I wrote a 15 retrospective on Elliott Smith’s best album, XO, for Tone Deaf.
Elliott Smith is one of my all-time favourite musicians, and he is as brilliant as he is tragic. It’s a really special album that has only gotten better with time.
The reading this week, ‘Reconfiguring Narrative’, focused on the impact hypertext has had on narrative and ideas of linearity, as well as some potential consequences.
The first thing that jumped out to my was the quote from Michael Joyce, described as one of the first major authors of hypertext fiction: “In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes”.
Joyce describes how hypertext challenges the idea of a linear narrative, one where the author predetermines where the story will go, and how the audience will read this narrative. Hypertext allows readers to navigate their own way through a certain narrative, through links or searches, and this renders the idea of a linear story as troublesome.
The reading claims that hypertext narratives should be measured in terms of a number of axes, formed by degrees or ratios of:
A hypertext narrative that takes full advantage of the potentials of this technology would measure on the high end of most of these aspects, it would allow a high level of reader choice, would include extralinguistic texts and the plot elements would have a high degree of multiplicity.
The reading describes hypertext as challenging aspects of narrative and the literary form that have been current and relevant since the days of Aristotle.
Hypertext allows a story to become “multidimensional and theoretically infinite, with an equally infinite set of possible network linkages, either programmed, fixed, or variable”. The reader can actively contribute to the narrative in these stories, and subsequently become much more than a ‘reader’.
I found it a little strange that we were assigned this reading as it is entirely focused on fictional writing, and we aren’t really emphasising this in our blogs. But I can see how it relates to the course, with these ideas of interactivity and the absence of linearity in writing directly applicable to our blogs.
We can use the spectrum mentioned in the reading to measure our own blogs, in terms of how much choice the reader has in what to look at (range of post etc), whether they are open to comments, how long the posts are and so on.
The idea linearity is also very important for our blogs, as we have no real idea how readers will find our work, or where they will begin. A reader may reach our blog through a google search, or through a link, or any other possibility, and this may not be to the latest post. We have to ensure that our blogs are coherent and readable from any point, and we also can’t control which post the reader will go to next, if any.
As the reading identifies, with hypertext media, the reader decides when the narrative finishes, merely in not being interested enough to continue, or thinking they have found a certain closure, and it is our aim as bloggers to hold the reader’s interest for as long as possible, to engage them with what we are writing, and encourage them to interact with this.
Due to the strikes, we didn’t have round two of the symposium this week, but we did get a trio of interesting and engaging videos to watch. All three focused on education, innovation, new media, and how these three must be combined in order to better prepare us for what the future may held. Each video acknowledges that we don’t know what the future will be like, so each is a form of design fiction in a way.
The first, a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, was entitled ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ and definitively answered this as ‘yes’. Robinson identifies the “extraordinary capacity” for innovation that children possess, but how this is educated out of them through an education system that focuses primarily on industry, and maths and languages.
He explains that this model of education no longer accurately prepares people for what the future will hold, and (somewhat depressingly), claims that “degrees aren’t worth anything”.
But it’s almost impossible to argue with him. We’re all creative as children. We’re not afraid to make mistakes or make fools of ourselves, and we have no fear to try things that we may not be good at or know we will most likely fail. But as Robinson explains, we are quickly taught in education that mistakes are bad, they are ‘fails’.
He says that “we need to radically rethink our ideas of intelligence”, and defines creativity as the “process of having original ideas that have values”.
The second video was another TED talk, this time from Michael Wesch, titled ‘From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able’. This one focuses on the ability of new media in education, and the ideas of two-way conversations and active audiences. He explains the idea that students learn what they do, so what are they learning when they are seated as passive audience members to a dominant lecturer?
The final video was another one from Wesch, a quick four minute clip that details the extraordinary potential of this hypertext that we’ve discussed so much, made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s from way back in 2007.
I think all three of these videos relate directly to Networked Media. The first video seemed to describe exactly what Adrian is trying to combat in this course, and education in general. It plays on the idea of teaching knowledge and know-how, rather than information, and removing the hierarchical nature of teaching. We are encouraged to be creativity in this; we can write on literally anything on our blogs, and get marked on it for it’s quality, not necessarily its relevance.
