#arts3091

How is digital (and electronic), networked media changing the aesthetic of media forms (that is, the way we arrange sensations/perceptions through media art/design or in everyday life?

To first divulge into thinking about how to possibly answer this question, it'll help to first break down the main components of the question itself.

Aesthetics

According to the lecture, aesthetics in this context can be seen in the way that our perceptions are structured in relation to the way the world affects us. As such, the aesthetic of media form has by and large taken a huge shift; particularly in documentaries.

Documentaries

The shift in documentary making and engagement tells us about shifts in the function of contemporary media.

Documentaries allow us to make sense of the world. The use of different technologies and techniques in documentary tends to make for a different kind of sense-making. All technologies do this and it has a really big affect on the world at large with traditional notions of meaning. The meaning of all that is our world. So things like God, nature, the human, truth freedom.

Documentaries are exemplars of how lived experience is put together. So what counts more in digital documentary is what is called IMMANENT SENSE. So things that we can sense in the immediate world or moment.

The documentary - Bear71 (2012), an interactive documentary where the nature of the human and the nature of animals have been broken down, has almost a mourning undertone to the loss of meaning when it comes to nature as a direct result of the Internet of Things. And yet ironically, it showcases the innumerable pieces of information that is now at hand in order to preserve nature. However, it allows us to make a NEW type of sense of the loss of the meaning of nature. 

It questions technology but also uses the same technology in creating and executing itself. We the viewers are engaged in the documentary and our surveillance gets inserted into it.

According to McCullough (2004, p.5), the term "ubiquity" has been applied to all manner of globalizing technology and has come to mean anything that has to do with universal connectivity. We've witnessed a paradigm shift that's gone from cyberspace to pervasive/ubiquitous computing. Digital technology now comes out of the screen and into our physical space and under our laws of physics; it's now built into our rooms, ingrained in our devices and props - it's everywhere. 

It's all instrumented and all interconnected. Temperature censors, traffic sensors etc all transmitting a sea of data that you could just drown in.

Since 1994, microprocessors have outnumbered people on the Earth. It's estimated that by 2020, there will be 50 billion objects connected to the Internet meaning that for every person there will be 6.6 objects connected to the Internet.This blows my mind.

The video, The Internet of Things explains how we're now living in what could be referred to as a 'system of systems' where all of the different devices in our homes are working together in transmitting data - making our home a system - but then outwardly transmitting data within a universal system. 

"It used to be that certain settings – a plush hotel lobby; a hushed library; a crowded subway car; a public park – conveyed certain social cues about how to behave and what should be going on in a given place.  Now, as the fixity of urban context evaporates as our consciousness moves to our smartphones, we are becoming overwhelmed with information overload and complexity" (Bollier, 2013).

Surveillance and the loss of privacy is also a bad side effect of pervasive information technology but it's still not intrusive enough for us to stop using it completely. 

I couldn't help but think of the (amazing!) film I only just watched a few days ago that relates perfectly to this topic - Spike Jonze's Her.

This film's narrative was the perfect example of ubiquitous computing and the future of the Internet of Things. In it, the protagonist, Theodore, purchases a new OS1 - the world's first artificially intelligent operating system that has a consciousness and eventually finds himself in love with 'her'. The most interesting part is that it's mutual. There were so many scenes in the film that showed what a true "smart home", "smart computer" or "smart phone" would be like as everything was automated and voice-operated. Yet you couldn't help but watch with a great sense of sadness as everybody seemed so isolated and basic human essences like love could be contrived (Theodore's job is to "write" (more voice-command) love letters between couples - so he'll pose as the person in the relationship who sends their lover a letter). 

I guess the best note to end on regarding such a complex topic is this:

"Let us focus on habits rather than novelties, on people rather than machines, and on the richness of existing places rather than invention from thin air" (McCullough, 2004, p.24).

McCullough, Malcolm (2004) Digital Ground Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 3-24

 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>

Spinoza: "Affect is about affecting and being affect" (2001, as cited in Massumi, 2002).

From what I gather through the readings and lecture, affect is essentially about how all kinds of world forces affect each other and therefore are changed by being affected. 

So what does this idea of affect have to do with media? I guess that's where the idea of viral media comes in. Anna Munster (2013), thinks of viral videos such as David After Dentist or Hahaha aren't just things that are generally "spread" from YouTube subscriber to subscriber but more so something peculiar, quirky, and elusive - something that sticks. She argues that such videos affect others by making them "laugh, catch the vitality, recognize the everydayness, repeat the refrain and move it along via online networks" (p. 122). As these things go viral, they enable a collective capacity to affect and be affected in online networks and consequently make the spread of networking contagious. 

