ARTS2090 Final assessment

QUESTION 4: When publishing changes, so does society. Investigate and compare the impact of two publication technologies, one pre-1900 and one post-2000, on a specific aspect of society (e.g. education, politics, creative industries, science, entertainment, social relationships).

INTRODUCTION

Publishing has been progressively developing for years, from pre-1900s when communication in the public is limited due to lack of technology until the advanced media technologies-internet has arrived. This is the main cause of breaking down the limitation of the century, creating the closeness in the social circle and hence, the social relationship has greatly changed. This essay will primarily investigate two publication technologies across two different periods of time, the pre-1900s and post-2000s. First of all, it's essential to look at the brief history of each publication technologies. Next, by analysing the massive changes between them, we will be looking at how they have altered a new picture to the entire society and eventually, it comes to the point of how this transition particularly influences our social relationship.

PRINTING PRESS

In exploring the impact on social relationship, we have learned that Johannes Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press in 1400s. Since the printing press has introduced, it has crucially become a life-changing event historically and more importantly the invention lessens much more time for book production by using movable type printing. (Farzaneh, 2009) Also,  this immediate effect has gained so much more support because it has proven in Farzaneh's statement (2009). When this occurred during the Renaissance period, where there was a shift from the growing demand for books as a result of the nation has increasingly become more intellectually curious. That means, it has entered the new period which is culminating in a tendency of cultural activism, hence, the printing press has thrived in the later 500 years.

The printing press from www.flickr.com

Prior to the invention of the printing press, retrieving information is a big task because it was limited to the ones that could speak Latin fluently under the control of the Roman Catholic Church and therefore, with the existing language barrier between people, this created a large gap between the upper and lower classes in the society at that time. (Olson, 1996) Thus, this revolutionary movement undeniably challenged the Church as it had proven that knowledge is no longer to be the property of the rich and authority but shifted this power to the common people across different class boundaries. That means, the growth of the liberal ideas and attitudes made the Church lose the control over the domain of knowledge in the public. However, with society was able to interpret the belief of secular religions better than before, in the way that a new bonding in the public has developed, which people started to freely share the similar perspective and understanding and thus particular groups had formed. In other words, this also impacted on social relationships as Briggs and Burker(2009) have stated,within this 'print culture', it's not just about spreading ideas but the even greater contribution would be the developing shift of relationship between space and discourse. The printing press can be also considered as the agent of change like the technologies in later centuries, it assisted social changes rather than originating them.(Briggs and Burker, 2009)

Furthermore, social relationships have further developed since the time when the publishing of books allowed for standardization for literary works. The consistency of language rules allowed the readers to interpret the ideas close to what the author was intent to express because this approach had huge distribution on correcting mistakes and errors unlike the previous work. Also, mass production with identical words and images wasn't a legend anymore, but overall, this kind of consistency enhanced the reading experience inevitably. (Arthur cited in Rosenblatt, 1964, p.17) Again, Arthur(cited in Eisenstein, 1979, p.689) regards social relationships such as the relation between the teacher and student has transformed under this influence. When the student could take full advantage of more advanced texts with the updated version, they start to surpass not only the peers but might as well as the wisdom of their teachers. It profoundly means higher education has laid the basis for understanding the people around more.

                  Three examples of the Saturday Evening Post from www.flickr.com

As a result of the introduction of the printing press, the idea of magazines came to America and the really first successful magazine in the U.S would be the Saturday Evening Post, which was published in 1821 and it was popularized as a weekly publication at that time. Magazines had only started to swell its publication from fewer than 100 to 600 by the time when it's regarded to be the mass medium in 1850. What this technological development had ever done to the human race was that it strengthened the opposing views and reinforce the thought against the issue of war.(Anonymous, 2013) Consequently, to some extent, the spurring of magazines hence generated a desire of peace within the public sphere and people felt more pitiful and caring towards each other, led to the effect of pulling the society even closer than it ever had.

After all, the printing press flourished the knowledge and understanding of what a society ought  to have and it has stayed changing in the following centuries until the arrival of internet, which became the resourceful tool to get access to the information. In comparison to the printing press, it's designated to fulfil more human needs throughout society as the services have been providing a new prospect to the accelerated economical  world in every norm and value.

INTERNET

The arrival of internet from www.flickr.com

In the beginning, 'the Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network but soon to include packet satellite networks.'(Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts and Wolff, 2012, para.13) Eventually, the World Wide Web(WWW) has developed in the 1990s, the dominant network has resulted in adopting numerous new approaches to this underlying technology according to Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts and Wolff(2012). And the popularity of internet is continued to grow after the Web 2.0 in 2000s. Thus, information can be found and shared regardless of geographical location around the globe. This unprecedented change puts emphasis on promoting SNSs such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, are the platforms that have been making more possibilities for us to interact.

