Symposium 12

Explicit social protocols – racism can cause serious backlash hard and soft protocol – law gives you an order set of rules by which two things can engage with each other  – states, bank accounts, phone to internet service provider techical protocola – are socially written, standard comes from collective social decision online protocols matter […]

a kernel

If pages dissolved as you read them, so you couldn’t go back, what would they become? Whether the result of clever marketing and product placement or not, this question made me think about eReaders. The idea of pages disappearing makes me think of the world going ‘soft copy’ crazy that books, files and all kinds […]

Societies of control

The Galloway reading  makes interesting discussion of Gillies Deleuze‘s idea about “Societies of Control”.   Source: http://eagainst.com These societies are one’s that operate not with the industrial machines of old, but with new machines, information technology, with computers! As the picture above might suggest, we are being controlled and our leashes tugged at, but by who? and how? Galloway […]

about 3 bloggers

Kiralee on the perks of high school notes that it was a time of greater structure and yet also greater freedom. She suggests less time  is really more time. Under the stresses and pressures of year 12 folios and exams, deadlines meant more action and results where as the abundance of time at uni brings disorganisation, […]

3 more on 3

Rachel  gives a fairly grim view of our own social networks, bringing conversation inside and to a screen rather than outdoors and face-to-face. She seems to ask if we are we really all that far from Wall-E’s floating humans who’ve forgotten what it is to be human. Source: Wall-E  George provides a funny anecdote on being ‘stuck’ […]

‘kernel’-ing

Raymond Queneau’s sonnet work Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) Source: goodreads One structure, thousands of combinations.  A silly sonnet: One’s left with only sorrow and disease enough to spur on any picaro the Turk you see was deeply mired in sleaze across the hillocks comes a steady blow Just one was right and not […]

Manovich – database as symbolic form

The Manovich reading  seemed to bring be a full circle back to one of Adrian’s first lecture’s where he spoke about stories not requiring a beginning, middle and end to exist and that our narratives or recognisable forms are the merely the result of the mediums we use to share them. Manovich notes that media objects have […]

Anderson- The Long Tail

This reading is about online algorithms as an economic model. Using the example of Touching the Void sales on Amazon.com, Anderson explains how algorithms can show service providers like Amazon, what is trending and how best to influence audiences and their purchasing. Amazon brought the book Touching the Void back from obscurity by placing it next to […]

culture jamming

Thought i’d like to share this fabulously funny exchange between culture jammer Jonah Peretti and Nike. Culture jamming is basically subversive advertising. Culture jammers tweak media campaigns and advertising so that the original message is subverted and made to say almost the opposite, putting forth often a social or environmental activist type message. shey.net feature […]

technological determinism

“the belief that technology is the agent of social change” – Andrew, Murphie and John Potts  Whether one supports this position or not, as culture we almost passively subscribe to it through our use of language. Potts makes the example of “the computer age” and I would expand on that with phrases like “the digi-age”, […]