Turn my back and overnight 130 new blog posts have appeared. This is my first go at catch up. And just a heads up, if you are now blogging about readings and classes from any of weeks one, two, three, four, they won’t appear here.

Kevin writes about technoanxiety, and disagrees with Douglas’ claim about book sales. Though to be fair to Douglas things have changed a lot since she wrote the book, particularly with the rise of the franchised novel/film model which, will cinematically artless, is economically very powerful. The refusal to link out, bad idea, it is treated your blog as the internet version of a gated community, kiss of death for the network which is defined by and as its ability to connect (link). One reason some news sites collapse is because of their anxiety about ‘losing’ traffic. Except it is an economy that is about connecting, not funnelling. Boglarka wants to mourn books and notes that “I for one hat readings that are excerpts from a textbook online”. Absolutely, but Douglas et al are arguing for what these days media people like to call born digital works. Things that are made digital not scans, with all the bells and whistles that provides (lines that can stretch automatically to let you write notes between the lines, highlighters in different colours and the ability to automatically export all that you have highlighted, and so on).

Denham has notes on symposium 0.3 and also on books and the pleasure of the physicality. If only to know where you’re up to. However, an ereader like Marvin, for example has a very elegant interface element that automatically visualises where you are in the book, including where the current chapter is, where you are in the chapter, and how big the chapter is relation to the whole book. Even a print book can’t do this so elegantly. Brittany has some takeaways from the symposium too, picking up how books need to become beautiful things that provide very specific experiences to matter now. Lauren has another excellent summary, and yes Lauren, ‘automagically’ is a word we use in this space. Sophie also has notes, and loves books and her e-reader (me too, personally, and I’m serious, if you love what books do, rather than what they are as things, then how could you not enjoy some of the qualities digitisation brings?). And now I bring down the count to below 300 with Christopher thinking also about books, their physicality and the digital. For the fetishists out there, it was, oh, about five years ago when people still insisted that digital video would not replace film in high end production, or projection in cinemas. That argument is now over. Don’t even mention photography (because most of us aren’t professional photographers and are happy with our phones’ cameras, yet to a photographer this is a shocking as us as wannabe tv makers thinking using your phone for video is OK – personally I do – and so it is with books, we’re humanities people, books are our thing, but it doesn’t follow that it is everyone else’s, or that it will stay this way).

Shannen’s jumbled notes, useful. Anna on what is one of the best blog posts I’ve read for a while. Thoughtful joining the dots, and while I am not sure I used the word “cadence” I wish I had and intend to do so from now on (thanks). Hypertext and new media is a different cadence (see) to literary reading, I have a chapter about it if you’re interested. Cuong also has good notes, picking up that all things have contexts. What we might not have made clear is that context is never, can never, be fixed. It is mercurial, so if all texts have contexts, and contexts are mercyrial, it follows that what we say, what they say, can never be pinned down. Things cannot say what they mean. Alas. Samuel continues to develop an intriguing voice, picking out an impressive range of salient points (think of the experience as peaks and valleys, which you prefer is up to you). And in relation to context, note how different these readings of the 50 minutes are, context, even in the same place at the same time. Mercurial indeed. Rebecca too has notes, and picks up on context and the multiple meanings of hypertext. I’d add more to that, hypertext is not just multiple meanings, but that the thing you read or watch each time changes in itself, so what we read is also multiple. This is important as it is not just that contexts around that book vary, but that when we read the book, each time the book (the words, the paragraphs) are different too. Anna C thinks the subject is like a hypertext, you need to feed the beast and make connections. Yes, and no. It does model a way the network is, you do need to prod it, but we also offer prompts and probes of our own. Torika thinks the bookstore, not the book, is dead. I’d suggest not quite, as a post some time ago celebrating the bookstore in relation to the experience it offers is what makes the valuable. (And why boutique stores have a better future than try to be all chains, hello Borders.) Patrick thinks about hypertext, music and has very interesting ideas about how books and publishing might look to music as a way to define a viable future (think that would be a very smart move).

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.

Rebecca feels bleak. The amateur is precisely that. They do it as a hobby. Your difference is you want a way to turn a passion in to a profession. Right now our graduates find good work, easily, not necessarily because of production skills but the raft of other skills and understands that you bring to the table. How to collaborate, how to work in/on the network, how to think creatively and critically even when it is all change. This is what the degree will give you, and these are the employable skills. The gifted amateur doesn’t have these.

