The affordances of living in a mediapolis [KCB206 sample blog post]
Deuze suggests that we live in a mediapolis: “a comprehensively mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences and expressions of everyday life” (2011, 137). New media provide technological affordances that extend and transform our relations, understandings and actions and offer new ways for us to govern our daily lives. For example, Skype enables me to stay in touch with my friends and family overseas. It allows me to see and speak to them without paying for expensive international calls. Rock (n.d.) reports that hospitals in the U.S. are now offering or considering specialised programs for military families to allow soldiers to partake live in the birth of their children via Skype birthing rooms. This exemplifies how embedded technologies have become in day-to-day practices and how they are appropriated in sometimes “unexpected and emergent ways” (Baym 2010, 44).
Soldier witnesses son's Colorado birth from Afghanistan Debra Melani Image sourced from: http://www.skyridgemedcenter.com/conditions_we_treat/pregnancy_childbirth/soldier-witnesses-birth-from-afar.htm
As we become more and more immersed in new media technologies, people are finding it increasingly difficult to imagine their lives without them. Roiphe (2012) has commented on the illusion of internet freedom by referring to Apple’s Freedom App which, once downloaded, blocks a user from internet access for a chosen period of time. After Theresa challenged us in the first lecture to abstain from using the internet for as long as possible, I realised how difficult it has become for me to go about my daily life without the use of new media technologies. I didn’t last long and the exercise made me aware of how widely using the internet has spread into my daily activities – I use it to access my university work, to communicate with my friends, to read the news and even to order food!
New information and communication technologies have also significantly redefined our understandings of private and public and the boundaries between them. Papacharissi and Gibson describe the times we are living in as the “publicly private and privately public era of social media” (2011, 75). Pearson’s (2009) concept of the glass bedroom resonated greatly with my experiences of using social media like Facebook. It can sometimes feel like I am exposing my private thoughts and actions to an invisible audience of unknown scale (boyd 2011).
Glass windows bedroom interior Tréndir Image sourced from: http://www.trendir.com/interiors/glass-windows-bedroom-interior.html
In this episode of the Ellen Degeneres Show, Ellen checks the Facebook pages of her audience before the show and exposes some of their most embarrassing photos live on TV:
Like the googling activity we did in our tutorial, Ellen's exposure exemplifies how we can become unaware of the invisible audiences we make ourselves visible to when using sites like Facebook (boyd 2011). While boyd and Hargittai's (2010) study on the Facebook use of young adults suggests that "far from being nonchalant and unconcerned about privacy matters, the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent", I believe that it can be easy to forget that one's mediated public audiences “could consist of all people across all space and time” (boyd 2008, 126). Although I regulate my privacy settings and consciously added all of my Facebook friends at some point, I am not always aware of each and every one of them when I post pictures or status updates.
Yet, while the internet has become a daily habit that I couldn’t imagine living without, and has blurred the boundaries between private and public, I understand that we should not overemphasise the ability of technologies to determine our behaviour. As Baym suggests: “people, technologies, and institutions all have power to influence the development and subsequent use of technology” (2010, 45).
References:
Baym, Nancy. 2010. “Ch 1: New Forms of Personal Connection.” In Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 1 - 21. Cambridge MA: Polity Press.
boyd, danah. 2011. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics – Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In A Networked Self – Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 39-58. New York: Routledge.
boyd, danah. 2008 “Why youth [heart] Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” In: Youth, Identity and Digital Media edited by David. Buckingham, 119-142. MIT Press.
boyd, danah and Eszter Hargittai. 2010. "Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?". First Monday, 15(8).
Domino’s Pizza. “Online ordering.” Accessed March 14, 2014. https://internetorder.dominos.com.au/estore/?storepulseid=98001&utm_campaign=Public_Site&utm_medium=Order&utm_source=ASP.default_aspx
Deuze, Mark. 2011 “Media Life.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (1): 137 - 148.
Freedom. “Freedom.” Accessed March 14, 2014. http://macfreedom.com/
Pearson, Erika. 2009. “All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks.” First Monday, 14(3): 1-7.
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.
Roiphe, Katie. 2012. “Can we really unplug?” Slate, Accessed March 14, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2012/01/why_is_the_freedom_app_so_popular_.html
Rock, Margaret. “Skype Connects Soldiers to Home.” Mobiledia, Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.mobiledia.com/news/117704.html
TheEllenShow. 2012. YouTube video, posted January 13. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXK0AnWGXwE