According to Buzzfeed's co-founder Jonah Peretti (2012), things that go viral are when it goes out of that direct sphere of control of the producer and people start sharing these things with each other on their own. Buzzfeed calls it "viral lift" where you start to see ordinary people share with their friends, and they share with their friends, and you start saturating the network and things start difusing on their own. How much of that organic sharing distribution you get on the 'product' determines how 'viral' it is. Peretti's view of things that go viral are usually entertaining, provoke emotion and something people are going to be proud to share with their friends. 

Which got me thinking about the whole No Makeup Selfie campaign for cancer awareness a few months back. 

This example is not a viral video but can certainly be seen as a viral campaign. If Peretti's expertise are anything to go by, it possesses most of the specific attributes something 'viral' would acquire. Cancer is such a huge killer around the world and so many people have been personally affected by it so public interest in the disease is never lacking. Then you've got another current trend that almost every person with a mobile phone is guilty of - the selfie. It's a viral trend in its own right, particularly among women. The hashtag #nomakeup has also been popularised on things like Instagram with female selfies, in an attempt to exhibit their fresh faces with the advantages of a flattering filter and angle. The combination of all of these factors and all for a good cause inevitably represents something that users would be proud to partake in and pass on. All parties involved in this campaign are affected whilst also affecting thus the amalgamation of brains and bodies are communicably networked and integrated into new "machines of expression" (Munster, 2013, p.123). This then opens up new territories that bring with them possibilities to rethink the relations between the social and sociability, communicability and communication. 

Massumi, Brian with Zournazi, Mary (2002) ‘Navigating Moments: A Conversation with Brian Massumi’, in Mary Zournazi (ed.) Hope: New Philosophies for Change Sydney: Pluto Press: 210-243

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

How are new media enabling people to organise locally, to form new communities, to take things into their own hands, from dealing with political issues to organising community gardens, or the commons more generally?

As Howard Rheingold (2008) argues, humans were working together collectively since our days of hunting. He believes that humans as a race, are innately cooperative and individual prosperity is based upon the positive interactions we have with each other. 

"Cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology from the level of the cell to the level of ecology... rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor. In fact people will act to punish cheaters, even at a cost to themselves" (Rheingold, 2008).

He argues that recent neurophysiological measures have shown that people who punish cheaters in economic gains show activity in the rewards center of their brain. So altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together. 

If looking at it through Rheingold's eyes, open source production has shown us that world class software like Linux and Modzilla can be created without the incentives of marketplace as we've known them. These platforms are enriching others, not out of altruism but by enriching themselves. 

http://youtu.be/r7XkMYPzsYk

The video above, by Michel Bauwens (2010) is a great breakdown of the rise of open infrastructure and society and the implications of this on humankind. Aspects of openness in open source technologies or P2P networks such as transparency, participation, open access and sharability, have allowed people to relate more and more to each other horizontally, creating a new value system.

Silicon Valley can be seen as an exemplar of this sort of cooperative micropolitical culture. Terranova (2004) sees the city as a kind of ecosystem for the development of 'disruptive technologies', whose growth and success is attributed to the multitude of diverse, specialized entities that support, feed off and interact with one another -  a postindustrial ecosystem that has governments keen on replicating its success (p. 103). Because of its nonlinear interactions and feedback loops, this sort of biological computation has no center and is leaderless. It is a group process that flourishes the more parties contribute to it. 

What keeps coming to mind with these theories are sites like airbnb.com. Looking through it for places to stay (half wishful thinking and half as motivation to actually plan an overseas trip at the end of the year), I couldn't help but think of how awesome this was as a product of the Internet and the cooperation of fellow humans coming together. To have come up with such a site, that exists and prospers on the grounds that humans are collaborating and helping each other inevitably puts me behind those rose-coloured glasses of Rheingold's. I mean, yes last week's topics were all based on the big politics of new media and mass economic power given to companies like Google, Facebook and of course, the government. But on the micro level, just like the New York Times' article 'The Rise of the New Groupthink' states, in electronic brainstorming, the protection of the screen mitigates regular problems that face-to-face group work normally faces. In this way, the Internet yields such wondrous collective creations like airbnb,com. where the collective contributions and cooperation of users is what enriches the site; thus enriching the offline lives of those who participate. There is a micro community within airbnb - essentially a macro group of strangers from all around the world - that build a value system among themselves based on trust. Personal reviews of guests that average out a feedback rating and also profiles of hosts with pictures are an example of how this specific value system is built. Whether or not the site itself has capitalist undertones behind its functions, you can't deny the power it yields from the collaboration of its users.

"My point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust and friendship" (Cain, 2012, p.3).

