A stage set for new-media composing

In this post I review and distill the content of the first two units-of-study in the spring 2013 version of the Digital Media for the Artist (DMA) course.

 The first two units-of-study --one on Working online, and another on the Basics of new-media composing-- together set the stage for later developments in the course, and for this reason it makes sense to put them in the same frame, and reflect on them in a single post.

The course design is unfolding well, so this post is mainly a recounting of the process and main points, although I also make note of new developments in the realm of staffing (the organization now includes a great cadre of Facebook group managers and this is making an appreciable difference in the way the course is playing out).

The text of this post is an edited pastiche of paragraphs drawn from overviews, assignments, and so forth, collected and unified herein. And, again, the text summarizes and highlights just the first two units and course goals. There are three remaining units and goals remaining, all of which build on the first two.

At its core, the DMA course is an opportunity for participants to develop intellectual, creative, procedural, and technical skills. To this end it involves working with principles and methods (rather than long-form content), in an active-learning framework of conversation, composition, and substantive play.

Two foundational methods are introduced in the first two units. One is the learning-cycle --which involves a phasic, rhythmic structure of Gathering, Creating, and Reflecting. The other is the new-media composing algorithm --which involves selecting, combining, recombining, and remixing Contexts, Principles, Genres, Tools, and Processes in the context of self-selected themes and topics. If students learn how to use these methods, they in effect learn the needed knowledge and skills.


Young/emerging artists need new-media knowledge and skills

The DMA course is a direct, structured, formal response to the essential question "What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?" As the instructional architect for the project, my job is to build a learning environment or ecology that is responsive to the question, and in some sense 'answers' it structurally. Once the structure is in place, my role shifts to project manager.

New-media is framed initially as "the new reading and writing." In this regard it is presented as the new-normal for everyone. For young, emerging creatives the bar is simply a bit higher. The proposition is that young creatives need to be able to work well online in a practical sense (which again applies to almost everyone these days in any field) and they also need to have a good handle on how to work the creative side of new-media (which applies mostly to art-minded folks who work in artistic fields).

Part of the rationale for the course is that many young/emerging artists have grown up using the internet mainly as consumers of new-media content, and now need to become fluent producers or composers of new-media content as well. In other words, it is the composing regime that warrants the formal structure of a course. The passive reception role --and even many aspects of the combining of information and perspectives into knowledge-- can more or less be taken for granted in the current Web 2.0 and beyond conditions. Composing is more specialized, though, and is therefore pulled-out of the more general matrix of 'online life' for closer, formal study.

Len Masterman's schema of media education and awareness provides a resonant context for this aspect of the course. Masterman's framework allows us to locate ourselves in an empowerment phase of media, which is the culmination of earlier inoculation, popular-arts, and investigative phases. In the empowerment phase it not enough to manage our screen-time (inoculation), choose content wisely (popular arts), and know when and how we are being manipulated (investigative) --although all of these remain important. We must also know how to compose and share our own content (empowerment). And, again, in the case of young/emerging artists the content-composing requirement may be a bit higher and more specific.


Young/emerging artists need to know how to work online

The first structured response to the above essential question --"What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?"-- is this: young/emerging artists need to know how to actively and effectively work online. Given that the internet is a conceptual + physical environment rolled into one (more will be said about this ontology later) knowledge and metaphors are as important as skills and software tools.

The approach to conceptual understanding begins with the simple observation that the internet is BIG, and seemingly chaotic. It is BIG in the obvious sense that it envelops and interconnects the entire planet, and it is also BIG in the sense that it literally represents the introduction of a new ontological category into Western culture (a category of things which intrinsically combine or exist in-between conceptual and physical). Westerners are perhaps somewhat accustomed to seeing such phenomena at the margins or edges of life, but with the advent of new-media and the internet 'tweeners' of more than one type are taking center stage!

Some of this BIGNESS and chaos associated with life has found expression before:

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing, confusion.”  

