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On digital artefacts

Ted Ted
August 4, 2019
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I recently recorded 3 short YouTube lectures on developing digital artefacts. Previously, I’ve outlined how I use the concept of digital artefacts in my piece on teaching digital media in a systemic way. In brief, the digital artefact assessment framework I developed gives students the opportunity to work on projects with real-world implications and relevance, that is, projects with nonlinear outcomes aimed at real stakeholders, users, and audiences. The only criteria for a digital artefact are that 1] artefacts should be developed in public on the open internet, therefore leveraging non-linearity, collective intelligence and fast feedback loops, and 2] artefacts should have a clearly defined social utility for stakeholders and audiences outside the subject and program. Below is my lecture outlining the key aspects of the digital artefact development process.

Fail Early, Fail Often [#fefo] is a developmental strategy originating in the open source community, and first formalized by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  In the context of teaching and learning, FEFO asks creators to push towards the limits of their idea, experiment at those limits and inevitably fail, and then to immediately iterate through this very process again, and again. At the individual level the result of FEFO in practice is rapid error discovery and elimination, while at the systemic level it leads to a culture of rapid prototyping, experimentation, and ideation. Below is my lecture outlining the use of the #fefo philosophy in developing digital artefacts.

Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny [#fist] is a developmental strategy developed by Lt. Col. Dan Ward, Chief of Acquisition Innovation at USAF. It provides a rule-of-thumb framework for evaluating the potential and scope of projects, allowing creators to chart ideation trajectories within parameters geared for simplicity. In my subjects FIST projects have to be: 1] time-bound [fast], even if part of an ongoing process; 2] reusing existing easily accessible techniques [inexpensive], as opposed to relying on complex new developments; 3] constantly aiming away from fragility [simple], and towards structural simplicity; 4] small-scale with the potential to grow [tiny], as opposed to large-scale with the potential to crumble. Below is my lecture outlining the use of the #fefo methodology in developing digital artefacts.

The Medium is the Message

Ted Ted
March 31, 2019
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These are the slides for the first two topical lectures from the subject BCM112 Emergent Media that I teach this session. In the first lecture I discuss Marshall McLuhan’s framework of understanding media, and the trajectory and dynamics of the process of convergence. I concentrate on the ways convergence affects industries, technologies, and audiences, establishing the parameters of the internet paradigm. In the second lecture I examine how ‘the medium is the message’ manifests itself in the process of digital production. I explore the kinds of experiences and production processes made possible by the emergence of a digital network economy.

Fail Early Fail Often

Ted Ted
March 8, 2018
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Here are the prezi slides from a guest lecture I gave on the Fail Early Fail Often philosophy [#fefo], as well as the methodology of Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny [#fist].

And below are some related gifs I made for the occasion:

Future networks lectures

Ted Ted
August 7, 2017
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This is a YouTube playlist of my lectures in BCM206 Future Networks, covering the story of information networks from the invention of the telegraph to the internet of things. The lecture series begins with the invention of the telegraph and the first great wiring on the planet. I tie this with the historical context of the US Civil War, the expansion of European colonial power, the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, followed by the work of Tesla, Bell, and Turing. I close with the second world war, which acts as a terminus and marker for the paradigm shift from telegraph to computer. Each of the weekly topics is big enough to deserve its own lecture series, therefore by necessity I have to cover a lot, and focus on key tropes emergent from the new networked society paradigm – i.e. separation of information from matter, the global brain, the knowledge society, the electronic frontier – and examine their role in our complex cyberpunk present.

The power of networks: distributed journalism, meme warfare, and collective intelligence

Ted Ted
April 12, 2017
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These are the slides for what was perhaps my favorite lecture so far in BCM112. The lecture has three distinct parts, presented by myself and my PhD students Doug Simkin and Travis Wall. I opened by building on the previous lecture which focused on the dynamics of networked participation, and expanded on the shift from passive consumption to produsage. The modalities of this shift are elegantly illustrated by the event-frame-story structure I developed to formalize the process of news production [it applies to any content production]. The event stage is where the original footage appears – it often is user generated, raw, messy, and with indeterminate context. The frame stage provides the filter for interpreting the raw data. The story stage is what is produced after the frame has done its work. In the legacy media paradigm the event and frame stages are closed to everyone except the authority figures responsible for story production – governments, institutions, journalists, academics, intellectuals, corporate content producers. This generates an environment where authority is dominant, and authenticity is whatever authority decides – the audience is passive and in a state of pure consumption. In the distributed media paradigm the entire process is open and can be entered by anyone at any point – event, frame, or story. This generates an environment where multiple event versions, frames, and stories compete for produser attention on an equal footing.

