Ripped apart by the internet

Do you think that the moment we feel expressing ourselves is a chore, that we’re doing it the wrong way, or too much of it?

With instant social media like Facebook and Twitter I suddenly feel like the time I get to my blog that I’m repeating myself.

And that’s just one side of things.

Thanks to university I had to split my online life into two – one that could be free with opinions and the other which was politically correct (and corporate friendly).

Uni’s over now, and I’m left with two lives that need to be filled, so to speak. Yet when I finish interacting with one I feel too drained to touch the other. Like now for instance. After finishing this blog post I probably won’t feel like updating my media-oriented blog.


So what are the options?

I’m considering merging the two – so the information could be more comprehensive. The con here is that there is stuff I talk about that I would like to share with my colleagues and the rest of the world – but how do I make sure that’s the only stuff they get to see?

If I leave my other side separate then yes, the information is separate and hence more relevant – yet it will more likely than not be neglected over time.


People who decided to keep everything together have found that their merging work and personal lives have gotten them into trouble. For instance, @NicHodge (who works a Microsoft) recently had to begrudgingly split his twitter accounts as too many businesses (and bosses) were watching.

He writes a bit about it here.



For now I’ll leave things as they are.


I can’t help but think that the mere fact that I have to consider this is an indicator that social media isn’t fitting as seamlessly into our lives as we might think.



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StinkyCurve (Sammyjo?)

Looking Back

Wow, it's the end of semester already.

Reading over my first blog post, I've learnt everything I thought I'd learn in this course, and so much more.

I'd always thought games were a sort of interactive art, and because I've had the chance to inspect a vast array of different games, it's only intensified my opinion on the matter.

By getting to understand how to make games interesting, and learning to implement design and rule changes that use the 8 Kinds of Fun, Every game I play I'll now be able to reflect on how it might have been made, what messages they intend, and what sorts of ways they can make the game better.

While I'm not sure if I'll engage with game design in my career (although it would be nice to), this will definitely change the way I design anything with an audience in mind. The success of anything delivered to many people, I think, is understanding what they respond best to, and the ways we can get them to think about themselves, and how they relate to the world.

COMP4431 has been great for teaching me just how to do that.

Not to mention all the awesome lectures, the awesome games, and the awesome tutor!
(And no, I'm not sucking up!)

Anyway, great subject, hopefully I'll take all these lessons with me into the future, and I'll keep a close eye on the gaming world!

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StinkyCurve

Telecommunications and the Information Age

"Digital Native 1" by Philippe Martin on Flickr 

I was utterly fascinated reading the survey results presented by Anderson et al, considering I find the traditional (landline) telephone becoming defunct in my household in lieu of the internet.

I liked seeing the trends of telephony, (some of these I just missed out on before mobiles became cool,) where phones were placed in the house, the types of calls, (I loved the concept of the maintenance call), and the times of day people spoke and the types of calls they made.

As what some would call a Digital Native, I’ve experienced these things yet I’ve been much more involved in other forms of communication that have emerged.

I think that (considering last week’s entry) the habits demonstrated in the survey suggest that habits from the old way of using phones (for example, making calls because you feel you have to) are echoed in habits of telephony today. You can’t discount, however, the pattern we’ve settled into as humans – where we are comfortable with knowing we can reach almost anybody we know, whenever we want. Perhaps that’s a trend of communication, but I’d consider it more of a social trend.

New communication technologies seem to be more about talking to as many people, in as short time as possible, while doing as many other things as you can manage (although this may just be my experience), thus I find the telephone a bit of a step back in terms of productivity. While using the telephone I’ll feel as if I’m wasting time, or that I could better spend time doing other things while talking to a particular person. I suppose Borgmann would burst in at this point and wail that the fabric of society is collapsing due to the momentum of telephony, but I would argue that communication patterns have simply changed, not degraded.

Think of the surge in apartment housing over the last few decades (thanks to population growth) – while some would say the way of life is degraded for apartment dwellers, it just seems to be a simple change in lifestyle. Across, not down, to put it one way. While there are tradeoffs in space and maybe a little peace and quiet you often get convenience, community and affordability.

