Category: Networked Media

Posts for COMM2219 Networked Media

W3 – The Unlecture

One main idea I took away from last week’s ‘Unlecture’ and tute was this:

Over the last couple of weeks students seem to be getting frustrated about all this talk about learning – like we’re learning about learning alternatively instead of learning alternatively about Networked Media (using the Model II methods, speculative learning etc etc)

What I noticed in class and through other’s blog posts is that we’re all making connections between the Week 2 and Week 3 readings – something that Adrian has admitted was not intended and claimed that the readings are not intended to link to one another.

I think this is a good sign that we are, in fact, adopting this Model II learning method and finding our own way through the course. We’re making connections where we see them fit, not because we’re told to see them.

If we want to go back to the boat metaphor, you may say we’ve found ourselves following our own bit of current or an eddie or something like that… I’m not too good with the maritime jargon.

W3 – Design Fiction Cont, The Congress

As I said in my previous posts, I really enjoyed last week’s reading on Design Fiction.

I like how it ties together imagination, creativity, science, practicality and sociology.

Last Thursday night I went to a screening for The Congress as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. I don’t know a heap about sci-fi, and it was a bit more sci-fi than I was expecting.

But it was perfect timing, as after reading Matthew Ward’s article it put a lot of things into perspective.

For example, there were moments where the technological designs made complete ‘social’ sense – technology that could scan people into a computer system and insert them into movies. I think that’s a genius piece of design fiction as the central issue of the film was about ageing actresses who can’t find work for themselves.

It lost me a bit when it skipped 20 years into the future and Robin Wright enters this animated alternate universe. Mostly because I thought ‘why are they animated? What difference does it make that they’re animated rather than live action? If it’s imagined or hallucinated why can’t it just be real figures?’. Maybe that’s because the filmmaker Ari Folman thought it easier or more aesthetically impressive to depict this in an animated world. Or maybe its just bad design fiction.

I personally think it’s just bad design fiction. Why would we need to be animated? It’s kind of cool, but also kind of unnecessary.

Also, Bruce Sterling made the point that bad design fiction would be like seeing people have arms that could flap around and make them fly. Awkwardly enough, that’s exactly what happens late in the film *facepalm*

 

W2 – Being bored is a useless thing to say

With all this talk on speculative thinking and design fiction and whatnot, it reminded me of this:

http://theperplexedobserver.tumblr.com/post/8992161618/louis-ck-on-being-bored-im-bored-is-a

[I’m such a rookie blogger that I’m still figuring out how to embed images, so a link will have to do until then…]

It basically just reminds me of how silly it is to be bored by the status quo when it comes to technological trends. But also, in a broader sense, relates to how quickly you can be left behind if you don’t think ahead, don’t imagine new worlds or places, and don’t strive to create them yourself. And really, why wouldn’t you?

W2 – Design Fiction

This week’s reading included an interview with science-fiction writer and design fiction advocate, Bruce Sterling, and Matthew Ward’s article ‘Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice’.

I think design fiction is something people tend to think about subconsciously or retrospectively, but Sterling’s words help to put into perspective how it works as a speculative process as well as why and when it is important.

With new technologies constantly changing and shaping how we live, people often get a bit nostalgic and think/remark on whether or not the things we have today could’ve been imagined 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

Like, “Wow, if someone had told me 20 years ago that I could carry around something the size of a deck of cards and call people with it and use it to look up any piece of information I want and I could see photos and moving images through it, I just wouldn’t believe them. I’d think it was science fiction.”

It’s a valid thought. But what’s just as, if not more, important is transferring that kind of retrospective attitude into speculative thinking.

A step on from this, Sterling and Ward advocate that speculative thinking and design fiction isn’t just about creativity, it’s about practicality. What might the future look like, and what might we need or want in that world?

Sterling says sort of indirectly that in order for design fiction to be good, the subject/product needs to have a legitimate purpose. It doesn’t matter if the technology is conceivable or seems plausible, it just matters that it has a legitimate purpose. If it is deemed useful within the context of this imagined world (diegesis), and we are at some point faced with that state of existence, then the technology will strive to bring that piece of design to life, such that it is no longer fiction.

Building on this, Ward’s article emphasizes the crossover between sociology and science in design fiction. It’s not just a matter of whether it’s feasible to build something of cutting-edge technology, it’s a matter of speculating about the society in which the products/services are required.

It sort of lends to the million dollar question surrounding social media and what comes next. However many years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was creating and preparing a product that would perfectly suit our needs today. We’re a time-poor society of people who want to connect digitally, socially, efficiently and post-geographically. And above all else, as the users, we don’t want to pay for it.

