Jamming the Jammers

This weeks reading by Coombe and Herman details the rise of Culture Jamming and the unmeasured assistance it has received from the Internet. Culture Jamming is not a new phenomena, I would say that graffiti is one of the oldest and most basic forms of culture jamming. The Internet had definitely aided the cause of culture jammers (to draw attention to and subvert the meaning of corporations and market consumerism) through its zero cost production and dissemination of information (particularly through things like viral videos); However it fails to highlight that corporations and advertising agencies are themselves using the very tools of culture jamming for their own means.

Farrer and Warner describe culture jamming as employing “provocative counter- images that use incongruous words and images designed to jolt the viewer into re-examining the premises underlying the original ads”. Advertising agencies are increasingly doing this as part of their marketing technique. They design ads to have that ‘double take’ affect that spoof ad campaigns have, it makes people actually think about what they are absorbing rather than blindly accepting it, a clever technique to ensure active audiences rather than passive ones. This is not addressed at all in Coombe and Herman’s article and I think it is very important. Nowadays it is hard to tell whether a corporation’s message is being subverted as a political comment or as a clever marketing tool… what to do?!

Wikipedia describes Culture jamming as entailing the transformation of mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, using the original medium’s communication method. I think a prime example is the Carlton Draught beer ‘Big Ad’. The very lyrics of the song make clear the subverted meaning of the ad, ‘It’s a big ad. Expensive ad. It better sell some bloody beer’, and yet it is still immensely effective in selling its product, despite making a comment about the ridiculous power, money and influence of the alcohol industry! If the advertising industry is jamming the culture jammers, we need to find new and cleverer ways of shaking up the monopoly of corporate consumerism… and keep those ideas coming because it seems as soon as they grow to fruition, they are adopted and manipulated for the wrong purposes.

Sources

Coombe, R & Herman, A. ‘Culture Wars on the Net: Intellectual Property and Corporate Propriety in Digital Environments’ in The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2001 Vol 100, Iss 4, pp919 -944. http://iii.library.uow.edu.au/search~S0?/rDigc101/rdigc101/1,2,2,B/l856~b1677119&FF=rdigc101+@ereadings&1,1,,1,0 Accessed 4/10/10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5U0W8FDDk

Farrer, M.E. & Warner, J.L. ‘Spectacular Resistance: The Billionaires for Bush and the Art of Political Culture Jamming’ in Polity, July 2008, Vol 40, No. 3, p 273.

« You can find me at Austinmer, NSW, Google Earth.

You can find me at Austinmer, NSW, Google Earth.

I found this weeks reading by Munster ‘Welcome to Google Earth’ quite dry, dull and boring. Yes it was exploring an interesting subject matter, Google and how it works, but it barely delved into the social uses of Google Earth(GE) and its impact on communications and society.

I think it is a unique creation and I like that Munster draws attention to the complete lack of other people or users present within the GE online world. “While it is possible to fly around from location to location using Google Earth or Maps, this traversal is remarkably solitary” (399). This is what differentiates GE from other online networks, the complete lack of sociability.

I wonder how long it will be before GE creates gadgets like Flickr, which allows people to tag and annotate the landscape with their own stories and comments? Will this take away from the objectivity of GE? Another idea to ponder is whether GE is an accurate representation of the physical landscape? Obviously there are limitations as the images need continual updating, but as a virtual map it is scarily accurate. Is it possible to have a GE blind spot? I know there are areas which are not closely mapped but is it actually possible to have a geographical area unreachable by satellite cameras?

Also, does GE promote stalking? Is it an invasion of privacy? Munster talks about Google’s algorithm to determine the highest rated sites based on popularity (number of clicks), what does this mean for GE? Do the most frequently visited sites have the most up-to-date images due to demand? I wonder to what new levels privacy will be pushed as GE becomes more and more accurate and invasive.

