Notes from the article, ‘The man who put teenagers lives online’, by Owen Gibson, Technology News, Guardian Weekly.
Firstly, for my own research specifically the move to video and the number of uploads per day is phenomenal. Quote:
MySpace can have a similar democratising effect in the world of short film with amateur film-makers building up a MySpace fanbase before being snapped up by a big studio or broadcaster - 50,000 to 60,000 new videos are already being uploaded per day.
Reading through this article on MySpace, I was intrigued by the way the original creators looked around at what they describe as “the best social features” of other social networking entities. It would be interesting to define these features in terms of a research inquiry. The sites Craigslist, Evite and MP3.com where key references for the creators. The community site craiglist is intersting from a community media perspective, about:
Local community classifieds and forums - a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else — all for free, and in a relatively non-commercial environment.
The design of the site states Chris DeWolfe was not driven by a technical imperative i.e. lots of bells and whistles. The objective instead simplicity, with a focus on activities that young people engage in everyday, like for example locating tracks on an mp3 player.
Other associated links intermix media; friendster; geocities; tripod; Then there are copies facebook; bebo.
I located this book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. by Yochai Benkler via a podcast from Berkman. The text is available in a wiki. Our library has one on the way. More later as I read.
From Sean, a video presentation by Dave Weinberger at the Library of Congress, 2004, captured on CSPAN. Weinberger is the author of the book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a unified theory of the web, Cambridge MA,Perseus Publishing, 2003.
I enjoyed Tom Sherman’s (Spring 2005) articles on video in the Canadian Art Magazine. His frustration with the video being called film brought a smile. In the article ‘Video No Film’, he states:
Fuck film. The dead ideas of film are being heaped onto video, Cinematic history is like a ball and chain. Video, as an inclusive soluble medium, is having difficulty defending itself from the weight of this affliction. It has become fashionable to declare, I “filmed this or that with my digital camcorder.” In this ahistorical time, it has become common to use the nomenclature of film, the predominant medium of the 20th century, to declare one’s existence in the 21st. Everyone is going retro. p. 5 of 6
His outspoken views prompted more discussion on the list nettime, by Alan Sondheim. And more here by Sherman, Is the new video ‘film,’ video or film? More on Tom’s video work here.
Again the book Design Research sums up what is expected at the Graduate Research Conference (GRC):
Normally candidates draw attention to the most significant pieces aspects of their work at their presentation and endeavour to shape the manner in which the panel views their work. Discussion and debate between candidates and examiners require candidates to to find a set of languages to enable communications about designing. We might see these languages as visual, physical and word-based. Exams involve showing and telling. Candidates whether presenting for criticism or examination all tell similarly structured stories about what they did and why they did it. They tell about what was successful and sometimes why a path was not pursued. They say and show and tell what they found through their inquiries.
Peter Downton, ‘Reflections on reflective practices’, Design Research, RMIT University Press, 2003. p.128
At aoir, Michele Wilson’s presentation ‘Networks versus communities: an exploration of synergies and contradictions’ reiterated some ideas around theorising networks. MO also put me onto a book The Network Society by Darin Barney (Polity, 2004) that revises the vol 1,2 The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells.
Bruno Latour is also emerging as a theorist of interest in a number of places. The book, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies). A book that does not focus on networks, but more on the concept of attachments” in this Latour article, ‘Factures/Fractures: From the Concept of Network to that of Attachment’, 1999.
A read through George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalisation, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2006, has pointed towards some must reads. These are possibly more in line with a networked practice:
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10) by Jean-Francois Lyotard Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida; Glas, by Jacques Derrida
A book that was referred to a lot at the conference which had a key theme of convergence; Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins.
Authors: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, Social Network Sites: Definition and Conception
In this special issue, we are using the term “social network sites” to refer to websites that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within the system and formally articulate their relationship to other users in a way that is visible to anyone who can access their profile. While we are using the term “social network site” to define this space, another common term that appears in public discourse is “social networking sites.” This term grew in popularity through press coverage of these sites after “social networking systems” and “social networks” failed to take hold. In public discourse, the term “social networking sites” been expanded to refer to any site that allows people to communicate with people that they don’t know: dating sites, chatrooms, community sites, bulletin boards, etc. What makes social network sites unique is not the ability to meet new people, but the ability to articulate one’s social network.
Summary of presentation by N. Katherine Hayles at Re-Mediating Literature conference at Utrecht University, July 4-6, 2007.
N. Katherine Hayles: “Narrative and Database: Remediating Literature Through Data”
Recently several theorists have proposed that database is replacing narrative as the dominant cultural form, among them Lev Manovich and Ed Folsom. This presentation will argue for that narrative is essential for human communication and culture, but it will also acknowledge that contemporary narratives are transforming through the impact of data. Remediation here implies that the feedback cycle described by Bolter and Grusin in Remediation can also be understood to take place through different cultural forms as well as through different media, where the dynamics are informed not by the hypermediation / transparency dialectic they describe but rather by the circulation through narrative and data.
I noticed awhile back that Jean Burgess was doing some research on YouTube. A description from her blog research page:
I’m currently designing a major case study of YouTube as a complex system that sits within the history of the emergence, mass popularisation and marketisation of new media technologies and literacies (from the printing press to the Kodak camera and the domestication of personal computing).
In a recent post titled YouTube Research Gazette Jean brings together a great collection of YouTube research. First up, the Infoscape Research Lab who have on their site a section with the url name ‘videopolitics’. A description on the project titled ‘Code Politics: Party Leaders and Partisans on YouTube.’
Where do issues in virtual public spheres come from during an election? This research project aims to examine the movement of issues through media over time via coding, archival and analytical research into online media processes, understood as code politics. When and how do parties set the agenda, or do they? How does the blogosphere deploy new media formats such as embedded video or RSS, and how do aggregators (such as www.YouTube.com) that provide these formats influence agendas? What is the relationship between political parties, mainstream media, bloggers and the blogosphere?
There is other things to explore here but what caught my eye in the meantime was Chuck Tyron’s writing published on Flow TV. Chuck is profiled on his Chutry blog and he has an extensive delicious tag on YouTube. He is also participating on braintrustdv. About braintrustdv:
BRAINTRUSTdv is an ongoing attempt to understand electronic cinema on its own terms as well as through the prism of the twentieth-century art form from which it derives.
BRAINTRUSTdv is more concerned with the history of video technology than with the latest development; more concerned with aesthetic debates than with technical specifications; more concerned with articulate arguments than with terse weblog exchanges.
Back to Tryon’s writing on Flow TV which covers a number of socio-political perspectives.