Oh. Joy.

Being stranded in a foreign country is one thing. Being stranded in an eastern foreign country when you’re from the west? Absolute fish out of water.

We were led around and around an airport that was in a total state of bedlam (welcome to Beijing international) by an airline worker who kept pretending to get distracted by a walkie-talkie that wasn’t switched on. If we simply had to wait and listen for directions, the ordeal wouldn’t have been nearly as painful. Unfortunately we were left to tackle language AND technology barriers in order to re-book our own flights. Thanks to these serious road-blocks, we didn’t arrive at the airport hotel until about six hours later.

After a solid afternoon diet of Mars Bars and ham sandwiches, the three of us were almost crying for a decent meal. And here is what we learnt:

• If you order half a chicken in Beijing, you won’t get half a hot roasted chicken like you do here. You’ll get half a cold, preserved chicken. But hey, at least they don’t skimp on the neck!…Mmmmmmm, neck.
• If you ask for water, even in Mandarin, you will got hot tea.
• Meals are often served with a banana.
• Sweet and sour pork bites are 80% bone. Dental cover required.

Normally, I wouldn’t whinge, I LOVE feeling out of place in new countries! It’s possibly the most invigorating experience you’ll ever get! But when I’m exhausted, stranded, grumpy, $1000 poorer from having to re-book flights with a different airline and about to spend a night in a “non-smoking” room that ironically smells like an ashtray…and then when you open the window you get swarmed with mosquitoes…and you can’t drink the water but you have to brush your teeth and wouldn’t mind a shower…

And all the while if this was happening back home or back in Europe I’d be all over Twitter and Facebook bitching my brains out over this particular airline’s crisis management methods but I can’t get online because it’s $25 per mb and I don’t have bloody Weibo and I’m sick of speaking in sign language so there is no way I’m going downstairs to ask about the hotel computer…

And then it was tomorrow.

We packed.

We spent the money we’d changed on pens and panda puppet hands (see picture) and got on our newly booked “Singapore Airlines” flight home.

“Hello mam and gents, can I offer you some cocktails for your flight? Time magazine? Dessert?”

I almost proposed to that Singaporean man.

“Time for your monthly Facebook check and drug test!”- Newitz, 2012

Source: http://io9.com/5895095/why-facebook-is-the-future-of-workplace-surveillance

The use of social media is at an all time high. It is addictive. People love it. There are 1.11 billion Facebook users, Instagram has 100 million, Twitter with 500 million, and of course it’s all growing. The proliferation of participate”y culture and self produced media is all part of Tim O’Reilleys famously termed Web 2.0 that Robert Howard discusses in The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media.
Howard acknowledges that users or ‘prosumers’ can bypass traditional institutions and offer their “vernacular creations” directly to internet users. This is extremely useful when it comes to work such as an author wanting to publish a novel. Instead of going through a traditional publishing house which is hard, competitive and time consuming, the author can use one of numerous online self publishing websites and publish their book straight to users and set their own price and distribution rates.
But as we have seen this week, combining work and social media can not be all that positive.

Instead of the good ol’ background check, it’s not a Facebook check. Employers are asking to access potential employee’s social media accounts to get all the information that they need. But you not only need to take be cautious when applying for a job. But when you have one too.

Source: http://parachutedigitalmarketing.com.au/blog/social-media-and-social-networks/social-media-profiles-and-job-hunting/

Like the hairdresser, in the Escape Hair Design vs Sally-Anne Fitzgerald case, Fitzgerald was dismissed due to her employers discovering her sarcastic comments towards the hair salon and her “no holiday pay” and “xmas ‘bonus’”. Although she didn’t mention the name of the salon, she was fired. However, if she is writing statuses about her work situation, she would most likely have who she works for on her Facebook profile anyway. Easy enough for friends to put two and two together.

It is very easy, too easy, to express your feelings via social networking sites, but the smart thing is to not do it. Even if you think everything is set to the strictest privacy settings, check again. Even better, don’t post negative work related comments at all.Of course this is hard for some people to do, or not do. As discussed in class, it may be appropriate for businesses to create some soft of social media policy tailored to their specific workplace __________________________________________________________________________________

Find user numbers for a whole list of social network sites on this link –> http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/resource-how-many-people-use-the-top-social-media/

Newitz, A, 2012, ‘Why Facebook is the future of workplace surveillance’, Welcome from the future, http://io9.com/5895095/why-facebook-is-the-future-of-workplace-surveillance, accessed 11/05/2013.

I chose the search term ‘Tiannanmen square massacre in 1989′, because of its controversial nature and the measures the Chinese government went to in order to supress media coverage of the incident.

Unfortunately, when I went to the Chinese website (google.cn), I was unable to conduct a search, when I clicked on the search bar to write, the search engine redirected me to the Chinese version of Google (google.hk).

The Hong Kong version of Google allowed me to conduct my search.

556,000 results were returned for the search on the Tiananmen Square massacre.  I thought this was a fairly impressive result, free of censorship and bias. But then I had a look at Google Australia.

Returning 959,000 results, my Google Australia search retrieved almost twice as many links as Google Hong Kong. Suddenly, the search results found on the Hong Kong engine did not seem so open. I’m not sure of the reason for this difference in the number of search results, it may just be because of the language they were written in, but I found it interesting none-the-less.

