Posterous
Jennifer is using Posterous to post everything online. Shouldn't you?
Photo_235_thumb
 

jayjay’s stuff

PhD-related links

IOC Cease and Desist (via Flickr)

More details:

http://richardgiles.com/2009/10/09/the-olympics-and-creative-commons-photographs/

http://richardgiles.com/2009/10/14/the-olympics-and-creative-commons-photographs-part-2/

Posted November 2, 2009
// 0 Comments

City of bits: space, place, and the infobahn

A couple of things:

After the last post, I was recommended to get this book, City of Bits (1995) (William J Mitchell) by my supervisor- so I have ordered in on Amazon and have began reading a small preview on Google books.

Of the short section I've scanned over, already picking out themes of identity which still haven't really changed in the last 15 years since the book's beginnings.

I've maintained the principle that online interaction is becoming less literal (no need for an obvious avatar, ala Second Life - rather a multitude of interactions on different levels and platforms) - so I like the perspective that identity online is heavily manipulative, and reliant on how you think others see you. Michael Wesch suggested in his presentation about politics of authenticity that online communication is truly the first communication mechanism where we have been forced to look at ourselves in the reflections of others. Using youtube as his main example, Wesch shows clips of his students using Youtube for the first time, coming to terms with talking to a webcam, watching back their videos from the perspective of others and contemplating how others might see and understand them as human beings.

What Mitchell is saying here, however, is that persona is created by other people and can lead to a jarring sensation when you actually decide to meet in "meatspace" - Certainly, when you work with online media, maintaining an online identity is a full time occupation, but the notions of private and public start being more about what you prefer or WANT people to see about you, rather than who you actually are (it is said that if you never lie, you never have to remember anything...).

I don't think that feeling will ever go away, at least with online media in its current guise, but the fact that we have managed to change, or at least add to how we understand ourselves as individuals is fascinating.

Posterous keeps getting cooler - being directly able to lift pages from google books can never be a bad thing. All I need now is to be allowed to use a digital highlighter to complete the paperless transition.

Posted November 2, 2009
// 0 Comments

On the Post City...

The grid and its certainties is what Negri mourns. Geometric and planar, horizontal and rational, from Malevich to Mondrian, the Grid embodied the state of the modernist political-technological art, which was a disciplinary art. But as the societies of discipline morphed into the societies of control, the ‘architecture of borders, walls, doors, and locks give way to that of passwords, fire walls, public key encryption, and security certificates.' Modernist culture, organised by the grid (and its subjective correlate: the enlightened master) succumbs to a thousand niche-market cuts, whipped raw by Chris Anderson's ‘long tail' and decomposed into tribes by Mark J. Penn's ‘microtrends.' The grid mutates into the web, the imperial/utopian into the molecular/heterotopian. The new media-architecture begins to manipulate smaller units. The birth, from the ruins, of the negative center, issues the coup de grâce. The centre is robbed of its sovereignty.

‘The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past,' notes William Burroughs. ‘We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. Hegel writes of the function of kingship as consisting in dotting the i's and crossing the t's. No system can close itself-off using only elements internal to it. The function of the sovereign (what Foucault terms the author-function) was to supply the seal of transcendence. 20th century dictators, captured by cameras and connected with telephones, pumped-up the volume.

‘The age demanded an image,' notes Ezra Pound, ‘of its own accelerated grimace.' Placed in the heavens of a vertical hierarchy, the iron willed dictator conducted and channeled the psychologies of his followers: The Father of the Nation. But the death of God, pronounced by Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century, was the death of transcendence; the death of the possibility of an absolutely transcendent image. The ‘age of extremes' was a reaction-formation, against Gödel's incompleteness theorem, against Nietzsche's nihilism. Modernism was an ideology of reaction, which grafted the forms of the past onto new contents (Stalin the Red Tsar, Hitler the Sorcerer-Emperor...) and then stood back, aghast, as the host rejected the transplant.

The invention of digital technology ended this period of ideological frenzy. ‘As the Enlightenment and "modernity" were increasingly called into question,' writes Peter Wollen, ‘a process accelerated by post-1968 disenchantment, French intellectuals turned away from "knowledge-based" approaches to the humanities and towards the more speculative domains, urging a decentralised vision of "dissemination," "rhizomes" and "molecular" microstructures, Replacing Stalin and Hitler are ‘Enterprise Systems', computerised content management systems which cross organisational boundaries, and actualise the potential which the panopticon once contained.

