Symposium 09: The storytelling ecosystem

ecosystem services collapsing

Image via flickr user Martin Sharman

Stories in networked spaces can potentially be disparate connections of ‘bits’. The whole art of working in this space is to think about how these parts can come together to form something different that the sum of its parts. That’s what an ecosystem is: structures and patterns from individual parts – whether that be nature with its flora and fauna, or the online terrain of blogs or hypertext systems.

What’s interesting is that in these ecosystems, scale does not matter. Just because a tree may be the biggest in size, does to mean it’s the most important thing. Each part brings its own importance and diversity to the system. There is no privilege, no hierarchy, and most importantly, no centre. As Jason told us, we grow up thinking there is a centre to everything. This worldview is problematic, and makes it harder to adjust to the mindset that is more appropriate in understanding ecosystems. Everything intercommunicates in complex and interesting ways. However, there is no way of predicting in advance which parts will come to matter, and why this is the case. As Adrian reminds us, it’s only in the doing that these structures and relationships form.

In the symposium, we talked about Cowbird being a good example of the above.  This website, which is a “public library of human experience” takes individual’s stories and collates them into what Adrian calls a ‘soup’ of story, images and videos. These stories then shift from being a distinct island unto themselves, and start having relations with other stories. The story then grows as a consequence to these relations, out of the control of the author.

I asked whether this is similar to Twitter, which brings together information in a somewhat similar way. However, we discussed that Twitter is a timebound stream, which is more ephemeral in nature. You can aggregate and communicate with likeminded people, but it’s not a curatorial space. Hashtags, however, are a little bit more about curation and collation, but it is ultimately different from the above kind of ecosystem.

Symposium 07: Authorial intentions

This week’s symposium started out with the focus on intent.

What role does the authorial integrity of intent play? Can the content of intent be guaranteed? If the aforementioned context is supplied, can it survive?

As Adrian pointed out, the answer to most of the above is no.

Intent is problematic. 

Adrian urges us that one of the strongest skills we could learn is how to read against the intent of an author.

We then discussed semiotics, and the Cartesian separation between the signifier (body) and the signified (what it means; the rational mind). Adrian called this “the delirium of semiotics” which I don’t quite yet understand. I think it’s along the lines of meaning we are so obsessed with that something means (thinking that only that mind matters), that we almost forget about the substance (the body) itself.

Another really interesting takeaway following this was that “words can only mean by difference”. As in, something can only mean something not by what it is, but what it is not. A word only gets its meaning by virtue of the relations to other words that could have been there. The actual word is significant because you chose to use it instead of something else. Thus, the meaning never arrives.

We were encouraged to think about artefacts as a person, with a distinct personality. This is what’s interesting, and what talks to you. Not the author.
Authors/makers tend to give up a lot of their control when they move into a multilinear electronic space. However, they also gain a lot. They gain a different sort of control, and become a bit more like a choreography rather than a dictator. They can try to predict what the user will do and frame their content around this, but ultimately it is in the users’ hands.
In summation, Adrian claims it is a condition of language that you cannot guarantee the intent of your language or the arrival of your message. As media-makers, we should be prepared for this.

Symposium 05: Network Literacy and Hypertext

Leftover Symposium 04 questions:

  1. Should network literacy be focused on in earlier education?

    • Can it be taught formally? 
      • Yes absolutely, and it should be. Some parts of it are already in practice, but not enough. Arduino is a service which is being used in school to teach children about how to make computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than the average desktop computer.
      • To some extent, you graduate from school being quite disempowered from networks because things have consistently been gatekept for you.
    • What do you think the solution is? Should we let kids teach themselves through doing?
      • Adrian believes the only way you ever learn anything is through doing, and I agree with him. I have, and always will be, a kinaesthetic learner.
      • Kids teach themselves how to do things. The issue is facilitating this in a way that they learn the how and why of things instead of the didactic ‘do this’ and ‘do that’.
      • School systems often take out the ability to think critically, as the architecture of school education is all tailored towards passing exams and getting good scores on essays and projects. You get trained to think that bell curves are natural order, but really they’re an educational ideology/construction. It’s been shown that information retention rates drop off exponentially after this type of learning, so it’s not necessarily a valuable method.

