Tag Archives: the network

it’s a small world after all

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one of this week’s reading, “six degrees” by Duncan J. Watts was an interesting read about the science behind networks themselves and the ever popular “six degrees of separation”. now, haven’t we all at times tried to work out how far our 6 degrees can take us? i know i do. we all want to be connected to someone famous, even if it’s just through the simple means of knowing someone who knows someone else. it’s a pretty cool idea, even if i do still find it kinda hard to believe that little ole’ me could be connected to those people who live in completely secluded tribes in random parts of africa who have never had contact with the outside world. i mean, come on, they’ve never met anyone outside their tribe?!?! how could i be connected to them. but according to Watts and another researcher named Milgram, i am. if only it was useful. but i guess if everyone is in the same boat, it doesn’t really make any difference to anyone.

onto networks! now, i would describe this reading as having three distinct sections. one useful one about networks, one at the end about the previously discussed six degrees of separation. and a random chunk in the middle about the author’s experiences in college, his professor’s experiences in college, repeated mentions of fire flies and experiments on crickets. poor little crickets, thinking some other cricket loved them but it was only just a machine. ok, i’ll try and stop getting distracted. the networks. the article revealed a lot about the sciences of networks, or, how there isn’t much so far regarding the sciences of networks, but there should be. i like this reading because finally it gave me something real to think about in regards to networks. i mean yeah, the past readings have too, but this was all “networks” in big flashing lights, telling me how we’re all connected.

i thought the story/metaphor about the blackout on the west coast of the USA was great (once i could get the image of bug on a wire out o my head, so much talk of electrical power wires). it just demonstrated how people underestimate the power a

connected network has. like in the human body, sometimes even if one tiny little element fails, it can bring down an entire system because the network relies on everything working together. the relation to the science of networks is concerned with working out how each individual element knows how to come together and work together so cohesively to produce an operating network. this again raises the idea that individually we are all part of one huge network that just somehow manages to function cohesively. i think it’s interesting that this is an emerging field of scientific research, presumably because the notion of networks has been taken for granted as simply existing up until now. i guess the current rise in technology, especially with the network of the internet, that people have begun to realise that networks are a huge factor in our lives and that understanding them could be extremely beneficial to the future of our society.

 

goodbye lecture

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so we were finally getting the hang of the unlecture symposium only to have it stripped away from us. yes, hopefully the strike will lead us to a good outcome for students and teachers, but it was cold and raining and i spent around 2 hours trying to film the protest while shielding the camera from the rain under other peoples umbrellas. safe to say, i couldn’t feel my hands when i came back inside which made transferring the footage onto the computer a much harder task.

but, onto the the lecture that never happened. instead we got some pretty interesting youtube videos to look at. the problem was that watching these videos on youtube of course led my mind to wander so after watching one i’d be led onto something completely random and irrelevant (like the new honest trailer for star trek into darkness or what if star wars episode 1 was good or more info about the new pokemon mega evolutions – megakangaskhan anyone?!?!) so it really took me a lot longer than it should have to get through the videos. but i did. and they were pretty good. and here are some interesting points i took away from them.

the first video asked us if schools kill creativity. this comes from us learning and creating through making mistakes and being wrong however the current construction of the school system puts great emphasis on being right and never making mistakes. kids aren’t afraid to be wrong but as we grow older we become more afraid of being wrong because the institutions around us push us to be right.  if you’re not prepared to be wrong then you’re not gonna come up with anything original. education system restricts creativity by not allowing being wrong at all. we grow out of our creativity. again this relates back to design fiction. we need to be able to think ahead, to speculate and not just live in the present where we are told what to do and whats right and wrong. nothing can ever be created in an environment where creation is inhibited.

next came the description of the hierarchy of subjects in school: maths at the top, then humanities, then arts (and within arts is art and music then drama and dance). and all these relies on academic ability – aimed at creating the university professor. in this model, most useful things (subjects) for work are classed as more important. we need science and we need doctors and lawyers and maths. but the problem with this system is that highly talented people don’t realise they are because what they are good as is not classed as important during school. kids who are brilliant at music or dancing or acting are forced into those horrid methods or physics classes and are told that they are not learning right. and so the actual talent is suppressed. who knows what these kids could create? and now we might never know and the whole world has missed out.

