Blog Post - Week 6 - The Commons: Collection and (re)Distribution/Assembling Attention

Societal Change (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Social change is not something easily diagrammed on a chart. Sweeping transformations that rearrange the workings of an entire culture begin imperceptibly, quietly but steadily entering people’s minds until one day it seems the ideas were there all along. - (Walljaspe, 2011)

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In week six we deal with matters of the 'commons', and the information published by those in this sector. Also, we look at 'attention' - and specifically how publishing and assemblages affect our day-to-day lives.

Key questions to be discussed as per this week's moodle slides...

Attention: 

• How do publishing, and assemblages involving publishing, affect/construct your attention, and what does this do to you?
• What are the implications? Personal, social, political? 
• How are the senses assembled differently in the use of different archives, and different modes of publishing more generally? 
• What difference does this make to our (literal and figurative) sense of the social?

The Commons: 

• Who owns, gets to see, share, publish information or data, etc, from personal data to state and corporate data?
• What difference does this make? Should publishing be open access? 
• What difference do different forms of publishing (eg filesharing or P2P, or Apple apps, or niche music “netlabels”) make to the bringing together of a social group? 
• What are the implications? Personal, social, political?
  

When I first came to think about how i would approach this discussion, I immediately saw it fit to address these overarching questions...

The first: How do publishing, and assemblages involving publishing, affect/construct your attention, and what does this do to you? 

And secondly: What are the implications? Personal, social, political?

In the current media climate, we are so often engaged with readily-accessible technologies that our attention is somewhat shifted from that of the real world. Means of contemporary publishing, and too those assemblages involving publishing, construct and/or alter our attention - sometimes without us even realising.

By becoming more so connected with our peers in a digital context, it is often the case that we distance ourselves from those closest to us - think the use of our mobile phones in public....

The video below perfectly illustrates these aforementioned points of discussion.

So, from that video, we immediately come to know of the 'how' and the 'when (and perhaps also the 'why') our attention is altered through publishing methods .... but not so much the 'what' (or the implications to come out of these behaviours)

Times technology journalist Matt Richtel (2010) put that question forward to his readership in an article entitled 'The Price Of Putting 'Your Brain On Computers''

"What is the line right now when we go from a kind of technology nourishment to a kind of stepping backwards, to a kind of distraction — where instead of informing us, [technology] distracts us and impedes our productivity?... There's growing evidence that that line is closer than we've imagined or acknowledged."

Thus, we may deduce that an over-indulgence in technology (and more so, published material on a whole) may divert our attention to those lengths where by productivity becomes reduced and so too our engagement with our peers most closest to us.

"There's growing concern among scientists that indulging in these ceaseless disruptions isn't good for our brains, in much the way that excessive sugar or fat - other things we evolved to crave when they were in shorter supply - isn't good for our bodies." - Temple (2011)

“It’s one of those things that regardless of where you are, everyone has experienced it" - 
Australian graduate student,Alex Heigh, on 'Phubbing' (Source: Time)

From these points, it is now more clear how our behaviour is affected by publishing. The question then beckons, who, in fact, are those publishing this material?

It is here that this week's discussion leads into the 'commons' - an explanation of which is delivered below...

Quite simply, the 'Commons' are public spaces. So therefore in a media context, that 'public space' should be one where the public can contribute to discussions - however that is not always the case.

Our modes of public discussion have shifted over time, from the days meetings in town halls to private user-gen forums on the web.

"...On the Internet, the viral spiral is how new commons are born. It began with free software and later produced the web..." 

