The Nature of the Experiment.

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Reminiscent of Science Fiction sagas that envisions dystopian futures, Castells' courageously takes on the confusion of a strange new world in his 1999 ‘Introduction to the Information Age’. Now a decade old, his reading acts as a look back to when a fourth world of exclusion emerged and marginalized youth and women from the digital collective. How things have changed. Today, the digital playing field more even and inviting then ever before. Changes on our digital frontier occur rapidly, even daily in place of the incremental changes Castells' experienced over years. Modern time and space have well and truly warped, thrusting our society forever more into a multidimensional world where our lives, economies and cultures take place simultaneously in our past, present and future.

The Cambrian Explosion, one of the most important discoveries in our modern history, is surmised to just over 7,000 words long. It takes no more than an hour to read, if you have one spare that is. On completion, you will have attained the combined knowledge of thousands of contributors, each who committed years, if not their entire careers studying. Living in the information age (Castells) grants us all the wish of knowing everything instantly, as Castells’ timeless time compresses years into seconds, seconds into nanoseconds.

As people of the information age, we are able to access information and consume it with instantaneous ease. This, however, is not without intermediation. Search engines are one type of mediator, and are not unbiased in their actions. Marketing products, content filters and ‘paid positions’ as mentioned by Howard, control who sees what, how and for what reason. This only serves to construct a constantly shifting field of information in a static and mostly (if not naïvely) trusted environment, a concern raised by Hellsten, Leydesdorff & Wouters. Today, there is an answer for everything a mere mouse click away and a array of places to start looking. My favourite: Dinoogle. It gives you the scope of google, with the added benefits of dinosaurs!

References

Howard, P. N. and Massanari, A. (2007). Learning to Search and Searching to Learn: Income, Education, and Experience Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), article 5.

Castells, M. (1999). 'An Introduction to the Information Age' in The Media Reader: Continuity & Transformation. Hugh Mackay & Tim O'Sullivan (eds), London: Sage: 398-410.

The Secret Of My Own Soul.

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Akin to the iconic Dorian Grey, we too have the ability to contort our reality; to hide beneath a fabricated facade in order to achieve everlasting life. While preserving our digital souls, SNS contort the truth. Weak connections can pass for elevated social status, inferred knowledge of those remotely connected to us connote a false popularity and validation that requires individuals to uphold the performance of their selected identities. As Donath and boyd discussed, one thread of truth can be weaved into a convincingly deceptive online network. Through todays sundry of social networking sites (SNS) you are granted this everlasting life. However, interconnected social networks often remove beneficial barriers between divergent aspects of ones life.

As Elmo Keep exemplifies, eternal life may not be what you had in mind when these prior divided worlds meet. Through death, wether it be old age or a symbolic social suicide, you will leave behind open doors to a past life through your social networks. Private emails, public profiles and personal digital affects are left behind in the glass bedroom, preserving life in static, pristine condition for all to see. This exemplar of self preservation in its finest, leads to the question of just who is looking at it? An idea touched upon by Pearson. Just as Dorian found out, trying to contain to divergent parts of a personality, wether physical or virtual can lead to a tragic undoing.

References

Donath, J. and boyd, d. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal , volume 22 (4): 71-82.

Pearson, E. (2009). All the World Wide Web's a stage: the Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks.First Monday, volume 14, Number 3.

Keep, E. (2010) Everlasting Digital Life.

http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/everlasting-digital-life. (accessed March 26, 2010).

Walking Ghosts.

I fear I am meeting less and less inspiring people in my everyday life. People who lack opinion. Who don't know what is going on. Who don't really care. Who are too busy being 'someone' online that they are a 'no-one' in person.

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Intimacy At A Distance.

Our perpetual quest for approval, meaning and above all, individuality has been given a new name in a new age of media. The ‘symbolic project’ as Thompson so eloquently calls it, is a constantly fluxing representation of ourselves. One which is able to be tweaked, edited and added to incessantly. And through social networks, we have limitless content to construct this being out of and numerous stages on which to present it to the world.

Rosen spoke of fine art that was commissioned to depict the sitters worth and status through oils and costly frames. Centuries later, this principal of self preservation and documentation is still in practice, but depicted by pixels and the number of followers one has. It is the idea of acquaintances, or ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ as Huberman would say, overblown to grotesque proportions.

