Posts Tagged ‘Networked Media’
The last minute nature of this post is indicative of my passive aggressive rebellion against the changes to the weekly course requirements. I understand the benefit of reading my fellow students’ posts and referencing them, creating links between the different MediaFactory sites like a big old spiderweb, but I really enjoyed writing about other things not specifically relevant to the subject. I’d rather be required to do this, than make links to other students blog and comment on how much I enjoy their writing style and suggest kindly that maybe they could include some more funny cat GIFs?
Having said that… I really enjoyed Louis’ response to the week 6 reading. The educational possibilities of hypertext are endlessly exciting, yet we have barely scratched the surface in uncovering and harnessing the power of the technology. I love the concept of the Titanic-esque classroom, IMAX theatres in schools and technology that allows for more experiential learning. The whole thing reminds me of The Magic Schoolbus, an educational TV show we watched in primary school that also had a game we got to play on floppy disk in the computer labs. What made the program so effective and addictive was the sense of competition and reward it presented, and the narrative continuation that allowed you to start at one point and make your way through to an end point, with effective stimulation throughout the process.
I agree with Apple that its quite bizarre to think that humans prefer an open-ended and ongoing conversation as opposed to closure. I can’t imagine enjoying a book that never ends, in the same way that most people would be turned off by a War and Peace-esque 600+ pager. Yet this is what hypertext provides us with, a mimicry of conversation and ongoing internal thoughts. Where is the limit? How many things can we focus on at once before we well and truly explode?
Gihan writes succinctly about the dangers of writing with a specific audience in mind, a task which is at times inevitable. I think it is important to think about why you are writing something, is it to gratify yourself or to be gratified by others? I have a diary that I jot down random thoughts and things that happen to me each day, but the thought of anybody reading this freaks me out more than anything. And yet everything else I write, I write with the notion of being gratified by a potential audience afterwards.
When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. . . .
The human mind does not work in that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
It makes so much sense that this way of thinking is what launched Hypertext in the first place. We do not think in straight lines, but in mind maps spreading like spiderwebs. Scrolling through pieces of information, we come across one that links to something else or reminds us of a past experience, and we either choose to follow down that path or we choose to keep scrolling. Choosing whether to click on the link that a page presents us with, or to persevere with the original page.
We make this decision constantly, so quickly that sometimes we aren’t even aware of it. And yet, when you stop to think about it, often the link from one topic to another is so unclear it seems invisible.
Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a friend when I realised that even though I still was listening to what they were telling me, I was also thinking about the way the sunlight had streamed through the trees in beams of light when I visited Hanging Rock two weeks ago. At first, I had no idea why I had started thinking about this memory, and I also wasn’t fully aware that I was even really thinking about it, until I realised that I wasn’t 100% listening to what my friend was telling me.
There was something about something he had said to me, that had brought me back to that moment. The link was so unclear that I was barely aware that I had even selected it, let alone known that it was there.
This week’s symposium left me fondly recalling the hundreds of hours I have spent of my life reading and re-reading the Harry Potter novels. I’ll resist the urge to make some cliched jokes or references to the magical world and cut to the chase – like the many aspects of this universe that I and my fellow Potter lovers accepted in blind faith and without question (there are some great ones here, but what I really want to know is wouldn’t Hermione get sick of Ron after about 5 minutes??), I realised that the whole idea of a “restricted section” in the library is actually a little bizarre in itself.
At Hogwarts, the idea that some magic is too powerful and dark that it would be dangerous for a young and inexperienced wizard to discover it makes enough sense. But is there an equivalent in the muggle-world?
Are there really schools that exist that ban sections of their library from young and inexperienced students, deeming that they are not mature or experienced enough to learn about certain things that exist within the world yet? I can imagine this happening in other countries, or in past dystopian or dictator-led societies that aimed to restrict freedom of thought.
This obviously leads to questions of censorship, the idea that how long we have been alive dictates whether we are legally allowed to read/see/hear certain pieces of media, or other pieces of information or media that the powers that be have decided are better off unseen.
One aspect of this that particularly frustrates me is the censorship of female bodies. Instagram accounts are constantly being reported and deleted for posting images that artistically express the human form, yet violate the platform’s bizarre nudity regulations.
One example that really gets me clenching my fists was when artist Petra Collins posted this image to Instagram:
The image got so many complaints that the social media platform not only took it down, they deleted Collin’s entire account. Something tells me that if it wasn’t for the presence of pubic hair in the shot, nobody would have had any problem with a picture of a young woman in a bikini.
On the other hand, if we search the hashtag #pubes, 24,173 images come up – and about 97% of those are dudes. Why are we supposed to be disgusted and protected from perfectly normal part of the human body on one sex, and turn a blind eye to it on the other?
I never realised the extent to which the media that we have free access to is censored or frowned upon in a society that is in other ways so forward thinking and open minded.
I dream of a world where we all have access to the Restricted Section, and those in control let us make our own minds up with what we choose to expose ourselves to.
Could have gone a lot harder on that feminist rant. #freethenipple
Okay members of the networked media world, what is happening to me? Slowly but surely, over the course of roughly 18 months, I’ve become one of those “media people”. The half-hearted battle I played out before signing over my soul to a full blown Instagram addiction was the first sign. Soon after, The Vine and PedestrianTV became interchanging homepages. The intoxicating world of Tumblr re-entered my life alongside the greasy hair and caffeine-fuelled all-nighters that I believed my 16 year old self had left behind for good. I got a kick out of a Twitter bio that referenced Helen Garner and described myself as a “Youth Worker & Journalism Student”, and tweeted about my love for mangosteens and dim sum and an addiction to fruit ninja and online shopping in the menswear section.
Blogging, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter etc. etc.
But tonight reached new heights when I found myself browsing other student’s blogs, following a link to a short time-lapse video of Melbourne, feeling inspired and subsequently perusing the Canon website for DSLR cameras and finally, receiving an email from the lovely Canon people confirming my purchase of a 700D EOS DSLR camera.
Feeling quite a few hundred dollars lighter, I’m in shock at the speediness of my decision making. I’ve never been super into photography or movie making, but the constant exposure to stunning examples of each, (combined with my recent education in the myriad possibilities of Adobe Premiere), lit a very keen urge to start creating my own.
This is the short film, (found on Bonnie’s blog:
This is another video that circled around facebook by a young Melbourne-based photographer that I admire shot in Thailand:
Thailand Travels from Nic OJAE on Vimeo.
You can check out some of his other stuff here.
In light of this week’s Symposium, I figured it made sense to reflect on my own experience of school. While I have little experience of being placed in a class inappropriate to the individual’s level, I do have an experience of a school that came close to 100% fitting my needs and one that did quite the opposite.
I started high school at an all girls school with 250-300 students in each year level, where I was desperately bored, under stimulated and ultimately unhappy for four years. I doubt a single teacher I had over those four years would be able to recognise me now, I passed under the radar so thoroughly. I remember sitting in my Year 10 Parent-Teacher-Student Interviews and being told by two separate teachers that I was not at a high enough level for either VCE Specialist Maths or VCE English Literature, much to the disbelief of my father sitting beside me.
A few weeks later, Year 10 ended and the next year I started Year 11 at a different school. My new school was about half the size, co-ed, with a strong focus on the performing arts and located in the heart of St Kilda (as opposed to private school privilege hotspot Kew, where my old school was located). Within a few weeks, my Maths and English teachers had each asked me why I wasn’t enrolled in the two subjects I had been denied at my old school.
While I know that many people would absolutely thrive within the conditions and opportunities we were presented with at such a large school with the amazing facilities we had access to as with my first school, and I also want to acknowledge how privileged I am to have been able to attend the schools I did, I felt entirely stifled and disillusioned by the learning environment presented to me. I can recognise now that for me to thrive, I need teachers and mentors who take the time to learn my name, who take the time to believe in my ability and to demand me to be better when it is due.
At the heart of all of this, I believe strongly in teaching with an individualised approach, treating each student as a person and assessing their particular needs, rather than looking at the wider cohort. As Adrian said, schools that are currently approaching education in this way are often seen as radical, and yet I can’t express how necessary and beneficial this approach is, for students, for parents, and for schools.
The other thing that Bolter’s piece made me think about, was my experience of travelling alone in Europe last year. After my phone was stolen in Rome, I arrived at my Paris apartment the next day with no ability to contact home, some passable French and ten days to spend walking the streets alone. My French speaking skills limited my possibilities to express myself orally, and with no one to share the experience with in English, I made best friends with my diary and the ten novels I devoured throughout my time there.
After ten days soaking in the beauty of cobblestone streets, pain au chocolat for petit dejeuner, afternoons spent in the library section of the wonderful Centre Pompidou and whole days spent in city gardens hidden in courtyards around Le Marais, designed to capture the sunlight and minimise the noise from the street, with Tim Winton, Ian McEwan, Helen Garner and my moleskin notebook for company, I felt like I was bathing in literary prose.
But as the days wore on, something strange began to happen. My constant exposure to literature and habit of writing down every last detail that happened each day was changing the way I was experiencing the world around me. Instead of noticing things happening around me arbitrarily, everything became inspiration. Everything.