It is true because 'the internet has become a prime venue for social interaction' (McKenna, Green and Gleason cited in D'Amico, 1998, para.1) In essence, social interaction is a big topic nowadays when people are forming closer relationship not just to the ones they know in reality, but also those whom they only meet online. It habitually becomes a nature to talk to strangers without a face-to-face meeting. In a sense, internet communication may produce greater intimacy and closeness. However in some cases like the 'couch potatoes' in terms of media, may indirectly weaken the bonding between people and make a close relationship fall apart when one's immersing on internet too much.

Internet is used for so many social purposes and is still continuing to make massive changes to the society like the printing press once brought to us. However, its real growth began in 2006 when it started to lead us to a new direction as a comprehensive tool to touch the world.(Nauert, 2006) Most of us have been witnessing the emergence of the internet is becoming our communication vehicle, powerfully linking us together via the online world through SNSs. Furthermore, our online communities are built up under the growth of personal engagement. Nauert(2006) has pointed out that the internet not only affects our involvement in online interaction, but also our offline action. More importantly, the idea of social activism also comes up with  our participation online.

Internet and social relationship from www.flickr.com

Positively, the continuing growth of the internet connection offers us more possibilities to expand our groups of friends, our friends we meet in person as well as the ones we meet online. Accordingly, the data has shown that internet users have met an average of 4.65 friends online from the report.(Nauert, 2006, para.17) Also, teens these days tend to use the network as a type of phone to chat and exchange 'instant messages' with their friends.(Bargh & McKenna as cited in Gross et al. 2004) There is another hypothesis of people may form closer relationship since they can be better disclosing their inner self online, such a virtual communication is likely to be more self-expressive for online relationships. (McKenna, Green and Gleason, 2002) That means, this technological breakthroughs strategically increase the intimacy in interactions, even more, some media research studies suggest that the internet is helping to renew old friendships when it's enabling us to look for people that we haven't contact with for years through SNSs , as well as the ones that are hard to reach perhaps from the other half of the globe. For example, this reconfiguration has maintained a strong tie between couples who live in different countries so that geographic distance won't be the cause of their broken marriage(Hogan, Li, Dutton as cited in Dutton et al, 2009b). Similarly, online dating started to thrive in these years, in Hogan, Li and Dutton's(2011) article, it indicates that there comes a trend of people who have found their partner through numerous site sources such as the SNSs, which are associated to the online dating sites.

Twitter logo from www.flickr.com

Besides, the emergence of  Twitter, has intensified our social engagement in the 'imagined communities' by reassembling individuals in this process of production. Since it differs from the older generation of printing press, its evolutionary movement has increasingly enhanced the distribution and aggregation in a sense. Not to mention that such a SNS prompts the information and equally distributes power for amateur journalism, the grass root ones to have a say. In this contemporary society, this mode of publication is highly recognized as a fast transmission to link the users together through its sharing mechanism. Therefore every content can be seen for any categories of people such as employers, close friends, family members even strangers we have never met in real life before.

Hence, these electronic relationships that have built up from Twitter creates a confusion when it becomes much harder for us to tell whether the friends we are interacting is showing the 'real them' or only acting in a way that we are expecting from them to be. Instead, the indulgence of interaction on Twitter is 'driving us to relate more with acquaintances we aren't close with and neglect the ones we really care about.'(Anonymous, 2012) Evan(2010) also suggests that such a SNS is only used for venting feelings, if a person chooses to express anger through SNS rather than talking over the issues in person, there will be a sign of danger of personal relationship. Even more, if private information is publicly shared in this large circulation of contents without the other person's agreement, it will obviously wreck a social relationship as well.    

CONCLUSION

Social relationship from www.flickr.com

Broadly speaking, these two publication technologies constitute the society in two different ways when they are distinguished from the different modes of publishing. For the printing press era, it was defined as the very nature of the society since it only started to make contents spreadable, as the basis of the concept of publication which makes something public in the very beginning. The ongoing change only took another big step into this contemporary society when the internet eventually arrived. Consequently, these two major changes from 'printing' to 'networking' remarkably have reshaped our society. But more importantly, our social relationships were also challenged from our participation, especially the internet which produces considerable impact on social relationships in both positive and negative ways.