I think that’s important to note when thinking about how technologies have changed in the face of society’s trends. While we have seen a definite change (at least in modern Australian homes) from Anderson et al’s survey, it does not mean we’ve stopped communication – it just means our form of (or at least what we consider to be) efficient communication has changed to suit our lifestyle; and I think businesses who take note of that reap the most rewards, profit wise.

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StinkyCurve

Going Banana(phone)s!

The development of the telephone for me didn’t seem as much of a world-shifting explosion than  it did a vicious corporate warfare. There, I said it!

That said, I think the development of the telephone is a particularly good example of a technologically constructed system that became socially enhanced.

When Alexander Graham Bell began his enterprise with his telephone system, he didn’t wait for people to see his machine and decide to use it. He pushed the telephone into the market as an enterprise, bringing the business world into telephony with the promise of quick conferencing and speedy business deals over the telephone. If the hardware didn’t suit a particular place, (for example in rural America, Bell rebuilt the system, and eventually upgraded the hardware himself.

While Fischer goes on a fair bit about the corporate war raging between companies in his first piece “The Telephone in America”, he takes a different perspective in the second and talks about how the telephone was directly marketed to the consumer.

The telephone as I mentioned was mainly marketed to businessmen because for the most part... as no one seemed to know what to use the telephone for. Once the business market  was safely established, companies like AT&T began to market out to people who didn’t necessarily have a use, but they made one.

Copy focused on high-profit services, such as long distance and extension sets; modern “psychology”, so to speak, influenced advertising themes;  and Bell leaders became more sensitive to the competition from other consumer goods.

Telephony really took off once competitors got involved. Competition between companies for pricing resulted in cheap cap calls for homes, and people were often left with the need to call more often to make use of the amount they spent for their call time.

Telephony increased with electrification and Automobility I think because companies seemed to hit a marketing sweet spot – they began to realise that by attributing a product to an identity or suggestion would encourage people to partake to become that identity. This is where the sociability of technology makes it’s big debut, because it’s here that technology becomes moulded by social demands. For instance, if a phone is marketed to a domestic audience boasting of efficiency and value for money, the product will be tailored as such to provide and attractive source for the consumer, and it will be more likely others in the same socio-cultural groups will follow.

The aggressive company mud-fight over the monopoly of the telephone was really a blessing; as the importance of the consumer to the product became painfully apparent. Finally.

The evidence is in the marketing of phones today – if you look at apple’s advertising that appeals to the tech-chic fashion (clean lines, vibrant colour, hip music), or the sleek advertising of the blackberry (black, crisp, clean, professional), and the sorts of plans telephony companies market with them: business caps for high volumes of calls, personal caps with internet data and free SMS included – companies have really honed on this and it seems to be paying!

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StinkyCurve

Jumping into the problem with both feet

Botany Rd Mascot. Australia by  rangertocpt on Flickr

I recall learning in a similar subject about Sydney’s dependence on cars. It was particularly interesting to read about pre-1940s Sydney where it seemed that there was something quite similar to a car-crisis, but not with cars.

Before cars, naturally, there were horses and carts. Lots of them. Of course there needed to be the correct infrastructure to support these many wooden vehicles, so when the first cars came along the transition was sort of awkward. Horses would be frightened of the loud engines, and cars would become broken down on the unsealed bumpy roads. The combination of horses and loud engines made for a smelly, smoggy atmosphere and it was in this sort of light that people first opposed the car for their intrusiveness.

However, as time rolled on and the car began to replace the horse and cart, big infrastructure changes occurred to cater for the new popular mode of transport. Roads were widened for cars and sealed with tar, licensing and registration was introduced to support the sheer amount of vehicles and even changes were made to the city itself. Instead of being heavily based in a single city centre, people began to spread outwards into smaller suburban areas, with large travelling gaps between major hubs (on the assumption that one would drive to a particular location). Houses were built with room to park cars, houses were built away from industrial areas, deciding that it would be simple to drive to work. 

The car-crisis that hit in the late 20^th century manifested itself in the form of global warming and pollution. It became horribly apparent that toxic exhaust from cars were contributing to major detrimental environmental phenomena (like climate change) which forced people to revise their love of the car. While the switch from leaded fuel to unleaded helped somewhat, it became recently apparent that the real solution is to be rid of cars altogether. However those huge architectural changes like suburbs and roads and long distance travel means it’s largely un-economical to suddenly remove the car from culture.

