Describing Communication Technologies_ The Onset Of Typed Note-Taking Practices

Written notes are a hallmark of education, wherein the ability to remember what is said or viewed within the context of a classroom or any other educational landscape at any specific point in time is a necessity. After all, “writing represents language, but it out-lasts the spoken word. The oldest examples of writing have lasted over five thousand years. Others will last only until I press my computer’s delete  key” (Gnanadesikan, 2011, p. 3). The ability to look back to a specific point in time during a lecture, or to revisit a slide from a classroom session, is a godsend to students within the educational systems of today’s world, as it allows for the individual to refresh their own memory of events and topics of discussion, and affords the note-taker the ability to reevaluate, reinforce, and remember the important bits that may have slipped their mind.

Mike Forsyth: Emoji Story 

https://blogs.ubc.ca/mforsyth/home/etec-540/task-6-an-emoji-story/  

Deliberation in Mode of Communication

Mike’s Emoji Story post differs from my own in a few ways, namely the amount of detail he put into the generation of his emoji story (though I feel like mine was rather short due to the fact that I chose to summarize the first issue of a comic series rather than a whole movie), but there are several instances of our interpretation of this task where we align in interesting ways. Primarily, both of us expressed our unfamiliarity with emojis as a method of communication, and our attempts to utilize emojis as a form of representational iconography that goes beyond the original purpose of the emojis in an attempt to ascribe meaning to their presentation. Additionally, my note that “If we lack the symbols to express our conceptualizations, we are unable to properly communicate our ideas, our stories, our concepts.” lines up rather closely to Mike’s reflection on how they “wonder if my students, or even some of the younger teachers at my school would find this an easier task as they are more adept at using emojis as a form of pictorial writing”. I also note how both myself and Mike ponder on our lack of foresight, and the potential for miscommunication when considering abstract ideas (in their case, the passage of time, in my own, the use of not-so-perfectly fitting one-to-one comparisons between concepts and symbols).

Hasan Singer: CrAIyon

https://blogs.ubc.ca/hsinger540/2023/11/19/text-to-image-craiyon/ 

Importance of Clarification in Prompts

Hasan’s post on the use of CrAIyon as an AI art generation tool really struck a chord with me. Their notes on the issues of transparency and the origins of the art that was being generated echo a similar sentiment in my own post, wherein I intentionally gave prompts that would require some amount of interpretation that I could not give. Hasan’s use of iterative prompt generation and the AI’s lackluster performance when given extremely specific prompts also align with my own disappointment over a lack of appropriately apocalyptic depictions of the AI uprising; Hasan’s point that “there seems to be a problem in conjoining different ideas but, besides the existence of the problem, it is difficult, as someone using the model, to connect that problem with a specific lack, whether in training data or in the model itself” puts a much neater and finer point on the issues I was having with my own foray; insofar that the concepts I was driving at were not aligning with the AI’s conceptualization of the same prompt.

Anne George: Golden Record Curation

https://blogs.ubc.ca/annegetec540/2023/10/30/task-8-golden-record/ 

Curation Process and Conscious Choices

I really resonated with Anne’s post on the Curation task for the Voyager Golden Record, because it appears that we arrived at different conclusions whilst still having extremely similar curation processes and decision rubrics. We both touch on the cultural significance of several of the original choices made for the Golden Record, but we also acknowledge the statistical impossibility of incorporating every different culture on the planet, and as such we both transitioned away from a cultural rubric and pivoted to a more musically-composition based rubric instead, opting to try and incorporate as large a breadth of different instrumentations as possible. Even our breakdown of the composition of each song is similar, though it is funny to note that our final lists do differ in several instances, highlighting the fact that even when utilizing similar rubrics, individual conscious choices will differ based on many unknown factors (something that I put a fair bit of emphasis on in the curation data task that followed this one).

Didy Huang: Speculative Futures

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540ddhng/2023/11/26/task-12-speculative-futures/ 

Design choice and descriptive medium

Didy’s implementation of immersion truly inspired me when it came to task [12.2]. When i was going about my own post for this task, I felt like the inclusion of an AI-generated image for each of the three prompts that I chose to look into was a fun way to incorporate another level of integration into the post; then I looked at Didy’s post, and was immediately blown away at their ability to join together interaction, audio, and the generated prompt into a whole other level of interaction. It is funny to me that we both focused on a prompt that was decidedly apocalyptic, and that we both went for a narrative style in our expansion of the prompt. However, I must say that Didy’s really is on a whole other level compared to mine. I also enjoyed our little conversation in the comments, as their experience with the Resident Evil series really made sense when looking back at their production for the task.

