Zoe writes stunning post about interactivity, structure, narrative, and recent examples of how things now talk back or with us. Begins from the Ryan reading, and continues. This is good thinking and good blogging. It has links out to examples, it uses the idea in the reading to think with, rather than just describe them. So if you want a leg up into why this stuff might matter, check “Actively Interacting Interactively“.
More George
Denham muses on the Landow, in particular beginning to think about the implications for readers and authors that systems such as hypertext require. (Hypertext is not the only thing here, it’s just a good way to get into rethinking readers, texts, writers/makers in the context of network specific work.) Isabella also picks this up, as well as the dissolution of the private and the public that blogs, and now in their wake social media (blogs largely paved the way for social media) have introduced into the public sphere.
Wesch and Knowledge-able
Shavoni liked Wesch’s talk about being knowledge-able, and that we learn by doing, not listening, and then makes the list. Join that to Robinson’s talk and lots of questions and problems just pop out. Responsibility for this is not in any one place, so it makes it easy to leave it alone. Or we can make changes, even small ones. Like letting someone make and share a list like that.
Robinson
Alois has an intriguing riposte to the Robinson presentation. Why do I still hold a lecture, even though it is 2013 and I can, at a click of a button, record it and stick it on that bit of educational pap that is Blackboard? Because, as Alois notes, the shared experiences matter. What, seriously, would this subject be if it were a video and a lab each week? Shavoni wants to make mistakes, maybe?
Dreams Lie on the Ground All Around Me in Pieces
Sorry Matthew, really didn’t want to be that harsh. There are lots and lots of new jobs in media. It is a growth area. Just not in a) paid regular jobs in b) traditional forms of media. Outside of that shrinking universe, there’s a lot of work.
Beta Unsymposium 0.3
Back on, Tuesday, 12.5.2. Hopefully full complement. We have carry over questions due to the industrial action of last Tuesday:
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?
And we have bonus questions from one of the Thursday classes:
- Does the traditional essay no longer hold value in eduction?
- What method of essay writing should be taught in schools? Is creativity the priority?
- Could hypertext be a substitute for referencing?
- Has writing improved or worsened with technology?
- What do you think will be the consequences of electronic writing?
Endings
Brittany, in what I take to be comments on the Douglas reading, gets the idea that if a work is multilinear then the idea of ‘the end’ becomes, well, problematic. (And I find this very hard to explain without a hypertext fiction that I might know you will have read.) So the end might be programmatically defined (the hypertext ends based on some procedural rules, which could be anything, since they’re procedural – think game play), it could be structural (after x things in a particular way, it ends, though if you start again and go different ways, you may find next time you can proceed through the earlier end, or not even see it, so now obviously there is more than one ending, which returns to the problem of what is ‘the end’ here), or it could be the reader, for whatever reason, has decided they’re read enough.
Six Degrees
Shannen describing what we call a small world network. This is what we are going to be reading about in weeks 6 and 7 or thereabouts. As we have said each week, the world is now very small, and what you do, even here, matters if you want it to. The point from Shannen’s example is not that it sort of ‘flaked’ but it happened because of the things already discussed. A passion, engagement, and so a reputation is developed over time, which is then of value to others.
Hypertext Cities
Louisa likens a hypertextual story that changes each time you read it to visiting a city every couple of years. At first I thought, woah, the scale seems a bit, well odd. Then I thought about it, and at least for me it is the small differences, along with the big, that make up change in the city. That tower over there, different. A big thing? Sort of, for itself, but in the scheme of the entire city, nah, it’s a small thing. So if I think of a city as something big and complex but it is actually made up of very specific, different, local bits (that suburb, that street in that suburb, even that shop on that street in that suburb), then it is a good way to ‘get’ what the hypertext theory is about. The entire work is the city. But it isn’t any one thing, and there are, oh, how many ways to make my way through this city? But it’s still the city, isn’t it? Gee, the more you think with it, the better an example it becomes.
What is Networked Media?
There is a shape to the course (perhaps that introduction of the boat just let everyone assume there is no agency, anywhere?) and the intro to the readings that don’t have to be done for a week or two yet might help. We are laying the bricks or foundations or ideas or words or theories or concepts for what the deep structure of the network is. It is all about structure. Structure I define as a pattern. So what is the pattern of the Web (and at the moment we’re really only worried about the Web, email, FTP, gopher, BBS, RTSP, forums, virtual worlds, MMORPGs and so on, won’t fit in, this is not a survey of the internet circa 2013 but what is its deep shape)