This reading was particularly interesting as Potts and Murphie described the differences between technology, technique and culture. They talk about how these three terms have become imbedded in our society through the way that they interact. When culture and technology are combined, they must be versatile and mobile in order to achieve technological advance. To make things clearer for myself, I am going to outline what the three terms mean.
Technology was first used as a term around the time of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ in order to “describe the radical restructuring of Western societies as a result of industrial purpose”. Since then it has been used to describe the systems of machinery and their processes. It is also important to remember that technology is heavily influenced by cultural values, ideologies and ethical concerns.
Technique is described by Potts and Murphie as “the use of skill to accomplish something”. They make note that we need technique in order to use technologies and therefore, if technique was lost, there would be no skill to advance technology.
Culture is a lot harder to define compared to the previous terms. Potts and Murphie describe it as being both dynamic and multiple. It is dynamic because there is always constant change in the ideas and values. It is multiple due to the way it is made up of the different classes, races and ages.
Once again, another incredibly heavy and dry reading. When are we going to read something that isn’t filled with computing jargon and coding languages that I don’t think I’ll ever understand? Sometimes I’m not really sure where this course is going in terms of communications studies.
Anyway, after racking my brain to put this reading into some sense, I think I have a couple of take away ideas. Not sure if they are correct though.
The reading talks about protocols that control network function on the internet. Digital computers are also emphasised on throughout the chapter. In his ‘diagram’ he refers often to a distributed network which is the web, technology is referred to as the computer and management is protocol. According to Galloway, the internet has far exceeded anyone’s original expectations in the way it has imbedded so thoroughly into our lives. It has now become “a global distributed network connecting billions of people around the world”.
So my Broadcast Media group and I fiiiiiiinally completed our tv assignment which has been so draining over the past 2 weeks. Our segment focused on the issue of graduates struggling to find work and we couldn’t have been happier with the outcome. The long and tedious hours of editing certainly paid off and I’m so glad it’s over.
This week’s reading by Barabasi was interesting at times, however I still became lost in all the terminology. It took me waaaay back to my final year in school, learning about networks and how to calculate bell curves and histograms. My hatred for this subject in maths was probably the reason why I didn’t like this reading as much as the others.
However, Barabasi does bring up some intriguing points in his chapter. The 80/20 rule can explain many different statistics and their truisms, but it can’t explain the Web. I found it interesting that “80 per cent of links on the Web point to only 15 per cent of Webpages.” He also states that whilst there are a lot of ‘nodes’, there actually isn’t that many links, but rather hubs with loads of links in them. He also mentions ‘power laws’ a lot and that webpages often follow this 80/20 expression.
The information below is taken from Wikipedia which really helped me to understand the concept of the 80/20 rule:
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Business-management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.
It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”. Mathematically, the 80-20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.
The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to Pareto efficiency, which was also introduced by the same economist. Pareto developed both concepts in the context of the distribution of income and wealth among the population.
“what matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere”
I liked this quote in Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” because it describes exactly what our blogs are used for and why we should use them. The idea that anyone from anywhere can be reading your content is what is most important.
This reading also offered a new insight into the online sharing of media. Anderson speaks of how the “future of entertainment” is changing rapidly due to the way it is now accessed. We no longer have to purchase media or wait weeks at a time to watch episodes of your favourite shows. It’s as simple as finding a free media site and downloading as much as you please. This made me realise how much I utilise these online networks. I never buy music unless I cannot find it anywhere else. I do not buy TV shows or watch my favourite series on the TV, I download them in HD/Blu-ray quality to watch in my own time.
Anderson also discusses the way sites like Amazon and Rhapsody create links between their files such as similar artist searches. This technique is used on many sites including Facebook and YouTube. Whenever I open these sites, I am bombarded with “suggestions” such as online stores and videos I may ‘like’. I also get emails almost everyday from eBay with even more suggestions from sellers that I have previously bought from. Even though some of these sites are incredibly annoying, it is still a successful technique to get consumers to notice similar items. One site that I loooooooove to use is Pandora which is a music site that allows you to listen to music that is similar to your favourite bands and singers. I have found so many new artists that I now can’t stop listening to since using this site and there’s always something new to listen to.
As if its already half way thorough the semester! To say I’m excited about the end of the end of the year would be an understatement. However, I do think that I have been spending too much time thinking about the end of the year instead of using this blog to the best of my ability. I have missed the last two tutes which has been the main cause of my absence on here. I guess all I need to do is get back into a new routine and be a little more proatctive with my learning in this subject.
There are still a few things that I haven’t quite grasped how to do yet on here like add my blog roll and how to link my blog to my social network sites.
So I read the “Six degrees” reading and I realized half way through that it was written by the same guy who created the experiment in the “how Kevin Bacon cured cancer” documentary. However, it offered a lot of new insight into the reasons why Watts constructed the experiment. I’m still skeptical about the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else in some way.
As I was reading I kept asking myself “why are we learning about this?” I didn’t take a maths or science subject, so why is this relevant. However, I do understand that to be successful as a blogger, one needs connections and links to others. It reminded me of a reading I had for my Global Political Economy class last week which spoke about the super-elite rich innovators of the world today and how they have created their own network or exclusive community. They make these connections with each other to help benefit each other whilst also competing against one anothers ideas that will one day “change the world”.
So whilst I did get lost a few times within this reading, I do understand the relevance of most of it and that networks can exsist anywhere, whether it be people, a disease or even ideas.
