Madeleine has a very elegant take on not knowing, and the knowing that is an enabled to-doing. (All the tenses in there matter.)
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.
Essays and What Ifs
Patrick has a long post about the essay, tying the reading to Mode 2, while also weaving in several other’s comments. This is a blog that is beginning to mature as it writes with ideas and other people’s stuff. His observation that people might have gone better at school if they could write in the way the reading describes, rather than the more rigid way prescribed, is one of the things I was getting at in my lecture about why come to lectures. VCE and university preselects certain sorts of competencies. If you don’t have them, if you haven’t immersed yourself in them (generally unknowingly) then you don’t even get here. One of the things we’re doing in this subject is letting some other competencies be legitimated. Not great at the ‘formal’ essay, but good at tech, write lots of help. Or write some wiki entries that look at that door ajar.
Small Pieces
Zoe thinks about the Weinberger reading, experimentation and design fiction, and from there to online identity and recent public conversations about depth versus shallowness (conversation versus social media). It is probably a mistake to think that this is in opposition, we just like to be able to communicate at different scales, and in many ways the history of communication technologies can be viewed as a history of finding new scales (size and intensity).
05 Readings (to be read for Week 6)
The recent trajectory of the readings has been design fiction, partly to seed some other ways to go about making works that use evidence, and partly to relax the ways we might choose to judge what counts as ‘real’. Then the Bush and Nelson as precursors to the World Wide Web that have design fiction qualities about them, but which have also been very influential in themselves in how technologists have thought about the purpose of the machinery they were making. If you like these were ‘fictions’ that directly informed the design of the Web. From here we entered more specific hypertext theory. This is because a) hypertext is a networked writing structure, b) it predates the World Wide Web, c) many of its ideas, practical and theoretical, provide an excellent way to approach how to theorise the Web not as technologists but as people who want to be able to narrate things (us). This next lot of readings continues this, making some of the hypertextual things around narrative (shape or structure, and reading) more visible – I’ve skipped the material about what it is to write in this way, so that hypertext’s relation to what I’ll characterise as our ‘normal’ understanding of story can be more strange. If you like it is a way to help show the point of hypertext and the differences to what came before.
So, this weeks reading, are then about narrative structure and reading.
Key Readings for the Week
Extracts from Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. (PDF)
This is the easiest read of this weeks lot, and they are all quite difficult (I’m still sick, and if I’m able I’m going to try to dig out an old book from last century that is an introductory reader in this area – Ilana Snyder’s Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth.)
Extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. (PDF)
Optional Extras
Marie-Laure Ryan is one of the more prolific writers on interactive literature, fiction, and so on. She has a narratology background so the work is very strongly informed by those areas of literary theory that concentrate on narrative. This is really good work, and worthwhile if only to skim to see her maps of different narrative structures.
Extract from Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Open WorldCat. Web. 15 Aug. 2013. (PDF)
Finally, if the Douglas tweaked your interest and you’re a lit orientated student, then the next chapter is worth a read too:
Extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. (PDF)
Futures
Tiana got a shock, so let’s back track here. I get to play bad cop, Brian, Jasmine and Elliot good cop. Most of our graduates get good jobs, just mostly not directly making stuff for money. A lot end up in what I think of as creative middle management, they are production managers for a postproduction company (all around the world), or they are the person in charge of DVD development for a distributor. That means you don’t make the DVDs, you engage a design house, give them a brief and budget, and give the OK for their work. You work with marketing, distribution, and so on. These are very good jobs, and a growth area. Our students get these because you can talk to makers, and managers (remember my ‘T’ shaped people talk earlier?) Most don’t stay trying to make because the insecurity of employment and income is, well, insecure, you want a regular salary, holiday pay, superannuation. Some recognise the things we teach, and more sideways, portable.tv was created by two RMIT media graduates who paid attention to subjects like this. It’s a service, an experience, a series of events. The shock you need to get is that today you have the capacity to make this happen, and that is how it works. You have to take it to the world, rather than enter at the ground floor and work your way up (the world coming to you). So please, don’t panic (you have two more years here that will help), and realise the opportunities you now have, and take them.
Lauren picks up the experience media and content observations from symposium 0.1.
Beta Symposium Vox Pops 2
Nicholas found the format of the symposium working (it was our first go, I think it will settle into a clearer rhythm with practice, be nice to find a fourth chair too), and the to and fro of the conversation. The diversity of ideas and ways to approach things is one of the ambitions of trying this method, so even if it ends up being the teaching team that talks, you see thinking in situ, rather than rehearsal. Nicholas nicely uses the experience conversation in relation to coffee, it’s a very good example of why the experience economy is what now matters. Ditte also thinks it worked, and Brian’s important point that design fiction is about people do matter. (Ditte is from Denmark, Denmark has a relation to design that Australian designers, well, get rather hot and excited about, design, and design methods, are very much part and parcel of the Danish ‘experience’, in particular human centred design, i.e., design where people matter.)
And Edward G, using Seuss’s rhymes (of all things, btw there’s a tradition where any public lecture on Seuss requires the speaker to use anapaestic meter) opines positively. Chantelle OK, but not as much as before, and in relation to FaceBook for professionals, it’s probably LinkedIn, which was around well before FaceBook but has seen enormous growth in the last 5 years (advantage of being an early mover). Ditte gets deep into ANT, which is having a bit of an incidental renaissance with the discovery in the English speaking world of German media studies, and the rise of what is loosely called the ‘new materialism‘ in particular media archaeology.
Danielle, like many others, picked up the experience point. Perhaps this will appear as a question in a symposium from a class? Patrick has a good response about this, and why experience matters. Rebecca notes that if the world already reports news, then, to paraphrase, the problem is how to curate this, not create it. (This problem is literally seeing millions and millions of dollars thrown at it.)
Vincent offers a four week overview. How to design a webpage? Sorry, lynda.com is a good place to start, but your blogs, for instance, are written in PHP amongst HTML that talk to a MYSQL database and rely on very sophisticated CSS. We might do very simple text editing of a page, just to see that it really is just text, but web design, today, at anything approaching a professional level involves interaction design, coding, graphic design, and systems admin. Most of us auto install a content management system, buy a skin, skin the site. What you should learn is that if you are serious about online work, then you work with a team, with those other skills. Those that can do it by themselves, right now, they choose where hey want to work (a former student of mine is currently in Canada after working in New York, he can pretty much work where ever he wants, those who can code have inherited the earth at the moment, coding is not a media skill).
Kevin is a plus, wondering about futures and the example of 12second.tv versus Vine. Louisa ponders how good it must be at Google, the downside is that companies like Google provide all this so you don’t need to leave, buying into the geek culture of heroic 18 hour work sessions. It works for a while, till you turn 30, or have kids. Or have to be responsible for another person. Dominic, like everyone else, likes that some hard questions about media futures have been raised, as I’ve said here a few times, we really are one of the best courses to equip you for this, and if it comes up again, we’ll talk about it again. It is scary, but also exciting precisely because the barriers to entry are now gone, and a whole lot of stuff now becomes possible. Danielle uses pictures (the photo essay is a great form, and recently a scientific medical journal published a graphic essay, so you know, as my use of the Graham reading hopefully indicates, I’m all about expressing ideas, making arguments, with evidence, how you do that, well, it’s a new media age so use it), to say that by the first unsymposium some pieces are falling into place. As I said in week 1, it will make sense just not right away. Denham enjoyed the format, and that we can now make and do (sounds like a Nike ad) from the get go, and that being able to think with the future might matter.