Tag Archives: digital media

Regarding Japan Part 2: Affective Loops and Toxic Tastings

Eleven weeks have passed since the earthquake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan.  Although bodies are still being found amidst the wreckage, the rest of the world has long since moved on.   The media waves of shock, horror, heroism, heartbreak, and heart-warm continue to push and pull us through a relentless series of events: from Libya to Tuscaloosa, Kate and William to Bin Laden, Donald Trump to Strauss-Kahn.

The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks. Continue reading →

Academic Research in the Age of Facebook

Two articles prompted this post. Jonah Lehrer’s WSJ article on how easy it is for a “wise crowd” to turn into a “dumb herd,” and a NY Times piece about Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. How might this kind of filtering, networking, and pre-digesting of data affect academic research?

Eli Pariser tells us, not too surprisingly, that Google adapts to our needs, showing us stuff it thinks we are more likely to be interested in.

If you’re a foodie, says Jake Hubert, a Google spokesman, “over time, you’ll see more results for apple the fruit not for Apple the computer, and that’s based on your Web history.”

Which is fine, except that

in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

“People tend to get into this echo chamber where more and more of what they see conforms to the idea of who some software thinks they are — like a Nascar dad who likes samurai swords,” Mr. Lanier says. “You start to become more and more like the image of you because that is what you are seeing.”

Continue reading →

@_Capitalism_

I wasn’t so sure that it reflexively understood what it was doing with the whole global bio-political-cash-techno-domination thing–so it is an honor to finally hear from @capitalism_ itself on Twitter! Here @_capitalism describes its Twitterverse suchly:

“This is my house, this is where I speak my thoughts, this is where I brutalize the masses.”

In the great model of other revealers such as @MuammarLGaddafi, @OsamaInHell, and @BPGlobalPR–here is a representative sample of what @capitalism is thinking about today. Check out the transparency that can be achieve when grand narratives take it upon themselves to use the spiritual technology of the world wide web. No more investigative reporting, academic activism, or critical theory is necessary to interpret disaster capitalism. It is all right here! Zuckerberg is right, the world is becoming more transparent ‘cuz of the internets. Thanks Biz Stone and thank you @capitalism for coming clean with your intents!

_Capitalism_

Cash grabbing is an altruistic behaviors, grab that cash, put your consciousness on hold for another fifty years.  Continue reading →

Regarding Japan: On the risks and responsibilities of engagement

The day after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s northeast coast I received a well-intentioned facebook message from a friend I hadn’t spoken with in nearly a decade.  She was checking to see if I and those I care about in Japan were all right.   Although I responded graciously and positively, my own reluctance to participate in the twittering drama filled me with suspicion.  By writing to me, was she trying to claim a little piece of the action, a connection to the disaster?  Would she secretly prefer that I were directly affected so that she could share in the piquant pang of aftershock without having to suffer its enduring losses?

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?
Continue reading →

Introducing Guest Blogger Eleanor King

In a series of forthcoming posts, my friend Eleanor King is going to reflect upon the tsunami in Japan and the use of social media in attempts to resist the ways in which catastrophes are taken out of time and spun according to particular political, economic, and social trajectories that in turn shape our modes for consuming images of disasters.

Please give her a Savage welcome!

This is how others describe her:

A third year graduate student in Cultural Anthropology, Eleanor came to the University of Iowa with an M. Div from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Before landing in Iowa with her two cats, Eleanor worked a variety of non-profit jobs from facilitating social justice seminars at the Church Center for the United Nations to assisting elderly New York and displaced New Orleans jazz musicians through the Jazz Foundation of America.   Eleanor’s interests are diverse, but she continually returns to issues of ethnographic representation, technology, desire, the (gendered, racialized, sexualized) body, and new formulations of personhood and “life”. After writing her Master’s paper on voice, language ideology, and early film narration in Japan, Eleanor continues to explore the effects of new technological forms in Japan.  For her dissertation research she will be looking into the relationships, subjectivities and affects created between humans and machines, and the ethical implications of such encounters.

Strangers in our own house: Want the latest issue of CA? Go to Wiley.com, not Anthrosource

Ah, The American Anthropological Association’s sale of our intellectual property to Wiley-Blackwell just keeps getting better and better. Yesterday @AAApubs, the official Twitter presence of the AAA publication program (as far as I can tell) tweeted that a new issue of Cultural Anthropology had been published which featured an interview between Jean Comaroff and David Kyuman Kim. I thought Kim’s book Melancholy Freedom was fascinating if a little problematic — it’s an analysis of the role of hope in the work of Charles Taylor (mostly) and Judith Butler. Judith Butler’s work harbors the seed of a vaguely Christian religious ideal of hope? A very interesting and very careful and scholarly argument. Not sure what I think, but when the two reviews I’ve seen with the guy are by people as different as Jean Comaroff and Tavis Smiley, I want to learn more.

