The symposium reminded me of two cringey Internet moments.
The first, which I shared with most people I’m sure was the disaster of Kony 2012. I remember psyching myself to even buy a supporter pack (luckily never went through with that one), preparing to ‘cover the night’ and even going so far as to post a Facebook status showing my support (a big deal for me as someone who rarely gives much of my personal opinion on a platform like Facebook, preferring to go nuts with Twitter and WordPress, getting away with anything due to relatively low follower counts).
I was totally devastated when the guy who started the whole Kony thing, the one with the cute blonde kid called Jeffrey or something who was in that arty video they put together, was found naked and urinating in the street a few days later. Alongside the poor guy’s dignity, the entire movement came crashing down around him and exposed as a scam. Instead of becoming the leader of a world movement, he was somebody to be seriously ridiculed, as the majority of the population tried to come to terms with the fact that they had just been scammed, hardcore.
The whole thing reminded me of another occasion of ‘Can we really trust the Internet?’, that played out earlier this year. Among my family (and yes, I write about my family waaay too much), Christopher Pyne is probably not the first person we’d be inviting to our next dinner party.
Without going too far into it, I’m sure you can understand my glee and disbelief back in May when every Twitter or Facebook newsfeed I could lay eyes on was practically screaming out the fact that Christoper Pyne had just called Bill Shorten a c*** within parliament. After checking TheVine.com.au for back up, I rushed home from uni or work or whatever to tell Pyne’s number one anti-supporter, my mother, all about what I’d just read.
She was as gleeful as they come with the news, but after that evening’s 7.30 Report and the following morning’s Age refraining from mentioning the debacle at all, she began questioning me about my sources.
‘The internet’s just faster than TV,’ was the rather pathetic response I grunted back at her comments about the lack of coverage on the 7.30 Report (admitting mistakes to my mother is very far from one of my favourite activities). Somehow, this turned into something of a mini-argument, with my mother arguing for the sake of traditional, reliable media and myself stepping into the ring to defend the manifold benefits of the internet’s instant access.
By the time The Age rolled around with nothing to say on the topic, I had rechecked the Internet and sure enough, the C word had not been chucked around in parliament. Instead, Pyne had reportedly called Shorten a “grub” (what is up with that??), and the footage/sound recording had been altered to make one four letter word sound a lot more like another four lettered word. This had been posted on the Internet and then shared around like wildfire, scamming all of us Internet disciples through even our most trusted blogs. (Am I allowed to suggest that the rapidity with which such a story was shared around might be able to shed light on a nation’s growing mutual opinion of a certain Education Minister?)
Moral of the story: Don’t believe everything you see (on the internet). And stop using Wikipedia to back you up in debates!!
Adrian posted a link to the article ‘The Novel is Dead (This Time it’s for Real)’,
written by author Will Self and published in The Guardian that confirms some of my long harboured fears. (You can read the article here).
My father is a diagnosed workaholic, but before he was that, he was a boy growing up in a highly dysfunctional family in Melbourne’s outer Eastern suburbs in the 60s and 70s. His mother was a young Italian woman, 20 years younger than her husband, who could fly off the handle at any moment, chasing her three children around the sun room with a feather duster before clutching each child to her chest violently and sobbing about how much she loved them. For all her eccentricities, she valued family above all else, which is partly why she remained in a difficult and likely loveless marriage to a deaf and reclusive war veteran for over 50 years.
On the seemingly innocent Peacock St where my father grew up, dysfunction seemed to be a common theme behind closed doors. Throughout the 20 years he spent living on that street, he gathered information about all that went on from eavesdropping on whispered evening exchanges between neighbours, or gleaning what he could from the ambulances parked temporarily across the road.
He has since relayed these stories to his own children, which is how I know about the alcoholic who shot his wife and then himself at the kitchen table after finishing a pint of VB, or the charming and well known restauranteur who hung himself from his wardrobe railings.
Behind the manicured rose bushes and cups of tea shared between neighbours, children running under sprinklers in the stinking heat and drives around Burwood in my grandfather’s powder blue Valiant, backs sticking to the tan leather and seatbelts rubbing on necks, it seems my father grew up in a melting pot of simmering discontent.
These stories have entertained, educated, moved and enlightened us as Dad’s told them throughout the years, his unique wit and knack for timed exaggeration taking the downright disturbing to pointedly comical. And with every story about what went on, either from his own family or the families that he grew up among, he’s promised to one day get it all down and write a memoir that captures an era of such unique dysfunction and preserves it forever.
Thinking about my father’s memoir, currently nowhere near to being physically manifested, I can imagine it so clearly that it feels as if it already exists. It is so important to me to have this piece of history captured and represented in ink and paper, a history of my family and a history of a bizarre subset of humanity, and I can visualise so much of it on the page typed out in my father’s witty, dry prose, that the idea of it not eventuating feels very foreign.
When I imagine holding this book, seeing its cover, passing its spine in the Australian fiction section of Readings Carlton, one thing is very clear. It is not a story made for a kindle, or an iPad, or any type of e-Reader that you might watch middle aged women hold close to their chests on the train, blushing slightly at the racier parts of 50 Shades of Grey. That is a novel to be read electronically. I can also cope with any children’s series, university textbooks, any type of manual, crappy fem-lit crime fiction or anything by Dan Brown.
