Abby wonders about intention and meaning and the whole mess. She has a good question:

I walked away from this ‘unlecture’ thinking ‘well if you can guarantee intent, and authorship is such a flimsy notion, then why do we create?

In my own case the answer is because making in itself is pleasurable (we make music without audiences, dance without audiences, so creating often happens without the intention of an audience – all I mean is that creating is pleasurable. The next answer would be that I have things I want to say and share. I have to keep making and sharing precisely because their specific meaning never arrives. The things I make never quite say them right, and people don’t quite understand them as I thought they might, either. So we do it again.

Patrick has a long, good post on the 80/20 rule, networks and structure. Good read if you want to think about how it relates to networks. Shannen is living proof of the small world that Watts and Barabási discuss, while Kate engages with the long tail and its relation to economics. Holly applies all this to the recent election battle over Indi (Obama also cracked this with his first campaign, which everyone has been trying to imitate ever since), which is very much long tail and relied heavily on social media resources. Lina highlights a very important passage about how linking is not random, In the very simple example from the unsymposium even in writing an academic essay in hypertext linking is not random as a result is both a power law distribution, and a meaningful structure. Lina also has a good introduction to power laws, using bell curves to help think about their difference. Brittany discusses the ‘rich get richer’ reading which is about preferential linking and also the advantages that first movers gain.

Rebecca has unsymposium dump of notes. They won’t make sense if you weren’t there. James comments on ‘what rhymes with shop’. The point of the example was not to show that authors can’t trick, but that we all think reason is sovereign, comes first, because we think we are in charge and at the end of the day this is much the same as thinking our minds are what is in charge and we’re in charge of our minds. The ‘trick’ is to show that rhyme tricks reason in very simple ways, that reason and logic is very easily conned, seduced, lulled, and so on. Cognitive science knows this, brain biologists and chemists know this, lots of contemporary critical theorists know this. In the same way that every semester attendance declines by approximately 50% when the weather changes. In semester one it is after the first real cold snap. In semester two the first warm one. We all think we’re in charge of our minds and decisions, but this is nature and biology. In winter it is hibernation mode. In spring it is sex, once that sun kicks in your body is all hormones and the last thing nature intended a young body to do in spring is sit still in a windowless room and listen to people talk for 50 minutes. This drop in attendance happens even semester, every year, and always coincides with the change in the weather. It is a conceit to think that 50% of you all ‘decide’ not to come at the same time, the pattern is that consistent, and the numbers that high, that it isn’t a decision that is ‘made’ in the sense of deciding the red shoes or the blue shoes. It is our biology deciding for us.

In relation to writing or making stuff. I know plenty of people who picked the ‘twist’ in Fight Club and The Sixth Sense within a few minutes. This doesn’t make the work successful or not as whether a work ‘works’ is not defined by whether or not it achieves what the author intended. For example, I make propaganda for the Nazi party. I want people to despise several other groups in society to the point where we are happy to execute millions of people. My intention as a maker is clear. Apparently it has worked well. If we think quality equals integrity of my intent then Nazi propaganda needs to be considered as some of the highest creative work we have created. It isn’t. Intent is not what matters, for quality, judgement, and aesthetic experience. Except to the extent as mentioned in the symposium that we take it to be a meaningful thing that intends to say something, and then the game becomes what do we think it wants or is trying to say. But it, not the author or maker. (In the case of something like The Sixth Sense for instance is it the author, screenwriter, director, editor, or is this a Star Trek Borg hive mind where five people’s minds have melded into one?)

I hear the comment that it is really a symposium. Except the unsymposium is pickking up the unconference movement. A symposium would be defined in advance, contributors would prepare material a long time in advance, possibly even share their papers before hand. Here the questions or prompts don’t come from the speakers, and we don’t know what the other is going to say. The difference might appear small, but in surrendering some of the agenda to you it is qualitatively different to what a symposium ordinarily is.

Jackie has great questions about what would be shared in a hypertextual work. This is precisely the question that needs to be considered. There are lots of good answers, and so the problem it poses is how to craft a meaningful pattern rather than just experience it as difference or chaos. We won’t get there this semester, but this is what we explore in Integrated Media when we begin to make works with these qualities and then want to think about the sort of story and experience that could or should be made available.

Anna C notes some of the important things about hypertext. These are useful ideas and pointers. I’d recommend taking these as ideas that matter to things online, not just hypertext (which is one of the reasons why we are using hypertext as a way to approach ‘networks’). Your blog not just as a sort of hypertext, but as a networked practice and object – just begin, structure emerges over time through doing, and it proposes a world. On the other hand Anna C questions about my proposition about ‘insights into an author’s mind’ and provides Stephen Fry by way of example. Couple of points, when someone explicitly says ‘this is what I think’ this is not the same as reading their fiction or essay and from these tea leaves discern what we believe they think, or believe. Similarly with Stephen Fry, who is gay, but it is awfully difficult to discern from his acting career, or his published work, his sexuality, let alone prove it. So how do we know he is gay? Because he has told us. So yes, we can convey a sense of our self through our writing is we choose to, but that is a qualitatively different proposition to saying that when we write we inevitably always convey an authentic sense of our self to others.

Patrick riffs around authorial control. I think a useful way to soften this is to think about authorial intention, and then wonder how much of this is managed or not. I’d also point out that if I can ensure my message might make sense because I rely upon and use ‘codes and conventions’ then the definition of a code is that I am subject to it, not the other way round, so that is hardly the author being in charge of anything, is it? Sophie has a very good gloss of what was a very intense theoretical discussion, and uses my example of telling a story about Elliot and I as a way to think about the differences that linearity and multilinearity might provide. The issue with multilinearity is not that you can’t tell stories, but we need to learn how to tell them differently.

Abby with notes from unsymposium 0.2, picking up that intent (and context) is no guarantee of anything, and that hypertext (and I’d add other poststructural ways of writing) willing embraces this.