This draws on info from the Wesch TED talk and how this new media can, and has to be, utilised in education. I particularly liked the quote near the end where he says that it’s ridiculously easy to create and publish things online now (through avenues such as YouTube, Blogging etc), but it’s also ridiculously hard to do it well and properly, in a way that actually engages an audience and promotes further interaction. This is the aim of our blogs; we are trying to create our own content in order to engage with the course and our peers, and this can be achieved through this technique of ‘hypertext’ that Wesch describes in the last video.
In this week’s extra reading, Paul Graham’s launches all out war on the educational essay.
And he makes a number of fine points.
Essays are a constant presence through all of our education after primary school, and Graham argues that this form of the essay has made writing “boring and pointless”, and result in a “miserable high school experience”.
He quite accurately claims that writing an essay is, most of the time, writing an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. An essay will hardly ever tell a tutor or a lecturer anything that they don’t already know or believe, and this is exactly what they want to read.
Graham states that a ‘real’ essay should convince the reader due to it having the right answers, not because the rhetoric and argument is strong. In your typical high school or university essy, we are given are set topic, a set argument, that we have to base the whole essay on, and we obviously don’t have the chance to alter the question.
Graham says that instead of opening with an argumentative assertion, as we have been taught for countless years in education, an essay should begin with a question, and uses the metaphor of noticing an ajar door, and opening it to see inside. An essay should start with an interesting question that we don’t actually know the answer to, and the actually writing should involve us trying to find this answer, or something close to it.
I found this quote most applicable to our Networked Media course:
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud.
Graham also acknowledges that we write differently when we know there will be someone reading it, this forces us to write better.
We should, then, be writing essays not because we have to to pass a subject, but to form our ideas and thoughts into a cohesive whole, and allow us to expand on this ideas.
I think this serves to justify the heavy emphasis of blogging in the course, and it could be argued that we’re constantly writing this ‘true’ essays of sorts in our blog posts. We aren’t told exactly what to write about, and the blogs give us a chance to express ourselves and our thoughts on the subject as a whole. Having it as the primary assessment also forces us to actively engage with the content: in other subjects I may do all the reading, but not actually take much in or interpret it for myself, but in this course, I have to do the readings properly and actually somehow make an interesting blog post out of them.
I also found the second-to-final sentence interesting and thought provoking:
The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.
I found this week’s reading, ‘From Text To Hypertext’ by George Landow, very interesting for the most part, especially when it related directly to our blogs and the different styles of blogging.
The most relevant parts that I found in the reading was when Landow describes how hypertext, and specifically blogging, has completely transformed the ideas of a ‘reader’ an ‘author’, and a ‘text’, and these are ideas that we have to understand in order to actually participate in this blogging process.
Landow states that a blog is a “new kind of discursive prose in digital form that makes us rethink a genre”, and identifies the fact that this style isn’t a new one, it’s existed ever since there’s been diaries and journals. It’s the online, interactive format of blogs that make them so intriguing and important, they directly allow for an active and participatory relationship between the author and the reader, and encourage hypertextuality.
The author sees there being two different forms of this hypertextuality in blogs: linking chronologically distant individual entries to each other, which allows stories and articles to be put into historical and social context without the author repeating themselves, and through the comments on posts, which provides a space for people to respond and offer their own opinions.
We’ve already discussed the dangers of allowing comments on blog posts, and the issues of liability that Adrian has raised in the lectures, but I think if the comment’s are moderated for dangerous content, rather than differing opinion, they can be a useful and engaging aspect of any blog.
These blogs serve to blur the line between our online and offline lives due to its immediacy and accessibility: nowadays, we are going around a device in our pockets that can post to a blog, read a blog, and comment on a blog in seconds, it is now a constant part of our lives.
I found the statement that “we must write with an awareness that we are writing in the presence of other texts” particularly insightful – we can either choose to embrace this and provide links and references to supporting or contradictory texts, or we can ignore it and waste this opportunity.
