Dream Time: My Nightmare A couple of weeks ago I had my first VR experience using a headset array. This was at the Leicester City Gallery where I encountered Jo Fairfax's Dream Time art work. Jo wanted to create art where the viewer becomes a participant. It consists of a chair that suspends the user in mid-air and where switches in the arm rest allow the chair to be swivelled and motion through the computer-generated screens in the headset to be simulated. Far from a sense of weightlessness and flight, the heavy headset made me feel like a lab rat being experimented on. I had to wear a lab coat and gloves to protect the equipment from my human contamination. You can try the experience yourself at the City Gallery until March 4th, but you have to book a session. Dream Time was made possible by a £40,000 grant from NESTA. This is great organisation that funds people who are bringing together science, technology and the arts in interesting ways.

12.2.06 13:06 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

Term One: A Summary On this module we have been attempting to explore and analyse the role of digital technology in the contemporary media industries. We have been using blogging as a form of critical technical practice to think about how digital technologies are being used. So what have we learned so far?     As critical technical practitioners we should think about and investigate the social significance of new technologies and explore and evaluate them by using them to make things. We began by considering the idea of ‘being digital’, how we live with and use digital technologies, taken from the title of Nicholas Negroponte's book about the future of digital society. Blogs are an example of a cultural practice that has been facilitated by new technologies. Blogging is a form of social communication relying on reading and writing. It requires a dedication of time and purpose as an extension of literate society and forms of writing such as journalism and story telling. Electronic reading and writing may extend what people already do as readers and writers, but blogging may also turn non-writers into writers. The emergence of the computer has enabled entirely new ways to produce media, as well as ways of helping and expanding established methods and techniques.fficeffice" />     The basis of the ‘new’ in new media, then, is the onset of human-machine interaction of digital computation and network connectivity. The internet is a continuation and transformation of electronic communication that extends the ‘message’ of media (Marshall McLuhan). Television has turned us into audiences making us part of its content as part of the process of collapsing space and time. The internet exposes and extends us further as we make ourselves its content. The message of the internet is that we spend time making media as part of a personalised global communication network. This is a new alignment of what we can do with technology and what technology does to us. We become electronically and virtually connected to others through making ourselves the content of the internet in the lines we write and the photographs we post, and so on.     To study digital technology as new media we must refer to the concept of mediation; the way that media structure our experience and how media technologies are part of a wider social and cultural process of communicating and making meaning. In other words, how digital technologies re-structure the way that we experience the world and how we make digital media significant through its use. This is not simply a question of a complete break with the past, but instead it is a technological transformation of established and continuous media forms. Blogs are new media forms but they are remediations (Bolter and Grusin) of writing since as McLuhan has suggested, the content of any medium is always another medium. The important question becomes then to consider how digital technologies contribute to the transformation of existing media. Blogging makes the personal website genre more dynamic and invites a dialogue with readers at a degree that print cannot sustain. Blogging is electronic publishing, but with no guaranteed or necessarily targeted audience. It is writing ‘out loud’.     Mediation also helps to think through the operations of virtuality and cyberspace as conceptions of human-computer interaction.  Virtual reality (VR) refers to a sense of experiencing the world (a structure of experience) typically through computer media as if it were unmediated reality. This has proven difficult to achieve, but the sense of being immersed in a virtual environment is probably achieved in its most advanced form with videogames, though the cinema has the power to draw us into its simulations of reality. The virtuality of the internet is bound up with the concept of cyberspace, that theoretical place where we ‘go’ when we sit at our computers and log on to the internet. It is a concept that is a powerful metaphor for our sense of being online, for instance, as a participant on a communal website or internet experience, but on the other hand we are just using media as real people in real places to explore new ways of interacting at a distance and with the ability to control our identities. To communicate with someone through blogs, emails or chat rooms is a real not a virtual experience, but one conducted at a distance through the mediation of the computer screen. Is cyberspace any more virtual (unreal) than television (‘telespace’) or radio (‘radiospace’) as mediation, as structures of experience and circulation of meaning? It is the physicality of human-computer interaction that is distinctive, how we bring machines into the pattern of our lives rather than the virtual ‘loss of body’ of using machines that seems distinctive about cyberculture at the present moment.     