Week 12 – Aesthetics

Traditionally, when I think of a documentary, I think of something that will provide more information on a topic or issue and include real life footage and commentary. New media technologies are re-working these definitions as we can see in Bear 71 and Leviathan. When I first saw these two videos, they didn’t strike me as documentaries as they didn’t fit the traditional idea of what a documentary is. They didn’t contain commentary but were instead immersive right from the start. They are still documentaries in the sense that they provide more information on an issue, except they’re presented to us in a completely different way. I believe this is the mantra for much of contemporary media today – reworking traditional ideas and presenting them to us in new ways.

I guess after seeing these videos I have a new understanding of what a documentary is. It is something that is constantly evolving and with no clear boundaries. Particularly with mobile technologies, everyone has the ability to create a documentary and we already see this on Youtube. Is the phenomenon of ‘v-logging’ considered to be a type of documentary in itself? As people are recording their day to day lives, they create something that is raw and organic. As John Grierson, the man who coined the word ‘documentary’ describes it as presenting ‘life as it is’ (life filmed surreptitiously) and ‘life caught unawares’, as real as reality can get.

With these new styles of documentaries they present a reality that we can envision ourselves in. Particularly with Leviathan, the way it is filmed mimics being in the water, feeling every wave and being immersed in every movement. Technologies such as the GoPro allow amateurs to create this immersive style of documentary as you can see the endless amounts of GoPro footage on Youtube, ranging from surfing, snowboarding, skiing etc.

I would argue that these new types of documentaries created by digital and networked technologies are taking us further into reality rather than away from it. The ubiquity of mobile technologies today, allows everyone to capture their own reality without the need for a middle man. There is a stronger emphasis on aesthetics as new media technologies allow for it.

The potential for new creative genres in documentary films have become enriched by new media technologies. Time lapse videos have become incredibly popular over the past couple of years as a way for people to document their lives and some of these videos on Youtube have become viral. The way something is filmed has an impact on the way we perceive and understand it. The way a time lapse video is created, highlights difference as it is emphasised in every frame with the stop-motion. Here is a time lapse video with over 6 million hits, of a man who grows his beard for a year in China. It won many awards at film festivals and was ranked #8 top viral video in 2009:

Week 11 – The internet of things

In the lecture this week, Andrew gave a somewhat scary account of what our world would be like if it was run on ‘the internet of things’, a network that knew everything about us. He talked about the ability of this IOT to know our emotions by sensing our heartbeat and using that data to do specific things. If we had a bad day at work, we could come home to a prepared meal with our favourite music playing and a hot bath running. On the one hand it seems amazing and opens up endless possibilities but by the same token it needs to be handled carefully as whoever gets hold of this information would be extremely powerful. These ideas resonate strongly with the message in the movie ‘Transcendence’, where it reminds us that technology is useful and powerful, but if it is used for the wrong purposes it can be extremely dangerous, especially when it presumes a human role.

The current internet of things sees networks and platforms connecting with each other that produce new kinds of power for things to affect and be affected. The IOT creates a new ‘contagion of affect’. Bollier (2013) gives great examples of this new contagion affect where data is collected on apps and then connected to other networks to produce information. He makes a great point about how we forget how wired we really are. Sometimes I’m taken aback by information that my phone knows that I don’t even know. For every picture that you take, at least on the iPhone there is a geotag, and it is able to group your photos according to location. If I were to post a picture later on Instagram and geotag it using Foursquare, although I am no longer physically in the location I took the photo, the location still appears at the top of the search bar because of this data.

The idea that retailers can now track our movements, behaviour and moods during the course of browsing stores seems invasive, though this process is already happening in many of our interactions online. When I’m shopping online and looking a specific style of shirt, it will suggest me to similar styles of shirts on the sidebar. This is exactly the same process when we read a blog, or a news article on a website, it will provide links to similar stories based on what it believes are your interests.

I guess what all this data means is an increasingly tailored experience of the world. Of course this ties in with ideas we’ve explored throughout the course and indeed other media courses, and whether the media is limiting our experience of the world by exposing us to things we’re already predisposed to. Is all this technology and increasing collection of data just another way for companies to sell stuff to us? Another way to make us buy their products? Like Bollier says, ‘the design of a city shapes how we think’. In this IOT there exists a hierarchy of information, but who gets to control this hierarchy is the main question. What difference would it have made if I found that shirt myself as opposed to it being ‘suggested’ for me by the website? Maybe I would never have found it, or perhaps I would have found something even better by using my own senses, my own thoughts. Or does the computer now know me better than I know myself?

