Tag Archives: Networks

Lecture #7

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So, midsemester ends and we arrive back in building 80 on Monday morning – the soft tones in this image remind me of spring, and the beautiful sunshine that shone as I walked towards the lecture….

  • Mark points in time where you feel your ID is developing/changing in incremental stages
  • Make it easy for people to find your ID and understand you
  • How can you break though the noise and highlight the things that are significant – any professional identity is a projection, its assertive and you have to project and speak a little louder to bring things to the front.
  • Moderate your own level of activity and understand how that defines you.
  • ID Hub is a piece of evidence that promotes you as a credible content manager and project manager and provides a reference point for your skills and use of technology.
  • Start to consider your colleagues and look at other people’s ID hubs and assess which ones work and why – think about why you follow certain people and then think back to why people would want to follow you.
  • Be judicious and expository – use the platforms creatively.
  • Think about the way the media is changing, we are connecting with media differently – its less consumptive and more productive. This changes what is produced and how it is received.
  • Media is in a state of flux and we can begin to find new shapes and forms to contribute – be bold and adventurous with your creative practice and don’t be afraid to do things differently
  • The Digital Fiction Factory – multilayered storytelling.

What is a participatory project?

  • A project that solicits and draws on UGC/media for the purposes of creative storytelling and developing creative, collaborative, socially engaged experiences and features.
  • Commenting, liking, conversations, contributions, community, co-creation, collaboration – these are part of a spectrum and participants should traverse the spectrum from strong types of interactive activities and weaker ones.
  • Its co-created and its about storytelling and brings conventional media practise into the frame – drafting, editing, producing (production values)
  • Why would people bother to contribute to your project – think about designing  an EXPERIENCE that audiences can ENGAGE in. How can we think about the mechanics of interaction, consider what kinds of INCENTIVES you want to provide.
  • “while everything, technically is an experience of some sort, there is something important and special to many experiences that make them worth discussing. In particular, the elements that contribute to superior experiences are knowable and reproducible, which makes them designable. Nathan Sheldoff
  • Think about crafting a work that combines lean forward and lean back media experiences.
  • CALLOUTS -You need to lure and be assertive and make a clear and concise offer. Go into details of what you will be asking people to do/contribute in stages and provide seeding material that gives an indication of the kinds of work you want back.
  • Look for people that already have an active presence online and are already contributing work to other projects.
  • Start thinking about new practices, new roles and how you can define these into tasks for people to complete to get participants in.
  • Use social media to market projects and to get things moving – develop a rapport with participants and respond to interactions.

 

Weinberger Readings.

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David Weinberger is an American technologist whose main focus is on how the internet is changing relationships, society and communication. He is especially interested in how information becomes knowledge and often frames his research in a business context. His Bio page is great – the layout is funny & gives the impression he is putting his own interpretation of his information into the design – check it out here.

  • HYPOTHESIS: There is no practical limit on what the internet can hold, who can link to it – it’s crucial feature is it’s messiness which allows it to work at any scale, we can deal with the information overload because we now have a big enough medium for knowledge. The network has no shape, no borders, no edges which means networked knowledge lacks what we have long taken to be essential to the structure of knowledge – a foundation.

DIKW PYRAMID - representing purported structural and/or functional relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Typically information is defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge

  • Idea that information is structured information where as knowledge is ‘actionable ideas’ – example provided is knowledge is the recipe that turns information into bread.
  • Knowledge has been, in the past considered as an object of perfect beauty and the pursuit of knowledge a noble feat
  • Knowledge has been about reducing and filtering what we ‘need to know’
  • Opinions are not knowledge, even if they are true.
  • However, due to these filtering systems/systems of filing so called ‘information’ and knowledge’ away and drawing a line under the conclusions they draw, we have disallowed ourselves to learn from them, or even to explore their implications
  • The limitations are not in our own brains, but the media we have used to ‘store’ our knowledge – our methods such as databases, paper, filing can only ‘remember’ so much and physically hold so much
  • The internet has opened a huge open database of knowledge/information that is readily accessible and without borders and able to be connected – it’s connecting this knowledge via the network that is changing our way of knowing.
  • Makes an interesting point regarding ‘information overload’ – information overload has kind of ‘overloaded itself’ and is no longer considered as a psychological condition but a cultural syndrome, we no longer fear that this barrage of information will ‘keep us awake at night’ or render us confused and stagnant, but that we are not consuming enough of the information. We have created two methods to help us
  • 1. ALGORITHMIC – using computers memory and databases to find answers in an abstract swirl of knowledge
  • 2. SOCIAL – using our peers/friends choices as a guide

