Un-symposium Notes

  • Getting other people to contribute to your corporation eg. apps. in order to create more revenue
  • Open, universal and hopefully free- the web
  • Doesn’t seem like a cause that would benefit from being monetized
  • Free exchange of knowledge- anything that gets in the way
  • Patent trolls
  • Internet has a strong hippie background/ culture
  • Grateful Dead- rock band that allowed fans to record concerts and bootleg it, they had no concern with copyright etc.
  • Gift economy- freely donate stuff with no assumption of getting something in return
  • Every single protocol established on the web is owned by nobody
  • Protocols are public
  • Manners are a social protocol- no one owns them
  • Protocols are not private or ownable in the sense of property
  • Wikipedia- example of gift economy, entries done for free
  • Amazing resources that people can act for free
  • Building services that let people do these things rather than just producing the content
  • Freely donate information to Facebook- Facebook make billions and we don’t get a cent
  • Internet- distributed network
  • Unique network
  • If protocol was centralized and hierarchic it would fail
  • Everything is flat, equally far apart
  • I can send an email straight to David Bordwell, don’t have to go through his agent etc
  • Internet came out of academia
  • Facebook- harvest everything they know about you and sell it to advertising
  • RFC- request for comments
  • Anybody can respond and comment on an RFC
  • We want a new protocol that would….. this is how it should be implemented…. this is why
  • Radically different model to everything else
  • Overlap between old forms and more recent ones
  • Participatory culture- flourished through social media, real practices
  • Collaborative practices
  • Re-shaping of old forms in new contexts- this is a continual process
  • Physical books still exist even though there are E-Books everywhere, cross over, the co-exist
  • Restructuring old forms rather than replacing them
  • Internalize sense that someone could be watching you, monitoring your own behavior eg. commenting on Facebook

Court Report

A Ferntree Gully labourer found employment at a winery after being charged with drink driving twice in the past ten years. Lyndon Burgess was granted his license without restrictions yesterday at the Ringwood Magistrate’s Court, after having an interlock system in his car for six months. Mr Burgess said his drinking habits had improved and he was now only drinking once a week. “I was drinking four to five times a week, but I feel much better in the mornings now,” he said. When asked if he would be tempted to drink on the job, he said he “hated the stuff”. The Magistrate said he was the “perfect employee” for a winery. In another drink driving case heard on the same day, a 25-year-old Colston man was given a 6-month interlock period after driving with over 20 standard drinks in his system. Mr Mason’s license was disqualified for two years and since he has undergone counselling sessions with his GP. Mr Mason said he was now down to drinking 1-2 drinks a week. The Magistrate said in an interview with the police on the 11th of September, Mr Mason said he was still drinking 2 stubbies every night. Mr Mason said he was “taking slow steps” and had in reality had five beers last week. Mr Mason waited until two years after the application date to apply for his license because he had and intensive correction order and $2,500 to pay. Mr Mason said he bought himself a personal breathalyser and knew that if “you drink and drive, you’re a bloody idiot.” “It is time for me to grow up, I have seen too many friends die from alcohol abuse,” he said. “I watched a video about drink driving where a man went through an intersection and killed a child, that could have been me.” Mr Mason was ordered to have an interlock system installed into his car for a period of six months.

Actor-Network Theory

To remain at this very intuitive level, ANT is a simple material resistance
argument. Strenght does not come from concentration, purity and unity, but
from dissemination, heterogeneity and the careful plaiting of weak ties.

The reading for this week on actor-network theory was extremely complex and confusing I found, but then again I find that with a lot of the readings.
So to help me out, I found this:



It is a video on actor-network theory in plain english!
Enjoy, it helped me a lot!

Basically I took away that it is difficult to separate a material thing from a human technique/interaction with the "actor" or material thing

Week 10 Notes

  • Facebook photos compiled- All the faces of facebook
  • Coles/Myer card- can generate data
  • Shopping preferences, annual income
  • Hubble Telescope- visualization of galaxies, natural networks
  • How networks develop
  • Search engines- Yahoo to Google, what made Google so huge & connected
  • Preferential attachment- blogs you would prefer to link to eg. you like them, they are authoritative
  • Some things get more links than others, therefore we get hubs
  • Hubs- weak connections
  • Small world network- easy to get from one part of the network to another seemingly unrelated part
  • Can’t predefine network
  • Structure predefines content on TV
  • Kevin Bacon is a hub- The Oracle of Bacon
  • Walkman originally made to be listened to by 2 people, Sony changed it
  • SMS designed as business function
  • Writing has changed everything
  • Store info for later
  • 1st iPod cost 4 times the price of mp3 players now
  • “1000 songs in your pocket”
  • Apple is a media publishing company
  • Apple= world’s largest media company
  • Non-negotiables eg. rectangular film, rhyming
  • Social shaping of technology
  • Technological determinism
  • Technique is required when you have technology
  • Techniques are consequences/ responses to technology
  • Technology sometimes used in ways that are unprecedented
  • Technology does not mean computers
  • Archival system is technology?
  • Way you use it is a technique
  • Post-humanist…..