Barabási: Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forc...Read More
The big Lev Manovich: Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form”. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Vesna, Victoria, ed. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007...Read More
This is a site that has just garnered a lot of attention. It is presenting itself as an alternative to FaceBook and Twitter (app.net is also promoting itself as a Twitter alternative). The main differ...Read More
In last week’s symposium I mentioned, in passing, Bruno Latour and actor-network theory. These are complex areas, but in that long messy (they’re always messy if you actually want to deal ...Read More
No questions from classes this week. All classes have had a go, so for this week we are trying something different: each staff member is nominating a passage or idea from each of the readings to share...Read More
Mark Deuze is a key academic in the area of media and labour. I haven’t read this yet but suspect it is a good pointer of the sort of precarious labour that creative professionals very much find...Read More
Murphie and Potts identify some technologies as ‘neutral’ (as in reference to the gun violence debate). How does this apply to networked media and technologies? Can technologies be neutral...Read More
A continuing foray into the shapes of networks, particularly the sorts of shapes relevant to the internet. This is about power law distributions and small world networks. Which is a) why the internet ...Read More
Now we move to thinking about what sort of network the Web and Internet might be. Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. London: Vintage, 2003. Print. (Extract – PDF) Bara...Read More