Sep 14, 2008 0
I got this link from Geert’s critique of this video, ‘Michael Wesch Takes On YouTube’ on the video vortex list and in that critique he mentioned the book reference: James Elkens, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction.
Aug 25, 2008 0
Aug 24, 2008 1
Michael Dieter gave a guest lecture in Networked Media this week on Social Networking. These are my notes and perspective. He was quick to point out how the concept of “networked individualism …hyper-individualism” seems to become the precedent – a centric, narcissitic approach that contradicts the community potential of social software. His image of a friends wheel off Facebook was a good visual example of this concept. The MySpace celebrity sites Tila Tequila and Jeremy Jackson also provided prime examples. It was intriguing to hear that MySpace paid Tila to come across from Friendster and bring here 40,000 odd network. Overall, a concept that filtered through from Manuel Castells trilogy of books on ‘Network Societies’.
Also, he debunked the idea that websites like Facebook and MySpace actually provide young people with a free space to engage with peers without an authoritative figure in the background. Instead these spaces become places that he described as being governed by “corporate surveillance”, where a key economic objective is the monitoring of users personal information and purchasing habits for marketing purposes. This is the selling and distribution of this information to third party operatives. Facebook Beacon is an example that uses specific documentation in UGC content as a means to promote ‘Behavioural Forward Advertising’- Behavioural targeting (wikipedia). A confronting interview by 60 minutes with the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on this development. The distribution of private content in this context to friends networks is used for economic gain.
He also touched on the historical development of Social Network Sites based on the article danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship’.
Aesthetics in terms of design where also covered with the ironic note of PCWorld voting MySpace as the worst design on the Internet in 2006. MySpace in comparison to the early Friendster website opened up the HTML and CSS for users to customise which caused a proliferation of competing and fashionable design responses amongst users. A notion he demonstrated in the MySpace celebrity examples above.
A current key figure in terms of research on the social networking field is Danah Boyd who is in the process of completing her PhD at Berkeley. Note, Boyd also acts as a commercial consultant to Yahoo.
Fred Scharman a MA post-graduate produced a critique on Boyd’s perspective in the essay, You Must be Logged in to Do That!: MySpace and Control. I could not help noting that key figures researching and providing valid critique on social networking are post-graduate students.
Dieter finished the presentation with a reference to the Greg Elmer book Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy which critically examines for example, the mythical notion that contributing UCG is a voluntary process that is not constantly being monitored.
A Comedy Central video (February 15, 2006) ‘Trendspotting, Social networking sites are loaded with sexual predators; more importantly they’re loaded with sexual prey’, by Demetri Martin provides an amusing perspective.
Jul 2, 2008 0
The book Media Work by Mark Deuze has surfaced again. I got the reference initially back in January in Amsterdam from Geert and yes it is in the RMIT Library. Review ‘Mark Deuze on Media Work’, by Michael Stevenson on the Masters of Media blog that covered Video Vortex outcomes. A blog post ‘Building New Media Organisations’, by Axel Bruns on Deuze’s presentation at the CCI Conference. Mark Deuze interviewed on ABC Radio National this morning as a podcast.
Form the book summary:
The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.
Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and independence. Digital media supercharge these dilemmas, as industries merge and media converge, as audiences become co-creators of content online.
The media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. This book is a critical primer on how media workers manage to survive, and is essential reading for anyone considering a career in the media, or who wishes to understand how the media are made.
Jun 23, 2008 0
Studies in Material Thinking journal
http://www.aut.ac.nz/material_thinking/materialthinking2/currentissue.html
Mar 27, 2008 0
Lisa Gye posted this open book example ‘The Googlization of Everything’ by Siva Vaidhyanathanto to the fc list. The author Siva Vaidhyanathan uses the open book process (Institute for the Future of the Book) to critique Google. The book is a “book blog” and Vaidhyanathanto lays out some major research questions in the summary:
This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?
Vaidhyanathanto’s other books – Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). The about on the Institute for the Future of the Book:
We’re a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.
Feb 14, 2008 1
Alejandro Adams, Preliminary Notes on Web-hosted Cinema, http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/web-hosted.html
There is nothing unique about returning to early film theory in an attempt to delimit the creative uses of digital video technology. Comparing the infancy of the first manifestation of cinema with the infancy of its successor is as natural as it is profitable. Invoking, as I will, the elaborate investigations of early theorists such as Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim is a way to clarify my own observations concerning digital cinema in general and Web-hosted cinema in particular.
I got his reference from AM’s blog who posted a few notes on the article.
Feb 14, 2008 0
I picked up this 2008 published book Video: The Reflexive Medium by Yvonne Spielmann in Amsterdam at the beautiful Athenaeum Boekhandel.
From book description:
Video is an electronic medium, dependent on the transfer of electronic signals. Video signals are in constant movement, circulating between camera and monitor. This process of simultaneous production and reproduction makes video the most reflexive of media, distinct from both photography and film (in which the image or a sequence of images is central). Because it is processual and not bound to recording and the appearance of a “frame,” video shares properties with the computer. In this book, Yvonne Spielmann argues that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right. Video has metamorphosed from technology to medium, with a set of aesthetic languages that are specific to it, and current critical debates on new media still need to recognize this.
Full reference: Yvonne Spielmann, Video, The Reflexive Medium, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, (2008) First published in German (2005)
Dec 21, 2007 0
David Wolf has made his MA exegesis available online as a pdf download. It is titled Vidgets: The Development and Use of Interactive, Network Based Video Works.
Oct 10, 2007 0
Off the back of Scott’s lecture I have been revisiting the historical development of video. The ‘Video History Project’ turned up as part of that research. Form the about:
The Experimental Television Center’s Video History Project is an on-going research initiative which documents video art and community television, as it evolved in rural and urban New York State, and across the US. Begun in 1994, the Project has several initiatives including research, conferences and the website. Project Goals
* to provide a dynamic vehicle for the creation and dissemination of an inclusive media history, encouraging participation by a wide range of people including early practitioners as well as those presently shaping this history
* to identify, locate, and make accessible media history resources – tapes, artists’ instruments, writings and ephemera.
* to underscore the importance of intellectual access to information and to position independent media arts activities within a broader cultural context by cultivating research and public programming of these materials by those in the arts, humanities and sciences
* to increase public awareness of and appreciation for media and to create new audiences for the work by suggesting contexts in which the work can be appreciated.
* to encourage alliances among collecting institutions and those with educational and curatorial programs to assist the preservation of the works
The project goals provide a valuable perspective for working out the objectives of a research project both in terms of clarity for the researchers as well as users.
