Flowing Static

I was recently asked to invent a buzzword that described trends in today's media. I came up with "flowing static".

Since the arrival of camera phones and the internet, advertisements are no longer confined to the physical spaces agencies place them in. A billboard or magazine ad can easily be photographed and shared across the world instantly via text messaging and email. A TV ad posted online can be watched anywhere at any time, rather than at a specific time on a specific TV channel. This means distribution is no longer entirely in the hands of the producer.

This is flowing static, the digital flow of something that is physically static and bound. Ripping out an advert from a magazine is not as effective as online sharing because you can only ever have that one copy that you ripped out. Scanning, on the other hand, is tedious compared to snapping a picture with your phone. Recording a TV ad on videotape is also time consuming since you have to record it in real time for its whole duration. With online videos you can just copy the link and paste it anywhere you like.

For the first time, audiences are distributing adverts by creating thousands of digital copies of the same ad using many different devices and platforms. Ad agencies can now track flowing static in real time to see how ads are shared and discussed. It also allows agencies to follow how their ad will impact individuals’ decisions to purchase goods being advertised: for example, how likely people are to buy something if an ad for it was shared with them by a friend versus if they saw the ad simply posted on a website

This trend is not confined to mass media. It is also happening in people's personal photographic practices: family photos can now be shared all over the world with every family member (as long as they have some sort of digital device to access them from), for example. I believe the digital reproduction of photographs (be they old paper ones that have been digitised or recent ones that have many copies on many different platforms and devices) is having an effect on our sense of temporality and place: I'll discuss this in more detail in a later post.

My thought for the day

I just read a great article about the importance of reading fiction, particularly for males as it helps develop their ability to empathise, and it commented on the fact that online communication has influenced the decline of empathy. I often hear discussions of how, because of the internet and telephones, people spend less time with each other in person, making people less social, less connected, more introverted, etc. I wouldn't disagree with this entirely, but I don't think it's as straight forward as that. I don't believe that we are either social or anti-social, extroverted or introverted. I think technology has certainly transformed the way we socialise, with some ways of socialising becoming less popular, but, at the same time, with new ways of forming and strengthening relationships coming to life. 

From this, I'm interested in the question of empathy in the digital world. Does digital media affect our ability to empathise? Empathy is a very important part of being a social human: it is what holds people together. If anyone has any insights into this question, do please share. This is something I'd like to spend some time researching and thinking about.

How consumers can become the producers

A while back I saw this video on the 'Kinect Effect' and it really got me thinking about the power consumers have over products. "Kinect hackers" are rewriting the rules of Kinect, finding new ways of using it, which, in turn, transforms the product into something different. By consuming products, consumers are becoming the producers. This is powerful.

Think of Apple's app store too, which created the opportunity for anyone to produce a product that could be purchased anywhere in the world at the click of a button. To some extent, Facebook works on a similar logic, in that its users are actually producing the content they are consuming: Facebook is free partly because users are not the ones consuming Facebook, Facebook is the one consuming users (this, of course, is up for debate). Open source has created a new way of approaching consumption and the relationship between consumer and producer. I wonder, where does Marx fit into the discussion on open source? Are his arguments still relevant?

The source of this change in the role of consumers is not necessarily the consumers however. People have always found uses for products different to those intended by the producers. What has changed is the producer's attitude. Microsoft, for example, embraced what was happening to Kinect - this ad is proof in itself. But what questions does this raise about intellectual property? Do Kinect's new uses belong to Microsoft? To its users? Or to everyone?

Reading

Coming of Age in Second Life (2008) by Tom Boellstorf

"In this book I take Second Life's emergence as given and work to analyze the cultural practices and beliefs taking form within it.....Although some insightful research has claimed that online culture her-alds the arrival of the “posthuman,” I show that Second Life culture is pro-foundly human. It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our “real” lives have been “virtual” all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is hu-man “nature” to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being. Cutlure is our “killer app”: we are virtually human....Virtual worlds do have signifi-cant consequences for social life....In virtual worlds we are not quite human—our humanity is thrown off balance, considered anew, and reconfigured through" (5)

I've only just started, but I'm loving it already.

Digital Anthropology Reflections

For some time now, I have been asked by many what Digital Anthropology is. A valid question. One that, as I begin my masters, I realise is more complex and far reaching than can be expressed in a sentence or two. Digital Anthropology is an ongoing discussion in my eyes. Yes, it could be briefly summarised for conversational purposes, but that would only leave the listener with a few tantalising words about technology, culture and communication without revealing any significant insights. Yesterday I read an essay entitled 'Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept' by Leo Marx, which discussed the pivotal question of what technology is and how we define it. Here are some excerpts, which I think contribute to the explanation and discussion of Digital Anthropology:

"The generality of the word [technology] - its lack of speciality, the very aspect which evidently enabled it to supplant its more explicit and substantial precursors - also made it peculiarly susceptible to reification. Reification, as the philosopher George Lukacs famously explained, is what occurs when we endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or things. It thereby acquires, as he put it, "a 'phantom-objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people."....By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human - socioeconomic and political - relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purpose....We amplify the hazardous character of the concept by investing it with agency - by using the word technology as the subject of active verbs....Here we tacitly invest a machine with the power to initiate change, as if it were capable of altering the course of events, of history itself. By treating these inanimate objects - machines - as causal agents, we divert attention from the human (especially socioeconomic and political) relations responsible for precipitating this social upheaval. Contemporary discourse, private and public, is filled with hackneyed vignettes of technologically activated social change - pithy accounts of "the direction technology is taking us" or "changing our lives"....Technology, as such, makes nothing happen." (Marx, 2010, 576-577).

This is incredibly thought provoking. What a loaded statement: technology makes nothing happen! Wow. Do I agree with this statement? Maybe, maybe not, maybe half-way. But this is some of what I'll be delving into these next twelve months.

Source:

Marx, L., 2010. Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. In: Technology and Culture 51. 561-577.