Category Archives: the network

technologies and cultures

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so, one of this week’s readings, “Culture and Technology” by potts and murphie seems very familiar in the topic it is discussing. however, this familiarity does not stem from anything we’ve done in networked media so far but is pretty much a summary of everything we’ve done these last 9 weeks in the communication strand, “communication histories and technologies”.  nevertheless, it was an intersting read but i’ve yet to find the link between it and the network, other than that one reference to the internet. and i guess technologies in general because you couldn’t really have the network without technology.

what was interesting was the way the reading revealed how the word technology originated. “technology” is such a commonplace word nowadays, especially when doing a media degree, that it doesn’t feel like this word could have ever not been a part of our vocabulary (sorry for that weird double negative there, but you know what i’m saying. i hope). the fact that these new words were pretty much created to accommodate the changing ways of society in the 18th and 19th century. that and all the disputes over the exact meanings of the different words… “culture”, “technique”  and “technology”. can’t we just accept those words for what they are. they only have meaning in our society because we give them meaning.

i don’t know, i wasn’t a huge fan of this reading. it was also difficult because the pages were scanned in on the side (on i was too lazy go to downstairs to print it) so i had to do the whole reading with my laptop on its side. made it very hard to concentrate. 

apples and psychics

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so, last week’s networked class started off like your typical normal class. you know, discussion of the readings, the lectures, the network. then it kinda got turned a bit sideways. who do we have to blame for that? i guess just me mostly. i’m a terrible influence. i was the same in high school, i liked to make classes fun but that often happened at the expense of the other students’ learning. mah bad.

so, may as well start off with the actual content of the lass discussions, before my, let’s call it immaturity, took hold. well, we were responding to the topic raised in the symposium about games and narratives and hypertext. i think the problem with discussing games in this context is that there are so many different types of games, it’s impossible to put any one label on them or place them in a specific group. all games are different, from board games like chess where the aim is to win, to simple games like Tetris where you just don’t want to lose to more complex games like (here we go again) kingdom hearts where you follow a narrative which drives the game. but i spoke about all that last week. what i thought was most interesting in our class discussion was the inclusion of a type of game that i had never considered…. sports games.

there are so many different types of sports too. are they all games? you can have a footy match, thats a game. but is a running race a game? you still want to win it, just like a footy game. is there anything other than games that we want to win? i guess competitions. but are those games? you know, like the lottery. well, i guess they could be. anything could be game if you want it to be a game. just as we were asking, “but is sport, like a running race, really a game”, someone in class brilliant mentioned what we all call “the olympic games”. i guess i’d never thought of them actually as games. but that’s what it is, one giant game with every country trying to win.

so, how can a sports game like that be a narrative? well, a sports game has a beginning, middle and end. but not sure how much further their similarities go. i guess there are just too many types of games to ever be able to definitively decide whether or not it can be a hypertext narrative. but i’m gonna go with it cant’. i mean, maybe some can, but definitely not all of them.

as for the rest of class, well, this won’t really be funny unless you were there. but we were put into new groups and this time got to choose our own niki subject. yeah, goodbye calculator inventor from the 1800’s and random guy from this century that no-one has ever heard of (i’m looking at you david gauntlett). we got to choose our own topic. well, most of the good ones had been snatched up by then (curse whoever took facebook) but there were some good options left, like apple. and someone else in my group thought medium would be interesting.

but there i stopped him. what is medium?? i mean, medium is really just a word (as apple is not only a company but a fruit, but we’ll get to that). there are lots of different meanings of the word medium and i couldn’t even be sure which one of those was intended by whoever put medium on the niki index (probably adrian). i mean, i looked up medium, and theres a blog website/forum/something-or-other called medium (which, lets be honest, is probably what adrian wanted), then there’s medium as in, something that delivers a media. you know, like a tv, or a radio, or a cinema, or a computer or phone or really anything. in this sense of the word, almost anything could be a medium!!!!!! (just so you understand, we were having a very vocal conversation about this in class with elliot. i’m pretty sure if he didn’t think i was crazy before, he does now) And then there’s the other form of medium which is…. psychics!!!! you know, like the tv show… medium!!! and so, just because i really don’t like this entire niki project, and i was so annoyed at the ambiguity of the entire “medium” option even being on that list, i somehow managed to convince my group to do our niki entry on psychics communicating with ghosts to solve crimes to do with the online network. don’t even ask. i am insane. and i know it. and now my whole class knows it too.

