[Week 9 Tut Preparation] Images do lie!

Images do lie!

The blog question for this week is: “Do visual media work differently to other media forms?” The first thought that occurred to my mind is “Yes”. But after looking closer at the readings provided in the course blog and my own research, I want to change my answer to “No”. But it does not mean visual media works completely different from others media form, especially traditional forms.

Looking at the printing history, people used to use images, or simplified images to represent their ideas, for example, the Egyptian ancient cravings, or Chinese characters (which are still in use at the moment). Then people changed to use textual signs, such as words, letters to represent the same idea. All of those publishing forms play important parts in constructing/deconstructing archives or creating publics/imagined publics. Another similarity between visual media and other forms of media is the ability of ‘[reassembling] our social engagements, engagements with the publics we imagine are out there via variations to modes of publishing.’ (1) As long as visual media is the form of publishing data, it shares certain characteristics of all other media forms.

Then, technology came into play. It was when people went back to favor the images as they used to. As the noted in the lecture, images (painting, photographs) bring reality with them. Similar to words, images also describe objects. However, if words are abstract, images are more concrete and sometimes they can represent more than just the object. If we have to add adjectives and adverbs before a noun to add some characteristics to it, an image can convey all the idea above with tones, colors and arrangements (by using pixels for digital images and paints for traditional ones and so on).

But can we trust images? There are many debates about the trustworthiness of words and written texts, but can we trust images like we used to trust texts just because they are all captures the ‘reality’? As Lodriguss pointed out ‘that the manipulation of images started with the invention of Photoshop, but there have been fake photographs since the invention of photography’. He also says ‘They were apparently cut out of other photos and pasted on top of a photo of the woman at right and re-photographed in a composite image.’ (Image below) It is easy to notice that the picture somehow was manipulated due to the ‘unnatural’ state of the arrangements as well as physical representation of reality.

Daquilla Family Photograph by A. Werner and Sons

But with technologies, it will be harder for people to distinguish between the truth and the presentation. In the example below, the author changed the red color of M8, the Lagoon Nebula, to blue with one simple step by using Photoshop. Personally I have a little knowledge about the software as well and I can think of at least three ways of changing the color of that image. Imagine what else can people so with such technology?

M8 “True” Color

M8 “False” Color

In conclusion, the visual media, indeed, has some significant advantages to other media forms, but when it comes to ethical issues, it shares the same problem.

(1) Taken from the Lecture notes.

[Week 8 Tut Preparation] Information graphics – Advantages and disadvantages

Information graphics – Advantages and disadvantages

It might take pages to fully describe the Sydney City Rail map, such as listing the lines system, instructions of directions, mentioning of joint points, and so on. But it only takes ONE image to illustrate all of the criteria above. The illustrated image of the City Rail map is something called ‘information graphic’.

Sydney City Rail Map in the Future

Napoleon Bonaparte once said ‘A picture is worth a thousands word’, which now is set to be the goal of visualisation or the creation of information graphics. As the lecture pointed out, visualisation is not about photography, is not about capturing what we see into images, but it is about how to publish data in a creative, yet much more effective way. As a form of archive, information graphics contain data that can communicate with readers/audiences in the matter of seconds. The ‘end-goals’ of visualisation are illustrating the relationships among the contents of the graphic, as well as establishing an understanding of the data in it.

Looking back as the City Rail network map in Sydney, it is obvious that Central is the biggest joint points of all lines from Innerwest line to Airport & Easthills line, for example. But it may takes hundred words to list the name of all the available lines in the system when all you have to do in the graphic is making lines with different colours, patterns and positions.

However, is it always beneficial to have visualisation of data? Bresciani and Eppler have found out that even visualisation has risks, mainly in three categories: cognitive, emotional and social. And all the risks come from both designers and users/readers. They note that the highest risk is the de-focused of information. Due to the huge amount of data that was compressed in one picture, it may end up storing too much information and readers can be distracted easily from their main reading purposes. For example, in the City Rail map, the amount of lines and stops may distract or confuse people, especially when they first see the map.

Another risk is cultural and cross-cultural differences.

These are pitfalls related to the social environment and induced by the heterogeneity of users, due to the fact that the meaning of symbols and colours are not universal (Henderson 1995, Ware 2004, Nisbett 2004, Ewenstein/White 2007). Hence some graphic representations may be misinterpreted in other cultural contexts.