I came across a plan proposed by the Australian government to begin an initiative to change the structure of our metropolitan area to promote accessibility, in other words, encouraging citizens to get around on foot again – and to be able to reach all the necessary materials for living without requiring a car. It sounds like a brilliant idea and it can work, if we can only convince our petrol-headed culture to give up a cultural and gender icon.  That will be the hard part!

Below is a pamphlet from the City of Sydney council, outlining their intentions to make villages and accessible centres part of their plan of action:

http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/development/documents/LocalActionPlans/LocalActionbooklet.pdf

From my rough searching on the internet, it seems a few councils and municipalities are taking this intiative too, which is a particularly encouraging sign.

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StinkyCurve

Are Games Art?

While for some this seems to be a bit of a hard question, I find it a bit of a no-brainer.

Are video games an art form?

It pays for a moment to consider what art itself is, and that's a much bigger question.

For me, art is anything, visual, aural, sensory, intellectual, which gets me thinking and reflecting about whatever the piece is about. For me, a boot hanging from a telephone wire in an urban area is artistic in that it gets me to reflect on it's story: how it got there. In a similar fashion, watching my partner write code for Linux is an artform too - in that it takes a particular amount of skill and dedication to successfully pull off a task (partcularly if it's a big one). Isn't that what painting's like too?

The games for this week, Home, and Missing, are for me similar to the more familiar sort of surrealist, postmodern forms of art. While both games are designed in a similar way to games we know well, their aim is very different to what we're used to.

Home

Home, a mini pixel novella if you will, is about getting old. I almost couldn't stand to play it, afraid of what could happen to the sweet old Mr. Palmer. This game forces mortality on to you - as your food, happiness and sleep meters all slowly drain to nothing as you try so hard to get to any one  of them, it occurs to you that there really isn't any hope.
It's sort of crushing.
I expected some sort of sad demise of Mr. Palmer, but the sweet ending where we discover his daughter has been there for him gives us a little beacon of hope in an otherwise very dreary game.

Missing

Missing is a similarly sad game. You are a father whose son has been missing for years. The aim of the game seems to be to find your son (although there is no instruction apart from a short introductory story). As you go around putting up posters and talking to people in exactly the same manner, with exactly the same responses, over and over again, you realise that it will go on forever. The fact that you could go on with this game for ever without any closure makes your heart sink. I, like many players I'm sure, continued, and went around the map a few times, asking the people again, just in case something comes up. The realism within the game's metaphors is one of the hardest hitting things - people actually experience this.

These games make you sad. While we normally turn to games for comfort or escape from the dreary reality, these games plunge you into some of the hardest things to think about. Instead of bringing you entertainment and brainless enjoyment, Home and Missing rip you by your heartstrings into a reflection about life, and about others. Through experiencing the polar opposite of what games intend you to feel, you can understand just how deep games can go, psychologically.

And for me, that's definitely art.

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StinkyCurve

Consumers at the Wheel – An essay summary

Utes have their own gender associations. (Image from Google)

There is very little doubt as to the cultural, social and technological importance of automobiles. They have changed the way physical labour is carried out, they have altered patterns of transport and even impacted the way we construct buildings, and cities.

Automobiles were initially experimental machines. Engineers toyed with different engine forms to find the most effective engine in terms of fuel use and power. Once the internal combustion engine was built, inception was slow as cars were constructed from parts collaborated from specialist companies. Henry Ford and Sloan revolutionized the construction of the automobile. While they managed their companies differently, they both made the construction of the car efficient, cost effective; and as a result they could sell cars cheaply.

Once Ford began mass-producing cars and selling them particularly cheap, automobiles began to make a significant dent in the rural market. The initial uproar against the machines turned into an opportunity; many farmers endeavoured to modify the t-model engines for their own purposes (like washing machines and farming tools, for instance). While this was outside the interpretive flexibility envisioned by engineers, it became another way in which the automobile reached an alternate market. Indeed, new meaning was being given to the car by an emerging group of new users, that is, technically proficient male farmers. (K&P, pg 777)

Kline and Pinch note that the car, in being reappropriated for the rural market in this manner; the car began to reflect the gender roles of the rural Midwest through the embodiment of male prowess (in the repairing and driving of automobiles), and the car was also seen as a relief to over-worked female farmers, providing a means of transporting stock from farms to markets within town centres.