--William James, 1890

But the blooming, buzzing, confusion of life is now multiplied times-two by the internet. So it's not just plain big (a global network) it is also exponentially big. It is indeed the case that life has always been complex, as William James noted, but it has never before been exponentially complex. What we have now is complexity on complexity, complexity raised to a higher power.

The premise in this is that the internet largely and literally mirrors life itself, and --again in a very lifelike way-- the internet is also, then, precisely what we make it. The mirroring adds an inner loop in which we are implicated. So, conceptually, the internet is presented as large-scale and exponentially-complex. This begins to set the stage for working effectively and creatively online. Complex environments require complex interventions and creative refashioning of scale and organizing metaphors. This provides initial guidance.

Beyond this general and general point, though, the DMA course proposes quite a few things that young creatives can do to render the scale of the internet into workable proportions, and thereby shape its exponential complexity in support of practical and creative work.


Working online means working with chaos

I guess the general point here is that of 'working with' rather than 'controlling' the internet is a reasonable first step. Working-with is defined as becoming skilled in making the following sorts of substantive simplifications.

1. Get your attitude on
Like everything else, the process of making the internet into a workable workplace starts with attitude, so we need to check out attitudes out. The best way I know to do this is to relay a set of attitudinal orientations to the internet laid out by a stalwart media studies dude, Len Masterman (pictured on the right). Find below Masterman' four options (which BTW he relates to four sequential, historical phases in media studies). Masterman's options can serve as the raw materials from which to build an attitude that will serve you well in working online:

Option one
We can construct an attitude based limiting our exposure. Keep the exponential mess at bay! Masterman posits this and refers to it as the "inoculation" approach or phase. Note in this context that media studies often starts with the TV era, but as mentioned previously some in ancient Greece regarded writing as a toxic/offensive medium, so the historical context for 'inoculation-based' attitudes can be expanded meaningfully back further in time. (This makes me think we might have some fun doing some faux product-design for lines of digital-screen products, in squeeze-tube and/or spray-application forms :) I'm not knocking this approach, though. I pester my own sons to be aware of the need to learn how to pull themselves away from the almost magnetic attraction of screen-world. Some measure of inoculation may be part of the attitude you build for yourself.

Option two
We can build an attitude based on the development of good/smart content selection choices, and thereby manage the chaotic mess of it all without having to renounce or wall ourselves off or limit exposure to the internet. Masterman documents this strategy as well, and refers to it as a "popular arts" approach in which we select rather than reject-all. Historically this ties to the era when people first began to realize it was possible to create good content on TV --the era of PBS, Sesame Street, etc.-- and possible also to make good choices about what to watch. Spending hours online doing research is not the same as spending hours just kind of goofing off. A "popular arts" element in attitude construction adds a qualitative, selective dimension.

Option three
We can create an attitude based on the study of how media systems work, how chaotic/complex systems work, how profusion and confusion work, how commercial interests may seek to use the chaos and confusion of the internet to their benefit rather than ours, etc. Through studying these types of things we can gain clues as to how to make the chaos of the internet work for us, rather than for someone else. We can sort of fight fire with fire in this way, or fight marketing research with other types of research.  Masterman labels this an "investigative" attitude or approach. It is tied to an era in which people began to actively explore issues of media bias, stereotyping, media ownership patterns, etc. For our purposes, we can build some measure of the "investigative" ethos and methodology into our quest to make the internet into a workable workplace.

Option four
We can adopt an attitude of assertive empowerment, based on becoming media-literate --in other words able to "read" and "write" in a variety of media including but not limited to text, and capable of producing and publishing media content in addition to consuming media content. This attitude would imply adding our own hand-built finishing touches, building our own 'house' on the internet, and in that way literally making it into the kind of workplace we would like it to be. Masterman would refer to this as the "empowerment" attitude or approach to the internet.

The above attitude-construction materials are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined, recombined, mixed and matched. The important thing here is that you reflect on the above options or building materials, and complete your own attitude-building process as part of the larger project of making the internet into a workable workplace for you.