Everybody has a unique perception towards certain kinds of things and comes from different cultures, which leads to different ways of interpreting the meaning of the ‘text’ (in this case, a graphic). One graphic can be relevant to one group of people and irrelevant to another. For example the Sydney City Rail map is only useful for those who are currently living in Sydney.  Those who live in Melbourne or Adelaide would find this useless.

[Week 7 Tute preparation] Fighting against SOPA/PIPA for the sake of the law or for your own personal sakes?

Fighting against SOPA/PIPA for the sake of the law

or for your own personal sakes?

Many arguments were raised when the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act were first introduced to the press and on theirs way to the Upper House of the US Government. However, two Acts were never able to become the law since they received too many negative feedbacks from the online users from individuals to large organisation such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Executives of large Social Media platforms had joined together to write a letter to send to the Senates to express their oppositional views on the two Acts. Wikipedia was shut down for 24 hours on Wednesday, 18^th January to protest against the SOPA/PIPA. A group of Anonymous hackers hacked into the federal websites of the US Government to show their disagreement towards the issues. However, the US government continued to carry on their suggestions and resulted in the close down of the website MegaUpload and the arrest of its founder, Kim Dotcom. However, due to heavy negative responses, the Acts could not be pass to the Upper House.

But the questions of morally right or wrong still remain. There are incredible raises in illegal download of files on the Internet. For example, the Apple’s App Store was accused of being irresponsible for the account hacking issues.

In the shadowy world of hacking, it’s often unclear how criminals get iTunes passwords or credit card information. But the App Store, and Apple’s broader iTunes Store, have become playgrounds for illicit transactions. And the Web is rife with App Store scams. On Chinese online marketplaces, like Taobao or DHgate, some sellers are offering access to iTunes accounts for as little as $33. One seller on DHgate, for instance, has sold 56 iTunes accounts for less than $35 each, promising thousands of dollars in “credit.”

The New York Times, March 15^th 2012.

With little amount of money, online users can have unlimited access to iTunes account that were not theirs and download freely without paying for the apps. The issues continued with the large amount of pirated files on the Internet. With only seven simple steps on The Pirate Bay, users can download all the media they want and ‘own [them] forever’ without paying for them. And surprisingly, the figures that the Guardian published on their website was breath-taking. We are living among, mostly, illegal files networks more than we had ever imagine:

• Pirated contents accounts for 24% of the worldwide internet bandwidth consumption.


• The biggest chunk is carried by bittorrent (the protocol used for file sharing); it weighs about 40% of the illegitimate content in Europe and 20% in the US (including downstream and upstream). Worldwide, bittorrent gets 250 million UVs per month.


• The second tier is made by the so-called cyberlockers (5% of the global bandwidth), among them the infamous Megaupload, raided a few days ago by the FBI and the New Zealand police. On the 500 million unique visitors per month to cyberlockers, Megaupload drained 93 million UVs. (To put things in perspective, the entire US newspaper industry gets about 110 million UVs per month). The Cyberlockers segment has twice the users but consumes eight times less bandwidth than bittorrent simply because files are much bigger on the peer-to-peer system.


• The third significant segment in piracy is illegal video streaming (1.4% of the global bandwidth.)

The Guardian,  23^rd January 2012.

Seemingly, people are fighting for the online sharing files right for their own personal interests. Everyone wants to get a bargain.  Truthfully, if I exchange my 1Tb of movies, music and all kind of media into figures, I am sure I would never pay such money for them (and honestly I am too scared to do that). And from my personal experience, I only feel like it’s worth to spend money on what I really like, I do purchase DVDs and CDs of my favourite artists. But the desire of consuming as much media as possible is always there, together with the rapid raise of the new media outlets among the market. Therefore, SOPA protects the copyright but prevents consumption, which sounds contradicted.

However, there were also some positive negative comments on the issue. Paulo Coeho commented that ‘“Pirating” can act as an introduction to an artist’s work. If you like his or her idea, then you will want to have it in your house; a good idea doesn’t need protection.’ But it is only a small portion of population has such publicity to guarantee their sales number or people’s recognition and buying such their ‘intellectual products’, which means only a small portion of population has the ability to stay that positive.

[Week 5 Tut Preparation] You’ve caught the archive fever, dear!

