Month: August 2013

Beta Unsymposium 0.3

Adrian Miles

Back on, Tuesday, 12.5.2. Hopefully full complement. We have carry over questions due to the industrial action of last Tuesday:

In other news, in other labs this week work to date in niki will be critiqued, and then further developed (next week the next lot of topics will be distributed). Readings have been updated, Adrian saw a platypus (alive) in the Yarra at Templestowe, and these are the very good questions from Friday’s class for the symposium:

  • how does hypertext relate to storytelling in different media formats?
  • is the work we publish online only validated once it is viewed/consumed by others?
  • do you think the digitalisation of literary texts and the use of the E-reader will eventually replace the physical book completely?

And we have bonus questions from one of the Thursday classes:

  • Does the traditional essay no longer hold value in eduction?
  • What method of essay writing should be taught in schools? Is creativity the priority?
  • Could hypertext be a substitute for referencing?
  • Has writing improved or worsened with technology?
  • What do you think will be the consequences of electronic writing?

Endings

Adrian Miles

Brittany, in what I take to be comments on the Douglas reading, gets the idea that if a work is multilinear then the idea of ‘the end’ becomes, well, problematic. (And I find this very hard to explain without a hypertext fiction that I might know you will have read.) So the end might be programmatically defined (the hypertext ends based on some procedural rules, which could be anything, since they’re procedural – think game play), it could be structural (after x things in a particular way, it ends, though if you start again and go different ways, you may find next time you can proceed through the earlier end, or not even see it, so now obviously there is more than one ending, which returns to the problem of what is ‘the end’ here), or it could be the reader, for whatever reason, has decided they’re read enough.

Six Degrees

Adrian Miles

Shannen describing what we call a small world network. This is what we are going to be reading about in weeks 6 and 7 or thereabouts. As we have said each week, the world is now very small, and what you do, even here, matters if you want it to. The point from Shannen’s example is not that it sort of ‘flaked’ but it happened because of the things already discussed. A passion, engagement, and so a reputation is developed over time, which is then of value to others.

Hypertext Cities

Adrian Miles

Louisa likens a hypertextual story that changes each time you read it to visiting a city every couple of years. At first I thought, woah, the scale seems a bit, well odd. Then I thought about it, and at least for me it is the small differences, along with the big, that make up change in the city. That tower over there, different. A big thing? Sort of, for itself, but in the scheme of the entire city, nah, it’s a small thing. So if I think of a city as something big and complex but it is actually made up of very specific, different, local bits (that suburb, that street in that suburb, even that shop on that street in that suburb), then it is a good way to ‘get’ what the hypertext theory is about. The entire work is the city. But it isn’t any one thing, and there are, oh, how many ways to make my way through this city? But it’s still the city, isn’t it? Gee, the more you think with it, the better an example it becomes.

What is Networked Media?

Adrian Miles

There is a shape to the course (perhaps that introduction of the boat just let everyone assume there is no agency, anywhere?) and the intro to the readings that don’t have to be done for a week or two yet might help. We are laying the bricks or foundations or ideas or words or theories or concepts for what the deep structure of the network is. It is all about structure. Structure I define as a pattern. So what is the pattern of the Web (and at the moment we’re really only worried about the Web, email, FTP, gopher, BBS, RTSP, forums, virtual worlds, MMORPGs and so on, won’t fit in, this is not a survey of the internet circa 2013 but what is its deep shape)

06 Reading (for week 7)

Adrian Miles

The structure so far has been to begin with things on education and learning. This was because a) we want to try to do some things differently so needed some context as to why, b) the easiest and most effective way to provide you with the experience of disruption is to disrupt what you have been taught to take for granted. (We want to give you the experience of disruption for two reasons. The first is that a lot of learning happens when things that we take for granted are ‘made strange’ or unfamiliar, it is a way to make visible our assumptions and values. The over is that the internet is a disruptive technology in relation to heritage (industrial, pre-internet) media, and I want you to learn that the internet is both exciting but also in many ways eroding, the very industries you aspire to.

Then we moved to design fiction. This was a way to move from learning as saying what I already know to learning as being an investigation of what might be, including what I don’t yet know. Learning as a casting forward rather than a relying back to what I have already learned. Design fiction is also a very useful concept in relation to ways of engaging with change, technology, and the social. Sort of big ticket items for the network.

