Week 11 reading.

October 13, 2014 | Readings, Week 11  |  Leave a Comment

Galloway talks about the internet and the control that came with it. The reading is filled with a lot of complex terms.

(BENEFITS OF PUTTING STRATEGY BEHIND ONLINE MARKETING FOR BUSINESS, taken from SpecialEyesGroup)

Final Peer Review

October 9, 2014 | Uncategorized  |  Leave a Comment

Michaela post on how the conflict between narrative and database reminded her of a book she read not too long ago, the summary she did, did make sense of why she thought of it.

George posted on his understanding about the Manovich reading.

Bonie wrote a very honest confession about how she had been a bad student for this semester.

11th Symposium

October 9, 2014 | Symposium, Week 11  |  Leave a Comment

Adrian discussed about database base on the reading.

basically database is a collection of information stored within a system, it’s in a form of a list, it is limitless, and is retrieved based on demand. Our blog is a good example for that, our post is part of the database and it shows up when someone search/retrieved the information when they are looking for it.

The tutors remind us about the due date of the final assessment and ways to include media, such as it is better to embed rather than linking something.

The reading by Manovich talks about the difference of Narrative form and Database form.

Narative form, which can be found in print and movies,  belongs to the modern age. Whilst the Database form ( a structured form of data and is organised for a quick retrieval in computer) belongs to the post-modern age .

Ellen posted how the draft essay is pointless, truthfully I didn’t know that the draft you submitted won’t be read and we just have to figure out ourselves. I hope this would not be the case, if yes then I’ll be super annoyed. Mia posted a short but interesting sentence/quote about how particles make up energy! It’s not coincidence Mia, there is always something driving behind it 🙂 Michaela posted what she have read on Twitter, apparently twitter is going to start putting ads like Facebook. I’m not sure how to react to that since I don’t use twitter.

Can’t believe its week 10 already, just two more week to go!

This week symposium Adrian and the rest of the tutor discussed how to make the final essay. They advised us to do in the reverse cone instead of the usual cone.

Cones

Normally we use the ‘normal cone’ where we started the essay broadly and as we reach the end/conclusion it get narrower and deeper. But this time, Adrian suggested the other way around, which is starting broadly and reaching a broader ending. He gave an example of ‘Why do you cycle through the side of the river?’ which resulting a lot of answers. Betty gave the suggestion to use footnote.

Enough of that, the real symposium is about the long tail from the reading. In statistic, the distribution of sales not all the same, there are high sales part which we called the heads and the low distribution sales which we call the long tail as the  numbers are a lot. In the symposium it is discussed that hypertext is like the long tail – only few can link to the important bits but there are many links that leads to other links which is not to important. Basically our web culture is ‘destroying’ the market theory, why?  Because in the web everything is equal, the fee for the shelves between the high hits (head)  and low hits (long tail)  is the same with each other. The network allow people to ‘live’ forever, you don’t have to live in the ‘head’ area to survive, you can be in the bottom and wait till someday someone will recognize your work. One example to explain this is the iTunes, they allow everyone to have same shelves.

Barabasi Law

September 29, 2014 | Week 9  |  Leave a Comment

Barabasi used physics theory to explain about network system and also linked them to the current network applied in our city, such as the train system and airports.

Mia, is very happy because she has bought a ticket to Japan, woohoo have fun there Mia!

Michael has done an amazing job is summing yesterday symposium 🙂

Kenton finds Adrian discussion to be the most interesting and uses the example of cowbird.

I enjoyed the symposium from yesterday, It is very clarifying and make my head less spin. Previous symposium always answers question but in the end generates more confusion than the actual getting answers. But Yesterday symposium is much easier to understand as the tutors explained how they take the reading and how they interpreted it.

For example the Duncan Watts reading, each of the tutor explain which paragraph they found most fascinating. The first is Elliot, he finds that network is important as a whole and focuses as a whole rather than the individual parts. Though I still have to figure out by what did he mean by “Cognition as an Abstraction.”

Jason’s parts is the one i understood the most I guess. He used the example of a race (human race) and also explained the basic idea how parts interact with one another to create a complex system. He wanted to point out that network literacy doesn’t always associate with technology and internet and that it could spread out to biology, and so on. For me this is an eye-opening, ever since we started this course, my head has been wrapped around the assumption that network=technology and I forgot that there are more to things than what it seems.

Betty discussed how individual behavior aggregated toward a collective behavior. The application for network and how it work. For there to be a network you need an internet and a level of connectivity. She also mentioned how cultural activity might also access or maybe give some aspect to the technology…

Last but not least is Adrian take on the reading. His explanations similar but deeper and more condensed. He explains that it is more toward the relation of parts and not just the part itself and also giving an explanation of how network is similar to ecology. In ecology you need a variety of things from the animals, plants, water, earth, and all that parts to form a structure and a pattern and there is no hierarchy is the structure (We are not talking about the hierarchy of food chain but rather to the structure of it, no part is less important than the other, every part is essential and is needed). He draws  it toward hos blog and blog post is similar, there is no hierarchy in it and each of the parts interlink and made a sort of network.

I think the symposium is much better done this way so we can discuss the reading further and actually got some sort of conclusion in it.

(Image by Leszek Glasner taken from allthingsd)

Watts and Networks

September 19, 2014 | Readings, Week 8  |  Leave a Comment

One of this week reading is by Duncan Watts. Watts discussed how networks can be seen as a particular systems and explain how we as the audience could understand the behavior of individual component as well its collective behavior changes.  The idea reaffirms that relationship between parts is more important and far more crucial that the part themselves.

He uses the structure of power grid, the electricity network, as an example (I find this cute Watts=Electricity).  He states that: ‘the
power system is arguably the most essential technological feature of the modern world. More pervasive even than highways and railroads, and more fundamental than cars, airplanes, and computers, electric power is the substrate onto which every other technology is grafted, the foundation for the grand edifice of the industrial and information ages.
Without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and
everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly
more expensive and inconvenient. Electricity is a fact of life so basic
that we cannot imagine being without it.’

I can’t help but agree, I mean who can live without electricity. Imagine living without internet, TV, A/C, Lamps, … etc I just can’t think. I think all of this power i.e. technology, electricity are here to drive us toward the future.

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