The reason I was interested in exploring these search results is because I thought it would be interesting to see the limitations placed on the cyber world in China. Could it be suggested that censorship inhibits the abilities of Asian groups to engage in, and develop, cybercultures?

It is in spite of this that we as a democratic and judicial society must have a policy, as we must for everything, it seems. Lymobe Eko recognises that each country regulates the infrastructure and content of its section of the web within the framework of its political, social, cultural and economic values (Zheng p272). China is the obvious extreme at the conservative end of the spectrum, censoring entire web domains as well as sites within a domain.

Lena L. Zhang’s paper “Behind the ‘Great Firewall’ Decoding China’s Internet Media Policies from the Inside” discusses the Great Firewall in terms of “China’s current internet media policy in terms of the nature of the policy, the policymaking process, major forces driving the policy and future trends” (Zheng 2006 p271)

The paper professes study from within the ‘Great Firewall’ going directly to “the source and interviewed 19 influential Chinese internet policymakers” (Zheng p272).

Zhneg highlights some interesting aspects of online policy, particu;arly when quoting Lyombe Eko, A

Associate Director For Academic Graduate Studies at the University of Iowa. Eko argues that internet regulation is complicated and should take political and cultural values into consideration. He strongly believes that “internet regulation has begun to reflect the political and cultural complexity of the political, linguistic, and cultural difference between the nations” (Eko in Zheng p272).

The internet (like all communication media before it) is becoming “what technology, economics, politics and culture make of it” (Eko in Zheng p272).

Going on from what Eko is saying, my opinion is that the online policy is based around what the policymakers fear most, and what is deemed the biggest threat to the current administration.

Although the Zheng article puts the future policy of China’s internet firewall in the more liberal domain (288), some have stated that their techniques and methods are more sophisticated thus leading to more conservative policy.

Back home, Lumby et al put together a report to focus on “the scope and the nature of content that is likely to be caught by the proposed filter and on identifying associated public policy implications”(p ii).

Rather than focus on what current policy includes, the report focuses in part of neglected aspects of public policy. In doing this it poses the (rather long but relevant) question:

how [do] we sensibly balance the risks posed by online material, particularly to children, and the opportunities provided to the broader community to participate in sometimes controversial debates, to access and debate material pertaining to political and social issues, and to allow reasonable adults to make decisions about what they consume or produce online?

To me, this is the question every policy maker needs to answer before going ahead. This question acknowledges the need and right of citizens to making their own decisions about what they view online, and implies that the government will not make that decision for them, as is the case in China.

References:

Lumby, C et al. (2009) Untangling the Web: The Scope of Content Caught by Mandatory Internet Filtering. Report

Lena L. Zhang. (2006) “Behind the ‘Great Firewall’: Decoding China’s Internet Media Policies from the Inside.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 12.3 pp 271-291

What is vidding? As Francesca Coppa explains “[v]idding is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies are set to music. The result is called a vid or a songvid”(1.1). Fanfiction by extension is much the same in theory, but the end product is a narrative using the story lines and characters of the source material to create a new story or extend and existing story arc.

I believe vidding and fan-fiction is not copyright infringement if done correctly. The use of a disclaimer in the description or in the product itself is of the utmost importance  A disclaimer (below) are a written statement releasing any ownership of the source material. All fan-fiction website require a disclaimer somewhere in the story. One must be abundantly clear that they would like to receive no money for their work, and I find this endearing. All we want to do is participate  be part of the fandom. This is outlined in the paper by Coppa , where she explains vidding was a way for female fans to engage with Star Trek which did not represent woman in a favourable manner. As Tushnet and Vaughn write, “[f]ans use the vids as context for exploring and debating deeper themes within the media source material. ” and Coppa adds “[v]idding is a form of collaborative critical thinking” (5.1) and “provides an audience with tangible responses to [the] art” (p9).

Ultimately those who aren’t fans of vids or fan-fiction (see what did there?) need to toughen up. They have been around for a long time and I suspect will be around for the foreseeable future. Tushnet and Vaughn comment on this, as vidding and “remix culture is growing, and the technical savvy of those who have grown up with the Internet is a large part of that. The twenty-five percent of young people who remix content are exposed to a unique opportunity for learning, personal expression, and individual autonomy” (p8)

References:

Tushnet, R & Vaughn, R (2012) ”Reply Comment of the Organization for Transformative Works.” Brief submitted to the US Copyright Office. Read only sections 1-9, pages 1-18. <http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/otw_dmca_reply_2012.pdf>

Coppa, F (2008) “Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding.” Transformative Works and Cultures, <http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64>

Students and teachers use the Internet for a variety of things – most lectures are available online, assessments are submitted online and contact between teachers and students is also done online. So, what happens to those who either don’t have a computer or don’t have access to the Internet? Well, they simply miss out, and don’t have the same opportunities as those who do.

Looking at the University of Wollongong for example, each student is given an account in which they use to access the Internet to communicate, study, research and manage their degree on either their own computer or the those available on campus. However, not all students own a computer, and not all students can use the provided computers at the same time or when they’re in certain rooms or lecture halls without computers.

As stated by Chatswood High School principal Sue Low (2013) stated during an interview with The Herald Sun, “Laptops are now just as much of the culture of education as are pens and paper.” While Low was referring to providing high school students with laptops, the same thing applies - those who can’t afford a computer are indeed missing out, and as she goes on to say, ”It’s fine if your family can afford a computer. But if those funds are not there for you in the family, you’re not going to have a computer in school.”