oh, and if you were wondering where i was going with the whole “apple” thing, i was still annoyed at this whole project and wanting to do something that they didn’t want us to do. so with apple i was completely planning on making the entry about the fruit itself (and, you know, the network of apple trees, the different types of apples, and the fruit business) instead of apple the company. i think it’s a pretty good idea. to bad i got so excited by the psychics idea that i got sidetracked. who knows, still 1 niki left to do!!!!

 

 

i’m a gamer

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you know, as much as i had never thought of myself as one, i found myself proudly putting my hand up in this weeks lecture when adrian asked who in the crowd considered themselves a gamer. i guess i’m not a gamer in what most people think of the term. i don’t sit on my computer or my console playing games 24/7, i don’t shoot

other people from across the globe, or battle them in magical duels over the internet. but i do play my games (more often now than i did in high school thats for sure) and i do love them. even if it really is only one or two games that i actually play (*cough* pokemon and kingdom hearts *cough*).

first off, there are many types of video games, and all of them are different (and this doesn’t count all the games that aren’t video games) so it’s hard to be able to make an overall, wholesome statement about all video games being hypertext or not. i think it was Elliot who mentioned that when hypertext first came around, people started calling it a video game. but there’s a difference. a video game, even if it does have a word that you can explore, is still set in it’s story (if it even has one, but we’ll get to that) whereas a hypertext can have nearly limitless possibilities, the story doesn’t have to result in this one specific conclusion like a video game. BUT! as Jasmine then pointed out, when playing a game, there can always be parts of the game that you haven’t yet explored or discovered and this is like hypertext, you cannot see all the possible paths. but is this enough of a connection?so, “what relevance does this have?” i hear you ask. well, you inquisitive reader you. one of the big points discussed in this weeks lecture was whether a video game can be considered a hypertext narrative. and there were so many differing opinions coming out from the symposium too. we had a resounding “NO!” from one side of the table and a yes! from another and then kinda just landed in the middle. so let me break down the points for you

i’m not sure. adrian emphasised the necessity of story and narrative within both the hypertext and the game. well, mainly that a hypertext does have a narrative but a game doesn’t have too. i mean yes, some do, but there are other games that obviously don’t have a narrative, like pong. or tetris. so where hypertext is about new and different ways of telling a story, a game doesn’t even have to have one, so how can it be a hypertext narrative? another point that adrian brought up was that “games are about winning” and that “you can’t win a story”. but, when you read a story,

isn’t reaching a positive outcome within the story kinda like winning? i mean, you want the outcome to be good and when it it you feel as if you have won.  i guess it’s still different types of winning. but with a video game that has a narrative rather than a competitive or points system, there’s also no real definite “win”. does beating the game mean you have won or just completed it like you have completed a story? take kingdom hearts for example, you play a single character, sora, and your quest is (in simple terms) to bring peace to pretty much everywhere. yeah, there’s fighting along the way, and you can win those individual battles, but when you complete the story, is that really “winning” or have you just reached the conclusion of the narrative? and some games you never win. like tetris or temple run, the aim is just to keep going for as long as you can, so really you’re only option is lose, there is neither a “win” nor a narrative conclusion. so really, there really is no proper way to answer this question. because there are too many different types of games to classify anything. as long as we keep playing and reading, does it really matter?

just one more small note from the lecture, i really liked Adrian’s point about the meaning not living in the text (or shot, as his example was in film) but in the combination of two shots or links between the texts. on it’s own, a text is nothing (similar to the theory that context cannot survive) but it must be combined with something else to have a meaning and different combinations can have different meaning. this reminds me of something we covered last semester in cinema studies about editing, what is known as the Kuleshov Effect and pretty much is about how the meaning of a shot can be altered completely by the following shot. check out this video below from none other than alfred hitchcock for a much better explanantion.

that’s all from me now, a bit long this post was. i guess there was a lot to talk about.