Who out there now has designed in a fictional sense something that will so perfectly address the needs (social, financial etc) of the world ahead of us? And at what point will that piece of design fiction become fact and part of our reality?

A network like Facebook seamlessly lends itself to the social practices of today, but the technology required to bring it to life would have deemed it a piece of science fiction 50 years ago.

If I had a time machine and went back to the 1940s and told my grandmother all about Facebook, she probably couldn’t imagine how something like that would work. But more importantly, probably couldn’t imagine why something like that would work.

It’s a matter of speculating about people and their needs, as well as technology and the possibilities it has. Some people have tried and failed – check out Mashable’s list of companies that ‘Could Have Been Facebook’ had they made more accurate speculations.

Ultimately, a bad work of design fiction is something that doesn’t have a legitimate purpose. The problems it seeks to solve have no real relevance to now or any future issues. If it has relevance, and we are faced with that imagined world, it might just come to be.

So what comes next? That’s the million dollar question.

W2 – The Unlecture

This week’s lecture mostly reinforced and clarified some of my thoughts from the previous week.

Firstly, there were some key ideas about things we face as we blog that I really took to. There was the idea about sketch–writing that I really like which relates back to some of the concepts about writing without audience from WMT. However, when publishing content on a blog, opposed to a private, hard-copy journal, there are some serious considerations in terms of copyright and media regulation that we, as media practitioners, must be subjected to and wary of. As much as we may like to experiment/speculate/try to write without audience, constraints such as these always exist. This is the reality of networked media and online publishing.

Secondly, Adrian’s brief recommendation to blog informally and often was a simple but very key piece of advice. I think it’s common as students to feel protective about our work in fear of it being published without first being perfected, or for things to be read without feeling completely sure of how our ‘writing’ may be consumed. But the fact of the matter is that we all need to get used to letting go of our writing, be it a major work or small and simple expression of an idea, and let it be consumed. I think this is an integral part of growing from being a student (when your work often remains between yourself and your teacher) to a media practitioner (when you’ve got a deadline by which you need to produce and distribute your work).

Thirdly, I have some feedback on the form of the unlecture. I feel it could’ve worked better had it been an open forum – just a simple hands-up, ask a question to the panel of tutors/coordinators etc. I think this would’ve inspired more interesting questions to develop about ‘networked media’ rather than the dry, administrative questions I think we all just quickly scribbled down. When this happens (as it has at times over the last two weeks), it tends to feel like a lecture on teaching methods, rather than a learning environment in which these somewhat ‘new’ or ‘unorthodox’ learning philosophies are learnt through experience. I think we’d all do well to just jump into a discussion about the issues or topics within the networked media industry, and learn by doing. Having said that, I respect that it all takes some getting used to, so a bit of conversation about how things are going to work this semester isn’t so bad…

W1: Are you reading this?

‘Reflection in action’

This term grabbed me in the first part of M.K. Smith’s Chris Argyris: theories of action, double-looped learning and organizational learning. Peter Senge explains how Argyris introduced him to the process of, I guess, continuous awareness of the motivations behind your own behaviour, particularly when it comes to addressing problematically repetitive behaviour.

By contrast, this reminded me of the first reading in the Writing Media Texts course: Sari Smith’s Journals and Notebooks. When I read this article six months ago, it opened my mind up to the idea of writing with no audience. Through a process of sketch writing, the writer is at liberty experiment by streaming ideas, in a sort of big to unleash their creative subconscious and practice skills freely.

I feel I’ve always been very wary of who is ‘reading’: Do you like my blog? Do I sound like a moron? Is this photo stupid? Was that story line a total cliche?

I had never really kept a journal or notebook like that where I was just streaming ideas and testing the boundaries of my skills and creative practice. But I think this is an integral part of learning about media ‘writing’ – e.g. photography, video, sound – most of which is relatively new to me.

Alternatively, the idea of ‘reflection in action’ requires constant awareness and questioning of practice. While it doesn’t necessarily refer to creative outputs for an audience, there is some crossover in terms of self-awareness and the impact of your actions and habits.

Having quite consciously worked through both approaches in my media practice, I don’t think that ‘reflection in action’ is ultimately the most effective approach. Sometimes it helps to simply allow yourself to behave and interact in ways that are organic and free-flowing.

But there also comes a time when it’s important to reflect on things and ensure awareness of how you operate – be that socially, professionally, creatively etc.

Like most things, everything in moderation.

 

W1: The ‘Unlecture’

So far, I don’t mind the idea of an ‘Unlecture’.

I certainly like the idea of being experimental with the learning process, despite being a little thrown off from the traditional ways of learning I think we’re all pretty accustomed to.

