12.1 Statistically Probable

Whether it's simply gauging quantity or solving complex problems through formulas, numbers are extremely convenient. Six Degrees is by far the most mathematically inclined individual we've read so far, which brings a lot of interesting points to the table.

As someone who took a whopping two math classes as an undergraduate student, it is both refreshing and sometimes frustrating thinking of certain concepts in non-abstract terms. Prior to reading the book, I never really considered networks so important in so many fields of science. It does make sense, though; in many sciences, strange things happen when groups are added to the mix. As quoted early on from Anderson, more is different.

With each iteration and additional field of study, new approaches address the different angles that networking has been studied from. Each time, fascinating ideas are revealed, from the Small-world Networks constrained between two curves to the baffling tests performed by Asch. While each further study provides a better idea of how networking and in many ways society works statistically, each test comes with a disclaimer warning that these don't cover everything.

And really, how could they? Even with the development of computers since the 1950's that have allowed people to research topics and simulate environments in ways that were unthinkable before, there are still thinks beyond our ability to imitate or replicate. We can calculate the possible variations of societies based on grouping and random encounters, and while this provides interesting information about Small-world Networks, it brings about far more questions than it answers. I almost wish that Watts had included the variables and criteria used to generate this information.

This isn't to say that the questions are bad, by any stretch of the imagination. Over the course of the book, all the statistics and numbers add up to provide a far more encompassing view of how networks operate, but it seems as though this information can realistically only be viewed separately. Like a much more complicated Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, there are multiple aspects of human nature that we have significant problems comparing and gauging side by side. Even the most complex simulation would have trouble taking everything into account. Humans are tricky like that.

But we do get a better idea of some of the stupid crazy things people are prone to (again, see Asch). As Watts ends with, this is all still relatively new. Strangely enough, many theories in networking share traits in physics and epidemiology and sociology, leading to new networks being formed between unlikely groups in the scientific community. The research is there, the application is complicated, and the work is set out for those that wish to continue in this field.

11.1 Defining Ourselves

All this talk about defining ourselves online makes me feel as though we are increasingly defined by a set of variables and statistics. Not to say that we weren't before, but now it's far more obvious and quantitative. It's just like those programming classes I'm glad I won't have to take again: eyeColor = "GREEN", height = 76, hairColor = "BROWN". Each of these bits of information is categorized and stored away, in many ways bringing the body online through characters and numbers. This makes for a personalized space online with sites that remember our preferences like Amazon.com and can even tell us not only who we're romantically compatible with but how successful the relationship is likely to be across multiple categories.

All of this, however, is determined by the information we provide. Yes, we tailor that information. The information accessible to friends is in many cases also accessible to family and coworkers, as well as potential employers. Broadcasting personal information is typically not wise, and throwing up a few quotes from Shakespeare or saying one of your favorite books is Catcher in the Rye never hurt anyone.

As Boyd indicates, we define ourselves textually online and write ourselves into existence in this online space. When the writing stops, the persona online starts to fade; even information that is only a few weeks old is outdated when many are making their presence known every few hours. Once the information lingers for long enough, even if it is still physically present online, it can become detached from the person who originally constructed the information and eventually lost.

Years ago I frequently updated a page on deviantART and had a MySpace page. The MySpace page was rarely updated and I had more friends on Facebook, so even though the information was present there it drifted into obscurity to the point that I can't remember how to access my account. The information about myself never changed on deviantART, but each new art submission and comment on other artist's work maintained an identity and presence; the most recent post was who I was on that site. Once I stopped posting, people stopped visiting and the identity attached to that account stopped existing some years ago.

Now, I've reached a point where the information communicated online rarely has any synchronization with reality. While I have the option to broadcast my current state of being over Twitter or Facebook, it is more like announcing than expressing, though many friends on Facebook seem inclined to express their political views very visibly on my newsfeed day after day. And maybe that's the new state of things; less concern with what information is presented to others. People are already broadcasting their breakups on Facebook before their significant others know about it, so why not make everything as blatant?

10.1 Knowledge is Power

Blueprints are useful. Describing blueprints verbally is painful. A picture is worth a thousand words. Just saying. Also, I'm delighted to see Nakamura actually mention the difficulties and complications new terminology brings to the table. It seems in some cases that is the theme of some of the material that we read; for all the topics on communication, the way they're presented can easily hamper interpretation.

I couldn't help but think of the internet as a whole after reading Panopticism, which I'm assuming is the point I was supposed to get. Everything is recorded, equally divided, and uninterrupted work links the outside and the inside; this seems so familiar, but the internet as we've come to know it hardly seems like a disciplinary mechanism.