If old media is characterised by consumption on a mass scale, new media such as the internet offers a different kind of consumption by the masses and production on a wider scale. On the one hand, mass media is becoming more fragmented as broadcasting gives way to ‘narrowcasting’. The ‘on demand’ aspect of digital media services is a distinctive transformation of existing media. On the other hand, digital technologies provide tools of media production that allow the audience to become users. The web seems to be a new technology of production that allows individuals to create their own public image for themselves. Instead of imitating others that are presented to us, we create images of ourselves to follow. In the outward presentation of self that constitutes our identity, the web is a set of techniques that allows us to create public images that may come to dominate our identities. With web technologies such as blogs we objectify ourselves as the content of new media. We can literally play with and explore ‘who we are’ in the process of creating content and communicating with others.   McQuail identifies four categories of new media;   interpersonal communication media (email, mobile phones) interactive play media (videogames, VR) information search media (WWW) collective participatory media (the Internet, WWW).   These categories help us to focus on the purposes that have been assigned to digital technologies. McQuail also adds four characteristics to these categories:   social presence = the sense of personal contact with others when using a medium, including ‘media richness’, involving more senses, being more personal   autonomy =  feeling in  control of content and use, independent from source   private = solitary behaviour, individualistic choices and responses and frequently anonymity   playfulness = shallow, transient entertainment.   Here we see some of the significance that we attach to our uses of new technologies – to play, to do something alone, to have a sense of control and to gain personal contact at a distance.     We have focused on the web as a digital medium. The web is a technological apparatus that is becoming ‘second nature’ for many people, but not for all. The web is also a loosely defined technology of cultural production. You can make content, but equally you can buy things or obtain information. The web is loosely dedicated as a media technology (Burnett and Marshall). Technologically, the web is just a database of documents and files stored on servers accessed at specific addresses on the internet. It is a different medium compared to television. The web is a communication network whereas television is a broadcast network, and the web is an ‘on demand’ system rather than a technology that ‘pushes’ content to audiences. The web offers the potential for a more personalised form of mass media – many-to-many communication, and to be creators, publishers, as much as readers, viewers, listeners. Websites are the technological equivalent of television programmes or films so that websites are content that provide objects of study. Websites are the technological products of individuals, institutions and organisations, and websites are collections of web pages linked together. It is this hypertextuality that makes websites much more expansive, non-linear and indeterminate than, for instance, television programmes. Visionaries of hypertext such as Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee imagine a utopian global system for creating, sharing and managing information. Electronic hypertext provides a basis for re-invigorating debates about printed texts. The web is the most familiar example of hypertext, a technology that has great creative potential at the same time as being a mundane element of web document construction.      To summarise, then, from a cultural studies perspective, media technology such   as the web is an instrument for creating things that society attempts to make meaningful. Thus, websites are representations of culture that tell us about the kind of society we live in, how technology is used, and they can be used in the processes of making sense of who, what and where we are. Technology is a technological apparatus that becomes integrated into the patterns of everyday life. For example, take new media advertising which is part of a growing entertainment economy, a business-entertainment convergence. The existing advertising industry attempts to exploit less regulated media such as the web and mobile phones to create new  forms of media and communication (such as viral videos) as a continuation of commercial media funded by advertising. The interactivity of new media also allows new forms of user activities and relationships between producers and consumers, new forms of intermediation (Coke sells music), and viral marketing and hypercontextual blurring of reality and fiction (such as in ‘alternate reality games’ (ARGs). These are all extensions of existing media practices that are brought into the pattern of everyday life.     A blog is an online journal about personal observations about life or specific topics with links to other locations on the web. They are personal, collaborative, work, play, and so on. Blogs seem to add to the scope of media culture as a participatory form of reading and writing on a new scale of access and influence. Blogging is a media experience, a process involving things, using things, participation, creating and exchanging meanings in the process of mediation, where production rather than consumption comes to the fore in making ourselves between work and leisure. Making media demands our time as production rather than consumption, a more active time that can feel more like work than leisure.     We know that technologies are cultural because similar technologies are used in very different cultural practices and not everyone chooses to use blogs – they appeal differently to people. New technologies such as computer and network media create new potentials and possibilities for expression and activity in similar and very different social and cultural contexts. How the Web develops is not just dependent on its technological basis, but what society decides to do with technology, the way that technologies get taken up as part of everyday life in the process of making and using media, the way that we become digital.

