Tim O’Reilly on his experience creating a major company in publishing (print and e) in the ‘internet economy’. It is a good read for many of you as it shows (I think) the connections between what we’ve been saying, how we’ve run the subject, and what O’Reilly has done, tried to do, and what matters. This is a business that is growing, and gives back in significant ways, so it is model to pay attention to.
More Voxies
Louisa has a bullet list of stations along the way. A semesters worth of material in 50 minutes. Patrick joins up NBN, infrastructure policy and network media. I’m with Patrick, the bigger, faster, more resilient it is built now, the better off we will be, it is the difference in defining useful as an extractive economy (dig it up, sell it) versus a knowledge economy. Olivia has another list of points from the unsymposium, very useful gloss. Millicent notices that she, like Brian, uses media ‘hypertextually’ (and so the debate that happens out in the real world is whether this is a good, or a bad, thing). Rebecca S thinks with her dad about Facebook, and dad points out that not very long ago MSN was all the rage (anyone remember MySpace?). My criticism of Facebook is that I think the network is the place for quality and niche, and I really really struggle to have that experience on Facebook. Let alone being inundated with dating ads (I’ve told them I’m married, and not looking, but they’re the ads I get??) One of my favourites is from Danielle with thoughts about games, stories, keyboards, recommendation engines and sharing the link love (link to others in the tail). This last point is incredibly important, it is what guarantees diversity and depth to the web – for all the reasons the last two week’s of readings have described. Closely followed by Lauren M who realised (very well done) that when I described hypertext as a post cinematic literacy, and that meaning is created outside of the shots, that what I was simply describing was the Kuleshov effect. Yep. Hypertext figured this out quickly, most other interactive media hasn’t. Rebecca M has another node come load of dump notes from the unsymposium… More to come…
Recommendation Engines
Was off my game (not sure you’d notice) Tuesday afternoon so wasn’t very clear. In relation to recommendation systems and things like FaceBook and Amazon, specificity here matters. They both have ways of recommending things but they are quite different in how they work, and why. FaceBook is about selling ads to advertisers, just like TV and newspapers. So when it puts ads in there it is using what it thinks it knows about you, based on what you and your friends have done on FaceBook in the past, combined with how much advertisers are willing to pay for their ad to someone that Facebook has defined as like you. So this is not a recommendation system, it is an advertising regime and the algorithmic systems that Facebook uses are about targeting advertisers to you. This makes it fundamentally different to the recommendation algorithms used by services such as Amazon and iTunes because for these latter services there is an enormous catalogue of material and as retailers they don’t care which one you buy, just that you buy. Facebook, on the other hand, since it sells ads which, as ads, want you to buy that thing rather than some other thing, has to care about what you choose and why – this is the entire premise of advertising. (In other words the book shop doesn’t care which book you buy, as long as you buy a book they stock, though once in the book shop some publishers will use different point of sale advertising to try to get you to buy that particlar book. Amazon and iTunes music store are like the book shop, they just want you in the shop, Facebook is more like the publisher, they not only want you in the shop, but then they want to sell ads to those in the shop.) Advertising is not and cannot be driven by recommendation algorithms because, for Amazon and iTunes, these are anonymous peer driven (anonymous because you don’t know them, peer because funnily enough there are other people who seem to like things you do, and on that basis there’s a pretty good chance you’ll like what they like too.)
Amazon on the other hand uses its data, harvested from what people buy on amazon, to data mine it to build its recommendation system. This is not a lot more complicated than using what I buy to define my profile, and then matching it with similar profiles. Once this is done it is possible to make suggestions based on what other people who appear to be interested in the things I’m interested in are interested in (there’s a lot of interest there). However, it is not trying to sell me anything specific, it just wants to help me find new things, in particular things I might not have noticed, on the reasonable assumption that I’ve bought there before, so am likely to do so again. In other words things don’t appear because they’ve been paid to be there (which is Facebook), they’re there because lots of people who buy those books also buy these ones. Because of Amazon’s scale (how many sales it makes) it has an enormous amount of information from which it can build its recommendations. It also lets you rank and rate its recommendations, which is handy and of course lets their algorithm became better. iTunes recommendations work the same way, it is simply using sales information so that people who like Bonnie Prince Billy are also likely to enjoy Bill Callahan. What is of value here is that it usually only takes about two clicks to find stuff that you often don’t know, and you can then decide if you’d like to listen to it. So, in relation to producing recommendation hierarchies it is quite resilient.
Intent and Why?
Abby wonders about intention and meaning and the whole mess. She has a good question:
I walked away from this ‘unlecture’ thinking ‘well if you can guarantee intent, and authorship is such a flimsy notion, then why do we create?