  • INFORMATION OVERLOAD OR FILTERING FAILURE?
  • Our filters are becoming problematic especially when it comes to the authority of knowledge – books, newspapers and encyclopaedias got their authority having filtered information from external sources (including ‘us’/the society), but now our information sources are our social networks – the impact of this is we ‘stay in our circles’.
  • ‘Old’ filters separated information into two distinctive categories
  • ‘New’ filters don’t filter anything out, they bring certain bits of information to the front in a hierarchy, yet the filtered out stuff is still readily available.
  • We know there is too much to know – what are the consequences of this?
  1. Its clear the old system is no longer an option – we need new filtering techniques that don’t rely on forcing information through one little system, we need social filtering relying on choices madein our social arenas – EG) ‘Like’ button on Facebook
  2. There is too much good stuff – you cant find a complete set of knowledge in one click
  3. There is also a lot of bad stuff – anyone can filter/contribute
  4. Every idea is contradicted on the web – perpetual disagreement will always exist.
  5. Filtering to the front means that filtering becomes part of the contnt. New filters are like links and are crucial bits of information.
  6. Filters are crucial content – increasingly smart network with more and more hooks and ties that we can help our navigation of information and make sense of what we need to find.

 

  • Filters no longer reduce information  they now increase and reveal  a sea of information.
  • Knowledge is now wide, boundary free,populist, “other”- credentialed (allowing sub groups authority and voice), unsettled.

Have you Noticed?

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I know I write a lot of stuff on here about Networks, and not always of the digital kind. I often tend to write about physical social networks which can be expressed via digital means or online forums, I hope it’s relevant and provides the kind of texture and voice our blogs are supposed to be characterised by.

Anyway, I really wanted to write a post about my experience last night, because it was truly inspiring, thought provoking and had an ACTUAL affect on me that has rendered me unable to chase it’s imagery from my mind.

So, Ian Ngo and I were gallery exploring and ended up at about 7PM drifting into RMIT after spying the potential setting up of a little exhibition in the Building 9 common room. What we stumbled upon was nothing less than a little gem of inspiration, both in an academic and social sense.

Homelessness is something that I think is a very contentious issue in Australia, most of what we hear about is how we dont hear enough about the truths of homelessness, or that the homeless are denied of status or voice within society. Sometimes I think that if people (politicians and supposedly ‘socially aware’ busybodies predominantly) stopped trying to speak on behalf of the homeless, or assume what issues need to be spoken about and just let them speak, we could all at least be given the opportunity to listen. This is what I felt like i was given last night as third year students put on an exhibition doing exactly that – giving the street performers, big issues sellers and street artists of Melbourne a chance to really speak, and giving me the chance to really listen.

“When nobody gives a care for them, we take that as a challenge, to make the public see them in a different light. They were once part of our community. And what we’re doing right now, is simply putting them back into the community they were once in. Our aim is to become a bridge between them and the society. By sharing their stories and unique talent/s, we are hoping that the society will get to know them better and see these people from a different lens.”

 

I liked the way the students used a Facebook page to generate intrigue about the impending exhibition and the project – by adopting a simple question which contained many different shades of meaning, it got people wondering about what exactly they a) should be noticing, and b) what they were noticing.

The ambiguity of the project is inherent in it’s message which can seem to be a repeated idea in society, or one that is ‘generically’ explored by student film makers – that homeless people make great subjects because they give the viewer the sense that they are superior or a moral sense of warmth because they have watched a documentary about homelessness.

Have you noticed? didn’t do this, it used the familiarlarity of the faces of Bourke St, Swanston St and streets alike to pose the question – why dont we stop and talk to homeless people? I liked the way they presented them as people not ‘subjects’, they were just people, like us, floating along in a world which treats them differently, or fails to notice them at all.

After watching the short, and beautifully filmed documentary I felt implored to go to every single one of the people depicted (all of whom I walk past so often I’m ashamed) and thank them for being involved because it truly did change the way I notice them.

So, thanks RMIT – you kicked the ass of Westspace & Thousand Pound Bend last night & proved that work can still be affecting and inspiring even when it’s being shown in an empty common room with Aldi Wine.

Get common creatively…

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Creative Commons License Check it out!

Mad Media Musings by Zoe Annabel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Aquiring a licence is important as it protects your work from being copied and reproduced without acknowledgment or attribution. However, as Hugh pointed out – much of the content on our blogs is actually a mash up of other people’s work. This means that by copyrighting our work, which has other peoples work embedded in it we have created a kind of ‘sticky situation’ – we have, in effect taken other peoples work and reframed it in our own context. So, if we become the next Natalie Tran – problems could arise – problems that involve us being sued or potentially looked down upon for alluding to her cleavage?

