Category: Networked Media 2013

The most delicious essay I’ve ever read.

 

Reading Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay” was comforting and frustrating at the same time.  I loved every bit of it as it validated thought processes I have in my own creative practice that after a long time of ignoring or attempting to fight, I now actually “trust my instincts”. Well, more than I once did anyway.

However, the conflict Graham arose in me comes from my interaction with the year 11 and 12 kids I tutor. I’ve been tutoring VCE students since I left high-school 3 years ago.  And every year since leaving, I’ve felt increasingly hypocritical trying to teach the nuances of that soul-bleaching “TEXT-RESPONSE ESSAY”. Shudder.

My students see me a certain way: as a tutor who excelled at high-school English, loves the English language and can wield words into verses of the silkiest poetry that your fingers ever caressed as they followed the line of print on a page. And the dreaded essay? PAH! She can make them write themselves, they think. Presumably.

My students stand on different levels of confidence when it comes to English but I’ve had one common experience with all of them. At some point they’ve all expressed an idea, an original occurrence that’s quite insightful and validates my method of teaching…but then they’ll ask me one of these questions:

 “Am I allowed to say that?”

“ Am I allowed to put that in?”

“ Am I allowed to write that there?”

 

AAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

In those moments I’m not sure if I’m more frustrated at the schooling system or my students for asking permission to write down a thought. But then I remember what it was like to be sitting in classroom with 25 other students, being taught the “hamburger structure” of an essay. The best marks would be determined by whose lettuce was the crunchiest and whose meat patty was the most succulent. But what if you didn’t eat meat and you teacher didn’t like your awesome-but-not-normal chickpea and sweet potato patty?

As much as I would love to just give them Paul Graham’s essay complete with highlightings of what I think are the most brilliant points, I wont. Because you pass high-school by giving your markers what they want.  Such is the system, that as a tutor, I won’t be considered any good if I tell my students otherwise.

So I impart  this wisdom from beyond the class room walls in small incremental and sneaky dosages. Just enough to enhance their writing so that something stands out as different (but not too different) to the marker.

I tell them to not worry so much about the traditional confinements of essay structure that they’ve been thought and let their thoughts flow and not bring down the dam walls if an idea seems too complex to write. I’ve noticed that original ideas only seem “too complex” because the high-school essay structure we’ve been fed is way too simple. It doesn’t allow  for complexity and when you try to explore a complex structure within that paradigm, it just sounds undisciplined.

The idea of having no structure is as daunting as facing the task of writing another literature essay itself.  And not just for high-school kids. However by the time you get to university, the Essay is such a dated, simple task that university students are jaded by it.  It transforms itself into the archetypal, university-level essay with a minimum of 10 academic references that is forgotten once eagerly pushed through the drop-off box.

How do we transform this way of thinking about the essay? It seems that as long as the Essay is tied to an academic context, it will be approached with much the same attitude.

This is why this reading did me a whole lot of good—because it almost feels like permission granted for the Essay to have an alternate existence.  I may even email Graham’s essay to my students. Not to challenge them, but as reassurance of the freedom and potential they face once they leave high-school.

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on the Weinberger reading.

 

 

He writes that Concepts of space, time, self and knowledge are constituents of the network.  It seems that these are concepts borrowed from the physical world that, when applied to the Internet, become skewed.

Space becomes imaginary, but it is a word to describe the occupancy of something in physical existence.

Time can be paused unlike real life. You can come back to anything you’re doing at any time.

The Self can exist in multiplicities, as fragments of a whole that may or may not represent the person holding the identities.

And Knowledge is transformed. Anything is available at our disposal. Furthermore, knowledges are created so rapidly simple in the existence of the network.

 

So, with regards to the network can space, time, self and knowledge even be called those things?

Start with what you know

 

A question was posed in the symposium today; something along the lines of “If we live in a re-mixed culture, can we ever produce something new?”