Garth Von Buchholz: Golden Record Curation

https://blogs.ubc.ca/garthvb/2023/10/28/task-8-golden-record-curation-assignment/ 

Conscious Decision Making and Curation Bias

Similarly to Anne George’s post on the same task, Garth’s Voyager Golden Record Curation post really resonated with me, as we seemed to be on the same wave-length when it comes to our decision making process, especially when coming up with a selection rubric. I do find it interesting that Garth makes special note of the styles and types of music that are significantly lacking from the original 27 tracks, as I too was compelled to make not of this (albeit in a different way; Garth highlights the different styles that are noticeably absent, whereas I offer selections of my own choosing). I also resonated with Garth’s conscious attempt at limiting the Euro-Western bias that they acknowledge, and I applaud their ability to try and reconcile their own bias through acknowledging that there is still a large percentage of Western examples on their own curated list. In a similar vein, in my own post, I tried to reconcile my own bias through the suggestions of songs I would like to include in the list, whilst acknowledging my own inherent bias or preferences when selecting these ancillary songs.

Nick Robitaille: What’s In Your Bag – Redesign

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540robitaille/2023/10/22/task-7-whats-in-your-bag-redesign/ 

Mode-switching and the implications of design

Nick’s use of personification as a driving force for the mode switching factor of this task really took me by surprise; I had not even considered utilizing this space as an opportunity to explore different methods of descriptive audio mediums, and the idea of interviewing one’s own belongings as a descriptive device really intrigued me. I found my own description of my bag and its contents to be somewhat boring, an almost pedestrian attempt at podcast or ASMR style recording of a simple description of the items themselves, whereas Nick’s creativity of having the bag and its items speak for themselves really highlights the different possibilities when exploring mode-switching. While I tried to toy with non-verbal audio effects, such as the clinking of the bag and other audio cues within my recording, Nick’s choice to play with music and the audio tropes of an interview opened up a whole new avenue of description that I had previously not thought about. Nick’s post really made me curious about how we might be able to play within different mediums to expand upon how we view those mediums themselves as a mode of communication; a transcript of a conversation for a written text would follow the same vein as an interview does in audio form; and this really opened up possibilities within the scope of the Emoji Story task as well, as we are forced to play within a visual medium in an effort to communicate.

For this exercise, I decided to try out generating a few different prompts to write about. Below are the three that I came across that stuck with me. The first is the one that I actually sat down to write about, and the following two are ideas that I expand upon a little bit but don’t fully flesh out. I also went and added an AI generated image based off of the prompt’s content using the BING AI image generator.

Prompt #1:

In the not-so-distant future, we had the oh-so-bright idea of integrating algorithmic learning models into pharmaceutical ventures, in order to generate medicine that could proactively treat illnesses that had not yet begun to take hold; a form of inoculation against the potential downfall of the human race, a vaccine for life itself. What we should have known from the start is that life itself can become an illness: the constant growth of cells, the inherent desire to reproduce, to grow, to proliferate exitance beyond the capacity of our own capabilities, it’s no wonder the algorithms began to see life for what it truly is; a form of cancer. The unstable proliferation of living tissue, often at the cost of the host organism, eventually leads to its own extinction. What is that, if not a cancer? What is that, if not the human experience? We are born into this world with one purpose: to replace those that came before us. It’s Darwinian in nature; the young eventually overthrow the old, but live long enough to see the cycle repeat. So how does a machine solve the equation? How do you close the loop? You make it zero-sum. In order to solve an equation that is continually adding pluses, you need to close the loop so you can finally get the equals. So the algorithm generated a pill; an every-day vitamin, that became a once-in-a-lifetime dosage. It promised all the nutrients you would ever need for the rest of your life, in one simple little capsule. A very literal antibiotic, in every sense of the word. It’s a good thing that the packets didn’t come with the ingredients listed on the outside, because I’m pretty sure that much botulinum is lethal.

Prompt #2:

I didn’t end up writing out this scenario, but I had a few ideas rattling around that I kinda liked the sound of. The one that stuck the most was the idea of a post-apocalyptic world populated by AI, that eventually finds references to alcohol consumption. Sure enough, they can find and re-create the physical properties of liquor, but the purpose behind its use and the ability to actually get drunk proves to be a bit of a problem; How do you convince an intelligence that what it really needs is a few fluid ounces of something that will  make it very unintelligent very quickly? Plus, the idea of drunken robots makes me laugh. Bender Bending Rodriguez eat your heart out.