4.1.06 14:18 Permalink / 3 Comments / comment

Easy as JCB: Nizlopi for Christmas #1 Why are Westlife so popular? I am obviously missing something. They have had loads of hits, but I couldn't sing any of them, but I can quickly break into a chorus of  the 'Fast Food Song'- now that's got to be significant, hasn't it? Westlife as Christmas #1 would be deadly dull (as if I care who will be topping the pops this yuletide). Actually I hope it is Nizlopi with their JCB song mainly because their use of a Flash web video as a promotional tool gives us an interesting case study to consider. Is there any better web technology than Flash for creating buzz and stir among internet communities (apart from web video you web jockey!). In the JCB example we see the power of Flash as an animation technology that can imitate and remediate the 'cartoon' and create music videos that can be made individually and shared with others. We also see the use of 'click culture' digitextuality that entices the user to pick up the pencil and doodle, make content, share content and connect to other users, or link to e-commerce downloads. Flash is an invitation to produce content that stretches our thinking about the 'loose web', what the web does and who it is for - artists, cartooners, gamers, and advertainers. It's your web, Flash it. Happy Blogmas one and all!

14.12.05 14:46 Permalink / comment

Play More, Work Less We may admire our sporting superstars, and rightly so, because they have achieved what most of us will never do - they get paid to PLAY. For the rest of us non-professional players we must work to PLAY, and PLAY to escape work. PLAY is the great non-work distraction, and with digital technologies we get a chance to PLAY more and more. We are tempted to PLAY and encouraged to PLAY at every turn. It feels like society is becoming more PLAYful with the introduction of digital technologies. PLAY is a valuable commodity that is often on display in our saturated mediascape. It is no surprise to see consumer brands giving us the gift of PLAY as web connectivity and interactivity are harnessed to promotions that reach beyond the traditional one-way messages of the billboard and the television ad. Go on! Stop working, PLAY, download and 'get your dream cars instantly!'.

28.11.05 20:37 Permalink / 2 Comments / comment

Pokerroomy I have just been online with wenske, 2pair z x, IloveDarin, gosouth9, King Cat, Midges Mom, robx9, indiangirl1, and 2005 Titan at Pokerroom. This was a typical web temporary affiliation where I didn't learn anything about these pseudonymous people, but we played a poker tournament together and I finished second after a prolonged struggle with IloveDarin on the final hands of the game. This is but one trivial way that the web is used for every second of every day in multifarious ways. The basis of our engagement with the web is with websites, those distincive collections of web pages that are accessed through our web browsers at specific addresses. Websites are the significant content of the web as a medium, the equivalent of films for cinema and programmes for television. The websites we use and how we use them provide evidence about the way that we bring web technology into our everyday lives, in the same way that we watch films and television programmes. One of the differences is, however, how websites demand our attention, we have to make them happen, whereas films and television programmes carry on without us.

26.11.05 00:49 Permalink / 3 Comments / comment

Cybercasualties This week, as every November, people have been remembering those who were killed in the services, particularly in the two world wars. I am not one for buying poppies - they seem to me like a symbol of perpetual validation of war, too public and establishment to be anti-war. This week we are thinking about real space and 'cyberspace', that conceptual space 'behind the monitor screen', where we 'go' when we use the web. The journey, of course, is delusional, but we cling to the imagination of occupancy down the wires and pipes to the boxes. These boxes of data contain digitized information that can be called up on our screens at our request. Billions of searchable data, such as the details of 1.7m forces casualties of the two world wars whose remains are tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Here you can search for those forgotten men and women that people try to remember once a year - including my great uncle Leonard Brooke, who was killed in the trenches in 1917 aged 21 years. How strange that this man's body lies in a real space, a French field miles from home, and a commemorative certificate of his sacrifice and a picture of his burial place can be called up from electronic space as if it were kept in a drawer in the house.

15.11.05 00:33 Permalink / comment

Participate! - 'the social action website' I was drawn to a story in the culture section of my Saturday newspaper about a new website that 'is using the power of the internet to promote real-life social change'. This is an American site called Participate run by Participant Productions, a media production company who believe that films can persuade people to get involved in important social issues.Films they have made include Murderball and Good Night, and Good Luck. The website allows people to register as users, run blogs and get involved in online community discussions, as well as publicising campaigns and methods of action. Here we see a faith in the power of the media to stimulate a response - to make films that educate and entertain, moving them to action. We see technology (making films) becoming significant, a form of cultural production signifying the idea that society has issues that need addressing. We also see evidence of the web as a technology determining forms of community at a distance, extending the human capacity to organise and network, a technological apparatus that liberals welcome - as long as conservatives and other right-wing nutters don't use it in the same way.

7.11.05 19:41 Permalink / comment

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