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Algorithmic Play

This sort of messing about is right up my street, but where to begin? I don’t want to mess up the existing results for something like my Facebook, Google, Alexa, Amazon, eBay and so on, so I thought I’d try downloading something new and having a mess with that.

Probably the most bizarre bazaar on the internet.

Leaping straight towards the most dubious option I could think of, I’ve installed Wish, a shopping app that sells dubious things unfettered by the need for copyright, trademarks, and similar consumer protections. If you want knock-off Lego, things that are photographed to make them look life size but are actually tiny, or gadgets that claim to be able to pick locks or block wifi, then Wish is the place to go!

I have no intention of ever buying anything from Wish, that would be ridiculous. I did give it a bit of a place to start by logging in with my Google account. I don’t really use my Google account for much, but have recently used it to set up Pinterest, Pocket, IFTTT and other things relevant to this course.

Quick question – is Judge Dredd Cyberpunk or a Dystopia?

I’m going to have a look and see what sort of things it thinks I might want to buy, and then use Google to search for lots of cyberpunk things and see how that affects the “merchandise” that Wish shows me.

I get the feeling that this could go terribly wrong and that I may need some sort of mind bleach by the time I’m finished…

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Some NHS e-Learning about an NHS MOOC – My Microethnographic Artefact for Block 2

If only we had anything this cool…

Here is a link to my Artefact. Since the MOOC I looked at was for a MOOC developed by the NHS, primarily for NHS staff and since I work as an e-Learning Developer for an NHS Trust, I decided to make my artefact in the style of one of the thousands of e-Learning courses that the organisation produces every year. Please don’t let this put you off, in this case the form of the artefact is in many ways part of the message I’m trying to convey 🙂

Artefact Link

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Re-configuring this blog

Looking at the posts coming in from my Lifestream, and bearing in mind that this blog is primarily being created for the EDC course, I’ve decided to change how it is set up.

This page will continue in a similar vein, with posts being chronological and being a mix of Lifestream elements and my longer posts on particular subjects. I like to write for a general audience, so I’d like to keep it as accessible as possible for people who stumble upon it (or get poked into visiting by me), with additional pages being set up to explain why I have posted certain things, or to explain what I’m doing in a more academic context with references and things like that.

Milk Steak and Jellybeans – a foul calumny. Also an Always Sunny reference, which is long overdue let’s face it.

Hopefully this will make it easier to mark as a project as well, with the assessors not having to wade through a load of my inane posts about niche cartoons and random memes. As I progress in my understanding of Digital Cultures, it becomes more and more obvious that while chaos and random connections are the meat and drink of the internet, unless you construct a proper menu (pun utterly intended) to impose some order on that chaos, you can just end up with offal, boiled in sour milk with a picture of an amusing cat stapled to it for your meal. This restructuring is an attempt to prevent my readers from having to face that particularly ghastly supper.