 

 

 

 

 

ok

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so, the title of this blog post will only make sense to bec skilton but to us it’s a pretty relevant summary of our activites in class last week. i would explain it to you, but it just wouldn’t be funny. and you’d probably end up just thinking i’m crazy (or crazier than you already thought i was). but, considering that there’s probably no one actually reading this, i don’t really have to explain myself anyway.

back to the actual point of this blog post, our class discussions. for some reason, most of them tend to involve a lot of rebuttal against stuff that’s been said during that week’s lecture. and last week’s class was no different. the main point that people didn’t like was adrian’s claim that context cannot survive the text. i both agree and disagree with this (i guess what i’m really saying is, everyone made good points so i’m on the fence). every text can only be written in the specific context of that time and really can only be read in the specific context of the time in which it is being read. so in that sense, no, it does not survive. but a text being written in a different context does not mean the author doesn’t exist, or their intentions don’t exist and especially doesn’t mean that we can’t try and work out what their intentions were. as someone in class pointed out, the second we acknowledge that someone has created something, it changes our view of it. i guess the consensus was that everything that had been said at the lecture was too absolute. i guess in this day and age we are a fan of ambiguity and blurred lines (but not the song). i’ve never really been such a fan of black and white anyway.

laws lost, networks or physics?

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so this week’s reading, “the 80/20 rule” is pretty heavy. i mean, it started off all well and good, tlaking about networks and links and nodes and hubs. but then it turned sciencey. and when i say sciencey, i mean physics. and i hate physics. and this is coming from a science student (well, i used to be, believe it or not, in high school i did chemistry, biology and psychology) but i could not stand physics.

now, the problem i found with this reading is that we were never given a really clearly defined definition of what this incredible “power law” was. i mean, it seemed like Barabási started trying to explain it then got carried away in his own thoughts and never got around to finishing that explanation. and that left me very lost for the rest of the article because a substantial amount of the content was about power laws and atoms and freezing water. and i’m not really sure what any of that had to do with the network. so instead i’ll discuss the actually interesting “80/20” rule.

the 80/20 is kind of like the opposite of the bell curve, where very few of whatever it is that your measuring have a large amount of whatever the other thing that you’re measuring is. well, that was a terrible explanation. sorry. i guess an example would help. ok. so the 80/20 rule is saying, as per an example from the reading, that 80% of the world’s money is earned by only 20% of the population. so, in slightly simpler terms, a very small part of the population earn a very large amount and vice versa (a very large part of the population earn very little money).

so, how does this work in relation to networks? well, i guess the whole point is like links on the internet. just a few of the vast number of pages or “nodes” have a lot of links connecting to them and the majority of pages will just have one or two connections. in that way, im kinda picturing google as like the king of the internet. one huge page with a million links going out, but each of the pages that google will link to will only have one, maybe two other links out. so google is what connects them all and creates the network, without which it would just be a bunch of pages that no one sees because nothing is connected.

like that nice little picture, which is a very simplified version, you can see that one person is linked to a lot of people while most of those are only linked to one or two. so that one guy would be the 20 and everyone else the 80 (not in exact figures obviously) but you can see that the smaller amount of people have more links out than the larger amount of people. and i think that’s the power rule. but, you know, when physics and maths become involved, you never know what’s really going on.

can i control my blog?

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this week was a very interesting unlecture, despite us not getting to my question :(. i guess there were just so many good things to talk about in regards to the other questions that we just ran out of time for mine.

the biggest point i took away from it was about the amount of control the author can have? and how much is that? well, right now it doesn’t seem like a lot. that’s the problem with the gap between the author and the reader, you can never know just how they’re gonna interpret  your work. so, in a sense, emphasising your lack of control can give you more control. if we write something that allows for different interpretations, we are showing that we are understanding how our audience works. actually, i don’t know. i lost myself just then. but it made sense when i started, haha. it’s also about not being able to know exactly what the author was thinking or intending, we just need to take the work as it is and attempt to make sense of it independently of the author.

