Networked Me

Rebecca thinks a lot more about Wesch’s comment that every time we tag a photo, and so on, “we are teaching the machine”. Absolutely. FaceBook is so valuable not because so many use it, but because it can farm what we do and use that data to make new knowledge for marketing, and sell that. So every like, dislike, ad we click, literally adds to the ‘intelligence’ of their systems and their financial value. It is our behaviour, accumulated and then ‘flipped’ into data, then knowledge, that FaceBook relies upon. The social front end is just a siphon for the other stuff, the same way a supermarket loyalty card is just a small price to pay to know exactly what products you buy, how often, when (and of course where you shop and where you live). We leave media trails today, FaceBook is a closed community to catch as many of your media trails as possible (video, places you visit, photos, likes, posts, friendships), and to make money from them. This is one consequence of what we call a ubiquitous network. The network, unlike a book, is always with you. Ready.

To Essay

Imogen wonders about all that she learnt in high school being wrong. Not all, but the essay is turned into a dead thing. The essay is a living thing. Hypertext is a living thing because it lets you write and read by following and making rivers (just read the Nelson again as an ideas stream trying to be literally realised on a book), one reason I did the work on teaching was to make this something present to everyone. Now I’m doing it with what we think writing is. Hypertext does the same with what we think narrative is. Denham joins the Graham reading on the essay with the role of the blog, which is one of the reasons Graham might speculate that the web could see a golden age of the essay (though now we have Medium where there is some very high quality essaying going on), in particular the importance of the essay as a form of thinking where you think out loud. This is a writing where you do the thinking in the writing, not somewhere else and then report on what you thunked. Daniel provides the crib reading notes of key takeaways. Which reminds me, the form of the subject, its shape and style, is essayist in the way that Graham describes in the reading. It is following some ideas, not necessarily defending positions, which is perhaps why it is difficult for students, used to being trained to defend positions and therefore told the positions that matter, to get a hold on. Ideas are always slippery, particularly if you bother to listen to them.

Torika picks up some points, that other forms of writing might matter too. Perhaps, but language is the stuff we have to think with, so the essay becomes the place where thinking can and does happen. So it matters simply for that. On other hand, while the ‘traditional’ essay might help develop organised thinking for me this is precisely the problem. Why is organised thinking important? This becomes a tautological argument because it turns out organised thinking is useful if you need to write organised essays. But if you think that connection, complexity and how thickly things join is important, which you really can’t ‘organise’ (which is one of the ways in which creativity and innovation happens – they’re its ingredients if you like) then being organised isn’t so useful anymore. This matters simply because high school and then university privileges this idea of being able to ‘order’ and so those who are very smart, but have highly cluttered minds, struggle. As Einstein said (a famously disorganised thinker) “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Twenty Years Ago

William, reasonably, wonders why the readings are ‘old’. Quick answers. They are not about the history of the internet, but hypertext. Because hypertext has (and still has) some of the smartest things to say and think about network structure. These ideas can help understand the entire web, right down to how to think about complex linked emergent structure in interactive video. The one thing hypertext is not great for in digital media is games, but we’re not looking at games (there’s a games degree for that). But read recent work on, say, online documentary, and apart from sounding like hypertext from 1990, it would be vastly improved by actually knowing about hypertext from 1990. So hypertext is a deep strucure, so learning about that helps us to understand everything else. He is also working on a hypertext, well done. Once upon a time we did a lot more hypertext, and used specific hypertext software because it is very very hard to get its importance without having to deal with it in the nitty gritty. Bit like trying to explain writing to someone who doesn’t have it. It would be very hard to just describe what it is, and its value, to someone who thought things were just fine as they were thank you.

The Essay

Really enjoyed Georgina’s post after reading the Graham article about the essay. Yes, the essay is a way to come up with answers, not writing the already known. As humanities students it is our lab, our experimental space, where we test and invent. We don’t do this somewhere else then report on it (which is what most of us have been taught an essay is) but the essay is actually where we do the thinking. This is one reason I like blogs. And posts like Georgina’s. Simply because it is thinking in the moment of the writing and discovering something. That should be the point of writing in a university in the humanities. Experiment and thinking in the language of our practice (writing). The essay is a technology, treat it as that and the question becomes what do you want to do with it.