So I go to Anthrosource. Anthrosource is the online portal which all AAA members get access to which lets us read all the journals in our field — in fact, it is the main ‘member benefit’ for AAA members. The bad old days of waiting for a copy of Cultural Anthropology to be mailed to me is over, now I can read it on AnthroSource for free immediately!

Except that the latest edition of Cultural Anthropology is not on Anthrosource. Was @AAApubs wrong about the article being online? As it turns out, no: Wiley’s website is selling the current issue of Cultural Anthropology, so their customers can read the article immediately. Which doesn’t include the tens of thousands of actual anthropologists who use Anthrosource to access our journals.

So I think: maybe it just takes a couple of hours for the new journal to appear on Anthrosource. I go home, get up the next morning, and find an email from Wiley announcing that the new issue of Cultural Anthropology is online. Has everything been refreshed and uploaded? No. The article is still only available to Wiley subscribers.

I’m hopeful that this is a temporary problem and that I am just unusual in not wanting to wait 48 hours for the Internet to get itself all set up. But even if this problem is solved quickly, what does it mean to our association that our own members cannot read the journals that Wiley is flogging to its subscribers? What began as a terrible idea of outsourcing our publications to a for-profit company has turned into a situation where we are now strangers in our own house.

There’s no better way to summarize the situation than the link that’s included in @AAApubs twitter description. It ends with a URL addressed
http://www.wiley.com/go/anthrosource. When you click on the link you are directed to a page at Wiley that reads: “sorry there is no information available for this journal.”

Critical Pessimism & Media Reform Movements

The American satellite television network Free Speech TV asked me to write up a blurb for their monthly newsletter about my participatory/observatory trip with them to the National Conference on Media Reform in Boston. This is my attempt at what Henry Jenkins calls “critical pessimism”–an “exaggeration” that “frighten readers into taking action” to stop media consolidation, exclusion, and the absence of televisual diversity.

Free Speech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

From its inception in 1995, Free Speech TV’s goal has been to infiltrate and subvert the vapid, shrill and corporately controlled American television newscape with challenging and unheard voices. Fast forward to 2011, and in the age of viral videos, social media and ubiquitous computing, the same issues persist.

An excellent young pro-freedom-of-speech organization, Free Press, called all media activists to Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), April 8-10, to celebrate independent media and incubate strategies to fight the tide of corporate personhood, monopolization in communication industries, and the denial of access to the public airwaves.

These are issues FSTV has long fought, first with VHS tapes of radical documentaries shipped to community access stations throughout the nation, then through satellite carriage in 30 million homes, and now via live internet video and direct dialogues with the audience through social media.

FSTV was at NCMR in full force, covering live panels on everything from the role of social media in North African revolutions to media’s sexualization of women; developing strategic relationships with print, radio, internet and television collaborators; interviewing luminaries like FCC Commissioner Copps; and inspiring the delegates by opening up the otherwise closed and corporatized satellite television world to the voices of media activists fighting for access and diversity during a frankly terrifying period in American media freedom.

One question haunted the many stages, daises and dialogues at the NCMR: Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet – by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized – becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?

For example, while we were in the conference, the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. The mergers of Comcast and NBC-Universal and AT&T/T-Mobile loomed behind every passionate oration. And yet FSTV was there to document when FCC Commissioner Copps took the stage stating he would resist the denial of network neutrality and such monopolizing mergers.

Internationally, examples of the power and problems of the internet exist. The Egypt-based Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” had 80,000 members, many who amassed at Tahrir Square on January 26, instigating a wave of democratization that began in Tunisia – also fueled by social media – and hopefully continuing to Libya. Two days later, however, the Mubarak regime was able effectively to hit a “kill switch” on the internet and target activists using Facebook for arrest, an activity that worked against the desires of the repressive regime. At the NCMR, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous said,  “Facebook was down … so they hit the streets. It had the reverse desire and effect that the government wanted to happen.”

In 2010, Reporters Without Borders compiled a list of 13 internet enemies – countries that suppress free speech online. The U.S. wasn’t on the list, but U.S. companies Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Apple were pressured to cut digital and financial support for whistleblowing WikiLeaks. The point is obvious: A vigilant press aided by an open, uncensored and unprivatized internet are necessary yet threatened and are the focus of FSTV’s coverage at NCMR.

