by rebeccamylonas -

12.5

the ten dreams of technology – I’ve paraphrased a couple in a very hungover and not very coherent language you may or may not find easier to understand

the dream of symbiosis
computers and our brains working together and learning together, in extreme form it is basically where everyone turns into freaking cyboids and have brains for computers and google is in your brain – could you imagine not having to google something because you instantly had ALL THE KNOWLEDGE? the concept of googling something and finding out the answer instantly is now something that we can’t live without, but before google was invented, people didn’t have access to such information so easily…so one day something better than google will have to come around, and maybe that’s having google in your brain constantly so all of the people know all of the things all of the time… hey brain, I feel a little sick right now, these are my symptoms, what’s up? and your brain would be ‘bro you got this thing’ in response (well at least I’d like to think my brain would call me bro, cause we’re mates). that’d be kinda neat. but also kind of a scary thought, because natural intelligence wouldn’t be such a big deal anymore.

the dream of world peace
that someday technology will be created that rescues all the starving children and the crying polar bears and that makes baby jesus happy. it’s messed up when you think about how much pointless technology has been created, how much harmful technology has been created, how 80% of technology has been created for selfish or greedy reasons. surely with all the computer geniuses and mad scientists in the world there’s got to be some way they can put their heads together and cause world peace? maybe if they created a pill that made people not be assholes? that would be nice.

 

 

 

by rebeccamylonas -

fin

well in a little over 24 hours,my first year of university is done and dusted. I can’t even begin to describe how relieved I am that as of tomorrow (well not really, got a couple things to hand in, but still, won’t have to actually attend uni) I can come home from work and pass out and not have a nagging guilt that I’m not doing my uni work in preference of drinking on my rooftop or sitting around in bed all day watching sons of anarchy (which, by the way, I am totally going to pick up watching again because now I have the time to lie in bed for days crying in mourning of opie which is going to occur in the next few episodes and which I have been dreading since finding out that he dies). I work better under pressure and I’m much happier when I’m constantly busy and don’t have time to waste so I know the novelty of having all that free time will wear off eventually (sooner, rather than later probably) but it’s nice to know I’ll actually be able to enjoy the glorious weather and leave my work at work for a change. so aside from working a couple days a week (7 am starts, they still kill me but it’s a nice thought that I can now enjoy my afternoons guilt free) and potentially starting a dancing job on the weekends at luwow (audition on tuesday!! fingers crossed) I will be a free woman! I’ll have time to write music, dance, eat, drink and not be a hermit.

I’d like to think I’ll spend all of my free time productively, going to the gym, working and eating well…but lets be honest… sooo, if I can get through to march in a healthy state of mind and not a raging alcoholic/morbidly obese, that is all I’m asking. enjoy your holidays everyone!

by rebeccamylonas -

something new

turns out it’s never too late to learn something! it took me until week 12 to realise that wordpress enables you to insert gifs much easier (and more conveniently) than using html. I generally would use really basic code and had no control over image size or anything.  it’s thanks to this post written by my mate moose.
what a cool guy, now I can use the terrific features he taught me to link incriminating facebook photos much easier-

moose gets loose.
by rebeccamylonas -

12

this week’s unlecture was virtually just reflecting on the course and all of the unlectures before it… it was a summary and ‘wrapping up’ on why we did each topic (speculative thinking, hypertext, databases, long-tail etc etc) and points to take away.

the most salient point was adrian hammering in to us about “shaping a new journalism” towards the beginning of the lecture > aim high and do something big, do something different, don’t set your goals low ( to “being a camera operator on the x factor” ) because it’s a waste of an education > I agree with this, I know people who haven’t even studied and have jobs working on shows like that, you can do jobs like that without any real study or experience.. there’s no point studying if you’re going to settle for jobs you can just ‘fall into’

it’s interesting to hear the lecturers (particularly jasmine) reflecting on teaching the course because it seems it was all as new to them as it was to us and the course was a big ‘testing’ phase in a lot of senses…. it’s nice to know that we weren’t the only ones who were confused about what we were doing from time to time. elliot apologised for being ‘experimental’ on his students, not suss at all…

by rebeccamylonas -

11.5

this week’s reading was on actor-network theory… this reading was insanely dense and other than the two following points (below) I could pull out – and probably only because they were listed “firstly” and “secondly” which made it easy to gravitate towards them like the simple-minded human I am – none of it really got through to my brain… maybe from too much coffee/not enough sleep, maybe not enough coffee/too much sleep…maybe because it’s the end of week 11, a thursday afternoon still painfully slogging through the excessive brain damage (then again, a smart person told me once that you can’t kill braincells if you don’t have a brain) I caused myself last weekend and in all honestly I’d actually rather stick thumtacks in my eyelids than sit down and do uni work right now…  but, hey, this has nothing to do with the reading, or networked media, other than of-course to point out how much of a massive failure I am at this subject right now and really I am just rambling on in an attempt to make you feel sorry for me so you ignore the fact that I’ve really gotten nothing from this reading and this post is really barely about the reading at all…the point being, I tried. I really did….so yeah…

misunderstandings generally made about ‘actor theory’ –
1. giving it a common “technical” meaning because it can function in many ways that can’t be classified under one umbrella description
2. actor-network theory has little to do with social networks

this video has a nice modern young woman summing up actor-network theory pretty basically in language that I can understand and I couldn’t even concentrate on what she’s saying, so go figure-

in fact, here’s a youtube search I did which has heaps of links to bruno latour talking about super interesting things (you’re welcome), and then there’s this video somewhere down the list which I sat and watched for about 33 seconds before being like wtf am I doing with my life I am going to go for a nap…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i25aGGrTJK8

by rebeccamylonas -

11

why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web? 
not all economic models are obvious ones > internet has a ‘californian-hippy-culture-free-information structure’, share freely, no intellectual property , Berners-Lee supports this > gift economy (freely donate stuff without assumption of return) > nobody owns the patent to HTML
example of ‘manners’ > you can’t patent a social protocol

We’re used to the idea of the internet being characterised as a democratic, open, non-hierarchical technology and space: is Galloway arguing something that fundamentally challenges this?
the internet is a distributed network where the nodes can interact with eachother despite how far away they might be

protocols etc > how does this relate to the internet?
– virtual and the actual (anything has before it a set of futures, only some virtual futures will come to be and become the actual> the virtual is ‘true’ but the actual is ‘real’)
– expanding possibilities that are very ‘true’ but only some of them will become ‘real’ or actualised > we can’t know which will come to be and what will happen

databases and narratives > Cowbird > create an account, contribute a story (photograph and page of text) > database form for narrative (collects or lists ‘stories’ according to their subject matter, eg. ‘sunrise’) > links things according to place, age, user, subject
narratives are intentional cause and effect sequences> a list is not a narrative
databases separate our content from presentation

 

 

by rebeccamylonas -

the dark web

silk road – the largest online black marketplace in the world – has been shut down.

read an article from sydney morning herald here

this is something that many people said was virtually impossible – the way the infrastructure of silk road works seemed to be practically impenetrable, untraceable, and yet somehow, someway, the FBI have found a way to shut it down. while it may be the end of silk road specifically, this is definitely not the last we’ve seen of the dark web. where there is a demand, supply comes. somebody will pop up and fill the void that has been left by the breakdown of silk road. now that people have gotten used to the idea of an online marketplace for buying their illegal substances I doubt people would be eager to go back to meeting in dark alleyways, trecking to far off suburbs, constantly looking over their shoulders… and to be perfectly honest, the way the site was constructed (it was completely functional and efficient for many years) was practically ingenious. the founder Dread Pirate Roberts (just look at this dudes name, this is one badass guy) kept his real identity secret for years thanks to the anonymity of the web, known merely as the faceless person (or persons – they couldn’t even pin point whether it was a person or a group who was behind silk road) who started this gigantic operation.

my point is…silk road is definitely a relevant example of many of the things we have looked at in network media. online footprint or identity, databases, small-world networks, hubs… so in an attempt to pay my respects to one of the biggest events in the history of the internet (I’m not exaggerating) I am going to breakdown how silk road relates to a couple of the key concepts of the course-

technology and culture:
silk road is a fantastic example of how changing technology affects our culture today. silk road revolutionised the trafficking of black-market substances. since the introduction of such a technology which allows users to gain access (easily) to drugs from across the globe it has changed both the quality and variety of drugs consumers have access to. users are no longer limited to what they have access to in their personal networks- you can import pure columbian blow, marijuana of the finest grade, everything, anything you can think of. now that this change has occurred, I don’t think drug culture is going to go back to the way it was.

