Balsamo, Anne (November 2014) “Stitching the Future of the AIDS Quilt: The Cultural Work of DigitalMemorials” in Visual Communications Quarterly. (Vol 21, Issue 3).
The Literat and Balsamo readings, I think, bring us to our conversations about materiality that we've been having. First, there's a lot of symbolism to process here: the quilt that was made to visibilize a dying population and the spread of AIDS is itself expiring (and "losing" visibility). The move of digitizing the quilt as a way of preserving memories of activism and trauma is a serious move. In our regular recourse to preserve or save information digitally, to what extent are we thinking about what is lost through digital preservation? In preserving this artifact of activism and death through digital means, aren't we potentially losing something significant to that memory? Something attached to the materiality of the artifact, it's dying/expiring materiality? (I'm also reminded of other digital preservation experiments, like Morehshin Allahyari's work on "material speculation.")
Moggridge, B. (2007) “Prototypes.” In Designing Interactions. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, pp.682-723.
I can see/understand the utility of a constraints-based design plan. Practically speaking, it's hard to think of a design for a digital object without a consideration of the technical, labor, material, etc. constraints. However, when I read this, I couldn't help but think of proceduralist and formalist approaches to theorizing and creating digital interactions. This relates to the conversation we were having a few weeks ago about world building, where constraints-based design approaches tend to start with a blank/clean slate. However, reading this alongside the Literat and Balsamo piece, I feel I have to question the ability of this kind of design approach to capture or take into account constraints that exist beyond the digital or otherwise creation space of an object. Sure, we can take into account technical difficulties as a constraint for building something, but how do you take into account trauma and death as design constraints?
MacCormick, John (2012) “PageRank: The Technology That Launched Google” 9 Algorithms thatChanged the Future: the Ingenious Ideas that Drive Today’s Computers. Princeton University Press:Princeton.
I didn't understand most of this reading, but it did lead to some weird thoughts. While reading this, a not completely critical question popped into my head: can you get lost on the internet? Can you explore or discover spaces on the internet? When "surfing" the web, we move through pages that are linked by "flows" of information. We "explore" the internet, and move through the "digital frontier." There are probably more (dangerously colonial) metaphors of exploration and discovery that are used to describe the internet. But, I think we should be questioning that cultural fantasy, asking to what extent we are meant to "find our way" online. If we're being "tracked" or "positioned" online based on what we put into a search engine, or based on the tags used to categorize the spaces we visit, then it seems like we can't actually get "lost" online per se (plus, you could always just close the browser….or commit the ultimate sin and close all the tabs you've kept open for at least three months). Perhaps "surfing" and "exploring" are less useful ways of imagining our online interactions. Maybe we need to think about online interactions as being more in line with "orientations" (going down a search engine rabbit hole might be a constant process of reorientation, rather than getting lost, for example).
Ghose, Anindya, Ipeirotis, P., Li, B. (18 August 2013) “Examining the Impact of Ranking on ConsumerBehavior and Search Engine Revenue” Management Science
I also didn't understand too much of this reading, but it was at least easy to put it in conversation with the MacCormick reading. To continue my thought from the MacCormick reading, we can maybe find some use in thinking of page ranking algorithms as algorithms of orientation (not algorithms of control, nor algorithms of freedom and exploration, but probably similar to algorithms of oppression). Page ranking, then, has a role in orienting us in different ways towards information - not just political information (reorienting "fake news"), but also consumer information. Page ranking doesn't necessarily bring us the most relevant information we need to make decisions, but rather orients us towards a set of information/data based on how corporations pay to orient themselves towards consumers.