Discussion of Hakim Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) and Checking my Old Rolodex.

This is the story of why, despite being here at ITP for 18 months, and having walked past the wooden mirror (it has 830 servos in it: eight.hundred.and.thirty) at ITP everyday, I am still completely bowled over at being here.

Put another way, it is also the story of how I came to nearly sneezing my coffee and practically choking on my bagel on a morning late last semester before Friday morning’s Media, Economics and Participation seminar class.

Finally, its the story of why my old plastic black Rolodex sitting here on my desk, has been opened for the first time in quite a long while.

Background

The class discussion centered around the clustering and fame model.  We were to discuss the tension between the density of a group with its scale.  As groups get bigger, they become less dense – lots of people, harder to know everyone, or  would you even want to?  We discussed social networking sites, Facebook, Friendster and MySpace in particular.

Assigned pre-class reading: danah boyd’s Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace paper, awesome but it wasn’t danah’s piece that sent my eyebrows to the ceiling. Nor was it Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice paper.  Both were seriously meaty food for thought, but not the focus of this post.

It was Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Image: NYU Bobst Library

In summary, it woke me up and launched my eyebrows skywards.  Half a page in: furiously wikipedia-ing Hakim Bey (he was born Peter Wilson by the way), wondering if Clay had lost it, struggling to see how he fitted in with class.  How indeed it fitted in with anything.

And here’s the explanation, my (hastily scribbled) notes below from class.  Saddle up, this class was a good one.

Class notes from Clay’s Discussion of Hakim Bey’s TAZ: Why is the piece so tortured?  How does it bear to clustering?

NB for further background on these notes from lecture, see Yegor Gaidar’s Grain and Oil: The Soviet Collapse

Dateline – spring equinox 1990: from the 1930s, resistance of the idea of market-based liberal democracies, particularly amongst American artists was normal – the alternative was communism.  USSR became a beacon of hope for people who has in mind the overthrow of markets and democracies as a way of running the world and characteristics such as commercialism.  But, by the 1980s – no one actually wanted to go and live in Moscow, it became an alternative system, people adopted soft communist stance and supporting Polish Solidarity movement – a sort of communism not connected to actual life in the USSR.

What happened just before Bey published this article: ALL of this went away when USSR, then essentially bankrupt but sustained because it could sell oil.  Solidarity movement really kicked off in Poland, but then the oil price dropped, and grain prices rose, USSR had to go Western Europe to borrow money, and Western Europe said they wouldn’t give money if the Soviets rolled tanks into Poland.  Then, when people realized Eastern Europeans wouldn’t be killed if they rose up – most of communist Eastern Europe fell in 6 weeks.  It vanished – incredibly so.  It was so disorienting, John Birch Society (the right-wing view) started to issue press releases saying it was a Soviet trick.

The disorientation on the Left at that time is represented by people like Bey.  They were astounded too because the people were desperate to revolt to join the liberal free market system that the liberals such as Bey in the US despised.  How was there a revolution that meant more people wanted the thing that he didn’t – this is why the piece is SO tortured.

Its the intellectual rational for Burning Man.

It is an attempt to rescue the idea of radical freedom from revolution – which vanished in an instant.

He is saying – give up on the nation state, give up on the map, find it instead in social clusters and 4th dimension.  Essentially, the TAZ is the Cliff Notes for the rave scene.

Bey is offering a demoralized band of revolutionaries the hope that personalized freedom is achieved in small groups is a good cultural norm, it is not Libertinism, its an attempt to rescue a paleolithic path – eg the family (disappointing) and the band (polyamorous cluster – gratifying).

The nature of the cluster is critically important: the state, the corporation, the family – contrasted with the rave, the dinner party, the self selected group.  He favors the self selecting into small group with shared interest – ie you can be autonomous all the time without the autonomous system you are part of existing forever, hopping from one rave, to a dinner party to another rave, as opposed to being stuck in/part of one thing – it is his response to the collapse of the revolution.

TAZ’s are the new revolutionary form – goal of Bey.

An amazingly forward prediction of the complex discussion after the public has the Internet.  He was one of the earliest people to get to the idea of locating freedom within social clusters within the dimension of time.  Bey got a lot right about the issues we’re still grappling with.

My 2 cents on this.

This lecture, together with the reading, thinking and discussion that followed it, was like all those 830 servos in the Wooden Mirror.  Even in places where the unexpected could possibly become the norm,  I am relieved to report that the assigned reading and class discussion at ITP is still continuing to make me snort coffee, raise my eyebrows, and be intrigued.

