Again, no lightbulb moments this week. I did the reading two weeks ago but I haven’t blogged about it so far, as I was busy doing the first assessment. I’m also busy freaking out about the next assessment which is pretty darn full on and other personal things that are happening next week and I’ve been planning for all summer. So anyway, excuses aside, here are the notes I took.
I had no choice but to miss the lecture today and I could not for the life of me understand the audio recording, so I’ve had to make do with the lecture slides from Adrian’s Dropmark and scouring the class blogs (thank you Ned, Michael and Denise!).
I was hoping that I would get a bit more elaboration on the reading Adrian set — chapter three from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life — but not so from what I gather from the lecture. On my first reading I, like almost everyone else I’ve noticed, struggled to understand what the hell was going on. I made precisely one note. To try and understand, I looked over the class blogs again for some help. They steered me on track a little but most people had only covered the beginning bits. I read it again and made some more notes. Today, I read it for a third time and took notes for the rest of it. I looked over the class blogs again. I formed some ideas. I’m not really sure how to go about this reading, so I’ve decided to simply copy out the notes I took and see if I can expand on my understanding of them.
…the dividing line no longer falls between work and leisure. These two areas of activity flow together. They repeat and reinforce each other.
A distinction is required other than the one that distributes behaviours according to their place (of work or leisure) and qualifies them thus by the fact that they are located on one or another square of the social checkerboard…
Although they remain dependent on the possibilities offered by circumstance, these traverse tactics do not obey the law of the place, for they are not defined or identified by it.
I think what this section is basically saying is, things previously defined as “leisure” should not be so cast aside because they are equally worthwhile methods of “making do”. This was kind of mentioned in the lecture slides, but I can’t tell if Adrian is saying the everyday is trivial or it’s not (because I wasn’t there). Or maybe this is about the “in between” work and leisure, like la perruque. What I’m struggling with already here is, what is the relevance?
These “ways of operating” are similar to “instructions for use” and they create a certain play in the machine through a stratification of different and interfering kinds of functioning. Thus a North African living in Paris… creates for himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language.
So, the North African is “in between” knowledge of his old home and his new home and he “makes do” with the ways of operating that he must create for himself from all of that information grafted together. I think.
The thousands of people who buy a health magazine, the customers in a supermarket, the practitioners of urban space, the consumers of newspaper stories and legends — what do they make of what they “absorb,” receive and pay for? What do they do with it?
The television viewer… has been dislodged from the product; he plays no role in its apparition.
Taking cues from Madeline, I am reminded of Weinberger. Just because you read things in a book, does that mean you know it? It makes me think of that fear people have of losing authority. I feel like this relates to filtering forward and I know there are parts further on that are definitely similar.
…”consumption”… characterised not by its own products but in an art of using those imposed on it.
The consumer cannot be identified or qualified by the newspapers or commercial products he assimilates between the person (who uses them) and these products (indexes of the “order” which is imposed on him), there is a gap of varying proportions opened by the use that he makes of them.
Now this definitely makes me think of filtering forward. As Fabien explains, we need to reevaluate the idea that the consumer is just passive. We are not passive; we are always filtering forward. I am starting to see a whole picture here… As a side note, Ned points out the frustratingly vague example given here about Spanish colonisation of “indigenous Indian culture” (which I assume is talking about South America?)
…distinction between “langue” (a system) and “parole” (an act)…
Users, like renters, acquire the right to operate on and with this fund without owning it.
By situating the act in relation to its circumstances, “contexts of use” draw attention to the traits that specify the act of speaking (or practice of language) and are its effects. Enunciation furnishes a model of these characteristics…
This example is better, I think. Language is a very set system and model with rules. But language does not have to be that way and is, in fact, totally different when people are actually using it. It is not just something that people “rent” but rather something they can mould themselves. Enunciation is a good example of this because, as de Certeau goes on to say, enunciation is made up of: 1) a realisation, 2) an appropriation, 3) a contract, and 4) a present.
A strategy is the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.
A tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.
One deploys his forces, one does not take chances with feints. Power is bound by its very visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a “last resort.”
This is an interesting thing. Funnily enough, the first example I personally thought of was Game of Thrones. Which is which? Are the Starks strategic and the Lannisters tactical or the other way around? Or perhaps both the Starks and Lannisters are strategic and it is those characters like Varys and Littlefinger that are tactical, “others” moving within a space not owned by them, and therefore the more dangerous? I think the latter.
