Unlecture #10

The tenth lecture covered a very wide range of relevant issues to networked media, including the open nature of the Internet, Kevin Bacon, and the fact that technology is everywhere and is everything.

I really liked the start of the lecture with Adrian showing us the ‘Faces Of Facebook’ website which has recently gone viral, and relating it to our course. It is an example of a free form creative practice, on that has taken advantage of the fact that social media sites like Facebook are so public and open; even if your page is on the most strict private settings, people can still see your profile picture.

This is an interactive and interesting site that was not made or endorsed by Facebook at all, one individual has just utilised the opportunities that social networking presents, and things like these exemplify the inherent contrasts between traditional and new media.

Traditional media doesn’t utilise the ‘database’ form, information isn’t easily accessible by everyone, like the example that Adrian used, it’s impossible, and somewhat ridiculous to imagine, that we could access the information of people using Coles/Myers cards, but this is what we can do with new media, allowing sites like this to be made.

‘Faces Of Facebook’ incorporates the profile pictures of all of the site’s 1.2 billion users, allowing you to zoom in one an individual’s picture. It was created by Natalia Rojas, a Miami-based ‘creative technologist’, who said simply that “I accidentally discovered how to access all the profile pictures from everyone on Facebook when I was playing around with their API”.

The site also updates in real time as new users sign on to the site, adapting to the ever-changing realm of the internet. The site has well and truly gone viral in the last few days, gaining much attention from the media, and it serves to display just how huge and all-encompassing this network that we are studying is. Just look at the opening page of the site, it’s just a messy collage of different colours, but upon zooming in, it becomes a structured and ordered network of the internet.

The lecture also discussed the power law distribution that explains the network of the internet, and how this results in ‘hubs’ emerging. We heard how Hollywood is a great example of this, with actors and directors and the likes usually sticking together and groups, resulting certain actors becoming hubs (KEVIN BACON) and creating connections between two seemingly unrelated people.

This results in these hubs having ‘weak connections’, it is structured and far from random, but usually we don’t actually know who is behind these hubs personally, creating less strong nodes.

At the end the lecture also touched on the all-encompassing term of technology, and the contest between technological determinism versus cultural determinism.

As Elliot discussed, in nearly every case, technology is developed for one reason, and is ultimately used for a completely other purpose. This was seen with SMS, which was originally thought to be just for business notifications, but is now the major form of social communication, as well as just the internet as a whole, which was created by the US during the Cold War in order to have a system that would avoid complete destruction in the event of a nuclear attack.

I really liked Adrian’s concluding statement, calling out people that claim to go on ‘technology free’ detoxes, when in fact technology is unavoidably everywhere.

Willy Wonka

The analogy of hypertext being like film editing got my thinking about the ‘fake trailers’ or ‘recuts’ that people make, transforming the genre of famous films.

This idea that hypertext creates meaning through linking things together, ones that may be completely unrelated, matches up with how an editor cuts shots together to create a film narrative.

This fake trailers are made from the exact same shots that are used in the real film, but have been edited in a different order, changing the structure, and with a different soundtrack (and sometimes a voiceover), the meaning of the film is drastically altered.

These trailers detail how meaning is created through how things are linked together, rather than the actual content, showing that when hypertext users choose which link to follow, a completely different meaning may be created.

This trailer recuts Top Gun as a romantic movie, creating a love story between the two main characters, just be re-ordering the shots, and adding music and a voice-over. A scene with the characters in a bar, which was something entirely different in the original, becomes a romantic interaction between the two, due to the way it is cut after a scene with Tom Cruise previously, and the use of that annoying Dido song. A new meaning is created solely through editing the exact same shots in a different manner.

Another good one is Willy Wonka recut as a horror movie. The maker cleverly recuts it to portray Wonka has a crazy man that uses his factory as some sort of torture house, and this is achieved through editing. The scene where Willy Wonka first meets Charlie and the others is intercut with shots of the children getting into trouble inside the factory, making what Wonka is saying, which seems polite and innocuous in the original, eerie and ominous in the recut.

This one is a bit different, as it doesn’t really alter the film’s genre, but rather just what era it’s from. It transforms 2001: A Space Odyssey, into a 2012 Summer, popcorn blockbuster. This is achieved almost solely in changing the pace of the editing, going from the very slow, long shots of the original, to fast, rushed editing of the recut, making it seem more like a modern day action movie. This is also complemented by a loud, obnoxious, and booming soundtrack.