As far as speculative learning goes, I was a bit thrown off by what Adrian meant, but I’m warming up to the idea and, steadily, the process.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, I’m very much accustomed to the academic system by which you are assigned a grade and BAM! You pass or fail and here’s by how much. In terms of academic study, I think I could use fewer guidelines. I think I’m a little too reliant on them to tell me what to do.

So I think it will certainly do me some good to just try and find my own way through the learning process, figure out in some way what I want to get out of the course (stay tuned…) and how I might be able to determine how well I’ve achieved that outside of the usual numeric grade measures.

Of course, this all lends to Adrian’s boat metaphor. And whilst I’m not the biggest fan of long-winded metaphors, I’m looking forward to the speculative learning process: instigating ideas, being pushed to think creatively and so on.

It may feel a little unusual, but I’m sure we’ll find our way and do a little better than these guys:

W1 – Chris Argyris: Theories of action, double loop and organizational learning

The most satisfying thing about being a student is having those perfect moments when theories, experiences and personal thoughts just seamlessly coincide to make sense of life in general.

I had a little moment like this today while reading Chris Argyris’ article Theories of action, double loop and organizational learning and considering the theories of espoused theory vs. theory-in-action.

I feel that throughout our experiences of education, work, and just trying to get by each day, many people tend to be Model I thinkers. But we’d do well to adopt a bit more of a Model II attitude. In fact, I think it’s increasingly necessary that we do.

To explain what I mean by this, let’s consider my attitudes towards being a student and the endless struggle to strike a balance between study, work, social life and health.

Hand me a survey and my “espoused theory” self would tell you I’ve completed the recommended 40 hours of uni/study, worked a reasonable 6 hour shift on the weekend, spent an enjoyable 8 hours hanging with my mates and a completed a healthy 3.5 hours of cardio this week. Winner!

Theory-in-action: I’ve spent 15 hours on uni/study, 31.5 hours working and interning, 15 hours hanging with my friends and the only cardio I do is sprinting to the train station each morning after sleeping through my alarm yet again.

Considering the dissonance between the espoused theory and theory-in-action of this situation generally just leads to massive waves of guilt. I find myself thinking crap, I should probably cut down my shifts and hit the books and not go out tonight and go for a goddamn run once in a while!

But it’s a good way to start considering things like practice and goals, and how accurate we’ve been in defining them.

Putting on my “Argyris” thinking cap, I can narrow down…

my practice/actions – working too many jobs, staying up too late, neglecting my health and denying the fact I’m back at school again

… which have consequences – feeling overworked, unhealthy, tired and behind in my homework

… that seemingly fail to achieve my intended outcome – of being a super-dedicated student who maintains a healthy lifestyle balance between work, friends and study! Ha.

photo funny-Fry-college-meme_zps5edc8db9.jpg

So what now?

Well, there’s this idea of double-loop and single-loop learning. 

Staying with this case in point, at this point in my week I figure I have two options:

1)      rearrange my time in order to support my goals of being described the aforementioned “super-dedicated student” (single-loop), or

2) reassess how I really want to be spending my time and why (double-loop)

I feel that far too often people fall into the trap of being goal-focused, or at least I do. It goes back to how we are raised, educated, and most commonly expected to operate in a workplace. We have goals and we have expectations from ourselves and others to achieve them.

While single-loop learning requires us to rework the methods we use to achieve the goal, double-loop learning implores us to question the goal itself.

Maybe our method was right, and the unexpected outcome is what our goal should’ve been all along. Maybe the desired outcome was a misguided vision and thus the methods we used to achieve it were a waste of time.

Maybe I don’t really want to be a “super-dedicated student” after all and actually want to just become a 150kg workaholic with a closet drinking problem? No… I take that back. I do want to work hard.

But I need to refine what this means and why I want to do it. Then I can figure out how.

It’s a sort of lighthearted “case in point”, but it lends to bigger ideas.

As students, we tend to get caught up in measuring the experience of academic learning according to the governing values of Model I, but need to balance this with the values of Model II.

In fact, the concepts of Model I and II are integral to not just considering how we operate as students and why we study, but are integral to refining a practice that ensures our work remains relevant in the future.

In a professional working environment, there are fewer definitive measures and ‘right answers’ – two things we are overwhelmed with while we study.

But if you want to do good work that is relevant, valuable and fulfilling in the future, you have to get used to asking questions about what it is you’re working towards and why. Speculating about these things is the only way to stay ahead of the curb.

Ultimately, as media students/practitioners/“professionals-to-be,” relevance and how we achieve that are two of the most important things to consider, and Argyris’ concepts are a good framework for kickstarting that process.