{"id":29,"date":"2020-03-12T22:28:23","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T11:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/?p=29"},"modified":"2020-03-12T22:28:23","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T11:28:23","slug":"week-2-databaase-is-the-new-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/2020\/03\/12\/week-2-databaase-is-the-new-black\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 2 – Databaase is the New Black"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Outside my window today the ol\u2019 Polistes humilis<\/a><\/i> are moving around slowly, not doing much, not chewing wood into paper, not building nests, seemingly living a carefree but passing slow vespid life. But how can that be? Only a week ago I Morteined them back to the Stone Age—now they appear to be enjoying a mid-Roman period of refinement without industry. Also, without conflict. If they are progressing this fast, how long before they invent the printing press? They already have the paper.<\/p>\n

They appear sluggish and lackadaisical, though. Really sluggish. Minutes go by with barely the wriggle of an antenna. They move, but are they alive? Have I, spurred on by one crazy article from last year<\/a> and the easy availability of insect spray, unwittingly created a wasp zombie apocalypse?<\/p>\n

Well, if I have, it\u2019s small and local. That gives me (and you) time to focus on database as a symbol for changes in fiction during the inter-millennial transition we\u2019ve all been going through during the last twenty-five years.<\/p>\n

And so we come, by what might at first seem like a towering irrelevancy, to the work of Lev Manovich. In \u201cDatabase as a Symbolic Form\u201d (Manovich, 1998) he proposes that the method of representing the real world in fictional form is no longer narrative, but the database. He explaind \u2018database\u2019 thusly:\n from the point of view of user’s experience a large proportion of them are databases in a more basic sense. They appear as a collections of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search. The user experience of such computerized collections is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site (p 2).<\/blockquote>\nHe goes on to point out that the Internet, or at least the World Wide Web (as opposed to email, chat, Skype and so on) is a collection of separate parts with no intrinsic narrative structure. The narrative, if there is one, is imposed on the page by the page\u2019s user.<\/p>\n

Manovich calls the method the users use to turn the database into a narrative the algorithm. In computer games, for example, an algorithm is coded into the game for the user to use, but it still takes motivation from the user, in the form of playing the game, to make the algorithm act on the database. But unlike a narrative, the writer or compiler of the database can\u2019t control what the users\u2019 experience will be once they use the algorithm, or it wouldn\u2019t be a game.\n

While computer games do not follow database logic, they appear to be ruled by another logic \u2014 that of an algorithm. They demand that a player executes an algorithm in order to win (p 5)<\/blockquote><\/p>\n

The important thing, therefore, is thet the writer of the page, or of any database, doesn\u2019t control how the database can form a narrative.<\/p>\n

Therefore, I think, if the author of the database cannot control how the user, or reader, derives a narrative from it, they\u2019re under no obligation to make a narrative themselves. They can\u2019t be obliged to control something which is intrinsically out of their control.<\/p>\n

…the general principle of new media: the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself. …computer programming encapsulates the world according to its own logic (p 5).<\/blockquote><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, he doesn\u2019t give any examples of this actually happening<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The possibilities for self-expression<\/del>indulgence were staggering.<\/p>\n

Somehow, for some reason he presumably considers to be adequately explored, Manovich contrives to introduce Peter Greenaway\u2019s Prospero\u2019s Books<\/a><\/i> as a film that eschews narrative in favour of a database: \n

Many of [Greenaway\u2019s] films progress forward by recounting a list of items, a catalog which does not have any inherent order (for example, different books in Prospero’s Books) (p 20).<\/blockquote><\/p>\n

My ex and I sat through all 372 hours of this prurient dolly shot one night at a friend\u2019s house, while they dropped in from time to time to address the phsycailtiy of the various nudes that \u2018played\u2019 each of the books of the enterprising magician (who, it must be noted, resembles the Professor from \u201cGilligan\u2019s Island\u201d in that he has great magical powers but can\u2019t get himself and his daughter off the island) from Shakespeare\u2019s The Tempest<\/i>. Greenaway may very well embody the databasic zeitgeist<\/i> but the movie was boring even on two bottles of merlot. That second bottle is the ritical sieve. If the movie still has no story or narrative after I\u2019ve fuelled the synapses and silenced the critic, then it never will have while I\u2019m conscious.<\/p>\n

it follows that if database is the new symbol for culture in the third millennium, no creator is under any obligation to do anything for the \u2018user\u2019. Never one to fulfil an obligation I can shy away from, I have still taken this whole concept on board, because I\u2019ve found a twenty-first century instance of database trumping narrative: the listicle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

13 Things They Didn\u2019t Tell You About COVID19<\/h2>\n
    \n
  • It\u2019s strawberry-flavoured<\/li>\n
  • It was first reported in 1347, but was knocked off the charts by the bubonic plague the following year<\/li>\n
  • Corona beer is not made from coronavirus<\/li>\n
  • Neither is Guinness<\/li>\n
  • COVID19 can\u2019t be vaccinated against — yet — because vaccines don\u2019t work — yet<\/li>\n
  • There is NO<\/b> point six!<\/li>\n
  • I\u2019m not saying it, because of copyright<\/li>\n
  • It is not<\/i> some form of Gypsy curse. (We\u2019renot allowed to say what kind of curse it is.)<\/li>\n
  • COVID19 is made from Viagara<\/li>\n
  • It can\u2019t survice below whatever the temperature is where you are right now. Thus, it is helped out by Climate Change<\/li>\n
  • It is not — well, might not be — a prehistoric virus released by the metling polar ice caps<\/li>\n
  • It spreas toother countries alphabetically. Afghanistan is covering this up. Zimbabwe isn\u2019t worried<\/li>\n
  • The average life expectancy of an infected person is less than the time it takes to type this sen—<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Now, even while I was making that up, I had some narratives going through my brain. In the simplest example the line about Guinness comes after the line about Corona. It follows on logically from one sentence to the other, because \u2018neither\u2019 supports the thought in the previous sentence. It\u2019s not a particularly brilliant joke—items six and seven are probably better—but it relies on the order of those items.<\/p>\n

    This is a mistake on my part. I wasn\u2019t going to provide any narrative, and I had at first thought to write the items then sort them alphabetically just in case two or more itemsmight follow on narratively, but then I couldn\u2019t resist the Corona-Guinness comparison and then I inserted items six and seven because some of you might get the reference. The human mind craves narrative, and I kind of feel I ought to give you some if you\u2019re human and you\u2019ve read this far.<\/p>\n

    \n

    Manovich, L. (1998). Database as a Symbolic Form. Retrieved from Manovich.net: http:\/\/manovich.net\/content\/04-projects\/022-database-as-a-symbolic-form\/19_article_1998.pdf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Outside my window today the ol\u2019 Polistes humilis are moving around slowly, not doing much, not chewing wood into paper, not building nests, seemingly living a carefree but passing slow vespid life. But how can that be? Only a week ago I Morteined them back to the Stone Age—now they appear to be enjoying a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bawrt-2004"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}