the second video emphasised the difference between knowledgable and knowledge-able and the importance of the latter. Wesch describes knowledge-able as “being able to find, sort, criticise and create new info.” again this is similar to what we were hearing from adrian back on day 1 of Networked media, we want the “know-how” not the “know-what”. anything can tell us the know what or give us the knowledge but we need to know what to do with that, how to use it or even how to create our own.

there was also a lot of talk about the impact of media on communication and the world in the recent years. how “media has mediated our relationships” for example us changing the layout of our living rooms to be situated around the tv. our programs and conversations have been shortened and are punctuated by commercials. tv and media is a one-way conversation. you have to be on tv to have a voice or be significant. in the classroom, the students are trying to finding meaning in the word and find their significance in the huge world online. media is a global conversation, and now, even though it is easier to connect and share than it ever was before, it is also know eve harder to actually get out there.

Welsch also discussed the video he made with his students. check it out below if you haven’t already because it was actually brilliant and describes how most students feel at uni or even high school.

just so interesting, it’s like what’s been discussed previously in the lectures and classes. we need to create our futures. what we are learning right now isn’t necessarily the best or most conducive way to learn what we need. problems with technology now, we all have our fancy laptops open in class but are we always working? sit at the back of a lecture theatre and at least half of the screens will be showing facebook or some other social networking site. the sentences i found the most interesting in the video were about how much reading and writing would be done for their classes compared to their online life. which is why i have found keeping this blog is so great. it encourages us to contribute in a way that we are familiar with. i feel i’ve written more in this blog for the subject than i would have for any other class this year so far. and that’s the importance of creating and introducing these new modes of learning that better suits the way society and students function today. the current education system is practically archaic and students tune it out purely because most cannot focus for that long. we are used to 6 second videos, not 2 hour lectures.

so, all my essays have been wrong?

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now, those first assigned readings are pretty lengthy and heavy. and i’m so tired that my eyes are turning each letter into some strange hieroglyph that probably wouldn’t even make sense to Cleopatra. so i decided to leave those nice long essays for another time and move onto to something a little nicer on the brain. and i’m glad i did. the age of the essay, by paul graham, was really interesting and has really changed my whole view on essays. unfortunately however, i think if i actually took any of this advice and wrote a proper “essay” for an assignment, i would prob fail. but, it’s interesting stuff either way.

it was interesting the way Paul explained how the way we write essays is similar to hows lawyers present an argument. even though i’ve never really watched law an order, i’ve seen enough law shows on tv to see how that makes sense. an opening statement, presenting the argument with evidence and witnesses and then delivering a closing statement. pretty much an essay word for word. also, i absolutely hate the conclusion of an essay. kinda like how Paul described, it’s pretty much just summing up the previous points but no new ones?? then whats the point of the rest of the essay? like he said, it’s just finding a way to smartly re-word the intro, and it’s often really hard to do, especially when you’ve already spent so much time smartly wording the intro itself.

my favourite part of the article was when paul tells us what a real essay is. essay literally means try. now, as i mentioned before, i wish essay we write at uni could be like this. when i was reading the stuff he was describing about a real essay, like, not starting with a thesis or definitive point to argue but rather going in with a thought or question and just exploring where it could take you, to me that kinda felt like my blog. i start to write something as a blog post and as i write i’ll realise something new or one thought will take me on a completely unintended path or thought stream. thats why half my blog posts end up so long! my mind likes to make weird connections that i don’t even realise until i’m half way through a paragraph that i had not intended in an way.  for a couple of my previous blog posts i actually had to go back and change the title or the first paragraph because the rest of the post didn’t follow it at all! but i could just be crazy. similarly, in high school i could never plan an essay, even in english, like for the final exam. like, i would write practice essays to prepare but i would never get to an essay and write out  plan and dot points on what i would say. because for me, each sentence would form the next sentence and these would often lead to new ideas that you just can’t think about in the pressure of giving yourself 5 minutes to plan an essay at the start. so when beginning an essay i was never entirely sure where it would end and often had to go back and change the introduction accordingly.

like paul said, a real essay is thinking out loud. and to me that’s pretty much what blogging is! it’s a search search for truth but is supposed to meander, not get straight to point. the random tangents we take are where the exciting stuff happens. the surprises. and these are our most valuable experiences. not only are surprises made from what we don’t know but often they contradict what we thought we knew. and that’s where we lead to new discoveries and ideas. they can’t just come from no-where. they come from the unknown or the strange and are built upon to create something great.