This recuts help to show how many is established the structuring of individual parts, and that it is so easy to alter meaning merely through re-ordering these parts, something that has become inherent to us with hypertext and the internet.

Databased

Lev Manovich’s ‘Database As Symbolic Form’ focuses on the idea of database in the age of new media and digital computers, and how this interacts and contrasts with more traditional forms of narrative.

Manovich defines database as a structured collection of data, and says that it “is anything but a simple collection of objects”. These databases are unstructured with no narrative, they represent the world as a list that refuses to be ordered. Databases have “become the centre of the creative process in the computer age”. Websites are inherently databases; they are endless and unstructured collections of images, texts, and other data records.

Manovich claims that new media objects don’t tell stories like we’re used to in the media; they don’t have a beginning or an end, but are just collections of individual items, each no more significant than the next. Many major hubs of the internet, as identified in the power laws structure of the network, are clearly databases, such as Wikipedia, which is a database of information posted by anyone and everyone and basically any topic you could think of, and Google, a database of pretty much any website you can think of.

Again, I found that using the analogy of cinema editing helped my to slightly understand this reading, with Manovich using these ideas to compare database with its natural enemy: narrative. Database and narrative are binary opposites, where database is unordered, unstructured, and unlinear, narrative is ordered, structured, and liner, telling a clear story to the reader.

A film is a sequential narrative (even non-linear ones like Tarantino), they are a timeline of individual shots that appear on the cinema screen one at a time. You can see the shots that are accumulated throughout the process of actually filming a script as creating a database: the shots are individual, arbitrarily, and not yet in order, as much of filming is logistically done out of order. It is only when the editor begins to piece these shots together to match the script that the film transforms from a database to a narrative. As the author says, the editor creates “a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films that could have been constructed”.

I found this analogy useful again in comprehending the pretty intense and heavy ideas that are encompassed in this reading, and I think we can view hypertext and these online databases as like a film where the viewer can actively choose how it is edited – what shot comes next, what song is used, which character is the protagonist) – while it is being shown.

I found this reading pretty heavy going, but I eventually got some interesting points out of it. I like the idea of describing of a website as a database, and how this is inherently in contrast with narrative as the two concepts are direct opposites. Databases exemplify the concept of hypertext that we’ve been focusing on; they are interactive and constantly changing, while narrative is orderly structured and static over time.

Save The Palace

I wrote this thing a few months ago but I think it’s still a pretty relevant issue. It’s about the Palace Theatre, a great music venue in Melbourne that may be replaced by a hotel.

Melbourne is set to lose another iconic music venue, and it’s time to take another stand to save live music in this city.

News that The Palace Theatre may well be destroyed to make way for a hotel has been met with anger and indignation from music-lovers, and rightly so: The Palace Theatre is far too special and important to the Melbourne music scene to be lost.

It was recently announced that the Chinese property investment firm Jinshan Investments has applied to build Australia’s first ‘W Hotel’, a complex encompassing 40,000 square metres, hosting 205 hotel rooms and 145 apartments, estimated to cost around $180 million; because if there’s one thing that we need more of in the city, it’s a hotel.

These plans would include the complete demolition of The Palace Theatre, wiping the iconic, unique, and historic venue off the face of the planet. The Palace is a near-perfect place to watch live music, and losing it would leave a gaping whole in the Melbourne music scene that will have harmful long-term effects.

The current situation is a continuation of a worrying trend occurring across the country, with developers seemingly hell-bent on transforming our vibrant city into a culture-free, dull and life-less one, with the likes of the East Brunswick Club and, for a very short period of time, The Tote, closing down.

If this trend continues, Melbourne may well eventually lose the unique buildings that define it as a city, and merely be another city filled with sky-scraping hotels and luxurious, modern buildings.

Even viewed as a matter outside of live music, the proposed developments will be severely damaging to Melbourne being the self-proclaimed “cultural capital” of the country. To demolish a hundred year old theatre for a 100m tall luxury hotel would set a dangerous and damaging precedent that will undoubtedly have a negative impact on the artistic and musical status of the city.