FSTV embodies that ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites. Today, every issue, from class inequality to ecological justice – is a media issue. However, our media sources, from journalists to internet and television delivery systems, are being co-opted by monopolizing corporations and lobbyists. As an independent, open and interactive television network, FSTV is an antidote to the problems facing free speech and democracy as more media power is centralized in fewer hands. Thankfully, as we found out in Boston, FSTV is not alone in this dangerous and difficult operation of media liberation.

Jenkins hyperbolically describes “critical pessimists” as people who “opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses”. This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production.

Participation, Collaboration, and Mergers

I work at UCLA’s Part.Public.Part.Lab where we investigate new modes of co-production and participation facilitated by networked technologies. Internet-enabled citizen journalism such as Current TV, public science like PatientsLikeMe, and free and open software development like Wikipedia are key foci. In the lab I investigate the vitality or closure of a moment of freedom and openness within cable television, news production, and internet video when the amateur and the alternative disrupted the professional and the mainstream. What are the promises and perils of social justice video in the age of internet/television convergence? Will internet video become as inaccessible, vapid, and homogenous as cable television? In our recent paper, Birds of the Internet: Towards a field guide to the organization and governance of participation, we draft a guide to identify two species flourishing in the internet ecology: what we call “formal social enterprises,” which include firms and non-profits, as well as the “organized publics” the enterprises foster or from which they emerge. These two types share a vertical or inverted relationship, power comes down from visionary CEOs and charismatic NGO directors to provoke rabid social media production, or a viable movement foments amongst grassroots makers that percolates upwards towards the formation of semi-elitist institutions. In light of this research and with a discreet fieldwork experience to think through I would like to clarify and address three types of social interaction: participation, collaboration, and mergers. Continue reading →

Is Email Obsolete?

In a very brief post John Hawks writes:

I could not possibly count the number of “Hey, John” e-mails I’ve gotten from undergraduates who were never taught any better. I’m not an e-mail snob, but some do get answered much more promptly than others.

And he provides this link on “Personal vs. Professional Email” which emphasizes establishing a respectful tone without bombast or flattery.

This model of email etiquette neatly summarizes how things were done back in the day when I was a college student (*cue wipe to flashback sequence). About sixteen years ago regular people outside a few specialized professions were just getting started on email. Folks thought of the email like it was a letter simply because there was nothing else in our lives to compare it to. It was composed sitting at a desk on a desktop PC. You started all of them with “Dear So-and-so,” and finished it with “Sincerely.”

But this is not how people email anymore. Certainly not young people who comprise the majority of my students. Their emails are composed on their cell phones in a state of distraction. The paper letter is no longer their point of reference. Tweets, status updates, and IM’s are. Informality, empty subject lines and absent greetings don’t even register as an annoyance for me. I do frequently become annoyed by the content of my students’ emails, but I see that as independent of the form of their communique.

Just as frequently I respond to their messages without hailing them in salutation or signing my name. This is the way it is done now. Even with my liberal attitude I have the damnedest time keeping in contact with some students by email. Last week in my Gen Anth class we were talking about the role of Facebook and Twitter in Libya when one woman remarked, “Email is obsolete.” For a lot of my students the bulk of their on-line lives are mediated by social networks and IM. No wonder its hard for me to get in touch with them! Email’s days are numbered.

I get what the link Hawks provides is saying. I don’t send subjectless, greetingless emails to publishers for instance – and yes, at some point I had to learn this behavior. By Hawks own measure he’s no snob and I don’t question his commitment to his students. But academia is already crowded with rules of form and rituals of decorum. You gotta pick your battles and email etiquette is like adding an extra layer of stodginess to something that already has to contend with being cast as old fashioned.

Social Media: From Meaning to Presence

by Jenny Cool, USC

I sometimes joke that I’ve been working in new media so long I can’t believe we still call it that. But longitude is no laughing matter in an age of time-space compression: and the persistence of novelty no accident. Yet, there is much to be gleaned from histories of the new. At least that’s what I contend in taking up Adam’s invitation to post about my 10-year study of Cyborganic, an influential group of early web geeks—producer-consumers of new forms, social imaginaries, and practices of networked communication and techno-sociality. Cyborganic spored and faded away by 2003, yet many of the genres, imaginaries, and practices that emerged out of this milieu (San Francisco’s South of Market area in the 1990s) have since become predominant on the Internet. Cyborganic members brought Wired magazine online; led the open source Apache project; and created dozens of Internet firms and projects, from bOING bOING to Craig’s List and Twitter. Continue reading →

On Waxing Nostalgic about Ordinary Video

by Patricia G. Lange, USC

How do you define “ordinary” video makers? Given that online video is being generated at phenomenal rates (YouTube 2010), it is not surprising that studies are tackling previously ignored sets of everyday video practices. A number of important and insightful studies have been concerned with a special kind of the everyday, that which focuses on the so-called “ordinary” video maker. Such a figure is often ostensibly defined as a non-professional in the film industry. They have neither been trained nor are participating in mainstream film production or critique.

