Week Fourteen: Barney and Andrejevic

Justified worry or just paranoia? 

The topics of both works this week are proving themselves to be more and more relevant as we become more and more reliant on networking technology, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with some of the conclusions they reach.

Barney, I think, is on the nose about a lot of things, specifically passages like "...the response of those hoping to capitalize on the commercial potential of network technology has been to make the medium behave more like television... ."(pg. 182) There is more content than ever on the web, but in ways it seems more constricted and less free. Barney notes that everything is being divided into channels to deliver pertinent content to receptive audiences while diminishing content that may not be of interest. 

It's happening all over the web, and it's certainly a far cry from an idealistic democratic utopia of media, but perhaps the amount of content necessitates it. There's simply too much on the web for anyone to dive in unfiltered and attempt to find much of worth. The channeling of the net is probably something to remain watchful of in the future, but given the alternative of pure oversaturation and information overload, it might be favorable.

When it comes to Andrejevic, I feel like he supposes a hefty amount of motive and intent on those doing the surveillance that simply might not be there. I don't want to say that we shouldn't be concerned that everything about us is being recorded and tracked online, but it may just be pushing us out of our comfort zone and we venture into unknown territory with all the internet is capable of.

Maybe I'm too naive in not really caring so much about all the data tracking and personalization of ads that is happening. In a lots of areas, I think it's good. I like that netflix can recommend me movies I may like based what else I've watched. I like that Pandora plays songs it thinks I'll enjoy based on my listening habits. I like that amazon attempts to suggest what I might want to buy based on previous searches and purchases.

It ties in with my point about Barney. There's just too much out there to try and slog through it on my own. I don't mind sacrificing a bit of digital privacy to streamline the process (and really, digital privacy still seems a little nebulous to me). Or I could be way off base in assuming that all these monitoring agents are doing it just to make everything more targeted and efficient online, when there's really some underhanded scheme at work to track and label everything about us.

I don't see a reason to worry, but it could be the kind of thing that can't be seen until it's past the point of worry.

Week Thirteen: Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp

Where does it go from here?

A refreshing bout of optimism in this week's readings made for a nice change of pace. It hasn't all been doom-and-gloom so far, but for the most part I feel that the stuff we've read has tended towards bleak. Lurie and Tripp both presented some basic overviews on the web and its relations to politics. The whole feeling I got from them was along the lines of "here's this wonderful new tool that is hardly being utilized to its full potential. We can do wonderful things with this!" 

And we're seeing those wonderful things happen. Traditional means of media are all on the decline, either dying out or adapting themselves for integration with the internet. Not only that, but we're finding the internet to be wonderfully democratic, participatory, open, and accessible. The perfect storm of new media is upon us.

But the best thing from this week's readings was Kelly's "The Web Runs on Love, not Greed." He put it in great perspective in his discussion about the billions of pages and sites on the internet, and how its inventors would have thought those numbers quite impossible to attain in such a short time.

Yet here we are, moving closer and closer to the digital divide every day as the web becomes more and more useful and powerful. But what does it lead to?

I can't help but imagine that with anything but optimism. 5 years ago we were content to wait hours for a song to download, and now we're streaming entire films in high definition on connections that are "average." It's fascinating, and it's only going to improve. I saw a graph the other day of the projected storage capacity of SD cards over the next few years, and it was staggering. They've grown from a few megabytes to several gigabytes in a short time, but projections show that if they continue to develop at their current pace, we'll have SD card capable of holding several terrabytes.

Terrabytes, on something the size of a postage stamp. That's insane.

I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said something like, "Any prediction about the future that sounds reasonable in anyway is assuredly incorrect." That's the feeling I got from Kelly's piece, and it's an exciting feeling to have. Wherever media and the internet goes from here, as long as people like Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp are at the helm, it will be good.

Week Twelve

Does Media Really Die?

One problem I had with the Gilder piece, especially in the first half, was his constant insistence that TV is a doomed medium, headed for a sure death at the hands of new technology and broadcast standards. Sure, it's a little unfair to look at how the situation played out 20 years after Gilder wrote the piece, but it's a mentality I just don't understand.

Television today really only resembles television of 20 or 30 years ago in name only. Yet the medium persists. Content delivery shifted from over the air to cable, but the box still remains in every living room in the country. Computers rose, becoming more and more like the telecomputers Gilder wrote of, but the set still sits in the living room. There only functional difference between computer monitors and HDTVs is a tuner and a coax jack, but the big screens have only moved from sitting on a shelf in the living room to being mounted on the walls.

