Bringing it all together

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The path this course has taken throughout the semester has been instrumental in my developing a deeper understanding of the role of technology in the intersection of communication and society as a whole. While this technology is visible in all parts of our life, too often my own consumption of it has been superficially and intellectually shallow. This course’s study has shown me that new media and technology merit serious discussion, study, and understanding.

Primarily, through this course I was able to stand back from my day-to-day relationship with technology through some intense academic readings, two papers, and good class discussion. For example, the Lister book’s critical examination of New Media was a rigorous analysis of the qualities and effect of new media. This set off the differences in harsh contrast between old and new media, and for me this showed the possibilities for social transformation existing in New Media. What are some of the ways that New Media is not new?

Our course’s focus on separate New Media applications, issues, and subcultures showed some of the potential for new forms and pathways of social interactions. The courses on the Politics of New Media ( the obvious and the not-so-obvious) clearly delineated how power structures on the internet can be formed and enforced, but in some ways the reality of New Media allow for organization, subversion and inversion of power structures as never before.

Awareness of the ubiquity of New Media in turn raised my awareness of the unseen power structures built around an information-based economy. My final project about network neutrality, for example, helped me trace the systems of power based around who controls access to the Internet and how their interests might deny or throttle others’ access to the Internet. What are some examples that you know of government or corporate interests shutting down websites or users?

In my Communication 150 course, we learned about the Sapir-Worfe hypothesis. The basic premise was that a person’s thoughts and perception of the world was influenced by the confines of their language (http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/whorf.html). Although the extent of this effect is highly contended, I have come to understand it as a component of understanding any communication. I believe, then, that digital literacy proposes a new way of thinking, a new language for users to absorb. The next twenty years will see a new generation of digitally literate citizens who will be empowered by New Media to communicate, challenge power, and create content. This is what I have come to believe from our course.

New Media Economics and Prosumer Response

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In this week’s reading, Lister discusses the history of new media economics, the social understanding of new media spaces, and the distribution of new media technologies and access. This week’s reading brought to mind an intersections of new media and economics that I’ve been personally interested in: the (newer) browser wars and other wars for common desktop applications.

On pages 190-192, the book gives a brief overview of the economic path created by IBM versus the one created by Apple. That is, IBM created a very open system in which hardware and software could be developed without violating any held patents, while Apple’s system generally excluded any non-corporate development or innovation. This economic precondition led to IBM’s eventual loss of market share while the software-focused Microsoft grew more and more powerful.

I think the text could go further to discuss the impact of Microsoft’s hegemony on software applications for IBM/Windows PCs through the late 90’s and today; specifically, the proliferation of new, user-created browsers to replace the default Microsoft Internet Explorer. Through the 90’s, as Microsoft captured the market for IBM-based software, its associated applications like Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and others incrementally gained ground as bundled software.

New browsers like Opera and Firefox were created as users found the default products to be slow, cumbersome, lacking in features, and, in the case of I.E., posing a security risk. In my opinion, Microsoft fell into a pattern of updating an old product while ignoring its user base. Newer versions of Internet Explorer have integrated features pioneered by Firefox, and Firefox still innovates in response from the needs of its users. What other alternatives to common Windows applications do you use? Are they created by a community or by another company?

The popularity of the Firefox browser was reinforced when millions downloaded its newest version, Firefox 3, this summer. As a user myself, the new version featured several innovations designed to help users bookmark, provide security, and more efficiently access the Internet. Although it holds a small market share compared to I.E., Firefox shows that users can create better content where larger companies are economically satisfied without paying attention to the user’s needs.

Another example of Microsoft’s software ubiquity being questioned can be found in the new release of the new Open Office, a free suite of software designed to replace Microsoft Office. As open source code, users can see and edit the program in order to improve it and submit these changes to the community. The newest version released counted 3 million downloads, and you can read the details of this release at http://www.pcworld.com/article/152768/openoffice_open_source.html?tk=rss_news.

This shows another example of users moving to unseat the dominant market player with free or low-cost software. This becomes more and more viable as technology is globalized and more users enter the system. It gives me hope that this might be the area that more utopian visions of technology are realized.

Discursive Identity and the shaping of online identity

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In this week’s reading, Lister identified the role of technology in development of identity. First Lister describes the nature of identity in terms of a social construction. For Lister, the individual absorbs identities from groups, organizations, and social communication with others. From there, the identity is constructed as the individual deploys the characteristics included in that individual’s understanding of the identity.

Identity is, Lister continues, a discursive action. Instead of a one-way street of the society imparting a meaning on the individual, an identity itself can be re-defined by its users. It is a dynamic quality that any members of a society can continually re-define and participate in. Are there any identities which are not up for re-definition by its users?

I see the growth of new media as further democratizing and distributing the power of identity creation and accelerating the ease of acquisition of identity. Online communities, where groups of users can congregate and share in an aspect of their identities, allow users to shape what it means to have a certain identity. For example, my roommate participates in the Dave Matthews Band fansite http://www.antsmarching.org/. For a band with a huge fan base, the website allows fans to congregate online and together shape what it means to be a fan of the Dave Matthews Band. This is a discursive identity What other websites or types of identities are shaped online?

