As a digital generation, we are generating data traces all the time. From the walls of Pompeii to the ‘walls’ of Facebook, we generate data relentlessly without thought. We create unimaginable amounts of data and with access to live patterns and observations of data, comes predictive power of user groups’ future actions from shopping habits to social behaviours. Predictive power makes way for social control and surveillance capitalism- this is where China’s surveillance system is currently running.
My remediation this week is based on the claims that China makes to it’s citizens and the rest of the world that their data-driven technology is based on improving security and the lives of its citizens by classing it’s citizens into ‘social credit’ scores based on behaviour through surveillance. However, with 170 million cameras installed and another 400 million to be installed in the next three years, China is planning and already in the process of a digital dictatorship.
My remediation this week is based on the mobile phone being an always-on connectivity device. The predominant medium was first the printing press, radio and tv- all of which are only connected when you switch them on. Today, the mobile/smart phone is always on, always connected and always on the individual which means the internet is now part of your body and your body is not part of the internet. Today, the human body is IN the medium – in real time.
Closed appliance vs generative platform (no good or bad)
A closed appliance such as Apple, carefully curates the environment of the iPhone and other products they develop. Apple has complete control over the platform, the content (apps) and the user (what we can do).
“We define everything that is on the phone… We don’t want your phone to be like a PC. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.” – Steve Jobs
Whereas, Android is the opposite. It is an open and free platform which anyone can access and modify the code. Android has no control over the platform, the content or the user because of the nature of it’s open ‘garden’- Google Play and many different independent android markets can be accessed from any android device, unlike Apple. Android also allows rooting OS where gaining access to the system allows complete control for the user over the hardware and software.
Permission culture (and locked appliance) APPLE
We are locking your options because we know better
Creative commons provides free licenses for creators to give permission for others to use their work in advance under certain conditions. This allows a fast-track for the creators as they don’t have to give permission individually to use the work.
“The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of “property” but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is, is what is theirs.”
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, 2004
Copyright creates artificial scarcity/value over content. The industry wants to control content, ideas and uses.
My remediation this week is based on how content creators, especially in the movie sector, have no accurate prediction on how successful the content will be with audiences. Despite what they spend on the movie (or content), audiences may engage with a movie on a much lower budget due to an unpredictable algorithm. This uncertainty sees content fighting for the audience’s attention with no predictable ‘route’ for audience interaction in sight.
Chelsea Wood, Lily Cooper, Bella Reid, Kayleigh Sandow Design by Clee Designs
I decided to make Lifestyle Gurus to address the fact that most lifestyle and fitness pages are run by extremely fit and healthy people which portrays a healthy lifestyle in an almost unachievable way.
I decided to get my friends together to produce content that is relatable, fun and informing all in one. We have been posting some easy, healthy recipes and sharing some workouts that out users can do at home.
I started with a whole different concept of a positivity page which didn’t get a lot of engagement because the concept was too broad and I didn’t identify with a niche audience. See below.
I wasn’t enjoying my page and due to the LACK OF feedback and interaction I knew I had to change something. Based on this, I decided to iterate my concept by thinking about I would enjoy and content I wish I had on my Instagram feed as a teenager/ young adult. I stuck to Instagram because it is an easily accessible platform and the content we are making is timely and efficient, #FIST.
My friends and I’s group chat is 90% us sharing workouts and recipes we want to try, so I thought this needs to be something, and what better than for my DA.
They all loved the idea and were all in, so we come up with ‘Lifestyle Gurus’ with the purpose of creating content for what we think is missing in the health area on Instagram. We are aiming to share content that is different from health influencers on Instagram by not sharing unrealistic pictures of ourselves, helping motivate and relate to our users who are going through tough times of body image by sharing our own personal experiences and showing fun behind the scenes of what influencers don’t share when working out and eating healthy.
As soon as our first post was put up, we gained 50 followers in the space of 2 hours and our engagement doubled from my last DA account. We are now at 157 followers in a week.
Where to from here?
In the future, we want to share a segment on our page once a week called #LETSTALK where we talk about an insecurity or issue we have/are facing around health and fitness to show our users that ‘healthy’ people on Instagram struggle too.
