*crying with laughter*

The Comm Ball was on Tuesday. Let’s just call this photo “The Exorcism of Tiana Koutsis”

Kev & Ed

This symposium was really hot, I felt like I was melting.

Besides all the excitement for the Comm Ball later that night what I found most interesting was the future of the internet. Apparently google uses more electricity to run than Melbourne. I had never thought about the internet as something outside of the virtual world. There’s more to the internet than whats inside the virtual world. There’s the outer net, I guess. As adrian pointed out the internet requires a lot of energy to run and if something doesn’t change, it will eventually collapse.

I started googling the collapse of the internet and according to the people on HowStuffWorks the internet itself can’t collapse. Basically there are millions of different traffic paths for data to cross through so it is pretty stable. “Even if an entire section of the Internet were to go offline in the wake of a natural disaster or a nuclear attack, other sections could remain functional. ”

Although what Adrian focussed on was the actual infrastructure supporting the internet. How else will the internet be run other than electricity? How do we change the way the internet is supported?

Games are not hypertext. There was a lot of discussion around this, and at first I was not convinced. There are series of games such as Call of Duty, where characters and plot lines pass on from each edition. However, this is merely a narrative within a game. The main goal is to win the game. And not every game has a plot line or characters. Adrian used the example of Tetris. It’s just a simple aim to win.

THE QWERTY KEYBOARD. Now that little brief mention of why it was invented probably blew me away more than anything else in that 50 minutes. It was designed to stop typist from typing too fast and jamming the keys. These days the keys would definitely get jammed because all I can hear whenever someone makes a valid point in the unsymposium is a storm of keys being smashed as people document things to write about on their blogs.

Have you ever just sat on a tram and realised that each random person is living a life as vivid and complex as your own? They have ambitions, friends, a partner, people they don’t get along with, fears, routines and problems. They have a life long story that continues invisibly round you. They have connections to hundreds of other people you will never know existed. However you may appear in their life too, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, a blur of traffic passing on the high way, as a passenger on a tram sitting right next to them.

This photo freaks me out.

30 years ago, when Alex and Donna lived in different countries and long before they met and married, they were captured in the same photo at Disney World. That’s Donna at right in front. Alex is in the stroller in the background immediately behind Mr. Smee.

A random passerby could one day mean so much more than just an extra in your life. Your future husband could be sitting behind you on a tram and you would never know.

In one of my classes we are studying photography and personally I am not really impressed with what photography has become in recent years. It used to be such a novelty. You couldn’t just whip out your phone and snap 1,371 photos of your face looking the same each time with your tongue stuck out. No. In portrait photos people got dressed up nicely and posed. In any photography people wouldn’t carelessly aim and shoot. They would line up the shot to ensure an aesthetically pleasing image. They would be selective with their photography.

Nowadays people just take photos of their food to put on instagram or selfies in a night club. When was the last time you took a photo with your mum? With your grandparents? With your brother or sister? I know for one I rarely take these sorts of photos anymore.

Now that’s not really the problem I am having. I kind of segway-ed a bit. What I dislike about photography these days is not that it is digital, it’s that it stays digital. We never get photos printed anymore. We leave them on the SD card or upload them to our computer but that is where it ends. Then a computer might crash, a file might get lost, an SD card might become faulty. And all those memories are lost. This has happened to me. As soon as my family got a digital camera when I was about 8 or 9 years old photos just seemed to stop. I am sure there are thousands on an old laptop somewhere but no one will ever have the time to go buy a new charger, charge it up, look through all the files and find them.

This is a photograph my grandfather took of my grandmother in the late 50’s in Greece.

I really liked the point of view Adrian presented this week. He said that an author’s work isn’t an insight into their mind. You can only analyse what the piece itself is saying. This made me think of Sacha Baron Cohen. His work is really controversial and although it portrays him as very racist, it doesn’t mean that he actually is. For example a lot of his work is racist towards Jewish people. What a lot of people don’t realise is that Sacha Baron Cohen is Jewish and does not actually believe anything his characters say or do. He is merely creating something for an audience.

Something I didn’t agree with, like Elliot, was that the author can’t control the reader and what they think. Of course authors don’t have 100% control of the mind of their audience however don’t texts have some sort of aim? Don’t they strive to achieve a certain response from the audience? Even the most obvious: persuasive writing… Isn’t persuasive writing supposed to persuade the audience into agreeing with something? Films also constantly guide an audiences mind. No one would have watched Avatar and thought “These humans should be knocking down this extra terrestrial forrest” or watched Titanic and thought “Don’t let Jack live”.