The board, I mean the board!

This week Rebecca is once again on the ball, this girl deserves a HD.

Rebecca wrote an interesting post about the readings, bringing in the classical debate, chicken or the egg?

Simone wrote about the luna eclipse.

David wrote about his response to Manovich.

Box: Ticked!

To be fair I didn’t actually attend this weeks symposium. It is therefore very convenient that I can ‘legally’ stalk and ‘mention’ someone else’s views on the session and be able to tick my box next week. Cheers Rebecca! Your always on the ball (unless your like me and copy someone else’s).

Anyway according to Rebecca’s post During this week’s symposium, Adrian’s discussion “too-and-froed between databases and design, and it really wasn’t until about half way through until i realised just how interrelated they actually are. Network media now is simply just a mass of mega databases, and really everything we do with technology is dependent on it. For example; pretty much the only phones you see people with now are the iPhone or the Samsung. Whether this heated and business-vicious affair turns out to be just another fad or not, the point is that as a result of this, such a large proportion of society has now linked themselves in with the databases of iCloud or Dropbox. Why so? Is this really because of the technology that is being offered? Or is because of the way in which these fancy new phones are being marketed through the graphical design capabilities that are now available? When you think about the subject of ‘design’ now, it is now about creating something that is better than what is available now, but about creating something that is bigger,better and more advanced then the what people can already predict. Social technology is now changing and advancing faster than it ever has before and because of this databases are now becoming more and more crucial to maintaining security of anything you put online. Or are they? Perhaps the term personal databases would be more appropriate, given the recent celebrity nude hacks…”

Is this post cheating on my behalf? Perhaps. However I could equally argue that I am simply demonstrating my learnt knowledge of copyright laws. Cheers net med.

Are you the next M. Zuckerberg? In an interesting article from Pedestrian TV they look at how you can turn your next drunken app idea into $$$$.

Check out the full article here.

“This weeks reading  by Gitelman looks at the way the media, in particularly new media, are experienced
and studied as historical subjects. It uses the examples of recorded sound and the World Wide Web, since the Web is a core instance or application of what are today familiarly and collectively referred to as “new media.” In pairing these examples, I begin with the truism that all media were once new as well as the assumption, widely shared by others, that looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped.”

Whenever I read something that tells me I will be reading about the “World Wide Web” I want to shoot myself in the foot. I feel as though the Internet and online spaces are changing so quickly that anything that mentions the phrase “World Wide Web” is irrelevant and a waste of time. It irritates me that we should have to read things that are so outdated. But I did anyway and heres what I found:

Not much.

It was a lot of philosophical, over written, over classified, pointless information that I will never use again in my life.

Like what is this babble..

“Naturalizing, essentializing, or ceding agency to media is something that happens at a lexical level”

Legit, SHOOT MYSELF IN THE FOOT.

During this weeks symposium Adrian started by going through tips on how to write a critical media essay which I actually found quite interesting, although I don’t think I will particularly use this in my final piece.

Adrian then went on to discuss the question how does the long tail affect the music industry?

It was actually quite an interesting symposium. If you missed it here’s a link to what a long tail is, and here’s a link to what a long tail is in relation to the music industry.

And now for my weekly stalk:

Stephanie has some good points about the symposium and relates the idea of the long tail as the new market place to iTunes.

Rebecca talks about the new social media site Ello (which by the way I STILL have not been invited to, not impressed ELLO) Also if anyone is reading this and has Ello, kindly send me a freaking invite. Who do they think they are, being all ‘invite only’ some elite sweet 16 birthday party, I feel like I’m in high school again, not getting invited to the cool kids hall parties…

Monique thinks about how the 80/20 rule affects the equality of an online network.

“Your fear is the most boring part of you. I know because fear is the most boring part of me. Don’t treat it like it’s precious. It’s just your old regular Made in China fear…” Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, speaking about fear.

This weeks reading by Duncan Watts looks at the idea of networking. Not just networking as we think of it today, but the science or mathematics behind it also.

Watts begins by looking at a major power outage that occurred throughout America in 1977. He states that it was identified that a major reason for the outage occurred because of a lack of understanding about the interdependencies that were present within the system.

He then continues to talk about individual behaviour and how it aggregates to collective behaviour then moves on to networks. Watts states that a network is nothing more than a collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion, but proceeds to declare a true definition of networks is too difficult to describe. He also examines how human interactions exist in a network and compares the rules that govern individual behaviour to that of a mob.

Watts also talks about how networks are not a new idea, they have been around since 1736 and were studying in a mathematical sense.

He proceeds to identify two key qualities that make up a network, interestingly Adrian also looks at these two points, the first being the concept that networks represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something, the second, that networks are constantly changing and evolving.

I also found it interesting how Watts talks about using human relationships to form a mathematical equation. Although by this point I am completely lost, this thought did intrigue me slightly.

Finally Watts looks at the concept of the ‘Small World Problem’ and the idea of ‘Six Degree’s of Separation’. Most people are familiar with this concept and it was interesting to read how Stanley Milgram originally conducted the experiment. I did think, that if someone tried to conduct this experiment today they would have serious issues as most of the letters would be thrown away, thinking it was some kind of spam mail.

Overall a very confusing read as it zig zagged all over the place. But I guess it was just all about different kinds of networks, which makes sense.

In this weeks round-up Ellen has a great summary of week 7’s symposium and looks at the idea’s discussed surrounding privacy. I think this is interesting considering my earlier post about U2 and their ‘gifted’ album, and also considering the huge privacy scandal that took place a few weeks back with Apple’s cloud. I really feel like Apple aren’t doing themselves many favours recently in regards to respecting the our privacy.

Rebecca looks into the reading by Barabasi which looks at a new approach to the concept of network media by comparing the way in which we network ourselves online and way in which we network in person.

Finally, Simone has once again outdone herself with a fantastically entertaining review of the symposium. Simone looked at the different definitions or interpretations of narcissism as identified by Betty and Adrian.