2. Find and use resonant organizing metaphors 

Marcos Novak's poetic notion of the datasphere as 'liquid architecture' and Roy Pea's notion of 'distributed cognition' are both apt. The internet is often characterized as a relentlessly distributed (as opposed to centralized or hierarchical) environment, and distributed cognition names the way that intelligence is inherent in the mix. So distributed cognition in a way extends the reality of software (which is one part idea, one part physical manifestation rolled into a unity) to everything. Tables are seen as containing a lot of smarts, a lot of 'idea.' A lot of thinking goes into making a table, and the thinking that goes in stays in, then reverberates in use. So a table can be seen as a form of very rudimentary software. It has the same nature or ontology. Pencils or pens are very smart, not as smart as a smart phone, but still very smart, and then of course computers, software, and the internet are incredibly smart.

The concept of distributed cognition was then used to introduce the proposition that new-media has in effect introduced a new ontological category into Western culture, a category of in-betweenness. And in this context we also explored the reflexive point that we don't learn of  this new ontology via having it taught to us, but rather as a by-product of living it in the form of software. The naming of it comes after. And we also explored the reflexive point that the internet is inevitably what we make it. Our interpretation of it --our own attitude and so forth-- is part of what we see when we look at it.

A third and very basic metaphor is that of the network (rather than the fortress or centralized/hierarchical form). Very often complexity can be well-represented as a network, which allows the type of meaningful, non-reductive simplification we are after.  

3. Use the natural artist's response: compose! 

Artists have always been involved in responding to and creating representations of BIG things in order to make them intelligible, so art has a big role in helping society understand the internet and new-media. The internet is an arena that begs for artistic help, and the arts have always been about creating representations that are packed with intellect, creativity, beauty, questions, insights, and answers that exist only in the overall or whole effect of a work itself. So the arts may be well-suited in and of themselves to making the internet understandable and workable. 

4. Make models or microcosms

Architects and other designers usually build models before they start building actual buildings, and it is creatively very fun as well. Such modeling is a great way to render BIG and complex things workable.

5. Make drawings or visual representations 

Like models or microcosms, graphic representations --even very simple ones-- can be very helpful in representing complex systems in simple yet meaningful terms. This is the basis of data-visualization, but simple drawings are often just as useful as complicated computer-generated ones. Network diagrams/drawings are particularly useful because these are keyed to the distributed nature of the internet and new-media. BTW holistic or 'global' graphic representation is oddly one of the things that computers are not entirely good at. Whiteboards and blackboards, and even laying or splaying materials out on a table or floor, is cognitively better if the idea is to get 'the big picture.'

6. Learn about systems-theory and complexity/chaos-theory 

These theory-domains open up onto intellectual/linguistic strategies for understanding BIG things. These are branches of science devoted specifically to the study of large dynamic systems. If we frame the internet as a complex system, we can then productively note patterns, currents, trends, and instances of "emergent order" (which is a key concept in complexity/chaos theory). Pattern-recognition is a hugely important intellectual skill in the internet era, and educating yourself on systems theory and chaos/complexity theory will give you some tools with which to develop your pattern-recognition skills.

7. Identify and use themes/principles and methods 

This is an 'architectural' or 'architectonic' approach to rendering BIG things usable. It is featured in the design of DMA, along with the other obvious approach of composing. When it comes to liberal arts content, extracting and using principles and methods creatively --rather than acquiring and re-stating long-form content-- is better keyed to the needs of young/emerging artists. From there, composers need to work with principles and methodologies, not long-form content. It's as simple as that. There is nothing wrong with long-form content. It's just rarely not work very well for composers. The idea is to have distilled bits of reality to PLAY-- to arrange and rearrange, to align and distort, to mix and remix, and all the rest. Sometimes this requires long-form research and study, but again this is for the purpose of mastering principles to work with. It is for this reason that this proto-software website on new-media composing for DMA features a fairly extensive list of distilled principles, processes, genres, and tools to mix, match, and remix.

