Week 11, Blog 9: Multiplicity, Fragmented and Flexible media

The relationship between the concepts of multiplicity, fragmented media, and flexible media, can be some what confusing; they all relate but have distinct natures within media today. In order to understand these terms though it is imperative that the bigger picture of the modern ‘Internet of things’, is analysed. The Internet of things being, all the things in our lives, and how the Internet has or may have changed our relationship with such things.

Multiplicity here is the collection of all of these things, and how each relationship between things has an affect on its outcome, and how the coming together of a few things or many things or even nothing has a certain relational affect. Multiplicity in this sense is the coming together of things, and relates more so to the abundance of potentials from such ‘coming together’. Take something away and what’s left may come together in a completely different way, or not come together at all, or add something to a relationship of things and it may shift the relationship all together. Fragmented media here relates whereby the current media landscape has shifted and is now more fragmented in terms of its accessibility, instead of requiring to go straight to the SMH website for news for example, you may be able to access links through Facebook, or Twitter. Ironically, fragmented media allows for more connections, and herein we are witness to this increasingly flexible type of media; there are numerous paths to attaining such media, and media is becoming ubiquitous even within social media.

The Internet of things relates to this wherein it is the coming together of things such as app’s, technology, our environment and our own experiences of our reality, and how this ‘coming together’ has a significant affect on our lives, and how we interact with society. Bollier (2013) discusses the concept of ‘commons’ with significant relation to this concept. “The ambient commons consists of all of those things in our built environment, especially in cities, that we take for granted as part of the landscape: architectural design, urban spaces, designs that guide and inform our travels, amenities for social conviviality.” These commons can be thought of as pieces in the multiplicity puzzle, they are our surrounding environment in which has an effect on how we may interact with apps or technology. This relationship between all facets of the multiplicity puzzle has been described by Bollier (2013); “we now experience a cityscape in different ways. We identify our locations, find information, connect with each other and experience life in different ways.  The embedded design elements of the ambient commons affect how we think, behave and orient ourselves to the world.”

It is important to note within this media landscape that the democratisation of smartphones, for example, has given people the tools in which they are able to reclaim their ambient ‘commons’ to suit their needs, i.e. they are able to tailor their experiences of their environment through things such as apps, because they can tailor how and why they use such apps.

 

Reference:

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>

Blog/Week 8: Web 2.0, Sousveillance and Democracy

The Web as we know it has not always been as it is today, obviously… but how has this affected Surveillance, or Veillance in general, and how have many of these institutional shifts affected democracy within our society.

Obviously we have seen the media grow from community mediation, to traditional media such as print, to the web, and now what we would call Web 2.0; which is user-generated web content, and social media. This shift of cultural media practices has obviously had other cultural consequences, such as a shift in our cultural democratic nature.

Sousveillance is key to this democratic change; Sousveillance is ‘monitoring from below’ or as Mann, the inventor of the term would say, “the many watching the few” (Mann in Bollier, 2013) /society watching institutional bodies, the government and more. Fundamental to Sousveillance is the fact that it ‘can be’ because of such technological and media changes; without Web 2.0 and the capabilities of user-generated content such sousveillance of institutions and government bodies would not be possible. “Mann argues that sousveillance is an inevitable trend in technological societies and that, on balance, it ‘has positive survival characteristics,’” (Bollier, 2013). This ‘Balance’ that Bollier cites Mann as referring to, is what has created a more democratic nature; the government has become more accountable, more participatory, there is greater accountability and transparency (Styles, 2009). A notable social change here is the shift that the government as a whole has undertaken; it has gone from a governing body which holds significant power, to now a singular participant of our society, with less ability to dictate, due to sousveillance of them.

I believe that sousveillance is a rather productive and efficient way in which our society can ‘monitor’ our government and larger institutional bodies. My worry though is un researched, biased opinions gaining leverage over the government if they gather ‘heat’ because of the nature of Web 2.0, not because they are ‘valid opinions’. This may be a down side to Sousveillance because if less knowledgeable people take up an opinion because it had media and Web 2.0 coverage, ‘it’s an issue even if it isn’t an issue’; as they say in PR.

 

References

Bollier, David (2013) ‘Sousveillance as a Responce to Surveillance’, David Bollier: news and perspectives on the commons, November 24, <http://bollier.org/blog/sousveillance-response-surveillance>

Styles, Catherine (2009) “A Government 2.0 idea – first, make all the functions visible’, <http://catherinestyles.com/2009/06/28/a-government-2-0-idea/>

Arts3091 Blog 7 – Framing, Vectors and “Hackers”

Frames as Lakoff & Johnson (1999) would put it, are “the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality and sometimes to create what we take to be reality.” Many frames are unconsciously and automatically processed in order to make sense of occurrences/things/procedure, etc. within our lives.