Prompt #3:

This one hit a little too close to home… we are already living in a society that is coming apart, and issues surrounding class already cause me to harbor feelings of resentment. Im quite certain that there already exists a brand of candy that only the ultra-elite know about (possibly made of babies or whatever the hell it is that the 1% actually enjoy) that the rest of us will remain ignorant of for as long as our systems continue as they do.

I have dabbled with AI generated images before, so this was a fun exercise to go back and try something a little more meta. I started out trying some of my favorite artists to mixed results, and when that didn’t prove to be particularly interesting, I decided to try and be a little more self-referential. I wanted to see what AI could generate based on prompts that were tangentially-aligned with the end of humanity at the hands of AI: namely, the singularity (which is disconcertingly similar to how it depicts the soul of a  machine, I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything foreboding at all). I wanted to see how an AI art-generator “thought” of other machines, and then based on this little experiment I asked it to draw Craiyon itself. The results were… unexpected…

I always knew the technological apocalypse would come at the hands of Furries…

Stupid jokes aside, my grand rug-pull moment fell rather flat, which is I guess to be expected. Looks like we are a ways away from full AI art domination, so I guess I’ll just go back to using it to create a Discord Avatar for myself and a new phone wallpaper. While the images were technically correct in their composition based off my limited prompts, I was expecting something more drastically different between the iterations generated from the same prompts; instead, all of the images shared a similar colour pallet, a similar image structure, and no real significant variation between the 9 or so generated images. I would be more enticed to continue refining my prompts if there was a genuine gradation between the images generated, and I can’t help but feel like it is a missed opportunity to not have more differentiated images generated off of the same prompt.

As someone who spends a fair bit of time online and playing videogames, I thought I was going to be well prepared for this “game”; I have played non-intuitive or “meta” games before, and I thought this would simply be another one of these games. The initial “click HERE” gag seemed to point to that, but this game was slightly different from others that I have played: this one genuinely frustrated me. It was an interesting mix of meta and off-meta functions that were set up in such a way as to somehow obfuscate what I thought would be intentional design choices meant to mislead people familiar with this genre of game, that it almost felt like the creator had read Issa & Isaiahs or Woolgar and incorporated use and usability trials into the game.

It is an interesting take on gaming and web design, this sort of thing. On one hand, once you know what you are doing, it can be completed in very short order, but the struggle to get there almost feels like the point of the game; it become reminiscent of speedrunning to me (the practice of breaking down the functions of a game in order to complete it as fast as physically possible, most often by playing the game in a way that was unintended by the developers), in that they took the same design elements and functions of your average website, but they employ them in such a way as to break immersion and intuitive design. It’s a topic that comes up in speedrunning as well; should developers try to fix the exploits that these players are using, or should they embrace the culture and add in additional features that can only be found by playing non-intuitively (here is a fun clip of the DOOM developers talking about it. I would suggest watching the whole video, it is rather entertaining)? Off-meta, or non-intuitive gameplay opens up extremely interesting opportunities when it comes to game design. A prime example of this that comes to mind is the game Superliminal (another dev’s react video can be found here if you want to see some of the fancier gameplay), wherein players need to go about solving puzzles in ways that wouldn’t occur to the average user (like changing the angle at which you are viewing something to make it appear larger before you interact with it). It is an interesting challenge to how we view use and usability, both on the user side of things as well as the creator’s side.

On first glance, I would argue that the visualizations are almost useless when considering a broader analysis of the communities they generated; raw, numerical data aside, there are no justifications, no reasonings behind the initial choices expressed in the data set that these visualizations are derived from. For all intents and purposes, the choices made in the initial quiz from which this data was derived, could have been made at random by the users. Without the justifications or some level of reasoning behind the choices, the only information we can extrapolate from these visualizations are the choices individuals made, and the correlations between the choices made by individuals who had similar or identical selections. Speaking from my own choices, I selected music that represented as wide a range of different instrumentations and vocalizations as possible, despite the fact that I greatly dislike some of the songs that I chose. By grouping me with individuals who made the same selections but for different justifications, the data is skewed and possibly even misleading when analyzing the visualizations.