These ideas are especially relevant to journalism and the reporting of news online. We can link directly to past stories, profiles on individuals and anything else, meaning that not so much backstory is necessary in a story, and we can get straight to the point. This is something that some, but certainly not all, news websites are embracing, and it creates a more engaging dissemination of news for the ‘reader’.
In the blog world (I refuse to call it the ‘blogosphere’), there is no longer such thing as a ‘reader’. Anyone that actively makes the choice to read, post, or comment on a blog post is an active participant in this world. They now have the choice of when to start reading a post, when to stop reading, whether to leave a comment or a useful link, and whether to share this blog with their own followers. They are now just as an important figure in blogging as the original author.
I loved the way Landow described the reader’s presence as being represented by the mouse cursor or that blinking line – it is a constantly intrusive presence in any hypertext, but this can be a positive thing.
I found this reading to be quite interesting, and definitely applicable to our own blogs, especially the ideas of including our readers in the blogging process, and creating a network through various links and references in our own blogs.
“Take a look at your beloved candidates. They’re nothing but hideous space reptiles.”
Although it’s a Homer Simpson quote, it could just as easily be related to the Australian election.
It’s from the classic Halloween episode where the aliens, Kang and Kudos, kidnap two politicians and take on their appearance. Nobody really notices anything too different or suspects anything, and even when they are revealed, the public are powerless to stop one of them being elected.
Despite this being an excellent satire of the American situation, it can also just as brilliantly relate to our current situation in Australian politics. I’m not saying someone should try to yank our two leader’s heads to see if a giant alien is hiding underneath, but I’m also not saying that this is a ridiculous idea.
There are a number of remarkable similarities between the alien’s actions and those of Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd in the last couple of weeks. They make a series of bizarre, incomprehensible public statements, and a number of hilarious/depressing gaffes (suppository, anyone?), and although the two probably won’t be caught holding hands in public any time soon, you just never know at the moment.
Kodos so eloquently sums up the modern-day election campaign by saying: “All they want to hear are bland pleasantries embellished by an occasional saxophone solo or infant kiss”. Replace saxophone solo with a visit to a factory or school, and infant kiss, with awkward kiss to the back of a poor lady’s head, and you’ve got a precisely accurate summation of the Australian election.
In a campaign speech, one of the aliens gives the inspiring proclamation of “We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling towards freedom”. This could easily sub in for either leader’s election speeches, with both focusing bemusingly on ‘A New Way’, while constantly emphasising past mistakes and returning to old policies.
The alien claims that the “politics of failure have failed…we need to make them work again”, echoing the sentiments of Rudd’s announcement against negativity a few weeks again, while continuing to provide a negative campaign.
Homer eventually reveals the candidates for what they are, stating that they are “phonies” and “alien replicons from beyond the moon”, and let’s be honest, who hasn’t, at some point in time, wondered whether Rudd or Abbott is in fact an alien imposter from an outside universe?
Kang accurately surmises that the people are unable to do anything about it because “it’s a two-party system; you have to vote for one us”, a depressingly apt way to also sum up the Australian system. After being questioned about a third-party, the aliens implore them to “go ahead, throw away your vote”, a statement even more relevant to our situation following the Coalition’s preferencing which is seemingly an attempt to ‘Rains Of Castamere’ the Greens out of Parliament (if you haven’t seen Game Of Thrones yet don’t Google that one).
There are no real, significant differences between our two major parties, nothing big enough to allow debate to be primarily focused on policy. Because of this, our election campaigns have become a battleground of personality and rhetoric, of media appearances and sham ‘debates’.
The episode concludes with Kang being elected and immediately enslaving the population, and Homer says “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”, a sentiment that many of us may be employing following the upcoming election.
I found this week’s reading by Jay David Bolter very interesting and easy to read. Entitled ‘The Computer, Hypertext, And The History Of Writing’, it details how writing is a technology in itself, the development of writing and writing mechanisms across history, and the revolutionary nature of the computer in terms of writing.
Writing is not something that is typically thought as a ‘technology’. Instead, the things that display and facilitate writing, such as computers, laptops, and phones, are widely seen as technologies, and writing as more of an innate, regular thing.