Car Accessory firms saw the potential for the rural market and from 1915 released modification kits that actually assisted farmers in modifying their engines for individual use. This led to the introduction of modified automobiles that served a specialised purpose, for instance tractors for sawing wood, or ploughing fields.

 The cultural dependence upon a technology can heavily impact the demand for it, and additionally, how hard the technology will be to remove. Duncan Heining in his paper “Cars and Girls – The Car, Masculinity and Pop Music” discusses how songs about the automobile depict strong gender roles. Not unlike how Kline and Pinch discuss in their paper, the automobile was often seen as a phallic artefact, not only by the sense of status in owning one, but in the mediated manner in which women supposedly desired men with cars. However, Heining also goes further to say that the car can even help men understand their own sexuality, and that of women.

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StinkyCurve

Making a Masterpiece

I don't think it would be particularly difficult to make a game where you could design your own music.

There is a heavy association between the aural and the visual - and this can be seen already in music authoring programs like Garageband and Sony's Acid, where the user draws sound on and off. The entirety of the piece can be seen like an artpiece itself, with pieces overlapping, and others in sync with one another.

In a similar fashion, you could develop a game that takes this concept a little further. By getting the user to draw (anything), an algorithm can measure the peaks, turns and dips of what they've drawn and make a melody from it. Add complexity by repeating this for several layers of music, for instance melody, bass, percussion and harmony. Once you master the drawing vs listening process - it would be easy enough to get a handle on what shapes make what melodies.

In this way, you can go crazy and do something as odd as you can, or if you really put some effort in, construct a multi-dimensional concerto. It could really be utilized for a multitude of different skill sets.

This idea sort of makes me think of a cross between Audiosurf, Garageband and Paint :-)

Drawing on the Walls - Crayon Physics

When I first looked at the video for Crayon Physics (albeit in a public place with the sound muted), I thought it rather amusing that adults are so interested in a supposedly childish game.

Interestingly enough it's this odd hybrid of childishness, sandboxiness and physics engine-ness that makes the game so engaging.

Games that encourage people to design their own solutions are fascinating to me - as in their own way (while they may be contained in some sense) they encourage community, (I wonder what other people have done?), creativity (How many ways can I solve this problem?) and logic (What is the simplest, and most complex way to solve this problem?), among other things.

Sandbox games can be a little daunting though. I remember being a little intimidated when I entered my first sandbox in secondLife: there were so many possibilities to build and test, each more complex than the next. I didn't end up building anything. (In fact, I left SecondLife altogether).

Crayon Physics seeks to ease that intimidation with housing the potential within a childlike environment. With crayon in hand, the supposed limitation sort of lifts the creative pressure off your shoulders. Of course, the complexity of the physics engine is revealed as you have to get more creative - but you aren't thrown into an abyss of uncertainty in that regard. Throw in the cutesy sound effects and the soothing background music, and it turns from a scary building mastery challenge into... just a game.

The big, open spaces in the game (while helped with small hints) are mostly a signal to solve the puzzles whatever way you wish. Interestingly enough, people go for more complex solutions (In particular I found it hard to keep it simple!) As a result of trial-and-error design (rather than rebuilding designs from scratch). Unless you're like my younger brother, who just draws so many lines he just lifts the ball next to the star.

Sigh.

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StinkyCurve

Switching the Lights off For Good (Can I have a nightlight on?)

"Earth Hour" by Vũ on Flickr 

Silly me for thinking that the adoption of electrification was the same everywhere!

In recent decades the explosion in population density has meant that power stations have needed to be built to support soaring numbers of televisions, air conditioners and inflatable jumping-castles. (Wait, what?)

As a result it’s become increasingly evident that our electric grid is not as stable as it used to be; I think of the increasingly frequent Sydney CBD blackouts, and the infamous harbour bridge cable outage that happened to cut off our emergency electricity supply (which is supposedly meant to be fail safe!)

