The first reading for this week, ‘The 80/20 Rule’ by Albert-László Barabási, got into the nitty gritty aspect of networks on the internet, describing it in a scientific, very mathematical way. It took me a while to get my head around it, but with some useful examples, I think I kinda understand it.

It begins by describing this ‘80/20 Rule’, developed by Pareto when he was observing his garden. Pareto discovered that 80% of his peas were being produced by only 20% of the peapods, and then applied this to several other truisms, discovering that it is surprisingly accurate.

It states that in most cases, 4/5’s of our efforts will be mostly irrelevant, and this can approximated to the internet: 80% of links point to only around 15% of webpages.

Barabási then began to investigate the network behind the internet, and stated that he expected to find that they are connect randomly, but instead found that the distribution of links on various webpages followed a ‘power law’.

These power law distributions differ from random distributions as they don’t have a ‘peak’ and you can’t ascertain an average value from it. In a power law distribution, many small events coexist happily with a few large events; outliers are common, they aren’t really ‘outliers’.

Barabási describes this in terms of the internet by saying:

Millions of page creators work together in some magic way to generate a complex web that defies the random universe – collective action forces the degree distribution to evade the bell curve and to turn the web into a very peculiar network described by a power law.

I didn’t really ‘get’ this idea of a power law distribution under the example of maps.

The reading related a normal, random distribution to a roadmap, where the cities are the nodes and the highways connecting them are the links, it is a uniform network:

In contrast to this, a power law distribution is like an airline flight map, where the nodes are the airports, which are connected by direct flights between them. There are a few hubs, the major networks, but the vast majority of airports are tiny, appearing as nodes with at most a few links connecting them to other airports. In this map, the major networks are the likes of Sydney and Melbourne, where there are multiple links out to other airports, while smaller ones like Uluru only have two or three.

This is similar to the internet, where the are ‘major’ hubs, websites with a large volume of links to it, which then link out to other websites. This major hubs would have to include the likes of Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook.

This type of network is described as a ‘scale-free’ one, a very scientific way to describe the networks that we ourselves are contributing to with our blogs.

The other reading for this week, ‘Six Degrees’ by Duncan J. Watts, describes networks and their historical origins, as well as contrasting physical and online networks.

Watts opens with the statement of we “have become increasingly reliant on a truly staggering and ever growing array of devices, facilities, and services that have turned a once hostile environment into the lifestyle equivalent of a cool breeze”, as well as saying “without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly more expensive and inconvenient.

This article was written in 2002, but is only more relevant today, with the prevalence of internet, smart phones, and social networks. Nearly everything we do is somehow connected to these ‘networks’ of the internet, and without them, many aspects of society would cease to function.

The reading serves to ask a series of thought-provoking questions and identify a number of interesting potentials to do with these networks, without necessarily answering them.

Watts says that “a network is nothing more than a collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion”, and has distinct historical origins. In the past, a network was viewed as “objects of pure structure whose properties are fixed in time”, but as Watts states, this “couldn’t be further from the truth”.

Watts claims that “real networks represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something”, and this is a brilliant way to summarise these networks that we are studying in this course.

Watts uses the example of the ‘small world’ saying to explain these notions, as well as Milgram’s experimentation with ‘Six Degrees Of Separation’. We have our own network of relationships between individuals, and these are expansive, because each person has their own circle of relationships, and these relationships have their own relationships and so, creating a wide and diverse network of individuals. Six Degrees Of Separation is the idea that anyone, anywhere, can be connected to another person through six other people.

This idea enjoyed a resurgence with the internet, becoming an item of popular culture, and spawning wonderful things such as ‘Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon’, a game where people try to find the shortest path between any actor and Hollywood star Kevin Bacon.

These things are based on the ‘small world’ concept, which is brought into being whenever someone exclaims “it’s a small world” when they discover the person they are talking to is a friend of a friend or such. If the world was already small before the internet and its accompanying network, it is now miniscule. Online networks are overlapping and interacting constantly, and serve to bring us closer to anyone, anywhere, seen in the likes of social medias such as Facebook and Instagram.

Through these online networks, it is now infinitely easy for us to connect with anyone, be it a long-time friend living on the other side of the world, or a celebrity that chooses to respond to a Tweet or a Facebook post. This also applies to our blogs, with their possible reach to anyone in the world, and has exciting potentials that are only just now starting to emerge.

The reading ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson details the impact that these new networks of media have had on they way we consume entertainment media, and the way in which it is marketed and sold to us.