The paragraph on lepers seems reminiscent of the divided cultures on the internet. While not literally exiled to their leper colonies, individuals do isolate their presence online and tend to limit it to specific frequented sites and areas. In an escapist sort of way, people driven away by events or groups in reality are almost guaranteed to find like-minded individuals online. For some reason I'm envisioning Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd in the slightly modified Lepers Like Us.

In many ways the internet does seem like a great asylum, dividing us by our characteristics and fetishes. The strange thing now is the fact that every individual is a spectator in the central chamber and an inmate; we have the potential to witness those around us and we are becomingly increasingly visible online.

Though I also agree with Nakamura's assumption about previous media; we can't describe all the new means with old terms, since it frankly isn't the same. We tend to fall back on the accepted uses that have prevailed in previous media.

Over the course of last week I spent my time in Austin at the National College Media Convention, which was a fascinating experience on many levels. I have only been involved with campus media for a year, which means I'm nowhere near as experienced as the advisers presenting information and many of the students present. And I felt better off for it. After listening to a person with a doctorate tell me that online news would greatly decline after the economy recovers based on seven-year-old data, I worried the ignorance might be contagious but also felt pretty smart comparatively.

Though it may not be a good sign. The 'experts' in the field in many cases have trouble converting their expertise to fit with new media, and the technology is changing at a rate where newly appointed experts have mastered outdated material. Mentioning the seven-year-old data is only important because so much has happened just in that span of time. The groups that are surviving and thriving in college media aren't necessarily professionals, but they certainly are adaptable, and that is far more useful than possessing a wealth of outdated information.

But I digress. For all the advertisements that bombard my screen every time I peruse the internet, it never occurred to me that there is a correlation between some of these advertisements and the virtual personas witnessing them. Teeth whitening ads and body-building advertisements seemed like just more spam, but they do cater to a particular interest and are more prevalent than most other types of advertisements. This probably should have struck me since I'm in advertising, though I suppose I'm not quite trained to think that way.

Though advertising now is at a peculiar crossroads. As many speakers at the NCMC confessed, their website had greater reach and potential but the advertising revenue from online was a incomparable besides the revenue from print ads. Part of this seems to be a result of something one of the speakers mentioned; many people don't understand why they pay for clicks on a banner. This goes back to the rate of change in technology over the past quarter of a century. Old ideas taken for granted clash with emerging concepts, and the results are... fascinating.

9.0 First Thoughts and Public Relations

Today started a little different from my normal Sunday. After driving to Dallas, finding parking, and climbing on top of a security booth, I got a very unique view of the unfolding events for PAC-WE. This was quite an experience, and an hour, several scratches, and a leap of faith later I had essentially witnessed around a hundred people in yellow ponchos form two distinct shapes in a parking lot.

Of course, there was significant meaning behind the event, but all that information can be found on the website. This is about the experience, as well as communication and responsibility for new media. Or it will be when I get to that.

I honestly had not heard the phone story listed in the beginning of Here Comes Everybody before. That experience seems like the ideal outcome, with so many people rallying behind one issue, motivated by some virtue. Well, aside from the off-topic forums.

And PAC-WE seemed like something along the same lines. I heard about the event less than a week before it took place, but after searching around I found that the event had a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, and had been covered by a KERA blog. Sometime before the event someone mentioned the expected turnout for the event, which incidentally was a bit larger than the actual turnout.

The event had been a work in progress for about a month, which is a bit more than the ten day miracle performed to recover a lost phone. Given, this was an exceptional case, but what was to keep PAC-WE from being one as well? Bad timing? Networking issues? There are more variables than I could possibly imagine, but I still wonder what could have made things even better and hope to see a similar event inspired by our campus' art program soon.

All the planning and communication for this event was well organized from what I saw, which made me think about the end of the cell phone story where Evans gets a new job in public relations. This tripped an alarm in my head about the destruction of the public sphere. Given, I haven't worked in PR, though this comes up quite a bit at the office for the newspaper I work at since most writers should try to not sound like PR. I work in advertising and have come to understand that distribution does not equal our number of readers.

Assuming there is some large, typical company with PR distributing information on the company to various sources and advertising paying others to display their product or service, where does Facebook fit in? Or Twitter, for that matter? Perhaps this is an obvious question, but it seems that the people who have large followings in social networks could be making a mint through companies in two ways. They know how to get a following and could probably create a network of individuals interested in the company's goods.