I will never be able to come to terms with reading for pleasure on anything that doesn’t let me turn its pages by hand. If there’s no potential for paper cut related eye watering, there’ll be no tears of another sort either.
If what Will Self is saying is really really for real, the idea that I will never be able to read my father’s unborn memoir in a non-computer format saddens me more than I can say.
Reading 04.2 amazed me for Vannevar Bush’s ability in 1945, to imagine a totally fantastical and likely preposterous (for the time) point of advancement of the humble camera, and yet without ever considering the then unheard of digital possibilities. It is incredible to think that someone could look so far ahead, considering and rectifying every possible technical impediment, without ever considering any other potential for digital possibility. It makes me wonder how far along the process of invention we must currently sit, and whether there is potential for some new, unimaginable dimension or way of thinking that will revolutionise our day to day lives.
Reading 04.3 reminded me of not only the endless positive potential of the Internet, but also of its dangers. Working in the youth sector part time, I am often witness to tales of cyber bullying, online harassment and exactly how easy it is to be somebody you’re not online. Being somebody you’re not online ranges from extremes as with the case of Michael Campbell, to 16 year old girls who present an image of themselves online so far removed from reality that they begin to get confused between which version of themselves is the truth, their day to day life or the characters they portray online.
It also reminded me of that website Second Life, where grown men and women have affairs, gamble their life savings and even take drugs through an online platform. What is the difference between a physical affair and one conducted online? Is the former really that much worse than the latter? Each represent a disconnect from reality, a checking out of commitment, and a need to distract from the mundanity of day to day existence. In a way, I find a physical affair is easier to understand, for its need to fulfil a carnal desire, rather than a fabricated, 2-Dimensional experience, a love affair with a screen.
Much like that film Knocked Up, where a woman is convinced her husband is cheating on her, only to find he is secretly part of a Fantasy Baseball league. How can these flawed attempts to replicate reality possibly come to fill the holes represented by the real thing?
The idea of talking to somebody I don’t know very well on a platform such as Facebook Chat makes me nervous. How do I convey tone, sense of humour, how much attention I’m paying, body language etc. etc. through text in a box? I don’t know how to put myself through the screen, to transport my body and my voice and my opinions through my screen, through the links and nodes and intricate networks of the Internet and present myself on somebody else’s. I have not mastered how to communicate with somebody when I cannot see their reaction, cannot read their eyes or listen to their laughter, watch their brain tick over as they come up with a response.
So while the Internet fascinates and excites and empowers with each new advancement, I also worry like many before me for the fate of human interaction.
To Be Continued, and hashed out properly…
The first thing that caught my eye in Nelson’s writing was the inclusion of this quote by Annie Dillard:
Whenever a work’s structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.
I loved the structuring of the book and the comparison it draws to hypermedia, the internet and the workings of the human mind. It reminded me instantly of VCE Psychology, and learning about nodes and neural pathways within the brain (although I seem to be able to recall very little of this topic..). My very vague recollection points to many varyingly discombobulated pathways that take us from one thought to another, and the idea that we can take many different pathways to arrive at the same destination, much like with the internet as a mode for gathering information.
What I really loved about Nelson’s writing however, was his ability to make computer programming seem sexy – or at least, sexier – a topic that (until this course), I had never given a second thought. The possibilities are urgent, exciting and personal and from Nelson’s perspective, present an opportunity for fulfilment of the individual; physically, psychologically and emotionally, rather than simply an opportunity for corporate advantage.
Nelson writes of three approaches to the oncoming computer era. There are those who like the incompatibility and complication, and say it is the new world and that we must learn to live with it. Others, already hating computers, correctly dread these matters and hope vainly to stop the computer tide. Nelson’s suggestion of a third approach, is one that unifies and organises in the right way, so as to clarify and simplify our computer and working lives, and indeed to bring literature, science, art and civilisation to new heights of understanding, through hypertext.
While it is difficult to imagine a version of myself alive in 1980 with an opinion on this oncoming computer tide, I can only imagine that a piece such as Literary Machines would have quelled any of my lingering doubts or apathy. As a 21 year old in 2014 whose mind instantly goes on holiday at the mention of anything vaguely scientific or technological, Nelson’s ability to focus on the advantages for the individual, particularly within other arenas such as literature or art, his ability to convey urgency and his expression of political frustrations may have been just the things to get me going in the early 80’s.
Adrian’s essay saddened and excited me at the same time. It saddened me in the same way that the knowledge that I am a part of the last generation to have avoided having their baby photos taken on iPhones makes me weep for my parents’ quilted cover glossy albums soon to be a thing of the past. Perhaps as a result of being way too obsessed with Puberty Blues, there is this weird part of me that pines for a past analogue era and a 70s aesthetic. The increasing irrelevance of print literacy makes me want to revisit the library of my old primary school and relearn the Dewey Decimal System for the sake of preserving a lost language. (Let me take a second to note that the greater my exhaustion, the freer the cliches flow. I apologise.)
