Mob Mentality

Nathan

Watts outlined a notion that by knowing about networks, systems and basic organizing principles of we can predict the behaviour of individuals within that system without knowing specifics about the individuals. He summarizes these complex systems interactions: “Fortunately, as capricious, confusing, and unpredictable as individual humans typically are, when many of them get together, it is sometimes the case that we can understand the basic organizing principles while ignoring many of the complicated details. This is the flip side of complex systems. While knowing the rules that govern the behavior of individuals does not necessaril help us to predict the behavior of the mob, we may be able to predict the very same mob behavior without knowing very much about the unique personalities and characteristics of the individuals that make it up”.

 Essendon

This essentially means that individuals within complex systems become uniform. They act according to a mob mentality rather than their own personalities. If by only knowing a few choice facts about a person, and placing them in the midst of a crowd, we can predict the behavior of the mob and that individual.

Sports’ crowds are the example that spring to mind. By only knowing which team a spectator supports, and ignoring almost all other personal details about them, you can predict how they and the mob will react. We can predict when they will cheer, boo, yell, complain. We can track their emotions because we know which team they play for. Given understanding of the context of the system, say the AFL Grand Final, we could also predict behaviors more precisely: what they will do after of before the game, what they will be talking about during halftime, if they are having a few extra drink.

Does this concept of complex systems abolish individuality? Are we not really the special little flower we were told we were when placed in a crowd of 100,000 other flowers?

My First Hypertext

Nathan

Today hypertext media seems ubiquitous. I’m surrounded my interactive screens all vying to win my incredibly short attention span. However when I try to imagine a hypertext culture without an electronic medium, I struggle. So then I try and remember if I had any kind of hypertextual print when I was a kid, before I became submerged in my screens.

The first thing I settled on was Goosebumps. Now if you were like me and abused your primary school library, not for textbooks or non-fiction research, but rather for the Where’s Wally and the odd HP read when you could get your hands on one – you will definitely remember Goosebumps. They were an awesome series of short, easy to read horror stories and the ones that i read the most were the ‘Chose Your Own Story’ editions. These had an obscene amount of endings an plot twists, and the reader got to decide all of them. Once you finished a chapter you were presented with a series of scenarios; a) Go up the stair of the haunted house b) Check the back yard for your friend c) go back to your car, etc. These wouldn’t just affect the ending but the whole story, the characters you encountered, how your character developed. This was the first time I can remember a book not being restricted by sequence; in one book you would jump back and forwards in pages and the end could be in the middle of the book.

These editions of Goosebumps could be considered hypertextual in the way they are non-sequential. They branch off and allow choices to the reader.

I’ll end on a fun Goosebumps fact: Stine deliberately omitted any kind of drugs, depravity and violence in his books. There are also never any deaths in the stories.

goosebumps__140226182419

HTML Woes

Nathan

Reading Amy’s last minute post on the HTML code exam gave me some hope. I sympathize. You’re not alone, and although I wasn’t as code-savvy a year 7 as you, I too didn’t feel worried about this exam.

The inner workings of computer systems have always been a mystery to me and i assumed that they would remain just that. Trying to picture how I could make things appear on a screen by telling a machine what to do and even imagining how those machines worked in the first place made my head hurt. But if I ignore my overwhelming technological ineptitude and just focus on the code (forgetting about those super complex machines that read the code) it doesn’t seem too scary.

Looking back now I feel a small glow of pride knowing that I wrote a website, albeit a very basic and raw one. If I could remember what it felt like the first time I read a book it would probably have feel like this.

Project Xanadu

Nathan

The Internet has come a long way since the dial up days of AOL. Wifi and 3G are commonplace now and hardlines are used now only for a greater bandwidth. We can now download an upload almost anywhere in the world from our pockets.

This is the result of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and although now the notion of this kind of interconnectivity is commonplace, 30 years ago it seemed a space-age prospect. When Ted Nelson was sharing his thoughts on hypertext culture and ‘Project Xanadu’ (essentially a prototype Internet), he was also confessing his skepticism that humanity would even survive to see his predictions realized.

Hypertext is “non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen” (Nelson). Nelson highlighted this mode of information sharing as the way of the future. He outlined a world in which offices, businesses, and even homes may be paper-less, instead they would be filled with compters.

Nelson praised computers as instruments to simplify human life (simplification was something that he pushed in many different cases pertaining to computers) and the way to do this was to connect them, making information transfer almost seamless. This vision was realised, in a way, through the Internet.

References: Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report On, and Of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print.

Xanadu

Symposium #4 Notes

Nathan

How can you judge the validity of things on the Internet?

There are particular conventions and methods to determine validity; news websites in particular have this. They have a look and feel about them that makes them all similar and gives them almost a ‘stamp of approval’

  • Be wary. ‘The Onion’ looks and feels like a real news site but is a parody site.
  • The number of people saying something (in particular news) the higher the chance its is going to be true.
  • E.g. Robin Williams’ death: when I first heard I immediately turn to twitter to check the validity of the statement. When almost everyone is tweeting about it and linking various articles from various news sources, seems legit

Sometimes it’s very difficult to determine if someone/thing is legitimate online.

If you don’t know the topic area of a blog you are reading about, you need to research the area to prove the veracity of the blogger.

Wikipedia is often branded ad unreliable as it can be altered. However often times it is more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

 

What are the limitations of network literacy? How does it differ to print literacy?:

  • What limitations do both literacies share?
  • What strengths help compensate for each other?
  • Can they work together?
  • Are they destined to be rivals?

Economic model that under rides it.

Things like print & network literacy did not exist before we inhabited them; they only exist because we decide to use them.

There are a multitude of literacies that we have – How to read a person’s face, voice, gestures, body language, how to read a street signs, how to tell when it’s safe to cross a street. These are all literacies we have.

Third party services in network literate space disempower us.

  • We do not know the binary code to change the colour of our desktop background; a programmer has written a long and complicated code that allows us to easily change it. In this sense we are network illiterate.

However in print we understand thoroughly the intricacies of the medium.

  • If we so chose, we could write a book, collect the pages, print them, bind them, etc.

The Web Is Not The Net

Nathan

Vsauce is one of the most interesting YouTube channels out there. In this episode Michael talks about the birth of the Internet and how it differs from the World Wide Web. He then goes deeper into talking about how we use the internet, what its capable of and the social ramifications of a digital landscape as vast and accessible as the Web…or the Internet? Or both?

The Web Is Not The Net

Everything Bad Is Good For You

Nathan

Steven Johnson is an American popular science author and media theorist. In his book “Everything Bad Is Good For You” (2005), he presents an interesting argument defending modern pop culture, in particular: video games and television.

He argues that, although sometimes violent and sexual, video games stimulate reward centers of the brain and invite exploration and problem solving. Television is a “brilliant medium”, as it exposes how adept a person is in understanding narratives and interpersonal connections (and their AQ: Autism Quotient – higher emotional intelligence=lower AQ). Even reality television shows have merits in the way they display the complexity of social networking in human relations.

Johnson imagines a world where digital media came first and books were invented afterwards. Kids are now starting to read these new ‘books’, and that teachers and parents are worried:

“But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion –– you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”

Perhaps screen addiction is not as toxic as some would have you believe… Food for thought.