Trackbacks 05

Claudia with some useful notes on Symposium 11 (I was unable to attend as I was in Canberra with 400 other young people meeting with 100 MPs to discuss ending extreme poverty). Claudia found it a little difficult to stay tuned in for the whole lecture (don’t worry, Claudia. I think that’s basically the motto of Network Media for most students). She had some great notes about the idea of design thinking though. This is something I was first introduced to in my politics class Organisations, Politics & Economies. We learned that 21st century organisations must use design thinking, dynamism, and affective forethought in order to make themselves future-focused.

Future City Illinois

Professor Nigel Thrift suggests that organisations are less focused on singular products but more on the ideas and innovation behind trends that create the terrain for their products. For example, Nike are not just manufacturers of footwear and apparel, they innovate and design trends. Their motto is “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”, qualifying that “if you have a body, you are an athlete” (NikeInc.com, 2014). I am excited to see how much more prominent this kind of design thinking becomes, because I think it provides some great affordances for modern consumerism.

George writes about the 80/20 rule we saw in the Barabási reading. He also mentions the 90-0-1 principle, as cited by Jacob Neilsen in 2006. This idea suggests that there is a participation inequality on the Internet with only 1% of people creating content, 9% editing or modifying content, and 90% viewing content without actively contributing. I wonder how those figures have changed since 2006 and what they would look like in 2014.

Jessica writes about the database discussion from week 11’s symposium, focusing on the relationship between databases and narrative (which I agree there is none of – databases are not stories). I’m still trying to understand how blogs are a database though – I kind of wish I was there in the symposium to hear Adrian explain that one!

Trackbacks 04

Sophie with an amazing infographic about what a day in the internet looks like, which provided the following incredible statistics:

  • 294 billion emails are sent
  • 2 million blog posts are written
  • 172 million people visit Facebook, posting 532 million statuses and spending 4.7 billion minutes on the site.
  • 98 years of video footage is uploaded to YouTube
  • More iPhones are sold in one day than babies are born across the world.

Nethaniel with a surprisingly poetic image of a blog within a blog, creating what he calls ‘blog-ception’.

Caitlin with a story that spreads fear in the heart of any digital native: her iPhone has recently died. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read along, realising with each new word just how desperately crucial my iPhone has become in my life. It is all-but an extension of my hand. Like many, it’s the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning. I panic when it’s out of sight. I can’t fall asleep without it under my pillow. I once had a thirty minute tantrum on the Eurostar between London and Paris when I realised I had left my phone in my UK apartment and was not going to be able to document my trip using my iPhone camera! How laughable!

I’m sure we’ve all been in similar situations, when it becomes so very clear how much our relationship with a piece of aluminium and glass has developed into frighteningly dependent therapy-worthy patterns. But I couldn’t love that any more if I tried! For me, the affordances of these new technologies so far outweigh their downfalls, and I cannot wait to see what trends continue to emerge as they weave themselves even further into our lives.

Readings 08: Watts + our small worlds

Reading 08.1

In The Science of a Connected Age, Watts introduces us to the idea or small worlds, or as we will come to learn, small groups. He talks about the frequently forgotten enabler of our connectivity: the power system. This certainly made me chuckle, as I can certainly attest to taking this entire system for granted which allows me to perform my networked tasks which have engrained themselves in my day to day life. I don’t think I have physically looked at a power line in years. In fact, I grew up in a suburb in A.C.T where a key selling point was that the power lines were run underground and forced out of sight (and out of mind). But as Adrian has reminded us a few times this semester, we constantly bathe in an extraordinary sea of mobile data and radio waves. Just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. This Gizmodo article shows images from an artist who worked in collaboration with an astrobiologist to show us what the world might look like if we could see these wireless signals.

Image via Casey Chan

Image via Casey Chan

 

The power system is arguably the most essential technological feature of the modern world… Without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly more expensive and inconvenient.”

Continue Reading…

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.

Mixed Media Creative Critical Essay Draft

This essay (draft) uses applied knowing (knowing through doing) to demonstrate the network literacy I have acquired throughout the RMIT University course Network Media.

I will then talk about the repercussions that the radically changing cycle of media as we know it will have on my role as a professional media-maker and influencer.

I believe the key components to participating as a peer in the network are:

Trackbacks 03

Apple gives us a run-down of the Oracle of Kevin Bacon we spent time discussing in the symposium this week. She explains that technology is bringing the world together and making it a smaller place. I think it’s so sad that the ‘unconnected’ are so easily forgotten in sweeping statements like this. Three of five people in the world still do not have access to the Internet. We are so easily blind to the reality of information inequality. As can be seen in the late modern world, access to the digital world is closely connected to power and who wields this power. The disparity between those who are ‘media rich’ and those who are ‘media poor’ raise issues of technological infrastructure, or lack thereof. It’s something I’m very interested in – the idea of information rich countries and information poor countries who might be disadvantaged by their inability to access  the online realm.

Kate talks all about copyright in her blog post, making a really interesting observation that so often copyright is discussed with negative connotations (such as copyright infringement, or copyright limitations). Instead, I’m on Lessig’s team and think we should be moving more towards a celebration of all that copyright can allow, especially in the field of creative commons which can contribute to some amazing cultural movements such as remix culture and rewrite culture.  

Nicola tackles the idea of technological neutrality – something I’m still grappling with myself. She thinks that technology is neutral, until picked up and used by a human. I think that it’s a lot more complex than this, with debates around technological determinism and the relationship between technology and culture continuing to stump me with each new reading.

Study study study

This week I want to have a look at how I study. I want to articulate what works for me and what doesn’t.

In one of our Network Media labs, Betty had us try a Pomodoro study session – that is, an intense, distraction-free, concentrated period of studying for 25 minutes, followed by a 5 minute break.

This is a technique I’ve been using for about a year now, after the Apple App WorkBurst was recommended to me by a friend. I find this type of study really effective because it is essentially reward-based, offering a break after a period of mental exertion. This kind of bargaining always works with me, and I generally use the five minute break to watch videos on YouTube or stretch my legs before returning to a period of intense work.

Next I want to talk about co-studying. This is a concept which I love. Basically, it involves two or more individuals meeting up to study alone, together. I have a few friends who I routinely call on for this kind of silent motivation. Having someone do the same activity as me makes me want to continue studying both for them and for myself. I usually like to do this kind of study at a cafe or in a library with friends.

Lastly, I wanted to mention the things about study which I find the hardest to do – and that is, put simply, just starting. This is the absolute, 100% most difficult part for me. It often results in me procrasti-sleeping, procrasti-eating, procrasti-cleaning and of course, procrasti-television-watching.

That’s when this generally comes in handy: