New Media Paradigm (week five)

1. What is “new” about new media

2. Online Communities

3. Communication4. Interactivity5. Today, convergence

Convergence in…• The field of study• Culture

Convergence in the New Media Field

‘A radically new history of modern culture – a view from the future when more people will recognize that the true cultural innovators of the last decades of the twentieth century were interface designers, computer game designers, music video directors and DJs -- rather than painters, filmmakers or fiction writers whose fields remained relatively stable during this historical period.’

(Lev Manovich cited in Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick (eds), The New Media Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Based on Janet H. Murray

introduction “Inventing the

Medium”

New Media• Murray traces the

‘cultural helix… echoing and opposing strands that form the DNA for cyberspace’

• Marks the converging and diverging emergence of the digital medium

(Janet H. Murray in The MIT New Media Reader p. 3)

• Murray establishes a ‘call and response’ pattern between two distinct types of human being

• Who?

Engineers and Inventors

How does it work?

Fantasists and Philosophers

What’s it all about?

• Machine design • Machine research • Machine development• Machine testing• Machine maintenance• Ergonomics

• Study the [post]human condition• The social and cultural usage of new

technology

• Methods– Analytic– Critical– Speculative

– Note: Social Sciences like to be empirical – call themselves a science

Programmer/Designer

Convergence in 1940s

• Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)

• Bush’s As We May Think (1945)

• Both responding to the limits of books and libraries

• “Old” Media

Engineer or Fantasist?

BORGES BUSH

The Forking Paths

• Borges – a librarian– a thinker– a poet– a fiction writer…

El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan

Labyrinthine Texts/Hypertexts

Choose One or Many Forking Paths

' In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the [labyrinth] the character chooses simultaneously all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.' Borges, 1941

As We May Think

• Bush was an engineer and military advisor to Roosevelt in WW2

Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Memex (1945)

Books and Machines

Nonlinear Authoring

decision making processes, user choices, levels, forks, paths…

The Fun and the Adventure

of the

Labyrinth

1960s

The diverging and converging pattern continues to grow apace in the 1960s with… engineers invention of the Internet and the realization of mass PC market

Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines (1965)

Sociology and philosophy student enrols on a computing course

In the 1970s, engineering and humanities begin to diverge

While the Internet grew apace, the humanities focused increasingly on the ideological meanings they found hidden in media content

Content Analysis

MIT Press

Not just ‘how to do’, or ‘what’s it all about’, but thinking through new media in terms of both “how” and “what”

Part TwoCultural Convergence

Convergence occurs at many levels: possibly 9

• At the technological level

• Capacity of digital production to draw together previously discrete analogue forms

• Platform convergence– TV/PC– PC/TV– Video/audio/camera/m.phone– GPS/PDA– Social network/storybook– Banana/phone ;-)

Technological Convergence in the 1990s

Industrial Convergence

Industrial Level (added value)

• telecommunications• computer• broadcast • motion picture• print • publishing industries

• Realising the market value of digital innovation – the “new”

• Production and marketing of new technologies

• Consumption of interactive media

Convergence Policy

• The logic of convergence also guides current communication policy

• New Labour’s communication policies

• Technological determinism behind the ideology of cyberspace

– Sampson and Lugo (2003) on Labour’s communication policy

Convergence Culture

Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP.

Old Media TV Star Bert

Sesame Street - Bert and Ernie - Bananaphone

Dino Ignacio 1996 High School Kid from Manila

Uploaded images to the WWWon his website “Bert is Evil”

www.bertisevil.tv/

Unabomber manifesto

Bert on Mars

1998 winner of the Weird Website Award

A bit of fun

Breaking News on TV2001

Medium of Protest Posters, Banners

“The images apparently originate from a number of web sites called Bert is Evil, which argue that Bert is actually a dark genius who is connected to several high-profile personalities. Mostafa Kamal, the production manager at Azad Products, the Dhaka shop which made the posters, told AP news agency that he had got the pictures from the internet.” BBC News 12 October, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1594600.stm

Footage of protests captured by CNN

Owners of copyright of Bert’s image notice something

“Sesame Workshop, which produces the show, said it was considering all legal avenues to prevent the misappropriation of Bert in the future.”

"Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding," the company said. "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner."

Burt and Bin Laden Scandal bla bla bla

Localized TV

Meanwhile on the WWW

Bert is Evil Goes “Viral”

A frequency of thousands of hits per minute in October 2001

(http://www.lindqvist.com/bert-bin-laden/)

Society of Imitation

Bert on CNN YouTube lampoon

Convergence Culture

• Jenkins (p. 1-4) uses this example to explain three components of convergence culture

1. Media Convergence

– Flow of content across multiple media platforms

– The media searches of migratory media audiences

Gary Hayes article

2. Media System = Participatory Culture

– Consumer active in media system – user-producer [see Axel Bruns’ produser]

– Consumers make content and connections

• Mix of work and play

– Not all participation equal• Corporation still exert

great power• Programmer/user

relation

http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/13905-participatory-culture

•"The public becomes the participant consumer-producer of 'hardware' products and 'software' information alike." McLuhan, M and Nevitt, B. (1972). Take Today: The Executive as Drop Out. New York: Harcourt, p. 4

Axel Bruns’ produser

Axel Bruns’ produser“…. within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge… the role of consumer and… end user have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance.”

“In many of the spaces we encounter here, users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role - they have become a new, hybrid, produser.” (Bruns, (2007) from the http://produsage.org/ site.

http://www.briansolis.com/

3. Collective Intelligence

• Media convergence is all about collective social interaction

3. Collective Intelligence

• Collectives produce vast quantities of information – wikis

3. Collective Intelligence

• Tapped into by corporations, but not controlled by anyone person (or persons)

• No one person (or persons) can possibly know everything (on wikis e.g.)

The Consumer is King?

Exploited by Corporations?

3. Collective Intelligence

3. Collective Intelligence

• Consumption becomes a collective process

• Control is dependent on collective processes

3. Collective Intelligence• The production of knowledge is a

collective process• Knowing everything is a collective

rather than an individual intelligence

Not self-contained

Further viewing

• LECTURES: USC Annenberg Center Speaker Series: Henry Jenkins

• Interview with Ingnacio

• http://www.bertisevil.tv/