Sources

Munster, A. ‘Welcome to Google Earth’ in Critical Digital Studies, A Reader, ed Kroker, A & Kroker, M. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2008 pp 398-416  https://vista.uow.edu.au/webct/urw/lc765387217021.tp765387237021/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct Accessed 21/02/10.

http://www.flickr.com/about/

http://www.webtvhub.com/hilarious-google-earth-video-google-earth-makes-stalking-easy/

Jamming the Jammers »« Capturing the mundane and every-day

Capturing the mundane and every-day

This weeks’ reading by Susan Murray provided some interesting insights into the modern day use of photography and photographs. She describes photography as no longer “just the embalmer of time that André Bazin once spoke of, but rather a more alive, immediate, and often transitory, practice/form… (it is) an immediate, rather fleeting display of one’s discovery of the small and mundane” (2008; 151).

I feel she is absolutely correct in highlighting that photography is no longer a medium that is allocated purely to special occasions, and is the job of professionals. This is largely due to the minimal cost and ease of digital production, and the possibility of instant dissemination using new media and the Internet.

I like how Murry outlines that taking a photo is no longer solely about capturing a moment or memory that would otherwise be lost. Of course we still do take photos to document special occasions but we are also just as likely to take photos of what we had for lunch, or a street we walk down every day, or your pet. What meaning do these photos have for us and why do we take them? Do they help us solidify our understanding of what is “our” world and what is important to it? By documenting these aspects of everyday life do we gain meaning into what role they play?

I think taking photos and sharing photos helps people build a sense of who they are and what is their world. Our society is one where transience and instant gratification is the norm, and stability is hard to establish. Photographs slow down the pace and give people time to recognise things that may otherwise get lost in the blur of daily living. Photography helps people feel in control of themselves and their lives, as they can construct their world the way they want it to be, through the pictures they take of it. They also reaffirm this representation of their world by sharing their constructed images with friends and family.

Murry, S. ‘Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics’ in Journal of Visual Culture, 2008, Vol 7, No. 2, pp 147- 163.

You can find me at Austinmer, NSW, Google Earth. »« Webification breathes new life

Webification breathes new life

So after three attempts I have finally managed to create my Webification blog! woohooooooo!!!

I have learnt some excellent new skills like how to embed videos and include images onto my page, and how to adjust the size of the videos and how to create a playlist on YouTube so it’s all new and exciting and i don’t feel quite as  technologically retarded! now the internet is my oyster…

check it out at Sound Track in my mind.

Capturing the mundane and every-day »« YouTube Video

YouTube Video

This is a YouTube video that we made for a class activity last week. I only just managed to compress it into a small enough file to upload. 

Webification breathes new life »« Digital Foreplay

Digital Foreplay

Call me a nanna, but at the ripe old age of 22, I strongly believe that sometimes there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction.

In this weeks’ reading Cupples and Thompson state that in their study they found that “text messaging is by far the preferred means of communication for New Zealand teenagers”.

I think there is a fundamental flaw in that statement and that is to clarify for what type of communication text is the preferred means. There are still social and emotional rules that govern communication. You are not going to break traumatic news to someone (like their friend has died or parents have split up) through a text message unless it is the last available option. There are still things that can only be properly communicated face to face. Even a phone call, where all the nuance of voice, pace, accent and emotion may be present, is not a suitable means for some messages to be communicated. Yes texting may be easy, quick, succinct, silent, removed and immediate, but it does leaves things wide open to misinterpretation. I think a more correct statement would be that “texting is by far the preferred means of general communication between teenagers”.

Texting allows you to silently intrude into someone else’s day without their permission. A phone call you can choose to answer, but you can’t choose to receive a text, only wether to read it or not, and then in turn, reply or not. It also promotes pointless and random communicating e.g. Where r u? And then two minutes later where r u now? Sometimes it is so much quicker and easier just to call the person, rather than spend 10 minutes and $4 in texts to find out what you want.

Yes it has taken on a new, integral role in the building and nurturing of relationships between young and older people alike, but at what cost? Have people lost the skill of polite small talk? Of face-to-face flirting? Rejection can be a healthy learning curve that makes you appreciate it when you do establish a personal connection, it also makes you more aware of the way you treat others in the reverse situation (i.e. When you are the one doing the rejecting).