another aspect of this, which was also brought up in the unlecture was the notion that context cannot and does not survive the text. so how could we know what an author was thinking when he wrote a book 150 years ago because it was a completely different time with different social norms and ideologies. we can only interpret it the way we see it today because we no longer have access to the context in which the work was created.

i know there was more important stuff that was discussed but my brain is falling out on me, it’s been a long day at work. but the last thing i want to mention (which was actually the first thing adrian mentioned so working backwards here) was that awesome animal book (i forgot it’s name!!!!) with the ten animals that you could mix and match to create almsot endless possibilities. oh, how i would love to read that book. that book is probably how they make pokemon now a-days, seeing as how they are really running out of ideas for those little pocket monsters (fairy floss pokemon??? say whaaaat??). but, being the child at heart that i am, i really wanna read that book and see what cool animals i can make. it was an interesting point to, the difference between that and the “choose your own adventure book”. although everyone was talking about that because the reading mentioned something similar, the titanic online game/book was pretty much a choose your own adventure because there were more limited outcomes (well, thats what i assume, i haven’t actually read/played it). but the endless sonnet was cool. i wonder if anyone has done all the possibilities? i guess not considering it would take, what was it?, 200 million years. ok so maybe not, but there’s no harm in trying 😀

Back to blogging

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it feels like i haven’t blogged in a while. do you guys miss me? (do you guys even exist? probably not, haha). i guess we all took a nice break for the week. (just to say, at least our mid semester break was in the middle of our semester!!! deakin’s was in week four and monash’s is like in week 10! whats up with that?) and i haven’t really done or been looking at anything worth blogging about. and “why is that?” i hear you ask? because my new kingdom hearts 2 finally arrived (well, by new i mean i jsut got it, the game come out in like 2004).

now, for anyone wondering, kingdom hearts is by far my favourite game (yes probably even more than pokemon. ok, lets not get too crazy, equal to pokemon. but they’r very different) and i’ve played kingdom hearts 1 more times than i can count. who doesn’t love the magical adventures of sore, donald and goofy and travelling through the incredible worlds of the disney movies? (peter pan is obviously the best world). so, once i got that pesky little comm essay out of the way (which sadly took a lot longer than i had hoped due to some facebook/youtube/all time low obsession interference), it was a nice dive into the world of kingdom hearts 2. and it’s pretty cool. there’s some awesome new features, like double keyblades, and new worlds, like milan and lion king! its just awesome. and i know you think it sounds lame but trust me, the kingdom hearts series is regarded as one of the best games out there so get into it.

now, i’m so hyped up about this because they are finally releasing a kingdom hearts 3!!! but the killer line….. only on the new PS4 or new X-box! 🙁 which i don’t have and am not planning on buying. so depressing. how will i ever know if sora, donald, goofy, riku and kairi and up happy??? but they are also rereleasing the first game in HD with extra goodies and limited edition sketch books so i’m happy about that.

wow. that got off topic, i was not planning on going on for o long about kingdom hearts. well, thats the blog for you, start off in one place and end somewhere completely different. i guess it’ll be good for me to get back into regular blogging this week, maybe with some stuff to do with the actual subject involved. well, last week (or two weeks ago i guess, stupid holiday) it was finally my classes turn to come up with the questions for this week’s unlecture! now, there was some confusion due to the whole naming of the weekly readings in the blog, you know 01 reading for week 02. or the 05 readings for week 06 but we’ll discuss them in week 07. all very confusing. but we came up with some questions anyway. proudly, mine made it in!!! what is? no spoilers!!!! you’ll have to wait and hear it in the unlecture. but let me tell you, it’s a doozy! (ok, not really, i wasn’t even expecting it to be picked! but the others all liked it). but the others were pretty good and also brought up some good class discussions about what can be classified as hypertext or what kinds of hypertexts can be classified as academic or essay. and then we dove into the usual niki work.

but i should stop there. i’m rambling again and this post has covered a few too many things. stay tuned folks, hopefully more to come!