In my own case the answer is because making in itself is pleasurable (we make music without audiences, dance without audiences, so creating often happens without the intention of an audience – all I mean is that creating is pleasurable. The next answer would be that I have things I want to say and share. I have to keep making and sharing precisely because their specific meaning never arrives. The things I make never quite say them right, and people don’t quite understand them as I thought they might, either. So we do it again.
Latest Unsymposium VoxPops
Patrick has a long, good post on the 80/20 rule, networks and structure. Good read if you want to think about how it relates to networks. Shannen is living proof of the small world that Watts and Barabási discuss, while Kate engages with the long tail and its relation to economics. Holly applies all this to the recent election battle over Indi (Obama also cracked this with his first campaign, which everyone has been trying to imitate ever since), which is very much long tail and relied heavily on social media resources. Lina highlights a very important passage about how linking is not random, In the very simple example from the unsymposium even in writing an academic essay in hypertext linking is not random as a result is both a power law distribution, and a meaningful structure. Lina also has a good introduction to power laws, using bell curves to help think about their difference. Brittany discusses the ‘rich get richer’ reading which is about preferential linking and also the advantages that first movers gain.
Vacant Possession
Quite a few of the terms for Niki haven’t been used (for a variety of reasons). We’re now letting groups use empty terms if they like. So, if you are in a group that’s been given a term, and it is empty, but you are planning to put something in there, then please, immediately, get in there and leave some placeholder text saying the term is occupied, and there will be content happening shortly. Anything that remains empty is ripe for others to use.
Networky Stuff
Lucy has comments on the 80/20 rule, and its relation to the Web where 80% of links point to 15% of pages. This is why linking matters, it is how you build and nurture the long tail (and that the tail is where immense niche value lies). Lucy also discusses the second reading noting how the web isn’t static, its structure changes over time, and that hubs and connectors are important attributes of these sorts of networks, which occur in nature and online. Prani discusses the long tail, though it isn’t so much about being niches as that niches become viable in dramatically different ways courtesy of power law distributions and the long tail. Lauren tackles power laws, awkwardly but the discussion is good (must be the science). Nga on the long tail, with links to two useful clips. Danielle on the long tail, recommendation systems, and supply and demand, Tamrin with more detail on retail, long tail and the marketplace. Rebecca S has a joyfully scattered meander about long tails with various swishes along the way, it’s an excellent read. And Lauren M has notes from Watts and networks and nodes. there are lots of questions in other posts about why. Hope we get a chance to colour that in.
From the Niki
What’s niki about you ask?
- make something that others can use, to make to leave behind things for others
- (this was the founding rationale and ethos of the internet)
- learn how to make small things easily, and to learn from these so that they, and you, get better
- (the age of monuments might be in decline?)
- a viable model for media making is small things, that can then be joined
- (radical aren’t we?, cinema’s used this model for over a hundred years)
- to learn how to make knowledge in creative ways, you need to be allowed to make knowledge, in creative ways
- (unless you’d prefer not to be creative?)
The entry on Tim O’Reilly is nice. Ludic, technoliterate, this is what we call code work.
Unsymposium 0.5
Some carry over questions from last week,
- Can video games be considered hypertext narratives? How/why?
- How do you actually write a hypertext narrative?
- Why is hypertext considered influential in the future development of media making and storytelling?
And the new ones:
- The 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 a recommendations hierarchy could emerge?
- Does a network have a centre? Or do we all create centres for our own networks?
- What does Watts mean when he talks about synchronisation? How does it relate to 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?
08 Reading (For Week 9)
Required
Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. Culture and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. This is the introduction from this book. Short, very general but lays out some important general ideas and terms. (PDF)
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. The MIT Press, 2006. Print. (PDF). This could be experienced as dense. It is great work that combines critical theory, technology studies, technological understanding (Galloway knows how to do things with code and computers, as opposed to knowing how to do things on computers) to think about the significance of ‘protocol’ as a social and technological requirement online. I’ve set this reading because it brings together technical and philosophical understanding very well, as well as making some interesting points about something that is specific to the internet as a sociotechnical thing.
Optional
Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. Culture and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. “Theoretical Frameworks” (PDF)
This is the first chapter which is a survey come overview of key theories to think about culture and technology and their relation. This covers a lot of material. Some of you will enjoy it for its range and the theorists and ideas it introduces, others will pick up bits and pieces and others perhaps a bit lost. This is straightforward writing (this book was a set text for this subject in 2006 or 2007) that I enjoy as it covers a lot of ideas, contextualising them very well in the process.