Blog assessments coming due real soon now. The essay, up to a thousand words please. Less is OK if you’re comfortable with it. You submit your blog assessment on paper, print the entries/copy and paste them into single doc, attach to essay on paper, hand in the usual way to level 4 of building 9. Due Friday August 30th.
Month: August 2013
Twenty Years Ago
William, reasonably, wonders why the readings are ‘old’. Quick answers. They are not about the history of the internet, but hypertext. Because hypertext has (and still has) some of the smartest things to say and think about network structure. These ideas can help understand the entire web, right down to how to think about complex linked emergent structure in interactive video. The one thing hypertext is not great for in digital media is games, but we’re not looking at games (there’s a games degree for that). But read recent work on, say, online documentary, and apart from sounding like hypertext from 1990, it would be vastly improved by actually knowing about hypertext from 1990. So hypertext is a deep strucure, so learning about that helps us to understand everything else. He is also working on a hypertext, well done. Once upon a time we did a lot more hypertext, and used specific hypertext software because it is very very hard to get its importance without having to deal with it in the nitty gritty. Bit like trying to explain writing to someone who doesn’t have it. It would be very hard to just describe what it is, and its value, to someone who thought things were just fine as they were thank you.
Bolter
Brittany picks up from Jay Bolter’s article that all writing is a technology. And therefore when computers come along we can use the computer to keep writing the same way, or we can use the computer to write a different way. Hypertext is a different way. Word is the same way. Rebecca uses the quote about how we can’t distance ourselves from writing. I like to reverse this so that writing is a technology that has completely colonised us, has changed our world, without our consent. We are writing cyborgs, in effect. Helena picks up what we call the technicity of writing, and how it is an art. Even her counter example of scientific writing, good writing here requires artfulness just as anywhere else, different rules to short stories, but it is still an artful game. Shavoni has a very good outline of some takeaways from this reading.
Hypertext
Chantelle thinking about the Landow reading, in a long list of things, notes that in hypertext our texts don’t have edges anymore. We sort of might take this for granted and nod, “of course” (though some of you will be schocked by your experience of this made literal in Niki) but in practice most of us haven’t taken this on board. Our essays are on paper, they don’t’ really weave out, or in, or through, and still, in lots of ways, lots of media are silos. (mixbit is interesting here in relation to video as it starts to change this a little for video.) Allison worries about linearity, narrative and hypertext. Linearity is like the hegemonic elephant in the room with it’s bedmate narrative here. Why (I’m serious) does narrative always seem to be used to trump other things? When there are so many forms that don’t really rely on narrative – games, sport, music, lots of poetry. We can make moving works without narrative. If that is the case then we can probably, quite easily, making moving works that are multilinear. Yes? Laura-Jayne has good sketch notes on hypertext, though the copy and paste or typing from the Douglas jumbled down there at the end! Daniel has thumbnail points on hypertext. In hypertext the link is fundamental, which might get discussed, might not, depends on how much unpacking it might do.
Outside the Classroom
Alexandra wanders across the road, to that dotty spotty button building, to listen to some design industry types talk about stuff. Lots of connections to what we’ve been doing. Not because we used the ‘D’esign word too, but the larger ideas. Know what versus know how, T shaped people, and so on. An excellent blog post that neatly shows what we’re doing sits squarely outside of the lecture room.
Nelson
Isabella notes that Ted Nelson coined the term ‘hypertext’ (he’s coined a few others too, many of them McLuhanesque neologisms such as ‘thinkertoy’, ‘intertwingled’, and ‘transclusion’) and that Nelson’s vision was for hypertext to become a general form of writing. It sort of has, sort of, via the Web. Lauren gets into Xanadu (Nelson is a film buff by the way) and Nelson’s operating system and Charles Foster Kane’s ‘home’. Lauren picks up how when Nelson was writing we didn’t have CD, DVD, the internet, to make the point stronger, we didn’t have personal computers either. Lucy thinks about hypertext and choose your own adventure. We won’t get into much hypertext, but hypertext is multilinear, whereas choose your own adventure is linear, with different linear options. The difference might seem small but is enormous. Ella likes that Nelson got so much of it right (the serious hypertext people amongst us think that the recent rise of the Web as a platform for doing things, and not just publishing, is getting closer to Nelson’s vision, but the most idealistic parts are still missing). Hannah thinks that Nelson’s vision for education has missed the boat. While absolutely not a fan, google MOOC and wonder. 65,000 students, one subject, all at once. Universities are falling over themselves to get on board. For me, it is not the accuracy of Nelson’s predictions that matter, he worked towards (is still working towards, at 76, or 77) making this happen, and it is this effort that has directly influenced the sort of web we have today. That’s impressive, and lucky.