You’ve caught archive fever, dear!

Have you ever been in the state that you cannot stop checking your Email, Facebook or Twitter? Why do smartphones need ‘Push Notifications’ function at all? No matter how many questions are asked, the answer is the same: ‘You’ve caught archive fever, dear!’

Let’s start with archive. It is the storage of information of all kind, from physical to digital. People keep on building up their personal as well as public archive without acknowledging it. Similar to its content, archive exists in many forms. It can be notes, photo albums, CDs collection. It also can be emails, data in ‘clouds’. Basically archive is everything of remembering as Ogle argues in his blog. But have we, really, got the best of archive? He continues to state in his blog that people pay to much attention to currency and temporarily forget about what old stuff can do. But if we continuously look at old stuff and nonstoppingly adding up data, archive can be dangerous.

It is a fever.

So, what is archive fever?

Archive fever is the fever to constantly make more archives (and therefore a constantly changing culture), take more pictures, store and use them differently, invent new technologies for archiving…*

People just cannot stop creating things as much as they cannot stop keeping up with their friends in life, or on social networks, as we mostly do today. Even Facebook itself has caught the fever by introducing timeline to users, which allow us to access and trace back every single action that we do on the website. And users can even put milestones on their own timelines indicating ‘this happens when’ anytime they want, even before the time they actually registered and actived their pages. The desire to control everything may take people to a such complex place that people start to run away from it, while not long ago they was fancinated about it. Taking privacy as an example, imagine the connection between your own private archive and publich archive that enables the world to know everything about you. Facebook won’t stop synchronising your personal stuff online unless you order them to. With such amount of your own archives, can you control all of them?

* Definition taken from the course outline.

[Week 4 Tut Preparation] The Internet of things

The Internet of things

Thanks to the first lecture video called ‘The Internet of things’, the notion of assemblage, or just another fancy name of network but has more complex characteristics, is raised in relation to publishing and everything that circulates around this concept.

First of all, the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary 7^th edition defines ‘assemblage’ as ‘a collection of things; a group of people’ (p. 77).  If we put the word in publishing context, its meaning does not change much. As DeLanda defines, assemblage simply means the network of things*. ‘Things’ can also be considered as another assemblage, together they create a bigger network. In relation to Latour’s work on Actor-Network Theory, the assemblages are created by human and non-human elements, in which they were treated equally. For example, every element that makes a classroom a classroom should be treated equally, which simply means that the presence of a wooden table is as important as that of a student.

Secondly, when taking a closer look at the characteristics of an assemblage, it is noticeable that it does not have a fix ‘shape’, figuratively saying. Every single element in the network changes through time, which creates a flexible network. In this blog, I will take Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) as an example for analysis. Like many other online sharing platforms such as Youtube or Wikipedia, Dropbox is a ‘cloud’ for people to store and of course, share their files. So, what are the actors of this platform? First of all are the creators of the platform, in other words, the people who own the website. Then the next actor is customers/users. However, what make Dropbox a network of human and things? We should mention the second non-human actors, which are files people (users) shares on the site. Other actors may include business partners that invest money in maintaining the site, clients that actually pay for the service so they can experience and use the site for serious purposes. These actors interact with each other in a certain way, which creates the Dropbox interchangeable characteristic, which simply means that every actor in such assemblage responds to each other’s movements (uploading/downloading files), which changes the scale of the network constantly.

Clearly we can see that the assemblage is somehow a ‘living’ being, which requires the actors (elements) within it to perform in order to maintain its existence.

* Definition taken from the course outline.

[Week 3 Tut Preparation] Printing through time

Printing through time

It could be a little sudden if people were given a couple of pages about the evolution of printing through time. What I mean here is printing did not appear by itself in a specific day in history and then developed ever since. It could not be wrong to say that printing was the child of writing. A smart, yet complex one.

People started to ‘write’ things down to anyplace that could preserve their traces to memorise things, to communicate with each other in an abstract way. Every single piece of writing was unique, which means there was hardly a large number of copies existed parallel at the time. It dated back more than 5000 years ago, the Egyptian invented a system of pictorial writing, a system consists of pictures symbolising objects.

Egyptian Characters

Then though times, it started to change to transitional writing, when words started to present the names of objects, to have deeper meaning. Finally, writing reached the phonetic stage, where words started to ‘look’ like words today. They were more specific, unique and fully represent the meaning.