it’s a small world after all

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one of this week’s reading, “six degrees” by Duncan J. Watts was an interesting read about the science behind networks themselves and the ever popular “six degrees of separation”. now, haven’t we all at times tried to work out how far our 6 degrees can take us? i know i do. we all want to be connected to someone famous, even if it’s just through the simple means of knowing someone who knows someone else. it’s a pretty cool idea, even if i do still find it kinda hard to believe that little ole’ me could be connected to those people who live in completely secluded tribes in random parts of africa who have never had contact with the outside world. i mean, come on, they’ve never met anyone outside their tribe?!?! how could i be connected to them. but according to Watts and another researcher named Milgram, i am. if only it was useful. but i guess if everyone is in the same boat, it doesn’t really make any difference to anyone.

onto networks! now, i would describe this reading as having three distinct sections. one useful one about networks, one at the end about the previously discussed six degrees of separation. and a random chunk in the middle about the author’s experiences in college, his professor’s experiences in college, repeated mentions of fire flies and experiments on crickets. poor little crickets, thinking some other cricket loved them but it was only just a machine. ok, i’ll try and stop getting distracted. the networks. the article revealed a lot about the sciences of networks, or, how there isn’t much so far regarding the sciences of networks, but there should be. i like this reading because finally it gave me something real to think about in regards to networks. i mean yeah, the past readings have too, but this was all “networks” in big flashing lights, telling me how we’re all connected.

i thought the story/metaphor about the blackout on the west coast of the USA was great (once i could get the image of bug on a wire out o my head, so much talk of electrical power wires). it just demonstrated how people underestimate the power a

connected network has. like in the human body, sometimes even if one tiny little element fails, it can bring down an entire system because the network relies on everything working together. the relation to the science of networks is concerned with working out how each individual element knows how to come together and work together so cohesively to produce an operating network. this again raises the idea that individually we are all part of one huge network that just somehow manages to function cohesively. i think it’s interesting that this is an emerging field of scientific research, presumably because the notion of networks has been taken for granted as simply existing up until now. i guess the current rise in technology, especially with the network of the internet, that people have begun to realise that networks are a huge factor in our lives and that understanding them could be extremely beneficial to the future of our society.

 

Is this my diary? unlecture part 2

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so, i told you i was going to need a second post to cover everything that was mentioned in this weeks unlecture. this post will also probably cover some stuff from last weeks class and my most recent post about hypertext. but anyhow, onwards and upwards! (speaking of, i saw up for the first time the other day. it is brilliant.)

one of the main interesting things that was mentioned by both Elliot and Jasmine was the Korsakow program which i had neither heard of or was able to spell. but it’s a pretty cool concept nonetheless. similar to a hypertext novel, it does what a typical film can’t do by being fluid and changeable. it allows the viewer to create their own film by choosing the path that they wish to take. every time you return to something, it is completely different to what is was the first time you do it. now, this concept emphasises what was described as the “gap” between the media maker and the receiver. in any form of medium, the author can never guarantee the receiver will decipher the intended meaning of the text being created. and so hypertext and korsakow is allowing this gap to flourish so that rather than a specific meaning intended by the author that may not be received, each member of the audience can make their own personal interpretations of the text. there are an unlimited number of pathways one can take. it’s like in the brain, any one idea or thought can lead down a large variety of different neural pathways that span across the whole brain, each one leading to a different thought and each one individual.

this whole notion of hypertext leads on from the advancement of technology today. everything has had to change and adapt to fit into the new society. if a medium cannot adapt, it cannot survive. and hypertext is about joining all the little parts of the world together to make one big web of networks and connections where everything can be joined in multiple ways rather than just one linear connection. and our blogs allow us to form those connections and become a part of the wider network. this is similar to the niki’s we’ve been working on in class. each time one group presents their work to the rest, it’s a chance for everyone to gain. the group can get feedback about there work and the others can get both new knowledge and ideas about extra things they could include in their posts. the aim of the niki’s is to create a learning space for everyone in the course to be able to contribute to, in essence, to create a network that they have all worked on.

