「Positions through Contextualising」week 1 & week 2

week 1

Although I have been using the term “social network” in my explanations today, I initially misused the word “mass media,” which refers to technology intended to reach a mass audience and is the primary means of communication for the general public, commonly through platforms like newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet. After realizing this was different from what I wanted to express, I switched to using “network.”

In previous studio work, I attempted to demonstrate the impact of social networks on our thinking by recreating the process of a solar eclipse.

Initially, I tried editing together videos of a solar eclipse from social media using a multi-take cut technique. I did this because, at the beginning, I discovered similarities between multi-take cuts and the way we watch videos on video-sharing websites.

Then, I started to think more rigorously about the characteristics of social networks and hoped to use publication as a way to illustrate the thinking process influenced by social networks.

“A History of Reading” was my starting point in constructing the characteristics of social networks. I first understood the prototype of a social network as a process of information exchange, drawing from “A History of Reading” and summarized the characteristics of social networks as ‘fragmented output,’ ‘patchwork input,’ and ‘misunderstood understanding.’

In “The Shallows,” I read Nicholas Carr’s description of how “intelligent technology” affects our way of thinking. Carr used the examples of mechanical clocks and maps, capturing how clocks (uniform, rhythmic, and cyclical) and maps (bounded, spatial relationships) influence human thought. This made me realize that characteristics of prototypes that change human thinking should meet the following criteria:

a. The characteristic is common to social networks.

b. The characteristic emerged after the advent of social networks.

c. The characteristic simplifies and visualizes originally complex and abstract logic.

However, my earlier summaries of ‘fragmented output,’ ‘patchwork input,’ and ‘misunderstood’ did not meet these criteria.

So, I began to rethink how to construct the prototype of a social network.

“Kill All Norms,” “Tweets and the Streets,” and “The Story of Technoviking” made me aware of the complexity of social networks. They listed chaotic phenomena on social networks, like a magnifying glass over an already chaotic society—from Tumblr to 4chan, from alt-right to anti-feminism. I tried to summarize some characteristics from these phenomena: real-time, decentralized, anonymous.

These dispersed characteristics are determined by the infrastructure of the network, and up to this point, I had only identified these scattered features without knowing how to construct a prototype of the network through them.

“The Internet Does Not Exist” and “How Computer Networks Become Social” are the final references I used to construct the prototype of a network. “How Computer Networks Become Social” is the most important reference I read this week, starting with the author’s explanation of what a network is and how computer networks became social.

The meaning of a network: ‘a network is anything that can be modeled by identifying nodes and the links between them.’

How computer networks became social: 

In the first step, the network infrastructure established a connection for every uniquely identified device on the network, following the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Each device was uniquely identified and could communicate reliably with any other device. Once this technical network was stable, it became possible to give users online identities, such as user accounts, and software with which to communicate.

From these explanations, I already had a basic prototype of a social network: a net-like structure with basic users as nodes and information transmission as links.

This chapter looks at three ways that networks were conceptualized: social network analysis (SNA), network society (NS), and actor–network theory (ANT).

SNA can be traced back to a branch of social psychology established in the 1930s known as sociometry. Sociometry typically traced the connections between people in a certain population to create drawings of social relations, called sociograms.

And the explanation of SNA for SNSs:

Using mathematical and statistical techniques to analyze social relationships and affiliations. For users, SNSs provided cohesion and orientation within an otherwise vast and sometimes intimidating network space by providing an intensive interface to the extensive social and institutional connections across the Internet.

In Castells’ Network Society theory, Castells proposes concepts such as “individualized space of flow” and “personal timeless time.” We can understand, perhaps somewhat simplistically, that on social networks we can disregard spatial and temporal limitations. Spatially, we can communicate with someone on the other side of the globe; temporally, a comment we make on the internet can be preserved forever, and live coverage of events like the Olympic Games tends to create a sense that the world is sharing the same time: a global present.

ANT’s methods are critical and interpretive. One of the key ANT concepts is translation, which involves creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously different. For example, social network sites such as Friendster first introduced “friends” as a feature of their social networking website in 2002. The designers appropriated the highly socially valued convention of friendship and transformed it into a database operation. The practices and the meanings of friendship were translated into the technical event of creating Friends.

These three theories have provided me with many insights and justifications for constructing a social network. For example, I could use ANT’s method to trace an actor and use metaphorical methods to represent the characteristics of this actor. Or, I could use SNA’s method to construct a physical network structure. Or, I could use the temporal and spatial features proposed in Castell’s Network Society theory to construct a prototype.

Finally, these are the references I used in the visualization process.

week 2

After last week’s research, I decided to continue mainly in two areas: one is building a prototype of a social network, and the other is describing the impact of social networks on ways of thinking by depicting the periphery of the social network prototype. This week, I want to present one of the prototypes of social networks—digitized reality. This is a crucial foundation for the operation of social networks. For example, when we share tonight’s dinner on a social network, it is impossible to share the dinner itself. Instead, we convert this meal into transmittable digital information through photography or text.

This week, I first expressed this prototype visually, still using the example of a solar eclipse. A solar eclipse occurs because part of the sunlight is blocked by the moon, which is between the sun and the Earth. If you are in the shadow of the moon, then you can see the eclipse. This process of enlargement is explaining how a solar eclipse is formed. Furthermore, if something other than the moon blocks the sun, could it also be called an eclipse, like a comet suddenly flying between the Earth and the sun, or a mobile phone in front of me and the sun. The mobile phone I hold up creates a solar eclipse unique to me.

This is my metaphor for digitized reality. An eclipse describes a specific scene viewed from a specific angle. What we see is the momentary image of the sun blocked by the moon, not the spatial relationship behind them. Digitization is viewing the world from a digital perspective. From this specific angle, what we see is a flattened world, not the specific complex relationships behind it.

These images are ones I take when I want to send a message to a friend, like when I want to tell someone I have a new publication. I need to first photograph this publication to digitize its visual image, then transmit it to others. What they receive is a flattened visual information. They haven’t seen my publication; they just received this flattened information. But they will feel they have seen it.

Starting from digitized reality, many characteristics can be detailed, such as the fast speed of digital information transmission, which makes us feel that information transmission is real-time. Because digital information is made up of 0s and 1s, all digital information is black or white. Thus, starting from the prototype of digitized reality, I used these two publications to show the impact of digitized reality on our understanding of time and space and our understanding of interpersonal relationships.

In one publication, I continuously input different regional times under a real-time timer. Because the speed of my input and the speed of digital information transmission have a qualitative difference, what I input is never the real-time.

The digital version of time and space makes us transcend time and space. It makes us feel that the whole world is in the same place at the same moment.

In this publication, I screenshot the profile pictures of all my friends on my social software and placed them together with their social media IDs. This publication is the social media-defined collection of all my friends. Whether someone is or isn’t my friend is a very clear matter, and I have an exact number of friends. The digitized relationship removes all unclear boundaries, giving the clearest definition to all relationships in the language of 1 and 0.

Furthermore, starting from this prototype, a lot can be expanded upon, such as explaining how digitized reality affects our understanding of information acquisition. Thanks to the speed of digital information transmission, we have gained the right to understand all knowledge, making us feel omniscient.