The reading opens by contradicting this beliefs, with Bolter stating that “writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience…[it is a] sophisticated technology” that requires skill. Writing is a technology through its very etymological basis: the Greek root is ‘techne’, a “set of rules, system or method of making or doing, whether of the useful arts, or of the fine arts”. Therefore, writing itself is a technology, and writing in different forms requires different skills, and as Bolter says, “all writing demands method, the intention of the writer to arrange ideas systematically in a space for later examination by a reader”.
The reading details how these brand of technologies gradually become internalized by its user and are eventually ‘second-nature’, and in terms of writing, it is often hard to detach from the skill. Although we aren’t writing 24/7, our “technical relationship to the writing space is always with us”. Through avenues such as speech and reading, we are still practicing and utilising our writing skills.
Bolter states that “writing is certainly not innate”, and this is obvious by the fact that we must be actively taught how to write, and the specific and strict guidelines to do so.
Bolter identifies ‘economies of writing’, the materials, techniques, and uses involved, and how they have developed and adapted across time. Beginning historically with stone and papyrus, humans have developed the likes of the printing press and the type writing.
Word processing has revolutionised the technology of writing, and the ole pen and paper is slowly and gradually becoming obsolete, but this will be a very long process.
Bolter identifies hypertextual electronic writing as a “thorough rewriting of the writing space”, and a technology that includes the best components of previous techniques, including the idea of rapid change from the wax tablet, and the typewriter’s keyboard, discrete selection of alphabetic elements, and a machine-like uniformity.
In great contrast to previous technologies, computing does not allow a direct connection between the reader and the words, with these words being stored as electronic thingos that must be translated by a machine. I think this is one of the reasons why so many people are averse to the idea of e-readers, as it no longer feels like you’re actually holding a book in your hands. There is now a middleman of sorts between the reader and the words.
If writing itself is a technology, then it is a skill that needs to be honed and constantly practiced. Writing for our blogs is an entirely different skill than writing an essay, and we have to be able to adapt these skills to fit this new means for publishing our work.
Our blogs in themselves are networks, we can create links to other blogs or to anywhere else on the internet, and it takes skillful writing to effectively and fully utilise these newfound abilities regarding hypertext.
Yes. After this week’s ‘unlecture’, it finally feels like this subject is properly starting.
Entitled the ‘Beta Symposium 0.1’, it was our first introduction to the ‘Q and A’ style lectures that the rest of the semester would see, and for the most part, I think it worked really well.
It was a refreshing change to be interactive and engaging with many different subjects, as well as allowing us to shape the content. It was my tute this week that developed the eventual questions, and I think, although I’m slightly bias, that they were interesting and diverse.
We were finally allowed to use laptops, and this helped me to take in many of the key points and take-away ideas, and fortunately, there were many of these.
For me, the most enlightening questions was the first one, ‘What is the practicality of design fiction for people who are not designers?.
I think the answers really solidified for me why it’s important for us to be learning about design fiction, and how it can be used in whatever our chosen profession may be. As Adrian stated, “designers have a good toolkit for dealing with complex and wicked problems”. Looking to the future and asking ‘what if’, can help to solve problems in a productive and innovative manner in the present.
Design fiction provides a simple and flexible way to deal with problems that we will all encounter in the media industry, especially in how to adapt in a media world that is changing so dramatically and so constantly.
I also found the answers to the last question especially interesting: “What do you think the future of networked media will involve, and how will it benefit us?”.
I liked the statement that we can now “make things and build a reputation in our chosen areas free and easily”. We don’t have to find an avenue to publish our content, we can publish it ourselves almost instantly, just like I’m doing now. What we publish can also be viewed by anyone and everyone, and can help to build a reputation within our chosen profession. It’s about knowledge and how to use that knowledge, rather than just rope-learning straight-up information.
Overall, I really enjoyed this format for a lecture, and I think there was a lot of interesting and engaging content that relates directly to the course. It’s good to be finally into it.
‘Mistaken For Strangers’, billed as a music documentary about The National, is neither about The National, nor even really a music doco. And that’s why it’s brilliant.