it was pretty good advice, that stuff towards the end. an interesting way to look at life. allow yourself to be wrong because what made you wrong could be interesting or surprising. don’t simply accept everything you have been told by society. search for the truth in what is usually a given fact but seems wrong or “off”. and then you can write an essay.

and now i know some interesting facts about vikings in the 900’s too. gotta love them vikings.

charles cabbage and other class activities

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ok, maybe calling Charles Babbage, “Charles Cabbage”, is a bit disrespectful. but it’s not my fault that his last name sounds like cabbage. it just flows better.

in this weeks class, after some pretty light discussions about how most people enjoyed this weeks unlecture, we were thrown headfirst into research for our niki pages. who is niki do you ask?? niki is the networked media wiki. but niki sounds better than nmwiki so lets stick with niki. as i’m sure you’ve guessed by now, i was lucky enough to pull charles babbage out of the hat, along with 4 other class members. and while others in the class were sitting happily with stuff like written “youtube” on their little slips of paper, my table just had the dumbfounded faces. “who the hell is charles babbage??”

well now, i’ll tell you who charles babbage is. mr. babbage pretty much invented the calculator. now, i’m not talking about the pocket calculator, coz you would need pretty big pockets to fit this 2 story, 50 tonne beauty into your pocket. but back in the late 1800’s, babbage didn’t like the inaccuracy of calculations and so devised a machine to eliminate human error in arithmetic.


try fitting this in your pocket

so, after each of us spent 15 minutes googling (crazy that googling is a legitimate verb nowadays!) our mysterious subject, we were tasked with coming up with some ways of creating our niki page so that it would reflect his voice. you know, like an interview. except that he’s been dead for like 100 (almost wrote 1000!) years. and here we struggled. not because it was such a hard thing to think about, because i’m sure if we set our minds to it we would come up with something constructive (and if you by chance want to see what we came up with, and it’s not much i’ll just warn you know, you can check it out here) but our problem was that our attention span is just too short. everytime one of us came up with an idea, or the start of an idea, or even brought up another fact about the interesting life of mr babbage, we would all sidestep onto some completely random topic that would go on for another 10 or so minutes. so, by the end of class, our best idea was to ressurect charles as a zombie and try to talk to him before he tried to eat our brains. as you can see, a very productive class. but at least we’re getting somewhere….kinda.

wicked problems and future speculation, a successful “unlecture”

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so, yesterday marked the first unlecture that i thought really felt like an unlecture. we had prewritten questions that were all very relevant to what this course is about (rather than “Why do we have to come to this?”), many good points and contributions from the symposium team and also people asking and having their questions answered within the lecture itself. my main point, it was a very enjoyable and informative 50 minutes.

my favourite idea from the discussion was adrian’s explanation of the “wicked problem – a problem with no simple or single solution. where any response may cause other problems” and that design fiction is important in this area because it is not limited to straight, singular answers but can think broadly and more adaptbly (not a word but let’s roll with it). this idea linked in again with the ideas of the speculative thinking of design fiction and why we are studying this course in this method. the world is changing. as adrian said “print changed the world” and now the internet is doing it again and we are all getting pulled along for the ride. we need to think about what the future will be and look like. what we will be doing and how and where and when and what. what will our jobs look like in 5, 10 or 15 years? everything could and probably will be different.

another interesting point was that “content is not king”. people pay for the experience and a platform that can provide the content that people want will make the money, not the content itself. because the content can be replicated but the outlet to access that content is what is unique. we live in an ever changing society and if we want to succeed we need to find that edge up on the millions of people who can just create content with the technology readily available to them. we need to utilise the possibilities of design fiction and speculation in order to be prepared for the future of our industry. and then we’ll have to do it all again5 years later.

