censorship and government regulation (those this still applies at some levels today - China)
editorial control
limited choice of information retrieval
one-way communication
Advertising 2.0:
looser boundaries and wider parameters
we are editors of our own content (flickr, facebook, twitter, blogs)
more choice of information points
many to many communication
Enter niche markets and the long tail:
"In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.
Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.
What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.
Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book."
This all leads to what Chris Anderson (a.k.a The Long Tail) terms as "people power":
First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.
Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.
Class Work: Blog Post
Lecture 12: "I am the Long Tail", Name
In your blog post note your own long tail - tell us where you buy your books, dvds, music, groceries, travel, clothing and where do you get your information?
Include an image or screen capture of one of your online retailers and a link to a place where you access information.
Today we reviewed Structuralism and spoke a little bit about how Derrida and Poststructuralism fit within the time-line of literary theories.
We noted that (largely) for Structuralism and Formalism that the structure of language produces reality and that the meaning of a text (be it a novel or musical piece or artwork) is (usually) derived from the elements which constitute it (grammar or line and colour and texture) rather than the context etc...
What is digital culture? - Recap? (nb live blogged!)
We are looking beyond the IOCT to address the idea of forming a critical framework, judgements and to theorise one's own artistic work. That way we can demonstrate an understanding of what we're doing. When you come to do your final projects this kind of critical thinking will stand you in good stead.
Languages of New Media
Paul explains that there is always an element of interactivity with digital media. It's not necessarily true that there is a huge change when one moves on to a computer but there are degrees of interactivity.
Andy: well, everything is interactive.
Paul: sometimes it isn't important is someone interacts with something, what was important was the process...doesn't need an interactive purpose.
Jess: but as artist/creator you were interacting in the process of creation.
Andrew: so when artists create interactive installations is that a meaningless phrase or is there a point being made?
Paul: thinks this is about the intention rather than the meaning behind it. With all works of art and all systems of representation the user is required to fill in gaps in system (Manovich).
Andy: thinks interactive is being used to define degrees of control that the audience has
Andrew: so an interactive installation seems to imply that the audience has more control than a *usual* installation.
Jess: so does interactivity mean (for Paul) that the user can *change* the content
Paul: yes, to change the way it is deployed and navigated.
Andrew: If I build a pool, fill it and swim in it, how is that *experience* different from swimming in another pool?
Andy: to really originate something you must be the first person to make it (i.e. the wheel). But, innovation as a pure form and then innovation with constraints.
Paul: reminds us of Pierre Mendard and the context of the work
Andrew: If you have a sock and it gets a whole and you darn it and you keep darning it then over time you replace the thread...is it still the same sock? *infinite regress*
Solipsism: if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise? This is the problem with postmodernism, the only way anything can be said to have a meaningful is if we all share that social reality but with postmodernism there is no social reality.
"... the sane, having at their disposal all the most deadly weapons of the postwar recovery; on the other, a seedy solipsist and fourpence. ..."
Murphy 82.
Paul: with musicians, though the music might not have been written by the performer it takes on a new meaning/context
Jess: thus gains some originality
Paul on Manovich: not only creating the things you want to create but that everyone who sees your work understands what you're trying to create.
Andrew: "intuition": discuss!
Andy: something you know without being told, people talking about interface design and what's intuitive for some people is not intuitive for others
Andrew: are there levels of intuition that exist apriori? (how birds know to migrate) With regard to elephant coming out of the wall, neuroscience is the most fertile ground right now for examining these things. There may be some kind of way of understanding what people know or want in a given situation.
Andy: But, if you put enough people in a room with a button and ask them what will happen one is BOUND to think an elephant will appear.
Andrew: how do we know intuition is intuition?
Andy: so there are cultural assumptions on what is intuitive.
Back to: Le Corbusier:
"If I hold up a primary cubic form, I release in each individual the same primary sensation of the cube; but if Iplace some black geometric spots on the cube, I immediately release in a civilised man an idea of dice to play with, and a whole series of associations which would follow. A Papuan would see only an ornament."
(1920)
What Le Corbusier was interested in were universal truths. There was a strong element of idealism here. And of course the consequences of this we see in Leicester with the *design* of the buildings.
But there is some interesting 60s design in Leicester:
""The Engineering Building comprises large ground-level workshops (heavy machinery), covering most of the available site, and a vertical ensemble consisting of office and laboratory towers, lecture theaters and lift and staircase shafts."
Photo, exterior overview · Engineering Building · Leicester University, Leicester, England
Andrew: So, is it possible to have pastiche that isn't hideous?
(this question stumped us for a while)
Andrew: Culturally we've been through a shift. Pastiche had been used as a valued way of people learning how to create art (music and painting). The idea was to be as close to the model as possible = good training. But, with Modernist aesthetic pastiche become loathesome and unoriginal. Replicating the trodden path. But now the keywords are innovation, creation, and originality. Emphasis on developing one's own voice.
Jess: Pastiche now is about challenging and questioning previous contexts.
Think of "The Band" and their song that incorporates a brass band segment.
Implies the user/reader has a more elevated status as they can understand this questioning/challenge.
Andrew: postmodern thought is largely affiliated with technology. The main point here seems to be "what is original, what is pastiche, what is contextualising." clearly very important for postmodern theory (think Lyotard).
Paul: Interesting point that knowledge loses its "use-value" so knowledge is tied to commercialisation. So, in web 2.0 are things that are supposed to be of use-value are actually about commerce?
"The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. The 'producers' and users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages whatever they want to invent or learn.”
Jess: but it seems that lyotard is combining two knowledges, that of creation and that of dissemination (form and content)
Paul: Going back to the idea of exchange having value but now it's the content that has value.
Andy: In open source the idea is that information has a value but not necessarily a monetary value. It has a value when shared not on it's own.
Andrew: Howard Rheingold sees the commons of information being privatised.
Jess: so commodified knowledge can live alongside knowledge for knowledge's sake.
Paul: maybe the future is downloadable music where people get the info as well as the experience
Andrew: voluntary contributions (Radiohead) is not the future. People are prepared to pay what they think is fair.
Andy: having music freely available is more like a promotional tack rather than a way of making money.
Andrew: So the live gig is the privileged commodity.
Andrew: What is postmodernism?
"plagiarism by anticipation"
Student Presentations on "Everything is Mediated"
Andy:
Paul: "Everything is Mediated"
Reading for Next Week:
Barthes, S/Z, A Barthes reader / edited, and with an introduction, by Susan Sontag A Derrida reader : between the blinds / edited, with an introduction and notes, by Peggy Kamuf.
During this week's interesting discussion which seemed to keep coming back to literacy (what is it exactly), power, representation, and subjectivity I paused for a moment and captured a moment of "what really happened" as Barthes would have it: "the photographer had to be there ("The Photographic Image," Image/Music/Text 31)
This is me watching Professor Andrew Hugill watching his Second Life avatar watching a video...mise en abyme anyone?
"What is the content of the photographic message? What does the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene itself, the literal reality."
This module gives an introduction to key ideas in critical and cultural theory that affect creative technologies and the creative industries.
The syllabus includes Modernism and Postmodernism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Feminism, Semiotics, Linguistic Theory, Anthropology, Rhizomes, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Noise and Communication, Escience and Esocial science and The Ethnography of Cyberspace.