Vectors herein are key; they are metaphorical lines between frames in which assist in exposing and analysing the relationship between such frames. By manipulating the relationship between frames for example ‘Hacks’ occur. ‘Hacks are what Wark (2004) discusses as purposeful changes in the current cultural vectors by ‘Hackers’ in order to develop new vectors and frames. The power over these vectors is highly sought after because the ownership of these vectors directs ‘our’ attention from one frame to another and so forth. Owners of these vectors are called ‘Vectoralists’, typically these include big media corporations e.g. Google. With this great resource and power, companies like Google have a say in what framework links to another, and within that lies it importance and it’s power over our culture.

An example of a ‘hacker’ in this sense is Edward Bernays i.e. the ‘Father of Spin’ (Tye 1998). Bernays’ utilises the current, and at this stage separate, cultural frameworks, of Feminism and of smoking. By analysing the relationship between these frameworks Bernays’ was able to reconfigure the entire framework around smoking, and shifted it from a symbol of manhood, to a symbol of equality for men and women. Tye (1998) shows how Bernays’ changes this framework when he states “The formula was simple: Bernays generated events, the events generated news, and the news generated a demand for whatever he happened to be selling.” And the instance of the above example, Bernays was selling Equality and he definitely ‘sold’ it because the culture as stated before shifted significantly.

Frames ultimately shape how we experience and think about thing, and one of the key necessities within of media and Internet prevalent culture, is the importance of vectors and hacking and how these can work to change our current frameworks of things.

 

References:

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark (1999) ‘The Efficacious Cognitive Unconscious’ in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought New York: Basic Books: 115-117.

Tye, Larry (1998) ‘The Big Think’ in The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations New York: Henry Holt

Wark, McKenzie (2004) ‘Vector’ in A Hacker Manifesto Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Week 6 Blog: Software, Data, & Algorithms: Their Affects on Participatory Media

In terms of analysing Software, Data and Algorithms from the perspective of how they affect media and our interactions with it, is an important one. Software is ultimately the capabilities of a computer, and algorithms are digitized representations of our relationships as humans with physical things. Algorithms are also all the things we can do with data. I.e. through knowledge (data) we can produce algorithms on what potentially would/could result from a natural non-computational decision, i.e. an algorithm is a thought process rendered within a computer, which represents data and what that knowledge can result in. Algorithms in this sense are representations of our culture; they are the result of culturally patterned occurrences, and have an effect on the proceeding cultural occurrences.

Lev Manovich (2011) states, “The new ways of media access, distribution, analysis, generation and manipulation are all due to software. Which means that are they the result of the particular choices made by individuals, companies, and consortiums who develop software.” He goes on and argues “all the new qualities of ‘digital media’ are not situated ‘inside’ the media objects. Rather, they all exist ‘outside’.” Linking this back to how Algorithms are representational of the relationship between humans and natural, Balaji Srinivasan discusses how Geographical location has given way to ‘Geodesic location’, this he discusses as “the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network.” Here he is discussing the growing importance of social networks over physical networks within today’s society. This is so because of the cultural imperatives that have evolved around the specific computational affordances that have come to pass through software, data and Algorithms.

The Internet has undoubtedly promoted transformative effects upon human culture, and society. It has aided in the increased prevalence and significance of participatory media and mobile computing. Gary Wolf (2010) in his article ‘The Data-Driven Life’ reinforces how the use of this participatory media and mobile computing, is constantly being used in order to improve ones life, and to keep track of it. Bogost (2013) references the downside to this significant relationship, in his article; he investigates ‘Hyperemployment’ or “The exhausting work of the technology user.” He discusses here how technology is a tedious manner with many negative affects on culture and society. Within his article I found it interesting when he stated that we are “duped into contributing free value to technology companies, but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies.” Ultimately here Bogost (2013) is saying that we are slaves to these interactions with our media. The affordances of current software, Data and Algorithms, have shaped the way in which we as individuals interaction with our environments.