In terms of Bey’s writings and the discussion in class.  I wonder whether the concept of personalized freedom being found in small self selected groups is really that new.  Freedom brings choice.  I see it with every person I work with everyday.  We’re constantly defining, collecting, discarding, rebuilding.

These days, we often either do this  a) online, or b) use the Internet to enable us to do this in the physical world. For example, a) I friend people on Facebook and lo and behold, I have a new collection of  ‘friends online,’ or b) I have a collection of people on Facebook that I spend more time with in the physical world as a result of our proximity and ease of communication on Facebook.  Social networking is shaping my own collections of friends – in a way that really didn’t happen when I was growing up.

As I write this, I’m struck by how out of date that concept of a physical vs an online world seems now.  I know for many people, online is still strictly work, email etc.  But at ITP, and the world I increasingly find myself in, the two have become one and the same, like Pete Sampras’ tennis racquet to him.  Out of date analogy I know, but I watched him at Wimbledon over 10 years ago now – and came away completely mind-boggled, at how his hand and his racquet seemed to have no divide, its as if it was just a completely natural continuation of his arm.

A tool becomes part of the user, or the user becomes part of the tool?  Again, another dinosaur concept, the Internet as a tool?  It is pipes and packets yes, but its people and networks of people.  The question I’m fascinated in now, is how would our relationships differ, in terms of people we devote our time to, differ, without social networking.  Will foursquare sway the people I socialize with?  Did I really stop inviting people to my parties if they were not on Facebook?  Worse thought, did I really invite people to my parties because we were Facebook friends and wouldn’t  have done so otherwise?  To what extent is our use of applications shaping our social lives and our relationships?

Its enough to make me want to go through my old Rolodex and check, that non-online friends didn’t get lost, and look over my online friends, and check there’s not somekind of digital-skewing going on.  I don’t like the idea that this could be the case.

Our self-selected groups do change, of course, that’s a good thing, but changing simply because communications with some people don’t fall within the current social networking application?  Agh.

New Models for News

What happens when our old motivations have been turned on their head in the online publishing environment?  What if money is no longer the motivator?  Are we in free-fall?  What motivates us now?  What are the consequences of these new motivations?

Readings:

Carr, Nicholas; Shortcropping the long tail

Gneezy, Uri and Rustichini, Alfredo; A Fine Is A Price, Journal of Legal Studies (Jan 2000)

Shirky, Clay; Fames vs Fortune

Class Discussion – Participation Models

Clay outlined three elements of various groups:

A group with a large audience;

A group where each member participates equally; and

A group where each member participates actively.

He states that its impossible to have an online community with all of the above three elements.  The maximum you can hope for is two out of three.  For example, a large online community has a number of active participants but not all the participants contribute equally.  Whereas, you are far more likely to have a smaller community where all users participate equally.

20th century media usually followed the large audience with equal participation model (note, not really any active participants), eg. a television audience.

Other points to note:

1) Don’t assume what a site says it does is what it actually does!  Often its the unstated elements of a community that keeps  people coming back.

2) An audience may cover the complete spectrum of intimacy with the object of their attention.  Ie the spectrum from fame all the way through to love.   What does this mean?  In the early stages, your followers may just be people who love you, a few people who know you really well.  At the other end of the scale is fame: zillions of people following you who do not really know you very well.  In  a page-view driven environment, we are operating at the ‘fame’ end of the spectrum, potentially this becomes less fascinating for those users coming in wanting the love/affection/knowing you well experience.  However, the fact that ‘audience’ encompasses this whole spectrum, makes the challenge of keeping everyone engaged and wanting to participate challenging.

3) Techno-determinism and Cultural-determinism – how does the technology help or thwart?

4) Culture – contraints —-> feedback loop both ways

5) On filtering: there is no such thing as information overload, its just filter failure.

Consider the types of filters on the Deviant Art site:
- most active
- most viewed
- newest
- most comments

Looking at filtering mechanisms for site is important as it shows how they (the group) shows the tip of the ‘content-iceberg.’

Discussion of the Shirky/Carr readings:

In the online world, people are often not motivated by money to, for example, blog.  Also, groups where the main focus is not money making have often have a far more active community surrounding them than those where money making is the main aim.  Clay cited Deviant Art vs Etsy to illustrate this point.  So if money is no longer a motivator (and I’m not totally convinced on the clear ‘cutness‘ of this (see next week for more on that point) then what is the motivator?!

