Techno Culture and Human Bodies

It has been suggested by Debra Shaw that humans have a correlation to machines, rather than two different entities. Using the of the body's circulatory system as an example Shaw compares it to working with medical tools to create our 'natural' understand of the human body. Shaw tells us about William Harvey building upon Galen's findings how the heart served its purpose. Shaw continues to say "produced by technology in the simple sense that Harvey had necessarily to use tools to examine the workings of the heart."(Shaw, 2008, p.82) This suggestion allows us to make correlations between machines and the human bodies being repaired and reassembled using tools. 

There is a fixation among individuals to create ideological embodiments of there perfect self using technologies which have only advanced because of our understand of the human body. The example used within Shaw's Technoculture is that of Bruce Springsteen and the modern geek. Bruce Springsteen used in the consumer society to relate towards those of the working class by doing so creating a body that was enhanced with technologies within a gym.

"He thus signifies the passage from the body of the industrial worker, marked by social class, to the body of the late capitalist consumer" (Shaw, 2008, p.85). 

 

Emphasizing Shaw's notion of Bruce Springsteen, the modern geek, as the machine driven body can be constructed to fit the ideological stance within their cyberspace. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the computer literate can create new identities, to enhance properties of themselves otherwise unknown outside of cyberspace. This allows a "construction of a wide variety of private worlds and, through them, for self-exploration". (Turkle, 1984, p.21). With the technology allowing us to use pseudonyms, and be annoymous within cyberspace, the reality creates convergence between collective intelligence and its participatory culture. Do we live as a machine or in a machine?

Bibliography

Shaw, D. (2008). Technoculture: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Oxford Berg Press.

Turkle, S. (1984) The Second Life: Computers & The Human Spirit 

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture, where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. 

New Media/ Mass Culture

New Media is more readily available and more largely produced than ever before. It is created as quickly as we the audience can take it in and enjoy it. This mass culture that we are so use to and live by today was not favoured by some in its early days.

The Frankfurt School fled Germany during the Second World War to America and once there they were confronted with the mass culture that was engulfing America which was not to their tastes. The Frankfurt School was shocked when they arrived to discover how "... American mass culture shared many similarities with the products of mass production." (Creeber, 2009, p.12). They likened it to how Henry Ford was successful to produce his automobiles in mass quantities. They believed that as this culture was being mass produced it would have serious negative effects on the mass audiences who consumed this media.

Moreover on the belief that the Frankfurt School saw mass culture as being  negative influence on the mass audience that ingested it. The hypodermic needle theory was that, "...as wholly defenceless and constantly 'injected' by media messages, as if it were some form of mind-altering narcotic." (Creeber, 2009, p.13). Mass culture no matter what form it was packaged in was seen to be of no use or benefit to its audience but more of a nuisance.

Furthermore those who condemned mass culture were themselves consumers of high culture ans so therefore saw this new mass culture a threat to their way of life. The first direct General of the BBC, John Reith believed, "... Broacasting should be used to defend 'high culture' against the degrading nature and influence of mass culture." (Creeber, 2009, p.13). Even if mass culture is a threat to high culture or even if it is a negative influence on its audience the 'medium is the message' (Creeber quoting McLuhan, 2009, p.15) and therefore it should speak for itself on these issues and we can interrupt in our own way.

Bibliography

Creeber, G. and Martin R. (2009) Digital Cultures (Maidenhead:Open University Press)

Going Down The River in a Cardboard Box

"In contrast to analog media where each successive copy loses quality, digitally encoded media can be copied endlessly without degradation" (Manovich, 2001, 69)

Manovich begins by looking at William J. Mitchell's 'The Reconfigured Eye' (1982), In which Mitchell talks about how analog media "cannot be transmitted or copied without degradation" (Mitchell, 1982: 6) At the time of writing, Mitchell was living in a world where digital media was a break through in technology and it was looking like it was about to completely revolutionise the way media artefacts where accessed, developed and broadcast. It looked like nothing could destroy digital media and that anything which was digitally accessed was safe from complete destruction.

Mitchell goes on to refer to his view of digital media and how he believes it is completely lossless, "a digital image that is a thousand generations away from the original is indistinguishable in quality from any one of its progenitors".

He believes that digital media is invincible through generations of being passed down. For example. An old photograph will stain of the years with age and use, but if a digital image is stored on a hard drive for the same amount of time, it will be in the same condition and quality as when it was taken.

However, Manovich, speaking nearly twenty years after Mitchell, and being in the middle of the digital revolution, knows how digital media can be just as short-termed as analog media. "A single digital image consists of millions of pixels. All this data requires considerable storage" (Manovich, 2001: 70)

Even another decade later and we still cannot say that we have confidence in how computers store our media files. With technologies like DropBox, GoogleDrive and SkyDrive, surely we are just bypassing the problem instead of eliminating the problem which we built. 


Bibliography
Mitchell, W.J., The Reconfigured Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982)
Manovich, L., The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001)

Critical reflection on the introductory chapter of Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins

Reading through the Introduction of Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, it is noticeable that Jenkins does not think of convergence as being a principally technologically driven mechanism. Moreover, he states that a cultural shift is occurring whereby the media producers are losing their power at the expense of the media users. It is of course self-evident that consumers play a significant role in the process of convergence, as they decide how media content and media technology will be used, but can we truly state that an active “participatory culture” is more important than the technology and the media producers carrying out the convergence in the first instance? It might be better to put it in a way that these three components are all equally important in the phenomenon of convergence: on the one hand, media producers integrate the voice of the public, use this to develop new ideas and set out the lines of the media offer. On the other, however, media consumers contribute by evaluating the content or product and deciding for themselves what to do with it.

The fact that the media audience is not the exclusive crucial part in this convergence development became clear by reading through Jenkins’ review on the New Orleans Media Experience. People knew little about the coming changes and the event seemed to be set up for the media industry only to inform the public about what was ahead of them.

In this context it is worth noticing that although it might seem as an exclusively positive phenomenon that the broad media offer allows a wide variety of possibilities both for the producers and the consumers, it also should  be taken into account that the process of convergence causes some new sort of difficulties. For instance, producers now experience a new kind of stress caused by their new multifunctional responsibilities.


Bibliography

Jenkings, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide, revised version. NYU Press.