Class Twelve: Web 3.0
You are famous!
A lecture from Trebor Scholz that reviews the Social Web
The issue of the loss of the public
- danah boyd on predator panic: She suggests that social network behavior is also a logical reaction to parental authority from over-scheduled kids whose sociality has been radically constrained by a society based fundamentally on stranger danger. With playdates and even home schooling, young people searching for social contact that isn't an extension of family relationships go to the Internet to seek out less homogeneous and more diverse forms of community.
- Jane McGonigal on urban spaces - alternate reality games like Cruel 2 B Kind and World Without Oil
- My Trip to Liberty City
- Virgil Griffith on the end of anonymity in the crowd
The issue of the role of private corporations
"Me, 'Person of the Year'? No Thanks" - Siva Vaidhyanathan
How is Web 2.0 different from Web 3.0?
What does the head of Google say?
Several definitions of Web 3.0 .
. . . a term that is used to describe various evolution of Web usage and interaction along several paths. These include transforming the Web into a database, a move towards making content accessible by multiple non-browser applications, the leveraging of artificial intelligence technologies, the Semantic web, the Geospatial Web, or the 3D web. More often it is used as a marketing ploy to hype incremental improvements of Web 2.0.
What does the creator of the World Wide Web say?
Is it about greater interactivity or greater vividness?
Is it about more labor being done by users or by machines?
Manovich - Chapter 5 - "The Forms"
The Database
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) "emulated familiar physical interfaces -- a file cabinet, a desk, a trash can, a control panel." (213)
"A library, museum -- in fact, any large collection of cultural data -- is replaced by a computer database." (214)
"Narratology, the branch of modern literary theory devoted to the theory of narrative, distinguishes between narration and description." (216)
The research of Gerard Genette
Narratologists or often interested in the relationship of "diegesis" (a sequence of events) to "mimesis" (static imitation)
The ludology vs. narratology debate:
Game Liberation by Jesper Juul
"Ludology meets Narratology" by Gonzalo Frasca
Story-teller Janet Murray tries to have the last word
"While computer games do not follow a database logic; they appear to be ruled by another logic -- that of the algorithm." (222)
"It may appear at first sight that data is passive and algorithms active -- another example of the passive-active binary categories so loved by human cultures." (224)
Definition of narrative from Mieke Bal: "It should contain both an actor and a narrator; it also should contain three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story, and the fabula; and its 'contents' should be 'a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors." (227)
What about these videos by photographer Noah Kalina or graphic designer Ahree Lee? Do they tell a story? (And, of course, there are the parodies and imitators. )
Paradigm and Syntagm
Barthes: "The syntagm is a combination of signs, which has space as a support." (220)
Elements in the syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia, while elements in the paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia. (230)
"Put differently, the database of choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is implicit; while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explcit." New media reverse this relationship. Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialized." (231)
"The database is the center of the design process." (231)
(When you import your clips into iMovie, you may see this for yourself.)
Navigable Space
Doom and Myst as "spatial journeys" (245)
games as "narrative actions" and "exploration" (247)
"Navigable space can be used to represent both physical spaces and abstract informational spaces." (249)
VisitorVille for web traffic statistics and 3DMailbox for e-mail
"the idea of navigable space lies at the very origins of the computer era." (251)
"virtual spaces are most often not true spaces but collections of separate objects." (253)
"more haptic and aggregate than optic and systematic." (254)
"Thus we may connect the American ideology of democracy with its paranoid fear of hierarchy and centralized control with the flat structure of the web, where every page exists on the same level of importance as every other and where any two sources connected through hyperlinking have equal weight. Similarly, in the case of virtual 3-D spaces on the Web, the lack of a unifying perspective in U.S. culture, whether in the space of an American city or in the space of an increasingly public discourse, can be correlated with the design of VRML, which substitutes a collection of objects for unified space." (259)
Virtual tours
Panoramas of World War Two Landmarks
Home of Martin Luther King Jr.
Now we prefer choices like Google Earth
The flaneur (270)
What is real life were like Second Life?
Field Trip to Anteater Island
Read Bogost 145-230 for next time
Intro to Advergames
I Love Bees from Jane McGonigal. (Explanation here.)