The way the garbage man threw away his cigarette butt was suddenly loaded with poetic grace, as was the homeless man leering at me from across the street. A blue towel hanging of a balcony above me became bird like, a trapped animal desperate to float away into the dusk. Lying in a garden, I was moved to tears by the young boys kicking a soccer ball in the dust and the heat, and as the perfect blue sky was split in half by a ghost white aeroplane passing directly over me, as if trying to remind me in my loneliness that home was always just a plane ride away.
Not only was I constantly moved and inspired by the events around me, I was no longer experiencing them through a method of notice-react-move on, but instead as I saw each unfold around me, I experienced it in the prose that I imagined I would write about it in later.
I even thought of myself in the third person, as if I had stepped outside to see and feel myself for the first time in my life. I became ‘she’, or ‘the blonde girl’ in my own mind, and each line of prose came to me as if pre-written.
I understand how Bolter speaks of the writer’s inability to separate himself from his craft or his machine, and the exhaustion of such a difficulty. However, this bizarre and constant sensation brought about a level of surreal fulfilment to my experience that I might have previously thought impossible.
Bolter’s connection between writing and technology struck me after just watching an interview on The 7.30 Report with astronaut Chris Hadfield. Chris Hadfield is the guy that went into space and made this amazing video of himself playing the guitar and singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in zero gravity (among doing a whole lot of other cool sciencey astronaut for the world too).
In the interview, he made a really interesting point about science and the arts, when asked if the beauty and wonder of the universe could ever really be described by science, by poetry or simply through faith. Sidestepping that potential landmine, he instead commented on the response the world had to his video. Science and technology can only go so far, but when it comes to connecting and uniting the world you have to have the arts, be it music or poetry or writing, to get anyone to really pay attention on a deeper level. As fascinating as space exploration may be on a scientific level, it took the artistic expression of the song to really connect people to the experience in an emotional and meaningful way.
Science and the arts are inextricably linked in this way, and the dichotomy is such that as advancements are made in one element, it drags its opposing element forward with it. Writing is technology, as well as it is the antithesis of technology, and yet one cannot exist without the other.
Apparently procrastination is a very effective tool that allows you to do high quality work in the smallest amount of time possible. As much as I use this for comfort when its 11.30 the night before an assignment is due and I’m just making a start on my third episode of Orange is the New Black for the evening, I think it’s probably a much deadlier safety net than most of us realise.
By using it to validate my laziness, I’m never giving myself a chance to not be lazy. The language around it – “I can’t start an assignment until I have the pressure of it being due the next day…” “I do my best work the night before…” etc – is so engrained within my approach that when I sit down to try and make headway on a task a few weeks out, my subconscious is excusing my Brown Cardigan browsing before I’ve even opened my laptop. The fact that I’m trying to get on top of things early seems to equate to deserving a break and a Kit-Kat before I’ve even started.
So now here I am, the night before class with Elliott and the gang, trying to find the creative juices needed to squeeze out four blog posts that don’t run along the lines of “I found blah’s reading interesting because he made a point about blah which is very relevant to blah”, and have me falling asleep before I can even click Publish.
Nothing has made me more acutely aware of my perfectionism like starting a blog. I started a WordPress account earlier this year that consists of about eight posts. Roughly half of these posts finish with something like “I’m making a promise to my blogging community (of 7 people) to continue to post at least once a week, no excuses”, with each of these posts written weeks or months a part.
Writing is what I love to do, and more importantly, what I would one day love to be paid to do, and yet I spend the majority of my time on the internet playing Tetris or googling how to make gluten-free vegan sugar-free caramel brownies (which I never have the ingredients for!) and as far away from WordPress.com as possible. I am so scared of publishing anything even slightly subpar that I very rarely publish anything at all. By the time I finally get myself sitting down to write, I’ve backspaced and re-written my opening sentence 17 times and it’s definitely time to find out what’s been happening at the Litchfield Correctional Facility.
I’m sick of pretending to be a writer who doesn’t write, I’m sick of doubting each word as I type it, sick of drowning in cliched metaphors, of moving between the extremes of ‘boring’ and ‘try hard’ as I constantly question each sentence.
The annoying thing is, is that I can’t even say that I’m just going to do it anyway. Clearly trying to pre-trick myself into it by holding myself accountable to the blogosphere has not worked so well in the past. I’ll probably jinx myself by proclaiming on here that I’ll be updating MediaFactory five times a day and then give up forever.
So what I’m going to do instead, is just try to challenge my language. Stop validating my behaviour as a “classic perfectionist trait”, or that I was a born procrastinator. And just be, someone who wants to write.