Television hasn't died, it has evolved, and this is becoming true for every form of media. We are far, far past the point of compartmentalized forms of media that become obsolete after certain advancements (although print media may be the last holdout). Rather, a breakthough in one area, such as the development of flat screen HD displays, becomes a breakthrough in every area. 

As the second half of Gilder's piece indicates, even though corporations and governments aren't quite past the idea of killing one form of media in favor of boosting their own, technology certainly is. Natural selection has worked its way into the technological sector in the form of the microchip, and it's becoming readily apparent that any media that chooses to adapt to it will survive for a long time to come.

Media will continue to blend and meld, like TVs and computers becoming nearly indistinguishable from one another, but neither is going away.

Week Ten

Turner and Hooch Hayles: Counter-culture in a Posthuman World

These readings came at a perfect time for me, as I spent a bit of the break reading up on some futurist theories, from the likes of Ray Kurzweil and this fun site. There's a lot of similarities between those and Hayles' discussion on Posthuman cybernetics.

Basically, and this became more apparent as the Hayle text progressed, we're rocketing closer and closer towards a world with little need for human form everyday. Person-to-person interaction is becoming increasingly less needed as digital alternatives to everyday communications and commercial tasks present themselves. I think an argument could already be made that the idea of consciousness no longer represents itself in the brain but in the fingertips as they frantically pound keys to transfer thoughts to the web.

Although pure Posthumanist life in a cyber-world may be more of a technological inevitability than the cyber-fantasy of decades past, let's ignore that for a moment and focus on the present. As the title, and later the text, or Turner's work declares, counter-culture is now cyber-culture. And it makes sense. Counter-cultures tend to be youth-driven and thrive on platforms that tend to go against the norm. The French student revolts of the 60s, for example, that seem to pop up all the time in this course. Using street posters and hand made signs gave the students a unique voice and a feeling of connectedness within their group.

The balance is beginning to tip, but cyberspace has been a welcome home to counter-culture for the last couple decades. One of the great initial possibilities it provided was a voice for anyone to say anything. Given the state of mainstream media at the time of the rise of cyber-culture, this was huge. The movement has only continued to grow and expand, through popular groups of today such as Anonymous and Wikileaks.

But there's the tipping point. If it's popular and the majority of people are getting involved, is it still counter-culture, or just culture in general? What becomes of counter-culture and we move closer and closer towards a Posthuman society?

Hayle touches on the idea of interventions being made to change or halt the disembodiment process. I think that's where future of counter-culture lies. As the general public begins its gradual shift to a home on the digital range, movements may arise about just what it means to be human. Can we still be considered human if we shed our bodies and upload our consciousness, and if so, what do we consider those who opt not to? 

Week Something: Hayek

Rule of Law and the Media?

I'm struggling to see a connection between Hayek's piece and new media. I understand the arguments on a broader political level, and it certainly seems to fit in with other post-Marxist works, but what does it have to do with media? So I'll try to apply it to something I can relate to, which I'm starting to feel like I can only write about: film.

Does our political system provide a Rule of Law for media, specifically film, or is it one of, as Hayek calls it, "moral" arbitrariness? I'd argue most definitely the latter. Our constitution provides freedom of speech and press, and film certainly won a huge battle when it was granted first amendment protection. Yet as it has played out, it's a tenuous freedom of speech.

To shorten a long lesson of film history, a governing body was created a handful of decades ago as film was coming into its own and really beginning to say something. This body, the Motion Picture Association of America, sought to create a set of guidelines by which to approve the content of film. Today, we know these guidelines as ratings: G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17.

So far so good. Seems like a fine start to establishing a Rule of Law for film. Clear rules are being established and enforced in a consistent manner so that the system can become self-governing. Only problem is, the transparency stops at the letter of the rating. There is no defined list of what material constitutes what rating. None at all. The rating for each film is a pure moral judgement call on the part of the ratings board, and it's led to some terrible and puzzling decisions. The whole subject is discussed quite nicely in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

On the surface it's a thin Rule of Law, but in actuality the film industry of America is ruled in a completely arbitrary fashion. Factor in the also arbitrary obscenity laws and freedom of speech suddenly isn't so free. An NC-17 rating is a kiss of death for a film, regardless of the message it contains. Such a rating makes it nearly impossible to distribute or sell.