8. Know what the internet and new-media are made of in a scientific sense 

It is hugely important to know --as we already do in some ways via Novak's poetic metaphor of "liquid architecture"-- the nature or ontology of the internet. Many of the potentials (and potential pitfalls) of the internet workplace are directly related to it being, at bottom, made of electricity (which also 'flows' and which also can be described as a 'current'). As such the internet is as fundamentally mysterious as electricity is. Electricity functions as a connection-and-communications system --it does this in our own central nervous systems, and also in the external electrical grid which now includes internet. For example, if we understand this deeply, issues around privacy are much easier to understand. Electricity knows no bounds really, so we should expect a bit of a struggle to make boundaries in a world where new-media (and hence electricity) is everywhere.

9. Re-frame the internet in collective/species terms 

We often see the internet in individualistic terms --i.e., what does it mean to ME? How do I use it? etc. But some observers, including Michio Kaku and Jeremy Rifkin, are placing it instead in the context of what it means to humans as a species.

10. Make the creativity connection 

Think about the connections between electrical current or flow, and creativity. Is it pure coincidence that great performances are sometimes described as 'electric'? Or, looked at in the reverse direction, can it be pure coincidence that creativity is often characterized as a 'flow' state --for example by noted creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Might this have a species-level significance as well? We will explore this in the tasks as well.

11. Create an online studio/workplace 

This is a concrete example of combining the 'architectural' and 'compositional' impulses to meaningfully simplify the BIGNESS of the internet and new-media. Having a place of one's own on the internet is extremely important in simplifying it into context in which we can work productively. Note that 'one's own place' will much more likely have a distributed, networked flavor, again much like DMA does: recall that part of the DMA workplace is a website, part of it is Facebook, part of it is Blackboard, part of it is blog-world. This structure is intentional.

12. Get down with Culturomics 

This involves finding and learning how to use tools for managing BIGNESS --in particular managing "big data" much in the same way that we might use calculators to help us manage big numbers. Text analyzers are one example of this kind of tool.

13. Think environmental 

This is a very productive line to pursue in regard to constructing online workplaces. The best work currently being done in education IMO is by folks like David Perkins, Steve Benford, and Lois Hetland. All of them are analyzing education in terms of its environmental aptness to play an active role in the instructional process. They are my touchstone people for my 'infrastructional' approach. Hetland focuses on the characteristics of studio environments. Perkins focuses on the need for online workplaces to have certain features. Here's a quick quote: "Any learning environment can be parsed into five facets. These five facets are information banks, symbol pads, construction kits, 'phenomenaria' and task managers." Cool stuff (note that 'teachers' are replaced by 'task managers' for example). And Benford focuses on the characteristics that make f2f workplaces good, and then creates software that enables such things to take place online. For example he notes that having "peripheral awareness" of who else is online in the workplace is very important. Benford's field is Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) --which is again insightfully and refreshingly different from talking about 'online education.'

14. Think public 

In regard to organizing the internet as a workplace, it can again be compared to life itself. It is relentlessly, unavoidably, and yes, sometimes vexingly public. BUT, knowing this, we can adopt the same types of strategies we use in everyday life to balance public and private. These matters are rarely simple, but at least we have practice in everyday life that we can transfer to how we frame and work on the internet.

All of the above have potential to help us befriend the BIG chaotic beast. They include yet go beyond mere description by articulating actual methods for bringing order to chaos without reducing the richness of its creative potentials or its deep, broad, and intuitive significance as a mirror of life itself.

All of the above are offered in response to the essential question,"What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?" as part of the first structured response to the question: young/emerging artists need to know how to actively and effectively work online.

Working online ends up involving a complex combination of knowledge and skills, much as life itself does. In the DMA course itself,  all of the above strategies are employed in one way or another. For obvious reasons the course emphasizes some of them (composing for example) more than others, but they are all present and accounted for.

