From the telegraph to a whole new world called cyberspace in just a century or two? That is honestly so fascinating in my opinion. Who knew we would be living in the era of time where a brand new type of universe is created?
Nowadays, everything is connected through the internet. From socializing to work, we are all always having that online presence around us. This breaks all types of material borders around the globe, creating something called “network time/space homogenization”.
The cherry on top? *drum roll please*
Information is free.
On the labour aspect of this cyber network, information networks came from horizontal and centralized to distributed and decentralized. You may be thinking, what in the world is decentralization? Well, to put it in short, its changing the decision making process from a large powerful group to more delegated groups. In World War II, the Germans were actually the the first to initiate this format of decision making.
With that, different types of feedback charts were created, such as Wiener’s Feedback loop and John Boyd’s OODA loop. Both were used to assist in managing large information networks in real time. Below are the loops of Wiener’s and John Boyd’s respectively.
The drawbacks however, would be that conducting this method would be pretty pricey, and the larger of size and complexity of the network, the more costs you have to pay for the coordination.
What other upgrades came along with the internet? We came from industrial labour and factory machines, and evolved into information machines and information processing. That would have saved a vast amount of time back in the day where everything was dealt without technology, but that is another story.
Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned for next blog about the attention economy and the long tail effect!
I was just using my Iphone scrolling through Instgram watching my overseas friends enjoying their vacation in Hawaii, and then a thought hit through. Technology has evolved so much in the past century or so, that I am literally able to talk to my relatives overseas and see their faces within my phone.
It wasn’t always like that before back in the day though, technology was a lot of simpler and now obsolete in this generation. Personal computers were dull and plain, with names such as IBM 5150, Commodore 64 or Macintosh 128k. Their functions were simple, just to process information and send them out. Nothing too crazy like sending Imessage game requests with your best friend during a rainy day like Typhoon Mangkhut.
The development of computers rose when enhancements like the Bulletin Board System (BBS) came through, which is basically the fancy name of what we call now “The Internet”. The creation of this network arose a new cyberland in this globe, where it breaks material barriers across the world to give people free flow of information, cyberspace my friends.
With the birth of cyberspace, came along other siblings with it. Cyberpunk is associated with virtual sex, virtual reality or artificial intelligence, basically anything from our daily life transformed into a cyber alternative. The God Fathers of Cyberpunk are William Gibson, Neal Stephensen and Bruce Sterling.
Cyberspace and the internet are networks in this generation. According to Bruce Sterling’s article, “A Short History of the Internet” (1996), back in the 70s and 80s, various social groups owned personal computers, so it was easy for people to connect with each other online.
“Networks are the languages of our times”, a quote from the book “Network Logic, Who governs in an interconnected world?” The question is: since now we the world is all connected through the internet, who controls it?
References
Sterling B. (1996), “A Short History of the Internet”
Castells, M. (2004) ‘Afterword: why networks matter’. In Network Logic: Who governs in an interconnected world? (pp. 221-224)
The essence of reality TV success is it’s ability to entertain their audience.
Reality TV shows is definitely entertaining to almost everyone around you. Whether it is an extraordinary dance group showing off their acrobatic moves or someone being rejected on The Bachelor, anyone can be guaranteed to be mesmerized or have a good laugh at home with reality television.
I decided to compare the two dance reality TV shows, “NBC World of Dance” and “这！就是街舞”. Why I decided to compare these two shows is that, the goal is the same, one winner takes all. However, what grabs the audience’s attention to these shows are unalike in these two shows, let’s take a closer look.
“NBC World of Dance” is an American reality dance television show that has contestants from all around the world to compete against each other in a series of elimination. The judge panel consists of American celebrities that would give the green-light whether or not the individual or team has made it to the next round. Judges would also give constructive criticism towards each contestant at the end of their piece.
Below is an extract of one of the dance performances from the show.
Windmill on the elbow? Impressive move for sure, pretty sure that is not the actual term for that move though.
Moving forward with the analysis, World of Dance gives dancers around the world for a shot towards fame. Other than spectacular dance moves, the show’s success also comes from idea of using the world as their competition, rather than focusing on a demographic group i.e. American-based dancers. This demonstrates cultural proximity as viewers can feel a sense of pride when watching their own country’s dancers compete against other global dancers. “World of Dance” was the No. 1 new summer series in 18-49 and total viewers in 2017, with over 8 million subscribers on YouTube, taking the throne of the world’s number one urban dance competition.
Now let’s take a look at China’s reality dance TV show, “这！就是街舞”.
That was entertaining to watch, like how do people make their body move like water?
The show made its premiere in February 2018 on China’s streaming website YouKu. The format of this show is similar to World of Dance, with a few twists:
Judges are able to make impromptu decisions on who to kick out or add during the show, without any consultation with the board of directors
Songs used in the program are mainly in Mandarin
The end goal of the show is the same as World of Dance, but the Chinese dance reality television show is focused on one particular audience, Chinese.
Catchy pop up fonts will blow up next to the dancers when doing a particular move or movement, similar to game show features. This style of portraying the moves with flashy pop ups is based upon the Asian youth culture, where it is commonly used throughout a broad amount of Asian reality television nationally.
Chinese culture is recognized as performers tend to wear traditional Chinese clothing and use mainstream local songs in their performance, unlike World of Dance streaming Western pop music instead. Other Chinese influence in the show can be seen with the blurred out tattoos and dyed hair of the contestants. This is due to China’s government ban on “Hip Hop”, where tattoos and dyed hair is prohibited on any source of media in the country.
“这！就是街舞” first episode already made 100 million hits within its release on YouKu, with a 9.5 out of 10 ratings from its audience. Making this Chinese reality TV show as successful as World of Dance, in their own way. The methods these two shows both have their own individuality, focusing on their the audience’s appeal based on the cultural differences, which both worked well in each show.
Second week of lectures already? Time really does fly when you are having fun, so in this case, learning new knowledge about global networks in this world. (Yes, I actually paid attention in the lectures)
So far, I just had the second week of lecture and tutorial for this particular course, and so far I was amazed by how the world is all connected by the one single thing called, the internet. It is an obvious fact that we are all connected by the internet, especially in this generation, but learning how far we came from was what fascinated me!
In this week’s lecture, we learnt something called the Telegraph. In a sense, the telegraph was the first ever electrical invention to transmit messages to people without the use of messengers and mail. I would like to just call it the “old school WhatsApp” to make things easier for me to remember.
The first ever Telegraph was first created in 1837, with several improvements in the coming years later like the “First trans-Atlantic Cable” in 1866, which the speed was 8 words per minute. I wonder how long arguing would take back in the day when using these antiques, because nowadays people can send essays of texts within seconds.
Other fun facts I learnt was that the telephone was first ever invented in 1876, telephone operators would be girls and also a guy name Alan Turing is known to be “The Father of Modern Computing, Patron Saint of Cryptographers and Hackers”.
The Erryl Classicz 