Digital Media Emanicipates Participatory Culture

Participatory culture is not only about the content, but the collaborative opportunity, with everything being experimental, provisional and passing with the process being more important than the product. Participatory culture is a term coined by theorist Henry Jenkins (2009) in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, based on the concept that the affordances of the digital era allow users to “work collaboratively, generate and share ideas and creative works” (p. 10). According to Jenkins, the essence of intellectual growth is a collaborative effort, as compared to segregation of knowledge by individuals and drawing borders between producers and consumers. This ephemerality of the participatory culture makes it a conceptual phenomenon. The participatory culture through its tools and affordances enables global interaction that serves to exponentially expand the worldview of its participants. The digital era provides a platform that brought about a cultural shift towards freedom of expression, creating “affinity spaces” in the form of various online communities, forums, and blogs.

Jenkins asserts, “the participatory culture emancipated by the contemporary digital space shifts focus onto community involvement rather than lock-down of intellect, supporting creating and sharing with others” (p. 6). This signals the rise of open source culture with the advent of UNIX and Linux as platforms, where the code is created, shared and used collaboratively as a non-profit effort, without consumerist motives. In the digital space, the concept of participatory culture can be observed in a variety of socially collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Github, and Pinterest, with each example serving a distinct purpose that caters to its niche users and is feasible through communal effort. The rise of the open-source movement - a culture that allows individuals to freely access, use and share content - established the preconditions for a participatory culture, with the digital era being conducive to its development. The participatory culture contributed in the making of the digital era more democratized. As proliferating technology provides novel affordances for communication, collaboration, and dissemination of ideas, it has given rise to new opportunities for web participants to provide input into the digital space through the creation and sharing of content and ideas. Moreover, the harbingers of participatory culture call for a two-way active model of communication adopted into everyday usage. The old HR model - recruit, train, supervise, retain - is transformed into initiate, engage, collaborate and evolve (Tapscott 2009, p. 149) since the demarcations of success in the digital era are not solely based on individual efforts, but team play, with an ability to collaborate and co-create. An analysis of participatory culture provides an insight into the strengths of the digital era.

References:

Jenkins, H. (2009). Enabling Participation. In Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Tapscott, D. (2009). Grown up digital: How the net generation is changing your world. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Dynamics of Space and Time in the Digital Era

The digital era breaks the temporal and material boundaries of the physical, disorienting time and space. Time and space in the context of the digital era bends, folds, dilates and does not dismantle in linear form, which changes the perception of communication processes amongst its users. In Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, Gay (1997) states, “Electronic media destroys the specialness of place and time through their ability to ‘lift out’ particular signs, images, and sounds from their local contexts and to recombine them across time and space” (p. 105). The digital space allows for users to manipulate their communication and writing process because the affordances allow for tools such as auto-correct or various group editing functionalities. With the interrupted sanctity of time and space, “We can perhaps assume that the medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated” (Innis 1951, p. 34). For instance, Google Docs allows multiple users to access the same document at different locations at any time.

This triggers a different kind of thought process with a different consciousness with multiple editors than individually writing on a piece of paper, at a single time and space. It is interesting to note that we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of tools and technologies we use (Carr 2011, p. 64), in the preceding context, the users take on to the qualities fostered by the Google doc, a shared writing, and editing tool, in contrast with a paper and pen. Thus the values fostered by particular technologies have a direct correlation to the perception and the culture, the user extracts out of the continuous interaction with those tools.

Furthermore, another point of contrast between the cyberspace and tangible items is that the physical published materials provide a sense of authority, integrity and certainty, the “digital medium provides a sense of instability, the fact that a URL may or may not exist on our next visit” (Weel 2011, p. 181). Unlike the digital realm, print assures the quality of content through rationalization process of publishing houses, whereas the democratization of the Internet gives anybody the power to publish online, which challenges the authenticity of the published content. Hence, it is crucial to note that in the current day digital era the lack of temporal and spatial sanctity also cause a lack of a level of trust, which is imperative in a source of knowledge.

References:

Carr, N. (2011). Is google making us stupid. In M. Bauerlein (Ed.), The digital divide. Penguin books.

Gay, P. (1997). Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage, in association with The Open University.

Innis, H., & Watson, A. (2008). The bias of communication (2nd. ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Weel, A. (2011). Changing our textual minds: Towards a digital order of knowledge. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press.