There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic – from wikipedia:

‘Intrinsic motivation comes from rewards inherent to a task or activity itself – the enjoyment of a puzzle or the love of playing and extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the performer. Money is the most obvious example.‘

So – if on the Web, people like to just participate, or blog or write not for the extrinsic motivation of money, but for other reasons, what are these intrinsic motivations?

Intrinsic motivation can futher divided into personal motivation and social motivation.  Personal motivtion can be futher defined as ‘I am competent at this and I work on this autonomously‘ and social motivation described as ‘I find the membership of a group important and I am a generous person and want to contribute.’

Even within intrinsically motivated groups therefore, there is often tension between the ‘I am competent and will therefore contribute’ and the ‘I am generous and so want to contribute’ attitude.  There is also additional conflict between the ‘I am autonomous’ and ‘I am a member’ mindset.  Looking at Deviant Art, would it be half as popular where competence was regarded more highly than generosity of comment and critiquing?  We concluded probably not.

The biggest shift with the advent of publishing on the Internet, is the delinking of attention and money.  People now get a lot of attention without receiving financial renumeration.  Does this therefore mean that people are no longer motivated by money? I am dubious and look forward to continuing this conversation next week, but you can’t help notice in the new media publishing world, that extrinsic motivators such as money may now not be the primary reasons for people’s behavior – the old model doesn’t fit anymore, and this is a huge change in the media landscape.  These intrinsic motivators we see factoring heavily in the picture were inconceivable with such a large scale audience in the past.

Media By The Public

“The definition of the public used to be people who could know things about the society they lived in, but not say things about that society.  How can we make sense of a public that can talk to each other?” (From class syllabus)

Reading:

Len Dowie report, Reinventing American Journalism

Assignment:

Observe a site where amateurs are investigating or reporting the news.

Our group (Emeri, Liesje, Jonathan, Robert and Dimitris) analyzed the site Indymedia.  The site is quite incredible.  To me, it seemed on the edge of news reporting, in the sense it

After discussing the site, researching how it was founded, its stated purpose and how it differs from other news sites, we divided the research for the class discussion as follows:

Jonathan: General overview of structure and comparison with the regular/normal media corp structure

Dimitris: Comparison of different geographical areas – and how they report differently, or how “anarchic” they are or not

Catherine: Comparison of a news story between IMC, Huff Post and eg CNN (Honduras)

Emeri: Statistics, interviews w people who run it – general digging and fact-finding

Rob: Talking about his experiences in Philadelphia and also looking into whether any mainstream media picked up on IMC stories

Liesje: Looks into how participation happens eg commenting

In class however, it was clear the discussion of the class was moving towards the question of ‘what is the definition of a journalist these days?  AND why does this definition matter?‘  Are the loosely connected IMC bloggers and writers journalists? I initially assumed a journalist was a professional, and that an amateur blogger was not a professional.  However, Clay made the distinction between a profession, such as law, medicine and accountancy where a number of exams have to be passed and accreditation given before one is a member of that profession.

Journalism is not like that – you can be a journalist without a single examination.  If this is the case, the field is wide open as to the definition.  In the past, you were a journalist if you had a press pass.  Clay again pointed out this was a ‘happy mistake’ and the mistake has stuck.  Who however, should be in the White House press room asking Robert Gibbs questions?  Mostly, its journalists representing big media organizations with large audiences, and this does seem logical.  But where do high-profile bloggers fit in to this?  What if someone has a huge audience without fitting in the traditional definition of a journalist?  And then, throw this one in the mix!  What about kicking out traditional big-media organizations?  it’s happened: the White House no longer wants to talk to Fox.  This really lit the touch-paper to a yowling table thumping discussion in today’s class.  No matter how much Fox might be despised by many NYU Film School liberals, their audience is a large chunk of the country – and so now the President doesn’t want to deal with the people bringing them ‘their’ news?  A zillion questions are thrown up here, with some possibly unsettling outcomes.  If the Bush press office had refused to speak to MSNBC in such a public manner I could imagine the renting of  Prada and throwing of tofu in Brooklyn causing a ruckus so loud it would shake the very core of our granola chomping sensibilities from LA to NYC.  Even Helen Thomas, not exactly the Bush Administration’s favorite journalist, has made calls for the White House to lay off Fox.  However, these views do conflict with the slight glee felt by most of the class to see Fox being cast off.  It’s a tough one: who is a journalist, and even more, who is a journalist that is worth speaking to?  It seems a good question to think about though, and its a question that many people, from the members of our Friday lunchtime media class, to the White House are considering right now.

