User:Artemis gryllaki/Special Issue 8

Questions on (Social) Networks

04/03/2019

A part of the publication: The Network We (de)Served
(XPUB Special Issue #08)

Artemis Gryllaki

Dear guest,

Welcome to my home. It’s my pleasure to offer you some questions about (social) networks. At the starting point (the index page), you can see 26 questions, which correspond to 26 doors.

You can open a door by clicking on a colourful question, though the grey ones are still locked. (Apologies, the place is under construction.) Opening a red door will guide you to a different room of this house, while a green door, will lead you to one of my neighbour’s homes.

Most of the questions came to my mind after the day of our Infrastructour. Generally, they relate to broader social aspects around analogue and digital networks. Trying to respond to them, I started writing small texts to express what led me to these questions, also my thoughts, feelings and memories that came after them. My texts are not finished answers and do not speak only in one voice. I often contradict or doubt myself, which is something I usually do when I write; I find it useful when trying to approach an answer.

There is not one way to navigate through the rooms; you can visit them out of order. Sometimes there are doors from one room to another. Please feel free to walk around, stay in each place as long as you wish, and come back to this starting point, when lost!

May your journey begin!

Questions on (Social) Networks

In the final version of my project, I realised that the essay that I was writing was lacking structure and the chapters were not complete or finished responses to the questions related to them. I also understood that I was writing the text in a non-linear way, with several modes of address or tone in each chapter. I wanted to be clear for the reader that what I wrote were not concrete answers, but fragments of thoughts, memories, experiences, reflections and small researches, inspired by the questions I was gathering through this special issue. I decided that the best way to present the text, was not as a whole and linear essay, but a number of self-standing chapters, short-stories, each one corresponding in a question shown at the index page. Since the content of the chapters was linked in a way, and I wanted to encourage a non-linear reading, I inserted a system of links-routes from one chapter to another, thus creating a network of small texts. The index page behaves as the sitemap of the website, having a collection of questions, which link to a specific chapter. From one chapter, you can go back to the index page, or to another chapter, by links presented in the annotations side. Last but not least, on the index page, there are also questions that are the main research subjects of my fellow students. These questions, are also links, that lead you to the websites of the other members of our networked publication.

Index questions page

Chapter 2 page

Chapter 8 page