- David Bollier (Activist, writer, and policy strategist, co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group)

Prof. murphie summed up the notion of the 'Commons' well in this weeks lecture slides:

There will always be some kind of common... whether this is the land people share to grow food, or a space in which all can participate in political discussion, or common social life or the current sharing of information/ knowledge/media forms (music, films, yes, but also, books, published research, educational materials)

References:

Walljasper, Jay (2010) ‘The Commons Moment is Now’, Commondreams.org, <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/24-0>

Meretz, Stefan (2010) ‘Ten Theses about Global Commons Movement’, P2P Foundation, <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/ten-theses-about-global-commons-movement/2011/01/05>

Temple, James (2011) ‘All those tweets, apps, updates may drain brain’ San Fransciso Chronicle, April 17, <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/16/BUTO1J0S2P.DTL>

Steinmetz, Katy (2013) 'Why the ‘Stop Phubbing’ Campaign Is Going Viral' August 6, <http://techland.time.com/2013/08/06/why-the-stop-phubbing-campaign-is-going-viral/>

Blog Post - Week 5 - Archives, Authority and Memory, Cultural and Individual/Theory and Practice

Archives, as we most often come to think of them. (Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons)


“There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude,
without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.”
 (Enszer, 2012).

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This week, Prof. Murphie introduced us to the idea of theories, methods, memory and the archives in which these are commonly stored.

Key points to take away from the lecture:

•  Theory
•  Ideas about how things work
•  From latin: "theoria” - contemplation, although here we will see it as between contemplation and action.
•  Not only to understand the changing world, but to allow us to participate in the changing world.
•  Provides us with a new way of understanding already familiar things
• A form of mediation between methods and practices.
• Archives
• Ways of organising the materials we work with, e.g media, data, objects, ideas, etc...
• Memory 
• taken as complex, dynamic (constantly shifting) and ambiguous - is also where there is a lot of action at the junction of media technologies and cultural change

From this week's lecture and readings, we can deduce that archives (be it in the literal form as evidenced above, or in a more conceptual understanding i.e thoughts, memories, conversations, etc...) are home to the theories of the world. 

As a starting point, I'll call upon the text from this week's Moodle slides to introduce the idea behind archives, and too, 'Archive' fever.

"In general, for  (Jacques) Derrida (from the text Archive Fever, 1995) archives are always important because they become the basis for what counts within both society and even perhaps our sense of ourselves...

Archives constitute the most fundamental level of social and individual institutions and practices"

The term 'Archive fever', as referred to by Prof. Murphie, stems from the want to track, record, acknowledge and announce both past and current theories. (or more so today; practices, habits, actions, etc...)

Ogle (2010) argues that "...as people, we are made up of the sum total of all the experiences in our lives and in the lives of those we love. Being able to track what’s happening right now — amplified and revitalised by the real-time web — is important and will undoubtedly remain so..."

Enszer (2012)  furthers to state that "... archives are both “traditional and revolutionary; at once institutive and conservative..."

So what can we take away from this? And specifically more so in relation to 'Publics and Publishing?' 

I propose the first question to be, why we as media practitioners (and perhaps even more so as consumers) would want to archive, or store, things that have been published?

After significant thought and having read the associated texts of this weeks topic, I had concluded that the answer to that question is this: 

We collect, store and archive data so that we can track and trace the changes in epistemological / theoretical connections to world views and sub-sequential human activities. Or, in simpler terms, how lines of thought have changed over time, and how records of such determine (or help to explain) personal behaviours.

However from this, another interesting question to consider sprung forth, and one that was proposed by the ABC's Lyn Gallacher in 2010: Do (Archives) describe our past or our future?

I am also of the belief that the answer to this question is largely subject to matters of interpretation, and that not one such answer could be upheld with any great deal of conviction. 

