Being Connected

Shared cultural codes are obviously going to be influential in respect of our output. Take NTU for example. We are all in the same vicinity, watch more or less the same things, we all go to the same sort of places, whether it be bars, or food places. Hence we are all amongst the shared cultural codes. On the otherhand, a remote student, studying via the internet and living in Europe, will probably have very different culture codes to follow, be it social terminology, the art they find of interest, or maybe their culture in depicting religion or death, for example.

In the days where reproduction of work was limited, this probably spurred the most individual creativity. With no other artists to refer to, or ideas from further afield, people no doubt created what they experienced in the bubble of their life. Anything further than this, say, extra terrestrials, would no doubt have been considered abstract, or a highly warped mindset.

Yet indeed, when Medosch comments on the importancy of collaborating and combining ideas, I see this to be quite true idea wise, and definitely a profitable one. For example, the combination of touch screen and gaming resulted in the DS. Innovative approach, strong response from public, 40M+ DS sales worldwide. In fact, it has revolutionised the market to a point it almost seems odd to return to just button pressing.

I definitely believe and understand the merits of team collaborations, connections. You can hear another's point of view, whether it be addressing negatives, or equally, promoting positives. In the same way, you can feed off each other's ideas, sort of giving you the energy to come up with even more. If one person were to be of a higher standard in their ideas, this may rub off, adding to the sophistication for the other.

Using the example of a foreign studies student, this could work both ways. It isn't inconceivable that very different people have no interest in one and other, instead, wishing to seclude themselves and stick with what they know, as being right. Such a stance though would be quite disruptful creativity wise. Convsersley, the collaborators may really hit it off and produce something really diverse, combining both their culture and outlooks produced from the livings in different parts of the world - a great outcome.

In a social group where all ideas are shared and spread, one person could develop more, becoming more profound, meaning the group tend to turn to them for material to sample. This idea is something Albert-László Barabási acknowledges, a Professor and Director of Northeastern University's Center for Network Science, where he helped conceive and introduce a theory on scale-free networks.

The grey dots being more often used nodes, or 'hubs'.

"Barabási and collaborators coined the term "scale-free network" to describe the class of networks that exhibit a power-law degree distribution" within them. "Some network nodes had many more connections than the average; seeking a simple categorical label, Barabási and his collaborators called such highly connected nodes "hubs"." (web: Wikipedia, 'scale-free network', 06/02/08)

Considering this idea, I can think of an example of it being permissable in a large party situation. For example, family are all more or less of equal quality, aunt, cousins, grandparents. Yet they all link towards the birthday person. Friends and or work colleagues then also link to this birthday person, whilst having a few ties amongst themselves.

Will Durant wrote, “Nothing is new except arrangement" so perhaps everything made by man, after two thousand years, is just a recycled, maybe diluted, or exarcebated form of another. Fashion goes around in circles, 80s fashion reoccuring again in 2006. This would mean that the newer designer putting the clothes out nowadays, is infact, connected to the designer who sat before them and made the clothes in their era.

You could also contest products which have been deemed innovative or ground breaking. The iPod for example, it just a highly upgraded form of a portable radio. It is portable music, but arranged to be smaller and of a much higher capacity for holding music. The implentation of ideas is what makes things 'new' in our eyes nowadays, I believe.

Lastly, the addition of Web 2.0 has furthered the sort of information flow chart we receive nowadays. Bands for example post on their sites, giving it a sort exclusivity of exclusivity for their fans. This is then often reiterated by journalists putting it on their news sites. Fans in general of music on forums then pick up on this news, posting their own thoughts and feelings. This I think is a great example of being connected. You can really get a wide range of thoughts, rather than just your own, or those of fans - it kind of challenges bias. Also, it speeds up the notifying of people, whilst exapanding the net the news reaches overall. -This being more or less the equivolent of what Manovich in The Language of New Media p.199 iterates.

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So overall, I believe that whether we like it or not, we are all connected in someway. Whether it be the news we read, the art we look at, the food we taste. Its what makes us the way we are in the modern day world. Certainly, a life without connections would be quite limiting, uninspiring. But that in itself could inspire creativity, for need of change.

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