Rheingold, Howard (2008) ’Way-new collaboration’, YouTube.com (TED),<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d5s3Z0iesRM>

Terranova,Tiziana (2004) ‘From Organisms to Multitudes’ In Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age London: Pluto: 101-106

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>

In October 2012, United States was greatly destructed by Hurricane Sandy. As the largest Atlantic hurricane in history, Hurricane Sandy caused $68 billion USD loss on United States, and minimum 286 people were killed by the hurricane in seven countries. As such a great natural disaster that was causing a huge damage on United States, it was inevitable that Hurricane Sandy had become the news story that nearly every media in United States were covering. And among the various news coverage on Hurricane Sandy, the feature story that was written by Time magazine had specially grabbed a lot of attention. However, it was not only because the articles that are published on that volume of Time are well-written. Besides, the most attention-grabbing feature of that volume was the cover – Time magazine had put a photo that was taken through mobile application Instagram on its cover. As a weekly news magazine that has the largest number on circulation, the move that Time chose to put a photo that was taken by smartphone and edited by Instagram on its cover, had leaded to a huge discussion in the field of media. When people who are working in the field of media was still arguing about should a photo that is taken with Instagram be counted as “serious photojournalism”, Time’s director of photography, Kira Pollack, explained the reason why Time chose a photo on Instagram to put on its cover. “We just thought this is going to be the fastest way we can cover this and it’s the most direct route…It was about how quickly can we get pictures to our readers.” (Forbes, 2012) I think the statement that was mentioned by Pollack is just matching with what Manovich has talked about in his writing. In the article “There is only software”, Manovich (2011) argued that it is inaccurate to label the “new media” that its working process is relying on digital technology as “digital media”, it is more accurate to say that they are software. Manovich explained that reliant on the usage of different software, the “properties” of a media object will become variable. For example, through opening a digital photo by media-viewing software, you can only view the photo. However, with a photo-editing software, you can make changes on that photo. It is the same for the case of Time magazine using a photo on Instagram as cover photo. As the most popular online photo-sharing platform on mobile device, uploading a photo on Instagram does not simply mean putting a data on internet. Besides, it is a way of instantly sharing information by the medium of photo to the whole world. Through using different kinds of software, the nature of content can be varied in a huge difference.

Bibliography

Fobes. 2012. Skype Why Time Magazine Used Instagram To Cover Hurricane Sandy [online] Available at: <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/11/01/why-time-magazine-used-instagram-to-cover-hurricane-sandy/> [Accessed 3 June 2014].

Edmund Burke, first referred to the term The Fourth Estate in reference to the news media in a parliamentary debate in 1787. The term held with it notions of democracy, transparency, freedom, accountability and was seen to be the institutional 'watchdog' as it gave back power to the citizens (or proletariats). By having a fourth party to monitor the 3 governing bodies of society, it mediated the tensions between the people and the state and consequently empowered the people with information. 

Fast-forward 2 centuries later and the question of whether or not the Fourth Estate is doing its job - and efficiently at that - has yet to be answered. 

It seems the news media as an institution has evolved and morphed throughout those years and with every change or new outlet, came many new theories in information culture. Yet they were all unilateral in structure and more hierarchical than ever. And then the Internet was born.

In the digital era, the Internet was seen to be an emancipatory media outlet - the only one of its kind - because the processes of information were no longer unilateral, with the audience/listener/reader being at the receiving end. Rather, it was networked, ubiquitous, multilateral and constant. Information was no longer being handed down to the citizens from those at the top. The citizens were now equal producers of information. Blogging is a great example of this. It's seen as one of those revolutionary platforms of information that allowed anybody to produce and publish content. Then you've got things like YouTube, that does the same sort of thing, only with video. 

If knowledge is seen as power, the Internet was taking that power from those at the top i.e. government and corporations, and dispersing it among the citizens. 

The Arab Springs is a great example of this. Using the power of communication via social networking sites, presidents were overthrown. The Facebook movement that overthrew Egyptian president Mubarak in 2012 went as far as being called "Egyptian Revolution 2.0".

With these kinds of historical changes that were only achieved via the advantages of digital media, what could be the downfalls of such technology? More specifically, how could something like the Internet, or any type of digital media today for that matter, be a tool for oppression? Is it NOT the ultimate tool for democratisation in society?

Evgeny Morozov sees it almost as a catch-22 and that the utopian ideas of the Internet through the 1980's and 90's as emancipating citizen oppression from capitalist/bureaucratic restraints, was just a prolonged hallucination.

