Author: Alivia

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“The Database” by Lev Manovich left me wondering what it is I had just learned about. For me, the entire piece was confusing, probably due to my extremely limited understanding of databases and “new media” to begin with. But one thing that left me particularly confused was the relationship between databases and narratives.

Essentially, I understood that a database was a collection, while a narrative was a story. Manovich explains that “the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)” (pg 224). Because of these definitions, he says, databases are enemies with narratives. This dichotomy made sense to me.

That is until Manovich says that “regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives…they are all databases” (pg 228). How can a narrative be both a database and an enemy of a database?

The relationship became even more confusing when Manovich began discussing databases and narratives in terms of paradigms and syntagms. This description made it seem like the two things were very intertwined, and that one came out of the other’s existence. He says that “the database of choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is explicit, while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit. New media reverse this relationship” (230).

To me, the author is trying to argue that narratives and databases are simultaneously opposites, symbiotic, and in competition. Is this what he actually meant, or am I missing the link between all of these relationships?

This image of a crocodile and a bird somewhat illustrates this confusion. It is a symbiotic relationship, but the two animals seem like they would actually be enemies. Is this what Manovich was trying to say?

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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Last week in class, we discussed internet trolling at length. Essentially, these trolls are people who engage negatively with others online just because they want to. I found similarities in how Samuel Woolley talks about bots to how we talked about trolls in class.

The first thing that made me think of this was the story of a bot sending a death threat on twitter. A twitter user made a bot that took chunks of his tweets and rearranged them into new tweets. One of these new tweets sounded a lot like a death threat, and the Dutch police came knocking. Many examples of trolling on the more malicious end of the spectrum include making death threats to a target, like in the Gamergate “shitshow” where women received violent messages from online trolls.

The article’s discussion of bots also reminded me of trolls because of the difficulty in moderation. For both, the issue of free speech comes into play, because to limit bots or trolls could also limit free speech as a consequence. As Woolley says: “rumination on bots should also work to avoid policies or perspectives that simply blacklist all bots.”

The problem with comparing bots to trolls is that bots lack the sentience that trolls possess. One of the key points of a troll is that they get a kick out of what they’re doing to other people, and that is their motivation for continuing to troll. Bots, on the other hand, don’t have feelings, and therefore can’t get satisfaction out of what they’re doing.

Can a bot be an evil troll if they’re not even aware of what they’re doing? Is sentience a critical part of being a bully? These are questions that further investigation, persecution, and revision of bots will hopefully answer.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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In Patt Morrison’s article, she mentions that Australia has an anti-trolling law. This interested me, because the issue seemed so novel, niche, and indescribable that the idea of a federal law against it seemed unlikely. It turns out that New Zealand passed a similar law as well.

The NZ law was instated in 2015, and according to an article by Flynn Murphy, it bans “harmful digital communications.” The initial purpose was to stop cyberbullying, and under it “trolls” can be punished by up to two years in prison. This makes it seem much more serious than the term “trolling” would suggest. On one hand, the gravity is an important change. Whitney Phillips says in her article that “the implication that trolling is playful, disruptive for disruption’s sake, or fundamentally trivial (an attitude reflected in various year-end compilations of the “best trolls” of 2015) minimizes the experiences of those caught in the crosshairs of online harassers,” so the law could potentially validate the experiences of trolling victims. This article says that within a year of the law’s passing, 89 criminal charges were filed and 7 people had been jailed under the law.

Many people found problems with the law’s broad definition of harm. It was so broad, in fact, that things that would be legal to publish in print were not illegal online, which could limit free speech. According to Murphy, “the law effectively bans online communications judged “indecent”, “false” or “used to harass an individual”, the Post asked if reports on political expense scandals, or cartoons that mock religious figures, may also be banned under the legislation.” Many seemed to express a desire for journalists to be exempt from the law.

I think that these issues go back to an issue that Dr. Sample brought up last Friday, that you should always punch up, not down. If a journalist writes something harmful about a famous politician, it is not the same as someone “trolling” someone younger or of a more vulnerable class than them.

 

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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After reading the article “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in GIFs,” I wasn’t sure what I thought of it. Instead of forming an opinion right off the bat, I decided to look at the metadata attached to the article.

Although teenvogue.com doesn’t have a “comment” feature for articles, I was quickly able to find where they’d uploaded it to Facebook.

As with most articles covering any sort of racial topic, there were some very strong reactions from both ends of the spectrum. Out of the 166 comments, the ones that appear at the top all seem more negative than positive. They also seemed to be primarily posted by white people. I don’t think this was a mere coincidence.

When I read the article, I didn’t understand it right away, and I disagreed with some of the things in it. I, like many of the Facebook commenters, felt like Teen Vogue was trying to make “something out of absolutely nothing.”

Other commenters wondered what it would be like if the situation was flipped; if black people were underrepresented in GIFs.

The first four of the top comments are similar to the one above. The first five are from white people. It isn’t until scrolling pretty far down that you see comments like these:

Looking at the metadata attached to the article made me reconsider the problems I initially found with it. There are still parts I don’t agree with, such as “Images of black people, more than anyone else, are primed to go viral and circulate widely online,” because I think that “missing white girl syndrome” is a problem that contradicts this.

But the article opened my eyes to many social standards that I had failed to recognize before, such as seeing black people as a “walking hyperbole.” The article wasn’t “making something out of nothing,” but instead it was making something out of something that was previously completely ignored.

