06 Reading (for week 7)

Adrian Miles

The structure so far has been to begin with things on education and learning. This was because a) we want to try to do some things differently so needed some context as to why, b) the easiest and most effective way to provide you with the experience of disruption is to disrupt what you have been taught to take for granted. (We want to give you the experience of disruption for two reasons. The first is that a lot of learning happens when things that we take for granted are ‘made strange’ or unfamiliar, it is a way to make visible our assumptions and values. The over is that the internet is a disruptive technology in relation to heritage (industrial, pre-internet) media, and I want you to learn that the internet is both exciting but also in many ways eroding, the very industries you aspire to.

Then we moved to design fiction. This was a way to move from learning as saying what I already know to learning as being an investigation of what might be, including what I don’t yet know. Learning as a casting forward rather than a relying back to what I have already learned. Design fiction is also a very useful concept in relation to ways of engaging with change, technology, and the social. Sort of big ticket items for the network.

Then we have begun some pre-internet readings (Bush, Nelson). In both cases there is a utopian vision of technology that wants it to augment intelligence. This is a big deal. In the west, for example, the ‘robot’ tends to be always bad (it’s hard to find a film in the west where a robot is not actually going to kill us), and this in many quite real ways has hindered ideas and development (in the east there is a very different view, for example something as simple as Astro Boy shows a completely different view of robots, they have rights, they help, and it is generally only evil people who mistreat robots). So, computers could have gone the same way, always about to miscalculate and send the plane into the mountain, turning the car’s brakes off when you want them on, and your finance’s always at risk of a computer glitch. We trust computers, well, enough to let them fly our planes, manage our financial flows, and do a huge amount of diagnostic work in medicine. Hence Bush and Nelson matter because here you can see an approach that believed every person should have a computer because it would augment your ability to know and do. In 1970 (Nelson) this is an extraordinary vision, and one that is deeply grounded in the belief that intelligence, learning and making knowledge are the foundations of the human.

This segue into hypertext proper. Why. Lots of reasons. Hypertext existed before the Web, and so largely prefigures what the web is beginning to become (there are things I can do in a 1995 hypertext program, simple things, that the Web still cannot do). Hypertext theory, which comes out of the humanities and so is our province, has a lot to say about the ways in which digital media asks different questions for us about what an author is, a reader, and a text. So in hypertext we find the first real questioning, in sophisticated ways, of these things. In the same way hypertext has (still) most of the best ideas around multilinearity in relation to narrative, including not only what happens to stories in multilinear environments, but also how to go about making them. This is not a technical problem of software (that would be like thinking learning how to write a good essay is about learning how to make ink and paper), but about the problem of voice and structure. These readings will also matter in second year, because there we make hypertextual video works, but even though it is visible, the principals are exactly the same (and understood much better by the hypertext community than by the interactive video mob).

Finally, hypertext, as the idea of text made up of small chunks with different, multiple, possible connections between them, even though it describes possibly a single work, also describes the structure of the Web. This is Weinberger’s ‘small pieces loosely joined’, where he’s not talking about hypertext at all. In other words hypertext is a great model for thinking about the deep structure of the Web more broadly. So it’s a great place from which to begin.

Which brings us to this week, and probably next. These readings are about the network as a particular sort of structure. For me, this is a small step from hypertext, it is still about small more or less independent parts (a blog post, a node in a hypertext fiction), which now happen to be people, and about how they are connected to each other. The ideas here, the principals, are exactly the same that hypertext (and Ted Nelson) rely on and argue for. It is about many to many and one to many relations, and what sorts of ‘patterns’ then happen in such systems, and more importantly the consequences of these patterns. It is why there can be memes, things go viral (diseases, ideas, and YouTube clips) and why social media is possible. Remember, it is the same sort of ‘pattern’ that hypertext described.

So the readings are making a shape and a trajectory across an idea of what the network is. Generally the intent of it is to help us, it requires imagination, it is made up of loose small bits with lots of ways to connect, and disconnect, them, whether this be people, pages, likes, blogs, or tweets.

Networked Structures and Consequences

There will be some more reading from Watts, but for now this is just the introduction to this very readable book. As an introduction it doesn’t provide that many answers, but it has a great set of questions and problems and why they might matter. This is a book largely dedicated to the problem of how things move through networks, whether that be disease, information, or people. Turns out they all move in much the same way.
Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. London: Vintage, 2003. Print. (Extract, PDF)

Chris Anderson wrote an entire book about this. This though is an earlier article, same idea, just smaller. In this he is describing what Watt’s describes as a ‘power law distribution’, which it turns out is one of the characteristics of the sort of network that the Web is. While Watt’s discusses this in a variety of theoretical and sociological ways (he’s a sociologist who did his PhD with a mathematician) Anderson, in typical North American Silicon Valley joy, goes straight to the marketing come financial implications. It is, though, a key point, and is one of the reasons why blogs a) have a staggeringly large readership, and b) why a blog with only a few readers still matters.