WE HAVE THIS SUGGESTION BOX OPEN FOR USERS TO GIVE US FEEDBACK BUT IT HAS BEEN SPAMMED SO WE ARE GOIMG TO DEDICATE A POST EVERY FORTNIGHT TO FEEDBACK ON OUR PAGE INSTEAD OF A STORY SO WE GET GENUINE FEEDBACK
When isolation is over, we hope to share some recommendations on food outlets/restaurants that are cheap and healthy and share some exercise circuits users can do with their friends.
We’ve found through our feedback loop that our workouts have been getting the most engagement so in future we will focus more on equipment-free workouts. A few of our users have said they want more lunches, dinners and plant-based meals in the future so we will be doing more of that as well.
My remediation this week is based around “modern reality being mediated by images.” (Debord, 1967)
Jean Baudrillard’s work also relfects this opinion, that it isn’t about actually having these experiences, it’s about being seen to have these experiences or products.
Debord’s statement is extremely prevalent today when looking at social media, Instagram in particular. All those who post to the app, create a reality through thought-out, framed images which merely represent a reality. “The real is perceived by audiences as a string of images” (Baudrillard, 1981)
Debordalso states “all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.”
What Debord and Baudrillard’s work have in common is the outlook that consumerism isn’t about the quality of the products being sold, it’s the image they create for consumers about the appearance of owning the product.
My remediation is based around the following quote, the accumulation I created represents things today that most people wish they had, not because they like them, but because they would like to be associated with owning them.
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immerse accumulation of spectacles.” (Debord, 1967)
Association chains are built in our brains from a very young age. They are how we react to stimuli around us. For example, we know a fire is hot but we did not know this as a toddler because we hadn’t built that association yet. We had to learn by looking and feeling the warmth of the fire that it was hot. Now when you think of a fire, you might associate that with winter (in Australia) and camping while cooking some marshmellows. This is an association chain which is referred to as schema in our brains. Schema is our previous experiences and knowledge stored in our memory which is the foundation for association chains to grow. Its works by showing us a ‘frame’ of reality which becomes our own perception of events.
For my remediation this week I made a meme of a simple association chain I formed while thinking of stereotypical Australia.
In range of techniques, marketing agencies and even political campaigns play on the schema we have formed to get an idea across to us- which is propaganda. They play on emotions and the simple association chains we have formed over years to make it seem like their ideas are our own by showing us this ‘frame’ of ‘reality’. This can be a very dangerous tool in shaping society and diminishing democracy.
A meme is “the unit of cultural inheritance… copying an idea from one brain to another” Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976)
Whilst we mostly think of memes as funny and non-serious media that often floods our screens on a daily basis, in reality they have the most serious of implications you could imagine for something that isn’t taken too seriously in our generation.
Memes are everywhere. They are produced, reproduced, spread, mutated, they disappear, they reappear by anyone at any of the stages it goes through- it is never a finished product. So why should we be paying more attention?
‘Memetic Warfare’ has been the forefront of election campaigns, most famously Trump and #Brexit where memes are used as propaganda to control ideas and spread ideology through social media targeting the most niche of groups as well as not-so discretely.
Tactics include:
leaks
hacking
#’s
fake news
memes
cartoons
videos
comments
tweets
specific advertising
mockery
statistics
graphics
harassment
street art
spreading misinformation
The purpose of campaigns using these tactics is to influence behavior by changing perceptions through this specific targeting of groups of people. This has been seen in Trump election campaigns and even Australia’s federal election campaigning. The influence of memes and these tactics can have profound implications on literally the world “Control the narrative, Control the world” NATO CDE (2017).
This ‘battle’ for control of ideas in the social media world is “ruining democracy” as how are we supposed to vote freely if we are being persuaded by these sly tactics without even knowing it is happening. Does this undermine our democratic right? “To be self-governing, people require the capacity to form public opinion…” (Baker, 2006 p.7) Doesn’t this mean that Memetic Warfare is interrupting this capacity? It is no longer public OPINION if it is politically biased.