REFERENCES:

Anonymous(2012), Electronic relationships, Social Media's Negative Impact On Society, <http://worldissuesnz.blogspot.com.au/> accessed on 10/06/2013

Anonymous(2013), Magazines- the early history, Print Media 9, Cyber College internet campus, <http://www.cybercollege.com/frtv/mag1.htm> accessed on 07/06/2013

Arthur,P(2004), The impact of the printing press, ETEC540: Text Technolgies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing, <http://educ.ubc.ca/courses/etec540/Sept04/arthurp/researchtopic/index.htm> accessed on 06/06/2013

Bargh.J.A and McKenna.Y.A(2004), The internet and social life, <http://www.yale.edu/acmelab/articles/Internet_and_Social_Life.pdf> accessed on 09/06/2013

Briggs,A and Burke,P(2009), A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. 3rd Edition. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Evan,S(2010), negative effects of social networking on relationships, <http://voices.yahoo.com/negative-effects-social-networking-relationships-6936488.html?cat=49> accessed on 10/06/2013

Farzaneh.A(2009), The historical influences of the printing press, Suite101, <http://suite101.com/article/the-invention-and-repercussions-of-the-printing-a87609> accessed on 06/06/2013

Hogan, Li, Dutton(2011), A global shift in the social relationships of networked individuals: meeting and dating online comes of age, Oxford Internet Institute

Leiner.B.M, Cerf.V.G, Clark.D.D, Kahn.R.E, Kleinrock.L, Lynch.D.C, Postel.J, Roberts.L.G, Wolff.S(2012), Brief history of the internet,  Internet Society, <http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet#Authors> accessed on 07/06/2013

Mckenna.K.Y.A, Green.A.S and Gleason.E.J(2002), Relationship formation on the internet: What's the big attraction? Journal of Social Issues, vol.58, No.1, pp.9-31

Nauert.R(2006), The internet as agent of social change, Psych Central, <http://psychcentral.com/news/2006/11/29/the-internet-as-agent-of-social-change/438.html> accessed on 09/06/2013

Olson.D(1996), The World On Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading, Cambridge University Press

The powerpoint for the visualization project

Here is the link for our group presentation slides: http://www.slideshare.net/yoshiuil/male-to-female-suicide-rates

I mainly contributed to the first three slides in this powerpoint

The visual effects and the social body

To start this blog, let's start with the word 'empathy'

What is empathy? Is it just an emotional change or something more than its essence?

In 21 century, the definition of empathy can be a property, an advertisement, a stimulant potentially illuminating some hidden truth that we hardly see from the society we are living in. Perhaps, we can be even more creative to think 'empathy', this concept, is an art form, just like other emotions we have towards something we see/hear/feel, every sense of us is as a result of our relationship, our bonding to all the embodied experience around us. 

The form of visualization can be seen as the most influential process directly delivering the idea to us. By seeing the images, we occasionally would link it to our personal life and after this immediate effect has taken, our view of the issue of the images can be reformed. Just like one of the readings about polar bears on the endangered species list, a debate based on the effect of global warming has threatened the existence of this species. 

The image depicts a polar bear having trouble stand on a small iceberg, which is in the middle surrounded by water. It's pretty self-explanatory to relate to the event of climate change in the way of how it presents. As the polar bear here is being used as a symbol to emphasize on the severity of what the climate change has brought to nature. At this point, this visualization shares an empathetic feeling to the audience and that such success is due to the simplicity that it creates even stronger impact on our thought. It doesn't have to involve a long process to complicate something we get from the reality, because what this image is highlighting is the 'reality' that is happening currently. It fits the circumstances and unpack the issue well enough for the audience to associate it to the general social interaction. The significance of transparency within it that unites us and the general social body into one at this moment. 

Other than this, something intriguing I found is regarding to Vjing, another example that gathers the public altogether. Vivid Festival presents this idea fair well as it further extends the power of Vjing, which has brought the positive atmosphere alive in an artistic form. It's all about the variation, combination of lighting showcase that makes us mind-blown. Each year in Vivid, there would be more than a million people to celebrate this happiness since Vjing is something that strikingly impress us, something we see and then we feel its fascination. You cannot completely say this is a light show when it also accompanies with the creation of music and thus, the patterns of the lighting can be reformed and remixed as well as the beats of the background music. 

I am starting to feel how advanced technology reshapes the higher level of visualization by offering a chance for us to decode the textual elements within the pictures and how all these landmarks get us drown in its beauty of creation. But more important is that visualization encourages us to see, interact and perceive the messages in new and revolutionary ways. Ultimately seeing the effects is still far more profound then reading about the effects within the public sphere, only that we can actually feel how that relates to us as an individual, a social entity.   

Here are some videos I found on Youtube, let's familiarize with Vjing first... 

What is Vjing?

VJing, Live Visuals & creating videos with glowing pictures

Wax tailor Vjing - to dry up

                                      enjoy the videos!!!

Reference

Anon (2008), 'Struggling polar bears put on endangered list', <http://metro.co.uk/2008/05/15/struggling-polar-bears-put-on-endangered-list-137306/>, accessed on 14th of May

What can we get from visualisation?

An old saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is a really valid statement solidifying the term 'visualisation' from its representation of clusters of elements such as dots, lines, colours etc. 

