Category Archives: Thoughts

Unlecture No. 4: The First Symposium

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The lecture yesterday was without a doubt the most interesting lecture of the year, probably of university so far.

I think finally, after the first few weeks of talking about it, and waiting for Brian to return from wherever he was (holiday?), the dialogic structure has fallen into place. It needed to happen this week, as people were getting slightly miffed at the fact we were being told about a revolutionary method of teaching that treats us (students) like capable human beings (as opposed to blank but vaguely keen slates that need to be written on in order to make us appear employable), but the ‘unlectures’ had a distinctly lecture-like feel to them. We were still listening to one person speak for at least half an hour (though we were allowed the enormous privilege of asking one question at the start that may or may not have been answered in that half hour).

(forgive the parentheses)

Things I loved about how this unlecture/symposium was run:

  • More that one person spoke. Not only this, but there was less of a sense of hierarchy among the tutors. Brian seems to have balanced the numbers to achieve zen.
  • Students in the audience asked questions when they weren’t necessarily asked to (“So, does anyone have any questions about that…?” *crickets chirp and a dust ball rolls across the front of the room*). This, I think, will give other students the confidence to engage more openly, with less fear of being made seem like an idiot in front of the rest of the cohort.
  • The content was very interesting. Not to say that the last few weeks have been dull, or that what Adrian was saying was things I already knew, but I think having the other tutors to bounce off made what he had to say a lot more fresh, and much less rehearsed. As the tutors have different ideas about the subject, and the material within the subject, they challenged each other when they spoke. Everyone was thinking, rather than reciting.
  • We rehashed over things that we had already talked about from previous weeks. I think this is important in university subjects more generally, as the content that is covered is usually so massive. My friend studying Nursing at La Trobe said they covered the entire content of year 12 psychology in one week. I understand that you are expected to do much of your learning out of university hours, it is still helpful to go over things, just to make sure they were understood, or even to elaborate on them as a segue to the next topic, rather than segmenting each week as a different section of information.

For me, the most interesting part was the last example used by Adrian, about how you intend to get paid in this industry and what you have to do to achieve that. His example was that of a wedding photographer (a past student’s plan for a business).

Why on earth would anyone in their right mind (even if they had cash t throw around) spend $10,000 on hiring a photographer for their wedding when they can just ask Uncle Clive with his digital SLR and iMovie to make it for you. Clive would be keen to do it; then we wouldn’t have to buy a wedding present.

His answer? You must sell the experience, not the product. You must sell the fact that you can film an entire wedding, ceremony and reception, without being noticed by anyone so they feel they are being filmed. You sell your discretion, not your hour of footage. You sell that you will archive the footage of their wedding forever, for free (in case of housefire, flood, loss of the dvd, etc…). That you will send them uncut, additional footage every anniversary to remind them of their special day. You have to do the things that Uncle Clive won’t do.

The industry must not be about selling a thing. Because now, everyone can make these things with software that everyone gets for free on their computers. It must be about selling the experience of the thing. Which I personally, hadn’t thought enough about. It is not enough to just produce great videos, because there are thousands of teenagers with their webcams, with millions of followers, who are able to do the exact same thing, to a much greater audience.

It tied nicely into my conversation this morning with a friend who wants to start up a coffee shop. He was telling me about his connections in the industry and how he would be able to get discounts on the beans, how he has friends who would be willing to invest money into the business to get it started. And while you need these things (a coffee shop without premises or beans wouldn’t be a great coffee shop), you need customers. And you need a reason for customers to come back to your shop, as opposed to the one a block from their house that serves the exact same coffee, for the exact same price.

My answer (thank you Adrian), was the feel of the place. Everything from the decor, to the music playing, the staff that work there, the cups that people will drink from, and the sugar they will stir into their drinks. A customer must feel comfortable and at ease using a product (or buying a cup of coffee) or they won’t use it, because if they are willing to sacrifice comfort, they will find a very cheap solution to whatever the problem they face, or service they need.

