Category Archives: Readings

Independence and power of the online network

In class discussion we covered the readings as usual, covering mainly the dependence (or lack thereof) of the internet on humans.

A few points were made, such as the fact that these days programs make decisions on their own, that no matter what the internet might do on its own it was originally made by people, that people were brought up by their parents but they are still independent when they leave home and therefore the internet can be too, and also the fact that all of nature is determined by pre-existing factors and a great butterfly effect, and therefore neither humans or the internet are independent.

My opinion is that, no, the internet is not currently independent and for as long as human beings use it, it never will be. As long as there are the ‘makers’ out there writing scripts and protocols that develop the internet, and as long as there are ‘users’ out there whose needs and wants are shaping the way that the internet develops, it can not be independent of people. (I’m also a determinist philosophy-wise but I really think we went of track with that tangent so I’m not going to comment on it.)

This brings us to the power play within the internet. It is very interesting that, as the reading points out, the development of the internet has destabilised former societal power structures and instead this technology that doesn’t have a central power is the focus of so many lives and indeed is fundamentally entangled with our day to day beings. I agree with the reading in that there still is power in the internet, however the fact is, the internet is developed by the people who use it. It is an extremely democratic network because there is not central power, the needs and desires of every person lead to new technologies and processes on the internet. I think this is a great thing, politicians and global leaders may not. The issue it does lead to though is that people with great programming skills have an advantage over the average user on the internet and therefore have more power than them. They could use this power to do the wrong thing, as has happened in the past with viruses and online scams, but for the most part people with developing skills use it for good, and progress the internet into new and promising waters.

Live narrating my reading

I personally find readings intolerably boring, so in order to make it more interesting for myself I’m going to live blog it. Kind of. What I’ll do is read the thing and take breaks to comment on the content as I read.

For the first few sentences into the Galloway Protocol reading I just didn’t know what the guy was talking about. Then ‘Boom’. Got it. He’s wondering how there is still a power play in a network that is “decentralised”. Which I’m assuming means a network that doesn’t have a central power. LIKE THE INTERNET, BAM! I’m thinking that this is going to lead to a discussion of how power is spread out over the nodes in the network.

Ok so he’s not just talking about the internet, he’s talking about society as a whole and how some of the power has shifted from “factories”-capitalisation, the “sovereign”-the government and the “prison”-laws, onto digital technologies.

I hope I’m getting this right, it would be really embarrassing to be live blogging my thought process if it was an incorrect interpretation.

Cool yep I think I’m on the right track. So basically if you look back into history you’ll see that power was enforced through violence. Then as you travel along to the modern era more civilised and procedural procedures are used to control people’s behaviour. New technologies assist in the whole thing.

Ok now he’s finally mentioned the internet. It’s the big one. The big new technology that has created a huge shift in control.

Well that’s interesting, apparently the Internet was intentionally created as a result of the Cold War to have no central power so that if attacked the whole thing wouldn’t come to pieces. I kinda thought the whole, no-central-power thing would be an accident. So they intentionally broke up information into packets and invented a way to send them somewhere and reassemble. Cool.

What is “BSD”? Sounds like a weird sexual fetish. Nope they don’t explain that, next.

Ok this is just a history of the development of the internet, not bothering to write on this anymore. Now the internet is really big. Done.

At the centre of the internet lies protocols, by the Request For Commons. I did not know this. Where are these protocols and who writes them? Is this like the global constitution for the internet or like a big manual saying that if you press A, B will happen?

Holy Crap! There is an Internet Engineering Task Force! The modern day equivalent of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! Literally people that try to protect and guide users of the internet on a peaceful and ethical path into the future.

HTML and CSS are protocols, so it is more of a manual than a constitution.

Oh god, I’m not even a quarter of the way through. I’m skimming.

Protocols on the internet are all about etiquette and coding. They determine how the internet will progress and which technologies that are developed will be implemented and used by the masses. Kinda like real world governing but technology.

Voluntary regulation. I like that. The thing about the internet though is that a lot of people volunteer not to regulate protocol and instead go around it with their hacking brains and use the power to their advantage. How does that come into it?

New technologies no longer come from one hierarchal control point, but this guy doesn’t believe that this means that control is disappearing altogether.

Oh noooo he’s talking about IPs and DNSs now. Those are my topics. I need a break.

Miley Cyrus, Charles Manson and Rich get Richer

Overall, I found the reading, Rich get Richer, boring, repetitive and more technical than it aught to have been. Barbarasi spent a lot of words reiterating that: 1, networks grow (apparently this was some sort of revelation), and 2, the nodes of the network have a power structure.

What is this supposed to teach us? It is obvious from observation that networks grow. Even Charles Manson’s cult started with a few members or nodes, then attracted a few more, then a few more, a few died in mass suicide incidents and somehow, due to this preferential attachment of international interest they are replaced by more new members.

