cultural studies and the internet (digital media)

[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

[multi]

i thought this was interesting and someway connected..
even though its about everquest...
i think i got the same bug with p2p..a while back

Play it and find out... On second thought don't play it. If you're involved in college you really wanna graduate. EQ will addict you so much you'll forget about work. I don't know why it is. I really HATE RPG's but EQ is just extremely fun. It's got a weird aura about it, all I can say. [m, 16]

Almost everyone who has taken an introductory psychology course in high school or college has heard of B.F. Skinner. Skinner is an important figure in Behaviorism, and developed a learning theory known as Operant Conditioning. Skinner claimed that the frequency of a given behavior is directly linked to whether it is rewarded or punished. If a behavior is rewarded, it is more likely to be repeated. If it is punished, it becomes suppressed. This deceptively simple and straight-forward theory may explain why EverQuest is so addictive.

The rewards cycle in EverQuest begins with instant gratifications. When you start a new character, everything you need to do is close by - finding the guildmaster; finding mobs to kill. The first few mobs you attack die in several swings and you make level 2 in about 5 kills. By the time you make level 3 half an hour later, you are more aware of the underlying skill points, the accumulation of money, and gain a desire to get better equipment. Gradually, it takes longer and longer to get to the next level. The simple tasks that you did to improve trade skills have become trivial, but the rewards you get - the blue skill points and the metal bits - drive you to perform tasks more elaborate than before because trivial tasks are no longer rewarded. The one-click reward disappears, and is gradually replaced by rewards that take more and more clicks to get. And suddenly, some of us find ourselves clicking away for hours in front of a forge or jewellery kit.

This process of guiding an individual to perform more and more elaborate and complex tasks is known as shaping in Operant Conditioning. It is usually explained in textbooks in conjunction with Skinner Boxes. Skinner boxes are small glass or plexi-glass boxes equipped with a combination of levers, food pellets, and drinking tubes. Laboratory rats are placed into Skinner boxes and conditioned to perform elaborate tasks. At first, the rat is rewarded with a food pellet for facing the lever. Then it is rewarded if it gets closer to the lever. Eventually, the rat is shaped to press the lever. Once the rat learns that pressing the lever is rewarded, a food pellet does not need to be dropped every time and the rat will still continue pressing the lever. It is in the same way that EverQuest shapes players to pursue more and more elaborate blacksmithing or tailoring combinations. Moreover, EverQuest players continue to attempt elaborate combinations in the face of many costly failures.

There are several schedules of reinforcement that can be used in Operant Conditioning. The most basic is a fixed interval schedule, and the rat in the Skinner Box is rewarded every 5 minutes regardless of whether it presses the lever. Unsurprisingly, this method is not particularly effective. Another kind of reinforcement schedule is the fixed ratio schedule, and the rat is rewarded every time it presses the lever 5 times. This schedule is more effective than the fixed interval schedule. The most effective method is a random ratio schedule, and the rat is rewarded after it presses the lever a random number of times. Because the rat cannot predict precisely when it will be rewarded even though it knows it has to press the lever to get food, the rat presses the lever more consistently than in the other schedules.

A random ratio schedule is also the one that EverQuest uses. Both melee and trade skill points increase after a random number of attempts. You know you won't get skill points unless you practice the skill, but you don't know how many attempts it will take to get another skill point. Level increases also take a random number of kills. You know that you won't gain a level by standing around, but you don't know exactly how many mobs you need to kill. Because the time it takes to level can be estimated however, one might argue that level increments follow a fixed ratio rather than a random ratio schedule. It is the presence of experience penalties from dying that randomizes this estimation, because it is hard to estimate deaths. The ability for certain classes to use effective strategies (druid quad-kiting for example) at certain levels also means that a higher level may be completed in less time than the level before it. Veteran players know that just because you can get a bubble of experience in half an hour today doesn't mean you can do it again tomorrow, because class demand and grouping conditions change even in the same zone from day to day.

A completely transparent experience points system would be a fixed ratio schedule because you have a very good grasp of how many more solo kills it takes to gain a level. Thus, if EverQuest exposed the underlying numerical experience points and told you how many points a mob gave you, and how much more experience you need to gain a level, it would be less effective as a reinforcement schedule. A system that can most effectively hint at progress without sacrificing this opacity maximizes the random ratio schedule, and this is why the recently implemented blue macro-view line in the experience bar enhances the schedule already in place. This is particularly true for mid-level players who would get frustrated by the normal experience bar that moved too slowly, and thus made them feel that progress was not being made.