According to the developers, the proposed hotel will “re-energize” the eastern end of the CBD, although it is as yet unclear how an expensive, high-class hotel which will likely attract only rich businessmen will achieve this better than a renowned and vibrant music venue that attracts thousands of music fans from across the state, and the country.

The building was first erected in 1860 under the name of The Douglas Theatre, but was destroyed by a fire in 1911. The following year, the theatre in its current form was built, originally acting as a cinema, before being transformed into a nightclub and music venue in 1987.

Viewed from the outside, The Palace is a beautiful, attention-grabbing theatre filled with character like no other in the city. From the inside, The Palace is perhaps the best venue in the state to watch live music. With three levels and sizable standing area, including balconies virtually on top of the stage, and enough bars to ensure there’s never a long wait, every single person inside the venue is able to have an impeccable view of the act.

With a capacity of just under 2,000 it is one of the few of this size in the city, and in the last few years, it has played host to the likes of Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, Death Cab For Cutie, and Animal Collective, and serves an important role in facilitating tours for some of these mid-sized international bands, ones that are far too big to play the likes of The Corner Hotel, but cannot fill the expansive arenas such as Etihad Stadium, Rod Laver Arena, or Festival Hall.

The Palace is an iconic and historic venue, and should have a full Heritage Listing to prevent these types of attempted developments, but this is not the case, and now we must do something to save it. If the Palace Theatre can go, then no another venue in Melbourne is safe.

It’s been proved time and time again that music-loving people can and will take action in order to prevent these venues being destroyed. In 2010, following the forced closure of The Tote due to ridiculously harsh liquor licensing, an estimated 5,000 people rallied on the streets, leading to its eventual re-opening. The same year saw the Save Live Australian Music rally, which attracted between 10,000 and 20,000 people, according to the ABC.

It’s glaringly obvious that we are willing to take real action to save our music scene, and unfortunately this is becoming an increasingly necessary act to ensure the longterm stability of Melbourne’s live music scene.

Three years ago the music-lovers of Melbourne united to save The Tote, and the time has come to do so again. We cannot sit idly by and let these iconic music venues be destroyed one after the other, and the time has come to take a stand.

Recommendable

I really like the discussion in last week’s lecture about the system of recommendations on many websites nowadays, and the inherent hierarchy that it creates.

This system of recommendations offers remarkable opportunities online, but they also come with many problems, and are easily manipulated by businesses and advertisers. They can be extremely useful; advertisements is slightly more bearable when it actually relates to you, and shopping and browsing online for music and such is much more productive and rewarding when we are given a head-start through user recommendations and tools such as ‘people also bought’

However, there have been numerous examples of these systems becoming corrupted by businesses or due to the companies striving to make a profit. Time posted an article about this a few days ago, and listed data that supported how important online reviews by ‘users’ are. According to a 2013 survey, 9/10 customers said their buying decisions have been influenced by online reviews, while a study by Harvard Business School stated that just a one star increase in a review for a business corresponded to a revenue increase of 5-9%. Online reviews and user recommendations are so important today to how well a business or piece of media does, so much weight is placed on how a movie rates on IMDb, or how a book is recommended on Amazon and the likes, and this is much more important than reviews by experts in newspapers or magazines.

Yelp is a giant in the online review business, and is hugely profitable. The site allows users to rate businesses, but this system has been met with much criticism and controversy. It has been alleged that Yelp has filtered reviews based on whether the business in question has paid for advertising on the site or not, and that it has offered to remove derogatory reviews if advertising is bought. This is essentially blackmailing businesses into paying the site, and is a violation of the trust people now place on these review websites. This system has resulted in at least one class-action against Yelp, and is a clear example of how this hierarchy of recommendation can be manipulated to the detriment of the user.

Angie’s List is another website that has allegedly hijacked this review system. It is a site that only allows its two million paying subscribers to see and write the reviews, and has supposedly allowed businesses with a ‘B’ rating or better to pay to get their listing placed at the top of the search results. This creates a fake recommendations system that is misleading and lying the readers, with the aims of generating profit.

This system has also been abused by the businesses and creators of content that is being reviewed, with many being revealed to have reviewed their own or rivals content anonymously online, taking advantage of the fact that it is easy to anonymously post defamatory things online.

