Possibly, there is no more of an intimidating topic.  Most people think about themselves when contemplating the future and although overwhelming, most can dig through self doubt to find a sunny ending. In the case of media issues our environment is much more opaque.

When contemplating the future of media in relation to the theories of this course, two specific topics jump out; Reality and Big Politics. The reason for this is because they seem to be the two that will have to be rethought more vigorously by the common person than any other category.

Media is used to be a medium that facilitated personal expression of one’s reality OR as a tool to guide people about the changes in their environment (on behalf of governments, businesses and other institutions). It is because of change in technology and thereby the social and cultural use of media that both of these areas will be equally reshaped.

For example Jane McGonigal (<http://janemcgonigal.com/>) explores how her expression of reality changed because of the virtual technology in gaming which allowed her to be more collaborative and productive in a competitive and goal achieving environment. If social trends are reflecting a move toward gaming and the values that it comes with then so must the laws of communications (government) be altered to suit the changes to the new media ecology and forms of practices.

Once laws are in place, media can physically implement a platform of change (ie access to behind the scenes content), but also play a big role to get other institutes and independent opinion makers to cultivate practices that encourage adapting to the ‘futuristic’ communication styles wanted by the community. This may also include questioning which community (if a community can even be defined) they advertise to, and especially how; be it radio, ads within videos, or as holograms only visable with special glasses.

In conclusion, technology is a transversal and frame that changes big institution practices and media practices so that people’s experience of reality and communication are altered which in turn affects every aspect about community formation and the state of other ecologies.

New media has enabled a group of fans to organise themselves into a community, to share their interest, politicize the show and create new content. Most interestingly this environment is a very specific culture, unique to the attributes that come out of the fans whilst on the site and quite literally designs a new way of living, for at least the time they spend on the site.

The big institutions/politics govern the actions of the micro-communities only so far as influencing their activities transversality,  from the weekly episodes.  I would even go so far as to say that the fan community would pay more attention to the extremist opinions of audiences members  on the blog that don’t fit into the culture than that of the ‘uniformed’ opinions of TV critics who do not share the same passion and enthusiam for  thier community.

This theory of online social behaviour is supported in Jellis’ article who sees Politics as already infused with micro-political tenancies,(Jellis, Thomas (2009) ‘Disorientation and micropolitics: a response’, spacesof[aesthetic]experimentation, <http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/montreal/disorientation-and-micropolitics-a-response/>). Therefore all disciplines including television should account for audiences as activate agents, ready to organisation themselves and collaborate in an ecology of creative commons without the same obligations or restraints that institutions experience.

Linking to last week’s readings, as a critical student of media and online processes, one cannot be ignorant of the limitations in bottom-up social organising. Each group that forms are influenced by the values espoused in the content that drove them to organise in the first place. Therefore, the power of value-framing by large institutions cannot be underestimated.

This blog frames power as essential to the direction of ecologies of practice. Are institutions more powerful by resisting transversalities or adapting to them? And is it appropriate to give access or deny people from information zones? Do we even have this power?

The message from the lecture and readings rings clear to me; Framing is key (Massumi). It is no longer a matter of access to information; society is beyond asking for permission, it simply expects that all information will be revealed. Citizens have incredible power, but institutions can still frame issues that omit information to protect each discipline’s historical role in society.

Is this a good thing or bad? Who knows. Personally, I dedicate 40 hours a week to a volunteer organisation, AUJS (www.aujs.com.au), which work alone and in partnership with institutions. We struggle against hierarchy and yet cannot sustain ourselves without it.  It is commonplace to agree that government policy and service would be improved with citizen partcipation (Styles, Catherine (2009) ‘A Government 2.0 idea – first, make all the functions visible’ <http://catherinestyles.com/2009/06/28/a-government-2-0-idea/>) however Styles admits that there are limitations to citizen governance, echoed in my experience with AUJS regularly because democracy in it’s most truest form, is very slow.

Lessig’s article is interesting because it similarly describes a NGO, non-profit that engages with the biggest political institution of them all, the American Government to create transparency (Lessig, Lawrence (2010) ‘Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government.’<http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency?page=0,0>). For me, this is an interesting exercise of framing, because regardless of its success, one cannot be naive to think that the information about government’s daily activities were shown without being reframed.

In conclusion, digital networks are changing the willingness (voluntarily or not) for Big Politics to become transparent but I can’t help be critical of the content we are given which is an assessable element to the success of Web 2.0 society.

