#n8887527

[kcb206group4]

Which Technological, New Media Liberties are Worth Fighting For?

As New Media’s presence becomes evermore ubiquitous, it’s influence of political spheres worldwide grows simultaneously. However, in the ongoing debate over the nature of this growing influence as necessarily positive or negative, there can be no certain answer. As Clay Shirky writes, being an authoritative source on the subject as a Professor of New Media at New York University, “The use of social media tools -- text messaging, e-mail, photo sharing, social networking, and the like -- does not have a single preordained outcome. Therefore, attempts to outline their effects on political action are too often reduced to dueling anecdotes.” (Shirky, C. 2011) Hence, we have to just accept that there are both advantages and disadvantages that have arisen from this emerging, new technology and instead analyse these pros and cons in order to answer the more poignant question: Which Technological, New Media Liberties are worth fighting for?

Source: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-11/asking-the-hard-questions 

Personally, I have witnessed my own political opinions shaped by new media platforms. During the recent political elections, many of my friends were very vocal about their political beliefs and persuasions and I found their comments on the subject far more influential than the various campaigns I heard on television. There were still plenty of ignorant people with strong beliefs on the subject but because I knew them all personally I felt comfortable trusting the information presented by my more informed friends when forming my own conclusions. 

Shirky commented on this facet of new media’s dissemination of information and opinions, evaluating the garnering of information as secondary to the communication between citizens to form a cohesive “public sphere”, he writes, “Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference.” (Shirky, C. 2011) Therefore, it is the platforms which best enable participants to communicate amongst themselves, ‘echoing’ mediated opinions, that are the most critical to inciting positive political change.  

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/angry-students-social-media-the-perfect-storm-for-revolution/7927

It has also become clear to me that political change in the more authoritarian states will be slow, but inevitable as long as these ‘oppressed’ societies possess the technological tools required to form a connected, cohesive public sphere, strong enough to resist against their oppressors. (Shirky, C. 2011) This strategy for political activism does, however, desperately rely on these tools for communication and organisation in order to be effective and without them their efforts are drastically diminished. Thus, it remains crucial to protect these vital forms of communication in order to preserve citizens’ ability to be heard and rebel against inadequate governments. This is one global freedom that we should all fight for: the freedom of autonomous communication and assembly; it’s importance cannot be understated as it helps preserves the civil libraries that the people deem worth fighting for.

Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/turkish-prime-minister-characterizes-twitter-as-menace-to-society

Bibliography:

Shirky, C. 2011. “The Political Power of Social Media.” Foreign Affairs. Accessed May 2, 2014. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media  

[kcb206group4]

Online 'NetSpeak' - The Hybrid of Written and Spoken Mediums?

Online communication is a fascinating element of new media culture which has developed and evolved in response to it’s growing pervasion of society. Millions of people are now regularly communicating online which has generated a new form of social practices and ‘netiquette’ specific to the myriad forms of online communication and more importantly, based on the limitations and facilitations of this medium and the people who have adopted it. (Crystal, David. 2006) Which invites the question, how exactly do we communicate online, and how is it different from previous methods of communication?

Personally, I mainly use new media platforms to communicate with friends I’m unable to see regularly enough, to simply keep in contact with them. The majority of our communication is very conversational, essentially as if we were talking face-to-face. However, there are a few distinct differences between online and direct conversations. Many people complain about the Internet’s impersonal and shallow afforded connection, which I do agree with to an extent, however I relate more to the argument made by David Crystal who explores the hybridisation of written and spoken linguistic practices inherent in the online mediums new media enabled platforms have created.

Crystal begins by recalling an essentially accurate, core principle of online communication, ‘write the way people talk’, and highlighting a critical flaw with this statement, “But to what extent is it possible to ‘write speech’, given a keyboard restricted to the letters of the alphabet, numerals, and a sprinkling of other symbols, and a medium which - as we shall see - disallows some critical features of conversational speech?” This question is especially poignant as it points out that these online mediums share the physical limitations of writing while trying to imitate the fluidity and spontaneity of speech, which is obviously problematic but is what led to the innovative hybrid we have adopted today. For example, instances such as instant messaging that require active participation in a conversation and maintain a fast pace, “though expressed through the medium of writing… display several of the core properties of speech. They are time-governed, expecting or demanding an immediate response… and their utterances display much of the urgency and energetic force which is characteristic of face-to-face conversation.” (Crystal, David. 2006) I really agree with this point, as I think instant messaging is a clear blend of written and spoken mediums, and is essentially ‘written speech’.