The focus on the ordinary video maker is initially a logical one, given that many researchers would like to understand how people learn to make videos, why they share them, and how everyday video impacts online attention economies in comparison to professional works. It some quarters, the focus on the “ordinary” is a reaction to what some see as well-covered fandom studies that focus on advanced amateurs producing cool stuff. However, it is time to re-examine what is meant by the “ordinary” and to consider how such a mythic figure threatens to reify the binary between the novice and the professional that grass-roots video making has long had the potential to challenge. It is time to explore lenses, such as collective nostalgia, that appeal to many different types of video makers. Researching generational or cultural forms of nostalgia and its influence on video making could provide a wealth of insight into the cultural desires and practices of particular social groups.

Continue reading →

Thinking about the importance of communications “revolutions.”

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There has been a lot of talk about the importance of social media in recent world events. See for instance, here, here, and here. Some of the more astute commentators have referred to earlier technological revolutions and their impact on television: usenet, fax machines, television, cameras, telegraph, and even the printing press. One technology, however, always seem to get left out, maybe because it seems too “obvious,” and that is literacy.

This is too bad because there is a great literature on the subject. A user named “dinalopez” has put together a wonderful bibliography on WorldCat – a list which contains many of my favorite articles on the subject, as well as many I haven’t read. I wanted to draw upon this critical literacy studies literature to make three points about technology and social change.

Continue reading →

Culturomics?

Could social scientists and humanities scholars be replaced by bots?

From the December 17, 2010, issue of the journal Science comes a News of the Week piece “Google Opens Books to New Cultural Studies.” It sketches the ongoing research of a mathematician, Erez Lieberman Aiden, who is studying word frequencies using all of Google Books as his data source. Here’s the abstract of the technical publication.

By analyzing the growth, change, and decline of published words over the centuries, the mathematician argued, it should be possible to rigorously study the evolution of culture on a grand scale.
…
The researchers have revealed 500,000 English words missed by all dictionaries, tracked the rise and fall of ideologies and famous people, and, perhaps most provocatively, identified possible cases of political suppression unknown to historians. “The ambition is enormous,” says Nicholas Dames, a literary scholar at Columbia University.”

Just what the humanities needs! More studies of domination and resistance.

Continue reading →

Cultural Contradictions of Net Neutrality

“Free, open, keep one web,” World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s is heard provoking us in the 15 second video above.

How can you champion anything that has the totalizing vibe to it as Berners-Lee’s One Web thing? Doesn’t it sound like One Web=One World=First World? Isn’t this One Web pitch a commercial for the global hegemony of Silicon Valley made technologies, standards, and corporations? Wouldn’t a greater diversity of broadband and wifi options be more advantageous to cultural diversity than merely One? The controversial and slightly ridiculous claim I will make now is that the tiering or diversification of the internet, such as we saw yesterday at the FCC, might foreshadow the fragmentation of the One Web into many ethnic and linguistic webs in the future.

Continue reading →

Anonymous vs. The Guardian

[This is a guest post by Gabriella Coleman. Gabriella is an assistant professor in the Dept of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Her work examines the politics of digital media.]

So one of the reasons I was motived to write a post about the aesthetics of Anonymous was due, in part, to some problematic representations of the phenomenon in the mainstream press. The Guardian, in their latest article on Anonymous, managed again to offer up what is at best a crime-show television grasp of reality, when it comes to social communicative norms in digital spaces. I know that sounds especially harsh but I guess since I was misquoted, this time it is now personal.

One of the reporters emailed me letting me know he enjoyed the Savage Minds post and asked some questions, which I answered but none of that material made it in there. They instead provide this summary of my “position” providing a link to an Atlantic piece I wrote last week. They write:

Members of the group and outside experts such as Gabriella Coleman, a New York University professor who has studied Anonymous, estimate that up to 1,000 people are members of the broader network, who make their computers available to co-ordinated cyber attacks.

The irony is that my article they link to actually deconstructs the idea of a group and members. So they  use language of groups and members that I otherwise challenge in the piece they link to!! Also the numbers do not match at all: I never ever told them that up to 1,000 people are members of the broader network. The Atlantic mentions that thousands were involved, again not using a language of members or group. As to the theme of the article—hierarchy–to be sure, the issue of leaders and power must be interrogated and  there have bee discussions of this very topic among some Anonymous, but I would hardly call it a rigid hierarchy much less characterize it as some “group” where 1% hold the power and the other 99% are useless chaff.

You can read more about how some of anon has received the piece here.