With the NBN slowly being implemented, students online education will become even more important and, “The NBN will create new opportunities for education,” making accesses even more important in the times ahead.

It really comes down to students being well aware of how important Internet access is, and making sure they utilise the Internet if they are lucky enough to have complete Internet access. As for those who don’t, they will ultimately miss out, unfortunately.

References

Wright, J 2013, ‘Computer cash in lap of chaos’, Sun Herald, 3 February, accessed 11/04/13, http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/computer-cash-in-lap-of-chaos-20130202-2dr65.html

By Samuel Findlay

Student Number: 3801068

Much like the real world, we can modify our identity online, through avatars, changing our appearance, gender, race and more. I, for example, am a human male with short dark brown hair, but if I wanted to, I could be represented online in a game like World of Warcraft as a female night elf with purple hair.

Online identify isn’t limited to gaming either. Ones online social media presence can also be very different from that of the real world. While someone may be a quiet and polite person offline, they could very well be a talkative, rude and aggressive person online, with a completely different look and avatar, which doesn’t at all represent who they are in the real world. Also through social networks, people can quite easily falsely represent themselves as that of the opposite gender or age, with their avatar and way they interact online.

This then leads to the following questions: Are real life body modifications, online identities and avatars just fake irrelevant representations of who we are? Are we trying to be someone we are not through different representations of ourselves? Or perhaps the real question should be: Are we trying to be the person we really are? Certainly arguments can be made for each way of thinking.

Another point to be made is that our online identities can also be shaped by other people’s interpretations us. As found by Malene Larsen (2008) in a study of young people’s construction of identities, “users are continuously constructing and co-constructing their identity online” (Larsen 2008, pg.16).

I think it comes down to how comfortable one is with their inner self and surroundings. People are influenced by the real world – whether it be social norms, friends or family – but in the cyber world, a free environment with very little limitations, we can be whoever we want, judged only by people we probably don’t know. All it takes is an avatar and/or online presence, and our identity is modified just like that.

Reference

Larsen, M 2008, ‘Understanding Social Networking: On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online’, Online Networking: Connecting People. Ed. K. Sangeetha. Hyderabad, India: Icfai UP, accessed 03/04/13, http://vbn.aau.dk/files/17515750/Understanding_social__networking._Bidrag_til_bog.pdf

By Samuel Findlay

Student Number: 3801068

The virtual realm (LambdaMoo, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin) could not exist without a physical beings emotions and imagination.You are essentially interacting with other people so it is like a conversation, however you cannot see the other persons physical communication. Therefore your other senses are ignited and one becomes completely immersed.

Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace” tells of the author’s experience in a virtual world where a user had hacked the accounts of other participants in a text based virtual realm to make them write abhorrent things of a violent and sexual nature against their will.

The virtual realm was LambdaMOO, a social online gathering of people logging in and talking to others from around the world. Dibbell described LambdaMOO as “a MUD [Multi-User Domain]. Or to be yet more precise, it was a subspecies of MUD known as a MOO, which is short for “MUD, Object-Oriented.” All of which means that it was a kind of database especially designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through a physical space that in reality exists only as words filed away on a hard drive.”(1993). However all you actually see is text: dialogue and stage directions running across a screen.

In my degree of Digital Media I have often come across issues and instances within the realm of World of Warcraft(WoW), and of one situation in particular, that of a real world death and a virtual world inconsideration.

A an avid WoW player, who was an officer in a Horde guild on the Illidan server, suffered a fatal stroke and her guild (Horde) decided to honor her in WoW, as they could not attend her physical funeral. A rival guild called Serenity Now used the opportunity to  attack the funeral (as the attendees had not “dressed” for battle and were completely vulnerable) thus stripping their rivals of earned extras. The funeral goers cried unfair, as they were respecting someone in the real world and had been taken advantage of in a moment of weakness. The actions of Serenity Now was inconsiderate and violated the sanctity of the gathering. Others felt all was fair in love and war and the victims should not have made themselves so vulnerable.

The thing Horde thought was most unforgiving was that Serenity Now televised their attack on Google, revelling in the fact that they had attacked a funeral and showing themselves to be cruel and unrelenting.

Most were indifferent to Horde’s protests, seeing it as a virtual thing and was not that bad. But when posed with the question “imagine if you had attended a friend’s funeral and someone who had never really liked them had showed up to belittle the guests, how would you feel?” the issue becomes more apparent. Sure, you had not physically been harmed, and the friend had not been emotionally or physically harmed as thy were not conscious; however you and other guests had felt emotionally scarred. Imagine if this person had then publicised their efforts on Youtube.

Referring to a virtual experience in terms which imply a bodily presence is useful to encourage outsiders to empathize.

References:

Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace.”  1993.  Rev. and rpt. under the title “A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One)” as chap. 1 of Dibbell’s My Tiny Life 

As stated by Warschauer and Grimes in 2007, “The new Web’s architecture allows more interactive forms of publishing (of textual and multimedia content), participation, and networking through blogs, wikis, and social network sites.” (Warschauer & Grimes 2007, p.2) This form of participation allows the audience to read, listen and view information, while interacting with it.

Social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, has taken over now more than ever. But as well as taking over the online world, and making the online consumer a participant, social media has moved to television, movies, sport and so on. While we are watching a television show like Masterchef or Q&A, we can interact by tweeting our thoughts by simply including the show’s hashtag. By doing so, we are having our own conversation or debate with others online, which may continue well after the show’s conclusion.

