Archives

To be perfectly honest I found it hard to fully grasp the concept of archive fever. I think it has to do with an obsession or fixation on archives and what can be recorded, a kind of nostalgia. Having information on times and events.
What I did find interesting however was Matthew Ogle discussed, 'The Memory', in his Archive Fever, A love letter to the post real-time web. He states, 'By providing us with new ways to share what we're doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We've all been so distracted by the now that we've hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We've all become accidental archivists; our our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future.' I like how Ogle phrases this point and I feel it in my own anxieties which sprout from digital archives. For example, I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald sometime last year about Facebook tracking its users web history even if they don't have their Facebook account open, if they are on the same browser that they use for Facebook, they actions are being archived by Facebook. For instance, I use Firefox so whenever I have firefox running, Facebook is archiving everything I do. Although the web is doing this anyway, archiving my every action, even the action of writing this blog, Facebook sells their archives to corporations for millions of dollars. So one action, lets say of writing this blog, has been archived in my web history, Facebook, and possibly multiple organisations archives for commercia purposes, reating back to what Ogle describes as being 'accidental archivists'. I particularly like the way he describes this as a comet tail of personal history, all linked to me, the accidental archivist, who thrusts my comet relentlessly forward, leaving a larger tail everyday.

This kind of 'burgeoning digital archives', as Ogle puts it, scares me at times. It reminds me of our studies in first year, about 'the doubling of place', whereas such a private action, a google search, something not even mediated by a social networking platform, could be archived in hundreds of different places, for countless people to see.. who knows where in the world my information could be archived, and it all would have originated from my desk in my room.

Bay Pizza

When reading about assemblage and actor-network theory and how each are made of components which work individually and also sustain them as a whole or a network, I found it interesting to think of these relationships in terms of something familiar to me. Where I work.
I work in a pizza restaurant called Bay Pizza, it is only a take-away and delivery restaurant though, not a sit-down one.
When relating this to the theory of assemblage, as broken down into its individual components by De Landa, the material role of Bay pizza would be performed by the walls, the floor, the oven and essentially us a entities within the confides of our network. The expressive role would be played by things such as our logo on the front of the store, our signs which contain our menu and our habits in the store, which would demonstrate to outsiders what we do in the store. The territorializing role would be played mostly by my boss and also the owner and when he isn't present by myself, being manager. The deterritorializing role would be played, I believe, by a lack of ingredients, due to an overload in orders, or a break down in communication which could result in an order not being made in time for a customer. For the linguistic/coding role I thought this could maybe be played by an insurance company and or the security company which monitors our alarm system, even the company which delivers our produce and the customers which buy our product, all at work to protect and sustain the network which has formed.
With these aspects making us up as an assemblage network I found it then interesting to look at Bay Pizza in terms of actor-network theory and more so the 'material-semiotic' aspect.
As I explained earlier, there are many elements or entities which must come together to create the assemblage network, but we also must work together to ensure its survival. If material role breaks down, we are unable to open, if a territoralizing role breaks down, there is no order and we cannot operate, if a linguistic role breaks down we are vulnerable and will probably break down. Each separate element works together to make a whole network and the material form which is Bay Pizza.
As for the semiotic role, this comes from our relationship with our customers. If walking past our store a customer would most probably first see our expressive role at work, which would be responsible for bringing them inside and essentially apart of our network. Once inside, they would witness all the other roles at work and draw meaning from them; this is a functioning restaurant.

It was quite beneficial to relate assemblage theory and actor-network theory to something so close to home. However, it did make me wonder as the the limit of such theories, For example, Bay Pizza being one role in the assemblage of our street, or that street being one role in the assemblage of a suburb on so on to the point where the entire planet is one assemblage network and our semiotic meaning is to be perceived by, well, who knows.