This weeks links although informative, do not attempt to answer the limitation of being able to change a frame at all.  For example, a frame whereby students sit in a complex math lesson are not so easily swayed in their diligence and concentration if a colourful distraction appears as appose to students who would embrace this transversality had they been in an art lesson. With this in mind, if a group of people belong to a certain ecology, say the music or journalism industry, then it stands to reason that changes outside their ecology such as technology advances are resisted in order to maintain the integrity of the frame.

However, we know that industries and frames are ever changing and even are undefinable about where it begins and ends. This can be represented by the complex ecology between a fan and its subject of obsession. Pre-internet days, fans would write letters or travel great distances to show their affection to movie-stars, bringing the virtual screen legends into the actual reality. Today, fans can communicate to the movie-starts through twitter, breaking any untouchable gaze and frame associated with Hollywood and relying solely on the digital.

Therein we can see that people, industries and anything that has a frame can be both resistant and welcoming of transversalities. I believe that the aim of this week’s topic is to teach about how to recognise a successful transversal interruption in order to truly affect the direction and momentum of a frame.

Globalisation encourages a diverse understand about location, national identity, culture and access to information. Similarly with reality, whether it be actual such as the place we live, potential such as a dream or fantasy, or virtual such as online banking, we exist in it on every level.  Just as globalisation asks us to think differently about what is “mine” and what is “yours”,  so does technology ask us to think about what is possible, and what is not.

Today the progress of technology has created simulators that add to our understanding of the existing reality. It has transformed and extended our access to dimensions almost making people bionic. The idea that two people could be at two places at once was impossible, but nowadays through mobile phones or skype conversations, the virtual world common place.

A social reaction to the computer-mediated reality is a change in perception and values that a society holds. Perhaps once rude to check your watch whilst having a conversation, these days people use their Iphones at the dinner table and have conversations through technology, augmenting the limitations to space and time. Furthermore,  technology breaks the existence of a “reality frame”, that is, creating a fluid assemblage between the real, potential and virtual world by employing real world objects and merging them into the virtual world (for example WoW players).

I would also propose that the media play a large role in making virtual technologies acceptable in our daily lives. ‘Actual’ reality is considered stable, whereby technologies such as ovens or hairdryers supplement our lives but are approached with a wariness due to the fickle dependency when technology breaks. However, some technologies demand higher authority such as sleek  Apple products which are embraced in our changing proprioception of values, habits and movement, forming a new ‘actual’ reality.

A media ecology encompasses everything. From the readings I have been able to understand that the most important thing about an ecology is our perception if it. It includes what is around us, but also our internal processes that allow us to communicate with it. Everyone’s experience of the “same” ecology creates a domino effect whereby one interpretation  impacts the next person’s perception and so on in a never ending cycle. This post-structuralist perspective such as that of Deleuze helps extend the notion of an ecology or reality not as any one stable thing, but rather a environment for memory and cultural shifts.

The awareness of the spaces, media models, events and people at play in our ecology is reminiscent of Guattari’s three ecologies of the environment, the social and human subjective. This is important because public perception influences the models created to tame or politisize time and space that make up our ecology.  An examples of a behavioral model include things such as surveillance and governmentality to control the complexity between the dimensions and networks that frame our reality. It is important to critic the limitations of Guattari’s ecologies because of the limitlessness of any one ecology or discipline, thus it seems too simplistic (at least from the material provided in the readings) to divide our ecology into three rather an infinite amount.

This leads us to thinking about media ecologies as a technology that shape culture. If our culture has become a network (rather than a linear process) then all events that transverse along the transductant journey of the mixing ecologies become more complex. Moreover the ‘reality’ given to us by an ecology become the technology whilst the ecology is the code that we need to interpret and make sense of.

Echoing Baetson’s idea about meta communications or shifts of the pattern in our relations we see that the models created for our ecologies provide us with greater accessibility to remote ecologies. This accessibility politicizes an ecology because of the multiple forces that interact with various and potentially conflicting spaces thereby creating another genre (Deitz) of an ecology and more multi-blended models for our networks.

The question is not about the limits of thinking that mnemotechnics cause as much as it is about what we do with the knowledge, how we store it and what is changes in society. For me, the most interesting and practical model’s that illustrate this are status-media platforms such as twitter and facebook  which create an increase in  protentional thought whereby people are simultaneously experiencing an event and think in 140-characters-status-updates to document it. An interesting study of this could be whether or not we relive these memories in short-caption thoughts, rather than traditional longer episodic moments.

These status-making mnemotechnics strengthen the desire to make our lives more publishable. My research project is specifically about online communities and how they coordinate themselves and set up guidelines for behavior and interaction. A large proponent of that is acknowledging the global effects of Stiegler’s “global mnemotechnics” or globalisation of media technologies which increase the complexity of the online human experience. If memory can become global and thinking and actions standardised online, this possibly suggests a formulation of a potentially new ‘digital’ language whereby people are trained to think in the same way, thus all memories, protention, feelings and social structure in an online community becomes conditioned.