Having expressed my love for the old skool, let me make it clear that I also find the ever changing, connective nature of the topic and greater industry extremely exciting. The concept of the ‘produser’ clearly distinguishes networked media from any form of media that has come before it, and it is fascinating to consider the topic almost as its own living and breathing organism, that is changing before our very eyes. It is exhilarating to consider ourselves a part of this constantly changing hub of communication and connectivity, and to realise that we have the power to consume and contribute simultaneously. The below quote summed this up perfectly for me.
Through such sharing the distinction between consuming and creating content dissolves so unlike books in network literacy we become peers in the system, and indeed to be ‘good’ at network literacies is to contribute as much as it is to consume.
The essay also put Elliot’s description of the course into a little more perspective. It is scary to realise that by the time I will be graduating, much of what I’ve learned is likely to have become irrelevant. As such, I understand that the focus of the course will centre on becoming an effective “peer within the system”, a good “networker” if you will, rather than focusing solely on technical and potentially non-permanent aspects of the subject.
Creative Commons reminds me of when I was in high school and I got to stay at a friend’s house on the weekend whose mum was a “cool mum” and let us go to the parties my own mum banned outright (“Just let me speak to the person whose having the party’s parents and get a confirmation there will be enough parental supervision” – yeah, right.) I knew that my own mum was protecting me for a reason, just when she insisted on taking it that far it became pretty limiting and unnecessary. Having said that, a lot of the time the party wasn’t even worth the effort of convincing my mother to let me stay at said friend’s house, and I probably would have been better off home in bed watching season 1 of The OC for the millionth time.
Until this week’s readings on Creative Commons, I had no idea just how protected I actually was. I thought that whatever I posted on my (other) WordPress account was free to be stolen and/or manipulated by whoever saw fit and that there was little I could do about that. So it was kind of nice to find out that there are Internet Police protecting me from that kind of thing.
But the thing is, due to the extremely small pool of people who actually read my blog, (hi, mum), the idea that anybody out there in the Internet universe might have stumbled upon it and found anything worth reposting or referencing in even the most obscure way kind of appeals to me in a really big way. Of course, it’d be great if they did the simple thing and just asked for permission, but beggars/choosers etc.
So Creative Commons presents itself to me as a pretty efficient solution to my blogging mini-drama.
However, my next expression of apathy comes along as I question whether its really worth it acquiring a Creative Commons licence to plaster on my embarrassingly unused WordPress (when, lets face it, it’s never going to look as good as it did colour coded in texta to match the Kiwi bird it was representing). My blog stats show a solid 7 viewers over a 3 month period, so is this really something worth worrying about for me?
The first thing that came to mind when Elliot brought up HTML in the Week 2 tute was the 2 or 3 year period I spent honing the language to a fine art, without ever considering it may come in handy one day. This period refers to my early years of high school spent totally addicted to MySpace, but before I started thanking my 13 year old self for that surprising foresight I realised that every bit of knowledge I had gained about acquiring rainbow cursors that sprinkled fairy dust as you moved them across the screen had totally deserted me in the ensuing 8 years.
“Queen of MySpace” may or may not have been a term that was thrown around my year 7 cohort as I whispered magical proxy addresses to my classmates after our school wisely cottoned on and blocked the website. I was proud of my HTML, my fonts that flashed different colours in the early years and then the oh-so-cool minimalist approach I adopted towards the end. These days, influenced by the much less malleable Facebook I could barely insert a JPEG, let alone my once beloved GIFs.
As such, I highly enjoyed Week 2’s refresher on Hyper Text Mark-up Language, and can now:
Insert photos
Create links to other webpages/sections within the blog
Create a homepage
Upload videos
Maybe by next week I’ll even have my rainbow cursor back!!!
Reflecting on this week’s lecture, my main take away from the content is the concept of beginning, middle and end, and whether it is possible (or even worthwhile) to compare the browsing of the internet with the browsing of print material.
While I am not overly convinced with the usefulness of making such a comparison, I think it is a mistake to relate browsing the internet in its entirety with picking up and finishing a singular book. The comparison in my mind exists between the internet as a whole, and an imaginary library consisting of every book or item of print material ever published. I suppose you could go so far as to then compare one webpage to a single book, and compare the idea of browsing through different websites to choosing to read or refer to a certain book based on having enjoyed or found a similar book previously useful. One book leads you to pick up the next, in the same way that one might flick through various webpages on the internet.
In this way, the beginning/middle/end structure can apply to a singular webpage as from when you first open it until you click to exit. While you might not have read or seen everything contained on or within the website, it is not uncommon to have left a book unfinished, or only referenced it for the information you need.
There is no beginning, middle or end to the internet as a whole, just as there is none to the imaginary reading library I was talking about earlier. Each exist as oceans of information, and it is up to the individual to decide where they wish to enter*.
*Couldn’t bring myself to write “dive in”.
An image I took at The Peak in Hong Kong in June.
The photo is a link to my Tumblr account that I use as an online moodboard.