They are like artworks combined the concepts of interestingness, interaction and design. There are some fantastic infosthetics in the following site:   http://infosthetics.com/

Despite the fact that data visualisations are quite appealing to us from its visual presentation, they are increasingly becoming ubiquitous within visual culture because occasionally it can involve storytelling, as in seeing them as an assumption that they 'speak' for themselves from the construction being made. Visualisation, in a deeper sense, is an expression to turn the abstractive, conceptual subjects into a concrete meaning by presenting in infographics. So what can we see through our growing visibility of data? 

THE ENGAGEMENT

Yes, it's our engagement, an imaginative engagement with pictures that we do not normally have, it rhetorically questions in the act of how our relationship with images is formed from what we can project on them. For instance, the dashed line, which is to represent the borders but more importantly, it could be put in an image of visual procedure, plays a role as an instructor teaching us how we manipulate some places or letting us to collect the trace so we know how we can operate on certain devices.  Hence, it supplies a more intricate visual detail so that it functions in a way of making the picture more expressive. It inevitably breaks down the limitation of our ability to make an association between the action being built up through our brain and the comprehension goes beyond what the images are conventionally presented. It's more of an enthusiasm, or an obsession to discover our sense of resonance in the process, which is to make invisible to be visible. Timo has given us a lot of examples illustrating the dashed line can be symbolized as hidden geometry, movement, paths, ephemeral material.

The dashed line here carries a role of representing an instruction

 Moreover, the dashed line could be the (there you go, this is the dashed line)......................... expectation. 

you may not notice that dashed line is immersed in your life, even when you are waiting to open a page, the screen will show:   OPENING THE PAGE...........   ;  or when you are going to watch a video, it says   LOADING......

THE CONCRETE NUMBER

Visualisation is also about the way the numbers are displayed. In some cases such as the measurement of how many calories are contained within certain amount of food, as for calories, a unit, is an unspecified term cannot be represented graphically, the resemblance is able to give us an idea of the entity through the display of variety of food. Other examples such as the massive amount of tweets and the web pages on the internet, all these concepts can only be generated through firmly fixed on the visual landscape of social media. Number is needed to take another form to reveal the reality, and that should be clearly, succinctly and above all quickly presented to have impact. Hence, through visualisation, one of its excellent aims is to give the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. (Yale University Professor Emeritus Edward Tufte)

This is the website of information, the lines, dots, the formation of the shape geometrically and implicitly hint at the concept of 'numbers' in this case, the pattern is beautifully highlighting the importance of visualisation

THE CONSCIOUSNESS
Also the visualisation is not just simply about getting the information but what we can do with this information, what reflection it makes, how it affects us socially and changes our behaviour towards it. The effectiveness has something to do with how it alters our perceptions of what we believe from what social data looks like. Mostly, social data from visualisation makes it even authoritative than a text, as it can prompt responses more instant, like a part of a conversation to the audience, rather than being a stand-alone statement. The meaning behind can be an inference from the question preceding it, and the question is raised up in the way we interpret either positive or negative from our visibility. Through visualisation, it builds upon the understanding as a social act, a form of behaviour, a current trend that we all need to take concern with, just a typical example such as by looking at the data of a map in Amazon, you can see where the cluster of lines is most dense in an infographic, so to make a more accurate assumption of which books are more popular and well known and subsequently predicting what kind of books can be more sellable in this trend. To visualise the data, with each value representing an icon, and a line representing an association between each value, our consciousness will become much more active from the transparency.

This is a friendship network of children in a US school, the data was collected by asking the participants who their friends are. It directly shows how the social relation is happening in the school when races and ages are marked by the use of different colours. From this illustration, it explicitly tells us more than it just shows, it isn't just about the interaction between each of them.What we might notice more is the four dots that are being ostracized from anyone of the groups on the left hand side of this data visualisation, many factors can be the cause of their isolation and therefore, the schools should be have more awareness of them. In this aspect I just mentioned, a data visualisation has the possibility leading us to think out of the border.

So after we are encouraged to engage with the data image, find out the data sources and make sense of them, ultimately to evoke our consciousness from what we have seen, we are fulfilled of this kind of streamline visual metaphor. This entire process goes in a cause and effect relationship from our eyes, it's amazing to know that these visual creation is often uncanny in aesthetic, and that this artistic practices have contributed all these implication to information visualisation when a picture can unite all the collectives and extend its subjectivity within the simplicity, what else can be more articulate? 

   

images sources are from: http://www.flickr.com

References

Arnell, T(2006), the dashed line in use, <http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/the-dashed-line-in-use>

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/01/how_does_200_calories_look_like.html

The commons

The internet is a form of commons, it's gifted and has granted us a great chance of having further exploration of the existing issues, equally opening up the online debate, allowing everyone to have a voice. We can say COMMONS are resources held in common, not privately own or belong to any particular individuals but rather to be everyone's property, which are non-exclusive and accessible. SHARING is a better word to describe them. Why is that? In a sense, the commons cannot be commodified, in other words, their nature are to share ownership as widely. Furthermore, COMMONS are meant to be preserved regardless of any forms of return of capital, such aspect is to maintain them to our next generation at a minimum of not degrading them. 