Discussion questions included in the above first unit-of-study include the following:  When you hear the words 'internet' or 'digital/new-media' what comes to mind for you? You can start with likes and/or dislikes, but beyond that, what metaphors do you use to describe it? What is the current or actual state of your unintentional web-presence? Do you feel as if you need to hire reputation.com to help you manage things or climb out of the hole you dug for yourself in high school?? :) Do you feel as if the grown-ups are growing up around issues of online pictures and so forth, calling off the dogs so to speak, doing less over-reacting? What would the ideal state of your unintentional web-presence be? What is the current or actual state of your intentional web-presence? Do you already have a website, blog, both, other, etc.? What would the ideal state of your intentional web-presence be? Have you asked anyone in your field about these matters? Are you assuming you need a professional website without doing your research?


Young/emerging artists need to be new-media composers 

The second structured response the DMA course offers to the question,"What do young/emerging artists need to know about new-media?" is that they need to know how to compose content for practical and creative purposes in a fully empowered fashion.

This unit-of-study by learning begins by learning and working with a flexible composing methodology that involves selecting, combining, and recombining contexts, principles, genres, tools, processes, and exemplars --with the selections and combinations keyed to self-selected themes and topics.

The term composition is defined generally, and literally, to mean 'putting together' and is intentionally meant to apply to any work --from music to writing to dance to drama to film to new-media to cooking-- that is arranged or put together using conscious thought (and arguably also using 'unconscious' thought as well if we factor in the creative process).

Composing is also closely allied with the constant activity of combining and recombining sensory experiences and reflections into concepts and/or ideas. We typically call this type of physiologially-based composing perception. It also closely enjoins the psychologically-based composing that happens in representation and framing. All of these are included in the general intro to composing.

Artistic composition is mainly unique in its association with, or foregrounding of, the creative process. This does not mean, though, that all artistic work always foregrounds the creative process (artistic composing can sometimes be much more formulaic or practical than creative). Nor does it mean that the best artistic compositions are purely creative. The best ones may likely also enjoin intellectual, spiritual, and/or scientific processes or ways-of-knowing.

So it's safe to say that composition is a complex whole --and this of course renders it very useful for making sense of other complex wholes including 21st century living (the complexity-on-complexity we articulated in our first unit-of-study). Composing can front-load or foreground process, ideation, genres, or tools. It can front-load creativity, spirituality, intellect, or science. It can front-load rhetorical appeals to emotion, reason, and/or ethos. The whole house is in this house, so it is able to serve as a fitting-scaled methodological mirror.

The 'grammar' and 'vocabulary' of composition varies from one art arena to the next. For example, my training in painting and drawing familiarized me with a particular framework for thinking and talking about composition. It is a framework that features concepts like foreground/mid-ground/background, shallow/flat or deep/perspectival pictorial space, directionality (diagonals for active, horizontals for calm, verticals for stability), warm vs. cool color, linear vs. curvilinear, visual texture, scale variation, line-quality vs. line-description, abstract vs. realistic depiction, and so forth. Basically this amounts to a particular compositional vocabulary and grammar.

Dance, design, drama, film, and music all have unique compositional grammars and vocabularies that are all, nonetheless, somewhat similar. One of the things I love about UNCSA is that is provides a wonderful opportunity to compare different artistic compositional frameworks --ones derived from music, dance, drama, film, and of course new-media. What are the universal grammatical elements common to all? We look at the commonalities as well as the differences.

Our first set of new-media compositions were on the topic or theme of composition itself (which already enjoins the new-media principle of reflexivity), and involved various forms of comparing and relating 'everyday' composing with 'artistic' composing. We used the flexible methodology described above, with the proviso that there were pre-selections made in order to enable guided practice given these were our first works. As we move through the term the compositions become progressively more complex,  involving less pre-selects, less guidance, and more autonomy in operating and morphing the composing methodology.