It becomes a similar issue that can be seen in, surprisingly, policing practices; the use of uninterpreted or misleading, or even biased, data leads to ill-informed processes and frameworks being built upon incorrectly or misconstrued data. If this data is being used by an algorithm to suggest music for example, (or in the policing connection to allocate resources to a specific region), it doesn’t matter that the data being fed into the algorithm is biased; we will continue down this feedback loop of self-fulfilling predictive data that continues to discriminate more and more communities due to the biased nature of the data being provided by its own system; if the algorithm states that a region is more likely to be crime-addled, more police will be dispatched to that area, which leads to more arrests, which leads to more data which points out that yes, in fact, this area is crime prone, so more officers need to be sent there and the cycle continues to the point of collapse. In this situation, “the algorithm is presented as a new actor in these forms and relations of power” (Neyland, 2019, p. 7). The same can be applied to the groupings of the musical choices; if an algorithm sees that I have made the choices that I have, regardless of my justification, it will continue to funnel similar music into my feed, further constricting what I am being exposed to, thus limiting my future choices and creating an inwardly-spiraling restrictive outcome. Alternatively, if it groups individuals based on their choices within the same data set, it will group me with individuals who I potentially have nothing in common with, other than the fact that we both through one of the same songs should be on the curated list; my justification of it being a god representation of percussion instrumentation may be completely different from their justification of really loving Mozart. The data that is missing or not found within this visualization or quiz is just as important as the data that is displayed; the reasoning behind these choices or the factors surrounding them are what inform the connections between the choices themselves.

Preamble:

My criteria for the selection of songs, or rather, the paring down of the full list of 27 songs, is somewhat incoherent; I decided to select songs based on a multitude of different reasons, ranging from a socio-cultural basis, to the instrumental and tonal makeup of the songs themselves. I initially wanted to incorporate as many different culturally relevant songs as possible, including them on the merit that they are representative, or at least iconic, to a specific culture and its representation, but I abandoned this justification fairly quickly for some pretty straight-forward reasons. Firstly, there are more than 10 cultures on the planet earth, and believe it or not there are even more than 27, so to select songs purely for their cultural relevance would have done injustice to the cultures that are not able to be selected. Secondly, culture evolves and changes over time, so to select songs simply for their cultural impact on a specific time in space seems somewhat foolhardy, as the cultures they are meant to represent may not be in line with the selected songs by the time they are reviewed; a perfect example of this is the Mozart selections; while they may have been emblematic of European culture at the time, Europe as a whole has changed so drastically that to say a single piece of music by an Austrian composer is emblematic of the continent is a bit misleading. I tried to select songs on a compositional basis for several of them; Namely, the Peruvian Wedding Song was selected as it consists of a singular vocalist for its entirety, and the Gregorian Choir piece was selected as it is a collection of voices in harmony creating a symphonic soundscape with just the human voice. Likewise, I tried to select for a breadth of musical instrumentation; Mozart made the cut, as it was an orchestral piece that incorporates a stunning vocal range paired with musical ranges, and the Peruvian Pan Pipes and Drum Song, as well as the Morningstar & Devil Birds songs were selected for their unique instrument choices. Similarly, the Azerbaijani Bagpipes, Navajo Night Chant, and the Sacrificial Dance were selected for their blending of different instruments and human elements. Lastly, Johnny B Goode was chosen for several reasons; it was one of the few pieces of “modern” western-centric music that also incorporated a sense of pop-culture and cultural zeitgeist around a genre of music; in this case, Rock n’ Roll.

Individual Justifications:

Peruvian Wedding Song – Selected for its vocal composition, as a singular human voice is all that is represented, indicating music can be created without instruments or multiple voices. Additionally, its representation of a cultural phenomenon of marriage that extend to a multitude of different cultures merited its inclusion.

Azerbaijani Bagpipes – Selected for its use of Aerophonic instruments, a style of instrumentation that can be found across multiple different cultural areas around the world.

Queen of the night – Mozart – Chosen for the paring of musical layers and tonal changes accompanied by the tonal and range capabilities of a human voice, accompanied by music created by a multitude of instruments working in harmony.

Georgian Tchakrulo Choir – Chosen for its composition of only a selection of human voices, each working in harmony to create a sound that is greater than the sum of its parts, and due to the musical qualities that can be created when combining multiple human voices together into one song or series of sounds.

Morning star & Devil Birds – Chosen for its use of Aerophonic instruments that are utilized in a different and unique manner compared to the Azerbaijani Bagpipes; a more percussive use of an aerophone instrument, and its pairing with a human voice.

Navajo Night Chant – Chosen for similar reasons to the Gregorian Choir, it is a collective use of human voices, however in a more discordant tonal sense to that of the choir, and its pairing with shaken instruments creates a new, unique form of auditory engagement.