After reading Salsbury it’s fairly to see how our organisation of the electrical grid set us up for disaster. Power-stations controlled by state governments, positioned near mines of rich natural deposits of fuel weren’t particularly efficient considering the energy lost trying to get the power into thick suburban centres, and states bickered over resources. Thanks to the snowy river power station the connection of NSW and VIC power transmission lines began to set movements in motion to set up a national grid and remove the political power from the state governments.

While this is all sorted now with a national grid managed by several large corporations, our electricity grids are now more-or-less co dependant on each other, and should a main transmission line fail there are potentials for mass blackouts across metropolitan areas. While we need to kick the electric habit our cheap naturally fuelled electricity is a major economic deterrent for consumers to switch to something sustainable (such as solar power).  Gilchrist brings this up in his paper about solar hot-water heaters; in that the technology is already there, yet it is economically silly to purchase them due to a lack of political support.

The government has tried to implement ways of controlling our energy consumption - but the rushed, disorganised way they tried to get the technology out there meant it did more damage than good. The following article on the ABC makes comment on how the initiative was foiled by desperate ulterior motives like stimulating the economy.

Auditor-general Ian McPhee has identified several shortcomings in the way the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts handled the program's implementation as it faced pressure from the Federal Government to get it up and running during the height of the global financial crisis.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/15/3039211.htm

This makes me somewhat sceptic of recent attempts to be aware of energy consumption such as Earth Hour, in which everybody is invited to switch off their lights for an hour. Although yes it does raise awareness about energy consumption – it doesn’t deal with the base problem, that we need to rethink the structure of electrical grids to avoid excessive wastage (such as the transmission of energy to and from power stations), and managing load-bearing to avoid the waste of electricity in low-demand periods (which I think we touched on a few weeks ago...)

I think we’ve got all our wires crossed up in this respect. It’s unfortunate that our type of city, the population of the city and the age of the architecture make it difficult for us to make a move.

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StinkyCurve

Sparkies and Systems

Lighting Experiment: A Light Bulb by  Neil Rutledge on Flickr

Reading about the construction of the American system of electricity was refreshing considering I’d always thought it was a very clean, *TaDa!* sort of discovery. It was particularly interesting to discover that it wasn’t just Edison’s innovative work on the incandescent bulb that drove electrification, but also the managerial work of Insull and Mitchell, running companies in various different locations.

It was interesting to note that the American development of electrification was different to that of the European system, and that public perceptions based on the availability of electricity were particularly different.

I was very much fascinated with the attention to detail Edison used in his economic management of particular private electricity plants – and how he calculated the income for charging a company to earn himself dividends to build more power stations. This manner of working is very different from the innovation that I’m used to; and the analytical and economical work that went into the enterprise opened my eyes as to the real facets of a system (political, financial, managerial) that Hughes talks about in his paper from earlier in the session.

Nye’s paper is a refreshing change to Hughes as it addresses the public response to electricity. 


Nye explores the commoditisation of electricity quite well, and I got the distinct impression that this sort of commoditisation was the result of a high load bearing, in other words, a political push to use electricity to encourage use in particular socio-economic groups of the public. It’s seamless slip into popular culture as Nye indicates suggests that this push seems to have worked, particularly considering consumers gathered it to be their right to electricity.

The whole notion of system-builders makes me think of my favourite modern technological system: computers. To me it feels like the real builders recently have been the CEOs of the two biggest competitors: Apple and Windows. While the hardware was already there it seems that Gates and Jobs have taken the reins economically and managerially, and I think this is why both companies have skyrocketed in value. By marketing to their audience as a commodity they increase sales, and by lowering production prices and selling cheaper products they guarantee a high load bearing of use, and a constant stream of business. 


I particularly like this article I found which sorts of demonstrates this: Steve Jobs talks a bit about his business ideals; and what drives his success.

When someone owns a primary technology and you use it, they are eventually going to beat you on it. In the computer business, we quickly realized that we didn’t have to make processors and hard drives. 

http://gigaom.com/2010/07/16/business-tips-from-apple-steve-jobs/

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StinkyCurve