However Derrida proposes, as again witnessed in Enszer, that while the archive seems to point to the past, it “should call into question the coming of the future.” “It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.” (p.36)

References:

Derrida, J. (1995) ‘Archive Fever—A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25(2), pp9-63

Enszer, J.R. (2008) Julie R. Enszer (personal blog), 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida', November 16, <http://julierenszer.blogspot.com/2008/11/archive-fever-freudian-impression-by.html>

Gallacher, L. (2010) ‘Archive Fever’, Hindsight, Radio National, ABC, <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/archive-fever/4953602> (podcasts)

Ogle, M. (2010) ‘Archive Fever: A love letter to the post real-time web’, mattogle.com, December 16, <http://mattogle.com/archivefever/>

Blog Post - Week 4 - Assembling Publishing-Publics/Archive Fever

Latour's ANT (Source: Ryan Selvage)

"...Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is notoriously difficult to summarize, define or explain. There are a number of reasons for this..." (Cressman, 2009)

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This week; we discussed issues of assemblage, the role and impact of technology upon means of publishing and of course: Latour's 'Actor Network Theory'. (ANT)

Personally, i found it rather difficult to wrap my head around the many concepts and abundant intricacies of the ANT - and took great solace in Cressman's brief summation of the topic.

In short, Cressman (2009) argued that the ANT - as proposed by the likes of Latour (1996) -  considers "...both human and non-human elements equally as actors within a network. In other words, we should employ the same analytical and descriptive framework when faced with either a human, a text or a machine..."

Latour (Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons)

Straight away I found myself questioning when - and in what context - would the ANT be applicable/used?

Again, this was met with a degree of uncertainty, because many readings - not least that of Law and Hassard (1999) - found that there is no orthodoxy in current ANT, and different authors use the approach in substantially different ways.

However one sticking point across many, if not all of the proposals from those critiquing the theory is this: Technological and Social (or 'Human') actants, regardless of their contextual positioning, are to be held as equals in their respective social structure.

Once more, this lead me to question the potential windfalls of the ANT... and the first was rooted in the very name of the concept itself.

This stance was readily supported by Dankert (2010) who found that "ANT does not use the word actor in its regular meaning. The word actant would be more appropriate. An actant is that which accomplishes or undergoes an act. They differ from actors because an actant can not only be a human, but also an animal, object or concept that accomplishes or undergoes an act. Through the use of the word actant humans, animals, objects and concepts are treated equally in an analytical sense"

To relate this concept back to the over-arching theme of 'Publics and Publishing', we may thence gather that the ANT is applicable in determining the role and impacts of technologies (consider these as a means of publishing) upon their users (publics) - and vice versa!. This, in turn, serves as concrete foundations in many socio-cultural studies.

And whilst generally used in this field of study, I propose the idea that the ANT could also be used in an 'every day', or significantly more common, form when deconstructing advertising messages; be those via print or in a video-graphical form.

Respondents, in critiquing or analysing the given texts, could effectively deduce the role of the 'actants' in the work, and thus conceive their impact in transmitting the intended (or otherwise) messages to be decoded.

References:

Cressman, D. (2009) - A Brief Overview of Actor-Network Theory: Punctualization, Heterogeneous Engineering & Translation (accessible at http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/cprost/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/0901.pdf) 

Dankert, R. (2010) - Using Actor Network Theory Doing Research. (accessible at http://ritskedankert.nl/publicaties/2010/item/using-actor-network-theory-ant-doing-research)

Latour, B. (1996) - On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications” Soziale Welt pp.369-381.

Law, J. & Hassard, J. (1999) - Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford and Keele: Blackwell and the Sociological Review).

Blog Post - Week 3 - Tools and Techniques of Publishing

"Different tools, techniques, processes and genres set up different expectations, and different roles, for everyone involved" 
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The essential nature of publishing means that concepts, as were perhaps once held highly in a specific culture, may or may not resonate with those of a different sociality.

Key points to take away from this week's lecture ... 

Things (and increasingly, now) can be made public in both space and time - as was not the case in previous civilisations.

Writing captures the complexity - and more - of previous publishing methods (be in cave paintings, smoke signals, rock structures, etc...) whilst also removing itself from the lived experience … "Writing is good at ‘representing the un-representable" (Levinson: 17)

In week two's lecture, Prof. Murphie spoke of the foundations of publishing - and those methods which transcend through space and time.

