Classroom discussion notes:
What are new media?
Social?
Accessible? Less subject to unified control?
Transitional?
Anything up to date
Relative to individual age/awareness
Anything based in binary (understood as a two-factor code)
· Malleable (ease, speed, no change in quality)
· Automatic vs. manual
· Stores vs represents directly
· Permanence
· Transferability (speed, replication)
Social media (used to communicate to other people directly, can be organized by interest/topic
· Snapchat
· Twitter
· Instagram
· Facebook
· Lulu
Not games?
Advertisements
What the book says:
· Binary data
· Networked
· Information dense
· Impartial (the computer is the means of access for all data, but maybe not production)
Flavr Savr tomato
· GMOs
o Information as the knowledge to do something
o Information instantiated in material
o Do they cause cancer?
o They’re controversial
Genes
· A subset of DNA (GATC)
· Combination of proteins
· Code
o Some kind of formula
o Some blend of biology and culture
o A set of components/an alphabet
o A simplification
Facebook
· Personal information hub
o Connect people through similarity
o Suggests potential interests
o Utilize data for commercial purposes
Our behaviors are being codified for data mining
Shannon & Weaver
· Three levels
o Technical issues
o Semantics
o Sociology
· Five components
o Info source
o Transmitter
o Channel (noise)
o Receiver
o Destination
Haraway & Hayles
· The implications of reducing difference through coding
Knowledge vs. information
· Knowledge has a position of privilege, understanding, possession
· Information is neutral, external, transmissible, mobile, in action
· Interface dictates information parameters
o This shapes cultural understanding of what information is
o We can see this in texting, tweets
· Interfaces are not invisible
o They often try to make themselves so
o But they can become normative
· Interfaces create certain emotional attachments
Maps we found:
· Beer
· Trains +
· Ghosts
· Nirvana concerts
· Hotels
· London murders
· Radius of nuclear blasts
· UNCW’s built environment
· US population by ethnicity
· Recent London history
Interactivity
· Manovich
o “Interactivity” gets used loosely
o Within history of media
§ Specifically cinema
o Modern digital media are less interactive
§ Older stuff requires more engagement
· McLuhan
o Hot and cool media
§ Hot requires low interaction, cool invites you to work for it
o Opposite of Manovich
· Kiousis
o Psycho-sociological approach
§ Is interactivity a feature of technical systems, users, or relationships?
o Different kinds of interactivity (Manovich)
· Schultz
o New media is instantaneous
§ This connects with power and democracy (ideas absent from the previous)
· Barry
o Active citizenship
§ Expectations of being an informed citizen
§ Not necessarily to freedom
o Shift from coercion to seduction
· Reading
o Interactivity and creation of memory and history
Archive
· Newspaper archive (in library)
o Past record
o Categorized
o Range of topics
o Has a physical location/takes up space
o Someone’s responsible for maintain it
· Internet archive
o Partially chronological
o Stores lots of different types of media
o Access
o Comprehensiveness
o Who’s responsible for this?
· Location-driven services
o Foresquare
o Geo-aware images and check-ins
§ How do they know where I am?
§ Is this a privacy issue?
§ Is this ethical?
o A personal archive of places I’ve been/things I’ve done
· Social media
o Chronological timeline of information I’ve contributed
o May reveal things about me I didn’t intend
o Joined with other people big cultural trends
o Are there privacy issues here?
What is an archive?
· A collection of information
o For new media that would be digital (physical media, online data, etc.)
· Something formerly tangible
o Took up space
o Were collections of objects
· Something now more individualized
o
· Something more collaborative
o Wikipedia
§ Don’t use it because anyone can change it
§ Although it has citations, can lead you to other sources
§ It’s more rapidly updated
· Science
o Gravity
· Facts
o The sky is naturally blue
Derrida
· Psychoanalytic (Freudian)
o Connection with memory
§ Memory is an individual archive
§ Memory deals with lots of sense data
§ Memory is partially chronological, may also connect to current situation
§ Memory privileges access over storage
§ Memory is event-driven
§ Memory may be fluid/subject to change
o Magic pad?
Keen
· Doesn’t like democratizing archives
· Believes we have a shared culture that’s being threatened
o UNCW
o America
Simulation
Orders of simulacra
· Baudrillard
o Simulacra
§ Reproduction
o Historical shift
§ Counterfeit of nature (renaissance)(automaton)
§ Mass production of things not rooted in nature (Industrial age)(robot)
§ Reproduction and consumption of images/representations (digital age)
· Kittler
o The limited ability to interact with hardware
§ Interfaces preventing you from doing things to protect you from yourself
o The seeming potential of new media masks control
· The Posthuman
o Being affected by technology?
o What does it mean to be human?
§ Knowing right from wrong (a moral sense)
§ We’re in our body (Hayles)
o Hayles believes “informational posthumanism” (severing the connection between content and form or information and matter) is fallacious
§ It favors “informational pattern over material instantiation” without sufficient cause
§ It neglects the role of consciousness in human identity formation
§ It misinterprets the body as just another prosthesis to pilot (which makes other prostheses just more of the same)
§ It wrongly holds that humans can be seamlessly interfaced (to use one of our terms) with intelligent machines
o After human?
§ Being able to use technology to move beyond ourselves
o Awareness of our status as recyclers
o Awareness of information on demand
Are humans the only originators (the only creative things)?