As noted above, in the exponential conditions of LIFE+INTERNET, everything gets doubled, raised to its own higher power. 'Context' is elevated to 'text,' for example. Rather than just creating artworks, artists now often create genres.  Remixers don't work with traditionally-defined individual notes, they work with swatches, chunks, or samples that serve as their 'notes'' and so on. Everything gets ramped-up to a higher level, and that is where the understanding needs to go, too.

So our first compositions included as a pre-select the new-media principle of 'simultaneity' in order for us to dive into 'doubling' right from the get-go in a practical/experiential fashion. This echoes the conceptual point that it is not that we are composing our perceptions one minute, and then composing artwork at another, it's both at the same time. This is the kind of magic we are after. That's the magic that is key to unlocking the specific creative potentials of the new-media context. It's not that everyone will turn the key, or even want to, but the education of young/emerging artists requires that they all at least know where the key is if they want to pick it up at some point in their careers.

Maybe contemporary artists have a role to play in raising awareness about the need to ramp-up our understanding to a higher, exponential power. Here's what the brightest light in media studies, Marshall McLuhan, said about this --way back in 1964 in his classic book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man...

“The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments by a generation and more has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist "the antennae of the race." Art as radar acts as "an early alarm system," as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time in order to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as merely a form of self-expression. If art is an "early warning system," to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to the study of media but to the development of media controls.” 

--Marshall McLuhan, 1964

But isn't this how art has always worked?  Arguably, the arts have always been about creating meaningful complex microcosms, packed with intellect, creativity, thought, emotions, interactions, movement, stasis, beauty, blight, questions, insights, and answers that might exist only in the synergy of "whole effects" produced by the interactions of all of the above. The internet may in this way be functioning only as a gigantic megaphone, blasting out the message that it is time for artists to get going, time to step up and loom large on the new-world and new-media stage. It's for this reason I delight in working with young/emerging artists re: the creative potentials of new-media. If they understand it well, they are simultaneously understanding the contemporary world well, and --as artists-- they may then be in a key position to help others understand as well.

A Portrait of Young

This portrait is of the internet, and the internet generation. There is so much knowledge, so much readiness, so much power, so much raw potential, so much intelligence, so much good will among the young. Why so little direction? I don't mean that in a critical sense at all. I mean why aren't colleges and universities providing more opportunities for direction?

Statistics say that there are roughly 2.6 million students enrolled in college in the U.S. A single week of let's say 20 hours of work per student yields around 5.2 million man-hours available in a SINGLE week. The world has X number of problems. We have all that smarts and the manpower. So where is the direction to understand and solve the problems? Why aren't colleges and universities doing more crowd-sourcing? More data-mining and analysis? More perspective-gathering? More real-world, problem-based learning? Might this provide some of the needed direction?

The problems besetting instructional architecture all seem to resolve to the training of the architects, not with the current group of learners. Increasingly, curricula and classes seem to me to be part of the problem, a major distraction. Why? Because I think classes and curricula need to be directed at real life issues and problems. But the current group of instructional architects/teachers (myself among them) were trained to be interior designers, trained to be masters of presenting internally-coherent and internally-consistent content, trained to be masters of pretty perhaps? Maybe we need to figure out how to orient ourselves to looking out the windows of our practices rather than in. Maybe we need to build structures that point outwards. Do I think a poetic worldview and the knowledge of literature to back it up can be part of this? Absolutely. I am not arguing for a reductionist/utilitarian concept of education. I'm just arguing that we should experiment with putting the world first, pretty much as poets do in their own work I would think.

So I am setting my portrait of young in the context of the above types of questions. It is a portrait that I see before me, painted by the young folk I have the privilege to work with. They seem to get it. They have come of age right alongside the internet and, as one of them noted, they now for the most part carry the internet in their pockets. Okay, they have questions and concerns and all that, but hey, these are in large part the things that tell me they get it, they are ready, they have come of age. But when will the grown-ups grow up? That's my question I guess. I think there is hope for us, but we need to know how to provide views that look outwards, direction to the real world, channels, currents. We still have a role to play and I'd like us to get better at it.