And while pictographs, hieroglyphics, cave paintings and the like had told stories to their direct audience, whilst also standing the test of time, the messages were not easily transported and thus new methods would spring forth accordingly. The changes brought about in publishing and its social contexts aligned with the publics of the respect eras.

Writing has since accounted for such, capturing the complexity of the existing means of publishing, and more.  At the same time, writing tries to substitute itself for life (as lived in the present) but can also remove things from the lived experience. Abstract does this even better.

The below video details the history of written language...

"... Written language has allowed us to preserve great stories, plays, poems and even songs... As we have moved into the 21st century, the written language has seen rapid changes and become more important than ever ..." 

We have since moved from an era whereby publishers had often wanted as many people as possible to view their means of work, into an age where upholding the sanctity of texts has become the main priority.

As we - in the current and very much digital public domain - continue to shape and shift publishing methods, content distributors have had to alter their modes of delivery to ensure business longevity.

'Paywalls' - an arrangement whereby access is restricted to users who have paid to subscribe to the site - have been implemented by many news outlets to ensure their readership is still paying for the received content. A method, which as heard in the below video, has proven to have worked for Australian-based NewsCorp.

"... They [News providers] are making more money from their 79,000 digital subscribers, than they did from the 20,000,000 unique browsers they used to have ... The Times is making more money now from their subscription websites, than they did when they were free ... Subscribers feel like they are in a premium environment, and that the content has been tailored for them."

Blog Post - Week 2 - Pages to Pixels: The Transformation of Publishing

The Guardian (Source: Google's creative commons)

"For the past five hundred years, humans have used print — the book and its various page-based cousins — to move ideas across time and space. Radio, cinema and television emerged in the last century and now, with the advent of computers, we are combining media to forge new forms of expression" - futureofthebook.org

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In week one's lecture, Prof. Murphie laid the foundations of the 'Publics and Publishing in Transition' course . And from the outset, it become readily apparent that we - as media consumers - have largely determined the reasons both how and why published content is delivered to us in a certain fashion.

Initial, and key points to take away from the lecture...

-  Publishing: To issue, or cause to be issued, in copies made by printing or other processes – for sale or distribution to the public.  To make public, or generally known

- Printing: Is not the be all and end all, there are other means of publishing. 

Although not limited to just a one way influence, developing technology has also had a great say in the ways we go about our every day life - even in the way we kill flies ...

And again, although the above clip is not to be taken as gospel, it does reflect the idea that we have had to - and continue to - alter our behaviours thanks to technologies overarching presence.

Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing

From woodblock printing (200CE) through to the Digital era of the early 1990s, Printing methods have long undergone a means of change to befit the requirements of the public at the time.

As observed in the allotted readings for this week, and thanks largely to the development of the press, "To consult different books, it was no longer essential to be a wandering scholar" (Eisenstein, 1979:2). 

Furthermore, through the digital revolution and the readily accessible nature of texts, students (or consumers on a whole) may not need to employ a wide means of search to uncover a large sum of information. Such is the beauty of the digital era.

Brannon (2007:353) details the change in perception of the printing process, through time. "To these children of the digital age 'print' is the verb for the end process, the output of their computers."

Thus, I am of the opinion that the term 'Print', as well as that of 'Publish', must remain liquid (or fluent, dynamic, omnipresent, etc...) as technology further develops amidst the digital age.

3D and 4D printing have spurred on greater change and given light to new pathways not before trodden. The full extent of change (or influence) these technologies have over the general public is not yet fully clear, and such levels will be further determined in due time.

"These days, texts, the ideas they embody, and the vehicles by which they teach us are formed not by sequenced lines of metal type sorts but by the congruence of millions of pin points of carbon light"
 - Brannon, (2007:364)


References:

Eisenstein, E. (1979)  - ‘Defining the initial shift: some features of print culture’ in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change Vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 43-163

Brannon, B.A. (2007) -  ‘The Laser Printer as an Agent of Change’ in Baron, Sabrina et al., (eds.) Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press: 353-364