Then we have begun some pre-internet readings (Bush, Nelson). In both cases there is a utopian vision of technology that wants it to augment intelligence. This is a big deal. In the west, for example, the ‘robot’ tends to be always bad (it’s hard to find a film in the west where a robot is not actually going to kill us), and this in many quite real ways has hindered ideas and development (in the east there is a very different view, for example something as simple as Astro Boy shows a completely different view of robots, they have rights, they help, and it is generally only evil people who mistreat robots). So, computers could have gone the same way, always about to miscalculate and send the plane into the mountain, turning the car’s brakes off when you want them on, and your finance’s always at risk of a computer glitch. We trust computers, well, enough to let them fly our planes, manage our financial flows, and do a huge amount of diagnostic work in medicine. Hence Bush and Nelson matter because here you can see an approach that believed every person should have a computer because it would augment your ability to know and do. In 1970 (Nelson) this is an extraordinary vision, and one that is deeply grounded in the belief that intelligence, learning and making knowledge are the foundations of the human.

This segue into hypertext proper. Why. Lots of reasons. Hypertext existed before the Web, and so largely prefigures what the web is beginning to become (there are things I can do in a 1995 hypertext program, simple things, that the Web still cannot do). Hypertext theory, which comes out of the humanities and so is our province, has a lot to say about the ways in which digital media asks different questions for us about what an author is, a reader, and a text. So in hypertext we find the first real questioning, in sophisticated ways, of these things. In the same way hypertext has (still) most of the best ideas around multilinearity in relation to narrative, including not only what happens to stories in multilinear environments, but also how to go about making them. This is not a technical problem of software (that would be like thinking learning how to write a good essay is about learning how to make ink and paper), but about the problem of voice and structure. These readings will also matter in second year, because there we make hypertextual video works, but even though it is visible, the principals are exactly the same (and understood much better by the hypertext community than by the interactive video mob).

Finally, hypertext, as the idea of text made up of small chunks with different, multiple, possible connections between them, even though it describes possibly a single work, also describes the structure of the Web. This is Weinberger’s ‘small pieces loosely joined’, where he’s not talking about hypertext at all. In other words hypertext is a great model for thinking about the deep structure of the Web more broadly. So it’s a great place from which to begin.

Which brings us to this week, and probably next. These readings are about the network as a particular sort of structure. For me, this is a small step from hypertext, it is still about small more or less independent parts (a blog post, a node in a hypertext fiction), which now happen to be people, and about how they are connected to each other. The ideas here, the principals, are exactly the same that hypertext (and Ted Nelson) rely on and argue for. It is about many to many and one to many relations, and what sorts of ‘patterns’ then happen in such systems, and more importantly the consequences of these patterns. It is why there can be memes, things go viral (diseases, ideas, and YouTube clips) and why social media is possible. Remember, it is the same sort of ‘pattern’ that hypertext described.

So the readings are making a shape and a trajectory across an idea of what the network is. Generally the intent of it is to help us, it requires imagination, it is made up of loose small bits with lots of ways to connect, and disconnect, them, whether this be people, pages, likes, blogs, or tweets.

Networked Structures and Consequences

There will be some more reading from Watts, but for now this is just the introduction to this very readable book. As an introduction it doesn’t provide that many answers, but it has a great set of questions and problems and why they might matter. This is a book largely dedicated to the problem of how things move through networks, whether that be disease, information, or people. Turns out they all move in much the same way.
Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. London: Vintage, 2003. Print. (Extract, PDF)

Chris Anderson wrote an entire book about this. This though is an earlier article, same idea, just smaller. In this he is describing what Watt’s describes as a ‘power law distribution’, which it turns out is one of the characteristics of the sort of network that the Web is. While Watt’s discusses this in a variety of theoretical and sociological ways (he’s a sociologist who did his PhD with a mathematician) Anderson, in typical North American Silicon Valley joy, goes straight to the marketing come financial implications. It is, though, a key point, and is one of the reasons why blogs a) have a staggeringly large readership, and b) why a blog with only a few readers still matters.