 

References:

Bogust, Ian (2013), ‘Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User’, The Atlantic, November 8, <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/hyperemployment-or-the-exhausting-work-of-the-technology-user/281149/>

Manovich, Lev (2011) ‘There is only software’, software studies.com, <http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/04/new-article-by-lev-manovich-there-is.html>

Wolf, Gary (2010) ‘The Data-Driven Life’, The New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?_r=0&gt;

Week 5 Blog: Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality; The Social Consequences

This week the concept of ‘Reality’ has been shown to be fabricated in a sense, reinvented and restructured through the affordances of technology, and the way in which society interacts with it. Interactions here are key, because the way in which cultures interact with media and technology, affects their experience of their reality, and potentially shifts their reality from a traditional perspective, of life, and living, in the actual time and space in which the physical body is living in, to a more augmented reality, and in certain situations even to virtual realities.

A virtual reality is an immersive multimedia, it is a computer stimulated environment to reflect reality in many case. This is different to an Augmented Reality, which the world/the traditional sense of reality is supplemented by computer generated sensory input. Havens (2013) describes an Augmented technology as a short-cut, they suggest, “whether we can interact with data through a pair of glasses or contact lenses, the very nature of such technological immediacy will very quickly change human behaviour.” This idea that this relationship with technology, this augmented reality through the use of technology, actually affects our human experience of life is key here. Havens (2013) also suggests that there are consequences t experiencing an increasingly augmented reality; “Some say we’re losing serendipity, that the filters and personalisation algorithms narrow our choices so we stop experiencing decisions we’ve missed in the past, but with AR [Augmented reality] this form of tunnel vision will become literal.” Dourish (2004) Specifically recognises this change when he states, “We are increasingly encountering computation that moves beyond the traditional confines of the desk and attempts to incorporate itself more richly into our daily experience of the physical and social world.”

The reference of ‘daily experience’ (Dourish 2004) exposes how truly embedded augmented realities have become within our culture. It exposes how the use of an iPhone/smartphone or social media site for example, to mediate people’s lives has become an embedded cultural necessity, in which produced this augmented reality. In terms of the future I can only see our lives becoming more and more augmented.

 

References:

Anon. (n.d.) ‘Virtual Reality’, Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality>

Anon. (n.d.) ‘Augmented Reality’, Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality>

Dourish, Paul (2004) ‘A History of Interaction’, in Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Drell, Lauren (2012) ‘7 Ways Augmented Reality Will Improve Your Life’, Mashable, December 20, <http://mashable.com/2012/12/19/augmented-reality-city/>

Havens, John (2013) ‘The Impending Social Consequences of Augmented Reality’, Mashable, February 8, <http://mashable.com/2013/02/08/augmented-reality-future/>

Week 4 Blog: Memory and The Extended Mind

Memory, and The Extended Mind, within the 21^st century are interesting concepts. They encapsulate our brains and their interactions with the ever-changing technological landscape, and it prefaces how our interactions as humans with technology are being affected.          

            Memory for one had been transformed through technological advancements and has shifted from personal wetware memory, often forgotten and dismissed to hardware memory, which has been systematically archived in order for quick recall when necessary. This type of ‘memory’ has transformed memory because now, content cannot be forgotten. This is discussed by Chun and Hui (2011) when they state, “Memory with its degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable.”

            The Extended Mind is a philosophical concept and discussed by Alva Noë (2008, 2010). The Extended Mind suggests that the mind is not just your brain, but it’s the interactions between the mind, the body, and the world. Noë (2010) uses a mechanical metaphor to illustrate The Extended Mind and how it applies to the human experience,

“How my car drives depends on what goes on inside the engine. Modifying the engine affects the driving behaviour. Speeding up, slowing down, and such like, in turn, affect the engine. But it would be bizarre to say that driving really happens in the engine. If my car has no wheels on it, or is up on the lift, it won’t drive, whatever happens inside the engine… Brain stands to mind the way engine stands to driving.”

Here Noë is showing how the concept of The Extended Mind, cannot simply be understood as the way in which the brain works, but has to allow for the how these interactions between the brain, the body, and the environment, work together in order to produce our thought processes, and our smooth actions, our flowing relationship between movements, and more.

            Memory and The Extended Mind come together when Stiegler (n.d.) discussed ‘The Industrial Exteriorisation of memory’ and extends memory to inanimate objects. Here Steigler states,

“Memory bearing object[s] – a slip of paper, an annotated book… we discover then that a part of ourselves (like our memory) is outside of us… But it constitutes the most precious part of human memory; therein, the totality of the works of spirit, in all guises and aspects, take shape.”

Thus the similar principle of ‘external factors’, and the relationship between the brain, the body, and the environment (tools of memory), culminate together to produce the mind, and how we as humans interact with memory and memory making devices.  