Liveness


(image: On Classical Blog. The Guardian. March 3, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2009/mar/02/classical-music-great-orchestral-debate)

Today’s Age has a story about Barry Palmer (Hunters and Collectors guitarist, oh, that’s my middle age talking, isn’t it?) and a new app come service that lets you view live concert footage. The app and service is soundhalo. This is cool. However, the point? On TV and radio what carries the most value (in terms of audience interest and $) are events that are live, where the liveness matters. This excludes drama, game shows, and the like. It does include the new forms such as ‘reality’ game shows as they are designed and intended to be live. Sport is the biggest of them all (one billion Australian dollars to broadcast AFL), but music is the next biggest.

Sport matters because seeing it live is part of sport. You don’t want to watch it a day, a week, later. Not only because you will now the result but because sport’s pleasure is in its performing in the now. Um, that’d be the same for a concert, wouldn’t it? Rupert Murdoch understood this many many years ago when he paid a then unprecedented sum for the rights to the English Premier League (people thought he was mad), then stuck it all on SkyBSB. This is what made Sky viable. People will pay for live sport. And people will probably pay, or at least enjoy, seeing live music (can’t get to Glastonbury, then live is next best). So this app and service could be a winner simply because it can leverage what matters, which is the liveness.

For us, outside of the specifics of networked media, this is another nail in the coffin for heritage media. Not only does soundhalo offer an alternative revenue model for bands, but it reinforces the fact that the traditional power of TV was its control of time. If you wanted to watch your favourite show you had to be in front of a TV set at the time it was on. This meant they could charge lots of money for advertising since you had to be there to be part of it (in front of the TV). When was the last time you made sure you were at home, in front of the TV, to not miss something? That wasn’t a live event? I never do this for drama. Ever. The opposite of this was once normal. Just like we think those images of the family gathered around the radio to listen to something are, well, sepia quaint, this was my childhood, adolescence and early adult life for television. Not any more. If you can’t guarantee audience, you lose the basis of your revenue model (advertising). Things are changing, have to change, and will change. You will be at the vanguard of this.

When I Was a Media Student

People smoked in class.

In the first unlecture Adrian touched on the some of the changes in media since he was a student (in the pre-digital dark ages of the mid 1980s). One of the things mentioned was how the video camera was large, very expensive, and that the format was U-Matic (Betacam was broadcast quality, U-Matic was sort of next best). The edit suite needed two separate large video players, one as source the other as destination, and you had to load, fast forward, rewind, to the clips you wanted. Each tape held 30 minutes of video, so if you’d shot several takes you might have 4 or more tapes that would need constant loading, unloading, fast forwarding and so on. Since you edited from one tape to another and tape is linear, you nearly always did butt edits, as an insert edit meant putting video over the top of what was already there and so erasing whatever was ‘under’ it. This often meant re-editing everything from that point onwards, again, so you really only did it if it was so important that it just absolutely had to be done.

So things are, obviously, much smaller, and an order of magnitude faster and easier to do. However, the other thing is that because you dubbed from one tape to another, and it was analogue media, the edited copy would, by definition, not be as good as the original. In analogue media every copy introduces noise and so is less good than the original. Once you’d edited, then made a VHS quality from the original tape, the decline in quality was already noticeable if you looked hard enough. This meant the original tape was treated as something to be guarded, protected, and only used sparingly, as even watching it caused damage (which you would have to admit was taking things a bit far, you can watch a tape 100s of times before the video player heads – which are rapidly spinning metal drums – would wear out the tape) and you never paused it because the tape might have been stopped but the drums were still spinning madly!

So, first enormous now forgotten-take-for-granted of digital media. Infinite reproducibility with no loss of quality. You can copy a video file 1, 10, 100, 1,000,000 million times, and it is the same. Always. This means there is no essential quality or attribute given to the ‘original’ in digital media, since each version, being identical, is the same. (This second point is seriously radical if you think – speculate – about it, we have a culture that privileges the first as what matters, first place, first at something, first in line, first in the class, first film that did x, and in media this continued so the original copy mattered because it was the master that had to be preserved so future copies could be made. There is no longer any privilege, in the artefact – the object – in being ‘first’, does that mean the idea of first as best or better will slowly erode, or change?)

To see the difference, the YouTube clip above illustrates just how much quality is lost each time a VHS video tape is copied.