If a Thing is Worth Doing – Its Worth Doing Badly: The Rise of the Amateur

“The distinction between amateur and professional is complicated, and and not amenable to easy litmus-tests.” (From class syllabus)

Readings:

Gillmor, Dan; We Media (handout)

Michel, Amanda; Columbia Journalism Review Get Off the Bus

Shirky, Clay; Here Come’s Everybody – Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production

Assigment:

Write a short paper (1500-2000 words) describing the dynamics of the participatory site you observed.  In thinking about the group,  address these questions:

1. What is the group’s reason for being?  What or whose needs does it serve

2. What makes participation in the group worthwhile to its users?  (There will doubtless be more than one answer.)  What keeps the participants satisfied with their participation?  Attention, access to resources, public praise etc?

3. Imagine changing (and possibly improving) the tools, tasks or members in the group you looked at.  What would you change?  Why? What downsides might your proposed change create?

4. Compare the group you studied to at least one group mentioned in class.  How were the two groups the same?  How were they different?

5. Finally, on a different subject, how did your group of people in the class work together?  How did you decide what to look at?  How did you talk about your observations.  What tools did you use?  If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?

Response

Last week as a class we observed several sites where amateurs were coming together to comment on topics:

- DeviantArt

- Newsvine

- US Politics and the World (Flickr discussion group)

- Fontstruct

For my paper (currently the first draft is being reviewed – once this is done and comments incorporated, I’ll be posting it here) I analyzed the Deviant Art site and compared it to the Newsvine site.  More on this soon.

Sites that allow community commenting….

This week’s assignment was to:

“Find a site with amateur production of material and amateur discussion, a site where amateurs are posting material and discussing it with people with whom they have long-term relationships.  Consider what is in that environment that is relevant or interesting to what we’ve been looking at so far.  Essentially, observe how the site aggregates user-generated material – and lets those users comment on one another’s work.”

Our group (Cody, Steven, Kristin and Josh) reviewed the site DeviantArt.  The site enables artists to give and receive feedback and criticism on their work, to show their work and to sell their work.

Having discussed the group, we decided on the following as the key points to present to the class:

Consumers, Audiences, and Publics

One characteristic of public media is that an audience is more than just a list of individual viewers, and a public is more than just an audience.  This week we discussed the following readings:

- Duguid, Paul: Material Matters

- Habermas, Jurgen: Between Facts and Norms

- Starr, Paul: The Creation of The Media
We began by considering the following:

What does it mean to have a public – who is speaking on behalf of the public?
What is the relationship between the public and private spheres of the media?

First US paper (Public Occurrences), 4 pages long, last page blank, reserved for notes – see marginalia discussion last week.
Bridges btw conversational and published materials.
But these tools were poorly fitted.

Regard behavior as motivation – of the community, its an output, not an input

V clear separation between conversational and public media – not because its human, its the tool used for one just don’t work for the other, ie newspaper rubbish for conversation, but phones are really good at that.  Behavior changes through generations but not because people change, but the opportunities change.  Looks at opportunities rather than motives, ie a generation ago – sure, they’d be uploading their drunken exploits to FB, they just didn’t have the chance!

Paul Duguid Reading

Supercession, liberation, determinism.

Does anyone agree with:
new tech liberates people
there is a deterministic
new media replaces old media

Media is additive according to Clay – although this is false as some has gone away.
Claims of supersession – radio predicted to kill the telephone, it didn’t.
It does exists but not to the extend that anything never goes away.

Does information want to be free?
The fewer functions a form has – there nearer it is to becoming obsolete – this is the gap in Duguid’s talk of the social and material complex.
Ie – it can happen by degrees – its eclipsing, not supercession.

Genie and bottle – pg 12
Barthes Lexia and Barlow’s genie in a bottle….

Will e-books render novels obsolete?
Social bargain around copyright – reason why Kindle will go away according to Clay
I said they’d go away because of hardware constraints

Recap:
Publishing something in a different media – IS different – social and material complex
ie if you strip the info from package its useless, things renedered useless – no such thing as content.
Duguid says this – the form has a material effect on its consumption and its social embedment

BUT – its not as strong …  perhaps!