A Brief Scrutiny of Behaviours Fostered by Old and New Communication Technologies

Does social and digital media proliferate socialistic behaviours or individualistic behaviours? The digital era appears to be individualistic on the surface with the users delved into individual interfaces, though the interconnectedness that it fosters through mediation is a socialistic element. The majority of the traditional communication mediums - newsprint, radio-television broadcasting - served the masses, as author Innis (1951) claims: “The printing press and the radio address the world instead of the individual” (p. 191).

It is crucial to note that the traditional mediation era seemed geared toward social involvement on the surface with broadcast media addressing to the masses, but the received information remained limited to an individual, unable to connect individuals with one another. 

As digital technology made interaction feasible by providing the transmission power to the common man, it now brings about changes in the means of absorption of the information, and the value of the media for its participants. For instance, before the digital era was a dominant system, various forms of media had their transmittal times coordinated with the routine of the local consumers. According to the local clock, the television and radio broadcast had specified times for their programming and newspapers were printed and distributed. Transmission from the media sources was timed according to the needs of the locals and consumed in a linear fashion.

On the other hand, the interconnectedness made possible by the triumph of the digital era brings information to the user in a complex fashion. According to Murray (2012), “When we introduce new media formats or disrupt established inscriptions/ transmission technologies, we are also disrupting rituals that have transformed around these artifacts (p. 37). This is vital to note that the information inflow from various channels throughout the world is aggregated on web platforms.

Now users have to search through the presented information and filter the information that is relevant to them. Users that were once passive consumers are now entitled to information that is updated 24/7 from all over the world. On these web platforms, the information gets updated not according to the clocks of each user’s respective geographic location but constantly pushed worldwide to a single channel that collaborates it all. The digital era not only provides a new way of information transmission, but it also changes the behaviors and rituals for the users working around its affordances. Now users do not wake up to the flow of TV, radio and the newspaper, but catch up an immense amount of updates through social media platforms such as Twitter. Furthermore, the digital era allows a user to fabricate and assemble one’s own persona by maintaining their own social presence through blogs and social media. Users are able to manipulate space and time with the advent of remote instant communication technologies, such as smartphones, at their disposal along with the freedom to correspond at their own will. The digital era provides a ludic landscape for participants, providing them with an ability to hide, display and manipulate the representation of the self and the facts as they please. The comparison between the new digital technologies and precedent communication models, as well as mass communication and one-to-one communication models, signal the vast distinction in the ways users function within different models of communication.

References:

Innis, H., & Watson, A. (2008). The bias of communication (2nd. ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Murray, J. (2012). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Affordances in the Digital Era

The Concept of Affordances and its Utility in the Digital Era

An affordance designates the capacity of an object to support an action. J.J. Gibson (1979) explains the process of affordances in an ecological context to examine what a specific environment accords an animal in that space and the ways animals leverage the capabilities of the environment to perform certain actions. In the digital era, the term affordance expands its parameters to include the design of digital interfaces. Situating Gibson’s idea of affordance in a digital context: the environment is a virtual space created by digital technology and the animal is the human user. There is interconnectivity between how a user adapts to an object, and how an animal adapts to its environment, with the user having an impact on the object it utilizes and vice-versa. While explaining the implications for affordances, Gibson claims, “The affordance of something does not change as the need of the observer changes. The observer may or may not perceive or attend to the affordance, according to his needs, but the affordance, being invariant, is always there to be perceived” (1979, p. 140-41). The affordances of an object exist whether the user recognizes it or not. 

For instance, there could be a variety of users using the same type of smartphone interface, yet utilize different features and capabilities of it depending on their needs. It is critical to understand that an affordance is not dependent on the design or construction of an object but on the potentiality of uses that it makes possible. Thus, the introduction of affordance as a noun by Gibson (1979) has evolved in the digitalized era to designate “A situation where an object’s sensory characteristics intuitively imply its functionality and use” (Borowska, 2015). Discoverability or intuitiveness is an interesting concept that in essence adjectivizes affordance.