The presence of multi-layered and overlapping goals in the game allow players to pursue multiple rewards concurrently. You need more experience to gain levels so you can kill bigger creatures. Along the way, you need more money to buy better equipment. You may want to develop trade skills, complete quests, travel across Norrath, or camp a rare spawn. Most of the time, you'll be doing several of these at the same time. In fact, the game forces you to. You can't keep up with mobs if you level but don't buy new gear. You can't continue blacksmithing if you run out of money. What this means is that you're always close to a goal - a reward. You are seldom far away from all possible rewards.

But something more intensely provoking has happened in EverQuest which makes it addictive. Another frequently encountered figure in introductory psychology textbooks is Maslow, known for his proposed hierarchy of needs. Maslow sees human needs in a pyramid scheme. At the bottom are basic hunger and thirst needs. Then follows security. At the top of the pyramid are aesthetic needs and personal achievements, which would only be possible on a strong foundation of sated hunger and security needs. Thus, even though personal achievements are more rewarding than filling an empty stomach, these achievements are only possible once you've filled your stomach. But EverQuest makes it possible for Joes and Janes to become heroes. EverQuest makes it so that you can slay Vox in a guild raid on an empty stomach. What happens when people can feel achievement through continuous mouse-clicking? What happens when these achievements are more rewarding than "real life" achievements? And what if it's easier to click the mouse than to cook dinner?

One important tenet of Operant Conditioning is that behaviors are not inherently rewarding - they are made rewarding through reinforcement. It is the shaping process in EverQuest that makes the in-game "achievements" rewarding. It is the shaping process that make "achievements" achievements. People who don't play EQ don't see the appeal in clicking "COMBINE" in front of a forge for hours. They don't see why players would camp Quillmane or ice cougars for hours, even days, for an item that usually doesn't drop. To outsiders, the time players spend playing the game is mind-boggling. But it's hard for those of us inside the construct to realize this because the game has conditioned us to pursue these rewards.

Many things set EverQuest apart from other available computer games. Unlike other RPG's, there is no story-line or super-ordinate goal. In fact, there really isn't even any kind of plot, which allows the player to feel in control. Games like Diablo II give constant instant gratification, and do not gradually take more and more time to reach rewards. Game-play at level 25 in Diablo feels just like game-play at level 10, whereas that is not the case in EverQuest. No one would play Diablo if you needed to camp a mob that only sometimes dropped an item. In fact, no one would play Diablo if you had to wait for a mob to spawn. But what sets EverQuest apart is that it is multi-layered and complicated in a way that few other games are. Everything from trade skills to faction, from mobs to their loot, from zones to planes, is complex and well-textured. Finally, it is different because it is massively multi-player, but while most multiplayer games are completely destructive, EverQuest has a decidedly constructive and cooperative tone to it. There is no blood in the game. No disemboweled intestines splatter on your screen. Instead, players often find themselves chatting while waiting for a mob to spawn. The ranger may be fletching as he recounts a particularly close battle. The warrior chugs some Dwarven Ale. There may be some emotes with playful, sexual overtones. In contrast with Quake or Diablo, this scene feels awfully relaxed and idyllic.

The massively-multiplayer nature of the game takes the virtual construct one step beyond just an elaborate Skinner Box. The problem with many people is that you can't have one box tailored to all of their reinforcement needs. But having them all in their separate Skinner Boxes is not interesting. The internet solves this problem by allowing individually tailored Skinner Boxes interact with others. And in this way, EverQuest has created a system of inter-connected Skinner Boxes, a Skinner Network even, where each Skinner Box is tailored to its host's needs and reinforcement schedule, and where individuals can interact with each other without sacrificing the integrity of their own construct. It is like the Matrix where everyone is isolated in their own nutrient vat, but where they can interact in a digitally-constructed world.

Click … click … click … mad typing …. Click .. click .. Click .. click … click … mad typing …

thats great ..shani thx
i love that stuff..
was there any links on the page u got that from?