The COMMONS we are talking about here are intangible, digital commons have provided by the internet are information and knowledge resources that can be created and re-created, used and re-used , freely available for everyone to do further editing, adjustment, reconstruction to generate a better interactive environment among the community. These sources embody the act of openness and constructiveness, establishing the more active role in our norms.

In other words, COMMONS are internationally known and also represented as a movement spreading around the globe, building up its self-recognition to every user, they have their features for every user to distinguish them from one another, such as Wikipedia, a broad website for us to learn the brief idea of the concepts, we wouldn't use Youtube to do so as we know Youtube is primarily for searching videos and vice versa. Each of them have clearly modified itself as a symbol, a brand for its own market. COMMONS manage their own business and get themselves more advanced by the participants, the users who help them to grow and transform them to newer mode of production.

With COMMONS bombardment, it leads to what we call the economy of COMMONS when it comes to the whole system renews itself by three new components: the distributed communities passionately are working together simultaneously to build up the online social connection on the collaborative multi-platform and internet based technolgies by the foundations. The knowledge, code and design are abundance and easily to be duplicated through the availability of internet download.  As for COMMONS, this happens from time to time since they are not marketable and therefore, users tend to neglect their act as the invasion of the intellectual right of each production.

The establishment of COMMONS copyright is just like online battle to protect the information originality, it's an attempt to advocate the respect of the producer, it's necessarily to apply this approach towards every COMMON. I mean, internet is a COMMON itself, also a mix of COMMONS differ from each other, we do have the duty to stop any disruption or abuse of information, not letting it to go chaotic.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/labguest/3287937707/Creative commons TM Logo Idea
Here is someone's design of trademark logo for creative commons property. Creative commons licensed media encourages open minds and open eyes and hence, the C.C becomes a wide-eyed observer of the contents have offered via the net

References

Walljasper, J(2010), The commons moments is now, Commondreams.org,<http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/24-0>

Meretz, S(2010), Ten theses about global commons movement, P2P Foundation<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/ten-theses-about-global-commons-movement/2011/01/05>

Monbiot, G(2010), Reclaim the cyber-commons, Monbiot.com,<http://www.monbiot.com/2010/12/13/reclaim-the-cyber-commons/>

Good R and Bauwens M(2010), From Open business models to an economy of the commons, Robin good,<http://www.masternewmedia.org/from-open-business-models-to-an-economy-of-the-commons/>

Attention!! infotention!!

Attention!!!!

Infotention? 

Is this term really just about 'information' and 'attention'?

Or does it have something to do with multitasking, procrastination, seeking or more? 

Let's find out what it really is... Here comes a simple example:

from http://jensustathought.blogspot.com.au/2008_04_01_archive.html

What can you see from this image? A large cup or two faces?

This image illustrates the concept of infotention, what can you see within this image? a cup or two faces? It shows what colour or shape you pay more attention to when you see either of them first.
      

The reformation of the structure is now turning our world to an information economy, which it enhances the cyberspace as net is overflowing with information. This is a shift in dominating our society with mass production in practice. For me, INFOTENTION is regarded as a fast food principle, fast and convenient, we can easily get it but not healthy of getting it too much, the larger amount we get, unknowingly the more fat we stuff into our body just like how brain will be dysfunctioning by gathering too much of information. The point is why information is that appealing to us? Is it just because we cannot avoid seeing them? Panksepp suggests such motivation is from the emotional state such as curiosity, interest, foraging, engagement, craving and finally it comes with SEEKING.   

Look around and think what you are seeing, the chairs? table? TV? wardrobe? THINK AGAIN, you are actually receiving the data and information out there, from your naked eyes, you perceive from what you really see and turn them into your data. Here, it's all about perception...and human is seeking perception wherever we go, we cannot avoid or stop doing this...This is just one typical example of the concept of our refreshing memory from our searching engines, like Google, Safari, Firefox, our brain is another searching engine itself. Apart from the seeking from reality, nowadays, we focus more on media use and hence it leads us to have more desire of gaining information to the point of we are even wondering about our sanity, how much obsession we get from information...ARE WE DROWNING IN THE SEA OF INFORMATION? 

