User:Inge Hoonte/Olia

The Cloud

The Cloud is ours because we built it with "good enough content and valuable enough data." Says who? This seems to go against the whole amateur idea.

Munster and Lovink's What a network is not: "We should be wary of techno-contractions like "social software" that suggest technology glues us humans together (again). Instead, we should read – and enjoy – networks as info-clouds that cover the sun. They disperse the bright light of broadcasting media."

Also: "Networks are fragmentors. They break up strong signs and experiences into countless threads."

Chris Anderson, Wired, July 2008: we live in the Petabyte age and petabytes don't fit on hard disks, we ran out of organizational analogies.

Olia's illustration on p49 > the Cloud touches our computers. Our computers are NOT inside the Cloud. Various companies have their own clouds. [insert link to IT Crowd black box episode here]

LURKER!

Cory Arcangel: net.art freed artist from museums and galleries. Interesting to read in relation to Olia's newspaper project, work that is made for the web, recognized by the "physical" art world, and translated into a physical form so it can be presented in the analog way as well.

"First we had Geocities (web hosting made easy), then Live Journal (posting text to a web host made easy), then Myspace (Geocities and Live Journal made easy), then Facebook (Myspace made easy), and now Twitter (Livebook and Faceebook made even easier)." >> very much linking existing things together, leaving out other formats that could lead to other future developments by combining their "made easier" components.

Does he imply that just because the reader was made in the educational, artistic field, it is deemed of value instantly? This comes up a lot in the texts for this week, this distinction between educated people, the people who bring you the news, the authorities of truth, the experts, VERSUS "everybody else".

Valid point: in the end, monetary capital makes the world go round (not just the Internet), not cultural capital.

Also: once shine wears off, it's forgotten and we look at next big hit. I'm thinking of one-hit-wonders now (recently ran into Be My Baby by Vanessa Paradis who would mostly be forgotten if it weren't for Johnny Depp), but I guess Myspace was more a temporary trend. One that doesn't have a revival I guess, as in fashion's case with bell bottom pants, neon colors, and leggings.

And lastly: showing validity of making a book about the internet, physically logging its history rather than a website that might be taken offline in the future.

Forward

I mean ForwOrd. Preface.

Aim of book (or more humble, hope for book) is to fix relationship betw computer and user. Also, I guess to make it more physical? Talk about how we push that to the background. In sci-fi computers are often merely a floating screen or a device that expands your experience directly in your brain. By denying the physicality of computers we are simply denying we can't do what computers do. So by pushing its physicality to the background, we make it (the computer) disappear, and push the experience closer to our own, make it our own, claim it as our own, not a creation of the computer.

Interesting that they use the word Folklore to collect a complete history, hi and lo. Folk immediately calls to mind amateur? Not an entire array. But I guess that's on purpose.

Tron (1982) > relationship betw user and program is a very close one. This is based on a mutual interest. Nowadays the interest to learn about one another has changed, or maybe just simply become more diverse. If you can see internet as its own metropolis, then its citizens are just part of a developing society, in which the interest to partake in politics and programming slides to the background over time when it's all done and thought-out for you and decided for you.

Again here the distinction in education vs naive. Hi and lo. Dividing up the real estate in mansions that lusers don't have access to, and suburbs that are user-friendly where they can't do any damage.

Crowd-wisdom. I like that term. If you get stuck, you ask your peers.

User < Computer

Save the Internet............?

"Domain of digital must be regarded as a medium with a cultural history shaped more by its users and less by its inventors."