Other extreme: Barlow/Kelley
This was the big one, the info content of something is highly separable from its form
Form is a much smaller change reading on a kindle than when we switched from reading in a paper to listening on a radio.

Clay doesn’t think either extreme is supportable.

We’re in an era of some, but not total flexibility – email can be switched from different forms, but not everything.

Books-Kindles, still iffy.

The new medium at the moment is still in the crib, we’re in the incubator right now – new forms may come out.

Clay lecture:
Last week he laid out paper/newspaper spectrum.

Discussion of paperless office – of course – its gone up, but so has info, Newsweek’s prediction was wrong and right, we use way more paper in an office now, but as a percentage of the overall info now, its far smaller – we have so much more info now!  Informative content of paper has shrunk as so much of printing is shrunk.

4 of the 5 critical functions of paper have been eclipsed, but the 5th (info) has just ballooned.

Habermas Reading
In the context of media – whats the difference btw an audience and a public:

- public is a larger group – and within it people are members of different audiences
- public is class of people engaged in somekind of debate – not just consumers of media, or people who sense themselves to be part of a group.

- public is audience political effect – ie the group, known to itself that influences the state

Habermas – thinks PR is the great satan in respect of mass media.
Because it shapes opinion rather than allowing opinion to be formed.

Clay cites – MoveOn – issue —-> headcount
Opens it up to enormous participation of members
but the stuff with max agt is what goes to top, not the stuff with max numbers of emails

news – ideology – profitability
Patrons provide the money, that determines what the news was in Habermas’ time – its still the model today.
New Yorker really doesn’t make money nor the Atlantic Monthly.
Papers hard – because they want to max number of potential readers, but pull to the ideology of most of your readers but to get the max readers, you have to be on the ideological fringes.

Rational Critical Debate on weblogs – does it happen?

Week 1: From Gutenberg to Sarnoff – 500 years of media

What has changed in the media environment in the 500 years of modernity?

Notes from Clay class lecture:

1991 – watershed, NSF directed congress to allow public access to the Internet

Different types of media:
I did it by myself/large project
I did it professionally/amateur

Distribution via twitter – fluid media landscape

Media Landscape over last 500 years

Highlights:

Alphabet
Printing press (assembling letters – Gutenburg – movable type) – first big effect = abundance
Translation then occured – into local languages, not just the languages of the scholars
Print new books – ie one that noone had ever read before – capacity explodes – novelty
Concept of publishers – deciding what is good enough to publish, b/c they bear the economic risk – printers therefore became publishers
abundance + novelty leads to popularity, so you have to figure what will be popular.

Downside of abundance, is INFORMATION OVERLOAD (began in 1500s) – ie too many books!!  More likely – FILTER FAILURE (ie we begin to feel overloaded – normally we don’t)
Downside of novelty is the RISK OF QUALITY – just b/c its out there, doesn’t mean its good.
Downside of popularity is VULGARITY – meaning of the people.

Brits: Invisible College – publishing their experimental results, ie chemistry vs alchemists, doesn’t matter about the results, it was the openness/transparency culture – and this is what makes science science (Francis Bacon – Scientific Method) – BUT it needed printing press, and fast postal system.  Media makes capabilities available to groups, but its the decisions the people make is the thing that happen – so – media is the enabler, techno-determinism breaks down.   What are therefore the cultural norms around the use of the media as THIS is the important thing.

Next – big thing is the Telegraph (harnessing electrical flow through the air) – the harnessing of electricity.  Telepgraph establishes 2 way media – relatively synchronous media between 2 telegraph operators.

Next the telephone – also 2 way comms.
Now information outruns objects – eg horses.

At same time as telephone: photography, sound, movies then movies with sound.

Finally – 1901 – Marconi, electromagnetic spectrum – harnessing the flow again: radio and then TV.
Then this was just deepening of these for the next many years.

1) Public and private media differ, eg “I love you” phone and TV

Things good at creating conversation (phone) not good at creating groups (newspaper) and visa versa.

2) High fixed costs for publishing – eg newspaper, recording studio etc – core of Guttenberg Economics, ie the risk – > filter -> then publish, ie the risk is dealt with BEFORE publishing b/c its SO expensive.