Anderson describes the phenomenon of the Long Tail, the idea that any media “can find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the world”. The Long Tail incorporates expansive back-catalogues and archives of all different mediums of media.

Anderson identifies that the “future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream”. These online networks mean that media distribution is no longer shackled by the constraints of physical sales. Mediums no longer have to find a local audience in order to be stocked, now we have “infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion”.

This has resulted in the rise of niche and alternative products, as it is no longer subjected to a ‘lowest common denominator’ style of marketing, if a product has the potential to be sold anywhere, to anyone, it will be stocked. As Kevin Laws says, “the biggest money is in the smallest scale”.

The Long Tail is best exemplified by services such as Netflix, iTunes, and Spotify, where near-infinite back-catalogues of music, films, television shows etc are up for sale to people, allowing ‘cult’ media to become popular again.

This related most to our course because it describes how these networks that we have identified and studied can have a very real and highly significant impact on ‘physical’ things. The networks created by services such as ‘recommendations’ on online sales and links to similar products have facilitated the Long Tail, and in doing this, has drastically altered they way in which media is marketed and sold.

As Anderson says, “we live in the physical world, and until recently, most of our entertainment media did too”, but now it is becoming prevalent for media to be primarily sold online, in a way that can benefit both the consumer and the sellers.

Anderson says that “what matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere”. This jumped out at me as relating to our own blogs, and our possible, imagined audience. Anyone, anywhere, can access our writing; we have a huge potential audience that is historically unrivaled.

At the article’s conclusion, Anderson talks about the idea of a “celestial jukebox of music services that offer every track ever made, playable on demand”, accurately predicating the dominance of services such as Spotify, that provide online streaming to nearly every song ever for a monthly subscription. This is the Long Tail, and much of Spotify’s profits would rely on people who want to access obscure, ‘cult-like’ songs, rather than those people that just want to listen to Lady Gaga.

I really enjoyed this reading as a very different and contrasting piece to much of what we have done previously, especially in that it displayed the exciting potentials that these networks of media have, and how big an impact than can have on media and entertainment.

If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology, hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology.

I found this quote from the other Week Six reading, ‘Books Without Pages – Novels Without Endings’ to be a great way to summarise the relationship and contrasts between the book and hypertext, and show how in Networked Media, we are engaging with, and studying, a technology that is still in its infant stage.

The reading focuses on the abundant possibilities of hypertext fiction, and the affect this would have on linearity and the good ole book. It quotes Michael Joyce saying “What if you had a book that changed every time you read it?”, and this is what a hypertext fiction can deliver. According to the reading, it would be an interactive, adaptive fiction that allows the reader to guide how and where the narrative goes, as well as when it begins and finishes.

This level of an open-ended story can somewhat be seen in computer games that are around today, with the likes of Skyrim and GTA featuring such expansive maps and AI that near-limitless possible narratives arise. This is a very exciting prospect for the narrative.

As the reading states, the book is characterized by fixity, no matter how many times you read it, the text will be exactly the same. Our own perceptions of it may change on each re-read, but what we are reading is unchanging. I’m sure everyone gets immensely angry at the decisions made by a character, or who the story chooses to focus on, but with hypertext, these aspects may well be controlled be the reader, signaling where and how they want the story to go.

The reading defines hypertext as “a tool that lets us use the printed word as the basis for a technology that considerably extends writing’s reach and repertoire – mostly by removing text from the single dimension it has on the printed page”. Hypertext fiction can have a plethora of voices, and this “plurality is virtually omnipresent in the hypertext”. It allows the author and the reader to interact as equals.

The reading claims that printed text acts in much of the same way as a legal decision: it settles the conflicting claims and the elaborate narratives constructed by each side with a single decision at its conclusion. It’s like an episode of CSI, at the end, the murderer is revealed, and everything goes back to normal; there’s no room for audience interaction or controlling of the story.

A quote that jumped out at me was: “Reading print can seem a tad like listening to a monologue or a lecture, where you basically have two choices: listen or leave”. This is an idea that has already been introduced by Adrian, and used as the justification for the symposium style lectures. I really like the analogy between printed text and lectures – they are both a very much so a one-way dialogue with clear authority and a very low level of interactivity. We’re doing these ‘unlectures’ to remove these problems, and to function that hour in a more hypertext-like fashion based on interactivity and engagement.

And just like hypertext fiction in general, it has a lot of potential.