I know I am not immune. Half the artists, bands, public figures and cultures I am passionate about have been the rewarding gems of late night virtual trawling. But I believe holding a critical eye glass up to the site/profile/person before accepting it as truth and urge others to do the same. As today, marketers and companies are forced to blur the line between advertising, entertainment and information in an age when at a click of a mouse, their efforts can be forgotten.

References

Rosen, C. (2007). Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis, Number 17, Summer 2007: 15-31.

Huberman, B.A., Romero D. M. and Wu, F. (2009) Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday , Volume 14, Number 1.

Thompson, J. B. (1995). 'The Self as a Symbolic Project' in The Media & Modernity: a Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity: 209-219.

Existing In The Ether.

Virtual worlds absolve us from the cultural constraints which bind us to reality. Online, geographical and physical differences dissolve. For many, this reason alone is the appeal of virtual environments. Cooper explains how online, pure self expression is free from judgement (Cooper, 2007). Ones online identity, or Avatar, can replicate them exactly; allowing two lives to be led simultaneously. More commonly, people choose to become beings of vicarious fantasy. Virtual realities grant us the ability to change and control our world and more importantly, our place in it.

Strip away the cartoon facade and again, people exist online through constructed, virtual identities. Chen’s reading is a window to a world of manipulated perfection and the quest for recognition. The YouTube culture has allowed Impression Management to evolve to a whole new level. The obsession to create, maintain, and manage celebrity persona’s was documented through participants who manipulate their digital identity to acquire and communicate with fans. The internet is no longer a passive platform of entertainment, it now acts as both the agent and the arena for performers and their online audiences.

The dawn of any new medium brings with it a new age of marketing and business, as discussed by Kirby and Marsden. ‘Post-internet marketing’ (Lang, 2010) tactics allow those who adapt to a digital environment to dominate. Convention is disregarded by bands, journalists, artists and business who understand and utilize power of viral marketing. Behind the online anonymity, corporations research, monitor and predict our next move to exploit a constantly growing market. Ads are targeted to potential buyers by scanning emails as well as analysing and retaining search history. This is fully exposed in the tragic ‘I Love Alaska’ documentary. In no other instance do we so willingly give our every detail to invisible strangers.

As a kid, I dreamed by 2010 we would be living in virtual realities. This is not even close to what I had in mind.

References

Cooper, R. (2007). Alter Egos: Avatars and their Creators. 15 May.

Chen, L. C. P. (n.d.). Individual Online Impression Management: Self-Presentation on YouTube.

Kirby, J. & Marsden, P. (2005). Conclusion: the Future of Connected Marketing in Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution. Burlington: Butterworth-Heinemann: 267-274.

Minimovies- I Love Alaska. 2009. Streaming video recording.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SOCGdPyNU (accessed March 11, 2010).

It Speaks And Yet Says Nothing.

This weeks readings delved into the world of ‘communication’ in the words broadest sense. While Levy and McLuan discussed vastly different topics, from infections ipod culture to theoretical musings of message channels, both shared the themes of communication and perception.

Levy’s fear of having your musical diary scrutinized was something I could relate to as, like he states, Playlist is essentially character (Levey 2006, 29). The need for public validation and ‘one up-manship’(Levey 2006, 23) is foreign to me, yet is inescapable in a culture where competition takes a continuously evolving form. Levy spoke of the culture which has quickly built itself around the Ipod. He exposed a market which thrives on peoples obsession of knowing what others have, the desire to get it for themselves and the compulsive need to broadcast what they have to anyone, by any means possible. I question whether the ‘social connectedness’ (Levy 2006, 34) that David Li speaks of is just another phrase for public gloating? Methods of connection over shared attitudes already exist in many forms, providing the link to new friends Levy speaks of.

McLuhan presented a convoluted and at times arbitrary discussion on various communication channels. He spoke of their ability to alter how we associate with technology and in doing so, suggested how we should consider and validate the worth of new media. He believes 'The message of any medium... is the change...that it introduces into human affairs' (McLuhan 1965, 9). His notions of acceleration and social consequences are also something I found interesting and mirrored within todays obsession with social networking sites.

References

Levy, S. (2006). The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 21-41.

Lee, J-y. (2009). Contesting the Digital Economy and Culture: Digital Technologies and the Transformation of Popular Music in Korea.Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, volume 10, number 4: 489-506.

McLuhan, M. (1965). 'The Medium is the Message'm in Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, pp. 7-20.