This weeks reading for Integrated Media was an excerpt from Sam Hinton and Larissa Hjorth’s book: Understanding Contemporary Culture Series : Understanding Social Media. The following are some of the interesting points/random notes generated from the reading.

• Social Network Sites = SNS for short (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr etc)
• Social media has blurred the line between what is public and what is private.
• Our social activities online can be correlated and brought together to form a social profile which can in turn be sold to advertisers.
• Social media can be credited for the rise in participatory culture and engagement, where users become produces of content.
• Uses of SNS are unaware that their ‘unpaid work’ is being exploited for the benefits of corporations.
• Social media is both empowering and controlling at the same time.
• The way a person behaves online on SNS can be greatly influenced by their offline lives.
• “Friendship and intimacy can be both amplified and commodified through social media”

WEB 2.0

• Web 2.0 relates to how the internet developed as a result of how people used it. Web 2.0 is basically user-focused business models which were created and used as strategies to align with how people were using the internet.
• There is not just one internet. There are multiple. The different internets across the world are used in a variety of different ways.
• The web evolved much later after the internet was invented. The web became known to us as the ‘online’. Where the internet once was a series of computers connected to each other, sharing information, the web emerged as ‘an interface that allowed people to discover and access internet resources quickly and easily’.
• We use the web when we interact with each other online – e.g. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) application.
• When we type in a website address, we are accessing a server on a computer connected to the internet (a host). Some sites require several computers and servers to handle the traffic.
• We use a web browser to send information to the server on what we are trying to access, and the server sends this information back to the browser so that we may access it. This two way interaction is vital to how the web works hence why participation on the internet is so important.
• Hypertext: linking online texts to other texts, creating a complex series of relationships hence the name web.
• The web allowed computers connected to the internet to share photos, videos and text which in turn created a multimedia interface.
• “…the web’s ability to bring together multiple digital media sources through a single easy-to-use interface was a significant innovation in the development of the internet.

COMMERCIALISING THE WEB

• “…media was no longer delivered in a sealed package to audiences but that audiences played a participatory role in its creation.”
• There are two terms: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The term Web 1.0 only emerged after Web 2.0 was created, for at the time of Web 1.0, people did not know that they were infact in that era. The numbers of 1.0 and 2.0 mirror the numbering of software, and so insinuates that Web 1.0 is a less evolved and inferior version than Web 2.0.
• The internet, as it emerged, was capable of providing highly detailed information about audiences. Where there are people, there are markets.
• Earlier on, internet users were unwilling to pay for information and online services. So making money from the internet was a problematic issue. Web 1.0 was the product of trying to make money from internet users.

Wow this reading was not a nice one. “The affordances of networked connectivity offer the potential to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web. The challenge in these marriages of mass media form and rhizomatic network is to find new ways of shaping attention into a coherent experience. To do so we have to re-invent the social praxis of documentary, creating new visual and informational grammars.” Struggled to get through that one and it was one of the opening paragraphs.

Pretty much the reading went on to talk about how data is changing and how, simultaneously, our way of receiving and interpreting this data is also growing. The reading also went on to explain how documentary film has influenced changing the world, as opposed to simply just observing and recording it. I think this is an interesting point and one which relates to our other subject, True Lies: Documentaries. Representation is the key to communication.

So what does this mean when we look at the online models of documentation? As the web coding language HTML5 is becoming more of an integrated web technology as opposed to a simple add on, new connections can be made between source.

The discussion of the interface used in online documentary We Feel Fine was really a fascinating one. It essentially related to patterns on several different blogs which mentioned the same choice phrases or words. Each user has a unique experience when interacting with this documentary. It drew upon samples from the blogsphere and created something beautiful from it.

Luers, Will. “Plotting the Database.” Database | Narrative | Archive: Seven Interactive Essays on Digital Nonlinear Storytelling. Ed. Matt Soar and Monika Gagnon. N. p., 2013. Web.