(trying to get my blog posts shorter. getting there but not quite just yet. as you’ve probably noticed, i tend to go on and on a lot. there is just so much you could write about. but i want to try and keep theses short, or they have the possibility of never ending. here i go ranting again. ok. imma stop now)

maps, maps and more maps

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adrian posted this article in the subject blog and i really enjoyed it so wanted to share it with you all (that is, if “you all” is actually anyone at all). link is here.

some really interesting maps on this one. i found that australia and russia seem to be on almost opposite ends of the spectrum in nearly every case. in a lot of these maps, australia is well up there in the, lets say awesome, section of the spectrum, such as our high economic equality, we’re pretty welcoming to foreigners (although you wouldn’t think that now with all those awful “Stop the boat people” ads going around), we’re one of the the best places to be born and apparantly we are one of the top countries to be a mother in 😀 although we are pretty emotional (although not as emotional as america.) but i guess that contributes to why we all feel very loved (yes, one of the maps showed that we feel the most loved compared to many other countries. here’s a virtual hug to everyone in the blue/sad countries on the love map)

a funny one was the russian guy who speculated that the US would break up into 4 separate countries run by canada, mexico, russia and europe. and who knew there were so many atheists in china?? but that time lapse map of the earth from space was really cool. i’d love to visit one of those icy countries. yeah, it would be cold, but it would also be pretty cool (see what i did there?) and i’ve always wanted to build a proper snowman.

the one that’s really scary is just how far some of hamas’s rockets can reach out into israel. i’ve stood on the border of israel and gaza and it’s not a happy place. the towns along the edges of the border have a bomb shelter every 3 houses in each street. what a terrifying way to live. (wow, that just got pretty political, didn’t mean to go there. the map did it! blame the map!)

what i did find really interesting (and here’s me getting slightly political again, sorry!!) was how we had one of the highest percentage of tolerance towards homosexuality (even higher than america) but we still have yet to legalise gay marriage!!! there was a pretty high number of countries who have already (we can worry about the ones who’ve ruled it punishable by death another time) but isn’t it about time that we legalise it too?? IMO we need to take a leaf out of New Zealand’s book and make it legal. but that’s enough political stuff from me. i feel pretty strongly about this but you don’t need to suffer through my rantings. but i was happy to see that we weren’t in the highest percentage of smoking per person so at least aussies (well, some at least) are getting something right.

lets lighten the mood up a bit before signing off, how crazy is this map!!!!

Kane’s mansion building the future of technology

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so, this week’s readings were a bit heavy, mainly because to me, they were so old and, lets say “outdated” technologically, that sometimes i found myself getting lost in all that talk of hypertext. i mean, i’m just assuming hypertext is a hyperlink coz i know what a hyperlink is (well,not really but kinda)

but i know its not. and then it just started talking about the Xanadu program and all i could think of was that huge Xanadu mansion from Citizen Kane because we were forced to watch that movie over 50 times in VCE for media. reading through the document and all the talk of introducing hypertext and saving files online, i was just thinking, “how old is this?”. then i passed the sentence saying that a new product called “CD’s” were coming out and i realised just how old it was, it’s really crazy just how much technology has changed in the last 30 years.

what was interesting was just the innovations and ideas that people were created based off this very, dare i say primitive, system. that already the ideas were being created of storing multiple files on a computer or online rather than on floppy disks, this forward thinking is what got us where we are in technology today. the predictions about the fate of print were interesting too, because although print is not completely dead, it looks to be heading that way with the advancement of our technology.

i think the main ideas to take away from the reading is not necessarily the technological stuff (because lets, face it, we’re way past CD’s now) but more the ideas behind it. how to improve and expand on what we have and make it better and more accessible and simple (yes bad grammar, but that’s the beauty of the blog). coming back to design fiction, its not what we can do with our technology, but what we could do that takes us into the future.

Blogging success!

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since we started doing these blogs, i’ve been keeping up to date with adrian’s posts on the subject blog and my one aim was to get a mention in one of his posts. after a week and a half of random rants, success! i have made it in. granted, my mention was just about me liking the course but not the recent lecture so much, rather than me actually having something useful or intelligent to contribute in regards to like, the subject or readings or anything (my blog posts tend to be more along the lines of random and unintelligible rantings, most of which involve pokemon) , but a mention is a mention!

how to have a class discussion

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so, the second networked media class has come and gone and what have i learnt?

that i’m not a very good listener. and i have a very short attention span. i was always a better reader anyway.

but when we’re asked to sit down in pairs or threes and discuss the answer to a given question, it shouldn’t be so hard…right? i guess not if you know the question. but i seem to have the terrible trait of tuning out at precisely the wrong moments. i have to get that fixed. so the majority of what i learnt in class discussions was that my discussion buddy and i share vary similar tastes in television shows. (who else here misses lost? anyone?)