An author named R.J. Ellory was caught posting positive reviews of his own book on Amazon, as well as very negative ones on his rivals. Ellory perhaps naively made very little effort to actually hid it, sometimes signing off with his name or email address, but he has been met with a huge backlash for hijacking a system like this.

As soon as people lose trust in a recommendations system, it is useless. The whole idea of this hierarchy of recommendations is for unbiased, ‘normal’ people’s opinions to be heard and for these to influence and help other people, not for businesses and writers to manipulate it.
This is like comparing a ‘promoted’ tweet that appears at the top of your timeline with something that has been retweeted by someone you follow. One is something that is paid for and not necessarily relating to your interests, while the other is something that has been recommended to you by someone you have already stated you are interested in.

This system of recommendations has the real potential to be effective and worthwhile, but only if it can prevent business and companies taking advantage of it.

The Protocols Of Protocols

The other reading for this week is the Introduction from ‘Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization’ but Alexander Galloway.

To be honest, after reading this sizable chapter, I was left feeling a little like this:

The reading is very, very heavy on technical terms and internet coding and the likes, things that I really don’t have my head around. I thought it was a pretty damn dry reading, especially when we’re studying a topic that could have very interesting and interactive readings, ones that actually employ the hypertext that we are focusing on so much.

The reading focuses on the idea of the protocols that control the way in which networks on the internet function, and the importance of digital computers.

Galloway describes the internet as a “global distributed computer network”, and also covers how it was never originally intended to become anything like what it is today. The internet was originally developed by the US to be a “computer network that was independent of centralised command and control” so it could “withstand a nuclear attack that targets such centralised hubs”.

It was deliberately created as a decentralised network, but it was never meant to become the near-omniscient force in our lives that it is today; now it is “a global distributed network connecting billions of people around the world”.

According to Galloway, the concept of protocol is at the core of networked computing, and defines this as a “set of recommendations and rules that outlines specific technical standards”.

Protocols are apparently the standards that govern the implementation of specific technologies, the ‘rules’ of sorts of the internet. I found the analogy of the highway system somewhat helpful to help comprehend this concept: there are many different routes to get from one place to another, but there are uniform rules that apply to these ways, such as stopping at red lights, going the speed limit, staying on the actual roads etc. As Galloway says, “these conventional rules that govern the set of possible behaviour patterns within a heterogenous system are what computer scientists call protocol”. While the internet is so expansive and apparently ‘free’, there are still these rules and guidelines governing how it is used.

I think this is the key point that I took out of this reading (most of it I didn’t fully understand), the idea that although the internet is commonly viewed as this chaotic, ruleless utopia/dystopia, there are still a very stringent set of protocols governing how we act on the internet and contribute to the network that it creates.

 

The Technology Of Culture

This week’s reading was from the introduction of Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts’ book ‘Culture And Technology’ and focuses on efforts to defining key terms involved in a theoretical analysis of the complex relationship between culture and technology: technology, technique, and culture.

The authors summarize why these definitions are so important for this area of study towards the end of the introduction, by saying that “civilizations are based on the technologies of building and writing. Cultural activities are dependent on technology. Contemporary mass culture is made possible by the technologies of communication and production”. This terms are obviously crucially important to understanding culture, society, and the way in which networks are formed, and the clear starting point is to define them, which proves to be much harder than you’d think.

Words can just as easily adapt and evolve with societal changes as technology does, with different meanings and interpretations evolving. Potts uses the example of the word ‘technocrat’ for this, saying that in the 1920s it originally describes someone who supported technocracy, a style of governance. Consequentially this word could be either an insult or a compliment, depending on your political ideology. But across time, technocrat has lost much of its political foundation, and its modern understanding now describes someone who highly values the potential of technology.

Because words can adapt and transform across time, and quickly, like this, it makes it problematic to attempt to stringently define them. The reading uses the analogy of technological change to refer to how quickly things can adapt, saying that the “cultural ramifications of technological change are multiple and volatile, making fools of modern-day prophets”. Prophets can also looks like ‘fools’ when trying to pin down the meanings of words, as they can also develop along with technological changes.

