From the beginning of the industrial revolution, people have to been extending our range of technologies and discover various ways where it can be used to be better suited in our lifestyle and raise our living standard to maximum. In other to do so, people are forced to learn and adopt the ‘new’ way of living alongside with media. When television had started to be common as a home appliance, people can not only gain information concerning society, government, international news as well as enjoy their home entertainments such as soap drama, music channel etc. These ways, even women and children can have access to a wider perspectives about the world they lived in, hence changed the status of these group in society as well as the structure of society. Through television, we are provoked to think of Marshall McLuhan’s saying – ‘Medium is the Message’, as the introduction television transformed the structure of society, yet performed as an artwork where producers thought, advertisement and news can be shown. At the same time, television can also be described as a passive medium where our choices of which program to watch, our favourite channel and the time we watch creates television as an artwork we can choose.
To fully understand what is ‘digital media’, we must research and explore way more than just technology like television and radio, but also the nowadays’ social media platform available such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blogs and forum. As internet explorer and webpages being available, we are able to received first-hand information despite our location, creating the world as a global village. This is then transformed to a network where people are able to express their feeling and emotions towards a certain political events, or an action of an organisation, creating a pieces of art that’s not only belong to just one individual, but a group of people that shared common view and perspective. Likewise, according to Raymond Williams who introduced the idea of technological determinism, he viewed digital media as an “unconscious social needs” – where people are desire to stay with on with the trend of community and are scared of being left behind. This idea I think is a main drive of our reliance on digital media and creates our society alike an artwork.
In the beginning of my assessment, I examined the idea of context of digital media and its transformation over time through research of various media form – magazine, newspaper, Facebook and Twitter. It is then when I realised people uses media to communicate, express their thought very similarly despite their time and context. However, differences can still be witness as people are more self-conscious about people’s perspective of them from before. This has become one of the negative effects of digital media as people become desiring and engaging on how many people ‘like’ or ‘comment’ their status. This then affect the content of each digital media and creating an effect that spread like virus. One of many example is uploading of ‘vine’ video on Facebook to gain more recognition.
As my body of work, I uses two different types of media – letters and magazine and overlap the digital media available nowadays – Facebook and Twitter. By having magazine as a background for my illustrations, Facebook features are presented, this shows the complexity of digital media bought to contemporary society amongst with the existing form of media. Similar with this idea, the letter with the twitter page as background suggests the way of news were delivered in the past and compare and contrast the way digital media provided us with information. However, I think it is necessary to acknowledge that no matter what the time and context people are in, media have been and always will be presented as an artwork created by society to inform, entertain and reminds us of everyday happening around the world. Through the exploration of the question in this perspective, I believe that the consequences of digital media will be continuously improving to maximise our living standard as well as extend future generation knowledge. However, there is one question we must ask ourselves: is the artwork of digital media today created by individuals, society and government in contemporary society able to endlessly exist?