 

 

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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Name of the Category Reaction Gif

Example:

via GIPHY

Counter-Example: 

Analysis: These GIFs typically include the entire face or body of a person, which allows for powerful expressions. In the example, the person has a very strong reaction and uses his entire body and face. For a counter-GIF, we made a GIF showing just someone’s eye blinking. Because everyone is always blinking, this doesn’t portray any emotion or reaction to something. If this was sent in a text conversation in place of a reaction GIF, I would consider it an end of the conversation, which is directly opposite to the purpose of a reaction GIF.

 

Name of the Category: Cinemagraph

Example:

via GIPHY

Counter-Example: 

Analysis: These GIFs are normally very classy and artistic, often used in ad campaigns for fashion companies. The example I used was from a Coco Chanel ad campaign. I made a counter-GIF from the Simpsons, and used a picture of Homer drooling. Both of these are crude and unartistic things, but the actual GIF is created in the Cinemagraph style of only having one moving element.

 

Name of the Category: Sports

Example:

via GIPHY

Counter-Example: 

Analysis: Sports GIFs are usually meant to capture an intense moment in a sporting game, and therefore show an epic play or point. I chose an impressive catch from a baseball game for the prototypical example. The counter-GIF shows a very anti-climatic moment in a football game. I think it’s a counter-GIF because it’s not a moment from sports that anyone cares about remembering, so turning it into a GIF is almost pointless and undermines the purpose of sports gifs.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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Surprisingly, the hamburger you ate for lunch and the cloud storage you sent the artsy photo you took of it to may have more similarities than you think when looking at them through the lens of environmental concerns.

In the article “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge” by Ingrid Burrington, she discusses how the infrastructure behind the seemingly ephemeral and neutral Cloud could actually be quite disruptive to the environment. She explains how people view data centers as pristine, white “cathedrals,” when in reality they resemble crude factories. Of course, Apple and similar companies try to hide this infrastructure with glass-walled stores, minimalist interfaces, and sleek headquarters. Unless you did some digging, you may never know the environmental impact the Cloud has. For example, the article explains that “streaming an hour of video on a weekly basis uses more power annually than a new refrigerator.”

When reading Burrington’s piece, I couldn’t help but draw similarities between problems with Cloud infrastructure and problems with animal agriculture. First of all, many people like to think that livestock lives in large open pastures and then is humanely processed by a skilled butcher.  Instead, most of the meat we eat comes from large factory farming facilities with animals living and killed in horrendous conditions, similar to illusion hiding the dingy factories of data centers. Animal agriculture also has a detrimental impact on the environment. If you think that the ramifications of your netflix binge are bad, consider this: your quarter-pounder used up to 460 gallons of water, 65 acres of land to produce, and 4 pounds of total carbon footprint. 

Both data centers and factory farms are highly powerful and profitable businesses with horrendous environmental footprints. However, one critical difference is that for the data centers, it’s more feasible for them to cut back. For a factory farm to decrease their impact on the environment, they would have to severely cut back on production (and consequently, profits).

For now, the negative impacts of data centers are more under-the-radar than that of factory farms, as shown by the very different results you get with a google image search of both. In the future, though, will searching “data centers” give similarly grim results to the ones for “factory farming”

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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The study “Social Topography in a Wireless Era: The Negotiation of Public and Private Space” by Lee Humphreys aimed to observe and explore how people negotiate their private and public senses of self and privacy when they use their cellphones in public spaces. The study was conducted from 2002-2003, years before the first iPhone hit the market. I think that is why this article at times feels idle and meaningless.

At the time the article was written, cellphone popularity was still in its infancy, and the scope of the technology was limited compared to the smartphones of today.

Because of this, I think that everything about the new technology seemed remarkable, surprising, and worth studying. But as a present day reader, I don’t feel that I need to be told that people like to not be interrupted when using their phones in public, or that they find it bothersome if people are talking too loudly. I also believe that these behaviors could be observed in the absence of mobile phones. If people were holding a private conversation with their friends in a public space, they likely would not want to be interrupted, would somewhat separate themselves from the rest of the “participation unit,” and would be bothered if a group of people were being too loud near them.

While I will concede that at the time of the study the idea of private cellphone use in a public space was worth observing, I think that Humphreys tends to draw conclusions from mere coincidences. I don’t believe that setting your suitcase down by your feet is a territorial marking, even when you’re engrossed in a private cellphone conversation. Instead, it’s likely that the person in the study was tired of carrying a suitcase around.

The article’s fascination with something that now seems obvious or natural to us now shows how much technology has been integrated into our lives.

 

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

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The title of this post was inspired by a Reddit post entitled “Is Neuromancer confusing and poorly written, or am I stupid?” that accurately summed up the feelings I had while reading the novel. The question led me to two possible answers; a mathematical one, and one from the author himself.

The Voyant software includes a text analysis called “vocabulary density,” which is found by dividing the number of unique words in a text by the total number of words. For Neuromancer, this value is .112. This means that about 11% of the words in the book are unique. According to Voyant, the average sentence length in the novel is 10.6 words, meaning that a unique word is introduced in about every sentence. This mathematically explains why Neuromancer is so hard to understand, especially on the first read.

The second resource I found was an article written by William Gibson himself, titled “how I wrote Neuromancer.” In it, he admits he “had so very little idea of how to write a novel,” and that he “would write, then, to the audience I imagined in the future of my discovery by friendly if unimaginable forces, and to them alone. A message in a bottle. It only mattered that I get it as right as I possibly could for them.” For Gibson, it seems that the point of the novel was not to create a friendly read for the Sci-fi readers of the 80’s, but to create a prediction of the future.

In this video clip, Gibson talks about how one of his goals when writing was to challenge the science fiction genre, and how this can cause readers with preconceived expectations of the genre to think of his writing as a “failure.”

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia