Tag: reading

Defining Concepts

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The Potts & Murphie reading (whose names remind me of RMIT’s campus cafe), take on the influences of technology on our culture and its transformative evolution through the 17th to the 19th century.

Firstly, the authors reference the term technology‘s origins from the Ancient Greek, as the system of art. In the 17th century, the meaning behind the word is extracted from exactly this,  until its shift to a modern usage in the 19th century. Occurring in the rise of  science, technology became the system of mechanical and industrial arts, the foundation of a new world whose growing future is dependent on its mechanical inventions. Therefore, the term technique is subjected as the way we use such technology. The technological concept is labelled as a “vast pile of junk”, without the knowledge of the how and why we use them. “Losing” our techniques or awareness of operational skill means corresponds with its uselessness.

Culture, on the other hand, requires more effort in understanding. Whereas it is possible to contain culture as its self-contained element within arts and/or entertainment, i.e. French culture and youth culture, it simplifies the potential for culture to embrace all human activity. The early 19th century recognised culture as the artistic and intellectual aspects to a civilisation, Romantics claiming  industrial mechanisation as inhumane. In the 20th century, however, with the foundation of our dependency on computer technology, we witness a convergence of civilisation’s “techno-culture”.

Ultimately, the technology we use today is reliant on a co-dependency between how we use them (technique) and the benefits they provide for us. But if the human mind is correlated to the abilities of the advanced computer, does that make our bodies technologies themselves? Then the computer technology we are dependent upon would possess its own techniques that provides purpose to our modern existence. The challenge on the definition of technology once again arises, in this case…techno-culture beginning even further back in history than we imagine. The artistic and intellectual aspects of civilisation is then to be considered, the offspring of the technology of our own bodies, with which civilisation is built upon.

We’re all in this together

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I know that lately I have been slacking off with my blog, because I honestly can’t find the motivation to write more with all of the essays I have had to do for other subjects. I feel like all I have been doing is read…then write…and repeat. Not enough creating stuff.  But I digress.

This week’s readings is less direct with its subject in comparison to the past ones about pre-internet and the hypertext. The author takes on the concept of networking beyond the level that we have been currently stagnant on. But since blog posts aren’t created to be essay-length, one could place emphasis on three ideas that the author touches upon in his piece.

First off, the networking system is relayed as a process of interconnection, that is, a majority of efforts working together to produce a powerful impact. The example given is to that of a country’s electricity, with which the failure of a single fuse could corrupt a tri-state and cost billions of dollars in damage.

Secondly, the author analyses the concept of synchrony, somewhat a variation from a more familiar synchronisation,  understood as the “simple and well-defined version of emergence.”

Lastly, is the “six degrees of separation,” which the author himself was particularly unaware of until prior to his writing the piece. And no, this is not an allusion to a song by The Script. The idea introduced is that we are all connectable to everyone within six cycles of people’s relations. The author claims that everyone knows someone who knows someone (after three more) who knows a particular person, in his example the president. This is where the term “a small world” comes from, familiar to social events when recognition prevails in the strangest places.

These ideas gives me the impression that we, as humans, are small in the complex, tangled web of the world we live in. Our bodies, made up of sophisticated systems that even the most proficient of researchers are incapable of fully comprehending, are only cogs in the intensity of the machinery that is life. The human brain, with all its intangible emotions and cognitive processes are a part of an infinite cycle of networks, which we could never understand in our lifetime. It makes me wonder if the only way we could truly live, after all, is if we challenge the conformity of the system we are born into. Perhaps I am getting much too ideological with all these concepts and have strayed too far away from the take-away…but this is mine.

Hypertext Make-Believe

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This post is possibly going to be the shortest I am going to post on here…

This week’s reading by Landow, once again touches upon the concept of hypertext, more specifically fictional hypertext. The essay technically describes the advantages such technology brings to modern fiction, allowing the reader to create their own stories through the use of multiple variables that allows replay capability.

Just as with any hypertext reading that I had done in the past, the ideas being introduced are completely understandable, but I still found myself somewhat foreign to the idea. I was unable to link the technology being described to any sort of technology I have come across in my life. It was not until I have actually googled examples that I was confronted with this, a sample of everything the author mentioned in his essay.

Surprisingly, I have come to turns that this is the first time I have come across hypertexts. I don’t know about my peers, if this is something that predates our known awareness of the nineties, or maybe it is due to my different cultural upbringing.