This week we talked about the virtual and actual reality of memory, referencing the past, present and future as memory-making technologies. The most controversial technology, “the future” as a potential tool for memory making is also most valuable because it is a proponent where ideas and multiple potentials can spark from. Virtual memory on the other hand, can destabilizes memory by giving a false impression of real moment, however it provides order (like an archive) to make sense of the multitude of signals and signifies that impact our thinking.

The idea that technology is created by social needs or as a result of existing technology is fascinating especially when contextualised within the framework of theorists that argue either or both sides of the spectrum.

The most repeated quote throughout many of the required readings and indeed the tutuorial and lecture was McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”. I believe this weeks topics can be defined and explored within these words, also reflected by the CBC’s archives reading of McLuhan work, describing him as more relevant today in relation to new media than ever before.

“McLuhan argues that the cultural significance of media lies not in their content, but in the way they alter our perception of the world” (Murphie and Potts, 2003). If this is considered, then it can be fair to say that media has not discovered anything new; rather it is a medium which assembles news from a diverse range of ecologies and packages it in a way that influences our perception of the world.

This point is reiterated in the lecture when Murphie talked about “medium specifity” vs “mixed-media” technology. Of course even the simplest and specific medium is influenced by some sort of signifier (Baudrillard), interrupting the message or creating inspiration for new technological advances.

In relation to the area of my interest, the links about ‘internet as playground and factory’ resonate how social media and networking sites have become both an experimental medium for communications and a factory of innovation and new online-civilizations. It is about the ‘traditional’ desire for socializing, the ‘message’, and the mixed-media technology of the Ipad, phones and computers as the ‘medium’ which constantly simulate the battle between cultural materialism and technological determinism, thereby never determining a winner but constantly remediating the direction of communication technology.

Our reading task was to explore the online domain of the big and ever-changing world of social media. Part of that was to learn about places such as Youtube, Flickr and Delicious. Of-course we had to also engage with links provided by our lecturer within the course’s site. Particularly interesting was my experience with Flickr and Delicious because these were 2 of the 3 mediums that I had the least experience with. Engaging with a video on Youtube is a similar experience to watching television; what is ‘most viewed’ are the ‘top stories’ of the communities that rule the online world. Who are these communities? That will be discussed at a later time.

Through my exploration of the more complete texts such as photographic art (Flickr) and the wild west of links to any medium on the internet (Delicious) I learnt this about the cultural and social communities between 28th-6th of March 2011.

What is a Media Event?

Flickr: Over the week I clicked on the most recent uploads link “in the last minute” to get a feel for the community of people that actively engaged with this medium. The common themes of the images were exotic location, music events, nature/animals and profile pictures. The most striking difference between the images that can be commonly found in Google and those at Flickr was the level of depth, creativeness and professionalism.

According to Flickr a media event does not have to be something that is well advertised, be accessible or require a personality. Rather a media event is about the quality, hidden meaning and abstract expression that requires the viewer to create their own story.

What is the cultural and social change in media?

Delicious: Similarly to Flickr, I spent the week on the “Hot List” tab, tracking which topics were influencing the social and cultural practices of web users. The common themes were computer and phone software, online media tools and aggregating sites for images and facts.

Clearly, the cultural and social interests of Delicious users was making public other sites that fuels their interests in communications. Now, the news that is sought after is that which extend the possibilities and capabilities of creating media. Therein our question is whether we have tipped the scale of Web 2.0 whereby we consumed and created news and now have just become obsessed with news-making capabilities. We must ask where will this leave us? Perhaps it is a technological determinist viewpoint but something worth considering, especially if indicators show that our society is become more accepting of virtual communication as a culture.

What does this contribute to the final assignment?

I am very interesting in exploring social media as a new form of community. I am interested in understand how communities organise themselves, which rules apply, which do not, and other factors that play a role in creating the unique atmosphere for websites. This week we were able to gain a better insight into the mind of social media users and how those that use Flickr and Delicious define an event worth noting. Moreover the variation of creative medium used to express themselves helps to extend the framework in my mind of social and cultural practices that influence the creation of these communities.

When publishing changes, so does society. Investigate and compare the impact of two publication technologies, one pre-1900 and one post-1962, on a specific aspect of society (e.g. education, politics, creative industries, science, entertainment, social relationships).