#bcm112 with the help of distributed media, we have memes to tell us what to do in a pandemic. In a centralised node, we would have news stories to keep us entertained in iso. yawn… https://t.co/c3WjbDSJpT
Collective Intelligence can be described as a collaboration of specialised knowledge that is distributed in nature. Effectively, everything we own or use is made up of collective intelligence. Take a pencil for example, the wood is cut from trees, the lead is mined, the rubber on the end made somewhere else and all these skills specialised themselves. It becomes a cross-fertilisation of skill and ideas where no one makes pencil from start to finish, it is distributed.
My remediation is based on the Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history video. He explains that “All media gets digitised, the internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media.” This means that monologic media such as television, print, radio and even phone calls have migrated to the internet. The remediation is the internet taking charge and adopting monologic media and making it more conversational, to dialogic. Shirky also explains that “the internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups AND conversation at the SAME time.” This has taken shape from the phone being a one-to-one process, to tv/radio being one-to-many and finally the internet being many-to-many demonstrating a large network of distributed participation as a consumer can now be a user – a ‘produser’.
The Logic of Digital Production & The Network Economy
This week’s lecture was an extension the Medium is the Message concept and how media has changed from legacy to emergent media. Basically relating to industrial vs internet paradigms.
There was a lot packed into the lecture but I think I’ve got the basics down.
Legacy media/Industrial: (newspapers, tv, radio) are mass produced for a mass audience which have high production costs and a high risk of failure. Legacy media can relate to an industrial process such as an assembly line for producing cars on a mass scale. Each person along the assembly line has a specific role in making the car by doing a repetitive and singular task on the car but have no say in the final product. If one car is produced a little different to the others, it is deemed as a ‘failed’ product therefore showing there is no room for individual modification. This means there is no iteration process or conversation with consumers.
Emergent media/ Internet: (digital media) is a low cost process, there is a low risk of failure due to constant iteration with consumers and is produced for niche audiences. Emergent media allows mass customisation and personalisation which Kevin Kelly explains in ‘Better than free’ as “requiring ongoing conversation between the producer and user” and “constant iteration” being one of the eight ‘generatives’ (“uncopyable values”) that are valuable in the network economy as they can’t be purchased. The process of creating is more of a journey in the internet paradigm, this can be seen through craftsman such as jewelers who can adapt to the changes and view their pieces as unique from one another. There is no concept of a ‘failed’ product because there is no pre-set model to follow. This is referred to as an ‘eternal beta’ because the product can always be changed in some way.
Kelly refers to the internet as “a copy machine” as everything on the internet is a copy of a copy meaning there really aren’t any limitations to what can be produced. Due to this unlimited power of the internet paradigm, there are no boundaries to what can be created and all content flows freely throughout. We can produce, reproduce and alter everything to be another copy. This can be seen through the glitch aesthetic, glitching takes one image, video or anything digital and alters it to a ‘broken’ copy. This ‘broken’ aesthetic is a new way of creating content and is seen everywhere- in music videos, music itself, video gaming, social platforms, etc. Glitching demonstrates that the internet paradigm really has no boundaries and reiterates the concept of the ‘eternal beta’ where there is no final product- they are just copies of a copy.
According to our old mate, McLuhan, ‘the Medium is the Message’ means, “The personal and social consequences of any medium- that is, of any extension of ourselves- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” But what does this mean?
To say I know what this means in it’s entirety, would be a flat out lie. But I think I’m catching what he’s throwing (ok maybe some is slipping through my fingers).
From my understanding from the lecture and the readings this week, I have taken away the following:
an extension of ourselves is anything in reality because it signals information of some kind- hair, clothes, driving a car or using a pen- these all extend our normal abilities. Using language as a medium, takes our thoughts into a message.
McLuhan uses the example of a hammer extending our arms abilities
A medium is anything from which a change occurs, usually from a new innovation or technology
The content itself is not the medium, the medium is the change in dynamics that the new technology brings. For example, Federman, M. (2004) suggests that “the message of a newscast are not the news stories themselves, but a change in the public attitude towards crime, or the creation of a climate of fear.” as a result of the message.
Federman also encourages to “seek non-obvious changes or effects that are enabled by the new thing.”
Another example I’ve come up with could be (I’m hoping), the message of an advertising campaign being made is not the advertisement itself, but the change in product purchases as a result.
chats with chels 