But is this online interactivity actually useful? Some would argue that this new interactive way of consumption and engagement has actually made us lazy and has shorted our attention span as individuals, which is perhaps true is some cases. Instead of digging deep to find information, we can simple use Google. And instead of watching a television show focusing on it, we are interacting with it, multitasking on our computer or smartphone.

While being able to interact with online information has its benefits of public review through comments, gained participation through social media, shared opinions through blogs and, as stated by Cover in 2006, the promotion of convenient and comfortable ways of altering text (Cover 2006, pg.141), we are now becoming dependent upon this interactivity.

For better or for worse, online interactivity is the here and now, and isn’t going anywhere, so we may as well use it to its full potential. So, feel to interact with this post.

References

Rob Cover, “Audience Inter/active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control and Reconceiving Audience History,” New Media and Society 8 (2006): 139-58

Warschauer, M & Grimes, D 2007, ‘Audience, Authorship and Artifact; The Emergent Semiotics of Web 2.0′, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, vol.27, pp.1–23

By Samuel Findlay

Student Number: 3801068

“Authors and media producers who continue to operate in the dominant paradigm of intellectual property can be said to be engaged in a struggle against this sort of interactive engagement through both legal and technology protections, while audiences continue to fight back with ever new technologies to challenge such attempts at control.”(p 140)

Personally, I found the reading of be a bit traditionalist and closed minded.

He explains that there are “new tensions in the author-text-audience relationship” (p140) and calls the relationship a “struggle” (p139) and also a “digital war”(p153). Cover goes on to explain how he himself combats his enemies.

“In order to prevent students from cutting and pasting material back into their assessedwork, and to avoid having notes altered – perhaps misrepresenting other authors – and redistributed, I would ordinarily dump that material into an acrobat.pdf document, under the view that fewer students would have access to a full-capacity Acrobat programme to unlock the text from the file.”(p153)

How utterly annoying. I would not want to be a student of his at all. The whole point of education is to challenge established ideas, to analyse and discuss the old and the new.

The nature of information sharing these days is no longer one sided. News broadcasted  on twitter is now seen a source material for those more established news networks, as it provides statements and visual without having to send a journalist “on the scene. Today, news and information creation is a conversation, a flow of multiple peoples perspectives, which is arguably better that getting something from the bigger players in news reportage who’s views are usually the result of vested interests. It’s straight from the source. No one seems to mind that TEN News used their twitpic, as long as they were credited with the photos. Personally I would be flattered.

Cover feels that “news and information creation is, and should be, in the hands of a media industry and its authors, journalists or content creators.” (p145). It is unclear what she means by content creators, but I’m inclined to think he has contradicted herself within the same sentence. This is because we can, as he consistently points out, all create our own content these days (I’m doing mine right now). Myself as an example, the fact that I’m a journalism student may mean I create more content that others (practice makes perfect!), I manage a music blog, I have a Twitter and a Soundcloud, I have a personal Tumblr page. While I was overseas I maintained a travel blog, a collection of thoughts and advice for my friends and family back home. I also, along with everyone else in my class, need to maintain this blog to pass.

Why does Mr Cover and others like her get to decide who can create content, who decides who is allowed to report on various events, where is the law that says the user can’t be the author also?

Nowhere, I’m pretty sure. If the Arab Spring wave in 2011 is anything to go by, I’d say no one else cares about the the author’s accreditations or previous works. Many would not trouble themselves with knowing where they earned their journalism/law/politics degree; all anyone wants is the information.

As Stewart Brand famously said “information wants to be free”. Also, as far as I know, no one has a monopoly on information either (although some would like to think so).

Mr Cover is entitled to his opinion, and I understand he needs to make a living somehow; but I feel he needs to prepare to embrace, and ultimately utilise, the new environment he so eagerly condemns.

References:

Rob Cover, “Audience Inter/active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control and Reconceiving Audience History,”  New Media and Society 8 (2006): 139-58 link

But how do we view our cyber world – the Internet and its users?

The Internet a place of free information, which for the most part, is viewed as a world dominated by geeks, nerds and hackers. This, however, is a very stereotypical view of Internet users, made to be so mainly by the mainstream media and how we view participants of the electronic world.

A computer geek is often thought of as someone who is intelligent, yet has little to no social skills, and are usual male, as often portrayed in the media. An example of this is the four main characters (all men) of the popular television show, ‘The Big Bang Theory’ (2007). Especially Sheldon, who is extremely smart, and is great with computers, yet struggles to hold a regular conversation without coming across as being weird.

As for hackers, they too are portrayed as intelligent people with low social skills. However, hacking is often seen as an illegal act – although it can sometimes simply mean altering or customising electronic software for ones personal use and enjoyment. Another example is ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (Gibson 1988) – a data trafficker, who can store date in his head just like a hard drive. His job come across like drug dealing, as his life is in danger, forcing him to carry a gun. “I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks…” (Gibson 1988, pg.14).

While hackers are usually negatively portrayed in the mainstream media as criminals, they are also seen as rebels. As mentioned by Professor Barwell (2013) during a lecture on the matter, hacker and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is viewed as both a criminal, rebel, and as TIME Magazine (2010) once called him, “The Robin Hood of hacking.”

