BarryTaylorBlog

internet as playground and factory

 

In my theology and culture class we moved into a discussion about media, media theory and media culture this week, exploring the new realities facillitated by the technologies and various media we employ--how our self-understanding is often reconfigured. We spent a little time with McLuhan--I think you have to regradless of ones opinion about his work and we wound up with Virilio and particularly his theory of dromology--speed, and its effect upon us.

The work of Dominic Pettman in this realm is also pretty helpful. I love the maxim that was part of the inspiration for this talk/conference that, "Social participation is the oil of the digital economy," Pettman uses the term 'social lubrication' to explore the relationship between the virtual oil of digital economies and the way in which real oil drives economies. Below is a taste of some more of his work.

 

 

Meme Anatomies

Here is a cool infographic that breaks down a few of the major internet memes of 2012 and shows how they evolved. It is an interesting look into our cultural obsessions and how social media and pop cultural artifacts are a vibrant partnership

viddy well then droogies!!!

There is a new app from Random House for the 50th anniversay of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It only seems to be available in the U.K. at the moment but hopefully in the future it will arrive on these shores.
The reviews are all incredibly positive, declaring that this is one of those apps that really does enable the reader to engage with the text in new ways, not simply monetize a piece of text via another revenue stream.

theology and media culture

Just over halfway through the course and today we finished up the television section. In honour of Halloween we spent some time exploring otherness--strangers and monsters. We looked at The Walking Dead and True Blood using some of Richard Kearney's thinking on Strangers, Gods and Monsters, which I have found insightful along the way in thinking about the ways in which we (various and diverse cultures and societies) process and manage our fears, anxieties and concerns.

"There are monsters on the prowl whose form changes with the history of knowledge," declared Foucault and I think these shows, and others like them, give some examples of how our monsters have changed over the past decades. The fact that both zombies and vampires have traction in the culture is interesting to me. Those characters first appeared out of the underbelly of the enlightenment project, the 19th century churning with change and looking for new maps, manifested its anxieties in the tales of Frankenstein and Dracula--today we seem to have come back around to these symbols and are using them again, in modified forms, to attempt to find new pathways, to handle our present challenges and fears in this time when of not-knowing--when once again, the maps that have brought us thus far, seem insufficient.

Next week we are turning our attention toward digital culture and entering the world of new technologies, social media and all that. Geert Lovink's book on Network Culture is strong critique of post-desktop digitality, the world of mobile digitality, but along with critique he does open up some great questions about things like anonymity, connectivity, sociality, which I hope will give the students plenty to wrestle with. I must say that this particualr class has been very engaged thus far and I have heard and learnt a lot from them.

monday

after the apocalypse

I have been thinking a fair bit about this fascination that there seems to be with the idea of post-apocalypse, post-technological collapse. It's evident in things as diverse as The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead andnow, even more, the new JJ Abrams produced, Revolution, which explores the world post-electricity. It seems to echo the on-going love/hate relationship we have with technology. On the one hand we are enraptured with what technology can accomplish and how connected it allows us to be, and what it can deliver, literally into our hands. On the other hand, we speak a lot about the downside of technology-the loss of face-to-face communing, i-pod isolation, hyper-individualized mediation, and these shows seem to be wrestling with those duelling forces at work in our lives.

I begin a class next week on Theology and Media Culture and I might begin with this question, this issue, in the class, get us thinking about the role/s technology plays in enhancing and diminishing our lives. There is an interesting article in Esquire magazine online about this very thing--a worthwhile read. This is something that Marshall Mcluhan addressed with his laws of media tetrad, putting forward the view that technology, any technology, causes four major effects upon the user-it (whatever it is)enhances, retrieves, reverses and obsolesces. We seem to live somewhere in the tension between those dynamics, each of us being pulled by various preferences, positions, access etc. 

There are often times when I would happily give up my cell-phone, but the idea of going back to a pre-electric world--one that would also herald a return to the 'dark' in so many other areas, is not one that I care to visit. I think we have to find our own balance with technology and its use, misuse, disuse.

Much like Hunger Games--Revolution presents a sort of frontier-survivalist mentality--both interestingly, are heavily led by females--the girl with the crossbow in the NBC ad would not look out of place at all in the HG artworks, advertising and narrative ideology--this idea of living close to the land, technology-free, surviving off of ones wits and ancient-or older, close-to-earth wisdom, holds great appeal.