If people are hiding behind their mobile phones to avoid rejection than are they really even experiencing the tense but exciting playground of personal interaction? Or is it a plastic game to be manipulated from a distance? Communication is so much more than words. What takes you 30 seconds to type in a text could be expressed in a single look and shrug of the shoulders… but would you have the confidence? That is the question.

Cupples, J. & Thompson, L. ‘Heterotextuality and digital foreplay’, Feminist Media Studies, 2010, vol 10, No. 1, p 1-15.

YouTube Video »« Privately Public?

Privately Public?

In the current frenzied climate of Social Networking Sites (SNS), how you manage your relationships online is just as important as the way you manage them offline. The two worlds are not separate and distinct, but are blurry, overlap and mirror each other.

Sheehan (2002) is quoted in this weeks reading (Lange, 2008; 364) as pointing out that “individuals have privacy to the extent that others have limited access to information about them, to the intimacies of their lives, to their thoughts or bodies”. This describes the basic method of maintaining different relationships, that is, controlling who has access to what information about you.

I think this method has been literally realised through the evolution of SNS. On Facebook you pick and choose who you want to have access to certain information about you, whether that be through accepting/ declining friend requests, tagging pictures, sending comments vs. emails, and your privacy settings. The Internet allows an abundance of information to be readily available, so people have to work harder at controlling the flow of information about them, in order to maintain certain relationships.

The reading explored this specifically in regard to YouTube users and subscribers. It discussed the different methods people employ to distinguish between information publicly available and information privately available, despite YouTube being a public sharing forum.  The methods it discussed were fairly general, and I think they are not unique to YouTube users alone.

“Using media to develop and maintain social networks is an established practice” according to Baym (2000, in Lange, 2008; 362). I think this practice is becoming more and more complex as our control over who has access to what information about us decreases.

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook says that nothing on the Internet is private. Well obviously there are ways to make information that is available on the internet fairly private (by reducing its access, coding, tags, searchability), but what about the information others already have about you? How can you restrict other people from sharing private information about you publicly? I think this the uphill battle that everyone who uses the Internet is currently facing- How to be privately public.

Lange, P.G, 2008, ‘Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol 13; pp361- 380.

Digital Foreplay »« friend or Friend? face to Face?

friend or Friend? face to Face?

The world became so much smaller with Social Network Sites (SNS). Well not “The World” technically, but my world. Your world. As Boyd & Ellison (2007) emphasise, the majority of people with SNS profiles use the sites to maintain pre-existing offline relationships. Which means that friends of friends are no longer “strangers” but members of your network and therefore potential friends. These potential ‘Friend’ links become not so hazy and distant when it means you are  granted  access to a persons’ photos, videos, personal information, messages from other friends and friend networks, all because you have a mutual acquaintance.

The pool of people you “know” gets deeper and deeper, but does “knowing” a person really just constitute being up to date with their social goings on, recent friends they’ve made or places they’ve been? I don’t think so.

I am intrigued that this weeks’ reading made no reference to any studies that analyse the impact of SNS on offline relationships. It referred to it often but never explored this interesting relationship.

Does being Friends with someone on Facebook make it easier to be friends with someone face to face? I am inclined to think that it makes it harder, as there is less to talk about when you actually do come face to face with them, because you already know everything going on in their life from status updates and new pictures/ comments they’ve posted.

If you hadn’t have sparked up an online ‘friendship’ with a friend of a friend, would you still have met them face to face? It is hard to distinguish between real time online and real time offline, is the distinction blurred in our current Facebook obsessed culture? Are our offline relationships now so integrated with our online relationships that it is impossible to distinguish between the two? I ponder the thought that friendship has become superficial.

I know that my best friends will be so regardless of our interaction online, but is that because I established those friendships before the era of SNS really took off? Would my friendships be as solid or indifferent to online social networking if I were born a few years later, and hence then part of a different generation, the Z gen?