This is also relating back to Weinberger. Could you argue that mass media is strategic and the consumer is tactical? Strategy is power — the authority. But our new modes of filtering forward lean more towards tactic. A shift in authority.
Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the “weak” within the order established by the “strong,” an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf.
Tactics are more frequently going off their tracks… Consumers are transformed into immigrants. The system in which they move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it… There is no longer an elsewhere. Because of this, the “strategic” model is also transformed, as if defeated by its own success: it was by definition based on the definition of “proper” distinct from everything else; but now that “proper” has become the whole.
OK, I feel like we’ve come full circle. This is totally on the same track as Weinberger. Ackoff’s pyramid is like strategy, the authority. But with the change in the way consumers absorb information — tactically, filtering forward — the “proper” is now the whole pyramid and it’s not a pyramid anymore, as Adrian said in the lecture. There is no “top of the food chain.”
I wonder if this has made sense to anyone else.
What I’m getting from my fellow ‘Young uns’, as Adrian refers to us, is that the general consensus is things aren’t looking good. We, as the human race, have potentially lost ourselves in the masses of information we have created. This is scary.
Our homework was to pull a question from the reading, David Weinberger’s Too Big to Know, and answer it. It looks like the question everyone wants to know the answer to has been the same one since at least 1934: Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Put another way (not necessarily precisely the same but I daresay closely linked): how do we find value in information today?
Jenny made a list of what she believes are the negative consequences of this new world of information. She argues that just because there’s all this stuff coming at us all the time doesn’t make us smarter. Carla says, “The smartest person in a classroom is no longer the teacher, it’s Google. If Google knows everything, why do we have to?” Katrina says, “No publisher is choosing what we can access or not access, it’s almost a process of post then think.” Even my father commented here about his ire at the trouble of having to find worthwhile information.
I think what people are afraid of, in a way, is having to figure things out for themselves. The authority on information is slowly being pulled from under the feet of institutions and being placed on the shoulders of the consumer. If you are interested in something now, you have to figure it out for yourself. For example, the internet has gone a little wild with this Kony/Invisible Children thing and everyone is sharing it. Does that give it authority? I think a lot of people seem to think so and they continue to spread it. But there are other people who dig a little deeper and find out that everything is not as it seems.
Fabien sums up Weinberger’s arguments succinctly: “The author also points out that the problem does not lie in the amount of information that can be found online but rather in the way it is filtered and distributed. He argues that the unrealistic problem of information overload has been a threat to western civilisations for many centuries, however he suggests that the internet poses a real problem to the authority and control of how information and knowledge are outsourced.” This is like the paranoia thing Ned was talking about. There is no real problem. There’s not some terrible condition people are going to come down with because they’re just so darned overwhelmed with the idea that maybe they have to work to know stuff. Things are changing but they’re changing for the better. The way we access, filter and distribute information is much more open and interconnected. As Katrina says, the internet has no edges. Why is this such a scary concept?
Weinberger quotes Clay Shirky: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” This fear of information overload stems from people who have to leave behind the authority of institutions. But as Shirky demonstrates on his own blog, institutions just aren’t going to be compatible with our “New Institution of Knowledge” (Weinberger) — that is, not an institution at all.
Jay Rosen argues that the internet is, in fact, improving journalism. He concedes that it has increased the amount of “rubbish” but in return for that misfortune we have been granted global access, and that the “everyday practitioner” now has a multitude of tools they didn’t have before. My favourite point of his is that the balance of power has changed. This is, again, what the fear is about. People are afraid of shifts in power, especially the people that had the power before. Shirky’s post was in direct response to someone who was afraid of that shift in power. But as Rosen puts it, “It does not mean that ‘everyone’s a journalist’. Rather, the pros have to raise their game.”
Ian talked briefly about ‘experts’ and how one distinguishes oneself as such in these trying times. One of Rosen’s points in his article is that the rise of internet media has forced journalists to become less isolated from the business of journalism. Adrian talked about this also in the lecture — “I am a journalist, therefore I…” Our new information era does not have much space for rigidity like this. It is inhibitive and it’s not where we’re going. We are moving towards transparency and open data and we are forcing people to have some stake in media. The responsibility is evening out and the rules are being broken down.
My father was worried about accuracy. But the internet is much faster and much more reliable with accuracy than newspapers. “The News” is bound by its time schedules, its rules, its production lines. The internet doesn’t work that way. Twitter breaks stories faster than “the press”, as well as debunking falsities quicker than you can say tweet. This bothers some people, I guess, because the BBC now has a policy in place that forbids its journalists from breaking their stories on Twitter before it has reached their whole team. The BBC is intent on holding itself back. Isn’t that a clear signal that there ain’t no wisdom in their knowledge?