Potts claims that the word technology has come to describe the overall system of machines and processes used, while also stating that it has “become so ubiquitous that it has been said that we now live in technology, are surrounded by technological systems, and are dependent on them”. The word technology now has such a broad definition that it is almost impossible to effectively deal with, because, as Potts says, “technology has become so central to so many societies that it needs to be considered as much more than a collection of tools and machines”.

In contrast to this, the word technique refers to “a specific method or skill”, the means by which technology is harnessed in order to achieve an intended goal. Very basically, it is “the use of skill to accomplish something”, but as Potts observes, anything to with our own bodies must also involve technique then, and “techniques are as crucial to cultural and the transmission of culture as technologies”.

Raymond Williams is quoted as saying that culture is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”, and this is due to the fact that it can be so widely applied: it can described something self-contained, such as Australian culture, but can also be applied so broadly as to include the entire human race.

Potts says that “we see culture as messy, confused and riven with contradictions”, and that it is ultimately unpredictable, with the ‘inventors of culture’ inevitably not envisioning the technologies being used in the way that they now are, with the internet providing a relevant example.

I liked Brian Eno’s definition of culture the best, and thought it was the easiest to understand. Eno concisely defined culture as “everything we do not have to do”. For example, we have to move, but we don’t have to dance or run or skip, therefore these are cultures. I think this is a good way to simplify the ideas of culture into an easily understood and workable definition.

This reading provided some useful ideas surrounding troublesome definitions of the important concepts of technology, technique, and culture, and this will now be able to be applied to other aspects of analysis in the networked media.

The Richer Get Richer

The second week’s reading was another chapter from old mate Albert-László Barabási, again focusing on explaining the network of the internet scientifically.

It was pretty dry and heavy going, but there was a few interesting points buried in there.

This one continues from other, and mainly focuses on explaining why there are ‘hubs’ in the networks, huge websites that dominate traffic on the internet. This is explained through the rich get richer phenomenon, whereby the pages that we prefer to link are the ones that are already better known, ones with more links and views. The more links that a website has, the easier it is for them

It’s also stated that this power law distribution could potentially apply to all networks that we initially believed to be random, but it has been mathematically proven to apply to the internet.

The network of the internet is in no way random. It is entirely deliberate, calculated and co-ordinated, and is done so through two factors: growth, and preferential attachment.

Both of these are seemingly non-brainers nowadays. The internet is obviously constantly growing and changing, each millisecond of the day. Just with this very post, the internet is growing, however minutely. Page by page, post by post, unlecture notes by unlecture notes, the internet is growing all around us.

This is combined with the fact that we don’t link to things randomly (duh), but we link to pages that already have a lot of links to it, ones that are respected and already used, we employ preferential attachment. This, in a very basic way, is how a Google search works (I think).

These factors result in a power law distribution, due to this rich get richer phenomenon, with the creation of ‘hubs’ in the network, these big websites that dominate links and traffic on the internet.

This was the main point that I got out of the reading, primarily, the explanation for why, and how, the internet network is how it is.

Unlecture #8

This week’s symposium focused on the actual process of writing a hypertext narrative, the problems of a Long Tail-style free market model with recommendations, and the centrality or lack thereof, of networks.

I liked the discussion about how when writing a hypertext narrative, the structure naturally emerges from the process of creating it, as opposed to an essay, where you will inevitably have a plan or structure before beginning to write it.

Before writing something, you may not know what is the most important piece of information, or what will be most relevant to the reader, so writing in a hypertext form allows this to happen naturally, with the most importance/relevant piece of information becoming the one with the most links to other bits of the writing, or to things outside of this narrative.

I also that it was useful that with a hypertext narrative, the process of research and planning becomes much more transparent and easy to navigate, with the ability to provide direct links to full quotes, articles that were cited, or notes that were used to write the actual piece.

The biggest thing I took out of this lecture was how Adrian described hypertext, and I think this was the point that I fully ‘got’ this new concept. Adrian compared hypertext to cinema, saying that the nodes are like each shot used in a film, and the links are the edits used to join the shots. As opposed to film, hypertext as multiple, near-unlimited ways to edit this piece together, and there is always the very real potential for meaning to be altered when something is edited differently.

As has been discovered with film, the meaning lies in the relationship between one shot and another, and Adrian labelled this as “hypertextual logic”, because the meaning in a hypertextual narrative is also primarily derived from the way in which the nodes are linked together.

