[Shani]

some notes on cultural studies and digital media. (felt it should go in here). this is long.. go grab a coffee (or hot chocolate or tea if your a hyperactive freak or something). i dunno, i found this stuff interesting..


Contemporary Culture & Media 2003

Digital Media Cultures

Key concepts: digitality, virtual reality, cybercultures, simulacra. Computer mediated communication, posthumanism

Digital Media (digitality: a structured collection of bits, can be manipulated by programs on a computer, stored on disks and other storage devices, and transmitted over networks.) (a.k.a Multimedia: refers to their shared digital representation. Interactive; the Internet, information society, new media)

Digital Media consist of a wide range of new media technologies, including:

cable and satellite television
digital special effects
DVDs (digital video/versatile disk)/CD-Rom/ LD/ CD-RW; DVD-RW/Box tops/ consoles
and the Internet

The material between these technologies have increasingly eroded, or as Terry Flew points out (in the second reading for this week), converged, it is becoming increasingly hard to distinguish one from the other forms of technology.

Functional convergence (the delivery of media and information through computer-based technology systems)
Industry convergence (takeovers, mergers, and strategic linkages between computing and IT sectors, telecommunication companies and the media sector)
convergence of products and services (forms of media and information content that take advantage of a networked broadband infrastructure, the capabilities provided by digitisation and the scope of interactivity and user customisation of services).

Digital media have produced changes in the contemporary culture: film as a new intertextual commodity, television as niche/narrow broadcasting, and media cultures are global economies of production.

At the level of the everyday, (with a new play aesthetic), interactivity has produced 'liveness' (immediacy), new spaces and new identities.


Theorisations of new media

1. Remediation (Bolter and Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media)

Remediation refers to the representation of one medium in another medium (repositioning and redefining of old media through digital multimedia)

* Immediacy: the desire to be immediately in touch with the represented objects without being obstructed by the medium which represents the representation).

* Hypermediacy: refers to another form of immediacy; another form of rendering the unmediated presence of the new hypermedia themselves).

the purpose of immersive virtual immediacy is "to disappear".


2. Les Manovich (The Language of New Media)

Montage is an example of hypermediacy because "it aims to create visual, stylistic, semantic and emotional dissonance between different elements" and by doing so, attracts the spectator's attention towards the construction that sets the boundaries that separate these elements at the same time.

On the other hand, in digital composition – "different spaces are combined into a single seamless virtual space" – a good example of the aesthetics of continuity (digital composition is the opposite to montage aesthetics)


Need to problematise the digital-analogue distinction:

Digital (discontinuous): arbitrary
Analogue (continuous): motivated

Studying Digital Media Cultures

“(M)edia cultures is a contested terrain across which key social groups and competing political ideologies struggle for dominance and that individuals live these struggles through the images, discourse, symbols, myths and spectacles of media cultures” Douglas Kellner (Media Cultures, Routledge, 1995)


(M)edia culture [is] a space rich in stories, information, and meanings…~ Michael R. Real (Exploring Media Culture, Sage, 1996)


Digital Media Culture combines technology and culture in such a way that produce new forms and configurations and new types of experiences and societies in which media and technology become the organising principle.


Digital Media is ontological, (ontology: relates to the nature of being) pragmatic and phenomenological

Ontological (what it is): what digital media is

Pragmatic (what it can do): digital media cultures use technology not just for its pragmatic purpose; technology is used to delineate status (social, class, etc) that shape experience.

Phenomenological (how it affects our experience): current systems of communications (e.g. emails/ SMS) make possible a kind of closeness by way of speedy or instantaneous oral/written exchange. It has also produced a new space characterised by new modes of being.


Characteristics and Politics of New Media

technology
transportation-navigation/transmission
communication (CMC) (a new space: cyberculture)


Cyberspace and Cybercultures
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." (William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1987 51)

this image is related to an anxiety about space, gender and the loss of the body as a site of the construction of identity.

2 ideas of cyberspace:

the network is [somewhere, everywhere, nowhere] that is mediated and virtual;
reproduces a new identity without a body




Cyberspace: Conceptual Space: Mediated, Virtual, Imagined


"Cyberspace...is the name some people use for the conceptual space where words, human relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using CMC technology."

(Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1993)


"CMC...not only structures social relations, it is the space within which the relations occur and the tool that individuals use to enter that space. It is more than the context within which social relations occur (although it is that, too) for it is commented on and imaginatively constructed by symbolic processes initiated and maintained by individual and groups."

(S.G. Jones. CyberSociety: Computer mediated Communication and Community, 1995)



Cyberspace is also Mediated/ Wired

"A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night." ~ Michael Benedikt (in Cyberspace: First Steps).

new media technology as a form of global communication and how media technology creates a new and parallel universe.


History of the emergence of cyberspace

- the invention of the printing press/ print revolution had three implications:
(1) production and dissemination of information was democraticised;
(2) the growth of popular culture and the spread of diverse cultural practices;
(3) the fact that these information and its effects cannot be located to one place, or entirely controlled from one point.

- the idea of time (the invention of the telegraph marked the distinct separation of transportation and communication).

- space is decontextualised and replaced by a distinctive non-geographical hyperspace. (the invention of the telephone)

- television first introduced the effects of parallel worlds.


Cyberspace (as conceptual, wired and mediated) has produced cybercultures: cybercultures

Features of cyberculture

interactive, feedback
"liveness" : the relation between the receiver and sender is virtual


"Cyberculture is built upon…a proliferation of nows in diverse modalities and inflections and heres that are not single, material, and continuous but multiple, discontinuous, and virtual"
(Margaret Morse, Virtualities, 1998: 15)


Cyberculture: Virtual

"it is no longer possible to separate the economic or productive realm from the realms of ideology or culture, since cultural artifacts, images, representations, even culture feelings and psychic structires have become part of the world of the economic" (Jean Baudrillard)

Information society (postmodern culture is not simply a culture of the sign; rather it is culture of the 'simulacrum').

A simulacrum is an identical copy without an original.

Simulation: distinction between original and copy has been destroyed
Hyperreal: is the generation by models of a real without origins or reality
e.g. The Matrix. Hyperrreality calls into question the claims of representation, both political and cultural.


Cybercultures: Imagined/Virtual Community

"Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." ~ (Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1993)


e.g. Napster


Cybercultures: Cyberspace and a new identity (posthuman, cyborg)

"The posthuman is a revisionary conception of the category 'human', a coupling of the human and the technological, in which it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the information circuits in which it is enmeshed."

~ Kathryn Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifers.” October 66 (Fall): 1993, 80.


Cyborg Origins: cybernetics, military cyborg, repdroductive cyborg, comic book cyborg, Hollywood cyborg, feminist cyborg

"A cyborg exists when two kinds of boundaries are simultaneously problematic: 1) that between animals (or other organisms) and humans, and 2) that between self-controlled, self-governing machines (automatons) and organisms, especially humans (models of autonomy). The cyborg is a figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy."

~ (Donna Haraway. Primate Visions. p139)



"The global and the universal are not pre-existing empirical qualities; they are deeply fraught, dangerous, and inescapable inventions. The cyborg is a figure for exploring those inventions, whom they serve, how they can be reconfigured." (Haraway, A Cyborg Handbook)

the cyborg is a creature in a postgender world and resists all seductions to organic wholeness.


Posthuman Politics

posthuman bodies are the causes and effects of relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences


e.g. cyberfeminism: cyberfeminist VNS Matrix manifesto


e.g. Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (eds. Chris Berry, Fran Martin, Audrey Yue, Duke 2003)

new media: disrupt ontological claims

mobile cultures are produced: global and subcultural