Potts’ ‘Introduction: ‘Culture’ and ‘Technology’ looks at the “complex relationship between culture and technology.” Technological advances have affected studies across the board, from medicine and sciences to new media art. Potts states that “new technologies have played a prominent role – from intellectual property to the changing notion of community.” This prompted a few thoughts. Firstly, the cultural pressures associated with ever evolving technologies and the perceived ‘need’ to have the latest and greatest version of everything – phones, tablets, cars etc. It also relates to something one of my Niki group members told me about; Silicon Valley companies buying intellectual property and patenting ideas (lots of ideas). So what does this me for me? Well, you may come up with a brilliant invention, something you believe is a completely original idea BUT… some company in Silicon Valley has already patented the idea. This company will then charge you a fee for your idea. Here is an article I found about this issue: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57496641-38/inside-intellectual-ventures-the-most-hated-company-in-tech/

For more Potts: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2324267

Unimportant Side Note
I was listening to Daft Punk’s ‘Lose yourself to dance’ while writing this post, hence the title.

In week 8’s tutorial we discussed ‘the long tail’ in more detail. The long tail is about the Internet but, also about the economics of the entertainment industry and how to make money. Traditional money making is dependent on popularity and getting hits. People are going through catalogs and discovering their preferences are much more niche than they originally thought. Now, through a series of links, peoples niches are becoming more specific. We discussed this in terms of music… you ‘like’ a band on Facebook, they link to a band that inspires them and so on. Adrian comments “This is why linking matters, it is how you build and nurture the long tail (and that the tail is where immense niche value lies).” Though your music list may be expanding, your preferences are not necessarily broadening. 

This was another interesting read from Barabasi. It began with a look at Italian Economist Vilfredo Pareto and his ‘80/20 Rule.’ This rule is based on one of Pareto’s empirical observations; “he noticed that 80 per cent of his peas was produced by only 20 per cent of the peapods.” Pareto found that “in most cases four-fifths of our efforts are largely irrelevant.” This has since, “morphed into a wide range of other truisms as well.” Though this rule can be applied to a lot of situations, it cannot be applied to all situations. It can, however, be applied to the Web – “80 per cent of links on the Web point to only 15 per cent of Webpages.”

Barabasi notes that the Web network isn’t heaps of random links but “many nodes with a few links only, and a few hubs with an extraordinarily large number of links.” He reasons that “the distribution of links on various Webpages precisely follows a mathematical expression called a power law.” Every time a 80/20 rule applies, there is a power law behind it. “A histogram following a power law is a continuously decreasing curve, implying that many small events coexist with a few large events.” Different from a bell curve, it “does not have a peak.”

Barabasi states that “in a continuous hierarchy there is no single node which we could pick out and claim to be characteristic of all nodes . . . This is the reason my research group started to describe networks with power-law degree distribution as scale-free.”

Learn more: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2301020

Barabasi’s ‘Rich Get Richer’ looks at the role of power laws on the Web (likening it to Hollywood), and hubs. Barabasi said he realised that “the Web [and its power laws] was by no means special at all” and instead, “some universal law or mechanism must be responsible” for power distribution. This ‘universal law’ “could potentially apply to all networks.”

Barabasi proposes Model A and then highlights its insufficiency. In Model A, all the nodes which make up the web have an equal chance to be linked to but, not all are linked too. Thus, there are “winners and losers.” This contradicts Erdos and Renyi who contend that all nodes in a network are equal. He explains that “the first nodes in model A will be the richest, since these nodes have the longest time to collect links.” Say for example, Meryl Streep would have more links then a Hollywood newbie like Elle Fanning. But, “while the early nodes were clear winners, the exponential form predicted that they are too small and there are too few of them. Therefore, Model A failed to account for the hubs and connectors. It demonstrated, however, that growth alone cannot explain the emergence of power laws.”

Barabasi also makes the point that the Web, and Hollywood, isn’t static. Conversely, the number of nodes in a network is always growing. The Web began with a few web pages, and Hollywood began with a small number of actors and silent films. Again, he contradicts Erdos and Renyi and their “random universe.” Barabasi reasons that we don’t link to nodes randomly but, choose from a list (as with Google) or are attracted by advertising. “The Webpages to which we prefer to link are not ordinary nodes. They are hubs. The better known they are, the more links point to them. The more links they attract, the easier it is to find them on the Web and so the more familiar we are with them.” This highlights that our decision making is based on preferential attachment – which page has more people linked to? Barabasi importantly notes that “preferential attachment induces a rich-get-richer phenomenon.” He finds that “real networks are governed by two laws: growth and preferential attachment.”

For more: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2301022

Watts looks at networks and their history in ‘Six Degrees.’ He writes that “the networks we will actually be dealing with can be represented in almost comical simplicity by dots on a piece of paper, with lines connecting them.” He concedes that some of the complexities regarding certain connections will be lost but “we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and techniques . . . that we might never have been able to answer had we gotten bogged down in all the messy details.”

Watts also takes a look at the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory. This theory proposes that everyone is six steps away from any other person in the world. ‘It’s a small’ world is one of those sayings I first heard used by my parents, now I am guilty of using it. It is true though. Every time a family member or friend goes away, they bump into so and so who went to school with . . . so and so whose best friends with my old neighbour . . . so and so who knows my orthodontist’s brother in law etc. You get my point don’t you? It seems that wherever you are in the world, there is someone who knows someone you know. I can’t help but wonder, with the onslaught of communication technology, are people even three steps away from each other? It is infinitely easy to connect with people, even those you haven’t seen in fifty years or who live on the opposite side of the world. In this new age of technology, our network of relationships is larger than ever before.