Initially, affordance as a term was leveraged to express “the functions that the physical properties of an object make possible” (Murray 2012, p. 4), though it ought to have an indirect link to the emotional response triggered through physical tinkering that the mind registers. Thus, the environmental and emotional qualities triggered by digital interactions can enable “meaningful engagement, motivated by the informational needs of users” (Lupton 2014, p. 133). For instance, the use of a certain application can trigger peculiar emotions. This leads us to delve deeper into elements of interconnectedness between the object and the user that sheds light on the idea of perception. It is important to note that perception of animals or users impact the way they utilize the environment or the object. In the digital age, perception works as another key factor: a skill or tool for the arena of digital affordances, because affordance tends to exist regardless of its recognition. Hence, the core to the theory of digital affordance is the object, the user, and one’s perception.

References:

Borowska, P. (2015, April 7). 6 TYPES OF DIGITAL AFFORDANCE THAT IMPACT YOUR UX. Retrieved July 2, 2015

Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Lupton, E. (2014). Beautiful users: Designing for people (p. 142). Princeton Architectural Press. Murray, J. (2012). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Art, Appropriation and New Media

Idea of Appropriation in the Digitized World

In this contemporary digitized era, Appropriation is a phenomenon that refers to utilizing old techniques and constructing a new ‘appearance’ out of it, appropriating material or technique for another or related context. Appropriation is an artistic and creative new media practice that serves as the content strategy for various purposes and projects. Some historical instances for the appropriation are Collage and Dadaism, the Sound Art, and Turntablism.

Art and Appropriation

The Collage and Dadaism are precursors to contemporary appropriation practices. The Dadaist movement refers to a movement of a revolt by certain 20th-century artists against smugness in traditional art and Western society. Their works, illustrating absurdity of purposeless machines and collages of discarded materials, expressed their cynicism about conventional ideas of form and their rejection of traditional concepts of beauty ("Dadaism - definition," 2013). Dadaist anti-art manifestations consisted of artworks made of rubbish, or out of random operations of chance. Around the same time Marcel Duchamp, often cited as the father of the post-modernism, introduced provocative artworks such as Readymade, which were frowned upon by the canon of artists consisting of re-appropriating urinal displayed as an artwork and naming it Fountain, thus challenging the avant-gardist of the time (Wood, 2003). 

Fountain, Readymade, Marcel Duchamp, 1917

The Dadaist movement got appropriated as a form of political commentary, using the activism in a form of cultural jamming: a movement that seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard “liberation” and trademark infringement (Harold, 2009). The group of activist tried to get their voice heard and bring the change for which old content had to be brought in and re-appropriated a new context for it to create certain meaning. For instance, appropriation of an image from the painting Grand Odalisque by Guerilla Girls (1989). 

Guerilla Girls, 1989

Guerilla Girls is an anonymous group of American art activists that used advertising as a means of drawing attention to their task by re-appropriating Odalisque’s face with a gorilla mask and quoting: “Do women have to be naked to get into Met. Museum?” Also, giving a statistical ratio of the number of female artists vs. male in order to raise havoc. The purpose was to bring attention to the female artist of color and exposing the domination of white males in the world of art.

Adbusters

Another example is Adbusters, a Cultural-jammers anti-consumerists campaign that published parodies of Ads in a form of collages. These ads were purposed to serve as rhetorical x-rays, revealing the true intentions of the advertisers. The effort by Adbusters became a common way for the “subvertisers” to talk back to a multimedia spectacle of corporate marketing by subverting the ads. The use of appropriation was for the ‘activism’ purposes to evoke awareness in the public.

Music, Technology, and Appropriation

A sound artist, John Oswald, an improvisational jazz musician and visual artist, coined the idea of Plunderphonics to describe his work: a form of sound collage that refers to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition ("Plunderphonics," 2013). In this sense, appropriation-based art embodies what can be considered as an appropriate reaction to the saturation of our lives with the images and sounds of popular culture.

Turntablism is another idea that falls under the domain of appropriation of technology. Turntablism is the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph turntables and a DJ mixer ("Turntablism - wikipedia," 2013). The artist plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle produces sounds, which are unique and not reproduced—the record player becomes a musical instrument (Oswald, 2013). Janek Schaefer’s ‘Tri-phonic Turntable’ (1997), invented and built a 3-tonearm record player that plays up to three records at different speeds and levels, the purpose of which was to start manipulating old vinyl to make new music (Schaefer, 2013). One of the most interesting elements of Janek Schaefer’s work is how the idea of appropriation is not simply applied to the creative misuse of media content but to media technologies themselves, which helped him to appropriate his work of building a ‘new media artwork’. The turntable, for Schaeffer, provides not simply a means to repurpose-recorded content but as something that itself is to be appropriated in creative ways.

