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Networked Media

Controlled over Control // Networked Media // Week 4

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This week in the lecture, we learnt about the role social media plays in the world of affordances, and where it fits in this the concept of new media. I loved thinking about new media as this jar, and social media as the roots of a plant, growing inside this jar, only able to spread as much as the container allows. Then there are the fruits of this plant, the leaves. These are the individual social media services (SMS’s), and they can grow and live, or fall and die. Just a really nice and simple analogy.

The main aspect of this weeks content that I really enjoyed pondering and discussing came from the Hilton and Hjorth reading. ‘the term user has two connotations: controller and controlled’ (Hilton, S & Hjorth, L) to me is a very poetic and interesting way to address the evergrowing concerns about privacy and addiction when it comes to social media and the web as a whole. I think everyone has felt that they were being manipulated by social media services, whether that be through addicting and compelling interaction loops, or having self-esteem deteriorate as you scroll through feeds of meticulously crafted falsities.

However, one of the ways social media sites and the web as a whole can manipulate and damage you is our need to have access to it, and up until now, I hadn’t thought about how intensely this actually was, and how much of our lives revolve around the web and social media. Its affordances are too beneficial to our society. Some families communicate solely through the use of SMSs, and while I could definitely live without it, the affordances of Instagram allowing me to easily keep up with what friends are doing, as well as easily and aesthetically document events in my life and my photos and videos of them.

The reading definitely put it best, while Google always states that it is a user-focused company, it doesn’t really see us as users, it sees us as products, investors, dollar signs (Hilton, S & Hjorth, L).

Oh well, as long as I can still have my Instagram stories, I’ll be happy!

Hinton, S & Hjorth L 2013, Understanding Social Media. Sage Publications, London 2013. (Section: pp. 1-31.)

Networked Media

I Really Dig Thinking About Affordances // Networked Media // Week 3

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I never wanted to be too broad with these blog posts, but I don’t really know where to start with my interest in affordances and constraints. Everything about this is so interesting. I love discussing and thinking about what the ‘perceived affordances’ (Norman, 1999) of a product were, and comparing them to what we actually use the product for. I find the idea of constraints so fascinating, how the semantics of an object or design are always teaching us how to use other objects. These are obviously not new concepts to my brain. I have always known that a chair can be thrown, sat on, stood on and flipped, but the psychology of it and the constraints of a chair are having scholarly terms and being something we study is really exciting to me!

I’ve now started thinking about how these ideas of affordances and constraints relate to social media and technology as a whole. I’ve loved reading about the history of programs, and how in the early days of computers, there were lots of constraints that disrupted user-use. Programs were being created with an expected programmer level of computer knowledge, rather than being user-experience forward (Norman, 1999). This reminded me of the transition between Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and how the change brought a focus on user-creation and friendliness.

With my relatively amateur understanding, Instagram seems to push on user-focus affordances. While the original intention of Instagram seems to have been a relatively small scale image sharing service, mainly between your friends and followers, the platform has grown to push for posts reaching for the hundreds of thousands of likes, with a focus on hashtagging and appealing to the larger demographic. While that might not be correct or true, this idea of affordances and constraints is really interesting, and a little birdy told me it will be S U P E R helpful later in the semester.

(Seth Keen is a little birdy)

Norman, D 1999, ‘Affordance, conventions and design (Part 2)’, Nielsen Norman Group,  http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conv.html

 

Networked Media

The Ever Evolving World Wide Web // Networked Media // Week 2

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In class we discussed the differences between Web 1.0 and its evolution into what we have today, Web 2.0. The main takeaway I got from both the reading and the discussions is that Web 2.0 focuses more on community and co-creating. A collaborative web. This idea of collaboration is also everchanging, from the early days of Wikipedia edits and suggestions, to now, where groups can work together to control video game streams, using the chat comments to control the movements and inputs of the characters on screen. And while in both cases, intentional errors and trolling occur, the internet is better off with this level of mass involvement and creation.

Digressing a little, in the reading ‘New Media: A Critical Introduction”, Lister talks about the idea of The Perpetual Beta being a big change when Web 2.0 came to be, which is something that I had never really thought the internet lived without, but makes total sense to be a feature in the self-proclaimed ‘(or maybe I’ve dubbed it as the) ‘collaborative age of the web’. This idea of applications, software, firmware all updating and receiving feedback on what the community wants and doesn’t want is a perfect encapsulation of this idealistic user moulded web, and while many people feel like big companies don’t always listen to what users and the community want, I’m sure it’s really that developers can’t help but hear what we have to say.

Instagram in particular is heavily in a ‘perpetual beta’, with updates seemingly coming week in week out. And while it’s usually just for bug and crash fixes, the developers are always on the lookout to make the platform better for the users (and the shareholders)

The idea of an ever-growing Web 2.0 makes me excited for what is to come in the future for this user-driven, collaborative world wide web. Will this ‘Big Media’ relationship continue? Will we be enslaved to our tablets and fully integrate and collaborate with the internet? Who knows! All I can hope is that Grammarly learns to autocorrect my individual ‘i’ to ‘I’, cause:

(I’m really sorry for that ^^^^^)

 

Lister, M et al 2009, New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2009

Networked Media

Digital Cultures and Vernacular // Networked Media // Week 1

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The most interesting aspect of Sabine Niederer’s Networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age was this idea of  “digital cultures” (Niederer 2018, p.9), and while the idea of that term isn’t foreign to me, the term was until now.

When I think about a culture, I think about a collection of ideas, beliefs and people coming together to celebrate and connect. Cultures have their own religious beliefs, sense of humour, likes and dislikes; things that people can identify with.

The idea of a digital culture works the same way. Groups of like-minded individuals coming together on the web to embrace their similarities, whether that be on social media, forums or other areas of the internet. And within these cultures, internet or otherwise, comes a similar vernacular, often built within the community.

Niederer discusses how specific social media sites contain their own vernacular and language, such as how people who use Twitter operate within a ‘visual language’ of ‘in the moment’ conversations and quips (Niederer 2018, p. 23), and have invented and popularised terms such as Tweeting and Reposting. In our split class discussions, we pondered if the term tweet was intended to blow up by the creators of Twitter, or if the audience and users of Twitter embraced the term way beyond the expectations of the creators. A little off topic, but just something I found super interesting.

Now that I am familiar with the term, I feel like I’ve been heavily involved with digital cultures and their vernacular and language throughout my life. I vividly remember late nights at home playing Minecraft with friends over Skype when I was younger, and the terms we would use such as ‘no griefing zones’ and ‘mod ban’ that meant literally nothing to anyone but us and our server.  Or the group chats my friends and I have with nicknames and inside jokes that only we can make sense of because of a niche moment in our lives.

Digital culture and vernacular dominates our society, whether we consciously know it or not, and I think this idea of social media specific terms and phrases will be crucial in discussing the class prompt later on in the course.

References

Niederer, S 2018, Networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam. (read pp.1-20)