Paywall's

Publishing over the past decade has shifted dramatically. Modes of publishing are changing from print to digital and online. For myself, most to all of my daily intake of published material happens digitally. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian are the newspapers which I read and I will only ever read them in their printed form if I see one lying around, I will not purchase one, however, I do have a subscription to the Sydney Morning Herald via my iPhone.
This weeks reading seemed to focus around the issues of paywall's and to put it further, the issues of paywall's surrounding the New York Times. 


According to Dan Gillmor and Felix Salmon, the NYT's paywall is friendly, welcoming and much looser then that of the Wall Street Journal where information is completely restricted unless you have a subscription. They argue that this freer platform will encourage people to buy subscriptions and I personally would agree. I purchased my subscription with SMH when a paywall restricted me from reading the article through their application. I knew I could have easily gone through he browser and accessed the same article but I felt an obligation to the content, I view and enjoy the service on a daily basis and it felt right to pay; the process felt like more of a, paying of respect opposed to purchasing of material.
This being said for me as an individual, I have countless friends who would never read a journalistic article, online or printed. In this age it is far easier to access information through platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, twitter and many other forms of social networking. As Alan Rusbridger talks about in his interview, that the industry is shrinking. He states that for sometime now things have been expanding and growing with the digital age but now are shrinking and that journalists must find what they are good at and stick to it, he says, 'It's the Jeff Jarvis haiku, do what you do best and link to the rest'.
This is exactly what social networking and social forum websites do and do perfectly. All of these sites, which generate readers and viewers into the hundreds of millions, never pretend to be what they are not, they are all user generated sites. The content which we view is uploaded by everyday people. Of course this raises another issue, is what were are reading and viewing always factual and from a reliable source, but thats of another concern. In relation to modes of publishing, in the digital age, there is no longer a fixed, or even fail safe, way of getting information across. Information flow is dictated by the users and the forum they choose.

Understanding versus Perception

After going over the reading and discussing with others about the issue of e-readers I realised how unaware I was to the full extent of pro's and con's that e-readers pose to the way in which we intake publications. Maybe this is due to my age and furthermore my circumstance, I have, for most of memorable life, had easily available computers, have owned my own laptop for several years now and have had an iPhone for almost two years so a large amount of the publications I consume are through some form of digital technology. What I found interesting in this weeks readings was Jonah Lehrer's idea of understanding being trumped by perception in the digital age and how it can be applied to Stanislas Dehaene's research on the Ventral Route and the Dorsal Stream, areas of the brain which are used to decipher texts. 

For myself, as was the case with Lehrer, I find it much easier to scan over text on a screen and harder to edit my own text on a screen. I would in essence, for the majority of most days, be over using my brains Ventral Route. I consume almost every form of publication, besides books for pleasure reading, through some form of digital device. Does this mean my understanding of a text I read digitally is less? and furthermore is this rapidly growing us of digital devices hindering my ability to learn through my studies? According to Lehrer and Dahaene, most probably. My understanding of a text is being undermined by my want to perceive and access it more quickly, a digital irony it would seem. I see this kind of effect happening in online news publications. For example when I visit the Sydney Morning Herald's website to access my daily news information, I often see spelling and grammatical errors and I wonder, why? Don't they have editors? Or have the writers and editors fallen victim to perception hindering understanding just as I have? Have they became unable to access their Dorsal Streams while writing large walls of text and at an ever growing pace to keep up with the twenty four hour demand for information online? Whatever the answer, there is clearly a trend forming among online publications. 

On a further note, as Erick Schonfeld points out, with the availability of applications such as Read It Later and Instapper, where a user can, in essence, bookmark a publication to read at a later time, which he said, for some users, appears to be consuming peoples television time. Applications like these are making it even easier to perception to trump understanding. The convenience of e-readers would appear to good to pass up. 

As Lehrer states, 'consumer technology moves in a single direction: it's constantly making it easier for us to perceive the content'. So what can we do? In terms of hindering the rate of technology, nothing really. We can only try to maintain our sense of nostalgia with printed publications and make an effort to challenge our minds and challenge ourselves to learn to the most of our abilities. Easier said then done.