Free OS, another inversion of how we think media industries work. The Age’s (though it comes from Mashable) article does an good job of how disruptive and upside down this is.
Then there is Tile. This is just an elegant, stunning idea about to happen. I would love to teach a studio where we rethink what or how to make a story beginning from a concept like this. One day.
Excellent post about Twitter etiquette. These are rules of thumb for all social media. This is what we mean by a social protocol.
Where a potted history of the subject is offered, we touch on unresolved questions, and try to answer, or at least ruminate upon, the experience that may, or may not, have happened over these common twelve weeks.
The slides:
Substitute ‘journalism’ for any other heritage media in this story and it is identical. The opening paragraph sums up this subject. The Guardian is doing well in the digital domain and they do not want to employ people who think the digital is just a computer. This subject is network media because digital media is now a tautology. The Guardian is doing well not because they moved to digital, but they moved to the network as a scale free, distributed network. For those of you that have started to get your ‘blogs’ you’re already better equipped for the interview here than the print journalist described. (And read what she writes about the Guardian in Australia and their success because there’s a gap in the market precisely because traditional media here does not understand this new time.)
Torika wondering what is meant by ‘culture‘ and ‘technology‘. Tony has some observations from the Potts and Murphy and how culture and technology now intertwined. Courtney on technology, culture, and technique.
These are small robots that have the capacity to self assemble into ‘architectural’ forms. This is a very big change, and while we can get all whatever about tech determinism the key thing I’d take from it is that it is a networked/distributed model of organisation. Small pieces that only know enough to do enough, rather than our older intellectual models which assumed you needed to know all of something to be able to do anything. For example software companies once thought you needed a very strict design document to write code, but agile development showed that wasn’t the case. Then software companies thought you needed centralised command and control to write any major software, open source development demonstrated that that is not the case. Companies once thought that the top of the organisation had to be in charge of all, and that is no longer the case, and in education we once thought the teacher had to know all and somehow just communicate this to students. Likewise, the internet as a scale free network just happened, and just happens, with no central command and control decision making. This is a big theoretical change in how we understand the world, a move from centres (the brain, one part of the brain, some sort of dominating ideology or institution) to realising that there aren’t really centres (to the body, to the brain, to the world).
Carry over questions:
This week’s new questions:
A speculative piece that comes from the point of view of art to close out the semester:
Dietz, Steve. “Ten Dreams of Technology.” Leonardo 35.5 (2002): 509–522. MIT Press Journals. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. (PDF)
Why art? Because artists know how to think about the materiality of the digital, that it isn’t just virtual and abstract, that it has concrete qualities that matter. Why does this matter to you? Because to ‘get’ the network it is not enough to play on it, or use it, but you need to understand it in a deeper sense.
Weird examples to help explain. Do you know of any racing car driver who doesn’t have a deep understanding of cars, engines, tyres, and of course driving – they don’t just drive. Do you know of any dancer that doesn’t have a deep understanding of different sprung floors, points, slippers, shoes, ankles, knees, their own bodies and muscles? Do you know any film maker who doesn’t have a deep understanding of composition, miss-en-scene, light, space, time, and performance? It is part of trying to move past thinking that doing something on the interwebs means we understand the interwebs. In the same way that just because you know how to drive a car doesn’t mean you ‘understand’ cars.