Disciplinary power was based on anxiety; prisoners could never be certain whether the watchtower was occupied. Citizen-subjects today can be sure; the prisoners are now watching each-other. ‘In sales organisation,' reports Richard Sennett, ‘sales reps' performances can be mapped in real time on home-office computer screens.' Instead of a centralised point of imaginary control; a distributed network of leveraged eyeballs.

Something to chew on.

Posted October 30, 2009
// 0 Comments

There is nothing new here...

I'm currently reading through my notes from my MA degree, editing and
updating them and reviewing quotes to see if it is worth re-reading
particular concepts. I'm increasingly aware of the dates in which a
lot of these books were written, well over 10 years ago now - and yet,
I sit through tweetstream after tweetstream of new media related
events, I can't help feeling that I've heard it all somewhere before.
We are truly inoculated from our past experiences. Stop waffling and
taking half-baked opinions for granted, look at the past, we need a
purpose and we need dedicated evidence. Otherwise we're just wasting
time - it's been said before, with definitely more succinctness and far
better examples.

“Technology catalyses change not only in what we do but in how we
think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, of
their relationship with the world.” (Turkle, 1984: 3)

New Media “…enables a system of multiple
producers/distributors/consumers, an entirely new configuration of
communication relations in which the boundaries between those terms
collapse. A second age of mass media is on the horizon.” (Poster,
1995: 3)

“What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which
they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion
themselves to answer the challenges of new media.” (Bolter & Richard,
1999: 15)

Theories associated with the arrival of a post-industrial society:

Daniel Bell and Post-Industrialism
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973)
“...argues that the post-industrial society emerged from changes in
the social sector. He sees the economy and occupational structure as
influential here, but does not see politics or culture as significant
factors in the change.” (Nayar, 2004: 49)

Manuel Castells and the Informational City
“In a series of works on the informational society Castells identifies
an 'informational mode' of development. This is a new
sociotechnological paradigm, with information processing as the main
activity. Information processing influences all the processes of
production, distribution, consumption and management.” (Nayar, 2004:
52)

Jean Baudrillard and Postmodern Simulacra
“Baudrillard's work has been enormously influential in media studies
of the new age, has constantly emphasised the image, the development
of 'virtual' models of reality and the commodity-consumerist culture
of contemporary life.” (Nayar, 2004: 53)

“Baudrillard's central argument is that in the age of perfect
reproduction and endless repetition of images, the distinction between
the real and the illusory, between original and the copy, between
superficiality and depth has broken down. What we now have is a
culture of 'hyperreality'.” (Nayar, 2004: 53)

Arjun Appadurai and Globalised Culture
“Appadurai's work (2000 [1990]) argues that the central problem of
contemporary globalising processes in the 'tension between cultural
homogenization and cultural heterogenization.” (Appadurai, 2000: 94,
in Nayar, 2004: 56)


Bolter, J. and Richard, G (1999) Remediation - Understanding New
Media, Cambridge, MIT Press: MA
Nayar, P. K. (2004) Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of
Cybertechnology Sage: London
Poster, M. (1995) The Second Media Age. Blackwell: Cambridge
Turkle, S. (1984) The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit,
Granada Publishing: London

Filed under  //   innoculation   internet   new?   research  
Posted October 26, 2009
// 0 Comments

Dog Walking up Beacon Hill...

Blustry and sunny morning in Leicestershire, walking our tiny little dog pack.

                           
Click here to download:
Dog_Walking_up_Beacon_Hill....zip (7662 KB)

Filed under  //   beaconhill   dog   leicestershire   photos  
Posted October 25, 2009
// 2 Comments

Digital Anthropology Report: Attitudes to technology = basis of future class...

It's a bold statement to suggest that the ways in which we use the Internet may soon be seen as a potential signifier for class. What about those who aren't even online because of where they live? I will need to read the report in full to see what was looked at in terms of forming such conclusions. Regardless, there seems to be a nice, long list of links to click through which relate to media/digital anthropology.


How do people in Britain use the internet? How do they behave online? The new Digital Anthropology Report. The Six Tribes of Homo Digitalis gives some answers.

The British communication company Talk Talk sent researchers from the University of Kent into the homes of people around the UK to ask them questions about their attitudes towards digital technology and to watch them use it. They also commissioned anthropology professor David Zeitlyn to analyse the findings.