The other way these people could help is more indirect and quite possibly more effective. If you see a movie star drinking a sports drink on the big screen, the scene screams "product placement". If you see that same movie star tweet about drinking that same drink while kicking back and watching a sports game, it's not product placement; it's a personal promotion from an individual who isn't being paid to support that product. Or, we assume isn't being paid to support that product.

Twitter manipulations aside, assuming we should, who should network a company? They're not paying to promote, but is it still advertising? There's no mouthpiece in the form of other people to spread the word, but is it still public relations? Or is this something that could become a part of everyone's job? Most of us have these accounts for social networking, so technically we could all be funneling in resources for our businesses. If we should, why, and if so, who? Something I'll be pondering while finishing Shirky.

8.1 Public Sphere

On first reading the term 'public sphere' in our reading and how this is changed dramatically by the internet, I couldn't help but think about a story that is repeatedly brought up by one of my professors. The name eludes me, but essentially a man comes across a magical ring that makes them invisible. They promptly kill the king, sleep with the queen, and cause general mayhem. This is what the internet provides for us; a way to become (essentially) anonymous so we can do all manner of dastardly things (also see The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory).

But in many cases we don't. Is it because of panoptic surveillance? Are we not really invisible? Are we ultimately the same when we establish our identity online?

It seems like we're not supposed to just be ourselves, we're supposed to be more than ourselves. Revolutionizing politics and smashing traditional media are all in a days work for the new virtual person. Well, except for the fact that the same people who avoided and ignored political debate before the internet are doing it just as loudly now, and in some cases traditional media doesn't need the help of anyone to destroy themselves.

It would be inaccurate to say that there have not been interesting political possibilities and influences on the media (like this), but currently for politics this seems to be the exception, not the rule. For media, there's plenty, including an online publication for professionals and academics interested purely in video games, just one example of the bright, shining deviations from traditional media. There are political debate forums online, and online campaigning has proven to be a hit, but the revolutionizing of democracy may not be quite there yet.

I found the idea for multiple "overlapping and interconnected public spheres" fascinating; in many ways it seems this has become the case through various forms of social media. I'm not sure what this means globally or politically, but it is a shift towards mixing more perspectives into a larger scale public sphere.

Reasoning through debate strengthens the public sphere. "Publicity that is staged for show or manipulation" greatly wounds the public sphere. To equate mass media to public relations would be quite a stretch, but to deny the bias of media organizations and the potential for manipulation inherent in the information media outlets choose to show or hide would be unwise. This isn't to say that your favorite news anchor is trying to brainwash you, but to at least accept the possibility that there are biases among individuals and groups. So, assume for a moment that the information with a 'spin' on it is debated to strengthen the public sphere. This sounds like spinning yarn into gold, and yet it feels to me like garbage in, garbage out. Or has our public debate been 'faked' since the inception of mass media and our public sphere been suffering ever since?

This, like several other assertions made by individuals in Boeder's article, seem to ultimately perceive only good or sinister effects on the public sphere. It isn't good or bad, but it sure isn't neutral. This seems to be the theme for the class.

7.1 Encoding/Decoding

Stuart Hall's writing in many ways makes me think of a shot of Saussure with a dash of Marx for flavor. The way the we come to understand signs translates to the media we create and present to each other, and the meaning is defined by how 'natural' the codes used to transmit the message are.

The first things that came to mind were smilies, particularly when trying to relate the material to new media. Wikipedia claims this idea belongs to a Carnegie Mellon professor who came up with smilies in 1982, but in truth the basic origin doesn't satisfy my curiosity as to how it was distributed. Scott E. Fahlman may be responsible for first creating the sign, but the repeated use of the symbol from person to person assigned meaning to it. Visually, it isn't like broadcast media with lines radiating from a central point. It's more of a chain reaction set off by a central point, generating more points of origin and spreading in more ways than a broadcast could. It's like comparing a shaped charge to a nuclear bomb, with relative devastating effectiveness to scale.

I started using AOL Instant Messenger after the interface had been modified to convert a colon, dash, and parentheses into a properly-oriented yellow orb, though I can't say when I was first exposed to this sign. The dominant meaning for :-) is quite clear in our culture, though perhaps it's a sign of change with new media that the perceived origin of the terms is not necessarily a person or company but an application or site like AIM or Twitter.