Literacy: Old and new

The reading for this week was Scott McCloud’s Reading Comics. Although the title draws one’s attention to the specific medium of comic books, I think that the reading spoke to outside the medium as well as our understanding of communication itself. Being a graphic novel enthusiast myself, I read the title of the book and figured that it was below my own experience. I did head about his book on the NPR program To The Best of Our Knowledge (http://www.wpr.org/book/010121b.htm for the episode) and this piqued my interest somewhat. Moreover, after approaching the reading with the question of what kind of literacies new media require, I find that that the medium of the comic has more to do with our hypertext, nonlinear new media than static old media. How do others feel comics fall in on the new media/old media argument?

The main thrust of my idea is that comics are arranged as a series of still images and that there is something different and empowering about how we coax meaning and narrative out of these images: by filling in the blanks. For example, our imagination must fill in the blanks between two images, illustrating and assuming. The power comes from reading these in sequence, in our choice to do so, and that is fundamentally different from old media textual linearity.

In a similar way, one could understand the nonlinearity of new media in the same way. In many ways, the only way to understand a narrative or follow a coherent story is to experience new media in a certain way, or that the narrative (accurate or inaccurate) you construct is a result of the information you obtain from the new media. What are some other ways that comics can help us understand what kind of literacies we require?

Reading Reaction 2

This week’s reading focused more intensely on reconciling the differences between new media and old media, the reasons for this change, and how society has reacted to these changes. Specifically, the reading focuses on a few notable thinkers and their take on the nature of these new media. I’d like to focus my posting on  the way new media are worked out and point at an example of this.

I liked reading about the way society reacted to innovations in media, and the way that this is a unifying, but not necessary, theme in new media. On pages 60-61, the text analyzes the at-times bipolar ways that society experiences new media. Innovations that stand to replace or reposition old technology can provoke hostility from those who have grown accustomed to or powerful from, but at the same time carry an utopian promise that allows society to identify the faults of the past.  Does anyone thing that the discussion constructed about the Internet has escaped these tendencies or followed along with them?

In class we brought up that often new media fall into society’s previous roles for the old media. For example, we still use the internet for reading the news, as it replaces old media it doesn’t necessarily create a new category of culture. In the reading, it mentions that evaluating new media includes seeing the values society has created for the old media, and then understanding how these values gained good and bad cultural connotations. In my opinion, looking at newspapers, society has created values for journalism, including social justice and informing the public about their government. I find it exciting that a website like www.propublica.org exists. It is a non-profit online watchdog newspaper, employing journalists to do stories independent of old-media publications. Can anyone else point to new media embodying some values of old media (maybe some values that old media has abandoned but have been picked back up by new media)?

Reading Reaction

The first reading out of New Media: A Critical Introduction undertakes a difficult task: it seeks to define the term New Media, its components, its characteristics, its similarities and differences with “old” media, and begins to cover some of the criticism and scholarly dialogue about New Media. The difficulty in going through the process was the re-examination. An analogy could be drawn to a fish re-examining the water in which it’s swimming.

I was very interested in the teleological understanding of media in general. The reading on this subject (1.4) reminded me of the course CMUN 160, in which we studied the evolution of communication forms, from language, to the written word, through books, film, and finally the internet and new media. Although Weibel’s levels of progress originate at the photograph (47), there are some interesting correlations to be found elsewhere. For example, looking at 14^th-century illuminated biblical manuscripts, the narrative on these pages is distinctly nonlinear and gives a consideration to aesthetics, with images overlaid, borders drawn in, and so forth. By comparison, a random Wikipedia article (considered on the web to be a great example of hyperlinking) shows some similar features to the illuminated manuscripts,

for example:

and

A Typical Wikipedia Page

While there certainly has been a jump forward in technology, one must admit that websites and hyperlinking might not be a “completely new category or kind of thing” (38) but an adaptation of a practice already vetted hundreds of years ago. Does anyone else see the comparison I am drawing, or should websites be seen as something new altogether?

One critique I have of the analysis was the attention paid to understanding or imagining the usage of “VR” technology. While an enticing concept, the idea of a physically simulated world is technologically far off and seems in many ways to be something like flying cars or robot servants- fantasies created in earlier eras of technology that fail to materialize. In an interview on PRI’s To The Best of Our Knowledge (fast forward to 26:00 to hear his bit), Dr. Tom Bollestorff talks about what makes games like Second Life so immersive. Their failure to simulate the physical sensations of living in a virtual reality pale in comparison to the social and communicative experience players participate in. Put in other words, the players in World Of Warcraft don’t need to feel the sword in their hands or smell the damp cave air in order to be immersed in the virtual world. Do others think that inhabitants of these and other virtual worlds really need the physical sensations reproduced, or is a “virtual VR” the future of electronic world?

Hello world!

Typing live from LT 410, in CMUN 340.