Un-symposium Notes

  • Getting other people to contribute to your corporation eg. apps. in order to create more revenue
  • Open, universal and hopefully free- the web
  • Doesn’t seem like a cause that would benefit from being monetized
  • Free exchange of knowledge- anything that gets in the way
  • Patent trolls
  • Internet has a strong hippie background/ culture
  • Grateful Dead- rock band that allowed fans to record concerts and bootleg it, they had no concern with copyright etc.
  • Gift economy- freely donate stuff with no assumption of getting something in return
  • Every single protocol established on the web is owned by nobody
  • Protocols are public
  • Manners are a social protocol- no one owns them
  • Protocols are not private or ownable in the sense of property
  • Wikipedia- example of gift economy, entries done for free
  • Amazing resources that people can act for free
  • Building services that let people do these things rather than just producing the content
  • Freely donate information to Facebook- Facebook make billions and we don’t get a cent
  • Internet- distributed network
  • Unique network
  • If protocol was centralized and hierarchic it would fail
  • Everything is flat, equally far apart
  • I can send an email straight to David Bordwell, don’t have to go through his agent etc
  • Internet came out of academia
  • Facebook- harvest everything they know about you and sell it to advertising
  • RFC- request for comments
  • Anybody can respond and comment on an RFC
  • We want a new protocol that would….. this is how it should be implemented…. this is why
  • Radically different model to everything else
  • Overlap between old forms and more recent ones
  • Participatory culture- flourished through social media, real practices
  • Collaborative practices
  • Re-shaping of old forms in new contexts- this is a continual process
  • Physical books still exist even though there are E-Books everywhere, cross over, the co-exist
  • Restructuring old forms rather than replacing them
  • Internalize sense that someone could be watching you, monitoring your own behavior eg. commenting on Facebook

An Ever-Changing Story

When I think of a story that changes it’s shape every time you read it, I think of a city; in particularly a city that one does not visit too often.

My example could be Christchurch, New Zealand, somewhere I frequent once or twice every couple of years. Each time I visit Christchurch, it’s story is evolving, whether it be through my grandparents moving house, or through the earthquake that devastated the city centre.

Each time it tells me something different about itself and this is the example I come to when I think of an ever-evolving story. It could be telling the story of the banding together and strength of the community in rebuilding the city, even using shipping crates as restaurants (a pretty cool idea if you ask me). It could be telling me the story of the brisk winter that is just ending and the warm summer ahead.

I would be intrigued by a story that changed its shape each time I looked at it, as it would mean that it was an active entity that you could never get sick of. It would be fascinating to be able to explore different outcomes like in those movies where you can choose your own ending.

An ever-evolving story would be full of life, and in fact could be a metaphor for life and therefore I would be intrigued to see it happen.