This hyperactivity effectively applies to every piece of information we get from net-based communication because the constant information has further extended our capacity to accommodate the data by remodeling our brains to take it. At the same time, our attention span becomes shorter than ever since the modern world bombards us with stimuli, most of us will go with what trend brings to us, the updates of texts, tweets, youtube videos, status update on facebook, new products ad also capture our eyes as easy as it is. Our growing concern about these endless interruption firstly will cause the change of the base of our behaviour. The overflowing information persistently affects our productivity from our performance of accomplishing a task in a longer time before. Why is that? we have drawn our attention to the social networks, our media devices produce more interesting information unlike the banal ones we are doing, especially for teens, not surprisingly knowing, we are even more easily to be distracted. Just by saying that, back to the term INFOTENTION again, information does need our attention, but because of that, it has triggered our procrastination to do something more important. 

Procrastination is the product of multitasking. Teens these days see multitasking as their second nature. As if multitasking should be a skill that the teens need to acquire for adapting this so-called 'information society'. In other words, multitasking is the representation of we have distributed uneven effort to each task we are doing instead of putting our full effort to finish the most necessary one. So what makes us worry is that too much information could be the freedom from necessity and that we would drastically be losing our balance to our time management.   

What follows next? we then become not mindfully deciding which task we should finish first because we have already been having continuous partial attention to everything we do. Also, paying too much information of the media uses would unintentionally make our bodies being compromised in some way. For instance, we still have more concern with the status update on facebook even though we have tiny bit of time waiting in the queue, such behaviour can be understood from what Linda Stone says in the interview, she states that our mind is engaged and our body is 'hanging out'. 

However, for Linda Stone herself, multitasking might not completely a bad thing, a busy person like her finds it more productive by multitasking. Momentarily, she needs to move between tasks rapidly, she can manage to do the activities well, hence, we conclude, infotention is not always create negative effect. It does create positivity for some users like Linda Stone. 

To say that to critically engage with the idea of infotention, it should not be seen as one-sided, instead, this ongoing process is needed to break down for analyzing as it incorporates a range of human's temporary desire. Therefore, the new form of technical logic that have made us, the users as the most saleable asset. In addition, we take pictures and post them on the internet for file sharing with others as we want to get attention from the imagined world to see us image. So define this, we are just another form of infotention on the internet as well? 

NOW THINK AGAIN, if infotention hierarchically keeps invading into our lives, what are we going to end up with?  

ATTENTION!! NOW IT'S TIME TO PUT SOME LIMITS to our actions!!

Reference

Henry, J(2010), Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention: An interview with Linda Stone

(Part one), Confession of an ACA-Fan, <http://henryjenkins.org/2010/11/multitasking_and_continuous_pa.html>

Kinsley, S (2010), The technics of Attention, Paying Attention, <http://payingattention.org/2010/10/12/the-technics-of-attention/>

Goldhaber. M. H (1997), Attention Shoppers!, Wired, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es_attention.html>
O'Malley, M(2010), Attention and information, The Aporetic, <http://theaporetic.com/?p=228>
Temple, J(2011), All those tweets, apps, updates may drain brain, San Fransciso Chronicle, April 17, <http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/All-those-tweets-apps-updates-may-drain-brain-2374725.php>

Yoffe, E(2009), Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous, Slate, <http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/08/seeking.html>

image:
http://jensustathought.blogspot.com.au/2008_04_01_archive.html

Archive

What is archive?

Archive plays a role as a recording of all the memories and accumulation in order for individuals and organizations to check back the primary sources in the past. The documentation that are selected have been preserving for a long term, also none of them are identical copies, instead, they are distinctively existing in their own values to the relevant functions and institutions. It's a collective source of knowledge controlling over the practice of organizing, rearranging, accessing data to achieve the goal of helping us to remain a better continuous history.

This is a common image of what an actual archive looks like, its tidiness offers a foundation of providing organised data for better future viewing 

Web archiving is the most common way to collect the data from world wide web, that is, its massive size will operate automated collection.

Since Archive is everywhere, from the private sector such as academic learning to business sector and government sector. Everyone can be a great and active archivist as long as we are willing to put everything in order. For instance, photos in our phones and games in our computer are systematically kinds of archive. All these archive can be rearranged for a better viewing experience since classification is a key way to do so, we all have this experience by putting things with similar characteristics or functions. For instance, Facebook is a large system of archive when it comes to the point of easily classify our favourites, games, groups, friends, photos etc. A typical example will be list of friends, which they have made them even more specific by sorting them out into close friends, favourites, school friends or any other kinds. In other words, this is the best solution to find out the records of people and things, quoted 'when records and archiving professionals use the term 'archive' they are referring to the permanent storage of records, not merely their removal from current usage' (Wikipedia)

Archive, surely is not just a term for demonstrating the historical records but representing a power, an authoratative state ruling and governing our life in social order, without its existance, we might lose our balance to see things in a logical order since it's fundamentally keeps our ongoing data in a right place, in the sake of reminding us where to get back to it. It's everywhere, everything, not only for individual uses but also for business for profit, it's a must for them to corporate archives in order to maintain items related to the administration.

