Media in the Online Age notes
INTERACTIVITY VS PASSIVITY
In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; […] After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.
Leaving aside decades of debate within studies of television and mass culture2, the blurb proposes that downloading—and television—embody a passive, ideological form of consumption, whereas uploading is presented act of participation and production (even though it, too, is often a form of consumption).
Active participation is now a privileged mode of consumerism. As Jodi Dean has written, “our deepest commitments—to inclusion, equality and participation within a public—bind us to practices whereby we submit to global capital” (Dean 2002, 151). Contemporary media beg for and sometimes demand active participation. They ask their users to intertwine them with as many parts of their lives as possible. It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do.
At least in for-profit sectors, the goal of most institutions during the broadcast era was to produce measurable audiences for sale to advertisers. It was to attract attention. In that sense, there is a smooth continuity with the internet era, where media organizations also hope to produce attention that can then be parlayed into one or another form of market value. When people’s participation becomes someone else’s business—and here I mean business in the market-share and moneymaking sense of the term—the social goods that are supposed to come with it can be compromised. If you want democratic participation, you also need a reflective populace. If you’re going to break the fourth wall in your theatre production or installation piece, the participants have to be able to take on some kind of critical perspective on the work in order for it to have any avant-garde potential. The demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button. The supposedly democratic call to dialogue and participation can turn sour when people have good reasons and desires to retreat. In his discussion of Melville’s famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” John Durham Peters calls this the “cold righteousness of dialogism,” a “moral tyranny” of the call to the other to interact on a subject’s pregiven terms. “Dialogue’s supposed moral nobility can suffocate those who prefer not to play along” (Peters 1999, 159).
Participation has dissolved into passivity, liking and sharing posts, although seemingly a sign of active participation is the human social brain degrading itself to becoming a sheep. No original thought or content is made, and nothing of worth is added to the source material when it is liked or shared.
BALKANISATION/SPLINTERNET
The splinterenet is a characterisation of the internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors such as technology, politics, commerce, nationalism and religion. Describing the splintering of Internet technology, some writers see the problem in terms of new devices using different standards. Users no longer require web browsers to access the Internet, as new hardware tools often come with their own "unique set of standards" for displaying information.[3]
In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; […] After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.
Leaving aside decades of debate within studies of television and mass culture2, the blurb proposes that downloading—and television—embody a passive, ideological form of consumption, whereas uploading is presented act of participation and production (even though it, too, is often a form of consumption).
Active participation is now a privileged mode of consumerism. As Jodi Dean has written, “our deepest commitments—to inclusion, equality and participation within a public—bind us to practices whereby we submit to global capital” (Dean 2002, 151). Contemporary media beg for and sometimes demand active participation. They ask their users to intertwine them with as many parts of their lives as possible. It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do.
At least in for-profit sectors, the goal of most institutions during the broadcast era was to produce measurable audiences for sale to advertisers. It was to attract attention. In that sense, there is a smooth continuity with the internet era, where media organizations also hope to produce attention that can then be parlayed into one or another form of market value. When people’s participation becomes someone else’s business—and here I mean business in the market-share and moneymaking sense of the term—the social goods that are supposed to come with it can be compromised. If you want democratic participation, you also need a reflective populace. If you’re going to break the fourth wall in your theatre production or installation piece, the participants have to be able to take on some kind of critical perspective on the work in order for it to have any avant-garde potential. The demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button. The supposedly democratic call to dialogue and participation can turn sour when people have good reasons and desires to retreat. In his discussion of Melville’s famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” John Durham Peters calls this the “cold righteousness of dialogism,” a “moral tyranny” of the call to the other to interact on a subject’s pregiven terms. “Dialogue’s supposed moral nobility can suffocate those who prefer not to play along” (Peters 1999, 159).
Participation has dissolved into passivity, liking and sharing posts, although seemingly a sign of active participation is the human social brain degrading itself to becoming a sheep. No original thought or content is made, and nothing of worth is added to the source material when it is liked or shared.
BALKANISATION/SPLINTERNET
The splinterenet is a characterisation of the internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors such as technology, politics, commerce, nationalism and religion. Describing the splintering of Internet technology, some writers see the problem in terms of new devices using different standards. Users no longer require web browsers to access the Internet, as new hardware tools often come with their own "unique set of standards" for displaying information.[3]
Journalist and author Doc Searls uses the term "splinternet" to describe the "growing distance between the ideals of the Internet and the realities of dysfunctional nationalisms." which contribute to the various, and sometimes incompatible standards which often make it hard for search engines to use the data. He notes that "it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized". However, as new devices incorporate their own ad networks, formats, and technology, many are able to "hide content" from search engines"
Article - Internet without borders: The balkanisation of digital territory to protect privacy is not ultimately in consumer's interests
“balkanisation” of the internet, whereby digital firms have to tailor their services to each country they operate in. Not only would such stratification compromise the “open borders” that have allowed the internet to flourish; it would increase the cost of running a digital business – costs which would inevitably be passed on to the consumer.
Article - Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web
Twenty-five years on from the web's inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all. Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine's March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web. "I want a web that's open, works internationally, works as well as possible and is not nation-based" Berners-Lee told the audience, which included Martha Lane Fox, Jake Davis (AKA Topiary) and Lily Cole. He suggested one example to the contrary: "What I don't want is a web where the Brazilian government has every social network's data stored on servers on Brazilian soil. That would make it so difficult to set one up."
Its the role of governments, startups and journalists to keep that conversation at the fore, he added because the pace of change is not slowing - - its going faster than ever before. For his part, Berners-Lee drives the issue through his work at the Open Data Institute, World Wide Web Consortium and World Wide Web Foundation, but also as an MIT professor whose students are "building new architectures for the web where its decentralised". One the issue of monopolies, Berners-Lee did say its concerning to be "reliant on big companies, and one big server" something that stalls innovation, but that competition has historically resolved these issues and will continue to do so.
The kind of balkanised web he spoke about, as typified by Brazil's home-soil servers argument or Iran's emerging intranet, is partially being driven by revelations of NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance. The distrust that it has brewed, from a political level right down to the threat of self-censorship among ordinary citizens, threatens an open web and is, said Berners-Lee, a greater threat than censorship. Knowing the NSA may be breaking commercial encryption services could result in the emergence of more networks like China's Great Fire wall, to "protect" citizens. This is why we need a bit of anti-establishment push back, alluded to by Berners-Lee.
He reiterated the need to protect whistleblowers like Edward Snowden that leak information only in extreme circumstances "because they have this role in society". But more than this, he noted the need for hackers. "It's really important culture, it's important to have the geek community as a whole think about its responsibility and what it can do. We need various alternative voices pushing back on conventional government sometimes". In the midst of so much political and social disruption, the man who changed the course of communication, education, activism and so much more, and in so many ways, remains dedicated to fighting for a web founded in freedom and openness. But when asked what he would have done differently, the answer was easy. "I would have got rid of the slash slash after the colon. You don't really need it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time"
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