Week 8: Symposium 0.5

Why is hypertext considered influential in the future development of media making and storytelling?

• Interplay between hypertext and network and story and history itself
• Causal logic: this event happened to cause this event but that’s very rarely the case
• Hypertext was once considered Avant-garde, on the edge – but it is becoming more and more popular
• Nodes in hypertext are the same as a shot in a film – edits and hyperlinks – without cinema we wouldn’t have hypertext?
• The meaning is not in the shot it is in the relationship that joins the shots (relational media). Relations can be multiple.
• Tags: are examples of relational media.

Long tail seems to advocate a free-market model for the entertainment industry. Anderson says this model allows for more diversity, however, do you think problems such as recommendations hierarchy could emerge?

• EG: Facebook feeds, Spotify
• Idea of how taste cultures form around a shared interest
• Determined by class, race, gender, location in the past. These determinates are rivaled by self-driven stuff such as lifestyle choices. We determine who we are by what we choose to consume.
• Advertising or a recommendation service? Amazon vs. Facebook.
• Google ranking is determined through links not through traffic.