Anderson, Chris. “The Long Tail.” Wired. Oct. 2004. Web. 23 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

Douglas

Adrian Miles

Samuel thinks the Douglas makes more sense than the Landow, and moves into the Barthes‘ famous essay on the Death of the Author. In a nutshell, it is the reader who makes a text, not the author, with the author subject to history, genre, language, the text (yes) and, the reader.

Making

Adrian Miles

Lauren on how the essay means ‘to try’. The essay is where you think in the writing and so is fluid, personal, subjective, but also uses evidence and makes an argument. The best work is highly erudite, yet personable. This doesn’t necessarily easy to read, but it has a voice which is grounded in a life world of a writing-thinkerer, so that writing is the lab or studio of ideas learning to dance, rather than reporting of some research that has happened somewhere else. It’s the difference between following a recipe slavishly because you don’t get how foods and flavours work, versus, well, getting that cooking is a game of anthropomorphic organic chemistry. What’s it got to do with the subject. We are taking this as a way to approach entries in niki. As a place to think in, not just report. That letting writing become the space of thinking is a good rule of thumb for a good blog. That in the subject we are trying some ideas and they will take us places. That the internet is a great big ideas bank, engine, swamp, so while it is good for answers, to go with its flow is not just to make answers but to ask better questions, and to begin to build connections between otherwise or once separated things. Finally, in this course you all know how to write (because of the English score you need to get in) so I know I can use writing as a way to get at other ideas, because you all ‘get’ writing, though you aren’t particularly aware you do. Writing is the way most of us make, all the time, blogging is just making. As is niki. Making is how the network happens.

Networked Me

Adrian Miles

Rebecca thinks a lot more about Wesch’s comment that every time we tag a photo, and so on, “we are teaching the machine”. Absolutely. FaceBook is so valuable not because so many use it, but because it can farm what we do and use that data to make new knowledge for marketing, and sell that. So every like, dislike, ad we click, literally adds to the ‘intelligence’ of their systems and their financial value. It is our behaviour, accumulated and then ‘flipped’ into data, then knowledge, that FaceBook relies upon. The social front end is just a siphon for the other stuff, the same way a supermarket loyalty card is just a small price to pay to know exactly what products you buy, how often, when (and of course where you shop and where you live). We leave media trails today, FaceBook is a closed community to catch as many of your media trails as possible (video, places you visit, photos, likes, posts, friendships), and to make money from them. This is one consequence of what we call a ubiquitous network. The network, unlike a book, is always with you. Ready.

To Essay

Adrian Miles

Imogen wonders about all that she learnt in high school being wrong. Not all, but the essay is turned into a dead thing. The essay is a living thing. Hypertext is a living thing because it lets you write and read by following and making rivers (just read the Nelson again as an ideas stream trying to be literally realised on a book), one reason I did the work on teaching was to make this something present to everyone. Now I’m doing it with what we think writing is. Hypertext does the same with what we think narrative is. Denham joins the Graham reading on the essay with the role of the blog, which is one of the reasons Graham might speculate that the web could see a golden age of the essay (though now we have Medium where there is some very high quality essaying going on), in particular the importance of the essay as a form of thinking where you think out loud. This is a writing where you do the thinking in the writing, not somewhere else and then report on what you thunked. Daniel provides the crib reading notes of key takeaways. Which reminds me, the form of the subject, its shape and style, is essayist in the way that Graham describes in the reading. It is following some ideas, not necessarily defending positions, which is perhaps why it is difficult for students, used to being trained to defend positions and therefore told the positions that matter, to get a hold on. Ideas are always slippery, particularly if you bother to listen to them.

Torika picks up some points, that other forms of writing might matter too. Perhaps, but language is the stuff we have to think with, so the essay becomes the place where thinking can and does happen. So it matters simply for that. On other hand, while the ‘traditional’ essay might help develop organised thinking for me this is precisely the problem. Why is organised thinking important? This becomes a tautological argument because it turns out organised thinking is useful if you need to write organised essays. But if you think that connection, complexity and how thickly things join is important, which you really can’t ‘organise’ (which is one of the ways in which creativity and innovation happens – they’re its ingredients if you like) then being organised isn’t so useful anymore. This matters simply because high school and then university privileges this idea of being able to ‘order’ and so those who are very smart, but have highly cluttered minds, struggle. As Einstein said (a famously disorganised thinker) “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”