References

Bollier, David (2013) ‘How Will We Reclaim and Shape the Ambient Commons?’, David Bollier: news and perspectives on the commons, July 16, <http://bollier.org/blog/how-will-we-reclaim-and-shape-ambient-commons>

Week 10 – Going Viral

Viral is a term that we’re all familiar with as we have all seen those viral videos on Youtube, the laughing babies and the endless amounts of cat videos. But what makes these videos go viral while others do not? Rushkoff compares a media virus to a biological virus where its main characteristic is its ‘stickiness’. Like a virus, it creates a shell to protect its genetic code, it uses a ‘protein shell’ that could be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, visual image, clothing style or a pop hero – the main point is that it catches our attention by drawing on popular culture and stick on where it is noticed (Rushkoff 1996:10). Here’s an example of a viral video that reached insane virality and gave this girl instant ‘Youtube Fame’:

If we analyse this from Munster and Rushkoff’s theories we can see why this works. Firstly it has “stickiness”, it draws on a musical riff and a simple idea that is both funny and unpredictable. Bilton (2010) suggests three characteristics in networked things that go viral: speed of spread, quantity of views or users accessing something being spread, and the unpredictability of what will spread.

The spread of viral media simply could not happen on one platform, it relies on the interconnectivity of several platforms to create Perretti’s (2005) multitutdinous network that is parallel to that of a biological virus. It is made possible by what he calls the ‘Bored at Work Network’, involving people who make things go viral by forwarding, blogging, messaging, chatting and basically sharing viral media.

The affect of viral videos aren’t isolated to the videos themselves. There is a huge potential for the viral video to create other forms of virality through its contagious nature. Take for example PSY’s ‘Gangnam style’ that like Munster says, ‘erupt out of nowhere, gather momentum and behave like the dynamics of nonlinear systems’. The ‘Gangnam style’ phenomenon gave birth to a plethora of other imitation videos, and parodies, some of which went viral.

Increasingly viral videos are emerging because of this multitudinous network. Whereas previously perhaps the main platform would be Youtube, and unarguably it still is, the inundation of social media apps such as Vine, Instagram and even Snapchat have escalated the opportunities for virality. As Munster said what becomes crucial for contagion is not what is spreading but the movement between networks. “Going viral comes to signal a condition in which the biological, the communicative, and the affective all pass between one another” (Munster).

I’ll end today’s post with a viral video on Vine that my friend tagged me on Facebook (clearly a participant of Peretti’s ‘Bored at Work Network’) that uses a current pop song as its ‘stickiness’. Starting off as a Vine, to being reproduced onto Youtube into other forms, and shared thousands of times on Facebook, Twitter #wigglewigglewiggle and so forth. Enjoy

References

Munster, Anna (2013) ‘Going Viral: Contagion as Networked Affect, Networked Refrain’ in An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 99-123

Week 9 – Micropolitics

This week’s topic was really interesting to me because it was really applicable to the real world and opens up so many possibilities that could make the world a better place. In this day and age, our greatest problem is creating a sustainable future. “We can’t continue with a system that creates wealth, but that’s also destroying the planet and creating so much social inequality. I think that after 400 years of this, we know it doesn’t work. We need a new system to reclaim all these communal values” (Michel Bauwens).

This system is based on openness and what Bauwens refers to as a peer-to-peer economy with a bottom up society. I believe we have already begun to move into a post-capitalism phase and what Rifkin refers to as the Third Industrial revolution (TIR). Ever since the dawn of the internet, people have become not only consumers but producers themselves. He says that “Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century.” The TIR economy will allow people to potentially be their own manufacturer as well as their own internet site and power company as we have already seen with 3D printing. The phenomenon of the ‘zero marginal cost society’ sounds enticing and depicts an image of the ideal world, where we are sustainable in every aspect.

To me, micropolitics opens up a world of possibilities. What struck me the most was the idea of open education. If there could be a system or network online that was accessible by everyone, it would break down the need for hierarchy and institutions. No matter if you had money, lived in a low socio-economic suburb, you could receive the same quality of education because knowledge would be open to everyone.

I also really like the idea of sharing, and believe it would make the world more sustainable. From my own experience, I know we never finish a whole loaf of bread in a week, and about half the loaf goes to waste. Other perishable food like a big bunch of herbs or some other fresh produce that we don’t manage to finish either go bad or un-used. If there could be an app where people from your neighbourhood could communicate with each other about what food they have and organise an exchange that would eliminate the complex processes that already exist with organisations such as Ozharvest, that could potentially save people a lot of money and eliminate waste. The app would work similarly to apps such as FourSquare where you can see where your friends are currently eating at or have eaten at. It would work on a location data service, where you connect to the people in your specific neighbourhood and you could search what you need. Of course this idea would only work however, if there was enough trust within the community to ensure both parties are getting the best end of the deal.