However, there are exceptions to this suggestion, as Crystal goes on to point out, one of the major flaws being that the participants obviously are unable to communicate much of nuanced complexity of everyday conversation. He also notes that we are forced to receive information in chunks of text which is also quite limiting, “When we send a message to someone, we type it a keystroke at a time, but it does not arrive on that person’s screen a keystroke at a time… There is no way that a recipient can react to our message while it is being typed.. Correspondingly, there is no way for a participant to get a sense of how successful a message is, while it is being written - whether it is being understood, or whether it needs repair.” Which I think is another fundamental disparity between the two mediums. 

My final comment is that all mediums of communication are constantly undergoing development and being revised by the collective population, so as new media technologies develop, affording us with even greater ways to communicate, I look forward to future forms of communication with nothing but cautious optimism. 

References: Crystal, David. 2006. “Chapter 2 : The Medium of Netspeak” In Language and the internet, edited by David Crystal, 26-65. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Accessed April 9, 2014. https://qutvirtual3.qut.edu.au/qv/olt_material_search_p?p_unit_code=KCB206

[kcb206group4]

New Media and its Invisibility

Recently, as new media technologies have developed and evolved, constantly providing more sophisticated affordances with enhanced mobility, individuals have immersed themselves in this technology allowing once-separate facets of their life to converge to the extent where this mediation has become invisible. The product of this convergence is aptly named by Deuze (2011) as a ‘mediapolis’, “a comprehensively mediated public space where media underpin and overarch ... everyday life”. Having such a universal influence over the multitude of aspects of everyday life, media can no longer be seen as a separate entity of any description; media’s integral pervasion of contemporary life has demanded its total and indiscernible absorption into normality.

At this unprecedented stage in the ‘technosocial’ hybridization of contemporary life, as referred to in the first lecture, this invisible media has revolutionised how we experience reality. Always within arms-reach is a technological device of some kind allowing us to remain constantly submerged in this mediated reality. As observed by Deuze (2011: 140), once media becomes invisible “our experience of reality itself, becomes irreversibly modified,” the keyword for me being “irreversibly”. As we progressively adopt these ever-evolving forms of media, generally due to the desirable affordances (both practical and social) they provide, we form ingrained dependences with them requiring our continued engagement with these technologies to function. As we’ve surrounded ourselves by media we’ve slowly entered a fully mediated existence; escape from which is almost impossible to conceive. (Deuze, 2011) 

Deuze (2011: 140) also observes how invisible media modifies “our sense of identity”. Societally we use these embedded forms of media to communicate and interact but it’s how we do this, how we express ourselves to others, whether directly or passively, that helps shape our sense of identity. This idea of typing oneself into being, as espoused by Boyd and Ellison (2007), affirms the impact media has had on self-formation. Almost a decade ago, as highlighted by Donath and Boyd (2004), people were already accustomed to thinking of the on-line world as a social space, and today there are an abundance of social networking sites, each an elaborate hub of communication and interaction; manifestations of our mediated, technosocial lives. Hence, just as one’s appearance and behaviour is representative of their personality, so too does our appearance and behaviour online influence our self-perception and how we are perceived by others. These new platforms for self-expression encourage users to prolifically share information about themselves as part of the platforms' architectural design, according to Papacharissi and Gibson (2011). Despite the unfortunate required sacrifice of one’s privacy to fully engage with this “privately public era of social media,” (Papacharissi and Gibson, 2011: 75) it does afford a new sense of individuality to be cultivated from a collection of your self-advocated thoughts, ideas and beliefs. But first and foremost, it’s the increasing invisibility of this new media which is enabling and empowering this form of self-representation, and as this technology continues to evolve and more seamlessly integrate with reality, it only makes me wonder how far it’ll take us.

Bibliography:

Boyd, Danah and Nicole Elison. 2007. “Social Network sites: definition, history, and scholarship.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 13: 210-230.

Deuze, Mark. 2011 “Media Life.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (1): 137-148

Donath, Judith and danah boyd. 2004. “Public Displays of Connection.” BT Technology Journal 22 (4): 71-82

Papacharissi, Zizi and Paige L. Gibson. 2011. “15 minutes of Privacy: Privacy, Sociality, and Publicity on Social Network Sites.” In Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web, edited by Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke, 75-89. Heidelberg and New York: Springer.