Patricia Handshciegel observes, “…the print media industry shouldn’t be surprised, shocked, discouraged, confused or dismayed that the internet is replacing the print media platform… It should be expected.”
I realise I have focused primarily on print media, but when it comes down to data, information, knowledge and wisdom, and finding them all in new media, this is the biggest one, where we consider the authority of knowledge and wisdom to be. It’s our journalists and academics, not bloggers and ‘social media experts’ that know stuff. Except that I completely don’t agree with that and, as demonstrated, the platform is changing everyday so who can tell who is the authority? I come once again to… you. You decide who has authority.
I learnt more from blogs in a few months than from school in all its long years. Without this new form of information and knowledge, we wouldn’t have things like Wikileaks. Information overload has allowed us to oust corruption, find missing people, enrol in courses heretofore available only to the elite, meet people on the other side of the world, and topple authoritarian regimes. Sure, it’s scary, but this is what it looks like when you start to get access to real information. The knowledge and the wisdom that stems from that, well, it’s got to come from you now.
There are a lot of thoughts swirling after reading the extract of Weinberger’s Too Big to Know and attending today’s lecture. I think it was a good idea to read the extract the same day as the lecture because it was all very fresh in my mind.
Adrian spoke a lot about ‘noise’, which Weinberger also talks about but in the reading it is referred to as ‘information overload’. ‘Noise’ was defined as anything that interferes with the ‘mathematical theory of communication’ or the receiving of information. Adrian gave examples like slang or a harsh accent that can skew an intended message. A diagram was provided to illustrate the point.
Interestingly, I found this diagram to be ‘noise’ as it interfered with my understanding of the concept. But that’s another point. What I’m really going to talk about right now is, Is noise a problem?
Adrian said that noise introduces risk but also, and much more importantly, it introduces novelty. It brings the new, the ‘not yet’ to a process. There are a lot of complaints in our society about the ‘rubbish’ out there. This was explored by Weinberger also. How do you find value in things when there’s just so much… stuff?
I find this idea to be valid, but terribly outdated. Personally, I have long since abandoned this notion. I stopped watching television and listening to the radio when I was still in high school for growing contempt of mass media. I retreated instead to the internet, the place where I have acquired all the information that I deem has value. How do I do that? Well, I tend to not trust sites run by the mass media corporations that also run newspapers, television channels and radio stations. I am far less likely to put value in traditional media because all I see is continual corruption. For me, there is far more value in blogs than there is on, say, The Age.
Why? Well, for one, the methods utilised by bloggers are more honest. They don’t get paid off, they don’t fall into the traps of, as Adrian said, socialisation of knowledge industries. People on the internet have a desire to know things and a desire to share that knowledge. Newspapers and television channels have a desire to make money. That’s a pretty massive conflict of interest with me. If a big story breaks, I trust Twitter before I trust News Limited.
Adrian also talked about the ‘moral panic’ involved with this. How this ‘noise’ is apparently a problem in relation to our institutions of knowledge and control. These institutions are terrified by this loss of power and try their best to discredit ‘noise’ instead of working with it. Adrian hypothesised that our current mass media institutions will become like opera — that is, niche.
I had a niggling feeling in the latter part of the lecture. I agree wholeheartedly with this embracing of ‘noise’. I think ‘noise’ is an excellent concept and I think that all of this new information and knowledge described by Weinberger is brilliant and exciting and fascinating. There is a really looming liberation in this stuff, this access to information, the freedom to declare what is valuable on one’s own terms. But what bothers me is I feel like it’s kind of hypocritical in this situation.
Is that the word I mean? Hypocritical? It rubs me the wrong way that we have this discussion in a university. That just like everybody else — he even mentions it in the book — Weinberger wrote a book about it. I feel like this is playing into the whole ‘knowledge industry’ thing. I am being taught about ‘noise’ in an environment that traditionally reviles it. And I feel like it can be talked about freely like this because in the end, it’s still within the current system. Isn’t there something wrong there? I wonder if Weinberger explores that in the rest of his book. It feels a little too privileged to me, that’s all.
There was something I did really like that Adrian said early on in his lecture. It was essentially, if your medium does not talk back to you, change your medium. Something to think about, that one.