BLAME IT ON THE INTERNET;

PUBLISHING FUELLED ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

Publishing is a mode for audiences to share personal creativity. A limited mode of publishing, limits our own expression. Through the use of various platforms or ‘mediums’ of publishing (of which there is an infinite amount today), communications has become a constant source of change and facilitated the reinterpretation of a community’s social experience.

Most fascinatingly, publishing that is time-based (hard copy books, hieroglyphics) has been critiqued as the least interactive and thus, least sustainable for communicative purposes. But despite these concerns, time-based publishing undertakes an extra layer of analysis to factor in how people will interpret the text; how to sustain the original narrative.

Technology has helped make publishing widely accessible and influenced what and how we make things ‘public’ or known. It is this mode that has also reinvigorated ‘history from below’ but also made traditionally hierarchical texts just as portable. The dilemma we now face is this; what effect on culture does publication technologies produce?

Technology’s influence on religion? Or religion’s influence on technology?

The effect of publishing platforms on religious evolution is best contextualise though history from; Enlightenment through to the Industrialisation Revolution, and now the (Post)Modern, where any desire of religion has been diluted by the privilege for science over art. Combine this with the recent threat to traditional publishing (print media, television, radio, newspapers) and it can be concluded that the newest revolution has become the forced transformation of traditional communication and lifestyles, such as those practiced by prominent world faiths.

Harold Innis (1950) proposes that empires (cultures) are different depending on the kind of media they use[1]. In this, authority of religion shifts with different forms of publishing. As technology changed, and the written form of communication became digital, different rulers/empires were created (as can be compared to the rise and fall of Egyptians/Romans/Ottomans etc). Arguably, publishing technologies have allowed even minorities a voice and thus strengthened the existence of any sideline viewpoint by immortalising them online.

Reinforced by a highly sophisticated use of social technology and the relative modernity associated with Islam, this religion has used new media to spread extremism throughout the world, concentrated on the fundamentalist Islamic sector which has impacted the global social milieu experienced in almost every social aspect; political, technological and even educational areas (such as increased security policies due to terror, and bomb threat evacuation procedures in schools).

• • Pre technology boom – religious authority was limited to the devout
  • Post technology boom – religious authority accessible, belongs to all

As discussed, time-based media are authorities over longevity, whereas space-based media (smoke signals, internet) are widely accessible, but are temporary. As a religious ideology, monotheism has managed to withstand both time and space. New technologies have captured the modern “image-based” communication desires and combined them with the refined religious mediums such as religious texts. Islam, as the last of the three major world religions would seemingly have a disadvantage to be considered an authority of publishing (and distribution by association); however it is arguable that they have received an almost disproportionate attention from media today.

Two publication technologies that reflect the two halves of Islamic culture are:

1) The Qur’an (632 CE) (time-based medium) in its original written form, which was fairly limited to pockets of religious people in the Middle East and North Africa and,

2) The digitization of the Qur’an through the internet, (especially online translations) which saw the growth of jihad membership and religious extremism sites around the world.

The Qur’an’s influence on Islam and changes through publishing

Islam believes the Qur’an was revealed by Allah (Muslim God) to Muhammad (prophet) orally through the angel Jibrīl (Gabriel) over a period of approximately twenty-three years, beginning in 610 CE – 632 CE. Originally Muhammad’s sahabas (followers) memorised the Qur’an but it was later formally transformed into text through a process known as the ‘Uthmanic recension’ (651CE).

Originally, the text had strength in its real-time context. Many argue that the Qur’anic text cannot be reproduced in another language or form since an Arabic word may have a range of meanings depending on the context, making an accurate translation even more difficult[2]. However symbols are utilised in Islamic religion to provide a universal signal to followers in order to communicate the message of the Qur’an.

{CAPTION: The colour green has a special place in Islam. Some believe that green was Muhammad’s favourite colour. Others believe that it symbolizes nature and life, hence the physical manifestation of God. These are all part of the initial peaceful, enlightened and progressive nature of the Islamic religion.}

The word Qur’an means “recitation”. When Muslims speak in the abstract about “the Qur’an”, they usually mean the scripture as recited in Arabic rather than the printed work or any translation of it. So the book itself is a mode of publishing spirituality. Records show that learning of the Qur’an was conducted through an Imam (spiritual and community leader) who would preach Islam to communities and often lead pray which emphasis the orality and initial peaceful learning-oriented culture.

Before printing was widely adopted in the 19^th century, the Qur’an was transmitted in manuscript books made by copyists and calligraphers. Short extracts from the Qur’an were printed in the medieval period from carved wooden blocks, one block per page; a technique already widely used in China. Mass-produced less expensive versions of the Qur’an were produced from the 19^th century by lithography, which allowed reproduction of the calligraphy in hand-made versions. These examples of publishing techniques are manifestations of the impact and demand for the Islamic religion on the world.