But this was written in 1973 (provided Wikipedia isn't leading me astray). The rate and process for determining meaning, whether it's denotation, connotation, or dominant meaning, has been altered through new media. With technology in general, new terms are coined and widely accepted in a shared culture and language (television) and dominant meaning is altered (tweeting). This process is prevalent with nearly any technological advance. New media increases the rate which new codes are distributed, but it also allows for a virtual culture to develop a dominant meaning between all members of this culture with no physical contact or relation.

From the means for identifying a goon from SomethingAwful to the connotation of the phrase "I'm on a boat", the meaning for signs can quickly change with material found online. While the SNL skit was produced by produced by multiple people, it is still one broadcasting to many. Meaning was encoded into the video, distributed through television and websites, and decoded by viewers. Through mass media we've improved symmetry between encoding and decoding, limiting room for misinterpretation in audiences that share a language and culture.

Then take sites like SomethingAwful. With members across the world, the physical culture in the region where the person lives and the codes used there can be completely different from the virtual cultures visited online. Not only can members develop new dominant meaning through the messages from others, they can directly encode and transmit messages on the same level as any other member of this culture and have it (potentially) distributed to all members.

While pondering encoding, decoding, and the messages itself I can't help but hear echoes of McLuhan rattling around. The "global telepathy" is slowly(ish) being achieved with each new means for personally encoding and distributing signs to the world, from text to images to sound to video, maybe eventually thought. It does still rely on equivalence, but with each level and sense that people can convey their message through the less is lost in the decoding.

It's somehow strange to think that the end result is ideas presented in a lossless format. Wonder how much bandwidth that will take.

6.1 Language of New Media

Perhaps it's the fact that the references Manovich makes are something I understand, or perhaps the previous readings are contributing to my understanding. Either way, it's a good sign that the points Manovich lays out make sense.

The parallel development of film and computing machines as Manovich describes early in the book is something fascinating I hadn't really considered. Zuse's computer in particular describes a relationship between the two media that doesn't really come into play until much later. It is strange to think that the artistic side of media feeds the behemoth that will become mass media through computer technology, but as Jacquard's loom demonstrates, there has been this back-and-forth between technology and art for quite some time. In many cases ideas or tools of artists inspire others to build on those concepts to develop new technology, which can in many cases can be used to move art into areas that before were impossible to conceive before that technology, as we discussed last week.

When describing what doesn't distinguish new media from it's predecessors, the mention of lossy formating raises and important point about how data size and format has changed in the last decade and reminded me of why I don't use JPEGs. In many cases online and offline original lossy formats are being replaced online by lossless Portable Network Graphics and Tagged Image File Format files. Image files now contain additional information, from alpha channels in certain files to layers that before could only be viewed by programs like Photoshop. My education in computers has followed this development somewhat, with my origins in programming in QBasic and C++ to Java, Photoshop, Maya, and others, each bringing media that at one point was too massive to encompass in one device into an icon on our desktop that allows us to edit film, photographs, and 3D models with the click of a mouse.

The thought of what this means for the future is baffling. We can move from lossy to lossless and perhaps on to something else. When computers are capable of reproducing anything flawlessly, what is the next step? Maybe it's possibilities such as Ventner's "Critter Creator" that seem absolutely fantastical, but may not be so far fetched. The thought of being able to create life in a lossless format is a concept worth mulling over, especially if this means using a computer to create a human with no biological link to any other human; an Adam of sorts. Brings new meaning to playing God (or not playing, as Ventner said).

Externalizing thoughts and ideas struck me as a particularly fascinating remark by Manovich that ties into more than just "drawings, photographs, and other visual forms"; even our textual thoughts and ideas are distributed through means such as Facebook and Twitter, on Blogs and forums. These, too, represent standardization of thoughts. It becomes numerical and modular, from number of posts and the time the post was made to the 140 characters in that Tweet. It is strange to think that giving individuals the capacity to express their thoughts through images and words also standardizes them, giving them free reign to be unique along with their billion closest friends.

Thinking that the GUI is similar for work and play is particularly true from what I've witnessed, but I've also taken a few classes that are specifically about video games. Not only do we keep cut and paste functionality, there's saving, menus, and other details. Second Life blends the recreational functionality with business in an environment that is very much a virtual space with avatars similar to those found in games, but many of the locations in the MMO represent serious businesses and organizations, providing information and advertising.

All throughout the book Manovich seems to remark on the tie-ins between work and play, media designed for calculations and media designed for entertainment and the convergence between the two. While I certainly wish work now felt more like play, there are many instances where the line is blurred, from "Chinese gold-farmers" to occupations that incorporate more goal-based activities and use them as tools to keep workers happy and motivated. If the next level is turning work into play, then I definitely like where this is going.