Whether these representations and stereotypes are accurate or not, it is obvious that the mainstream media effects our views of those who participate in the electronic cyber world – apparently, nerdy, usually male people with low social skills, or criminal hackers.

References

Barwell, G 2013, Representation, Cyberpunk, & Hacking, lecture, DIGC335, Cybercultures, University of Wollongong, delivered March 19

Gibson, W 1988, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, Burning Chrome, Grafton, London, pp.14-36

Harrell, E 2010, ‘WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’, TIME, July 26, accessed 20/03/13, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2006496,00.html

By Samuel Findlay

Student Number: 3801068

In the 1980s and 1990s, hackers and phreakers were those people you would usually think of as nonathletic, pale faced smart alecs busy at their computers with little to no social skills and a vendetta against “the man”. Usually they would not have the best social skills, usually they would not play nicely with others. As a side note you automatically think they are working for The Dark Side…or Soviet Russia, and are not the good guys.

You’re thinking of someone like this:

Whether they looked like Matthew Lillard in Hackers or not, the 90s and early 00s saw a rise in pop culture references glorifying these postmodern pioneers.

Hackers may have been seen as mischievous miscreants by the establishment, but in popular culture they became the heroes of an age.

The movie most prominently featuring the hacker as the unlikely venturer to save the day would have to be Hackers. As mentioned above, Hackers was a cult classic release in 1995 about a young boy, Dade (Jonny Lee Miller), who is arrested by the US Secret Service for writing a computer virus and is banned from using a computer until his 18th birthday. Later on he ticks off the wrong black hat hacker and receives a threat from said black hat that he will send the world into chaos unless Dade can stop him, equipped with only his computer and his mad hacking skills.

Say “Hi” to Dade:

Our hero (this is about as sexed up as a hacker gets) as “The Mentor” manifests “ make[s] use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons [...], seek[s] after knowledge” and armed with only his intelligence he waged a war against someone much bigger than he and won.

At the cusp of the digital age, hackers were the poster people for a fascination with technology.

Fast-forward to today. You can use a computer? Big deal. There are definitely still hackers, and they are definitely still raiding the capitalists, the dictators and anyone else who stands in their way. But that’s old news.

What I’ve noticed these days is the nerds, the geeks, the outcasts and the oddballs are  not dismissed to the outskirts of society were they must skulk waiting for skerricks of social interaction. Take Golden Boy of the Hour, Mark Zuckerberg: while he did start out as a mischievous miscreant, his efforts earned him Facebook and now everyone wants to be his friend, and even marry him. He has quite a lot of money now too, which helps.

I watch a lot of TV, and from what I can see, there is a rise in popularity of the unconventional or eccentric character (who often does not play nicely with others) enlisted to help, paired with a “normal” or indeed “boring” side-kick to  get the job done, save the day and go home for a nice pot of tea. I am of course thinking of Jonny Lee Miller’s most recent character in CBS’s Elementary which is yet another modern adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes.

Set in New York, Sherlock is an ex-drug addict who has enlisted the help of Joan Watson as a sober companion. Long story short he gets bored and starts solving crimes, while Watson tags along. Similar shows to this are Perception, Bones, Castle, even Doctor Who, where the socially inept eccentric is recruited to entertain us this time. The protagonists are not technologically enhanced, nor are they hulking superheros, but they are all exceptionally intelligent.

Why is this relevent, why is this an equivalent? Because we are still glorifying the odd balls and the anti-heroes, 18 years on, but it’s no longer about futuristic worlds or humanoid cyborgs (okay we won’t include Doctor Who here); it’s about right now. 

But, of course, there are still those who lament the glory days.

This is my Cybercultures blog for the University of Wollongong subject, DIGC335.

In the coming weeks, this blog will gradually be updated with posts dealing with matters of digital media and communication.

With that said, be sure to stay tuned for more.

The study of cybercultures broadly concerns itself with interactions through computer networks including virtual online communities such as social networks and blogs, and has prompted a range of debates regarding identity.

The World Wide Web opened up to the public in 1993 and there followed a move away from computers being a one-on-one individual past time as they became “a portal that enabled people to lead parallel lives in virtual worlds”¹. It’s suggested that at this time people began to experience “the erosion of boundaries between the real and virtual as they moved in and out of their lives on the screen” when the “views of self became less unitary, more protean” leading to a “shift in how we create and experience our own identities”².

Personal homepages gave people the chance to offer a “much more strategic self-presentation than [in] everyday interaction”³ when the spontaneous interactions of real life (RL) limit the control that individuals have over what ‘self’ is presented, and how it is presented. Although it may be argued that blogs are more relevant today, it is proposed that personal homepages have provided stigmatised social groups with an emancipatory platform enabling people to be themselves, whilst for others the ‘stage’ of the homepage allows them to construct an identity, and it is proposed that people can re-establish a self-narrative and stable self-identity through their homepages: “people who use their homepages for self-presentation can lay out, arrange, retouch and manipulate their ‘homepage selves’ until the outcome reflects the self-identities they intend to present”⁴. This process can be seen as a form of self-exploration of identities, similar to the process of internal dialogue that an individual may have in RL, but the possibility of public feedback that can be said to contribute to their sense of identity and therefore function as identity validation⁵.