Indeed, writing saw a huge shift in culture, which printing furthered. After enlightenment, or the Islamic Golden Age (c. mid 8^th – mid 13^th century CE) which saw a progress of art, science, agriculture, philosophy and more, the scientific revolution took Islam’s advancements and shared it with the world, based on sharing of printed papers, data and ideas (including the teachings and interpretations on the Qur’an) which forced a wave of public education in order to be able to interact with the growth of capitalism. In this, the general distribution of information through printing created a public with a demand to be educated.[3]

In this, the Muslim people began to move away from the traditional leaning by text and became increasingly exposed to a more ‘visually oriented’ or image-based education. That is, the newly created informed public-sphere was brought together by publication and new technologies such as photography and politically oriented news media; this movement into a more image-based communication that ‘corrupted’ the purity of religion is attributed to Islam’s beginning into fundamentalism.

Digitization of the Qur’an and the internet’s influence on Islam

The innovation of technology i.e. telephones and TV broadcasting saw the return to an oral culture (that originally dictated Qur’anic learning). Publishing also created an environment that was saturated with reproduced and highly distributed texts, including the Qur’an. This change removed the value of ‘special’ and ‘original’ objects, thus the once holy Qur’an became a book diluted in the mass of other spiritual publishings’ and Islam struggled to redefine itself in new media ecology.

Ideographic writing is a picture-based expression of an idea or concept. Islamic scripture uses letters, not images in the Qur’an and ‘Allah’ is a god with no image. These abstract features ask for a higher intellectual dissertation of religion and lifestyle, however, the modern world privilege image-based stories; a traditional/archaic lifestyle of Muslim extremists is highly juxtaposed to the freedom of a Western lifestyle.

Thus the movement into a highly publicised environment which had an established need for images, superfluous entertainment and superficial desires led religious Islamists own desires for more attention – who felt their religion slipping into the background of society. Through this, extremist learnt to utilise ideographic communication such as Islamic flags, vlogs, minisodes and webcasts to spread their ‘oral’ messages of violence and hate.

Gregory Ulmer (1989) argues that electronic media that lie between orality and literacy is called ‘electracy’.[4] As discussed, the uses of online video messages are a powerful way to connect globally, and the messages to subscribe to ‘hard-core’ religious observance as exemplified in the Qur’an text (literacy) is combined with the oral commandment to observe religious teaches, i.e. jihad membership.

It would be fair to assert that like most other biblical texts, the Qur’an has extreme values concerning warfare; “Prophet! Rouse the believers to wage war. If there are twenty amongst you…they will subdue two hundred: if a hundred, they will subdue a thousand of the disbelievers: for these are a people without understanding”.[5] The internet as a publishing technology has facilitated a distorted view of the meanings in the Qur’an, because ethics cannot be conveyed through images. Most poignantly, the creation of legislation, agencies and government departments to counter terrorism (including intelligence agencies) has increased exponentially to compact the fear that has changed the face of privacy communication of online social interaction.

There is a fine line between radicalism and innovation

Electracy allows the written text to change, to answer back and to take on much of the immediacy and specificity of orality. Internet communication (and the publishing of extremist individual ideas rather than a collective one such as community religious teachings) thus gives a platform to radicalism, which arguably mimics innovation (a ‘new technology’ value). This extremism is the type of media story picked up on by information distributors (i.e. internet content host providers) because extremism is entertaining, which only serves to fuel the fortitude of those extremist values.

Moreover, as engaging as electracy media can be, digital communication can distort the flow of information/conversation (by suspending comments, moderating etc) which creates a culture of absorption; a controlled piece of information is combined with media images to promote religion and the product is a culture changed by technology into radicalism.

It is important to remember that religion and religious texts ie the Qur’an in of itself is not extreme, but the opportunities for radical ideals facilitated by publishing alternatives allowed for a changed perspective of an otherwise peaceful and progressive religion – which became a story for media to publish and distribute. Until Islamic observers can find a balance between using their holy scripture and revising it for the internet, there will always be a struggle for a moderate message.

[2] Fatani, Afnan (2006). “Translation and the Qur’an”. in Leaman, Oliver. The Qur’an: an encyclopedia. Great Britain: Routeledge. pp. 657–669.

[3] McLuhan, Marshall (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of tsypographic man Toronto: University of Toronto Press

[4] Ulmer, Gregory (1989) Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video New York: Routledge

[5] Qur’an 008.065