This morning’s lecture really helped to clarify some major points from the Michel de Carteau readings, I really liked the examples Adrian used because it helped me to understand the readings in the now, the present, Integrated Media 2012.

First, I want to rehash Adrian’s points about ‘good’ ideas – they should be connected to other ideas, not hidden away or protected from others. The more we connect our ideas the more knowledge can be generated. This is definitely a notion I can easily connect to my own learning. I feel so blessed to have my friendship group at RMIT, because we all share our knowledge so openly, and its rare that we don’t comment on each others work, and this is the way I have learnt as much as I have; by being connected to others and by linking our ideas together, we have each created separate things but with better practices and materials.

Another thing I wanted to investigate a bit more was ‘The Black Box Theory’ – I think, in the frame of media making or practice, it refers to the ‘too hard’ box. Adrian used the example of attempting to understand the de Carteau extract – because it’s new and foreign and hard to understand, we freeze up, were afraid of its form and our own inability to understand it, so we blame the source  EG) de Carteau is clearly a pompous intellectual writing to make himself feel good about creating a sense of inferiority in his audience. We CANNOT approach media making with a black box mentality, or throw things in the ‘too hard’ basket, because it cuts us off from the connections we could make, our work will stagnant, banal and we render ourselves unable to contribute or collaborate .

Wikipedia tells me “…a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings, that is, its implementation is “opaque” (black). Almost anything might be referred to as a black box: a transistor, an algorithm, or the human mind.”

The opposite of a black box is a system where the inner components or logic are available for inspection, which is sometimes known as a white box, a glass box, or a clear box.”

It’s funny, the picture of the black box kind of sums it up….

I think the best example Adrian used today to unravel the readings was the shopping mall, his example encapsulated all the major points from Carteau’s writings and simplified them into an awesome granule of accumulated knowledge. The shopping centre is a public space, but it is a strategic place, it has a clear purpose, a deliberate design which directs it’s users on a determined path which aims to enable and amplify their act of consumption. As we all know, shopping centres have become a notorious social ‘hang’ for the cool young kids who have nowhere else to go. Now, these bands of baggy pant wearing, fitted cap donning shitheads lingering around Myer and taking up the tables at the food court may just seem like simply ‘annoying kids’, but they are actually engaging in quite a complex social act – they are repurposing the space of a shopping centre and creating their own style of action, which basically means they are tactically ‘making do’, they are operating within the margins of the rules and defining their own space. This is not an act which is strategic, the kids are not attempting to bomb the shopping centre (unless your at Highpoint), they are just bored with nowhere else to go.

Finally, to sum up the major things I took from today’s lecture – knowledge, the internet, life is about ‘making do’, whether monumental or day to day. I hope the images above make sense…

• Tactics are what we employ everyday, we make do with what we have, we appropriate, redefine and redirect – thats life, we are inevitably weak in the grand scheme of things, but by being smart and resourceful we create our own spaces and modes of behaviour in discourses which attempt to be totalising, or spaces which attempt to employ strategic methods of influence. Blogging is a good example of an ‘in the moment’ tactical response to the strategies of the internet.
• Consumption is a tactical form of making – good example was the way we use fashion to construct our identities.
• Where is the gap between private and public spaces – social media and the internet sees public content coming out of almost every private space- EG) The Home.