3)  As a result of 2) – Positive Returns to Scale further raises the hurdles to further participation.  Production costs lower after the upfront capital has been spent.  Eg donut franchising, cost to produce next donut is incrememntal when havig paying customers, and profits rocket – costs lower and profits to the extent there is the customer base.  This means you become even harder to compete with – a handful of giants happen – unless there was govt intervention.  Reach is a function of capital.

4) The structure of public media hides professionals from amateurs and visa versa – ie NYT, we don’t know how they make it, and they don’t know what we do with it when we get it – eg what we read, what we talk to our friends about.

STREAM:

Create -> Distribute -> Consume ->React -> Converse

The only point where these realms of professional and amateur interact is at the CONSUME moment

5) Asymmetry of cost= Asymm of quality = Asymm of flow

ie huge asymm of cost of production and consumption ie printing press is v v expensive, a paper back is cheap.  SO production quality increases, ie blockbusters get so difficult for competitors to re create, ie 500 helicopters blown up in this movie!  Also quality – public isn’t a threat, videoing on television, or coping print because homemade quality is SO bad.

All of the above was true for 500 years and NONE of them are true now…  But culture is used to this, and people are freaked out, because the real world isn’t like this anymore.

Linux is another invisible college – sharing through media but it took the medium and the cultural norms to make the Linux community take off.

DIGITAL REVOLUTION

1) 1’s and 0″s are the same for EVERYONE – you have the perfect copy.  So the idea of a copy goes away.

2) All the Internet is is getting data from point a to point b – with no guarantees.  This is the the smallest unit of networking, the dyad.  Anyone can do it – its the equivalent of inventing your own alphabet = ARBITRARY MEDIA.

3) ARBITRARY RECIPIENTS – ie any A and any B in any combination and any amount.  No public private divide anymore, kills 1) above.

4) Peered infrastructure – symmetrical like the phone. Internet is sym like a phone (two-way conversation) but also public like the TV.  Sym media always used to be private, and asymm media used to always be public – this is NO longer the case.

THere is now a $0 marginal cost* ie sending an email is free.

5) No competitive advantage in distribution * – no one has access to a faster network end to end. Network neutrality.

6) Scale isn’t controlled by investment – ie I can get popular with no money.

We now have a envoromnent (media) where everyone can participate in groups or individually.

Introduction

The theme of this week’s discussion in class followed on from last week’s introductory lecture to media: From Gutenberg to Sarnoff – 500 years of media.  We debated what has changed in the media environment in the 500 years of modernity.  The readings discussed were:

- Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey Pingree: New Media: 1740-1915, and

- Eisenstein, Elizabeth: The Printing Press As An Agent Of Social Change.

Scrapbooking:  Books do smell nicer than Kindles…

Having read Ellen Gruber Garvey’s chapter “Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating” in Gitelman and Pingree’s New Media 1740-1915 we discussed in detail the concept of scrapbooking and its modern day analogs.   In particular analogies or not between scrapbooking and bookmarking on delicious.  It was noted that scrapbooking was a method of expressing preferences, same as delicious, however, it was more time consuming than merely clicking a mouse.  Did the act of selecting, cutting and arranging things on a page in any way affect our choices on our selected items to include?

Back in the day that scrapbooking was popular, it was often something that families would do together – hence the act itself was associated with other memories.  How many people could say now where they were, what was going on when they bookmarked a certain link for delicious 3 months ago.

Motivation: why do we collect and save? For ourselves as reminders, or to show others something of ourselves, to preserve memories?

The public/private concept: on delicious we are seeking opinon, crowd sourcing our filtering to the collection of ‘people like me’ – or alternatively, looking at the crazy stuff people unlike me can add to my world.  Reaching out and connecting.  As Clay noted, with delicious, you are reaching out publicly to everyone, and then have the option to scale down and become more intimate with fewer people, whereas the scrapbook is a deeply personal thing, that can be scaled up and shown to more people, and eventually be reproduced on a mass scale.  The size of each of their potential initial audiences is at the polar opposite ends of the scale to each other.

Scribes and printing presses compared to paper and online works – when can you call it a revolution?

What are the qualities of paper that made it attractive to us as something to use?  Its portable, its cheap, its lasts, it doesn’t last – but the main quality, which we all missed incidentally, is that you can write on it with something, there is contrast between the mark and the paper itself, and the mark lasts on the paper.