The Moat, under the Wheelers Center, is where I go for coffee when I’m at uni. Why? The one on campus is cheaper. Druid’s Cafe is much closer. Mr Tulk serves the exact same stuff. And if I do a quick google search; “coffee shops swanston st”, this is what Google maps tells me.

WHY ON EARTH WOULD I GO TO THE MOAT IF THERE ARE THIS MANY OTHER OPTIONS WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE?!

My answer? The feel of it. I like the place. I feel comfortable there. At home even. I’d be quite happy to spend the day there, just reading or writing. I like that they play quite classical or jazz over the speakers. I like that there is a different kind of spoon with each jar of sugar. I like that I know one of the waiters is called Stewart, and that he plays golf and used to own his own restaurant. I like that he knows I teach children to swim and do triathlons. I like that I don’t even have to talk to them anymore, I just sit down, and within a few minutes, a flat white will appear in front of me. I like them enough that I have brought at least a dozen people there since the beginning of the year, who had never heard of it, and some of them have become regulars too. It is comfortable, and easy, and I will probably keep going there till I finish my degree, spending hundreds of dollars on coffees and snacks, and probably even go there if I get an office job in the city after I finish uni.

Why? Because as Adrian said, I’m not paying for the coffee, I’m paying for the experience.

What Wit!

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Last night I started to read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (it seems it can only be read at night), the first major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I have come across several things that have been pretty interesting so far, including links to Solipsism, which we were discussing in philosophy last week.

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, into one of the richest family’s in Europe at the time (holding a monopoly on the steel industry in Austria), with four brothers and four sisters. He was the youngest member of the family. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was dominating, apparently lacking empathy, and saw only a future in industry for his sons. His mother, Leopoldine Kalmus, was reportedly timid and anxious, unable to stand up to her husband, a harsh perfectionist, focused only on business and the continuation of it through his family.

Ludwig’s brothers displayed evidence of a streak of depression that seems to have run through the family. Three of his four brothers committed suicide, and Ludwig contemplated it regularly, approaching it as though it was a problem of logic that he needed to overcome. In his notebooks he wrote:

“If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.”

His eldest brother was a musical prodigy, able to identify the different pitches and keys of music from the age of four. He disappeared on a boat after leaving for a America in 1902. The third eldest brother committed suicide in Berlin at a bar, where he ordered a glass of milk, requested the song “Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I” to be played by the pianist, and proceeded to mix potassium cyanide into his glass, before drinking it.

However, intro and gloom aside, I’d like to talk about several passages, the first being what Russell (who was Wittgenstein’s good friend and wrote the 20 odd page introduction to this work, which includes sentences like, “The definition of identity by means of the identity of indiscernible appears to be not a logically necessary principle”) describes as Wittgenstein’s most fundamental thesis.

“The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the components words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the structure and the structure of the fact. (…) That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language.”

This is difficult. And I’ve been reading through it (by the way, he has written his Tractatus in numerical point form, e.g. “1 The world is all the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.“) and I’m struggling to make an enormous amount of sense of it. But basically, what I think he’ saying, is reasonably simple, but the terms he uses are confusing. For example, his sentence that begins, “Given the syntax of a language,” is essentially saying that there is no difference between understanding the words in a sentence, and the persons meaning. It reminds me of the part from Atonement, when Briony is sitting in the nursery contemplating he failing play.

“By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols unravelled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from a distance, with woods in high summer spread before it…”

I’ll let this sit for a little bit, as I have to go off to training, but it is to be continued…

Wishing Wall?

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Trawling through tumblr the other (what charming alliteration) day, I came across this piece of art (DON’T CLICK THE LINK YET! READ ON!), by Kate MccGwire that I thought was quite interesting. Copyright being what it is, and this being my self-confessed (though not by myself) online identity, that will add to building a digital reputation, I won’t post any pictures of the actual exhibition, but click through the link to see it in the back-lit flesh.

In fact, perhaps I shall try to describe it to you. I’ll endeavor to build a picture of it in your mind, and then, only then, click through to the exhibition and you can see how close the picture I created is to the actual piece.