The appropriation of technology works by considering an existing interface and questioning its purpose, followed by brainstorming of other ways the interface could be given another purpose, hence ‘re-appropriated’. As a New Media practice, appropriation uses content and technology in new ways as a means to depict ‘creativity.’

References:

Adbusters: http://www.forbiddensymbols.com/wp-content/uploads/adbusters.png

Dadaism - defination. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Dadaism

Wood, Paul. Art of 20th Century: Frameworks of Modern Art. Yale University Press, 2003. Print.

Fountain Image: http://dotcomm.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Image2.jpg

Guerilla Girls: http://uh8yh30l48rpize52xh0q1o6i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/35447_0360981719317644_b.jpg

Harold, C. (2009). Pranking rhetoric "culture jamming" as media activism. The Advertising and Consumer Culture, 349.

Plunderphonics. (2013). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plunderphonics

Turntablism - wikipedia. (2013). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntablism

Oswald, J. (2013). The official global dj ratings. Retrieved from http://dj-rankings.com/resources-70

Schaefer, J. (2013). Tri-phonic turntable. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/23556662

Digital Media and the Case of Telegraph

Telegraph’s Cruciality to our Understanding of Digital Media Culture

The scrutinization of the role of the telegraph as a media device is essential to our understanding of contemporary digital media culture. The reasons for this analysis are the emergence of the telegraph to separate the correlation between communication and transportation, which was definitely groundbreaking. The contemporary digital media being based on the transmission of signals - that makes networking possible - is a trait that first emerged with the advent of Telegraph.

Before the advent of  the Telegraph, a common way to foster communication amongst the masses, states, and nations was to send a written message across through postal service. Hence, communication was equivalent to transportation and message transmittal. In the article, Technology and Ideology: The Case of Telegraph, Carey (1989) states, “The most important fact about the telegraph is the most obvious and innocent: It permitted for the first time the effective separation of communication from transportation (p. 3).” That is significant in understanding that for the first time ever in the history of mankind individuals attained a powerful tool to deliver messages instantaneously across substantial distances. The telegraph freed communication from the constraints of geography (Carey, 1989). The technological communication device that functioned by electrically dispatching the message came to be known as the telegram, which  altered the relationship between space and time through the medium of signals.

The emergence of the Telegraph as a form of media commonly stated for “Medium”, a form of communication makes the process of transmission possible through signs and signals.  As pointed out by Carey (1989), “The telegraph was the first electrical engineering technology to focus on the central problem in modern engineering: the economy of a signal” (p. 2), which is crucial in understanding that networking lays the foundation of the contemporary digital media landscape, networking occupying a space as a necessity on an individual level. The telegraph depicts a model of an early electric digital technology that sends messages across while blurring the spatial and temporal boundaries of human interactions. This is accomplished with the help of signals and networking providing the control to the user while marking the beginning of the information society.

Reference:

Carey, J. W. (1983). Technology and ideology: The case of the telegraph.Prospects, 8, 303-325.

Digital Interfaces and the User-friendliness

User-friendliness of the Digital Interfaces and the Systems of Control

The digital interface as being transparent or user-friendly describes the device’s ease of usability, also referred to as device’s intuitiveness. In Inventing the Medium, Janet H. Murray (2012) states, “Intuitive means drawing on our unconscious expectations about how things behave, expectations that come from experience and from ideas about the world that we have internalized so deeply that we don’t think about them consciously. Intuitions about the world are often based on repeated experience or established conventions” (p. 9). This is important in understanding that transparency or intuitiveness of an interface does not emerge from a vacuum, but rather from familiarity with the interface and previous experience of the user with a similar device that causes the user-friendliness. As Murray (2012) states, “it is an appropriate design strategy to exploit the user unconscious expectations and knowledge to cue their interaction with a new artifact or process, making the experience feel intuitive rather than difficult to understand or hard to learn (p. 9), which is important for the user-friendliness of an interface that depends on substantial reliance of user’s past recognition of interface functionality. The interface as being transparent signifies its conceptual invisibility.