 

References:

Kyong-Chun, Wendy Hui (2011) ‘The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future is a Memory’ in Huhtamo, Errki and Parikka, Jussi (eds.) Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications Berkeley: University of California Press

Noë, Alva and Solano, Marlon Barrios (2008) ‘dance as a way of knowing: interview with Alva Noë’, <http://www.dance-tech.net/video/1462368:Video:19594>

Noë, Alva (2010) ‘Does thinking happen in the brain?’, 13:7 Cosmos and Culture <http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/12/10/131945848/does-thinking-happen-in-the-brain>

‘The Extended Mind’, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Mind>

Stiegler, Bernard (n.d.) ‘Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: Plato as the first thinker of the proletarianisation’ <http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis>

 

Week 3 Blog: Bateson & Media Ecologies

Postman (Cited in Milberry, 2012) describes a ‘Media Ecology’ as follows: “In biology, a medium is defined as a substance within which a culture grows; in media ecology, a medium is a technology within which human culture grows, giving form to its politics, ideologies, and social organization.” This definition exposes how vast the concept of ‘Media Ecologies’ reaches, it shows its ever-encompassing nature whilst exposing that the relationship between all of the facets of media ecologies is not a simple one. Phillip Knightley (Cited in Deitz, 2010) argues that, “Access to media is a vital component in the democratic process.” Here he is exposing how it is not only imperative to interact with these technologies and be affected by it, but it is vitally important in order to one’s consciousness and to think democratically.

Bateson (2000) discusses an ‘Ecology of Mind,’ and hypotheses “That Human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction.” Here he is suggesting more abstract levels of communication (both explicit and implicit metalinguistic – the words used to communicate), are evident along with forms of metacommunication (how you say the words, in order to ‘read’/interpret their meanings). Bateson discusses here, face-to-face communication and the evident underlying metacommunication providing greater contextualisation behind the presented message, as it includes ‘redundancies’ or what Bateson calls ‘patterns.’ This being the extra stuff beyond the basic message. These ‘patterns’ help to crosscheck what’s being said to what’s meant. He develops this theory with the analogy of Chimps and how they differentiate ‘Play’ to ‘Combat’. Chimps have no discernible verbal cues stating the difference between play and combat, and so they must rely on these redundancies/‘patterns’ of metacommunication to realise the difference.

Felix Guattari (Cited in Media Ecologies And Digital Activism, 2008) further refines this discipline, and exposes a paradox, where he states, “Wherever we turn, there is the same nagging paradox: on the one hand, the continuous development of new techno scientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and restate socially useful activities on the surface of the planet, and, on the other hand the inability of organised social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work.” This here is what Bateson calls the ‘Double-bind’, where there is the opportunity for a potential outcome to have a negative effect, but by ignoring/doing nothing about it/doing something about it, also may have a negative effect.

The changing nature of the World makes it hard to show any certain cause-and-effect relationship between technology, society, culture, and even consciousness. But it is through Bateson that we learn that everything changes for us to learn further, and everything is there to be learnt.

 

References

Anon. (2008) ‘The Three Ecologies – Felix Guattari’, Media Ecologies and Digital Activism: thoughts about change for a changing world
<http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/the-three-ecologies-felix-guattari/>

Bateson, Gregory (2000) ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind Chicago: Chicago University Press

Deitz, Milissa (2010) ‘The New Media Ecology’, On Line Opinion: Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate <http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11410&page=1>

Milberry, Kate (2012) ‘Media Ecology’, Oxford Bibliographies, <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0054.xml#>

Week 2 Blog: Technological Determinism, Theorists and Theories

‘Technological determinism’ is the thought that media technology is an agent of social and cultural change. This concept is vast in its nature, and has lead many scholars to theorise more specifically it.

There are two major perspectives for technological determinism. Simplistically they are as follows:

1. Media from society are isolated; ‘media’ comes first, and then it shapes the subsequent society/culture.
2. Media technologies are a result of the societal needs. I.e. culture created these technologies.

These theories are rather broad, but the following scholars have further theories:

–       Kittler theorises that society are pawns of our technological domain rather than masters of it, (Jeffries, 2011).

–       Eric Havelock: “Argues that the technology of writing, using the phonetic alphabet, made possible profoundly new models of thought,” (Murphie & Potts, 2002).

–       Walter J Ong similarly argues that writing has transformed human consciousness most significantly (Murphie & Potts, 2002).