‘Mistaken For Strangers’ is truly about the camera operator and directer Tom Berninger, and his complicated relationship with his brother Matt, the leader singer from the band. He provides a humorous, self-deprecative and ultimately moving portrayal of being the young brother in the shadows of a highly successful sibling, and wonderfully shot live footage from The National’s expansive world tour of 2010 provides a lovely backdrop and foundation for the true story of the film.
It is certainly not your typical band doco. Hardly anything is revealed about the band, their origins, and the production of this years Trouble Will Find Me. The other band members are utilised mostly for their opinions of Matt and his relationships, and Tom Berninger gradually becomes the focus of the movie.
‘Mistaken For Strangers’ is a quirky, eccentric, and borderline self-indulgent reflection of life on the road as an outsider, but Berninger manages to achieve this while still remaining relatable and likable, as well as portraying the band in a wholly positive light.
The tale begins when Matt invites his 9-years-younger brother along to the world tour as a roadie. Tom decides to bring along a small camera, and eventually, and predictably, becomes much more focused on creating this film than his real duties on the tour, something that leads to many heated, and undeniably entertaining, arguments between the brothers.
Tom constantly references to Matt’s success and fame, at times bitterly, and others just bemusingly, and can only a muster a series of highly amusing questions to the other band members, including “do you ever get sleepy?”, “do you take your wallet with you on stage?”, and “which of you can play faster?” (directed at the Dessner twins).
Matt Berninger comes across as patient and light-hearted, although at times he’s shown to, understandably, lose his temper at his brother, and funnily does this after cereal was discovered in the hotel bathroom.
Ultimately, you don’t need to be a fan of The National to enjoy this film for the nuances and relatable themes, and you’ll definitely be much more inclined to the band after viewing it. It’s an unconventional, constantly engaging, intimate reflection on living in the shadows of a successful older brother, and the difficulties involved in relationships like this.
What we witnessed last night was not a debate.
It would have been more apt to name it ‘two politicians giving separate press conferences while standing close to each other’, but that doesn’t really have the same ring to it.
A worthwhile debate requires interaction and arguments between the two leaders, but we didn’t get any of that. What we got was a dull, bleak charade full of rhetoric with no real substance.
On the few occasions when Rudd or Abbot interrupted the other, or attempted to counter their points, they were quickly shot down, and then continued to rehash the same tired rhetoric that’s been prevalent across the first week of what will be a very long campaign.
The Australian people deserve better than this to accurately make up their mind and participate in the democratic system, and if there are any more of these ‘debates’ in a similar vein, it will be a wasted and tiresome display.
Both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott barely veered from their own very set scripts, and often strayed far away from the question, choosing instead to address their opponents perceived failings.
Nothing was achieved in this ‘debate’ that couldn’t have equally been produced from two separate press conferences, or just a simple press release. We didn’t see either leader assert themselves over the other, or venture off script to rebut the others point.
But the fact that the debate failed at its very basic level to provide a thought-provoking discussion between our two prospective prime ministers is not either politicians fault, or the moderator. It’s the basic rules that accompany it that prevented any real debate to take place. With very restricted time limits on each leader, little to no chance for rebuttal, and strict rules against interrupting or directly addressing the opponent, there was never going to be any productive discussion.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that this ‘debate’ would have even slightly swayed any undecided voters, and isn’t that the exact point of these events taking place? We didn’t discover any real strengths or weaknesses from either leader, and the status-quo was religiously upheld by both.
The only moment that could possibly inspire swing voters was Rudd’s announcement of a conscious vote on same-sex marriage within 100 days of his possible re-election, but even this was announced before the ‘debate’, and could have easily just been put out in a press release.
The next ‘debate’ must give our leaders a chance to actually have a real, interactive discussion between each other, to give the voters a real insight to how the handle the pressure of a live, open debate, and how they can actually communicate their policies without the aid of ingrained slogans and obviously prepared answers to predictable questions.
The forthcoming debates must be reconsidered in this light, or they might as well be replaced by simultaneous media releases from each leader, and we deserve much more than that.