Peruvian Pan Pipes & Drum Song – Chosen for its use of woodwind instruments and the inclusion of percussion instruments as well.

Sacrificial Dance Stravinsky – Chosen for its use of orchestral selections, highlighting the harmonics of “composed” music and the deliberate selection of a range of different musical instruments.

Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin Bulgaria – Chosen for its blending of harmonics between voice and instrument, showcasing the similarities and differences between vocalization and musical instrumentation.

Johnny B Goode – Chosen for its historical, pop-culture, instrumental, and cultural zeitgeist components.

Post-Selection Addendum:

The following is a selection of songs that I would like to have added to the list of the voyager’s album, given the chance in today’s time.

Burnt Rice, Shawn Wasabi – I would include this piece for its use of pre-recorded audio clips utilized in a way that generates music, and for its reliance on technology (in this case, the Midi Fighter 64) to generate music from practically any recorded audio.

War Pigs, Black Sabbath – I would include this piece as I believe it is emblematic of music as a “political” commentary or tool. While not strictly speaking a “protest song” (for that I would offer Killing In The Name, Rage Against The Machine), I believe its historical anti-war and anti-establishment messaging makes it worthy of inclusion; we as a human race have made poor decisions, and for us to be able to call out and bring attention to these decisions through song is worthy of its inclusion.

Wild Eyes, Parkway Drive – I would submit this piece as well, due to its messaging of generational disenfranchisement and the sense of an impending global disaster that is growing among young people in our current society, as well as its incorporation of storytelling narrative aspects. Aditionally, I would submit this song for its use of harsher human vocals as an example of how far a human being can push their own voice (though perhaps Pisces, Jinjer would be a better choice for this point).  Also just because the song absolutely slaps.

Here is my podcast episode discussing the vocalization of the What’s in your bag? Task.

I realized relatively quickly that I should have picked a story with a bit less abstract of a plot… but, we live with our mistakes! For this exercise, I definitely relied more on abstract placeholders to represent characters, items, and themes to represent different aspects of the story and its characters. I’m reminded of the platonic theory of forms; When we use symbols to represent ideas or things, we each have in our minds a specific object that represents the quintessential version of that thing. I think about this short video essay here on structures and the impossibility of interpretation and unknowable spaces within one of my favorite hobbies/obsessions, Magic: the Gathering. If you don’t want all of the lore and periphery, skip ahead to [3:45] and you will get what I am talking about (hopefully). The note of using illustrations as approximations of our intentions, and that the symbols are merely representational of a more pure, non-existent ideal form of the “thing” really struck me with this exercise. In this, I also relate back to Dr. Boroditsky’s discussion on the Amazonian cultures that have no words for numbers, and their lack of ability to communicate raw numerical information. If we lack the symbols to express our conceptualizations, we are unable to properly communicate our ideas, our stories, our concepts. Communication breaks down, and without the universals and a baseline understanding of what we are trying to communicate, we are unable to bring across our points. I struggled with this during this exercise, as there were symbols that were close to what I meant, but not one-to-one matches, so there is a real possibility of misinterpretation or miscommunication in my emoji story. An extremely eye-opening look at how communication can break down and falter if the baseline of how we interpret the mode of communication is not universal. I look forward to trying to piece together my classmate’s chosen stories!

Here is the twine that I had fun creating. Choose Your Own Misadventure

I decided to mimic, or rather make an homage, to a fun little game I played a long time ago that basically functioned as a “day in the life” simulator for an office job, that got increasingly more depressing as the game progressed. The whole thing felt like an imitation or critique of daily life, of mundanity, of capitalism, and of individual agency within the confines of a financial society. It was also very funny and used a lot of swearing and belittling language. While it was difficult to get the tone of this across in so few tiles in Twine, this short exercise really illustrated the power behind a visual storytelling tool like this. I had a lot of fun making this, and it felt like a creative writing exercise married with a computer science class; the ability to create new pathways, to change and mutate choices and see their possible routes come to life was really enlightening when considering story structure. The creating process was easy enough, but making everything homogenous and having the routes lead back to and from where I wanted took a little getting used to; I guess I am just used to linear storytelling. As a whole, I had a basic structure that I wanted to create, and then used this as a framework to flush out and create more options and possible routes/outcomes. In general, I think this is a pretty standard way to approach this, but I do feel like there are more unique ways to go about this; I feel like this platform would work amazingly well when ported into a game like Munchkin or something similar… a thought I may need to come back to and revisit.