Samuel very much enjoys Nelson’s vision and its depth and simplicity, and how the concept of the hyperlink (which is Nelson’s which is the basis of the link on any and every webpage, keep that in mind, how would you conceive of such a thing before they existed?) has changed the structure of writing and knowledge. Tamrin thinks about choose your own adventure stories, I think this has turned up a couple of times now so is probably a good example to think about how hypertext isn’t one of these. Good hypertext is multiyear, looping and turning in on itself, much more musical in form. Choose your own adventures are branching trees. These two drawings are from Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. The first is what you get in choose your own adventure, the second is the more common one in hypertextual structures.
Beta Symposium 0.2
There will be NO unsymposium 0.2 this Tuesday August 20th due to a half day stop called called by the National Tertiary Education Union from 1:30pm that day. This also means that Tuesday’s 3:30 lab will not run this week. The questions that have been framed for the symposium (below) will be held over until next week.
In lieu of the symposium please check out the following on YouTube:
- Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? 2007. Film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
- TEDxKC – Michael Wesch – From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able. 2010. Film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
- Web 2.0 Michael Wesch. The Machine Is Us/ing Us. 2007. Film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&feature=youtube_gdata_player
In other news, in other labs this week work to date in niki will be critiqued, and then further developed (next week the next lot of topics will be distributed). Readings have been updated, Adrian saw a platypus (alive) in the Yarra at Templestowe, and these are the very good questions from Friday’s class for the symposium:
- how does hypertext relate to storytelling in different media formats?
- is the work we publish online only validated once it is viewed/consumed by others?
- do you think the digitalisation of literary texts and the use of the E-reader will eventually replace the physical book completely?
Design, Speculation, Fiction
Jennifer’s dad worked at IBM (the company that famously once thought the world wide market for computers was about five), so he’s seen a lot of change. Including that when staff would have a computer on their desktop, that was crazy talk. The secret to that story is that it was spreadsheet software that drove the personal computer. Spreadsheet software let business people speculate, they could run ‘what if’ scenarios easily by writing a spreadsheet with all the variables to their profit and loss – what happens if we sell this many? If we employ three more people? if the phone bill goes up? And while we don’t have Marty McFly’s hover board, we do have maglev trains, which is freaky.
There were some questions about its role for us, as media people. Here you go. Simple. What do you think you want to do. (Direct, run a media company, design web sites, invent a reality TV franchise, write screenplays). Got something? Now, it is 2020. Write a design fiction. What do you do in your job in 2020? how do you get paid? what stuff do you make? for what/who? where? As I asked a student in honours once, who wanted to do stuff on journalism, “imagine journalism was invented right now, today, with the internet as a given, what would journalism and the ‘press’ be, if it was invented now?”. That’s a design fiction question.
Jackie wonders about the imagining part. The key thing is it isn’t scifi so it is premised on real things. A real concept, technology, or scenario. If FaceBook uses enough electricity to power a city (it does), then how can it be sustained given our reliance on carbon fuel sources and the risks of global warming? That’s ripe for speculative research.
Bush
Samuel notes Bush’s prescience, which is impressive. This is, though it wasn’t around then, a form of design fiction, it is speculative writing, coming from 1945 science and imagining forward. It has been a powerful vision for many of the people who invented the stuff we now take for granted. Monika notes how in 1945 the problem was all the scientific knowledge available, and simply what to do with it all. Bush’s memex was the solution, as was the Web for the physicists at CERN in the early 90s. Zoe is also impressed by the ‘what if’ thinking proposed. Lina picks up how Bush is about manipulating and supporting intelligence and knowledge, and creating technologies to enable us to do more with what we know, which is one reason why the internet has seen such rapid adoption, change, and use. Ashleigh highlights the key thing about computers, cognitive supplementation, they have made a difference to knowledge, how we make it, store it, find it, use it, and increasingly what it is. It is not just more, but different (a qualitative change). Memphis also picks up Bush’s point about rethinking the relationship between people, knowledge, and technology. Bush is a post War American idealist – what can’t science do? – but the intent here, just after the use of the atomic bomb, is important to get. It’s a vision to advance the human, not subjugate it. Shavoni has the excellent yardstick of her grandfather to make plain how much change has happened. A really interesting thing is that people, individuals, are like sponges in relation to technology. We soak it up, institutions – companies, universities, and so on, are bricks, they in fact react in the opposite way. (Yet another reason why ‘design thinking’ is being talked about in business schools, with limited success usually because the people they get aren’t really designers.) Jackie seems to pick up the fact that science has ‘scale’ and that things happen faster, and then faster. Not just because communication is faster, but the tools and our knowledge shifts from just being more to being different, so that the ability to innovate seems to get faster too. I’m not sure if this is the case, though it feels like it though also, taking an ANT point of view, it is very important to recognise that this happens around a couple of small ‘attractors’. The web, perhaps the iPhone and app store. Two small things that have triggered seismic shifts in nearly everything they touch. David, meanwhile, zeroes in on the memex, the model that inspired Nelson and hypertext, which in turn influenced Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. There really is a line from Bush, the memex, to your blog.