“I’m just like this cloud puppy, ready to bound into life head first.” – Not Louisa Keck
In class this week Elliot has asked us to stalk other class members and give feedback on their blogging habits.
I’m having a look at the work of:
Nicola
Rachel
& Marcus
I love Nicola’s minimalist layout, her upbeat and conversational tone and her knack for selecting hilarious GIFs. She writes notes on readings like she’s addressing the writer directly, emphasising with Ted Nelson and his desperate hopes for humanity and html. I also enjoyed her post Cabin Fever which left me drooling for a winter escape more than ever. I like the way she incorporates parts of her life outside of the course to give the reader an insight into who she is. I wonder if there would be anyway she could relate posts like this back to Network Media in some way? It would be really interesting to see how she uses her day to day experiences to give her deeper understanding into the course, or even just back to the world of media in general. I would love to read more about how her study relates to the rest of her world.
I like the way Rachel links all the readings to her own opinions, expressing her love for the linear and expressing her expectations for free speech within a liberal democracy. I also liked her inclusion of a Vale Robin Williams post, but I wonder if she could centre the image just to fit with the aesthetic of the blog? I also love her byline ‘Blogging the reel world’, and assume this is a link to her love of cinema. It would be really great to see this incorporated more into her writing, perhaps she could reference her posts back to particular films that they remind her of? Just a thought. I really like Rachel’s writing style and think she covers the scope of the course so far really well.
I really love how Marcus has included a very personal introduction on his homepage, covering his life so far including a childhood spent in the Philippines and the struggles of having to move to Australia mid-adolescence. I found it a little difficult to navigate to his posts, and wonder if he could create a link to a page containing each of his posts. His writing style is quite conversational, including funny images like the classic El Del Paso ‘Por que no las dos’ jpeg. I also like how honest he is about what he gets from each reading, and by talking about how he doesn’t understand certain bits he is actually able to create quite interesting and informative posts.
The symposium reminded me of two cringey Internet moments.
The first, which I shared with most people I’m sure was the disaster of Kony 2012. I remember psyching myself to even buy a supporter pack (luckily never went through with that one), preparing to ‘cover the night’ and even going so far as to post a Facebook status showing my support (a big deal for me as someone who rarely gives much of my personal opinion on a platform like Facebook, preferring to go nuts with Twitter and WordPress, getting away with anything due to relatively low follower counts).
I was totally devastated when the guy who started the whole Kony thing, the one with the cute blonde kid called Jeffrey or something who was in that arty video they put together, was found naked and urinating in the street a few days later. Alongside the poor guy’s dignity, the entire movement came crashing down around him and exposed as a scam. Instead of becoming the leader of a world movement, he was somebody to be seriously ridiculed, as the majority of the population tried to come to terms with the fact that they had just been scammed, hardcore.
The whole thing reminded me of another occasion of ‘Can we really trust the Internet?’, that played out earlier this year. Among my family (and yes, I write about my family waaay too much), Christopher Pyne is probably not the first person we’d be inviting to our next dinner party.
Without going too far into it, I’m sure you can understand my glee and disbelief back in May when every Twitter or Facebook newsfeed I could lay eyes on was practically screaming out the fact that Christoper Pyne had just called Bill Shorten a c*** within parliament. After checking TheVine.com.au for back up, I rushed home from uni or work or whatever to tell Pyne’s number one anti-supporter, my mother, all about what I’d just read.
She was as gleeful as they come with the news, but after that evening’s 7.30 Report and the following morning’s Age refraining from mentioning the debacle at all, she began questioning me about my sources.
‘The internet’s just faster than TV,’ was the rather pathetic response I grunted back at her comments about the lack of coverage on the 7.30 Report (admitting mistakes to my mother is very far from one of my favourite activities). Somehow, this turned into something of a mini-argument, with my mother arguing for the sake of traditional, reliable media and myself stepping into the ring to defend the manifold benefits of the internet’s instant access.
By the time The Age rolled around with nothing to say on the topic, I had rechecked the Internet and sure enough, the C word had not been chucked around in parliament. Instead, Pyne had reportedly called Shorten a “grub” (what is up with that??), and the footage/sound recording had been altered to make one four letter word sound a lot more like another four lettered word. This had been posted on the Internet and then shared around like wildfire, scamming all of us Internet disciples through even our most trusted blogs. (Am I allowed to suggest that the rapidity with which such a story was shared around might be able to shed light on a nation’s growing mutual opinion of a certain Education Minister?)
Moral of the story: Don’t believe everything you see (on the internet). And stop using Wikipedia to back you up in debates!!