.

Despite the symposiums usually being rather one sided or leading to a semantics debate, the discussion responding to this question actually didn’t go off-track. And there were some very relevant ideas to think about.

Media industries on the internet> a scale-free network> this model disrupts physical retail model> The hit market> Big media have to be generalists> Power law> The Long Tail> more sold by the long tail than mass entertainment> Constant change> in a transitional time> Industrial vs. Post-Industrial

20% of this post delivers 80% of the information

Notes based on Week 9: Reading and Symposium

Pareto’s Law: The 80/20 Rule

Observation of economic inequalities: In most cases four-fifths of our efforts are largely irrelevant.

80% land owned by 20% of population
80% profit produced by 20% employees
80% crime commited by 20% criminals
80% web links link to 15% webpages
80% citations go to 38% scientists

Bell curves:

pattern in most quantities in nature , with a peak distribution and very few on the extremes ends.
A signature of random networks.
Disorder

Power laws:

a continuously decreasing curve, implying many small events coexisting with a few large events.
Acknowledgement of hubs.
transition from disorder to order

How does order emerge from disorder?

Some fascinating visualizations of networks.

‘These

hubs

are the strongest argument

against the Utopian vision

of an egalitarian cyberspace. Yes, we all have the right to put anything we wish on the Web. But

will anybody notice?

If the Web were a random network, we would all have the same chance to be seen and heard. In a collective manner, we somehow create hubs, Websites to which everyone links. They are very easy to find, no matter where you are the Web. Compared to these hubs,

the rest of the web is invisible.’

(p.58.)

Collage of symposium notes

Hammer

Different perspectives influences utility, hence not neutral.

Not digital, but networked

< Real world doesn’t have a plot

plot ≠ narrative

Technological Determinism

Verbal/oral > remembering, reciting

Bird/human\termite

What does neutral even mean?

> Narrative = Experience?

Writing } storage of information

Reddit > constantly changing, phases,

Murphy & Potts: Technologies are neutral

Shields: plots are for dead people

Post literal world, we have abstracted the world in all sorts of ways

| building up own story about Reddit

Nothing can be neutral in relation to something else

Narcissism

The highlight of this week’s symposium was, yet again, the never ending clash between Adrian and Betty and the awkward, inappropriate examples from Adrian. Both which are very entertaining. Things that stood out for me during discussion was the different definitions or interpretations of narcissism. Betty relates it to the idea of self image, and projecting an image of our identity while Adrian argues that it has more to do with perfection. To me, the idea of perfection is closer to self love and confidence, where as projecting one’s image seem to imply a lack of internal confidence and is more associated with self-consciousness. This is generally triggered by more negative feelings towards ones self image. We are aware of our selves, our image because we may not necessarily have the confidence to not worry about it. More over, it implies that we are not perfect, which is quite the opposite to self love. It all depends on which approach we take initially, whether it is psychoanalysis or philosophical or social.

Towards a network singularity?

After last week’s symposium, I have been thinking about a future that is shaped by this digital evolution of hypertext and the network.

I recently watched the movie Transcendence, by cinematopher-turned-director Wally Pfister. The film explores how scientific progress (artificial intelligence, technological singularity) challenges our human morals and individuality. The film was not amazing (being a blockbuster, the film focused too heavily of an individual story of a ‘transcended’ intelligence, whose transcendence did not seem to gain him any wisdom beyond a human’s, rather than investigating the deep philosophical debate that surrounds the topic – remembering to justify my criticism), but I have been interested in the concept of singularity. Although most commonly, the theoretical cause of a technological singularity is attributed to artificial intelligence (where the AI evolve to a point beyond human comprehension achieves singularity rather than humans ‘transcending’ to it – this can also be seen in the film Her, where the AI’s eventually move on from their service to humans), what I’m interested in is if humans are able to share all information at once with each other. (Similar to the behaviour of ants in a colony that I have mentioned in a previous post.) The hardware that we currently use to access this network of knowledge and communication will only get smaller, more ‘customisable’ (we already have Google glasses!!), maybe one day these devices will become a part of us. Would we not all be ‘transcended’ by our ability to access the boundless web of information? In this sense, hypertext and our network of information are just the first few steps towards such a future.