Other institutions such as schools have their own archive too. A website called My school builds upon its archive system sharing information about the performance of schools and resources that the public may be needed, in result of doing this, more parents would have the willingness, or let's say the DESIRE to do more research for their children to get better education. Users can view wider range of information instead of going to a particular school in person because it provides further resources to check online over time. This valuable tool undoubtedly stimulate more responses for the communities and has an effect on intergrating and unifying clearer utility for all sorts of data sharing.

When knowing archive is all around us, it has been evolving until now and getting more influential later. This turns into what we call it an ARCHIVE FEVER. What association has arise from archive fever? Our DESIRE, the desire that we are getting trapped into this fascination, it turns us into those possessive ones having an attempt to sort out all our memories into different blocks. To make it clear, archive fever is like a trend, has implanted its ideological complex into our brain so we've got this inception, to be motivated to get involved into this act, the archive act to fulfil our desire in life.  CAN WE DEFINE IT AS A FLOOD?

Archive, maybe also a way to get attention, the fact that we notice is those data that have been selected in a particular folder will be much more noticeable than the random ones.

Ultimately, this fever will be a long lasting progress because such innovation incredibly amplified and revive our DESIRE to trace back what was happening before, remaining our personal resources and potentially enriching our exploration and experiences in life...

Everyone should be an active achivist, catching an archive fever...

references:

Archive, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive>

My school <http://www.myschool.edu.au/>

Sharon Howard(2007), Reposted: archive fever: a dusty digression, Early Modern notes, <http://earlymodernnotes.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/reposted-archive-fever-a-dusty-digression/>

Matthew Ogle(2010), Archive fever, Mattogle.com, <http://mattogle.com/archivefever/>

Assemblage

Conceptually the word 'Assemblage' means to gather everything together as a whole, to convey particular meaning to the public. In this process, it must involve actants to activate the performance in order to extend  further actions constantly. In other words, actants potentially cause repetitive making and re-making and eventually it comes to the final result after everything has done its job by adding certain effects. However, we cannot see how each of the actant induces the subsequent movement, only if we theorise this process, extracting the key elements from this involvement. Actor-network theory externalises this perspective and that reflects the networks of relation coherently and how this affects social relations.  

Theoretically, actants can be classfied as human and non-human actors, they both distribute partially during the production in this process. There is no such a difference when we talk about human factors and non human factors in this theory as they contribute, act, engage equally, the interaction has no hierarchy. That means, every factor virtually is a small component react and cause change to other components, to make up the whole complex system rather than competing against each other to create conflicts. 

The quote has taken from Wikipedia sums up the whole point:

ANT is often associated with the equal treatment of human and non-human actors. ANT assumes that all entities in a network can and should be described in the same terms. This is called the principle of generalized symmetry.

It's like a teamwork that things connect and exist or possibly dependent on each other, namely 'flat ontology'  

The other term 'Latour Litany' demonstrates the same semiotic meaning, it has taken from Bruno Latour's book, Politics of Nature. The central idea of the book implicitly conveys the same idea of the Actor-network theory. His book focuses on the creation of assemblies and collectives all around our nature and the very basis of our lives.

Other than that, according to Manuel DeLanda's theory, he suggested that all the matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from one another. Also each entity's capabilities are as real as its properties. 'Assemblage', in other words, constitutes by heterogenous lower-level assemblages. The theory advocates that entities always results in "populations", in a sense of forming a society. So when we use the term 'society', we are not talking about in a broader sense of totality, but it's considered to be the relations of all atomy is happening in any actual occasions. They are capable to produce temporality and spaciality and bounded to demonstrate 'flat ontology', this principle to higher level of realism. 

Interestingly, in my own understanding of the term 'assemblage' could be the patterns that carries an artistic value. To get rid of the boredom from reading so many texts, i searched for a few images to further analyse the core idea:

This image is appealing because it expresses further personal and human level of a larger social assemblages are made up of some small-scale units, the beauty of this image is subjectively becomes a plausible model emerges as an established distinct and separable sense impression once you look at it

This second image suggests a process of association from the formation of identical individuals, also it generates a sense of simplicity in the way of changing how each of the individual displays. In terms of assemblage, it relates back to the reflection on every entity equally powers up the entirety and that it leads to our attempt to neglect the details when we look at this image

The last image embodies the theory of 'Latour Litany' which is associated to the idea of each entity produces certain effect and its chaotic formation has an emphasis of the 'freedom' of every entity. So when we look at this image, we do notice all the eyeballs and each of their location as well as the shapes of different curves displaying in this image.

So when we see publishing as an assemblage, there are three layers should be included in this process which are: 

1. the invention of the printing press, materials are texts, images, painting etc
2. the advent technology influences enormous changes, such technological devices are ipad, ereaders etc actively updates a newer version of publishing 
3. following by the development of digital changes, publishing becomes more well known by a wider range of audience in different fields, hence we have a stronger intention to adapt to the new contents produced by new environments

The following video provides a further demonstration of the Actor-network theory, in brief, this system is an unbreakable chain that each actant intertwines one another.