We rely so much on technology--and for most of us, most of it is a mystery in terms of how it actually works--i'm still stuck on radio-waves!!! Derrida used this idea to great degree in his writing on knowledge and our relation to technology. For him, the space created between our reliance upon and ignorance of, technology, was precisley the cause of a revived and renewed interest in animis, magic and mystery--i.e. religious belief is affected by technology relation.

And of course, all these shows draw heavily upon the American Obsession with all things apocalyptic--which continues to be expressed at the heart of much of our culturally mediated imagination. Oh, and AC/DC are still cool!

hybrid media

Bravest Man Teaser - (Visit bravestman.com on mobile) from Daniel Savage on Vimeo.

 A teaser from a project that seeks to marry various meida together. I like this because Bravest Man in the Universe might just be my favourite album of the year so far. Read more about this project and the rise of hybrid media in general here.

things have changed

This is an interesting inforgraphic charting the expansion and development of the Internet over the past decade, remarkable really when you consider exactly how much things have changed and how fluidly we have embraced all these shifts. It came from here.

tiny machine

  

(via semi-good looking)

the friends and friends of friends on facebook

I just disconnected from Facebook. I did in a moment, at a traffic light, but it was a long time coming. For a while now, I have been thinking quite deeply about my relationship and feelings about this particular expression of social media. I have always been a little ambivalent. I first joined to communicate with friends in the UK who told me they always responded to messages there quicker than e-mail. So at first, it was simply a long-distance communication tool but then Friend Requests started to come--confirm, confirm. Then people I didn't remember or didn't know and then that moment--do I 'confirm' or 'not now,' well, they are friends of friends of mine so...why not? Then the numbers grow, 'find me on Facebook' became part of my vernacular and friends brought friends, nothing particularly serious, essentially innocuous. I have not been very active apart from messaging people occasionally and confirming people. But for some time I have been a little conflicted about confirming people I dont really know--but I dont interact much, I never 'like' anything and most of the time I pay little attention to what's in the news feed. But today for some reason I took an extended look and didn't like what I saw. My feed was full of negative comments about Obama's comments in support of the rights of same-sex couples to marry. What I found most troubling was that I didn't actually know many of these people--I had friended on the basis of other friends or on some kind of tenuous connection--church, seminary--mostly, I must admit around the issues of religion and culture.

Now, if you don't like the idea of same-sex marriage thats up to you, but I don't want to be connected to the ridiculous comments about how America is anti-Christian, how Obama is the devil, how he has rejected God's clearly defined Truth...blah blah blah. Because my opinion is different, doesn't mean I assume some moral superiority or don't want to engage in meaningful dialogue, but I am not going to sit around and see a whole bunch of mad shit in the feed of a social media tool that I have opted to use. 

My initial reaction was to go through and edit out, you know 'unfriend,' but then I thought that perhaps I would just give it all a miss and liberate my self from it. In Geert Lovink's marvellous book he writes,

"By questioning the self-evidence of Facebook and its befriending algorithm, we already make a first step toward refusing corporate-controlled social media platforms."I prefer not to." The next step could be to actively shape new manifestations of collective anonymous action: "I need to become anonymous in order to be present."

 I'd like to think that my decision to deactivate was a step toward refusing corporate-control, but  I was just pissed off with people on my page saying stuff that I thought was offensive and naive(it wasn't the postioning so much as the justifications that upset me), and I didn't want to have it in front of my face. I don't always react to dissenting opinions in this way, I try to remain open to any and every view--I think it's important to do so in the long run--but not on a social media platform that is so intimately connected with me.

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes--it was Nietzsche I think who nurtured the idea of 'star friendships' and of course, there are 'fair-weather' friends--we have many ways of speaking about friendship and facebook has undoubtedly brought new understandings to the concept--for good and bad I think. But what it comes down to for me is that some friendships are easily left behind, others, for a host of complex reasons, we stick with, even when they are difficult. I don't pick friends based on their opinions about particular issues (well, maybe music and dress haha!), I have been fortunate to have immense diversity in my friendships, and I accept them regardless of their opinions, but what I realized is that I need a more stringent process for accepting friends on social media platforms. There are some people who I only contact via Facebook, I'll have to do a little work to make sure I re-connect via other means. In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the freedom. One of my favourite quotes about friends comes from the movie Love is the Devil, in the mouth of Derek Jacobi playing the painter Francis Bacon,

"Real pain for my sham friends and champagne for my real friends."