 

I LOVE this question. It’s something I’ve contemplated many a time. As an artist, I look up to other artists. I use their knowledge with my own to create new artworks all the time. Sometimes I experiment with a technique that feels like it’s just come out of my brain but sooner or later find out it’s been tried before. It brings to mind a saying, “All art is imitation”. When I first heard that saying I was about 16 and felt a bit disheartened.  But around soon after I heard the saying “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” which made it better.

 

As a person who’s constantly creating something I’ve always thought of where ideas and inspiration comes from. And when I’m stuck, when my speculation just isn’t speculative enough and my ideas are under or over-thought, I turn to what is perhaps the greatest piece of advice a book has ever given me:

 

It comes from Stephen King’s “Duma Key”. He writes, “Start with what you know, then re-invent it”.

 

Lifesaver.

 

 

FLABBERGASTED. Bitcoins, the ripple monetary system and peer-to-peer financing…

I’ve been in deep conversation with a friend who knows much about these and have since been trying to get my head around it all through a lot of googling.

I thought this photograph was apt.

Also, for those who want to understand how bitcoins work, I found this video to be a good starter.

Assumptions

 

Adrain wrote:

“When we’re challenged, made uncomfortable, our mental map, and our reptilian brain, responds with fight or flight. Fight is to not wonder why but to decide it’s broken. Flight is to run away (i.e. not come). Either is a small way to respond where while you think you’re asserting agency it is in fact the instinctual opposite.”

 

I took the time to analyze my reaction to this course: it’s structure (or non-structure), it’s ambitions, freedoms, everything according to my perception.

My initial perceptions (and I suspect I share these with much of the class) was that Networked Media would become that one course you do every semester in which you invariably slack off. My head was telling me I was too airy-fairy, too wishy-washy, too whimsy and led by a mad professor whose teaching methods came to him in a dream (Okay, I only added that last part for dramatic impact and comic relief).

 

But yes, I made an assumption.

 

I have this trait I’m still developing, where I watch carefully the thoughts I give power to, the ones I choose to entertain. I’ve learnt over various experiences that thoughts are beyond powerful in cultivating our beings. For me, my practice of watching my thoughts is an attempt to be aware of my awareness (if that makes sense). In other words, to be more aware of my consciousness, how I perceive things internally rather than simply what I am perceiving externally. Assumptions, as I’m realizing, are rooted in the external perceptual, and so are kind of one-dimensional.

I’m getting slightly off topic here so let me bring it back to this course—I am giving it a solid, conscious go. I acknowledged my assumptions, made peace with them but told them they were unfair and ungrounded.  And perhaps most importantly, I acknowledged the ambitions of this course as pretty much being to get us to come around to thinking like this, or somewhat like it. To not be dismissive and defensive, with that standard “fight or flight” response, but to stop, examine and at least try to understand what is being proposed, challenged, envisaged.

I’ll give credit where credit is due—it is a bold method of teaching and an even bolder method of learning if it is actually and fully embraced and drained of pre-conceptions.

 

(and speaking of assumptions, check out THE ASSUMPTION SONG !)

Mason reading + a link to an awesome read

The John Mason reading was on noticing things. Or rather, I guess being more aware of things that otherwise wouldn’t warrant our awareness. It echoed some Buddhist sentiments on mindfulness and awareness for me. Interestingly, once I made that connection in my mind I couldn’t help but read the Mason reading through a Buddhist framework and the basic understanding of its teachings that I have.

Anyway, it got me thinking about out awareness of cognitive processes and I want to share this article on certain cognitive biases we all have that go largely unnoticed. It’s an interesting bit of light reading. My favourite is the “Current-Moment” bias which explains bad food choices at the supermarket.

Here it is 

Enjoy =)

 

(Para)phrases from Adrian fit for a bumper sticker

To be successful in the media industry we have to be knowledge producers not just knowledge consumers.

The method of this course is to make strange our assumptions, assumptions that matter–and when we change those assumptions, knowledge “happens”.

Every assumption about media and communications is now going through a change. We, are the VANGUARD for that change.

 

(“Vanguard” makes me feel like I’m back in my year 12 history class studying the Russian Revolution. I feel like a media proletariate, leading the network revolution, with Adrian as my Lenin).