In the book, the writer mentioned that “what flows is secondary to the continuous movement of flow itself. ” Flow can be explained as an information exchange. It is important to see how flow cooperates with people. People are as a note in the central of the network, and then the flow brings us to connect us to different information. What is important is the interaction between humans and information instead of only information itself. Flow helps us have a better understanding of the relationship between capital, infrastructure, and information in the digital network. In the past, flow was only a one-way ideological system. Nowadays, with the development of technology, people participate in the network as a node and provide many data points. We receive light, sound, video waves, advertisements, notifications from the internet. At the same time, we will provide information like our different accounts, comments, credit card to the internet. Also, there is more two-way information flow like text massages, email, video, calls, and so on. This information represents different intimate relationships, which need people to spend time and energy to keep them. Flow is like a channel, carrying information that helps people deliver and receive data and information and maintain relationships with others.
2 thoughts on “Flow-Zoey Zeng”
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Your ideas about the difference in flow implementation over time caused me to think about the difference between how the flow was first thought of within television commercials and how it is thought of in current social media. At first in television, the thought of tracking data to help improve the knowledge on flow would have been just to track how many people tune into the channel and how long they stay on and when they leave the channel. Now in social media, the data tracked to retain flow is a much longer list. This list includes the same things as before such as opening time and closing time but it also includes interactions within the app and how those interactions lead to other factors and which content the user spends the most time viewing. This advancement helps flow be managed much easier.
I think you make an excellent point about the idea of flow as a back and forth exchange of information, content, and ideas, rather than simply a one way stream. That was what differentiated this keyword in my mind from the other ideas and keywords we’ve discussed throughout class. This evolution of flow throughout history is something I found very interesting, as I often forget to consider just how much media consumption has changed in such a short amount of time. It is hard to imagine a world where television is not in an on-demand, streaming type of format.