They found that “homo digitalis” consists of Six Tribes with very different attitudes, usage patterns and modes of behaviour. Some of these tribes have embraced technology and put it at the centre of their lives. For other tribes, “the internet” is a rather frightening jungle.

The E-ager Beavers are the largest tribe by quite a distance, with 29% of the UK adult population. They use the internet heavily, but they are more passive users. They lack the confidence or the drive to get involved with uploading their own content or producing their own blogs.

The Timid Technophobes are the second largest group (23%). They have only limited internet skills and will only use it when they really need to. They still prefer to use pen and paper and prefer to send and receive letters. They don’t read blogs and are not interested in facebook either.

The tribe of the Digital Extroverts (9%) consists of people who are “always-on". They are active bloggers, use twitter, flickr etc. “Regularly updating their online profile is as much a part of their daily routine as eating.” The ability to interconnect and share data is a prerequisite.

According to Zeitlyn, your willingness to embrace technology and integrate it into your life will dictate your success in life far more than your social class will. As class structures change quickly, he writes in his analysis, the extent to which people use social networking and promote themselves online will become more important in determining their careers than what school or university they went to.

>> read the whole report (nice presentation with quiz and videos!)

SEE ALSO:

Dissertation: Why kids embrace Facebook and MySpace

Ethnographic Study: Social Websites Important For Childhood Development

Ethnographic study: Social network sites are “virtual campfires”

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

John Postill on media anthropology and internet activism in Malaysia

Cyberanthropology: “Second Life is their only chance to participate in religious rituals”

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Microsoft anthropologist: Let people be online at work or risk losing stuff!

From housewife to mousewive - Anthropological study on women and Internet

Ethnographic Study About Life Without Internet: Feelings of Loss and Frustration

Filed under  //   anthropology   class   digital   digitalbritain   natives  
Posted October 25, 2009
// 2 Comments

Why not call them personal network sites? (Via GoogleReader)

We might believe we are all using the same websites, but we are all looking at different screens. It's easy to forget that others are engaging with the Internet in a very individualized manner, so although we think we're seeing the same things (at least with our own outputs) it is difficult to see why others are viewing that content in very different terms. How can you examine this phenomenon accurately without a)patronising the user, b)missing the point, c)generalising the situation based on your own experiences.

via media/anthropology by John Postill on 10/17/09


personal-networkI’ve often wondered why scholars studying Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., call these platforms ’social network sites’ instead of personal network sites. After all, these are platforms built around individuals and their personal (or egocentric) networks rather than around ‘whole’ (or sociocentric) networks such as clans, universities, localities or firms. In social network analysis this distinction between personal and whole networks is crucial (see Knox et al 2006), yet it gets conflated in the Internet literature. For instance, Facebook allows for the creation of ‘networks’ (as in whole networks) and ‘groups’ but these are not as central to the site as its immense tangle of 300 million personal networks. It is is the ‘logic’ of personal networks that drives Facebook, not the logic of whole networks (Diagram by Peter Timusk).

Reference

Knox, H., Savage, M. & Harvey, P. (2006). Social networks and the study of relations: networks as method, metaphor and form. Economy & Society, 35(1)

Filed under  //   internet   networks   personal   SNS   social  
Posted October 24, 2009
// 0 Comments

#IMHO140 – Think before you Tweet. Pause before you Wave

Nice thought piece on how tweets->wave posts are causing a knee jerk reaction to share opinions - before we've really had the chance to let it sink in. In terms of how we see our self online, we may be so keen to contribute that we are not thinking about why or what we are actually sharing. Could this be considered a way in which we are giving others a piece of how we'd like to be seen as online?

via media140.org by Dominique Jackson on 10/23/09

Media140 likes to give our blog readers something a little different for the weekend, in the congenial #TGIF spirit that marks the end of the working week. Here, Tom Griffiths gives us his very personal perspective on Twitter and the office chair revolution and how we seem to have gone from apathy to energy in [...]

Filed under  //   greader   identity   repost  
Posted October 24, 2009
// 0 Comments

The joys of working at home...

I'm just using some dog-related examples to text drive posterous as a blogging platform. I've been a wordpress die hard for nearly 5 years so will take a lot of reassurance to move platform on my domain. I'm writing from my phone so I guess this is a major plus side. We'll see!

       
Click here to download:
The_joys_of_working_at_home....zip (1541 KB)

Filed under  //   blog   home   melvin   test   work  
Posted October 24, 2009
// 0 Comments

Cheers!

Posted September 11, 2009
// 0 Comments