This was a long, but straightforward read. Watts poses many questions and provides limited answers, he forces you to think. For more: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2272418

chris anderson makes some interesting points about networks and audience in ‘the long tail’

“the future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets”
anderson contends that your focus shouldn’t be on reaching the largest audience, instead it she be on reaching a specific audience and forming a connection with them

anderson believes people wrongly assume that “if people wanted it, surely it would be sold”
entertainment or whatever else you are providing needs to be accessible. it needs to be affordable and people must know how and where to find it. otherwise you won’t get an audience 

“we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did”
anderson is highlighting the power of the world wide web to connect people and cross geographical boundaries. entertainment media now has a much larger reach 

check it out: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2255470

The extract from J. Douglas’ ‘The End of Books – Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives’ looks at interactive narratives. I likened these to ‘choose you own adventure’ narratives in a previous post and Adrian corrected me – “hypertext is multilinear, whereas choose your own adventure is linear, with different linear options.” Interactive narratives still don’t appeal to me but apparently there are many people who “desire for the inexhaustible story, the mystery that unspools with a fresh cast of suspects instead of gliding quickly through its denouncement to a limited conclusion.” “The book that changes every time you read it” simply doesn’t appeal to me like it does to Douglas. Like Adrian, Douglas makes a clear distinction – “Yet this is no simple ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ scenario where readers can see for themselves that they have exhausted whatever possibilities the narrative held.” Does this mean that the possibilities/endings are endless? Adrian addressed this in a post (thankfully).

Despite the appeal of reading digital hypertext, Douglas says “it is hardly likely that digital media like hypertext are going to supersede books.” I appreciate this stance. I am so sick of people saying things like books are dead or journalists are a dying breed. Humans, like technologies, will adapt and evolve depending on society’s needs. Someone will always be needed to report the news. Douglas used the example of television looking for a niche with the advent of cinema. They found it in video tapes, taking the cinema and putting it on the small screen. Similarly “books as a technology have evolved over the course of hundreds of years through innovations life spacing between words, tables of contents and indices, standardized spelling and grammar etc.” “If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology.”

For the full extract: The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives

This week we took another look at George Landow’s ‘Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalisation.’ Here is something I found useful

“Hypertext narrative clearly takes a wide range of forms best understood in terms of a number of axes, including those formed by degrees or ratios of

1. reader choice, intervention, and empowerment
2. inclusion of extra linguistic texts (images, motion, sound)
3. complexity of network structure
4. degrees of multiplicity and variation in literary elements, such as plot, characterisation, setting, and so forth”

I like that Landow talks of ‘degrees or ratios’ of form. This way the different forms don’t become too limiting.

Prior to this reading, I would imagine a jumbled mind map whenever the work hypertext popped up. Perhaps this was due to a limited understanding of the concept, but I thought information could become easily lost within hypertext. This, however, was cleared up for me when Landow stated that “hypertext, the argument goes, makes certain elements in these works stand out for the first time.” This isn’t a surprise when you think about the potential of links to highlight information.  “This approach therefore uses hypertext as a lens, or a new agent of perception, to reveal something previously unnoticed.”

For more: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2234767

The extract from George Landow’s ‘Hypertext 3.0’ was very long. Luckily, it was straightforward and contained useful information regarding blogging. Landow notes that blogging hasn’t created a new style of writing. It is the same style that has been used in diaries and journals for centuries, it is just the medium within which this writing occurs that has changed. He says that blogging encourages hypertextuality and allows “the active reader-author envisaged by Nelson.” More so than ever, the reader is an active participant. They choose what to read and when, and can leave comments or post links regarding what they have read. Landow writes that hypertext “moves the boundary of power away from the author in the direction of the reader.” This statement makes me a bit uneasy. It is true that allowing readers to leave feedback and comments on your blog, places them in a position of power. As much as I like the idea of receiving feedback, I only really want positive feedback. I suppose I could settle for constructive criticism but receiving ‘hate’ can come along with this. Once you allow comments or participation, you are opening yourself up to the unknown and have therefore lost some power. Correctly, Landow states that the web is an “antihierarchical medium of information.”

For the full extract follow this link: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2214098

Jay David Bolter redefines writing as a technology in ‘Writing Space.’ Bolter seeks to “broaden our definition of technology to include skills as well as machines.” After reading this extract, it seems obvious that writing is a technology. “Even if the capacity for language is innate . . . Writing is certainly not innate.” Writing is a skill that involves learning and practice before it can become second nature.

To illustrate his point, Bolter looks at the history of economies of writing. Writing materials and techniques have always varied between cultures. The Egyptians etched hieroglyphics into stone, whereas the Sumerians adopted a wedge-shaped stylus which they etched into clay. Today, English speaking cultures have adopted an alphabet and write horizontally across the page. Conversely, the Japanese use characters and write vertically.

An important distinction is made between hard and soft structures. Bolter defines hard structures as “tangible qualities of the materials of writing,” such as stone. “Soft structures are those visually determined units and relationships that are written on or in the hard structures.” This includes characters or symbols drawn, painted or etched into the hard structures.

Bolter goes on to address how electronic technologies have changed the conditions of writing. He contends that new electronic structures “constitute perhaps the greatest single technological change in the history of writing.” These new hard structures take away from the connection between the words and the reader. “The author no longer writes on the page, but must instead work through layers of technology and a number of middlemen.” Online, language is coded, re-coded and decoded before it reaches the reader. But, electronic hard structures also provide rapid access to writing and ensure long periods of storage. Like all technological advances, there are pros and cons.

Follow this link for the reading: http://vogmae.dropmark.com/133224/2214097