It is the same in all networks. I’m struggling to think of a network that doesn’t grow and evolve in a number of ways, except unsuccessful networks or those that once grew and are now waning.

The power structure of these is a little more interesting than the rather unsurprising nature of network growth. Online in the modern world, preferential attachment is a huge power play between the big corporations on the net battling for clicks, and the occasional little guy who manages to get an adorable video of his cat doing something hilarious. These days big corporations will pay some little guy and his cat to do something adorable and hilarious, just to get page views. And the more views that guy gets, the more new nodes are created that link to that node, and his brand becomes more popular and the rest of his nodes become more linked to as well.

It’s like high school all over again. Vying for schoolyard popularity on the big bad net. Using hashtags, commenting on popular sites, talking up the big topics on Twitter, all these things are examples of people fighting to work their way up in the unendingly massive network of power play that is the internet.

How can we use this knowledge of preferential attachment and power laws in order to get to the top of our desired network hubs? That’s the important question here, and the one that everyone is trying to get to the bottom of. Understanding the problem with Barbarasi’s scientific explanation of power plays changes my view of the game but I always knew the game was there.

At the moment rising to the top of a networking hub is pinnacle to the ongoing development of any kind of online presence, and it is what most money making endeavors and ambitious creative projects and hopeful writers/photographers/Youtube sensations aspire to. In order to be well known, you need to be well known online.

So, how do you get there? How do you rise to the top. If you want to follow Barbarasi’s equations, get in early. Create something that a lot of other people are going to want to link to. In his examples he stated that a new node will automatically and naturally be attached to two other nodes, manually attach it to more. This would be known as spamming. Something that Barbarasi doesn’t account for. He talks about quantity but what about quality. He completely neglects to mention that the quality, content and originality of the link is going to be the reason that new nodes are created in relation to it.

That’s where Miley Cyrus is a genius at creating online hype. Over the past year she rose to the top of online power play. Countless Tweets, Facebook statuses, news articles, opinionated blog posts and snide Youtube comments were posted about Miley Cyrus-both negative and positive nodes. Either way her name sky rocketed to the top of the online network by being the topic of countless nodes.

This is one method of self promotion online, creating controversy, and perhaps one that is only suited to a person hoping to sell records through a wild and unconforming image.

For creating a well known professional online presense, the answer would be to create original and relevant industry content, and as Barbarasi’s findings teach us, post it fast and link it to the source of interest early to boost the preferential attachment to your nodes. (Nodes is a terrible word, online texts would be a much better way to put it in this context.) The amount of links attached to your online texts would then cause your personal and professional brand’s status to climb the online power ladder.

Hypertext

The word, hypertext, before I learned its meaning, sounded to me as if I was in a spacecraft, flying past words and sentences at the speed of light.

It turns out I was kind of right. In my imagination I was navigating the ship around space and through the networks of words. Coincidentally in a very similar way to how people surfing the internet navigate their way through links on pages to new find and absorb and filter new texts.

That’s how we surf the web. It isn’t linear, everything is connected. Every person’s path through the web is different.

This is a fantastic way to learn. In fact, I remember being very young and Googling Roy Lichtenstein, from there I was linked to pop art, from there I discovered Andy Warhol. From his biography I was linked to Edie Sedgwick, where I was linked to Poor Little Rich Girl on Youtube, where I was linked to a trailer for the 90s movie Clueless. It was an interesting path and it perhaps didn’t land in the most educational place, but until Youtube it is a good demonstration of learning through hypertext pathways. I still remember a lot about Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, pop art, Edie Sedgwick, that black and white ‘art-house’ film, Poor Little Rich Girl.

This is a little superstitious, but I believe that because the brain is made of billions of tiny connections -synapses- making connections is the best way to learn. Connections between our experiences and old and new knowledge.

I’ve really just covered my personal connection with hypertext rather than really focusing on the reading. For a really, really good summary of the reading on hypertext check out Li-Wen’s blog here.

Connecting travel to design fiction

Two of my last posts are about Design Fiction and my travels to India. While writing my post on India, during the period of time that I was studying Design Fiction, I was struck by a connection between the two-albeit an abstract one. (Very abstract.)

I live in Australia and I live an Australian lifestyle that is very separated from the lifestyles of Indian people living in India.

For me, India is another world, almost like the speculative worlds that we discuss in Design Fiction.

I was almost like the product, the design that was thrust into a speculative world to see how I would react and how I affected the world around me.

The flaw in this theory is that I am not a piece of technology or a design, I am one person and I didn’t have a huge influence on the society around me. However, the society did have a big impact on me.

Travel is like reverse Design Fiction.

On design fiction- my first impression

So, design fiction. Who knew that was a thing?

I’ve contemplated what the future will look like, both online and off. What new things will exist, how will they impact the world and how will it all impact me-particularly in the work force?