A rant. A fit – on the symposium

The highlight in this week’s Q&A symposium for me was the debate about whether we need to learn coding to become network literate. As I have mentioned before, it is a choice of words which in turn makes us develop different opinions on the matter. Of course we don’t need to be experts in coding, its not like everyone will get a job or make a living out of it, nor will it harm them to just rely on what is made available to them so far. However, suppose you are aware that there are things about the network/internet, or ways to do things that may benefit you, would you choose to not know? This knowledge may become handy at some point in the future, or it may just add to our experience of the thing itself, to help us make sense of it. In any case, it is only logical to choose to know more – this is a logical preference not a necessity, not knowing should only be applicable when you don’t have choice. When there is choice and one chooses not to know – that is an excuse. History provides a good enough example that the general knowledge of the average person will only continue to grow. Ignorance may be bliss, but that only remains as long as one is also ignorant of their powerlessness. Knowledge will continue to grow and expand, becoming more accessible to the average person. Despite what I just said about ‘choice’, it is kind of inevitable. 10 years from now, coding might be the basic first year component of this course instead of learning about networked media, which might be a secondary/primary school subject!

Which brings me to my second point…

Too bad we didn’t get to discuss the last question during the session. To generations from early 90’s and older, including myself, the idea that primary school kids and toddlers are growing up with the current technologies and networked devices must seem foreign and not such a healthy idea. Since the internet is already what it is and it all happened before the current generation of kids were born, they are already getting used to technology faster than they can learn to pick up a pen and write the alphabet on paper. Therefore, given their early exposure which allows them to know way more than we do in high school about networked literacies, it is fair to say that these subjects will be taught in earlier education. Kids are already taught through doing. Only generations like ours who adapted to such new technologies during our teenage years will probably need formulas or formal training to challenge the heavy conditioning we had growing up before social and networked media became significant.

First Non-lecture

This week we had our first Q&A style symposium, it was an interactive discussion between a panel of teachers and the students. It was quite an effective way to get the specific information you want to know: although there was a general topic, the direction of the symposium was driven by questions from teachers and students. It was organic and non-directional. Its dynamic structure allowed spontaneity and free flow of interaction. It is constantly shaping much like the internet itself. And on many levels resonate with our blogging experience and this week’s reading, Literary Machines by Ted Nelson on hypertext.

However, there are some cons to this ‘interactive lecture’. As there is no specific structure, the information that is generated (half-spontaneously throughout the discussion) may not be as clear as if it were planned and thought out sequentially. After all, it is also important to be able to communicate teachings and ideas in such a way that it is well received and understood by many. Also it would be less messy, if one question or answer were finished before jumping around to another idea or in a different direction. With that said, the benefit of a Q&A session is that it allows a topic to then be explored with more depth if it is done in a slightly more organised fashion.

This week’s session revealed some intriguing and surprising facts: that the millions of Youtube song covers are actually illegal due to the breach of copyrights on lyrics! And that only the copyright owner can prosecute. It was no surprise though that we discovered more grey areas when it comes to policies in the virtual territory. All this makes me feel a little less comfortable than I already was about blogging.

Week 2 in Networked Media

This week in Networked Media, Adrian delivered another fascinating symposium. We were given the challenge to explain and define: What is a book?

Through this thought experiment, conventions and assumptions were once again challenged. Text, pages, words, meanings, beginnings and ends are part of a system we invented and have since been taken for granted as infallible definitions of everything we experience. As we progress in a new world of internet cultures, we are forced to adapt to a world where there is no beginning or end. As we discussed these changes to story organisation, I was reminded of a book I recently came across. In Douglas Rushkoff‘s Present Shock, the media theorist explains the narrative collapse in storytelling in the digital age. He does so focusing not just on the materiality of the traditional and new mediums, but the different temporal experience of the two worlds that affect the way we use them. From reading and watching books and movies that begin and end, we now shift towards a dynamic world of the internet, where we can create our own stories within interactive virtual spaces such as social media and open world RPG games.

If anyone is interested, Rushkoff is on an episode of Joe Rogan Experience.

New perspective on media literacy

The first Networked Media lecture was intense and unexpected. It encouraged the questioning of everything including the structure of this empirical system in university. One of the many fascinating points in the lecture was that the reasons to attend university are changing. Adrian Miles points out that last time it was a matter of scarcity of equipment, facilities, knowledge and expertise. These things were inaccessible outside of academic communities. And that, many of us without any reflection upon this, carry on this assumption today at a time where the internet has made these qualities of university education accessible via tools like Google, Wikipedia or Youtube tutorials.

Adrian also encouraged the emphasis of quality over quantity in assessing work and educating. These new ways of thinking about learning are refreshing and mind-opening.