Cassie Writes. annotated tangents from the RMIT Bachelor of Communication (Media)

lecture 2: war against the centre

bowie - space oddysey

networked science

6 degrees of kevin bacon - everyone on the planet is connected by 6 people

netwars - military strategy and warfare - special ops vs terriorist networks

SOCIAL NETWORKING

computer networks

transportation netowkrs

being connected

networks: ways of thinking and knowing

ways of doing and being

ways of organising

for us: networking as a way of writing, publishing, designing and thinking

CONTEXT: network LITERACY (seth) and NETWORK literacy (today)

method: historical, conceptual

PLAN

under the spell of networks

war against the centre

(d)arpa net

killer apps: e-mail and the world wide web

features of networks

media in the age of networks, or "networked media"

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a network - thinking about things in terms of lines and connection. previous networks centralised, then decentralised, now distributed

ww2 - first war fought in the air. strategies, best bombing locations, what do we blow up?

allies realised the achilles heel of the german war machine was the ball bearing. all production (esp weaponry, war machines) reliant on this device

in war, if you can find a central point you can take out the entirety

established a new way of thinking - enemy itself is the idea of a centre - icons become seen as undesirable now after the world trade centre - easy locations for attacks

economy more surviable - town planning (after ww2) in america - different things in different locations - people, factories. multiple ways out of cities

WAR AGAINST THE CENTRE MEETS COMMUNICATION? :O what happens here

two superpowers, America & Soviet Union.

M.A.D doctrine - mutually assured destruction - they didnt go to war because it would have destroyed the whole planet

1959 - "survivable" communication

PAUL MORAN - way of communicating that takes the distributed network form

can survive these types of attacks; even if various sections are blown up a message can get through.

picture: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZHc0QHK_pqo/SxR0Vo0qDOI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/KhxZ3Kv5iFg/s400/networktypes.jpg

packet switching networks - little packets

digital - discrete amounts of data sent, not continual analog message

donald davies: efficiency (interactive computing) - at the time of massively large computers

(d)arpanet - the first network

april 7, 1969 arpa network makes the first connection, later that year they had 4 nodes connected

everyone was thinking about the moon landing that year - & bowie

email- the first "killer app"

1971/72

ray tomlinson

within a few months it was taking up 3/4 of the arpanet traffic

email - vitrually instantaneous, but does not require a reciever to be present like phone

survivable, message will arrive and be reassembled eventually

killer app 2.0 - world wide web (1992)

sir tim berners-lee

internet is the infrastructure - architecture while the world wide web is the application that uses it

global way to exchange and link documents together

three components

URL: uniform resource locator

HTTP: hypertext transfer protocol

HTML: hypertext markup language

features of networks

DOING MEDIA IN THE AGE OF NETWORKS

case study - wikipedia

-model of authorship

-writing method

-arrangement of knowledge

-page design

-material existence

-founder (!)

the idea of encyclopedia is not new. flourishes in network form

not one single author, but anyone can edit. collaboration and participation. moulding historical ideas about authorship.

arrangement of knowledge - french encyclopedia - wikipedia doesnt have this - decentralised

blue hyperlinks - the way ths page is designed is for you to go other places

material existence - all over the world

founder - jimmy wales - networked identity

LOOKING AHEAD

hypertext - what happens to writing in digital networks

blogs - 20 or 30 years ago, what would people be doing instead of this? diary

web design - designing for connectivity. different from newspaper, etc. lots of questions about preferences, connectivity, style

spatial montage - how is cinema transformed by the internet

copyright and remix culture - how does the law deal with this, the downloadable world

what we look at in the course will be shaped by the history he is talking about