Danielle picks up the material parts of the internet and digital technology that I raised but thinks some of it must be virtual. We use ‘virtual’ to mean that we digitise stuff and once this was thought to make it ‘immaterial’ so what sort of media it was originally doesn’t matter to the system. A bit of video is the same as a bit of text to the network. That is true. Just data to be pumped around. But it is still stuff, and that is something that contemporary thinking in these areas is increasingly paying attention to. The other use is thinking that what is presented is virtual as an ersatz copy of something real. Except with digital stuff ubiquitous I’m not sure we gain much by thinking it is different. We don’t talk of cinema as virtual reality, and to my mind Second Life is anything but ‘real’!
Cultural Technology
Samuel, via Potts and Murphie, wonders where culture ends and technology begins. I think today, certainly in the first world, to think one is separate from the other has all the hallmarks of a myth of a golden age. Christopher uses the analogy of the city to think about technology and culture by making the city literally a CPU. Speculative thinking anyone? Rebecca on ‘technology as the habitat we live in‘. Georgia on how there is no clear definition available for culture or technology (which might suggest the best way to approach them is as systems, not objects).
Pottering
Kate writes about the Potts and Murphie reading and wonders how we might even separate culture from technology. Increasingly I think the same thing, it just seems a romantic myth to think there is some ‘pure’ culture that lies outside of technology. What (seriously) would or could that be? Brittany makes the point that since technology is ubiquitous we live in technology, and is “an overarching system that we inhabit”. So, how over arching do you really think it is? Olivia pick up how the reading distinguishes between technique, technology, and culture. This is good as some key theorists in this area made a distinction between technique as a way of doing, and technology as machines that require techniques. Monika argues that culture is individual to the extent that “each individual following his [sic] own culture”. I’d suggest Potts and co don’t say this, and that culture to be culture has to be social and so shared. As individuals we might have ‘it’ but it is not an individual’s thing. We come into culture, we don’t create it as we wish it. Holly goes via the Romantic artists to think about technology (with a nod towards The Young Ones, what I would describe as punk TV) and culture. It’s a good way to approach it, and it also illustrates a range of political and cultural changes (the factories are now ‘somewhere else’, but technology is less of an outside evil than something well and truly inside). Denham provides a very good summary of the introduction, and yes, culture is a joyously dense word. Patrick recognises that the way we understand the word ‘technology’ has changed, as these things do, so an interesting question now is, in this sort of digital society, just what sort of work does the term now do for us? Why? Lina, as have several others, very much like Eno’s definition of culture as that which we don’t have to do. This is culture as what some others might define as luxury, not luxury as in a Rolex watch but luxury as in not essential to anything. Anna D has a summary of technology, technique, and culture. Alois wants to get into the details of older views of definition of culture that are premised on hierarchies. Good with that.
Games, Stories, It’s a Mess
Abby thinks games maybe are like stories and argues that “the user is always the protagonist”. I’d agree with that 100% and then ask how many stories have you read/watched where you can even make that claim? Ever?
More Richness
Denham has a post about the 80/20 rule and the inequality of the power law. Though the thing to take away is the long tail point, what lies in the tail is greater than what lies at the big end, so for online stuff something important is that while it might seem obvious that there are hubs (though it isn’t, why link to Google?) what is less obvious is the scale, and complexity, of the tail. Nga has a simple and useful account of why earlier web sites end up with more links to them than later ones (part of the explanation of preferential attachment). Lucy has a simple and elegant account for networks, centres and scale free networks.
The Internet of Things
Courtesy of Zoe the internet of everything, which is a riff off the current idea of an internet of things. And Zoe also finds MIT running a course that is what we here call speculative, since it’s MIT it gets written about in a national magazine, but same ideas.
Is It a Game?
Jake talks about how some games aren’t about winning. I’d suggest they aren’t games anymore. At some point an interactive narrative driven ‘game’ isn’t really a game, it’s an interactive narrative. Just as an interactive narrative that has a small moment of game play in it probably doesn’t make it a game. While Gone Home is narrative driven it is still a game – we don’t need to describe a novel as ‘narrative driven’. So what happens here is there is a strong narrative thread as it is a classic style puzzle quest game. I haven’t played it, but if the quest needs to be completed, it is a game. If you just explore a story world, then in my argot it is more interactive narrative than game. If people talk about it in terms of how you play it, and what you need to do in room X to be able to do thing Y, to discover Z, then it is a game. Play is play. Play that is orientated towards a measurable outcome (a result, however conceived), becomes a game. Reading narrative is not a game because we can’t measure the outcome, and we don’t.
Losing, Winning
Ajeet has a very good post. Questions, thinking out loud, joining ideas. Good questions open ended answers (it’s a fool’s paradise to think there are yes no answers to many of these questions). Play is not the same as a game, a game is, basically, competitive play and it becomes competitive because there are some sort of rules to determine an outcome. You can play mum’s and dad’s as a child, and that is so NOT The Sims.
Last Week.
Denham’s post from the unsymposium is worth a read, not just picking out the key take aways but providing some commentary on them too. The observation about film and hypertext and so much digital media making as a relational media is, I think, exceptionally important. The role of recommendations, and those systems that now elevate some people over others is what I meant about trying to work this out algorithmically. We know how to make recommendations based on things like what you buy compared to other people who buy similar things. But to do this just on comments we make is much harder – how do you tell who is more authoritative than someone else? The most common way this is being done at the moment is through peer review. I rank other people’s comments and those who consistently seem to be highly rated by others will be elevated in terms of authority in, and by, the system (this is essentially a slashdot system as they invented it). But there is a lot of time and money being spent on trying to solve this just on the stuff that’s already out there, without needing people to vote and rank.
Unsymposium 0.6
We will segue into this week’s questions via last week’s uncompleted answers:
- Does a network have a centre? Or do we all create centres for our own networks?
- Anderson states that infinite access to entertainment media is accommodating more niche tastes, encouraging exploration away from a hit-driven culture that thrives on “brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop songs”. Why are these still the most popular, mainstream and successful in our entertainment culture?
This week’s questions:
- Why does the 80/20 rule seem to appear universally in the physical world?
- What kinds of systems does the 80/20 rule apply to?
- Why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web?