but, despite my inherent lack of listening skills, i did manage to pick up on some stuff during the class (thankfully because i typed down anything elliot or my other peeps said because it was a lot more useful than what i was saying) but the main point i have is… i still don’t actually know what “networked media” is! so far the last two classes and “unlectures” have predominantly been about the blogs. “what is a blog?”, “what can we put in our blog?”, “why do we blog”, but thats just an assignment (yes, i know it’s important in the whole scheme of everything) and i still want to know… what actually is this subject?

all i got in class was “networked media is not necessarily social media”. ok, so now i know what it’s not. can someone please tell me what it is? i guess i’m single loop learning again here, just waiting for someone to give me an answer. ok, lets double loop it up. to be honest, i’m still not even sure that i get the looped learning thing. elliot explained that “Double loop learning involves questioning the assumptions that you make about the process and in doing, so renegotiate the task based on what you’ve renegotiated about the process.”.

we did have some interesting discussions on the blogs though in class. what i really liked was how elliot described the blogs as “cataloguing our thinking”. its similar to what was discussed in the previous unlecture about our blogs being ours. we are creating an online persona/identity, something which is vital in todays technological society. also interesting was when someone (sorry, i don’t remember who!) brought up the concept of consumption vs. production – our blogs are a way of us contributing to the online world, putting our voices out there to be heard.

this is going too long again. i’m still not getting the hang of short posts. i tend to write a lot, as i’m sure all those millions of people probably not even aware that my blog exists have now figured out. so one final thing from class that i liked.

i don’t really remember how we got onto the topic (me tuning out again!) but i think it was around the time when someone asked what is the network? elliot responded with this cool little bit of info about “web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0” as elliot explained:

“Web 1.0 – any kind of technology that allows any user to post any kind of info (early internet)

Web 2.0 – info getting pumped in to online space – info must be categorised and organised eg. Google (analyse amount of links to a page and quality of content within that page)

Web 3.0 – streamlining content towards specific users. Adapts its content in a way that is specific towards a user – advertising. Eg. Amazon will recommend products based on previous purchases.”

i don’t know what this info really had to do with networks except, like, online info and stuff, but it was really interesting so i do hope to use it someday.

Why do we blog?

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now that i have a couple of posts under my belt (metaphorically, i don’t actually have any belts), i can start to try and decipher what actually is a blog and why do we use it?

one point that i found really interesting is when adrian mentioned in the first “unlecture” that essay writing becomes so commonplace in secondary and tertiary school that no one ever questions why they have to write another essay but will always question why they have to keep another blog. especially because, as adrian said, after university, we will never write another essay. but chances are we will keep a blog of some sort. even the journals we used last semester we didn’t question. i did like the journals because, as i’ve mentioned before, i love print. but having started this blog i am loving it. its just so much easier and simpler and a far more productive way of getting my thoughts and ideas out. with my journal i would think carefully about everything i would write or stick in. but on a blog you can write so much more freely. and of course there’s the option of going back and editing something. there’s really only so much white out can do.

the freedom as well as a huge factor to the success of blogs. we can write about anything. of course, some stuff must and should be about the course and various readings but aside from that we have a free reign to discuss anything. and i can guarantee all of you that there will be a post from me about Pokemon in the future. but just try and compare keeping a blog to writing an essay. even the language is different. no need to worry about grammar or spelling (which is lucky because my spelling is pretty atrocious) or academic references. and in the end, we’ve written so much more than we will in a couple of essays spread throughout a semester. but it doesn’t feel like it, and thats the beauty of it!

but the bigger picture of the blog, as adrian discussed in the reading and the second “unlecture” is that once it’s posted, it’s out there. for good. anyone can read and someone will. the internet is forever. which, in a sense, is kinda scary. but what i really liked is how our content is truly ours. i have written this post and published it and it is mine. its that sense of ownership that makes the blog so important and valuable.

the internet has changed everything. how people go about their lives. how information is communicated. the list could go on for ages. and now we are out there. adrian said in the lecture that within a couple of weeks of having started this blog, we should be able to google ourselves and we would be hit number one. now for me i never thought this would happen. my last name being Midler, whenever i searched my name, the top 50 posts at least would be about Bette Midler and some random woman she knows called lauren. i tried earlier this year and same result. but tonight i hit up the google once again and was very pleasantly surprised to see myself as hits 1-6. granted, none of them were about this blog but just to see myself up there on google is something i had always dreamed of as a little girl who thought it would never be possible because of famous bette midler. the internet is growing and i’m excited to see where it takes us next.