In order to make sense of the system of control constituted by the interface, it is crucial to understand the idea of a ‘metaphor’. In the article, Impossibility of the Interface, Fuller (2004) described the metaphor as being useful in generating a way for users to imaginally map out in advance what functional capacity a device has by reference to a pre-existing apparatus (p. 100), which is pivotal to understand that Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a metaphor, a means of controlling the machine, as well as a way of grasping its nerve. Fuller (2004) states: “An interface is a contact surface. It reflects the physical properties of the users, the functions to be performed, and the balance of power and control (p. 99)”, which is significant, for that interface is indivisible from the system it is part of. Moreover, interface grants the user the power to monitor and control various separate elements in a device while maintaining the balance by not allowing a user to ‘alter’ the elements. Interfaces compose a system of control through discipline. Fuller (2004) explains the discipline as a ‘mold’ that allows an interface to remain something discrete, neutral that eventually constructs predictability through experience. He explains ‘Control’ as a process of constant ‘modulation’ that demands the constant renewal of adherence to codes and processes. Fuller thus concludes interface to be a manipulation between discipline, predictability and vague devious implication of control. Therefore, for an interface the ‘experience’ is a by-product of a combination of transparency and control. User-friendliness is a technique disciplining the body. Eventually, we are shaped with the interfaces that come to control our bodies, and hence we adapt our bodies to the systems of control. Perhaps, power becomes something through which we adapt our bodies to a system of control. The system of control then becomes synonymous with the “natural-ness” of the interface guiding the process of navigation and getting ‘things’ done.

References:

Murray, J. H. (2012). Inventing the medium. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

Fuller, M. (2003). The impossibility of Interface. Behind the Blip, 99-100.

Digital Media and Interspaces

Reflecting Upon the article Travelling Times by John Urry (2006)

Interspaces are new forms of personal and social space that are spaced between home, work, and social life, which are a product of new social routines, as noted by Urry (2006) in his article, Travelling Times. This is essentially the time spent in the commute whether by walking, rail travel, or car travel. These interspaces were never referred to until the mobility paradigm became prevalent within the masses, an idea of getting something done during the commute time is central to the formation of these interspaces. This productivity during the commute made possible by the appropriate tools and technologies. The interspaces enable the commuters to make their time productive, whether through everyday socialization, studying, or work related content. Digital Media has dominantly contributed to the formation of these interspaces, by providing commuters with ‘ready-to-hand’ tools of productivity, such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, mobile internet sticks and Kindles.  The mobile culture has allowed for constructive time on the move enabling communication and activities.

In the Travelling Times, Urry (2006) specifies two significant forms of mobile interspaces: public spaces of railway carriages and privatized spaces of a car. As a matter of fact, the use of railway carriages as a means of transport may take substantial time in commute than privatized means of transport, but there are more devices to make the time productive on the railway since it excludes the legalities of  the attentive driving factor. Recently, with the emergence of contemporary devices to support mobile Internets such as tablets, Kindles, netbooks and smartphones, tasks such as documentation, reading, and organizing can be efficiently carried out in the sphere of railway interspaces. With regards to the domain of car, which Urry (2006) describes as another paramount of mobility system, an iron cage of modernity, which involves various activities, some legal, some illegal, to make the use of interspace through digital media.

Instead of a travel time void, the digital media technologies have made the formation of interspaces feasible with ‘ready-to-hand’ technologies of organization and communication to increasingly support a life on the move. Hence, the mobility enabled by the digital media tools prevails for both rail and car travellers as it involves arranging and rearranging events on the move. “Activities and travel flow into one another” (p. 368), which is crucial in understanding the correlation between interspaces and multitasking. The digital media devices enable the boundaries of travel time and activity time to blur. These mobile technologies populate the everyday interspaces to reorganize the day by making phone calls for commuting, gossipping, scheduling-rescheduling meetings, downloading information, meeting up, moving on, building networks, planning the next meeting and coordinating a complex choreography in time-space. “Travel time is converted into activity time” (p. 369), which is vital in understanding that the digital media tools seem to provide food for the appetite of productivity during transit time.

Reference:

Urry, J. (2006). Travelling Times. European Journal of Communication, 21(3), 357-372.