I mean, the iPhone didn’t exist until just seven years ago and look at us now!

I really think it’s interesting that, as Matthew Ward pointed out in this article,  everything that we create now, is not for now. It is for the future. The plans that we have for our ideas are all fictional, until they either do or don’t come into reality. If an idea actualises, it will be seen, read and used in the future; and will have implications, however small, on other work for years to come.

It makes sense to fictionalise a world in which our idea lives and breathes. To prepare. To adapt in advance. To better the idea for the future before it even exists in the present.

Design fiction has a lot of benefits. By moving from reality into a fictional narrative, new realms and possibilities are unleashed. As Ward says:

“By focussing on the speculative and fictional, design is no longer constrained by the practical reality of todays material and economic restrictions.”

There’s also the fact that with design fiction we can predict and prepare for the success or failure of an idea.

For me, personally, I think it’s important to design a fictional industry in order to prepare for it. The industry that I have always planned to work in is advertising, but the ad industry has changed profoundly since I fell in love with it and will continue to change as I prepare myself to (hopefully) enter into the field.

Design fiction could be a way of preparing myself for a rapidly changing industry, to be ready for everything because I’ve fictionalised the changing world in advance. Design fiction could also play a part enhancing my ideas while I study and learn.

And just check out this design fiction from the other reading.

It is taking a product that doesn’t exist yet, but may very soon, and is already looking at how it could work and the impact it could have on our lives. Very cool.

From Mr Adrian Miles himself

The other reading for our Networked Media class was on the benefits of blogging in media education (link here).

This reading is, of course, a little more relevant to our media course than the one I blogged about in the previous post. It is after all the explanation as to why the students in my Networked Media class are all writing blogs so closely interlocked with what we study in class.

I do definitely see the value in keeping an academic blog, the use of which Adrian Miles really pushes for in the piece. Even if no one else reads it, it is a great resource for I alone; particularly with tagging and categorising, the blogging community, the ability to create different media content and make use of the other technical aspects of blogging.

My issue with it is exactly as was pointed out in the reading,

“…even with the best of intentions if the use of the blog is not strongly integrated into the learning and assessable outcomes of a subject then students will, deservedly, recognise that it simply isn’t worth their while and will treat it as a rote activity.” (Miles, p2)

I need to know that I’m utilising the blog to my greatest advantage, and to do that takes more effort than I might sub-conciously be willing to give to such a new and long term tool. Long term in that the profits of blog use would be long term rather than short term rewards, which makes habits so much easier to stick to.

This is my blog, my academic blog and not my personal blog. It seems wrong to separate the two and I’d prefer not to, but I have to. I’ll link my other blogs in my blogroll later today.

I hope to use this blog in particular to my fullest advantage for learning. Not just learning the things we cover in Networked Media, but also things that I want to learn for myself. I’ll use it in the ways that we discussed in the workshop and as Adrian Miles discusses in the reading for this week.

My other concern with this is that I keep forgetting that it is public. I feel as if I’m writing to myself and so I’m writing as if I am. I forget that there is an audience, even if it’s an audience of one they don’t want to read something that sounds like my journal.

Or perhaps that’s just my style of writing?

It’s 1am, I’ll find out tomorrow.

Noticing… what?

In all honestly I’d never even taken any special notice of the word ‘notice’ once at all in my life before reading this weeks reading. I’ve never seen the word come up so many times in a novel, let alone each paragraph of Mason’s piece.

I agree with Mason that we don’t notice most of the stimuli which we encounter in each day, but I think it would be less productive than more to start noticing pens and doorways as he suggests.

I really liked what was said about conversation. In any conversation that I may not be interested in, or having heard a friend say something that I don’t agree with, I often notice my body language change despite my own efforts to seem positive and engaged. It’s something I notice but something I can’t change.

So in a way, noticing personal action might be good but it also might just enhance anxiety. Who knows. I really think I ought to talk to my psychologist about this.

Any reading that needs to be brought up with my psychologist is either very good or very bad. And where is Mr Wilde in all of this?

It is in my practice to interpret readings into my own language and point of view in order to learn, and this is what I took from Mr Mason’s ideas:

  • Notice beauty, enhance your creativity.
  • Notice new things, interesting things, to enhance creativity.
  • Notice the language, spoken and unspoken, of other people, to understand them better for selfish reasons and unselfish reasons.
  • Notice yourself, your behaviour, to better yourself.
  • Take note of those things that happen that might be of some significance to you in the future, and reflect on them to gain full use of that incident.

I really don’t see what this has to do with my learning though. Self-development, maybe, but learning information, not so much.

I have however noticed myself not noticing things more than usual recently, so I will in the future try to be more ‘mindful’ than ‘mindless.’

The article, Researching Your Own Practice, by John Mason, can be read here.