The historical argument in support runs as follows (in a necessarily simplified form): there have been four periods in human history where fundamental transformations in the media have merited the term ‘revolution’. The first, the invention of the printing press, turned Europe upside down and lead to (amongst other things) the reformation, the establishment of some vernacular languages as standard languages (which in turn was a pre-requisite for the emergence of nationalism) and the rise of mass literacy. The second, the invention of the telegraph and later the telephone, was an innovation in two-way media which arguably facilitated the spread of empire through its ability to increase the power of the rulers over the ruled, integrated and centralised economies and led to the modern news business through the use of ‘wire’ agencies. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the development of satellite technologies in the 1960s that the telephone displaced the telegraph as a two-way communication medium of choice. Recorded media other than text had to await Marconi’s successful attempt to transmit radio signals across the Atlantic in 1901 which subsequently evolved into the most ubiquitous mass medium ever known, the radio. The term ‘broadcasting’ entered the media lexicon in the 1920s and, together with the press, became the principle means by which the state communicated with a mass of citizens. The fourth transformation which completed the media landscape that I grew up with, was the transmission of radio waves as images through the air. The birth of the television in the late 1920s led towards the two models of media ownership which dominated the twentieth century: the public service model in the UK and the marketplace model of the US.

These transformations beginning five hundred and fifty years ago led to what Clay Shirky refers to as an affordance asymmetry. In other words: those media which are good at creating conversation are not good at creating groups whilst those media that are good at creating groups, are not good at creating conversations. This is one of the reasons why the area of communication studies was so often broken into ‘interpersonal communication’, ‘group’, and ‘mass communication’. If you want to have a conversation you have to have it with another person. If you want to address a group you create a message and then send (broadcast) it to the group over the air or in the press. All of the ways that humans appropriated communication media in the twentieth century in order to self-organise collective action on their own behalf were shaped by these conditions. And then … the internet. The fifth radical transformation in mediated communication, which began only twenty years ago, has introduced a fundamental innovation in the affordances of the media through which we self-organise. The technical architecture of the internet supports interpersonal, group, and mass communication at the same time. Manuel Castells has a name for it: ‘mass self-communication’. And we have just begun the process of trying to understand it.

That process involves understanding the three major areas of change ushered in by the internet. Although intimately connected, all call for detailed study. The first is that communication technologies now facilitate many-to-many relationships in horizontal local/global networks. This goes far beyond the ‘cc’ capacity of email and the transformations it is beginning to create have yet to be fully realised. The second is that because everything (that can) is in the process of migrating to the network, every medium sits next to every other medium, facilitating (and sometimes forcing) a process of multi-modal convergence. There is little sense in suggesting that we watch the internet in the same way we watch the television. Increasingly we live ‘with’ the internet as an over-arching fabric where all forms of communcation are articulated into a composite, interactive, digital hypertext with enormous consequences for social organisation and cultural change. In a converged media landscape media become less an experience and more a site for the coordination of group-based communication. We are communicating more and to more people than in any other time in human history. Such a landscape leads to the third major change: traditional categories such as ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ have become blurred. Bruns calls the new category ‘produsage’; Gilmore talks of ‘the former audience’. The same equipment that allows me to consume media now also allows me to produce media. This is a radical change that is creating tension (opportunity v fear) in social, political and cultural arenas.

So, in just twenty years a media landscape has developed which is utterly different to the one I grew up with in the twentieth century. This twenty-first media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. It’s leading to changes in social, political and economic organisation. It’s forging new and changing older relationships between people. It’s undermining traditional power structures and creating opportunities to create new, more egalitarian values. Social movements and agents of political change have always re-programmed communication networks to bring new values, new ideas and change to people. The technologies of communication now available afford levels of autonomy never before experienced by such movements. ‘The Digital Commons’, ‘User-Generated Content’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’ are just some initial glimpses at the ways networked communication can enhance the opportunities for social change. What these technologies of communication don’t do however, is define the content and purpose of such change. Life is more complex than that, more interesting and more challenging to understand.

Now, I’m all for the shattering of the illusion that the self is a coherent, unified, subject, and using the result to modify the ways in which we live. I just don’t think that playing with multiple avatars is actually the tool that can do the shattering or that the adoption of multiple avatars can lead to the forging of a healthier self in harmony with its world. It’s a Disney World self, a solipsistic fantasy game that leads, well, to other games, other fantasies. And of course, lets not forget that Disney World is a corporation and the avatars it offers (no matter what level of customisation is allowed) are products used to generate profit. To think that a Facebook profile is not a product to sell to the highest bidder for advertising rights, is to miss an important trick in contemporary ‘social’ media.

And so to Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation by Beth Coleman which seems to be bringing Turkle’s earlier arguments up to date. Instead of multiple screens, virtual reality and RL (real life), Coleman offers X-reality (cross reality) to suggest that our online experiences are actual and fulfilling and that they augment the self in ways that are empowering. The key is in the avatar and the ways in which, with the rise of the ‘network of things’ (ie the world as a linked database), our ability to act on the world will be increased:

Coleman calls the next cycle of media technologies to enter our culture “pervasive media” and thinks that an emergent practice of X-reality will develop out of “everyday experience of augmented reality and extended sites [of] agency. This will help us to see ourselves not as passive consumers but as agents, with a capacity to change the world around us. THE Review

The reason I’m going to buy the book is not because I’m convinced by this snippet or the review of it in general. What I’ll read it for is to see if she’s able to deal with Turkle’s recent cautionary tone or to offer some counter-arguments to Jaron Lanier’s rather magisterial rant in You Are Not A Gadget. In other words, can she convince me that our ‘avatars’ are more than simply multiple choice identities which give away our precious content for nothing to aggregators, advertisers and corporations? Or that we are ‘augmented’ by these online experiences in ways that enable us to have a healthier connection to our worlds or change them for the better?