Whilst micropolitics seems extremely appealing, it doesn’t come without its drawbacks as mentioned by Hardin on the ‘tragedy of the commons’. I’ll take the example of 3D printing, if everyone could print whatever they needed what role do businesses play? And indeed how do you regulate what people produce to ensure there is no harm to society? What we need now is a major restructuring of society before we can reach that sustainable ‘post carbon future’.

References

Bauwens, Michel (2014) ’Openness, a necessary revolution into a smarter world’, P2P Foundation, February 4, <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/what-is-p2p-an-introduction/2014/02/04>

Rifkin, Jeremy (n.d.) ’The Third Industrial Revolution: How the Internet, Green Electricity, and 3-D Printing are Ushering in a Sustainable Era of Distributed Capitalism’, The World Financial Review, <http://www.worldfinancialreview.com/?p=1547>

 

Week 8 – The Fate of the State

This week was basically about exploring the idea of a society governed not by the government, but by the people. New media has opened up countless possibilities for people to interact, connect, communication and share information. What if we could use this technology to create a govern-less society, where the government are no longer in control, but we are in control of ourselves? That would really put a new definition on democracy – Power to the people. The crowdfunding campaign by JoatU was really interesting because the idea would actually be useful in real life. It could create a self-sufficient neighbourhood and fully utilise the resources that we have.

If we have neighbourhoods deciding what they want to be done, it creates the possibility of bypassing the gatekeepers. But what then becomes the role of the government? In Finland they have started crowdsourcing online, which means a law could be passed if enough people signed the petition. Therefore, effectively people would become the law-makers. However, this decentralisation doesn’t come without its problems, as it could result in chaos and people without a ‘voice’.

The government are adopting these new media technologies but their use is questionable as they raise issues about privacy, transparency and security. How do we draw the line between what is private and what is necessary information? Edward Snowden showed how fragile democracy really is in this new age, when a government claims to be  about freedom, yet infringes on people’s rights to privacy. The government’s use of new media technologies creates many complexities in the struggle to balance privacy and security.

As Morozov (2013) says: “The more information we reveal about ourselves, the denser but more invisible this barbed wire becomes. We gradually lose our capacity to reason and debate; we no longer understand why things happen to us.” Everything we do now contributes to this mega data that uses interconnected databases and the algorithms that we involuntarily create. Morozov says that it’s all about preserving democracy, not just about our right to privacy. Solove (2013) raises an issue that I have never thought about before, and that is “the aggregation effect” – the idea that one piece of information can be extremely telling about someone’s behaviour. It drew my attention to the fact that every piece of information we reveal matters because new media has the capabilities of making something you thought was private not so private.

References

Morozov, Evgeny (2013) ‘The Real Privacy Problem’, MIT Technology Review, October 22, <http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/>

Solove, David (2013) ‘Why Metadata Matters: The NSA and the Future of Privacy’, LinkedIn, November 25, <http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131125092647-2259773-why-metadata-matters-the-nsa-and-the-future-of-privacy>

Week 4 – Technology replacing memory?

This week’s lecture and readings focused on memory and perception, and also cognitive function. What I found most interesting was the reading by Bernard Stiegler. The fundamental question is whether technology is replacing our memory? A really interesting conversation came up within our tutorial group where we discussed our increasing reliance on technology to ‘remember’. We all know that feeling where you’ve spent ages trying to get the angle right, the lighting, the focus that you in fact miss out on the moment at hand. We’re so focused on capturing the moment incase we forget that we don’t actually ‘remember’ in the first place. During the NYE fireworks last year my friend was so focused on capturing the best video of the fireworks that she completely forgot to enjoy the experience. She was basically watching the fireworks through the screen of her phone. Well what difference does that make to watching it live on TV? Not much, I say. Afterwards she said she was definitely not going to be filming the fireworks next year because she didn’t get to enjoy the fireworks.

At that point I realised that this is something we are all guilty of. Our constant reliance on technology to remember for us that it takes away from our ability to fully experience a certain situation. This takes us back to Plato’s fear that the alphabet would ruin our ability to remember, and that we would lose the memory function in our brain. Again drawing on my own experience I find this to be true. When I was still in primary school, before there were smartphones, I used to remember all the important phone numbers (my best friend’s home number, now nobody uses the home phone…) in my head and be able to recall them. How many of you still do this? Honestly speaking I can only remember one phone number off the top of my head and that’s my dad’s.