Boyd, D. & Ellison, N. 2007. ‘Social Networking Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship’. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol 13, No. 1, pp 210- 230.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations

Privately Public? »« Do It for the Love of Music…

Do It for the Love of Music…

Webification Project Draft

For my webification project I am creating a blog called “Soundtrack in my mind” and it basically documents my world of music.  I am a musician myself and essentially  live, breathe and eat music. It accompanies  me wherever I go, whether that be in my head or through an ipod or just out in the world.

Features will include a Gig Guide of upcoming gigs I consider worthwhile checking out, a blog of my personal musings on music, reviews of recent live music I have seen, links to cool music clips and YouTube videos, images, related articles, links to relevant websites (like Triple J, FBI radio, Ticketec, Falls fetsival etc) and any other music related Paraphenaelia I  stumble accross on a day to day basis.

If I can work out how to include a ‘song of the week’ section I will include that too, but at the moment I  don’t know how to embed audio on my blog.

I attempted to create my website last night using Google Sites, but it was quite difficult to acheive what I  wanted (which may be purely due to the fact that I am very tech-un-savvy) so after consulting with Katie today,I think I am going to swap to a better platform like wordpress.com or blogger.com.

friend or Friend? face to Face? »« “If you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist”

“If you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist”

Week 4 reading review- ‘Gendering Facebook: Privacy and Commodification’.

I found this article very interesting as it discussed concerns and issues that I, as a regular female user of Facebook, share. I find it very alarming to learn that the way that Facebook makes money is to sell information about me and my likes, dislikes, consumer habits and friends to advertising groups. I had never really considered before that someone was profiting from my social networking online. The scary thing is that I am only learning this now, despite operating a Facebook account for more than 4 years! How much of my personal information has been monitored in the last 4 years that I am unaware of?

The article also mentions Facebook’s introduction of an advertising tracking program called Beacon in 2007 that allowed 40 “commercial websites to track online purchases of Facebook users and broadcast them to members’ social networks” (2008; 212). I never knew anything about this Beacon program! Even though Facebook has changed its’ settings to make the Beacon participation optional, is this an obvious amendment or part of the small print that people will not notice and be conned into? Does this mean that not only are my purchases being monitored, but the websites I access are also being monitored? It sounds like an invasion of privacy to me. But then on the internet what really classifies as private?

My largest concern regarding Facebook is privacy, something that the participants in the focus group in the reading were also primarily concerned with. My attention has only been drawn to the importance of privacy settings in the last 18 months, when I learnt that every time Facebook was updating itself it would automatically reset privacy settings to ‘open’. So people’s personal information was now publically available with no warning from the Facebook tech team! This caused a huge user fury, and Facebook has recently updated all of its privacy settings to address this issue. But it is very scary to think of what information strangers and stalkers (even if it is for professional advertising causes) could access about me when I thought I was protected.

I mainly use Facebook to keep in contact with friends who are travelling or who I don’t see in person very often. I think this is the purpose that the software was designed for. The article notes that most people still use Facebook to maintain current offline friendships rather than to create new ones. I agree with the statement made by one focus group participant about the social expectation to use Facebook. You risk being excluded from a whole range of events that only extend invitations online if you don’t have a Facebook account. But is this a bad thing?

I think that Facebook is eroding people ability to communicate face to face and extract information first hand. They do not know how to hold a conversation with someone and ask them about themselves, what’s been happening and what they are interested in, because they are used to having all this information available for easy access on a persons’ Facebook profile. It is also undermines the idea of friendship. Obviously just because someone is your ‘friend’ on Facebook does not mean they are automatically your friend face to face.

I don’t like my acquaintances knowing things about me or seeing pictures that I only want to show my close friends, just because it pops up in their news feed and we are “friends” on Facebook. It blurs the distinction between friend, family and acquaintance and interferes with the basic way that humans maintain relationships, through the control of information about themselves and who has access to it.

References

Cohen, Nicole S & Shade, Leslie R. ‘Gendering Facebook: Privacy and Commodification’, Journal of Feminist Media Studies, 8:2, pp 210- 214. Accessed 16/08/10.

Do It for the Love of Music… »« Week 3 reading review- “Analysing the web”