My worry is that when the young connect to their elders they hear recorded messages telling them that they have made a connection, but that the number they have reached is no longer in service. It is connection with no content. Why? Because they don't need the content. The internet provides that. What they don't have are conduits or pass-throughs to the real.

We provide some of these types of connections, but not enough. I worry that we still think teaching and learning are about content, rather than about real problems and real life. It's a lot of information and perspectives we all swim in. A vast ocean. A lot of liquid architecture. Do we perhaps need to build or generate some currents, ways to channel the flow to the real? Might this be how how 'liquid architecture' becomes more than a poetic metaphor for the internet?

So let's bring this all back home. There are 123 students enrolled in the Digital Media for the Artist course this term. How can I best channel the amazing amount of smarts, good will, and energy that a mere 123 young folks bring to the arena or theater (it's a small subset of the 26.2 million, but it is still a LOT of ability and energy). How can we make the most of this?

One way for us elders to grow up in tandem with the young is to help learners build or recognize currents by becoming becoming better data miners. Data-mining is clearly how the big boys (Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al) are making boatloads of money; they are sailing on the liquid data-streams they gather from us and sell to others. It's the ability to deal with vastness of scale and proportion that is now of most value, literally and figuratively. We might as well get in on the action, what say you?

So for starters we gathered responses in Facebook groups to the following prompt:

When you hear the words 'internet' or 'digital/new-media' what comes to mind for you? You can start with likes and/or dislikes, but beyond that, what metaphors do you use to describe it? What do you think of Novak's metaphor of 'liquid architecture'? What do you think about the idea of ontological in-between-ness? What concerns or worries do you have about what the internet is teaching us? What do you think it represents in human life and human development? 

Find below a small sample I selected from the responses. So, first off, note that you are getting a human-filtered dataset below. It is a particular portrait of young, in a way composed of of lines, colors, and shapes provided by the selection I made of participants' responses:

"I wish we knew when to draw the line, put down the smartphone, and just enjoy the Frappuccino before it gets all melty and gross."

"Privacy and pointlessness, I think those are the two most important problems the Internet has." 

"One of the most important benefits of the internet, besides entertainment and instant knowledge, is the more recent effects it has had on political issues. Protests and revolts have gone from the concepts on the internet to real life changes."

"I have heard lots of metaphors used in conjunction with the internet, for example; it’s like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube. Once something is out in the open, it is out; whether you wanted it out or not."

"The internet has allowed corporations to traffic in information, and when public information gets bought, it gets trimmed down by those who own it." 

"I fear that someday two people will fall in love and even get married without ever meeting face to face." 

"I think that while the internet and new media offer us the ability to see ourselves and the world in a new and transformative way, it simultaneously may be transforming what we think of as a ‘self’, for better or worse." 

"When I hear the word “internet,” I equate it to an intangible world bursting with endless information, representing the knowledge and creativity of millions of real people." 

"Until we stop the banality, originality and creativity will be mired in swamps of memes and self-pictures and vintage filters." 

"Ultimately, I believe that the internet or digital/new media is more of a blessing than a curse; people simply need to be mindful of how they use such a powerful tool."

"My problem with the Internet comes in when I think about the ways digital media could be utilized in such effective and important ways and instead how it is so often misused. I think that what a vast majority of the population uses the internet for is not to gain knowledge or learn about new ideas and cultures, but simply as a “watering hole” that we are all drawn to but that wastes our time, hacks our computers, and bombards us with continual ads and pop-ups that try to make us spend more money on things we don’t need or want." 

"The internet is both one of the greatest and worst things that has happened to my generation. While you have limitless access to information and have a constant flow of news coming at you, when used excessively I feel like it creates a disconnect between people. When I walk into a room it isn't a surprise to see more than half the room indulging in their smart phones, whether they're watching the latest movie trailer, checking their Twitter, or reading the latest news from CNN. While all of those things are very informative and can be helpful, where has the face to face conversations gone?"