someone asked in the lecture, “do the blogs even count if no-one is reading them?”. now this was a matter i had considered, because i write as if people are listening, adrian called them our “imaginary audience”. but that doesn’t mean that the imaginary audience won’t eventually become a real audience. that’s why we make those connections, so that we can get that audience. i think it was jasmine who asked “why do you write a personal journal or diary if it’s not intended to be read by anyone?”. and that’s a brilliant point. when i was young i kept a diary. i never wanted anyone to read it, but i still wrote in a manner of telling a story to a reader, just like how i write this blog assuming people are reading it. so is this blog my diary? i guess while it hovers at a low 5 visitors a day it probably is. but hopefully i get up there soon.

and one more thing from the lecture. it doesn’t really relate to anything but i thought it was cool. in fact, i don’t even think it actually happened, i think i just heard something. but at one point adrian said “automatically” and it sounded like “automagically”. now i don’t know if he really said that or i just had a major mishear but either way, it’s an awesome word that i think really represents how our world functions today, especially if you consider it in the eyes of some of the people we are researching for our niki’s, (i’m looking at you charles babbage) who would just see everything we have today as a sort of magic. who could have imagined 100 years ago where we would be today in terms of technology. it really does seem like the world is “automagic”

surviving the titanic

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so, i started writing this post 10 whole days ago. then i realised that i’d read the readings for the wrong week and left it to come back to on a later date. and then time completely got away from me and so here i am, ten days later, finishing off and posting this (hopefully) awesome post about the reading. and of course, now i actually have to read the reading again to make sure i remember it. but that’s not too bad.

so, this reading, “the end of books or books without end?” was pretty hypertext heavy. and it was the first reading i’ve read so far that made me intersested in the concept of hypertext. why? because of that one question that was asked: what if you had a book that changed every time you read it?

Now, to me, that sounds crazy. as you all know, i am a traditional book lover. and i will read my books over and over again. but to me it does get a bit repetitive and i often find myself wishing that the book could change somehow.

not to fear! hypertext is here! what do we mean by that? that author’s can create stories with an almost unlimited number of possibilities. and the best part is.. we are creating the story. the story of the book will be based on our choices so it is unique to each one of us. this kinda reminded me of those old goosebumps books we used to read as kids. you know, the choose your own path books? they pretty much all ended in the reader’s gruesome death. my personal favourite was “escape from the carnival of horrors”.

but then, aren’t we destroying the timelessness or changelessness of the book? or are we just making it better? how do you know when you’ve reached the end. how does the author know how to write an end, or where the reader will take themselves? i guess this is where hypertext comes in. as Douglas mentions in the reading, “hypertext it fluid. print is fixed”. where a simple book can sometimes just last a matter of hours (unless you’re reading a song of ice and fire. that thing is huge!), an interactive book or hypertext novel can last for over a week! now doesn’t that sound exciting? and as a bonus you get a brand new story every time you read it. but even for me, every time i reread a book, i tend to find something i missed the first time round. now maybe i’m just not paying enough attention when i read my books, but still, no matter how many times i reread harry potter (now keep in mind this is generally about 3 times a year for each book) i still pick up something i didn’t remember from the previous read. and i have a pretty good memory. so for me books are always exciting.

now, speaking of harry potter, another thing douglas mentioned was the interactive titanic adventure. lets be honest, it sounded pretty cool. surviving the titanic, changing history. where can i find this. but this concept made me think of something else, not quite exact but similar. and that was pottermore.

now if you haven’t heard of pottermore, i really urge you to check it out (click here for the link). pottermore was created by J.K. Rowling to give her fans a more in depth harry potter experience. in addition to an awesome online read along version of each book (in which every screen has hidden clickable goodness), readers can find out what house they would fit into by completing a quiz, earn points for their house which is combined with points from all the others online, they can purchase all their own wizarding goodies from diagon alley, make potions and even compete in duels against other readers online. so not exactly hypertext but getting there. the difference here is the story stays the same, you just get to experience the world of the story in a way that you couldn’t really just from reading the book.

i guess i’m not so against hypertext after all. as long as it doesn’t replace the book altogether. i’ll leave you with one more quote from Douglas.

“the book is a highly refined example of primitive technology while hypertext is a primitive example of highly refined technology”.