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Lecture #5

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I’m going to attempt one of those ‘stream of consciousness’ style blogs…here goes.

9:30AM – Building 12, Level 13 – Seth on all things Manovitch & Spatial Montage.

SPATIAL/TEMPORAL NARRATIVE:

- Industrial idea of a ‘factory line’ shot sequence in cinema

- John Cage – Landscape #4 as an example of 12 audio channels fused into one track

- Multiple Perspectives - investigating the use of screen art conventions and different narrative productions, multiple narratives and perspectives shown on different screens simultaneously - multiple, fragmented screens. Social desire to represent real life through fragmented/simultaneous texts – dispersive and reflective of how we navigate through lives

- Split Screen vs Single Frame Focus

- Mosaic Screen – television is beginning to re work this idea as shown in programmes such as 24.

GUI
- Graphic User Interface (computer as an early example of multiple windows/spacial montage)
- Gaming as an early example of Multiple Perspectives
- Object Orientated Programming
SCREEN FRAGMENTATION
- My boyfriend came back from war - Wanted to bring cinema to the internet space
- narrative approach was more considerate of space than time
- images link to other pages/images/graphics (frame sets) – you create your own path
SCREEN SPACE – Linda Wallace, Eurovision (single-channel video, March 2001)
- Single channel work with a fragmented screen
- TV screen can become like an internet browser which is streaming many fragmented screens at once
- “narrative can be layered, fragmented and non- linear”
- idea of replacement and co-existence
- Performance Space, Sydney
SEPARATE OBJECTS/MULTI-MEDIA
- function online – hyper-media, links, moving images
- separate files – colour tracks, sound tracks, multiple video tracks/panes – highly complex in terms of layering & audience reception/understanding about how exactly to engage with the work
- Network of the internet allows creaters to maintain many channels or ‘boxes’ to stream content from
- Multilinear, Fragmented
- granularity - how it’s cut up into ‘bits’ that can be viewed as separate through the network.
REMEMBER:
- How writing is changed by what is written on and how does it translate onto different devices – the screen is fluid and updatable by links, it acts like an information space.

#5 – Getting Visual.

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Network Media intends to develop our understanding of writing for the web, and how practices of writing have been changed by Hypertext. It also asks us to acknowledge the separate affordances and differences between traditional media and network media, and how the linearity or each text effects the way it is read/understood. George Landow’s idea surrounding the effects of hypertext on writers and readers alike extend to the notions of status tension and hierarchy that exist between writers and publishers and more conceptually, visual language and written language. His idea’s are extremely relevant as to the affordances of writing for the web and help to elucidate both the negative and positive impact this has on authorship. He takes quite a philosophical approach to the idea of what substantiates a text and how it’s context changes it’s meaning and how we understand and relate to it. This can be garnered through his references to philosopher Derrida whose ideas surrounding a text were steeped in the contexts brought to them – “there is nothing outside the text”. This brings to light Landow’s central idea of the changes in the role of an ‘author’ and a ‘writer’ and how it is being drastically changed by Hypertext and writing on the web.

In Hypertext 2.0, Landow points to our  treatment of visual language as secondary as being derived from print technology – a positive impact of hypertext, which interlinks all kinds of medias into one solid chunk of ‘complete’ information.

“This blindness to the crucial visual components of textuality not only threatens to hinder our attempts to learn how to write in the electronic space but has also markedly distorted our understanding of earlier forms of writing” PG7

This quote really embodies the central notion of the separation of content and form that Seth outlined in our very first lecture, and how the way something is presented effects our engagement, and thus our understanding of it’s messages.

It Gets Better

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I saw this ad last night on TV and thought it was definitely worth uploading as it has a direct and specific correlation the ideas we are discussing now in Networked Media. The advertisement provides the example of a online community – much like our little Networked Media Blog community! It shows the many different ways that people can become linked via the internet and its various applications such as Youtube, Blogger, Email, Facebook Etc.

One particular Webcam diary exeprt depicts a young guy saying “there are so many of us out here in this world”, and this is a true expression of a network of people who share an interest in one particular issue but who are united and brought together by the internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skPnJOZYdA

It’s quite an uplifting ad, one which really focused on the way that networks have the ability to bring people together, and that the more and more contributions made equate to a greater reach, and the community expands and grows and becomes a pillar of strength and inspiration for those involved.

The ad is pretty corny, but i think it does show the power of the internet to connect people who have previously felt disconnected or alone, it does open up a new world where you can decide whats important to you, and find others who feel the same.

‘the web is what you make it’ – as the tagline of the ad, references the idea that ‘you are the centre’, that what you as an internet user, control what content you choose to view/engage in.

Pretty cool huh.