Along with the evolution of writing, printing also develops through times. Reflecting the history of printing, people had invented incredible modes of printing through years, along with the development of technology and people’s awareness of the need of reading, writing and sharing with the world. The very first triumph in printing belonged to Chinese Confucian scholars, who wanted to owned their own copies of the text by “[simply laying] sheets of paper on the engraved slabs and rubbing all over with charcoal or graphite, they can take away a text in white letters on a black ground”. After that, they enhanced the ‘printing’ mode to “carve the letters in a raised form (and in mirror writing) and then to apply ink to the surface of the letters. When this ink is transferred to paper, the letters appear in black (or in a colour) against the white of the paper – much more pleasant to the eye than white on black”.

Then through centuries, people started to improve printing through many forms. And printing started to become such convenient tool that people started to rely on it.

Scroll

The first innovative form of printing is scroll. But it is oral-based and not quite organised.

Then the Codex appeared, which resembled today books. People can choose what they want to read, they can actually manage their desirable content.

The Codex

Then, the technology came along the play. People started to question:

"Is this really printing?"

Normally people publish books or their creativity objects through the concreted and traditional printing mode. But the technology had change the mode of publishing into a whole new direction. These types of publishing have almost completely changed the way people engage with the text and the way they produce the text. Is it still true that people have to read through a whole lot of rules and guidelines just to submit a manuscript with hope that it could be publish someday? Or is it just one click and the world could read what you want to say in your personal blog?

Printing has changed through many centuries and they will likely continue to transform, whether we like it or not. What effects could online publishing affect printing? The previous post in this blog did outline briefly the change eBooks bring to our lives. But there are many more problems that need to be look into to determine the good and bad side of printing and publishing today.

Images sources:

http://myappworld.com/how-to-sync-books-with-itunes-and-add-other-ebooks/howto/

http://www.bible-researcher.com/isaiah-scroll.html

http://www.logoi.com/notes/egyptian_script.html

[Week 2 Tut Preparation] EBooks: Open doors or the end of new opportunities?

EBooks: Open doors or the end of new opportunities?

Printing and publishing, even writing had experienced many changes, development as well as evolution through centuries. People changed from writing on rocks to writing on papers. ‘Documents’ also had different forms, varied from books, pictures to digital files on a computer. One of the significant changes of human printing and publishing history is the emergence of eBooks in today markets.

Existing together with traditional forms of prints, eBooks rapidly gain favor from large portion of the audiences during the past few years. EBooks have many features that normal books do not have. Book readers can only lent the book or talk about it with their friends only after they have read the whole book, or the most of it, not to mention the ‘time’. Ereaders can share what they are reading, thinking through social platforms immediately with their friends online. EBooks have created such interactive characteristics that allow readers to be more active about the content they have in eBook tablets. As Wortham put in her post, eBooks are libraries with interactive content that have wider spread on the network and that introduce users/readers to new way of managing their integrated ‘contents’.

However, there are many arguments about the down side of eBooks. John Naughton in his article for ‘The Guardian’ noted that eBooks limit people from being a ‘true’ reader. In his opinion, a concrete book completely belongs to one’s possession and he or she has complete access and right to the book:

I own my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and can do with it what I wish. I can, for example, lend it to friends, family and students. I can, if I wish, tear out pages and send them to people in the post, or stick them up on noticeboards. I can sell the book – if I could find a buyer. I can donate it to the local Oxfam shop. I can read sobering or inflammatory passages from it at political demonstrations. And so on.

But with an e-reader device, readers cannot do the things he said above. The digital contents have copyright and it prevents people from sharing knowledge to the world. Naughton also mentioned the online content is different from content that comes from a hard copy of the book. The government has control over the net and readers are restricted from reading inappropriate content. Readers also have not got control over their electronic bookshelves, which means contents can be deleted without any advance warning.

Another argument about the dark side of eBook evolution is the profit gain by publishers and the Amazon or any online eBook sellers. If profit originally comes to the publishers, the Amazon willingly cut down the profits to attract more buyers, which lowers the perceptions of readers about what a book really costs. Values, in digital age, may need to acquire a new definition.

Therefore, in the world of digitalisation, conflicts are created more than ever before, when books were just simply books.