In relation to my comment that something “turns up and things flip”. This does not dismiss design fiction. Design fiction is one way we make and think those things that will make this difference. It is only a contradiction is you want to be the person playing catch up to the world out there, or you want to contribute to helping change it.

Holly enjoyed it, and yes, it’s very Q and A isn’t it? Patrick took away the comments from Brian and Adrian about experience design, the experience economy, and that is is what you need to develop and understand (to I guess partially alleviate Rebecca’s bleakness). Shannen took away the ways in which design fiction (let’s call it speculative thinking, as I think Elliot’s observation that we have to be able to imagine and envision the future as media makers is very astute, and Brian’s recognition that design fiction lets you think very differently, and creatively, about what counts as evidence as ways to shift it out of ‘design’ and into what we do) helps you think ahead, even three years, while William remains estranged.

Jake joins the content question with double loops, crack cocaine, information and what he’s going to do next. (Notice I didn’t include Jake and crack cocaine in the link text, this is important because Google pays a lot of attention to the text that is the source of a link.) James is still disappointed, wanting more perhaps vigour, but it’s the first time so much like the first Q and A, the first IQ (which is pretty laboured), it takes time.

Kate liked the symposium in its first guise, and has written some good introductory notes around Actor Network Theory. This is a very influential theory in technology studies as it provides a way to think about the technology/ies as being participants and causal entities, without having to decide that it is all ‘defined by technology’ or ‘defined by culture’. In ANT culture and technology are actors. Samuel has a good list of take aways, particularly like the phrasing that “content is not king, connection is”. Anna also picks up the stuff about experience. This, I really don’t know how to make it plain, is also how you need to approach uni and your learning. Anyone can package the content, and there is now no scarity of access to media making tools, so that leaves the experience that we can offer. Same with media. If we can all make media, why do I use yours? Olivia, too, has a list of take aways around design, futures, and speculation. Finally, Zoe has a very succinct, but broad, list of things that mattered – agency, context, looking back to understand forwards.

Nice post from Dominic about this week. btw I agree with Elliot that education is a transaction, and with how he characterised it. My point was the terms of that transaction. What you are ‘buying’ is an experience (for instance how to think the future as Elliot described), which is quite a different ‘product’ than what I was describing. And yes, as many in education (and industry and media) recognise, education follows an industrial model all they way up and down – hierarchy of authority, ‘subjects’ in time slots, scheduled regular hours, and so on. It was a good model for the rise of mass literacy, it is less clear that it still is, and certainly the most interesting, and enriching, educational models don’t follow this.

Memphis returns to the boat story to think about where we are. That’s useful. It’s been in an eddie this week. Sometimes things get paused, sometimes they race along. Again, how you experience this, or have experienced this first three weeks – that IS the content of the subject. The disorientation, excitement, anxiety. The same experience that heritage, big, industrial media is having right now about itself and its future. Same you should have about the sort of world you will enter and what you want to make it into.

Jackie didn’t’ get much but thinks it was her, Edward too. Unlikely. I hit pause and the boat sat in an eddie just to answer one question, that was specifically intended for, at most, 10% of you. But that 10% were still there, and if you wonder that question, then you will stop coming and then there is no possibility to poke the possum as I tried to. I spent a lot for a few, that’s the way it is sometimes. Holly’s another ready to move on. Absolutely. Time to stop flogging a dead horse. Denham agrees. Imogen is ready for what’s next.

Torika speculates that isn’t a lecture to hear the lecture and the tute to talk about it? Once, yes. But just as you’re identifying gaps all by yourself, why think that having a single authoritative source is a good model of teaching? It is a good way to distribute information. It is a very hard way to distribute knowledge (and yes we’ve all seen inspirational TedTalks, but, you know, you can’t do that every week, those people have 1 thing, 1 idea, that they inspire about, in a few minutes, not 12 x 50 minutes). And this is the knowledge business now. Information does not equal teaching or learning. Turning information into knowledge is. You do that, not your lecturer or tutor. If information is now near to hand (the internet and digitised books, articles, commentators, etc) then why waste 50 minutes doing what a google link can do? So then the problem becomes what can we do in that 50 minutes that offers the possibility of making a difference to your understanding? Your understanding. Understanding is not the same as hearing someone explain something for 50 minutes.

Tamrin, on the other hand, is perceptive as they’ve been on the other side, too.