The static personal homepages of the 1990s may be seen as a precursor to contemporary blogs. Formats of blogs may vary and, whilst they may be written by individuals or a group and be specifically topic-driven, most blogs document the observations and thoughts of an individual and therefore often reflect personal lives and identities^{6 7}. It is proposed that “blogs serve to facilitate identity construction through self-reflection and social interaction”⁸ and are an example of how the Internet enables people to explore their identities. Rettberg (2008) suggests that blogs share similarities with oral cultures, and although it is proposed that “most blogs are never read by more people than the blogger would be likely to encounter in her local pub”⁹, it may be suggested that bloggers “write into the world with a clear expectation of having readers”¹⁰ and are therefore presenting themselves to an audience who may or may not be known to them.

A blog may therefore be seen as an example of the concept of the ‘audience as source’, furthermore, it may be argued that a blogger epitomises the notion of the ‘self as source’ and that the centrality of ‘me-ness’ in blogging explains its popularity; blogs provide people with a public forum of mass communication from which they can disseminate their personal narratives and therefore “place central emphasis on the self (i.e., the blogger)…. [and] offer a glorious vehicle for expressing one’s identity”¹¹.

So REDE is my glorious vehicle of ‘me-ness’, a space not to stop and stare but to stop and be seen. My audience, however, isn’t those who I meet in the pub but in a little coffee shop on Bold Street in Liverpool, including my blog buddy, poet, musician and film-maker Tom George. I hope my virtual ‘me-ness’ extends beyond virtual ‘same-ness’ and becomes a space where you too can stop and stare, but also a place where you can ponder, deliberate, discuss and share your stories: REDE.

1. Turkel, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other [Ebook]. Location 131.
2. Turkel, S. (2011). Location 131.
3. Cheung, C. (2007) ‘Identity Construction and Self-Presentation on Personal Homepages’ in Bell, D. and Kennedy, B.M. The Cybercultures Reader, 2^nd edition, London: Routledge. Page 275.
4. Cheung, C. (2007) Page 278.
5. Cheung, C. (2007).
6. Rettberg, J, Walker (2008) Blogging, Cambridge: Polity.
7. Sundar, S.S., Edwards, H.H., Hu, Y. and Stavrositu, C. (2007) ‘Blogging for Better Health: Putting the “Public” Back in Public Health’ in Tremayne, M. (ed.) Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media, London: Routledge.
8. Sundar et al. Page 90.
9. Coleman, S. and Ross, K. (2010) The Media and the Public: “Them” and “Us in Media Discourse, Chichester: Blackwell. Page 119.
10. Rettberg, J, Walker (2008). Page 57.
11. Sundar et al (2007). Page 85.

Allow me to repurpose this word to speak about figurative turns between the living and the nonliving, the animal, the machine, and the human.  Like the nineteenth-century parlour toy, the various creatures that inhabit our literary, philosophical, and technoscientific traditions demonstrate an optics and an aesthetics of animation.  The various foxes, mice, dogs, scorpions, and turtles that star in fables; the hedgehogs, larks, and magpies that lurk in the thought of Derrida, Heidegger, Descartes, and so on; the tortoises, moths, boids, and insects that emerge from robots labs—it is through their behaviours, performances, and techniques that one may be persuaded to see or feel that something has life or is, on the other hand, lifeless.  The concern for me in the rhetorical play of the zootrope has to do with the discourse of the animal and the machine, which articulates the contours of the boundaries between life and nonlife through those vast, arbitrary, and aggressive taxonomical generalizations.  For this discourse, so deeply rooted in the imagination of Western modernity, distinguishes these two enormous groups only to elide them in the biotechnological worldview that persists from Cartesian mechanism through to the informatic and computational paradigms of contemporary molecular biology.  A zootrope is thus a plaything for experimenting discursively with the modern limits of the animate and the inanimate, and for considering the very serious implications such experimentation holds for the lives of humans and nonhumans alike.

Zork: a game I still play, a return to simpler times, an illusion of a Golden Age.

Now I would argue that the historical reach of digital culture is slight enough to truncate this process of reaching back into history for a model in which to face an uncertain present and future, but it still exists. And in the classic case of an information gapfill, we borrow liberally from our traditional history in our physical worlds to model behavior digitally when no precedent exists online (becoming less and less of a case).

I should let Bell talk:

“The ideal of community enshrined in Gemeinschaft has an enduring legacy in the popular imagination, then, always tinged with nostalgia. It might be argued, in fact, that community has become overwritten by nostalgia, in that the way it is talked about so often focuses on its perceived loss, or decline, or erosion, in party-political rhetoric, for example, community is seen as the stable bulwark of society, imagined in distinctly romantic, ways ” (94).

A perceived loss, decline, an overwrite of nostalgia? I suspect this is more of a case of using our present to reinterpret our past; that, in comparison, the digital past seems favorable to the stormy present. This, in my estimation, has more to do with ephemera and legacy than we are willing to let on, a desire to make an imprint in this (digital) world, to know that I, too, was significant. This is a process perceived as being undercut by a grand network, a thriving community of worker bees. What we lament losing (the past of tight knit communities) is indeed what we fear in the present (the expansion and transformation of these tight knit communities into larger ones, more decentralized ones). What we have here is a shifting focus from us to it.

To counteract this devaluation (perceived) of the individual, we erect towers of legacy in our physical and digital worlds. Statues, museums, the Internet Archive, a slideshow, a Lifestream (not as a learning artefact, but as a signal that we were here), a time capsule, the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress. None of these are negative things per se; they are beautiful in their own right. I just think these bleed from that same core of our collective being that will always favor the past over the future, the certain over the uncertain.