These dynamics have profound effects on information as a tool for persuasion and frame shifting, or in other words – propaganda. In legacy media propaganda is a function of the dynamics of the paradigm: high cost of entry, high cost of failure, minimum experimentation, inherent quality filter, limited competition, cartelization with limited variation, and an inevitable stagnation.

In distributed media propaganda is memes. Here too propaganda is a function of the dynamics of the paradigm, but those are characterized by collective intelligence as the default form of participation in distributed networks. In this configuration users act as a self-coordinating swarm towards an emergent aggregate goal. The swarm has an orders of magnitude faster production time than the legacy media. This results in orders of magnitude faster feedback loops and information dissemination.

The next part of the lecture, delivered by Doug Simkin, focused on a case study of the /SG/ threads on 4chan’s /pol/ board as an illustration of an emergent distributed swarm in action. This is an excellent case study as it focuses on real-world change produced with astonishing speed in a fully distributed manner.

The final part of the lecture, delivered by Travis Wall, focused on a case study of the #draftourdaughters memetic warfare campaign, which occurred on 4chan’s /pol/ board in the days preceding the 2016 US presidential election. This case study is a potent illustration of the ability of networked swarms to leverage fast feedback loops, rapid prototyping, error discovery, and distributed coordination in highly scalable content production.

Trajectories of convergence I: user empowerment, information access, and networked participation

Ted Ted
April 12, 2017
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These are slides from a lecture I delivered in the fifth week of BCM112, building on open-process arguments conceptualized in a lecture on the logic and aesthetics of digital production. My particular focus in this lecture was on examining the main dynamics of the audience trajectory in the process of convergence. I develop the conceptual frame around Richard Sennet’s notion of dialogic media as ontologically distinct from monologic media, where the latter render a passive audience as listeners and consumers, while the former render conversational participants. I then build on this with Axel Bruns’ ideas on produsage [a better term than prosumer], and specifically his identification of thew new modalities of media in this configuration: a distributed generation of content, fluid movement of produsers between roles, digital artefacts remaining open and in a state of indeterminacy, and permissive ownership regimes enabling continuous collaboration. The key conceptual element here is that the entire chain of the process of production, aggregation, and curation of content is open to modification, and can be entered at any point.

The Medium is the Message II: craft, and the logic of digital making

Ted Ted
April 12, 2017
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Following from the opening lecture for BCM112, in which I laid the foundation for approaching digital media convergence from a McLuhan perspective,  these are the prezi slides for the follow-up lecture focusing on the logic of digital production. I open the lecture with a fairly dense conceptual frame establishing the logic of craft and production in digital media, and then follow this up with a range of examples focusing on the aesthetics of glitch, hyper kawaii, vaporwave, and Twitch mess. Again, I build up the concept frame as a shift from the industrial logic of the assembly line to the internet’s logic of mass-customization, where the new aesthetic form is characterized by rapid prototyping, experimentation, rapid error discovery, and open-process mods leading to unexpected outcomes . The key element of this logic-frame is that the openness of the process of digital making – all aspects of the object are open for modification even after release – leads to an emergent unpredictability of the end-result [there is no closure], and a resultant risk embedded in the process. This state of indeterminacy is how digital craft operates, and it is the risky openness that generates the new aesthetic of the medium.

The Medium is the Message I: trajectories of convergence

Ted Ted
April 12, 2017
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These are the prezi slides for my opening lecture in BCM112 Convergent Media Practices [live twitter #bcm112 hashtag]. The lecture is an introduction to the state of play in digital media, and specifically the open-ended process of media convergence as mapped by Henry Jenkins. I use McLuhan’s work as a basic frame of reference through which to analyze the process, while focusing on the three distinct trajectories of audiences, industries, and platforms. It is a dual-layered analysis, where the interplay between the three trajectories drives the dynamics of the process, and changes in media platforms act as phase transitions shifting the process on another plane. I am illustrating this dynamic with a number of examples, ranging from papyrus to codex and hypertext, to the shift from newspaper to radio, and of course – the internet.

A conversation about the Internet of Things

Ted Ted
February 20, 2017
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This is a conversation on the Internet of Things I recorded with my colleague Chris Moore as part of his podcasted lecture series on cyberculture. As interviews go this is quite organic, without a set script of questions and answers, hence the rambling style and side-stories. Among others, I discuss: the Amazon Echo [Alexa], enchanted objects, Mark Weiser and ubiquitous computing, smart clothes, surveillance, AI, technology-induced shifts in perception, speculative futurism, and paradigm shifts.