hubs & links
silk road discouraged sales taking place outside of the network or without going through the ‘hub’. within the ‘hub’ of silk road there were many sections and links out to smaller distributors. categorised into sections according to type of substance, the site then branches out into specific products.

shifting technologies – make it and they will come
silk road is constructed to mimic an ‘ebay’ or ‘amazon’ online marketplace type of format. it has taken an existing idea – a vast online marketplace – and directing it towards an un-targeted sector of the market. the idea of having an online marketplace is not a new thing. using it to deal drugs and guns is.

you can be anonymous online but there is no such thing as total anonymity
while dread pirate roberts kept his identity secret for a very long time, he was eventually caught. it proves that maybe total anonymity is not achievable. and maybe anonymity is not a good thing. I know friends who have used the site and had numerous things delivered to their addresses under different names (incase their package was seized at customs, so they could deny it was theirs) but I doubt authorities – if they were to seriously chase up every person who has ordered something from the site – would be fooled by a fake name. they have a postal address and no doubt a way of accessing an IP address from which the drugs were ordered… they can most certainly prove that it was you who ordered the gram of cocaine and not John Doe (to be fair, they’d use a name more subtle than John Doe). 

why now?
I can remember the example of Vine and a few other applications being brought up a while ago. why were these successful when the same thing has been introduced years earlier and failed miserably. would silk road have been so successful if it had been introduced, say, ten years ago? and now that it has been destroyed, what will be the new thing to pop up and take its place?

it’s an interesting thought that silk road wasn’t as indestructible as everybody seemed to think it is… but I doubt we’ve seen the end of online marketplaces such as this one…

here’s another example of a site that functions on the silk road mentality- atlantis (which shut down a week before silk road did, but boy did they have some interesting and unsubtle advertising campaigns!)

http://vimeo.com/69235119

by rebeccamylonas -

10.5

database is defined as a structured collection of data > storing and retreiving information easily

with new media comes a move away from “narrative” form to experience the world > instead the world has become a random collection of data

websites and other databases are continually growing and changing > therefore there cannot be a coherent “narrative” as the material is constantly changing

computer games are new media objects which are not databases, they rely on “narrative” > not all new media relies on a ‘database’ structure > they are motivated by the ‘algorithm’ logic

Will Wright (creator of the sims) “Playing the game is a continuous loop between the user (viewing outcomes and inputting decisions) and the computer (calculating outcomes and displaying them back to the user). The user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model.”

 

new media has largely been reduced to algorithms and data structures

the computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm:
reality-> media -> data-> data-base

when the ability to document and store information in a database (on a computer particularly) there was a push towards digitalising everything (including older formats like photography, scanning old photographs etc) in order to be able to easily store and access this information

while the concept of ‘database’ and ‘narrative’ are conflicting, ‘narrative’ and ‘algorithm’ have a commonality

not all cultural objects are narratives, there are specific criteria which to judge what can be considered a narrative or not, some databases are definitely not classed as narratives

by rebeccamylonas -

10

– creating good content gets you noticed  (example of the chick who coded that site with all of the facebook profiles), if there is a demand for something and you create it the market comes to you

– despite the larger hubs, newer networks can still flourish > hubs can deteriorate and newer nodes can become hubs (example of search engines > yahoo to google > why was there a transition between the two?)

– kevin bacon is a hub? three degrees of separation between kevin bacon and any other actor > hollywood is a small world network

– freeways used as an example (designers prejudice was brought to life through his layout, buses could not fit through)

– writing allows you to document knowledge and store it for later reference > you cannot have any technology without this basis

– iPod as an example of something that redefined marketplace and technology

– technological determinism (example of films always being rectangular rather than circle shaped, you can’t film in the dark) – you have to fit the “rules” of a technology, digital technology is not as free as you think

– technologies have a certain agency which can restrain and enable

–  music > the moment when the instrument “pushes back”, the music writes itself/takes on its own life > material technologically determining something

– technique is required when you have technologies > technologies develop techniques