I’m not holding my breath …

At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.

via the Independent

“Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

via Slavoj Žižek speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Transcript | The Parallax | Impose Magazine.

Lee’s remarkable image is simultaneously moving and troubling. By peeling away the superficial veneer of modern British society, it forces the viewer to evaluate their own position in the social hierarchy of the age and confront some uncomfortable truths.

It is a gritty, poetic image which tells a long and painful story. You can see it below (bottom row, fourth from the left) as part of Lee’s flickr gallery. Click through to that gallery and view the series as a full screen slideshow to really appreciate the beauty in the detail.

Come on, I’m sure you can beet me!!

 
via The Leonard Lopate Show
 

The series won an National Magazine Award in 2011.

An articulate polemic, his debate with Tony Blair, Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? is a magisterial demolishing of the Blair rhetoric with acerbic wit and tight logic. In his interview with Jeremy Paxman, he’s an exemplar of deft and accurate use of the English language.

I haven’t yet read his collected essays Arguably, published in October. I will.

Here’s a video essay that explores one of Speilberg’s characteristic cinematic techniques showing how that mastery has been built throughout his work and how it continues to be very carefully constructed. Particularly interesting is the way Speilberg turned the technique onto itself in the widely panned film ‘AI’.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

via metafilter

The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.

People have worried for a long time about the impact of hard and soft porn on children (see Young People, Sex and the Media for a good summary). Now here’s a slightly different focus about the ways in which lads magazines and hard core porn legitimise, justify and diffuse sexists attitudes and are becoming substitutes for a credible education about sex and relationships.

In Make Love Not Porn Cindy Gallop argues that hardcore porn is shaping and distorting the way that many young men and women think about sex and intimacy and that it’s time to debunk the myths that are routinely propagated by an expanding (online) industry. It’s these myths that constitute the knowledge about sex and which find expression in the lads mags: myths which are subsequently taken on board by young people and which can be damaging and demeaning.

For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline.

The only way to ensure that languages don’t die is to see them being taken up by new generations. That’s lead many to conclude that with so many of the cool things being invented in one of  the top ten languages of the world, the other thousands of languages that currently exist are destined to disappear. After all, if your kids don’t take up your language, that’s a sure sign that it’s not going to last very long. But, if some cool technologies could be programmed in that language which the kids will be desperate to use, then perhaps the language can survive.

The word N'ko written in the N'ko alphabet

So the story of N’Ko, a standard writing system for Mande languages, a group of related languages spoken by about 35 million people in West Africa. It was invented in 1949 but, because of the difficulty of building typewriters for N’Ko (the alphabet was created from scratch by a man called Solomani Kante), it seemed destined to be used only by a small elite.

Then came the internet and it looks like N’Ko could be the means by which those languages will continue to exist.

Read more about N’Ko and the way the internet is saving languages: Everyone Speaks Text Message – NYTimes.com.

Afghanistan – touch down in flight from Augustin Pictures on Vimeo.

via the Atlantic

Throughout her career she has tirelessly worked to dismantle the prejudices and stigmas associated with both autism and dyslexia and highlighted the compensatory strategies of those who effectively work with their autism or dyslexia.

In a good course students should have the opportunity to practice leadership, gain knowledge, and be autonomous. Students should be provided ways to get social attention and opportunities to play and compete with each other. But this is not enough. Students should have the opportunity to make connections to deep philosophical issues, too: to obey moral codes, improve society and have connections to past and upcoming generations.

via The Wisdom of Motivated Crowds | FLOSSE Posse.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Superstition quickly became an iconic funk track, perhaps the iconic funk track, which came out of Motown in the 1970s. After a 1972 tour with the Rolling Stones in the US introduced Stevie Wonder to a largely white audience, Superstion went to number one in the US charts, his second number 1. His first was as ‘Little Stevie’, nine years previously in 1963.

This was the first time that the bright, fractious, sound of the Hohner Clavinet – basically an amplified clavichord – had been used to such effect in a funk track. For years I thought that it was basically two clavinet parts placed to the extremes of the stereo mix.

And then I came across this analysis by someone who used the audio production software Protools to dissect Wonder’s multi-track master recording of the song by isolating all of the tracks and putting them back together one by one.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It’s a great lesson in how the genius of this groove is built: how the sum of the parts adds something special so that, no matter how many times you hum it to yourself, when you hear it on the original recording, its always capitivating.

And a bonus track? Here’s Stevie Wonder recording one of those Clavinet tracks in the studio.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

See more captiviting rebranding at http://www.guerillarebranding.com.

via MetaFilter

a. using a webcam

b. leaving your computer on

you should watch this.

Webcam from ZBros Productions on Vimeo.

And if you are still unsure about how prescient this short is, have a look at How to: spy on the Webcams of Your Website’s Visitors. Oh, and don’t forget to turn your webcam off …

That film was made by hijacking CCTV cameras. A group of young kids bought some relatively cheap and small devices which can sniff out signals broadcast by wireless CCTV networks. Using the surveillance images captured, the kids then created their own. Not only is it a great way of making free videos, it’s also a comment on the ubiquitous surveillance which is now an invisible part of all our lives. Have a look at MediaShed for more information on the form and how to make it.

Nor do you need a camera to make photographic images. Google street view has, since 2007, photographed street views of cities and urban areas in over 30 countries and is still crawling around streets taking high definition images in places as far apart as Israel, Lativa and Peru. Those images are now being used by photographers to produce landscape photographs such as this from Aaron Hobson:

If you want to follow up how Google street view has been the focus for a number of art projects, this article from Wired is a good place to start.