Then the ability to type on computers came along, to read books online, and it was found that many of the things that paper was held up as being good for, was done even better on a computer,  Its a hell of a lot cheaper to read a document online than printing it, and schlepping paper in bulk from a to b is hard work and expensive.  It was the same story when the scribes were facing the printing presses, the things the scribes could do, the printers could do quicker and in some cases better.  Elizabeth Eisenstein spoke to these huge revolutions in her book ‘The Printing Press As An Agent of Change‘.  The fact that something does something better than something else, or more efficiently does not necessarily mean that it is revolutionary.  It is the difference in the degree of difference between the old and the new, and the difference made to the experience of society as a result of the new method, for example the huge collapse in cost of production and vast increase in proliferation of texts as a result of the printing press, it was this scale, that made the new phenomenon so revolutionary.

So what is ‘media’ for our purposes?

For this class, we need a working, common definition of what exactly media is.  Clay defined it as follows:

“Media transforms and transmits communicative intent.”

So what is and isn’t ‘media’ under this definition?

A microphone would be, as it transfers content, and has the ability to transform it, but the microphone cable isn’t as it transfers data, but doesn’t transform it. Ditto for the Internet: no corruption of those 1’s and 0’s please – that’s a bad thing.  Both the transformational element and the transmission element are both required.

Sliding Scales, from paper to newspapers

Each of us were given a copy of Clay’s hometown newspaper from Missouri.  We analyzed it’s content, and discussed why it for example, contained horoscopes and a crossword puzzle, but no international news.  What purpose does a newspaper serve to a community?

We took it back to paper, the very basic starting block and described the piece of paper in terms of its capabilities: it can be written on, its portable etc.  A newspaper is more likely to be described in terms of its functionality: to provide news, to build communities, for advertising, and giving me a daily crossword puzzle.

How do scholars look at the differences between these two descriptions: capabilities vs. functionality?

Techno-determinists view that media is ‘good’ and where implemented, ‘good’ will happen.  A different view is taken by social-constuctivists who view that media is a neutral tool, and the way it is used by society determines its value.  The social constructivists therefore gravitate to the newspaper being described in terms of its functionality, i.e. what is done with the newspaper by the people, vs. the techno-determinists who view the media, just as we described the piece of paper in class, having the capabilities that are perceived as ‘good’ and hence its success as a type of media.

Media is not replaced, it is eclipsed…

The wholesale replacement of something usually occurs when the difference between the replaced and the replacement are trivial, for example a software update.  However, in terms of the freaking out that occurred when we as humans began to write things down: that we’d never speak or remember anything ever again, or email: we’ll never write a letter again, the former media has rarely been totally replaced.  It is the extent to which the new media has eclipsed the older media.  DJs still like records, banks still like you to handwrite them notes, people still do speak to each other, our memories do still function even though we write things down, and even telegrams and faxes are still occasionally sent.

Its the extent to which the new media gradually overlaps with the functionality and needs of the user as time progresses and determines when we should all start foaming at the mouth at the demise of Telex (for example).

When society becomes indifferent to a media, it is then that it becomes obsolete.  In reality though, there is always a small crescent of functionality left. It will be fascinating to see at what cycle of the moon’s phases the printed newspaper lands up in.  And, it is unlikely a Kindle will ever have the functionality to smell like a book, and until we become indifferent to our perceived importance of that delightful musty book smell, they will always be around.  Don’t panic just yet.

Course description from the ITP website:

Instructor: Clay Shirky

“Making words and images public used to be difficult, complex, and expensive. Now it’s not. That change, simple but fundamental, is transforming the media landscape. A publisher used to be required if you wanted to put material out into the public sphere; now anyone with a keyboard or a camera can circulate their material globally. This change in the economics of communication has opened the floodgates to a massive increase in the number and variety of participants creating and circulating media. This change, enormous and permanent, is driving several profound effects in the media landscape today. This course covers the transition from a world populated by professional media makers and a silent public to one where anyone who has a phone or a computer can be both producer and consumer. This change, brought about by the technological and economic characteristics of digital data and networks, is upending old industries — newspapers, music publishing, moviemaking — faster than new systems can be put in place. The result is chaos and experimentation as new ways of participating in the previously sparse media landscape are appearing everywhere. This course covers the history and economics of the previous media landscape, the design of digital networks that upend those historical systems, and new modes of participation from weblogs and wikis and Twitter to fan fiction and lolcats. The course centers on readings and field observation, with three papers due during the course of the term.”