–       Elizabeth Einstein (1979) agrees and notes large social ramifications from the printing press.

–       Jack Goody (1977) denotes that different media, each create “different cognitive potentiality for human beings,” (Murphie & Potts, 2002).

–       McLuhan states, “all technologies are extensions of the human capacity…extending human sense perception,” (Murphie & Potts, 2002). He also states, “The cultural significance of media lies not in their content, but in they way they alter our perception of the world.” (Murphie & Potts, 2002).

–       Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) theorises that the TV has had the largest impact to society, as it blurs age and gender divisions, as the TV does not require as much time and effort as reading, to show ‘effects’ of mediation.

–       Baudrillard theorises specifically about ‘Simulacra’, stating media produce ‘hyper-reality’. He suggests simulacra and mediation are becoming the real, rather than reality.

–       MacKenzie and Wajeman suggest that we cannot reduce the relationship between technology and society to cause-and-effect, but rather it is interwoven.

–       Virilio suggests society is loosing sense of time and space and even consciousness, as society is trying to move at the speed of media.

–       Kember and Zylinska (2012) theorise that “mediation becomes a key trope for understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technological world, our emergence and ways of interacting with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the world into media, agents, relations, and networks.”
They state the “dispersal of media and technology into our biological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with nonhuman entities,” (Zylinska, 2012).

There are many different opinions when it comes to technological determinism, but the one consistent thing is that Society, culture, and technology, have some form of effect on each other.

References:

Joanna Zylinska. 2012. After Media. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.joannazylinska.net/aftermedia/2012/10/10/our-new-book-life-after-new-media-is-out.html. [Accessed 11 March 14].

Kember, Sarah and Zylinska, Joanna (2012) ‘Introduction: New Media, Old Hat’ in Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Stuart Jeffries. 2011. Fredrich Kittler and the rise of the machine. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/28/friedrich-kittler-rise-of-the-machine. [Accessed 11 March 14].

Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John (2002) ‘Theoretical Frameworks’ in Culture and Technology London: Palgrave

Week 1: Media, Culture, & Social Change

With technological developments society is witness to media changes, which influences a cultural shift in terms of media usage. This culture shifts has resulted in the ever-present societal desire for enhanced technology in term requiring being ‘pervasively aware’ and ‘perpetually connected’. This creates a cycle of ‘New Media’ and the ubiquitous nature of the media landscape.

In many of our subjects previously taken and certainly courses in this semester, it is highly emphasised to us that we should prepare for changing media outlets. Whereby the fact that media interactions have changed dramatically over time, suggests it will keep dramatically changing. The changing nature of media outlets has therefore considerably changed the way in which people interact with media. It changes the power roles within society, whereby technology moderates sousveillance from within society of the media industry.

Mary Catherine Bates says media is made up of  “delicate interdependency’s of an ecological system that give it, its integrity,” (An Ecology of mind, 2011). By this she is meaning that everything our media industry is made up of, its people, its companies, its evading and changing culture, and its technology, are completely related, whereby, one effects another, and affects all.

Through this you can see that definitions in an ever-changing industry, are hard to determine, even academic studying the media industry are struggling to find a concise definition of media change, this is because of its dynamic and entirely encompassing nature, where “Media change refers to the change of media (media technologies, institutions, production, content, formats and audiences) and at the same time to the change caused by media (in society, culture, politics, life worlds and work environments),” (Kinnebrock et al, 2013).

For example networking used to involve communities; it was focused on “small, densely knit groups” (Rainie, & Wellman, 2012), and socialising was done in person. This contrasts the present, with the term ‘Networked individualism’ having emerged, this is characterised with looser more fragmented networks, but more access to other networks. It connects people in a completely different way and a variety of ways. It is defined as allowing the individual to be the centre of their own world and their own connections, rather than as an embedded group member of a singular group.

This cultural shift is present because of the technological changes that have pervaded the last few decades, they have created a new way of socialising, and accessing media. It has changed the definition of media, and created it’s ambiguous nature. The fact that these changes have considerably changed our culture is testament to the fact that media and journalism and culture, come hand in hand, and saturate our lives.

 

References:

An Ecology of Mind. 2011. An Ecology Of Mind. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.anecologyofmind.com/. [Accessed 09 March 14].

International Communication Association. 2013. Theorizing Media Change. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.icahdq.org/conf/other/Theorizingmediachange.asp. [Accessed 09 March 14].

Rainie, L & Wellman, B 2012, Networked Individualism, MIT Press, Cambridge