Un-Symposium: Number Ten

• Understanding a mechanism for how networks develop.
• A logic of organisation and development that we need to know about
• Hubs count, there are a few vital ones, and a many more non-vital ones that will never get to that size and scale

• Even though we have these hubs that accumulate more links over time, the newer nodes can still flourish within these networks
• Over time, bigger hubs can deteriorate
• Nodes can become hubs
• What was it about Google that made it such a large, powerful hub?

• Important to determine the limitations of networks as well as their capabilities for growth

• The internet is infinite
• It’s made up of nodes
• These nodes you can think of as things, and they’re going to connect to other things
• Preferential attachment: some people prefer to connect with certain people as opposed to others
• Skull-free networks, nodes
• Some things will get more links than others – which leads to hubs (densely connected networks)
• Hubs, by definition, have weak connections. This is one reason why they’re so effective at connecting. This leads to small-world network: it’s easy to get to one part of that network to a seemingly unrelated other part
• It’s not random, chaotic, unstructured – structure will emerge as a result of those conditions
• The structure pre-defines the content
• Hollywood is a small-world network (The Oracle of Bacon)

“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?

• VHS and beta-tapes: beta was a Sony technology and they refused to license it to any other company, but VHS licensed to anybody.

• Relates to Potts & Murphy reading in terms of technique. The values we bring to the technology

• The original walkman: if you look at the original ads, it was initially designed with two outputs, for two people. That’s evidence of this idea that the context that’s embedded in the design of the object is that music is meant to be a shared experience.
• Sony started noticing that people wanted to use it by themselves. It became an individual experience.
• Freewaves: Robert Moses designed the NY surround freeway system. Argued that what was a political feature of the system was that all of the overpass bridges were designed to be so low so that none of the buses that took the lower socio-economic workers and black people to the beaches at Long Island. None of the buses could use these freeway systems.

• Technological returnism vs. cultural determinism.
• To what extent does culture inform technology?
• SMS was designed to be a business tool, but took off in a larger social context.
• We can’t do most of the things we do every day without the existence of a writing technology, that allows us to store information and refer back to it at a later date
• iPod: we already had mp3 players (unreliable, difficult to use, sounded bad). iPod came out at four times the price of current mp3 players. There was no comparison price-wise. Took two years to overcome every other mp3 on the market. iPod disrupted and completely redefined the market place. Apple are now a media publishing company. Apple will veto applications, which has caused controversy. Will not publish apps that include pornography etc.
• Technological determinism: small T small D. Dance between the affordances of the technology and the ways in which I want to use it. We have normalised technological attitudes.

• Used to be a fervent anti-technological determinist. It’s more about the staging of arguments, why social and cultural aspects change, a move too easily attributed to the technology as causing that to shift.
• Issue with Adrian’s argument: square frame in cinema. For me, if it includes a lot of other things that have developed around the technology. It’s about a whole lot of other things other than the material/physical device. The technology is something that’s developed with the techniques, it has a whole range of uses that are specific/differ depending on the community that uses them etc.

• You can’t just impose yourself upon your instrument. You need to understand the instrument. Letting characters have some agency, outside the writer’s will. You need to find form in the marble, sculptor. You can’t go against the grain. Technology pushes back, it’s not limitless.

• Counter-points to technological determinism: a culture will identify and utilise technologies depending on its desires at a particular time. The way in which technologies can be used, and the ways in which they’re elected to be used.

“Does technique drive technology or does technology develop technique?”

• Technique is only required with technology
• Techniques are consequences of technologies, they’re a response to technologies

• Affordances of the technology, our behaviour influences the way that we use it

“Are there limits to what we define as technology?”

• Putting files into folders; same thing on computers. Are these technologies or techniques?
• Post-humanist: at the moment, a lot of theoretical work, still wants to treat technology as distinct from nature. There is no separation between culture and technology and nature and technology.
• Right now, we are immersed in technologies (radio waves, television waves, etc.)
• Technology is our condition. Nature and technology are not distinct

• It’s less a distinct thing out there, and is now around and within us