 “Citizens take on the role of information machines that feed the techno-bureaucratic complex with our data. And why wouldn’t we, if we are promised slimmer waistlines, cleaner air, or longer (and safer) lives in return?” (Morozov, 2013).

He believes that the idea of authoritarian leaders and dictators having a fear of the Internet and technology as a myth. Having people blog and having people voluntarily provide information about what might be wrong with some local issues actually helps those bureaucracies and governments achieve legitimacy.

Then you've got corporations like Facebook or Google. These companies are those that allow for mere citizens to engage and share information i.e. Egyptian Revolution 2.0, yet on the other hand, are the breeding ground for citizen surveillance. They are selling information about its users to advertisers and government parties like the NSA, thus undermining democracy. 

Richard Stallman, software freedom activist and computer programmer, says that companies like Facebook and Google+ threaten user’s security. Facebook knows who visited that page through a ‘like’ breaching user privacy.

This sort of surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg. Where there is technology, there is data, and all data can be tracked. The more people use technology, the more they subject themselves to being surveilled. So is there a solution? 

According to David Bollier (2013), we can find compromises to sustain as much power through our own privacy, as we can.

"Mann suggests that the use of veillance technologies ought to follow the norms of contract law.  If one party is using a veillance technology, then another party ought to be entitled to use their own counterveillance technology to record an interaction – just as any contract requires two informed, consenting parties.  If the surveillance party prohibits or discourages people from sousveillance – which amounts to a copy of the “veillance contract” – then a court of law should regard the surveillance recordings as inadmissible evidence in any future proceeding – just as a contract produced by one party, without a countersigned copy, would be inadmissible.

So what is the big deal about privacy though? How is it relevant in the debate on democracy in the Internet era? I think there's this commonly known idea that if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide. But in fact, lots of people have things they want to hide from somebody e.g. homosexuals who have yet to tell their friends and family, employee wanting to hide things from their employers or future employers etc. The fact is, it's the principle of having full control of your own information that is at question. It's about having the choice of keeping things private from entities you're unaware of. 

As Richard Stallman (2011) puts it:

"Human rights support each other. If we don’t have freedom in computing, it makes it harder for us to defend freedom in other areas."

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

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>

Stallman, Richard (2011), Facebook and Google+ Mistreat Their Users: The Next Web, YouTube.comm, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymuqUJ3MsEs>

So this week we talked about documentary aesthetics and their ability to influence social and media change. 

I’m going to use the example of the documentary by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, Blackfish (2013). Here is the trailer for Blackfish:

The documentary raised awareness of a different perspective on killer whale captivity, resulting in audiences sympathizing with the orca that was responsible for the death of the Sea World employee as it blamed humans for the animals’ aggressive behavior.

In turn, this influenced media change, as it became a large-scale PR crisis for Sea World. The company published a variety of videos and press releases to inform the public that the “facts” presented in the films were false (Osegi 2014). The documentary and the PR strategy engaged in a content war – with both sides providing contradicting information (Osegi 2014).

Social media propelled the “Blackfish effect,” particularly through the use of Change.org petitions (Zimmerman 2014). It changed the public opinion that killer whale shows were light-hearted entertainment to that of being an act of cruelty towards the highly intelligent animals. 

The documentary also affected SeaWorld’s corporate relationships, and musicians including Willie Nelson cancelled their SeaWorld gigs. Ironically, Cowperthwaite says she is not an activist herself and her intention in making the documentary was not for it to be so controversial – showing that a documentary can influence an audience reaction outside of the filmmaker’s intention.

“I couldn’t have been more naïve about the situation in SeaWorld,” Cowperthwaite said, "I'd see hundreds of children smiling and think, 'How can something that makes people so happy be such a bad thing?’ All of us are complicit, starting with myself” (Barkham 2013).

The emotional reaction was mainly commandeered by the cinematic aesthetics of the documentary. The stylistic features of the documentary allowed audiences to empathise with the suffocating conditions of confinement – sense of actuality, as the large size of the killer whale was well positioned against the small size of the confinement pool through effective camera techniques. 

In this way, audiences were able to form their opinions based on what they see – emphasizing the nature of the documentary as presenting itself as highly factual. 

Osegi, Andrew (2014) ‘SeaWorld vs. Blackfish: A Crisis PR War Rages on Social Media’ Business 2 Community. Last viewed 27 May 2014http://www.business2community.com/crisis-management/seaworld-vs-blackfish-crisis-pr-war-rages-social-media-0782970#!Re99l

Zimmerman, Tim (2014) ‘First Person: How Far Will the Blackfish Effect Go?’ National Geographic, last viewed 27 May 2014 http://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/news/2014/01/140113-blackfish-seaworld-killer-whale-orcas/