Week 1, Wednesday Readings

These should be completed by next Monday.  These are listed in order of importance and I would encourage you to think about the significance of the date of publication attached to each piece as it will inform your understanding of the text.

1. Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945. The Atlantic. Web. 19 July 2013.

2. Extracts from: Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. (low rez PDF)

3. Extract from: Bolter, Jay DavidWriting Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. Print. (low rez PDF)

4. 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. (PDF)

Mixed Media Creative Critical Essay

Value: (40%)

Due: Friday, 19th February at 5pm

This task can be completed in pairs or individually. If a complete draft of the writing (minimum 1200 words) is submitted to your teacher by Monday, 9th February you will receive a bonus 5 marks. Work that is done in pairs is expected to be more sophisticated (writing, ideas, use of media, references) than work that is done individually.

Submission

Email the URL of your essay with a screen capture of all pages included in a .pdf attachment by 5pm on the due date.

TOPIC PROBLEM

Network literacy is not merely knowing about this, it is doing it. It is in this doing that we can understand that literacy is an applied knowing, or if you prefer a knowing through doing.… It is being comfortable with change and flow as the day to day conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, and recognising that all of this may change, and appear differently in six months. What underlies such change, however, are the principles of distributed content production and sharing, folksonomies, trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build with these varieties of content and knowledge….. Network literacy means recognising that there are no longer canonical sources and having the skills to find what it is you think you want, of being able to judge it, and then of being able to incorporate this, in turn, into your knowledge flows. Finally, networked literacies are marked by your participation as a peer in these flows and networks — you contribute to them and in turn can share what others provide.

Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30.

Your task is to compose and pursue a research question that will enhance your understanding of a topic area that is of key interest to you and will have direct relevance to your future career.  This should be explored in the context of Networked Media and must include a variety of different media.  The essay can exist across multiple webpages.

Take any of the ideas/concepts/arguments in the above quote to investigate and think about the possible implications of this for you as a future professional media maker. For example, what might you need to know about? How might this affect how you make media? Consume it? How it get used? Distributed? Could the media in itself (what sort of thing we currently mean when we say ‘media’) change? In other words take something from this to think about what it might mean for you as someone who will influence our future media.

DESCRIPTION

This essay is to be published as a page or pages on your blog or as a standalone web page/s published via themediastudents.net website.

It is to include:

  • text
  • image (photos or drawings)
  • video and/or audio

The essay is to be around 1,500 words in length. It does not have to conform to traditional academic requirements and so can be

  • personal
  • use “I”
  • finish with questions rather than answers
  • be exploratory in its thinking and argument/s

However, it is still an essay which means the work must:

  • make an argument
  • explore or think about an idea or ideas
  • use evidence
  • appropriately cite that evidence

An essay is not an opinion piece, it is informed by research and thinking. This makes an essay critical, which doesn’t mean it criticises something negatively but that it interrogates ideas and assumptions to see what they are, what they are made of, and where they might take you. An essay is then a place in which you think through something, rather than reporting on what you already know or understand. This task is inviting you to treat your writing and making as more like a laboratory, where you state something, then think about what it means, its consequences or implications. In other words follow the idea where it leads you.

The essay can consist of more than a single page. The image/s and video/s and/or audio that you use are expected to contribute to the ideas being explored. They might reflect an idea, reinforce or endorse it, or provide a prompt or point of departure for your own thinking.

Summer Schedule

You can find the schedule for what you need to do this semester right here.

For the more studious amongst you, you can go through all of the readings early but given how compressed the course is already I wouldn’t recommend it.

Welcome to 2015 Summer Semester

We’re ready to kick off Summer semester for 2015 and I’m sure it’s going to be a good one.

First things first – your blog should be ready to go at the URL media factory.org.au/firstname-lastname.  You should have received instructions from media factory via your student email account on how to get that up and running.  If you haven’t received the email, please check your spam filters and trash folders.

On Wednesday we’ll be moving into territory concerning your rights and obligations online.  To do so, you’ll need to review the readings, especially those concerning copyright, so please have a look at those listed here:

  1. Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30. (pdf)
  2. Miles, Adrian. “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” Australian Screen Ed 41 (2006): 66–9. Print. (pdf)
  3. Copyright video set:

What is Creative Commons?

Blogs and Australian Law

Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons

Creative Commons Australia

Why Creative Commons happened

Australian Copyright Council

Lastly, there is an optional reading if you have time, otherwise just make sure you read it before next week:

  1. “Chris Argyris: Theories of Action, Double-Loop Learning and Organizational Learning.” http://infed.org/mobi/chris-argyris-theories-of-action-double-loop-learning-and-organizational-learning/. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 July 2013. (pdf)

Reading 11

Another change of tack, partly looking back intensively where we have been but also looking forward to the sorts of methods, questions, and problems that the way we have tried to approach networks, media, practice, and theory, lead toward.

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. The MIT Press, 2006. Print. (Extract from Introduction, PDF)

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.; London: The MIT Press, 2008. Print. (Extract from the Introduction, PDF)

Symposium Week 10

Barabási:

Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature’s unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favour of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organisation and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterising a system’s behaviour. They are the patent signatures of self-organisation in complex systems.

This unique and deep meaning of power laws perhaps explains our excitement when we first spotted them on the Web. It wasn’t only that they were unprecedented and unexpected in the context of networks. It was that they lifted complex networks out of the jungle of randomness where Erdős and Rényi had placed them forty years earlier and dropped them in the colorful and conceptually rich arena of self-organization. (p77)

The power law distribution thus forces us to abandon the idea of a scale, or a characteristic node. In a continuous hierarchy there is no single node which we could pic out and claim to be characteristic of all the nodes. There is no intrinsic scale in these networks. (p.70.)

Power laws rarely emerge in systems complete dominated by a roll of the dice. Physicists have learned that most often they signal a transition from disorder to order.

Anderson:

People get Vann-Adib’s question wrong because the answer is counterintuitive in two ways. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We’re stuck in a hit-driven mindset – we think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adib, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the “misses” usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a market response to inefficient distribution.

For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a market response to inefficient distribution. [Scarcity versus abundance.]

We are stuck in a hit driven mindset – we thnk that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production.

The three rules:

  1. make everything available
  2. cut the price in half, now lower it
  3. help me find it

Reading 10

The big Lev Manovich: Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form”. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Vesna, Victoria, ed. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. 39-60. (pdf)

and

Seaman, Bill. “Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics”. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Vesna, Victoria, ed. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. 121-140. (PDF)

What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like? — The Message — Medium

This is a site that has just garnered a lot of attention. It is presenting itself as an alternative to FaceBook and Twitter (app.net is also promoting itself as a Twitter alternative). The main difference is the desire to not sell you stuff, or sell your social profile to others. What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like? — The Message — Medium.

However, this post, on Ello, points out some of the problems with these claims.