Anderson, Chris. “The Long Tail.” Wired. Oct. 2004. Web. 23 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

Douglas

Adrian Miles

Samuel thinks the Douglas makes more sense than the Landow, and moves into the Barthes‘ famous essay on the Death of the Author. In a nutshell, it is the reader who makes a text, not the author, with the author subject to history, genre, language, the text (yes) and, the reader.

Making

Adrian Miles

Lauren on how the essay means ‘to try’. The essay is where you think in the writing and so is fluid, personal, subjective, but also uses evidence and makes an argument. The best work is highly erudite, yet personable. This doesn’t necessarily easy to read, but it has a voice which is grounded in a life world of a writing-thinkerer, so that writing is the lab or studio of ideas learning to dance, rather than reporting of some research that has happened somewhere else. It’s the difference between following a recipe slavishly because you don’t get how foods and flavours work, versus, well, getting that cooking is a game of anthropomorphic organic chemistry. What’s it got to do with the subject. We are taking this as a way to approach entries in niki. As a place to think in, not just report. That letting writing become the space of thinking is a good rule of thumb for a good blog. That in the subject we are trying some ideas and they will take us places. That the internet is a great big ideas bank, engine, swamp, so while it is good for answers, to go with its flow is not just to make answers but to ask better questions, and to begin to build connections between otherwise or once separated things. Finally, in this course you all know how to write (because of the English score you need to get in) so I know I can use writing as a way to get at other ideas, because you all ‘get’ writing, though you aren’t particularly aware you do. Writing is the way most of us make, all the time, blogging is just making. As is niki. Making is how the network happens.

Networked Me

Adrian Miles

Rebecca thinks a lot more about Wesch’s comment that every time we tag a photo, and so on, “we are teaching the machine”. Absolutely. FaceBook is so valuable not because so many use it, but because it can farm what we do and use that data to make new knowledge for marketing, and sell that. So every like, dislike, ad we click, literally adds to the ‘intelligence’ of their systems and their financial value. It is our behaviour, accumulated and then ‘flipped’ into data, then knowledge, that FaceBook relies upon. The social front end is just a siphon for the other stuff, the same way a supermarket loyalty card is just a small price to pay to know exactly what products you buy, how often, when (and of course where you shop and where you live). We leave media trails today, FaceBook is a closed community to catch as many of your media trails as possible (video, places you visit, photos, likes, posts, friendships), and to make money from them. This is one consequence of what we call a ubiquitous network. The network, unlike a book, is always with you. Ready.

To Essay

Adrian Miles

Imogen wonders about all that she learnt in high school being wrong. Not all, but the essay is turned into a dead thing. The essay is a living thing. Hypertext is a living thing because it lets you write and read by following and making rivers (just read the Nelson again as an ideas stream trying to be literally realised on a book), one reason I did the work on teaching was to make this something present to everyone. Now I’m doing it with what we think writing is. Hypertext does the same with what we think narrative is. Denham joins the Graham reading on the essay with the role of the blog, which is one of the reasons Graham might speculate that the web could see a golden age of the essay (though now we have Medium where there is some very high quality essaying going on), in particular the importance of the essay as a form of thinking where you think out loud. This is a writing where you do the thinking in the writing, not somewhere else and then report on what you thunked. Daniel provides the crib reading notes of key takeaways. Which reminds me, the form of the subject, its shape and style, is essayist in the way that Graham describes in the reading. It is following some ideas, not necessarily defending positions, which is perhaps why it is difficult for students, used to being trained to defend positions and therefore told the positions that matter, to get a hold on. Ideas are always slippery, particularly if you bother to listen to them.

Torika picks up some points, that other forms of writing might matter too. Perhaps, but language is the stuff we have to think with, so the essay becomes the place where thinking can and does happen. So it matters simply for that. On other hand, while the ‘traditional’ essay might help develop organised thinking for me this is precisely the problem. Why is organised thinking important? This becomes a tautological argument because it turns out organised thinking is useful if you need to write organised essays. But if you think that connection, complexity and how thickly things join is important, which you really can’t ‘organise’ (which is one of the ways in which creativity and innovation happens – they’re its ingredients if you like) then being organised isn’t so useful anymore. This matters simply because high school and then university privileges this idea of being able to ‘order’ and so those who are very smart, but have highly cluttered minds, struggle. As Einstein said (a famously disorganised thinker) “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Blog Assessments

Adrian Miles

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.

Twenty Years Ago

Adrian Miles

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

Adrian Miles

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

Adrian Miles

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

Adrian Miles

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.