There are countless other things that we now rely on technology to remember for us. Birthdays. Who needs to remember when Facebook can remind you? No need to remember when a TV show is on, apps like Zeebox will remind you! Is there really anything that we remember using solely our own memory? I draw from a quote I found interesting in the reading by Stiegler:

“We exteriorize in contemporary mnemotechnical equipment more and more cognitive functions, and correlatively we are losing more and more knowledge which is then delegated to equipment, but also to service industries which can network them, control them, formalize them, model them, and perhaps destroy them – for these knowledges, escaping our grasp, induce an “obsolescence of the human”, who finds itself more and more at a loss, and interiorly empty.

Is Facebook not just another format for a diary? To help us remember? As Wendy Chun says the ontology of digital media is defined by memory, from content to purpose, from hardware to software. It certainly is a huge aspect of it, as well as of course being a communicative tool. But the reason we upload photos and albums on there is in part to log our daily lives and in utilising sites such as Facebook in this way we are in fact servicing these industries and enabling them to persist and survive. If Facebook were to be deleted one day, would all our memories disappear with it? Are we now just empty shells that rely on exterior technologies to not only remember for us but become knowledge? These thoughts are perplexing, and the more questions I ask the more questions I have.

Stiegler points out, “the more improved the automobile becomes, the less we know how to drive – the GPS system assisting the driver in his driving will replace him altogether : it will teleguide the vehicle by a system of automatic driving –: we lose our sensori-motor schema formalized by the system as it becomes automatic.” But at the same time, I can understand Chun’s point that a machine alone cannot turn “an information explosion into a knowledge explosion”. There needs to be a constant interaction with human knowledge as even computer memory can be ephemeral.

Week 3 – Media Ecologies

This week’s topic of metacommunication and media ecology really challenged me to reflect on my own communicative processes and look for specific patterns of relation within them. Bateson’s theory of metacommunication suggests that there is a higher level of context to the supposed linear state of communication. Specifically, he refers to ‘redundancy’ as a pattern and the difference in communication that arises from different mediums. This prompted me to think about how differently I communicate to people through email versus text messages or face to face conversation.

The medium carries with it specific pre-conditioned connotations that we inadvertently adhere to. This is as Neil Postman says, ‘an environment is a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling and behaving’. 

The language and format of an email is fundamentally different to the informal approach taken through text messages. Bateson says that every communication involves a rich pattern of a whole bunch of events and this rich pattern, which tells us about the full nature of the communication taking place is the ‘real’ communication. He suggests that there is more ‘redundancy’ in face to face communication than email, which is true, but emoticons in text messages help to counteract this.

This takes us to the second element of this week’s theories and that is media ecology. I guess what we mean by media ecologies is instead of seeing media as something that exists on its own, it should be seen as an environment that thrives on constant interaction. Traditionally we would see the media as an isolated element, singled out as its own entity. But media ecologies focuses on the interaction and interplay of a whole bunch of different elements, including human and non-human interactions.

From the readings, Milberry describes media ecology as ‘a theory about the complex interplay between humans, technology, media and the environment with the aim of increasing awareness of mutual effects’. Its about the connections that change everything that connect.

References

Bateson, Gregory (2000) ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind Chicago: Chicago University Press: 177-183 (sections 1-11).

Media Ecology Association ‘What is Media Ecology’ <http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/>

Milberry, Kate (n.d.) ‘Media Ecology’, Oxford Bibliographies, <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0054.xml#>

Week 2 – Ideas about media and communication

This weeks readings were by Murphie and Potts which were quite extensive though I found extremely interesting. The readings explored the different approaches so far by various thinkers and their approach to the relationship between media and culture. There were a lot of conflicting views in the reading and different theorists critiquing each other. The one I most agreed with was the cultural materialism approach which takes into account the social and cultural context in which a technology is introduced.

I don’t believe that technology exists as an isolated entity that is free from social or cultural impact. An excellent example of this is the idea that not all inventions will become successful, and a lot of that success is pinned upon this idea of being ‘the right place at the right time’ kind of notion. Hence, the arguments made by McLuhan that ‘the medium is the message’ or the idea that ‘technology is neutral’ is perhaps invalid.

A technology emerges as a response to a specific set of cultural and social needs that Winston calls ‘supervening social necessities’ in reference to the diverse social forces that affect the process of innovation. Immediately the advent of social media sites such as Facebook came to mind. After watching the movie ‘The Social Network’ and discovering why Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook it shed light on this perspective. It’s creation was a response to the social need of teenagers for constant affirmation from their peers and essentially a popularity contest. If we look at Twitter it was a combination of the properties inherent in the technology itself and the need for instant news updates that made it so successful.

Yes, these technologies themselves shape culture, but the culture that already existed (the constant need to be up-to-date and stay ‘connected) has an impact on the technology produced i.e. Hashtags that people can ‘follow’.

References

Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John (2003) ‘Theoretical Frameworks’ in Culture and Technology London: Palgrave Macmillan: 11-38