References

Actor Network Theory’, Wikipedia,< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory>

Actor-Network Rochambeau,<http://www.anyspacewhatever.com/actor-network-rochambeau/>

DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, The Pinocchio Theory,<http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=541>

the form of Alphabet

Once i was told the key word for this week's blog is alphabet, it soon dragged me back to what I have learnt in linguistics last year. 'Alphabet', as confusing as it sounds, then my second thought was to search for its connection with the lecture this week, by talking about publishing, alphabet is the core of understanding the texts for readers. Alphabet is everywhere in publishing, it conceptually constitutes the entirety by making the abstract sense to concrete sense of comprehension. In other words, publishing would be some meaningless symbols if nobody gets the code of alphabet.

Here comes with a quote 'the reader must learne the alphabet, to wit: the order of the letters as they stand' says by 1604 edition of an English dictionary 

Publishing is all dependent on writing, from the ancient age when it started from cave painting, which is already 32000 years old, the earliest form of print publishing to proper writing system. Anyhow, the writing system in publishing has gone through a long process of development. It was more sense of ideographic writing as below:

The picture-based writing could cause misunderstanding as it abstractedly conveys the meaning through an image, which may create different understanding when it comes to uncertainty of the picture for readers or we can say pictographs is non-specific to the text, the representation of the contexts could be varied for different readers.

another example would be Chinese, the whole system is evolved with pictographs that u have to remember what each character looks like and how that sounds:

Phonetic writing system was developed later on when alphabet started in ancient Egypt by 27th century BC Egyptian developed a set of 24 hieroglyphs. Hence, this invention generates more sense of consciousness for human to enjoy the literature. we can say alphabet is the primary element that makes a writing system alive. It generates the meaning and culturally transmit messages from one generation to the next. it becomes widely spread.

references

Eisenstein, E (1979) ‘Defining the Initial Shift: Some features of print culture’ in the Printing Press as an Agent of Change Vol 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 43-163

Brannon, B.A (2007) ‘The Laser Printer as an Agent of Change’ in Baron, Sabrina et al., (eds.) Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press: 353-364

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

Ereaders

driven largely by growing ownership of devices that enable reading of e-books, Americans are migrating from old-school paper books to the electronic versions. Publishers and libraries are working to keep up with the Apples and Amazons of the world by expanding their e-book and technological offerings.

Brief introduction

The popularity of E-readers is an indication to the massive change of the publishing industry, following by the current rapid digital world development. However, it doesn't mean the printing method is becoming redundant, but it's just a way to shift to the newer method to more digital like, in which it's more convenient and appealing to the audience in terms of publishing. In other words, E-readers are essential to the publishing market as the culture evolves to the point of when the audience find it easier to read more books they like by just carrying a portable device to go everywhere. 

Features

• Firstly, E-reader is like the rest of the tablet allowing more multiple types of contents, with less banality.  
• Secondly, it can be used with internet, allowing Wi-Fi to get access to  book sellers so that readers can easily get to the books they want to read. On one hand, it has more resources for the readers to look for, on the other hand, it makes everything more convenient as it's freely to be downloaded from any places
• Thirdly, it has longer battery life, it can approximately last for 2 weeks
• Last but not least is E-reader is more readable, people still can read the text clearly even under the strong sunlight. 

Platforms

There is not much different to the physical books except for the way of how to present it and how this delivers to the public as a whole. That means, E-readers are as the enhanced version of the physical books. Also, the existence of  E-readers are associated to the general concept of publishing when it primarily represents the new platform, such as Amazon kindle and Kobo.

Amazon kindle

It's the production of Amazon.com. The name 'kindle' was derived from a metaphor meaning of the rising excitement from reading.

other image of amazon kindle from flickr.com

The kindle allows the user to download the contents through Wi-Fi or Amazon's 3G 'Whispernet' network regardless of the locations where users are in. The whispernet is also free of charge.

For further information, please visit https://kindle.amazon.com/

Kobo

The Kobo E-reader is produced by a Toronto-based company Kobo Inc.. It became like the rest of the e-book readers until the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten took over it in 2012. After this change, it started to develop its electronic ink screen.

The following video introduces the newest products of Kobo

For further information, please visit http://www.kobo.com/ereaders

Ereader facts

• 19% of UK consumers own an e-reader, also 19% of U.S adults own an e-reader
• average spending on digital reader newspaper subscriptions fell by $1 in 2012, while online newspaper subscriptions fell by $7
• Canadian e-reader owners use their devices for an average of 1.8 hours per day, down from 2.1 hours in 2011

more statistics are on http://www.factbrowser.com/tags/ereader/