It is a large, grey wall, seven meters long and over five meters tall, painted a neutral grey, not quite as dark as slate, perhaps closer to the colour of the grey on a Commonwealth Bank debit card. And on the wall, is a spiral of 23,000 chicken wish bones, starting from the right of center of the wall. The chicken wishbones are completely clean, and are that off-bonewhite, that is similarly called, cream (the colour you might see on the wall of your house). The wishbones are arranged so they almost fit into each other as the form the spiral, like this; “<<<<<<“, but rather than straight, curved in a lazy arc. The effect when seen from a distance is similar to what one might imagine if you saw an ornamental pebble garden from above.

You may now, I suppose, click the link and see what it actually looks like, as now, class must be attended.

(probably to be continued)

Toy Stories

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I stumbled across this article, when I was researching for the last post I did, and thought it was an incredible idea for a photographic project, and produced some incredible images.

It is titled, “Toy Stories“, by Italian photographer, Gabriele Galimberti, who spent 18 months traveling the world taking photographs of children with their favourite toys. As the article says, he spent some time playing with each of the children before helping them arrange their toys neatly on the ground, before taking several portraits of the child next to their toys.

His photograph’s reflected each different child’s world by illuminating their interests, personalities, families, cultures and wealth.

As Gamimberti discovered, there was some significant and obvious relationships between a child’s socioeconomic class and their personality.

“The wealthiest children were more possessive of their belongings, refusing to let Galimberti touch the toys at first. Building rapport with those kids took longer. The poorer children were much more receptive to Galimberti and were more generous with their fewer belongings. In the poorest countries, children often had very few toys, and therefore spent most of their time outdoors with friends.”

This project is special for several reasons, including that Gamimberti traveled so long and far to collect these photos, and that he was able to capture a snapshot of such a wide range of cultural and economic situations through such a simple vehicle. It reminds me of a quote by French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Galimberti chose the denominator common to all societies; children, and then picked a thing that is almost exclusively shared by this common denominator; toys. He gave us insight, not only into the world of the child, but the reality of the society that child was from, highlighting the different values favoured in different places around the world.

But mostly, this project is special because of the sense of nostalgia it creates in everyone who sees the photos, as they remember back to their own childhoods and cannot help but wonder what might have been in their portrait. It takes you back to all of those small pieces of plastic and metal that are either in landfill now, or are sitting in a box that collects dust in an attic or storage container somewhere. Those tokens, no, those idols, that you might have received as a Christmas present from an uncle, or your parent bought you one day after weeks of listening to your nagging, or that especially sacred first purchase with saved pocket money.

What was so special about them? Can you even remember now? Was it really that long ago?

Week 3 Reading: Bruce Sterling on design fictions

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One of the readings for this week was an interview with Bruce Sterling, an award winning science-fiction writer, but also a vocal advocate of what is known as “design fiction”. He defines design fiction as being, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend belief’s about change.” Sterling is appearing at a conference at Arizona State University, called ‘Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future‘, which serves to facilitate lecturing and discussion about what the future might look like.

I found some of the things said by Sterling to be quite interesting, especially at his mention of a legal case between technology giants Apple and Samsung. In the lawsuit, there was reference to an iPad-like tablet that was used as a prop in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which you can watch, here. Sterling used this as an example of a design fiction that proved to be successful, 45 years later, as you can now walk down to your local electronics store and purchase one.

Another interesting observation by Sterling was in his response when asked what it was that made design fictions work so well. He replied quite reasonably, “Talking about a future gadget isn’t like talking about a future government or women’s rights in the future or other hot-button problems. Plus people are interested in things like that.”

A pretty reasonable statement to make, that electronic toys are more likely to grab people’s attention than social rights or political issues. Perhaps a reflection of people’s general exhaustion at the topic of politics, or anything ‘serious’, or maybe more a statement about the imagination within everyone that needs, at least occasionally, to be exercised.

 

Women’s Work

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I came across this article the other day by Francesca Borri, an Italian freelance journalist covering the fighting in the middle east, specifically Syria. It was quite eye-opening as to what the risks actually were as a journalist in those kinds of environments, especially a freelance one who isn’t even guaranteed that her stories will sell.