In digital cultures, we just have tended to have shorter memories, attention spans, historical breadth; that, however, is catching up. Our digital culture now has scope and with that will come legacy.

Zork: a game I still play, a return to simpler times, an illusion of a Golden Age.

Now I would argue that the historical reach of digital culture is slight enough to truncate this process of reaching back into history for a model in which to face an uncertain present and future, but it still exists. And in the classic case of an information gapfill, we borrow liberally from our traditional history in our physical worlds to model behavior digitally when no precedent exists online (becoming less and less of a case).

I should let Bell talk:

“The ideal of community enshrined in Gemeinschaft has an enduring legacy in the popular imagination, then, always tinged with nostalgia. It might be argued, in fact, that community has become overwritten by nostalgia, in that the way it is talked about so often focuses on its perceived loss, or decline, or erosion, in party-political rhetoric, for example, community is seen as the stable bulwark of society, imagined in distinctly romantic, ways ” (94).

A perceived loss, decline, an overwrite of nostalgia? I suspect this is more of a case of using our present to reinterpret our past; that, in comparison, the digital past seems favorable to the stormy present. This, in my estimation, has more to do with ephemera and legacy than we are willing to let on, a desire to make an imprint in this (digital) world, to know that I, too, was significant. This is a process perceived as being undercut by a grand network, a thriving community of worker bees. What we lament losing (the past of tight knit communities) is indeed what we fear in the present (the expansion and transformation of these tight knit communities into larger ones, more decentralized ones). What we have here is a shifting focus from us to it.

To counteract this devaluation (perceived) of the individual, we erect towers of legacy in our physical and digital worlds. Statues, museums, the Internet Archive, a slideshow, a Lifestream (not as a learning artefact, but as a signal that we were here), a time capsule, the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress. None of these are negative things per se; they are beautiful in their own right. I just think these bleed from that same core of our collective being that will always favor the past over the future, the certain over the uncertain.

In digital cultures, we just have tended to have shorter memories, attention spans, historical breadth; that, however, is catching up. Our digital culture now has scope and with that will come legacy.

Ever since studying cybercultures as part of A-Level Media coursework I have become fascinated with areas such as social networking websites; (Facebook, Myspace Twitter, etc) and Web 2.0 (User generated content such as videos, fanfiction and fanart that can be uploaded to the internet).

Last term I read two books that kept my interest in cybercultures  alive. They were Convergence Culture – Where Old and New Media Collide (2008) by Henry Jenkins and YouTube – Digital Media and Society Series (2009) by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green.

The two books that kept my interest in cybercultures alive

Both books focus on how the internet has become such a common element in our everyday lives, particularly amongst youths. They also explore the cultural impact of websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and their good and bad aspects. Good aspects such as increased participation from members of fandom of franchises and increased interest from the young in technology and communicating and bad aspects such as Cyberbullying and an increased exposure to explicitly pornographic and violent materials.

One particular aspect of Web 2.0 that interests me is vlogging. Vlogging; better known as Video Logging is very popular on social networking websites; particularly YouTube. All that vlogging entails is that users simply film themselves and talk about a variety of subjects ranging from a favourite TV programme to a how their day was.

It gives viewers an insight into the lives and opinions of individuals they may never otherwise have contact with. One could say it contains a certain voyeuristic aspect to it that makes watching and even creating vlogs an intimate experience, not in the sexual sense, but in the fact that you are getting an insight into someone’s lifestyle by watching them talk to you about themselves and what they do (usually in their own home).

Voyeurism is the act of spying on someone who is involved in an intimate activity (usually something erotic such as undressing) or a private activity, so doing something nobody else thinks they would do. This can also apply to an insight into someone’s life. This is pleasurable as it is an almost guilty feeling watching someone live out their life without them knowing they are being observed. This can apply to vlogging because the viewers are being let into someone else’s home environment and being told about their day or them being giving their opinion on a film they’ve seen.

A famous example of a vlogger, who in fact turned out wasn’t a vlogger, Lonelygirl15, I read about her in the YouTube book I rented from the library. A bedroom video logger known as Bree, aka Lonelygirl15 produced a series of videos about her life and particularly her difficult relationship with her religious parents. The videos were very passionate in their subject matter and as the series of vlogs went on they drew a viewership of around 300,000 views each. This shows just how popular vlogs are. The series extended to other vloggers who apparently knew Bree and would give their views on the events in her life, creating a sort of narrative format that went beyond just Lonelygirl15′s YouTube channel. After a while the videos soon abandoned their bedroom location and were taken into the outside world. This was where suspicion as to the authenticity of the videos started to seep in. It was soon revealed, that the whole series of vlogs had in fact been an experiment on the part of independent film producers; Mesh Flinders and Miles Beckett.

Bree, aka Lonelygirl15

The above example shows just how much of a popular form of user generated content the vlog is, that even film producers want to get in on it. It is notable that nowadays many celebrities and organisation now have their own official pages on websites open to the public such as YouTube, Twitter and MySpace, etc and event their own websites.

A favourite example of mine is the actor, April Winchell’s website which she used to update on a regular basis updating visitors on her activities.