The lecture also included a discussion on the idea of the Long Tail, and whether it was problematic if recommendations hierarchies emerged. This would involve one opinion dominating others,, and lead to others being hidden.

Many internet sites, such as Amazing, Spotify, and iTunes, utilise this recommendations system to ‘help’ users find other things they may be interested in, but many argue that this means that some will have more influence than others.

This hierarchy can be seen on Triple J Unearthed, where certain users with some sort of influence or a large amount of reviews, are labelled ‘power users’, with their reviews appearing at the top and inevitably having more of an affect on a possible downloader.

I don’t necessarily see this as a problem, because nowadays much of this content is tailored reasonably well for our interests, and a hierarchy is usually a good way to ensure the content is consistently good. I think this only becomes a problem when it is manipulated or hijacked by advertisers, and the recommendations are no longer ‘real’.

The Issue With Single-Issue Parties

The farcical micro-party preferencing system will undermine the ability and purpose of the Australian Senate, with an influx of irrelevant single-issue parties looking on course to win seats.

The Senate is granted wide-ranging power in the Australian political makeup, serving as a review and critique of the lower house, and possessing the means to block certain legislation, but for it to be effective, it requires a diverse range of voices. These voices need to be able to discuss the array of issues that it will inevitably encounter, not just one, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the Australian Sports Party, and the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts will each win a seat in the Senate, single-issue candidates with little background and even fewer policies.

Wayne Dropulich, a gridiron playing engineer, looks set to win a Senate seat in Western Australia for the Australian Sports Party. The party’s ideology is, unsurprisingly, focused on advocating sports, and little else. Their website reveals no insight into how they would act in the Senate, or any other beliefs or values on wider policies.

At least the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party include a quick byline on their role, saying it “will primarily be to review proposed legislation, which is passed in the lower house”, but apart from that textbook definition of the Senate’s basic role, and a few other broad statements on this, there’s very little else of substance.

These candidates are now looking increasingly likely to be holding an important chunk of power, and will be voting on issues ranging from the carbon tax, mining tax, and a possible intervention in Syria. It’s hard to imagine how these party’s will act as the reliable ‘checker’ of government legislation on these issues, when they are so squarely focused on their own specific areas.

It may unfortunately also lead to an increase in shady, underground deals and alliances, with these parties accepting bills in order to further their own specific interests. We just have no way to tell how they will act on these prevalent issues in the national interest.

These single-issue parties are a blight on the Senate, wasting the crucial opportunity for diverse, minor parties holding some semblance of power in Australian politics, parties that need to effectively and transparently evaluate legislation on a wide-range of topics.

But who voted for these highly specific minor parties? Well, by the looks of the ABC and AEC’s figures, not many people actually did. The rise of these single-issue parties is due in part to the excessive amount of candidates on the Senate ballot, and the accompanying murky underworld of micro-party preferencing.

The Australian Sports Party will win a seat with only 0.22% of the primary, first-preference vote in Western Australia, while the Labor member received 12% and will not. Can we really call a victory with 0.22% of the vote an accurate representation of the state’s wishes? And is it truly democratic if the victory came down to back-room deals and preferences that handed others votes to the Party?
A similar situation has been seen in Victoria, with the Motoring Enthusiasts likely to receive a seat while only receiving 0.52% of the initial allocation, well behind the likes of The Sex Party, Family First, The Wikileaks Party, and the Palmer United Party.

In NSW, Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm’s name appeared first on the expansive ballot, and this, along with his party’s similar name to the LNP, may result in the very much pro-gun, former veterinarian gaining a seat in the Senate. Leyonhjelm has done nothing to shy away from the reasons of his voting results, duping himself the “senator for the donkeys”.

This process of micro-party preferencing is verging on non-sensical. It’s counter-intuitive and doesn’t properly represent the votes of the Australian people. The Senate’s purpose is to amend, negotiate and balance bills and legislation, and it’s hard to imagine how this will be achieved by parties whose major, and seemingly sole, focus is on cars and sports, hardly the most commonly discussed issues in Parliament.

It’s time to fix this system of voting so that our elected Senators, who are imbued with such important powers and responsibilities, accurately reflect the overall vote and allow the Senate to function as the check on the House Of Representatives’ power as it is intended to be.