But is this a bad thing? Is it really so wrong for a moral system to control film? I truly don't know. I certainly agree with the MPAA in making it more difficult for younger audiences to see more mature content. But then there's that arbitrary cutoff of what content is too mature even for mature audiences, and it all falls apart. I don't think a more clearly defined Rule of Law would be good for the industry, but when it's already so steeped in moral judgement how could a new system even begin to steer away from that?

I don't know. Maybe it's impossible at this point. Maybe it's meaningless. Maybe the connection I'm trying to make between Hayek and the MPAA is tenuous at best.

Week Six: Barthes and Focault

What's in a name?

It was interesting to see the general structuralist principles laid out by Barthes applied to different things by Focault. In the same way that Barthes broke down the meaning meanings and different "signifieds" of an image, so did Focault break down a name.

Particularly, Focault was interested in names of authors and what their meaning really becomes. His argument was that author's names are no longer representative of a person, but rather their body of work. For example, the signifier Stephen King does not have the signified of a middle-aged man in Maine, but has the signified of the associated horror and fantasy novels and short stories he has written. 

In thinking about this, I realized that Focault has quite a valid point, and not just when it comes to authors of literature. For myself, at least, when I hear the name of nearly any public figure, my mind immediately goes to what they've created, produced, or are generally known for. I don't hear the name Martin Scorsese and think of a nasally-voiced, bushy-browed New Yorker, I think of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, etc.

But is anything lost by removing the person from the signified? Focault almost makes it sound noble, as he writes "...the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society." We make authors larger than life, just through the fact or recognizing them for their work rather than who they are.

Yet the mere act of publishing shows that a person is willing to strip themselves of original identity and be known only for their works. Maybe it's just a vicious cycle at this point, but if an author cares enough about a certain topic or piece they wrote, it seems natural that they would want to spread that message. Should it get to the point of changing the meaning of their name, I would think they would be glad as it almost serves as free advertising for the work they wish to spread.

Week Five: McLuhan

TV: Still Cold?

Throughout the reading, I was quite perplexed by McLuhan's assertion that TV is a cold medium. Admittedly, I have no experience with TV as a medium circa 1964, but I just can't imagine anyone would view it as a cold medium today.

Right off the bat, McLuhan says that film is a hot medium and television cold. He then defines hot and cold, noting the difference to be one of suspending a sense in "high definition" and the level to which they allow participation. Ignoring the obvious joke that modern TV is broadcast in nothing but "high definition," I see no difference between film and television by either standard of his definition.

"Hot media," he writes on page 23, "do not leave so much to be filled in by the audience." Okay, I can follow that. A photograph shows an image in totality: hot. A telephone provides only auditory transmission, often imperfect, while requiring the listener to put a face to a voice: cold. Alright, I'm still with it.

Film merges photography and sound, operating on the persistence of memory at 24 frames per second while simultaneously engrossing the viewer's eardrum: totally hot. Yet TV, functionally the same as film: cold? Lost me.

Going more in-depth into television on pg. 309, McLuhan writes, "TV is a medium which rejects the sharp personality and favors the presentation of processes rather than of products." This is certainly untrue of modern television. We've arrived at a singular term for hosts of talk shows and news programs: Personalities. TV has become hyper-focused on personality, as it's what non-fiction shows live and die by. Steven Colbert, Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, Rachel Maddow, etc etc. all thrive in ratings because of personality. Little care is given to the content of the program, and the focus is entirely on the personality of the host.

And then comes an interesting thought, after a discussion on the differences between film and TV images on pg. 313, McLuhan comes to the conclusion that TV could be improved to match film on a visual perception level, but that it would then no longer be TV but something new entirely.

Perhaps this is where I disagree with McLuhan, as modern film and TV barely resemble film and TV of the 60s. 35mm prints are still quite common, but digital film is on the rise. Digital film, in presentation, is identical to high-definition TV (and interestingly enough, progressive-scan HD operates in a very similar whole-image based technology to 35mm film). As consumer televisions grow in size and home sound systems become more robust, the difference between film and television is closing quite rapidly.

Should McLuhan have written on the state of media today, I don't doubt his opinion on the temperature of film and television would be different. But would film still be hot, and TV cold? Maybe I don't have the best grasp on his terms, but I seem to think he would regard both, especially when considering digital film, as cold. Even working within his terms, I can't see either as anything but unquestionably hot.