All posts filed under: DIGC202

The Vulnerability of The iKettle and The Internet of Things

Published by

Why would your kettle need to be connected to the internet? I’d like to imagine that’s what they said when phones gained the connectivity. But, it’s not the same thing. It’s a fucking kettle. The iKettle (now somehow 2.0), by Smarter Apps, is a product that can be turned on wirelessly with a phone. Sometimes that boil button, the one button that you have to push is too hard to push. We may use remotes for everything in place of pressing a button. However, I still think the kettle-user is skipping to Step 2 in this important two-step process. This top comment on Silverman’s Telegraph post (2013) highlights it’s importance: “Oh but you still have to fill it yourself, thus making this even more pointless. People will overfill so they have to make fewer trips to the tap, so it will take longer to boil the kettle and will use up extra electricity. This invention could cause the end of the world as we know it.”O’Connor in response to “Wifi kettle allows you to boil water …

Creativelive: Free for a Limited Time Only

Published by

What’s better than free? To deconstruct the concept, I’ve focussed on online video tutorials and showcased Creativelive’s tactic of making it better than free. The advent of mass-amatuerisation has made it possible for anyone to learn anything for free. Youtube has become a repository for video demonstrations and how-to guides on any topic. In this case, Youtube symbolises the Long tail effect; an aggregation of niche videos that forms 80% of the available content. In contrast, Creativelive offers specialised workshops on a weekly schedule for free over a limited time. These are live streamed classes conducted over a 4 hour period by a creative expert. Kevin Kelly, in his article on Value Generatives, would describe this as an Authenticity model; something that a Youtube video might not present. The issue with scheduled classes is the time difference between Australia and the US – waking up at 2:00am is only sometimes worth it. Creativelive will repeat the same broadcast on repeat for the next few days, so you can access it at a better time. Creativelive offers a free product for a limited time and then …

University Preparation and the Performance of Labour

Published by

I’ve been considering the labour I commit to at University parallels the perils of Liquid Labour. The subject requires the interactivity with a live feed of content being generated constantly. I pay for the opportunity to work and engage with an institutional workforce, but it hums incessantly with the internet. How much I engage with the content outside of class will benefit me with higher marks, and there is much to engage with. There is an incentivised value in learning. How different is this to the work we commit to outside the employee work hours? Those hours are investments into your workplace, like an education. There are no longer incentives of higher pay to do more. You are taught at University, that to achieve and be promoted you have to go beyond what is expected.  You had to perform. But now you have to prove that behind the scenes you are rehearsing, over, and over. Prove that your performance is true to everyone on every communication platform. I understand Liquid Labour as an act of preparation.

Segbwema, Sierra Leone: A City Story

Published by

It is an appropriate time to display the relation of my DIGC202 digital project (in collaboration with my BCM240 research component) to this week’s topic of a network society. I am developing a Sierra Leone community platform for members of Segbwema to share stories and record their city’s history. Conversations with an immigrant from Sierra Leone revealed to me that recording history and personal events was undervalued in his city, a jarring difference he found in Australia. I still have to understand to what extent the difference is. But I desire the openness of such a platform to be held by the people for the people. An ideal I recognise has been repeated by Barlow (1996) into the void of cyberspace.  Control of Cyberspace is the key component to this project and it should be held by the community in Segbwema. The idea of control in Cyberspace appears in all three of the weeks readings; a conflict between users and controlled networks, that is repeated across decades 1994, 2004, and today.  The advent of projects like …

A Transition from the Old Aesthetic

Published by

Ted begins with the quote “Thought, nothing but thought.” This is an Old Aesthetic metaphor  describing a network as a brain sending thoughts. Romantic metaphors like thought  and memory guided our understanding of network capabilities. I agree with Sterling (on Wired) that this language oppressed the shift in perception like “metal chains”. Sterling suggests that “modern creatives … will have to disengage from the older generation’s mythos”.  Instead, creatives should use the New Aesthetic design.  James Bridle says the New Aesthetic “points towards new ways of seeing the world”. It engages the internet with the physical world. Like “an echo of the society, technology, politics and people that co-produce them.” THE FEATURED IMAGE IS A COLLECTION OF NAIVE THOUGHTS I WROTE DOWN WHILE READING THE READINGS.