Here is the link to April’s website:

http://www.aprilwinchell.com/

A more famous example would be Stephen Fry’s Twitter page with, at the time of writing this post (Saturday, 5th June 2010), 1,543,455 followers:

http://twitter.com/STEPHENFRY

Celebrities such as April Winchell and Stephen Fry use the internet to promote themselves as well as for other reasons

Celebrities using social networking websites is a great way for them to communicate with their fans and also as a form of self-promotion and to promote events and causes which mean a lot to the celebrity personally. For example; in spring/summer of 2009 April Winchell used her website to auction off memorabilia to her fans in order to raise money so she could buy a house in Escrow.

As well as celebrities using the internet, the internet has been able to create it’s own celebrities. These celebrities usually create their own videos that develop a large following amongst fellow internet users. One of my favourite internet celebrities is: ThatGuyWithTheGlasses (aka Doug Walker), who has his own website and uses it to create his own movies and TV series such as the famous Nostalgia Critic (2008-present).

The Nostalgia Critic series is updated by Walker on a weekly basis and oversees him playing a character known as the Nostalgia Critic who views films and TV shows from the 1980s and 90s and criticises and parodies them. The series is clearly aimed at those who were brought in the 80s and 90s, such as myself, and serve to humourously point out the flwas in the TV shows and movies we used to enjoy so much.

ThatGuyWithTheGlasses can be found by following this link:

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/

Internet celebrity Doug Walker and his famous Nostalgia Critic character from the internet based series of the same name

In short, Web 2.0 is becoming an integral part of our culture and is used by a variety of users from vloggers talking to people from within the confines of their bedrooms to celebrities using it to communicate with and promote themselves to the public.

Human? Animal? Machine? Or all of the above? William Gibson’s notion of ‘cyborg culture’ expresses ideas about a future technologically modified human. A human that has taken on characteristics of both animals and machines in the aim of achieving surreal identity transformation.

David Thomas, fellow ‘cyberpunk writer’ describes this transformation process using his term ‘technicity’, a cleverly coined mash up of tech-nology and ehnic-ity that offers the reader invaluable insight into these two key elements of the cyborg world. Although at first glance ideas of technicity and William Gibson’s envisioned cyberculture seem like a foreign and completely unimaginable reality for the human race, the process of modification is an issue that is undeniably current.

In modern day society we are seeing drastically rising rates in people seeking cosmetic procedures or self-modifications (Rohnrich, 2000, p1363). Where twenty years ago ‘plastic surgery’ was almost strictly a celebrity phenomenon, today the masses have followed suit and it is becoming increasingly common for members of the general public to alter their physical appearance to suit their needs, with the possibility of recomposing their identity in the process (as seen in Thomas’ notion of technicity).

At this stage there are no modifications that allow for a storage device to be installed in a human brain, but as far as appearance goes almost no alteration is off the table. In relation to the use of animal parts discussed by Gibson links can also be made between current society and cyborg culture. Medically, there has been approved use of animal transplants such as pig heart valves to humans (Ravelinglen et al, 2003, p1), and cosmetically women are using animal hair to lengthen their tresses.

This man could easily be one of Gibson’s characters, he has reconstructed his teeth, eyes and skin – allowing him to achieve a complete identity overhaul.

Now the question on all of our minds… What is next? Perhaps our soaring plastic surgery and modification rates, rapidly advancing technologies and openness to the use of animal parts in both health and cosmetic industries suggest that Gibson’s visions might not be so farfetched after all. Perhaps it is simply a matter of time until imagined cyborg culture becomes a reality, or perhaps (as seen in the image above) it is already happening.

Reference:

Gibson, W, 1984, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, Burning Chrome

Ravelinglen, A, Mortler, F, Mortler, E, Kerremans, I, Braeckman, J, 2003, ‘Proceeding with clinical trials of animal to human organ transplantation: a way out of the dilemma’, Journal of Medical Ethics, Volume 30, Issue 1

Rohnrich, R, 2000, ‘Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery’, The Increasing Popularity of Cosmetic Surgery Procedures: A look at Statistics in Plastic Surgery, Volume 106, Issue 6, pp 1363-1366

Tomas, D, 1989, ‘The Technophilic Body, On technicity in William Gibson’s cyborg culture’, The Cybercultures Reader, Routledge, London: 175-189

The technological predictions Vannevar Bush made in the article As We May Think were truly insightful, and far ahead of time. Bush’s hypothetical device “The Memex” was essentially a ‘memory’ and ‘index’ that would provide an “enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory” (Bush, 1945). This ‘memory supplement’ is prevalent in contemporary society, primarily in the form of the World Wide Web, and accessible via the range of modern day technologies (smart phones, laptops, computers) that connect us every day.

In 1945 Bush’s idea that individuals would one day be able to compile and store all of their books, records and communications in a single device would have seemed like a farfetched futuristic dream. But not only has our contemporary cyberworld fulfilled this dream, it has surpassed it. It could be argued that “The Memex” model acts as a foundation for the abundance of modern day technologies in use today. Bush offered a fundamental base idea, which has since been built upon, advanced and tweaked in order to meet the rapidly growing desires of the modern day consumer/ prosumer.

Bush imagined the core of what was to come, but could not perceive how technologies would grow, and more importantly, the interactive nature in which they would be used. Reflecting on Bush’s imagined ‘Memex’ allows for a much deeper appreciation of our current technological world. Having this record of a perceived future from a past perspective offers a surprising amount of insight into our ever-changing technological landscape today.

Reference:

Bush, V, 1945, ‘As We May Think’, Atlantic Monthly, Volume. 176, Issue. 1, pp. 101-08