She speaks with exasperation about her editors not wanting appreciating the danger every single minute in those environments, and that the only stories they wanted were to do with wherever the violence was most concentrated, with the highest number of casualties. She accepts the risks to her own life as part-and-parcel of the job, but says that the word ‘free’ in ‘freelance’ is misnomer as they, more than other types of journalists, are forced to cover the most dangerous stories in order to make ends meet as those are the only stories editors are interested in.

“People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?

Actually, I should have realized it that time my editor asked me for a piece on Gaza, because Gaza, as usual, was being bombed. I got this email: “You know Gaza by heart,” he wrote. “Who cares if you are in Aleppo?” Exactly. The truth is, I ended up in Syria because I saw the photographs in Time by Alessio Romenzi, who was smuggled into Homs through the water pipes when nobody was yet aware of the existence of Homs. I saw his shots while I was listening to Radiohead—those eyes, staring at me; the eyes of people being killed by Assad’s army, one by one, and nobody had even heard of a place called Homs. A vise clamped around my conscience, and I had to go to Syria immediately.

But whether you’re writing from Aleppo or Gaza or Rome, the editors see no difference. You are paid the same: $70 per piece. Even in places like Syria, where prices triple because of rampant speculation. So, for example, sleeping in this rebel base, under mortar fire, on a mattress on the ground, with yellow water that gave me typhoid, costs $50 per night; a car costs $250 per day. So you end up maximizing, rather than minimizing, the risks. Not only can you not afford insurance—it’s almost $1,000 a month—but you cannot afford a fixer or a translator. You find yourself alone in the unknown. The editors are well aware that $70 a piece pushes you to save on everything. They know, too, that if you happen to be seriously wounded, there is a temptation to hope not to survive, because you cannot afford to be wounded. But they buy your article anyway, even if they would never buy the Nike soccer ball handmade by a Pakistani child.

With new communication technologies there is this temptation to believe that speed is information. But it is based on a self-destructive logic: The content is now standardized, and your newspaper, your magazine, no longer has any distinctiveness, and so there is no reason to pay for the reporter. I mean, for the news, I have the Internet—and for free. The crisis today is of the media, not of the readership. Readers are still there, and contrary to what many editors believe, they are bright readers who ask for simplicity without simplification. They want to understand, not simply to know. Every time I publish an eyewitness account from the war, I get a dozen emails from people who say, “Okay, great piece, great tableaux, but I want to understand what’s going on in Syria.” And it would so please me to reply that I cannot submit an analysis piece, because the editors would simply spike it and tell me, “Who do you think you are, kid?”—even though I have three degrees, have written two books, and spent 10 years in various wars, first as a human-rights officer and now as a journalist. My youth, for what it’s worth, vanished when bits of brain splattered on me in Bosnia, when I was 23.”

The final paragraph left chills up my spine as she beautifully illustrates how a different view of the world takes hold of you when death is so present and so possible.

“Had I really understood something of war, I wouldn’t have gotten sidetracked trying to write about rebels and loyalists, Sunnis and Shia. Because really the only story to tell in war is how to live without fear. It all could be over in an instant. If I knew that, then I wouldn’t have been so afraid to love, to dare, in my life; instead of being here, now, hugging myself in this dark, rancid corner, desperately regretting all I didn’t do, all I didn’t say. You who tomorrow are still alive, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you love enough? You who have everything, why you are so afraid?”

Something to Like?

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I had been thinking a little bit about charity and activism in relation to social media, specifically, if it actually does anything more than feed a persons philanthropic sense of themselves.

I read this article which speaks about a new advertising campaign brought out by Crisis Relief Singapore with the slogan, “Liking isn’t helping”. It speaks to a generation of people (my generation) who commonly ‘like’ or ‘share’ a charity page on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media platform, with the intention of… Well, I’m not actually sure what their intention is, or what they hope to achieve by the click of a mouse.

We’ve all seen the ones. It might be a photograph of a horribly malnourished African child, wide-eyed with flies dancing on his lips, he is probably staring directly into the camera with a scabby hand outstretched. And below the photo will inevitably be the caption, “Like = Save, Ignore = Die”.