"I think the internet represents our human need to connect with one another. For instance, we're always logging into social sites to see how other people are doing. The internet makes our planet a little less huge in a way, because we can so easily connect to other locations, cultures, and people far away. Maybe this is another need of ours too, to feel like the world is something that can be made less large and mysterious." 

"The internet is what you make it." 

"When I think of the Internet, and the way it's developing and evolving, it reminds of a maturing human brain. Forming new networks and connections constantly, sharing gathered information; and slowly developing a consciousness. I believe that this "Internet consciousness" is the precursor to artificial intelligence which will bring in a new era in the relationship between mankind and technology."

"While I'm not thinking of it this way, google is constantly acting as a teacher for me. It allows me to find answers to my questions, literally at my fingertips. In less than ten seconds, I learned a new word. I can take the initiative to actually get answers to my questions any time i want, and it is both convenient and beneficial to my growth."

"When I think of the internet I think of the future. I think that we can all agree that the internet has both its pro's and con's. In my opinion the pros out way the cons."

"I think the biggest things about technology/ internet is that... its potential and its opportunities and resources are only going to be as much as we want them to be."

"It's up to us as humans to use all of the information the internet gives up so easily and readily. And we have the CHOICE to look into the information given and believe it as law or pass it off as something interesting we read on the internet. The question should not be wether the internet itself is merely good or bad, rather, are human beings using the power the internet gives us to push us forward or hold us back."

"The internet is a sponge that absorbs all information that is put into it and we as viewers squeeze what we can out of it."

"There's so much information on the internet now a days, its almost impossible not to learn something."

"That's what I think new media is, simply a new canvas on which we can dance, sing, act, film, or design. New media is the art of sharing and creating new and interesting ideas that we find intriguing, thought-provoking, or informative. It is simply a new way of thinking about the arts."

"The internet in my perspective is most like a mind, it is present and can create tangible things, but it itself is no more than just a stimuli."

"The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the internet is knowledge. Now a days you can learn just about anything online. The internet has now created a generation of Do it Yourselfers, allowing us to be more independent. We may not be professionals at first, but practice does make perfect."

"The internet is the baby boy of your Aunt's being shared over Facebook, the Youtube video of the Evolution of Dance, the Google search of late night wondering; how come the stars align as they do? What is the big dipper? It is a dated Ask Jeeves, Yahoo! Answers, lesser programs such as Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. It is a Tumblr blog full to the brim of cats and fandoms of popular television shows such as BBC sensations Sherlock and Dr. Who. Bandoms are also an avid group of people who enjoy music such as Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, One Direction, and Fun."

"The internet is like the answer key for a huge final exam."

"When I think of the internet I am really thinking of power."

Okay so the above represents the results of a human-based data-mining operation. But I decided to also push on. I decided to go in search of text-analyzing tools to experiment with a machine-filtered portrait of the above collection of quotes. So I inputted all of the quotes as a single bloc of text into the text analysis program, and here are the results.

My main points? 1) instructional architects need to invest in developing the skills of data-mining and analysis, including data-visualization techniques,  2) the data-stream of DMA views on the internet is intriguing and well worth mining, and 3) I could have spent the same time today preparing a lecture on my views of the internet, but I didn't do this. I did the experiment in data-mining via text analysis instead, and this caused me to have to learn something new --which was much more interesting to me in every way possible. In particular I enjoyed reading the participants' perspectives on the internet, I enjoyed the selection process, and I enjoyed the feeling of jumping off of the rails to explore a new tool.

BTW here is a link to the free Textanalyser tool I used. http://textalyser.net/

Also, here is a link to a Wikipedia entry on Text-mining: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mining And in case you are interested, the accuracy/reliability of Wikipedia has been studied, and it compares well with the accuracy/reliability Encyclopedia Britannica.