“We unlearn how to ask good questions. Problem with that in an age of distributed expertise, is that if you can’t ask good questions, you can’t find good answers. That’s the world we’re going into. Things are not black and white, it’s very grey and the skills you need to navigate this world are different.” – Adrian Miles

Symposium 05 questions:

  1. How is hypertext relevant to us as media practitioners?

    • Adrian says, how is it not? We deal with structures like that on almost all of our internet usage – such as YouTube (clicking from one video to another), Buzzfeed, news websites, Twitter, etc.
    • Elliott tells us of dual screening mentality which is a rising concern in the media industries, which says: ‘okay, we get your idea, but what’s the second screen going to be showing?’ As in, how are you going to utilise the network affordances by doing more? i.e. online webisodes, podcasts, building communities online, etc. Heritage media are doing this, but only slowly. They use it to shore up their existing model, as opposed to drastically changing it. They think ‘more is better’.
    • There’s a big gap, an opening to step in and properly use non-linear structures in storytelling. Adrian thinks that this is a waste that this isn’t working yet.
    • When moving into digital, content became highly granular (small chunks), and it becomes about the relationship between each other. Temporary relationships. This is how things get meaning, with the infinite multiple relationships between the parts. How we make stuff then had to change, because the end now doesn’t matter. And now the reader/audience power dynamic changes as well. Hypertext realised this.
  2. What predictions about network literacy should we be aware of?

    • Those who are network literate will engage with technology and come out on top better.
    • Media industries are changing drastically. However, history is not linear so we don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s a series of accidents.
    • Things to be aware of:
      • Physicality of the network – servers, infrastructure
      • Legal battles which may restrict or create affordances
      • Political battles, legislation, copyright.
  3. What are the consequences of being network illiterate?

    • You will have a reduced capacity to engage or develop appropriate strategies to engage.
    • Your only ability to understand will be through someone else – you will be dependent on them telling you what it means.  Think about what could this mean for creativity; corruption?

Symposium 04

Adrian was shocked in this week’s symposium to discover how little it seemed our cohort knew about the validity of certain internet content. I think, perhaps, that this was a stretch too far as I would hazard a guess that most of what we subsequently heard about looking for cues for legitimacy, such as locating which type of domain it’s coming from, was not new information for many in the lecture theatre. Where I thought the discussion turned very interesting though was when talking about how and why these practices are emulated, undermined, and impersonated (such as by The Onion, an American parody news site).

I think a similar area which is equally interesting is the rise of Twitter accounts which impersonate various organisations or people. Such as Vice Is Hip, Fake Pinterest, or even this article showing what might happen if Disney Princesses had Instagram.

However, I think these types of humour rely heavily on a more widely understood humour of parody, as opposed to impersonation.

We then listened to discussions about network literacy and its relation to print literacy, including what limitations and affordances both have. Adrian explained that we have a tendency to confuse form and content, which I wholeheartedly agree with. It was also interesting to hear Adrian say that the spaces within which network literacy happen have to be performed. They do not preexist us, we actually have to actively do them.

Adrian also reminded us that literacies, which exist in hundreds of forms, are always enacted in very minor detail. His example of ordering a lemonade in America illustrated this well. He explains that the varying social etiquettes of literacies complement and contest each other. They are not clearly defined, but entangled and messy, interacting and embedding themselves in our social practices.

We were reminded that we constantly rely on third parties to do things for us, leaving us disempowered due to our constant reliance on expertise. For example, we may know about books and how to write one, but we don’t necessarily know how a printer works. Similarly, we know how to curate our online presences with content, but we might not know how to build a web page. This is the sort of network literacy that needs to be ramped up in order to participate fully as effective media practitioners in our changing media landscape.

Symposium 03

Here are some of my musings from what was discussed in the first Networked Media symposium i was able to attend (I’m now two weeks post-arthroscopic surgery and can return to my regular activities! Hooray!):

The first question raised was ‘how much freedom do we have when writing critically of others or others’ work before we become liable for defamation or copyright infringement?’

Large copyright sign made of jigsaw puzzle pieces

We must begin to understand the rights and responsibilities of someone who operates a blog. As a blog owner, you are responsible for everything that is published on your blog – including in the comments. There is a difference between opinion and critique – we mustn’t make claims that are derogatory or defamatory towards people and dress them up as fact. The ‘truth’ is not a defence, and similarly, authorial intent counts for nothing. Regardless of if you intended for something to be offensive or not, if it has been perceived as offensive by someone or someones then it is.

There is a lot of complications when ascertaining whether your published material is ‘in the public interest’. Also remember that these laws differ between jurisdictions and across national borders. This is one of the growing concerns media professionals are adapting to in the face of globalisation, having to now work across a number of legal structures and licenses. 

It is up to the copyright holder to take action, however this area is becoming more and more aggressive, with entire law firms and organisations being dedicated to trawling the internet to find examples of copyright infringement (such as PPCA and APRA). Disney is a great example of how some organisations are being more lenient of traditional copyright law in order to benefit their audience-base who, in this example, formed such a community around the culture of Frozen (2013) where over 60,000 fan-made covers of the song ‘Let It Go’ have been shared across social media and have been collectively viewed more than 60 million times, even though these were all technically breaches of copyright.

We then spoke about the grey area of embedding. Adrian agreed that the existence of an embed button pretty much means you can use the content on your own site, because it is somewhat understood that the original source are the ones bearing liability. However, where this becomes a serious issue is when a user downloads the material and re-uploads it themselves instead of directly embedding it. The content is now being hosted on your own site, meaning you are infringing copyright.