As the article says, it reminds us of the quasi-charity campaign by Invisible Children who started the KONY2012 movement, promoting the philosophy that by sharing a video through social media, you are building awareness that will affect social change. Leaving aside some of the criticisms of Invisible Children as a charity organisation, the idea may still be have legs, or at least still legitimately begs the question; can social media actually change anything in the ‘real’ world?

In the wake of the Boston Bombings it was seen clearly what can happen when social media flexes it’s muscles and takes matters usually left up to trained professionals into it’s own hands. Reddit users began to do a little bit of investigative detective work for themselves, spreading a wave of misinformation that was picked up by legitimate news sources and published by them as fact. Several people were wrongly accused as being responsible for the bombings after Reddit users began collecting photographs from the event posted on social media in an attempt to discover the perpetrators of the attacks.

So social media can obviously have a significant impact on more than just the virtual sphere. But that doesn’t quite answer the question, as the example of the Boston Bombings was quite reactionary, emotionally fueled and unorganised in it’s response.

So perhaps we need to rephrase the question slightly: is social media able to affect social change in an organised and controlled way, as was suggested by KONY2012 and feminists groups on Tumblr? Or are they just people with a little bit too much spare time on their hands and are looking for a way promote a minority group to reestablish their own altruism?

 

Day 01: No sight of land

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Well, I suppose after a week of wholeheartedly avoiding this blog, I should succumb and publish a first post.

In regards to the second ‘unlecture’, there did seem to be a slight contradiction in what we were told was expected in regards to this blog.

  • On one hand, we were unlectured about the possibility of going to jail on child pornography charges if we failed to or incorrectly set up our spam fliters (which would serve to delete hundreds of thousands of potentially criminal messages attempting to weasel their way into our online existences), and that we could serve as a platform for people with slightly different values to hurl abuse and hatred at each other (Justin Bieber tweens on one side, Slipknot fans on the other, ready to wage bloody war on the battlefield of the comments section).
  • But on the other hand, we must frequently and casually post on it, sharing and publishing whatever takes our youthfully enthusiastic fancy, and hope that it vaguely related to the course (a minimum of 5 times a week).

The crux of these two things being that we were responsible for whatever comments were posted on this blog, which, as Adrian reminded us repeatedly, is here forever and will remain as a permanent digital footprint of us.

I see the contradiction rear its confused head now, with half of my brain telling me, “Oh yes Nick, write on the blog! Look how eager Cat is when she sees another dog at the park! Why don’t you have that unreserved enthusiasm for life?” (Cat is my dog, a Kelpie, nearly a year old with enough energy to solve Pakistan’s energy crisis and still have enough left over to heat a 7/11 sausage roll.) The other part of my brain, however, is slightly more reserved, and tells me in a cautious but understanding voice, “You might want to pass university, but staying out of prison is also nice.”

The issue seems to be, that I am struggling slightly to muster enthusiasm for a thing that could land me in jail through no active behavior of my own. To which I imagine Adrian’s reply, “You are legally able to purchase a gun, join the army and kill people, vote for the leader of this country and drive a car, I’m sure you will be able to manage a spam filter.” To which I would agree, I probably can. But the idea is still somewhat daunting.

Then again, I suppose I’d rather be informed and safe than sorry and eating canned peaches from a mess tray in Port Philip Prison. I guess it has to be viewed like a high school sex ed talk in health class. It brings the worst possible result of a behavior into harsh sunlight for all to see, which serves to temporarily frighten us away from risk taking fraternisation (with the internet…), but most likely will never occur. Not, of course, to suggest that it will never happen, but that if you take the right protective measures (the buzzword, I believe, is ‘careful’), you can significantly reduce your chances of any wrong-footing.

Which seems like a reasonable unlecture to have to sit through, even if at the time my main thoughts were focused around Barry, the overweight, wife-beater sporting pedophile who would probably refer to me as “fresh meat”, and would be my cellmate for several decades after being convicted of child pornography for failing to correctly set up my spam filters on my RMIT prompted blog.