• Database narratives: narratives where there is essentially no plot, no character development, no clear development of story etc mainly due to a “computer’s networked and modular environment”. Whilst it seems like there is no clear narrative construction within a database narrative, there are some elements of it.
• According to Jerome McGann: A database requires a user interface to function. A database is organised and provides an initial “critical analysis of the content materials”. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is a narrative.
• With a plot, it is generally within one space and time and continues on to make sense and link together. Significant turning points create their own interface where a viewer may understand what has happened, what is happening and what might happen.
• An example given is one of the database of the information related to a particular scene by Sergei Eisenstein in Alexander Nevsky’s film. The different elements of the scene are laid out so that we may see how they relate to one another: how the visual links to the music which links to the movement etc. This is a database, and it allows the viewer to quickly gather an interpret information.
• If an interface is unable to quickly and effectively receive or gather information then it is essentially not a well designed one.
• An interface changes by the direction in which the user chooses to take it.
• A plotted interface “withholds as much as it reveals” i.e. relays certain information by not including certain parts.
• An entry point is a portal from the interface to the database. The entry point should prep the user for interaction.
• Macro level: what we see at face value. Micro level: deeper meaning and understanding.
• The Whale Hunt is Jonathan Harris’ interactive photo essay. Macro level: a sea of colour made from the photos contained within the photo essay. Macro level: an understanding and emotional connection as the whale hunt unfolds.
• You may click on whichever photo you want throughout the interactive photo essay (as allowed by the interface), making it a non-linear narrative.
• Missing Data –> absence = presence. This is a writing technique which I remember being taught in school. Less is more; what you leave out can sometimes be more effective than what you choose to include.
• When we absorb a story, it will depend on our previous experiences and what we bring to our understanding of the narrative. There is a network in our minds over what information is being received and what we are adding in and decoding ourselves.
• “Empty space or “white space,” a graphic device that gives visual structure to “content,” might also be used as a narrative device to structure meaningful absences.”
• If data is excluded its importance is questioned.
• In “Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry” there is a very ambiguous opening, which doesn’t really give much information away about how the two people who owned the items in the catalogue broke up. In presenting viewers with this phase which is open to interpretation, it then allows the viewer to interpret the pictures openly. They are unsure what to look for and so, look for any clue that they can. Each page presents a new interface presenting the photos and information differently each time.
• The various different interfaces used in media force the viewers attention to follow certain lines of inquiries and focus i.e. big bold titles, colourful pictures etc.
• When there are multiple images on a page, it becomes a spacial montage where the screen is the interface. Our ability to utilise our distributed attention allows us to make meaning from the pictures and find links between them.
• depending on the interface, the multiple pictures on a screen can either compete for attention, disrupt the plot, create a simultaneous narrative or result in confusion/misdirection due to information not having any relation at all.
• An interface also uses graphic devices to help navigation i.e. hyperlinks, titles subtitles etc. An example is Facebook, where there is a clear banner at the top, and links to other pages in blue and white (or a change in the cursor symbol). These graphical devices are not content, they are just an aid.
• Relational events: “An interface is perhaps more engaging when displaying subjective time through spatial relationships. For example, a small frame embedded within a larger frame can spatially denote a “flashback.” Grids, timelines and nested narratives (mise en abyme) act both as framing device – for how to read one narrative in light of others – but also as a way to graphically model the nonlinearity and recursion in thought and experience.”

Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2011.

This reading was an interesting one, and not one I am used to reading. It was set out basically as a list of points in relation to editing in a film. When we look at our k-films, we could easily say that editing (after post producing our films) is linking them with the keywords and creating SNUs.

Some notes from this reading:

• According to Shield, we are told that in a story, everything happens for a reason. Infact, Shields believes that it doesn’t.
• He believes plots are for dead people.
• He doesn’t believe that collage is an evolution of narrative.
• Shields uses the analogy of broken dishes creating a mosaic, and how it doesn’t try to hide that it is made of broken dishes, but rather, celebrates it.
• What is the difference between looking and seeing? Can we make art or do we have to find it?
• Shields is drawn to stories because of the literature, not the characters, their problems or their relationships. He doesn’t just like to accept what is trying to be told at face value, but rather tries to find meaning for what has slipped between the cracks.
• “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”
• “You don’t need a story. The question is how long do you not need a story?”
• Non-fiction is flexible.

• complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and ambivalence.
• some documentaries use the form of a non-narrative as a way for the filmmaker to prompt the viewer to question the work.
• montage sequences expand our understanding of what is happening between shot to shot. This can impact on understanding or interpretation
• the spectator can activate non-linear relationships across a networked field of elements.

The Essay Film – described as a ‘hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in in-between fiction and nonfiction cinema. Essentially, an essay film classifies the new type of documentaries which utilise the filmmakers own personal reflections and experiences. Before continuing, I think that these would make for interesting documentaries, however, I get the feeling that there are generally some problems with this type of film.

So essentially, the essay film is not bound by the constraints of formal cinema, but rather, allows the filmmaker to employ avant-garde and their own artistic flare. “The essay film…is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive.”

So it seems as if the essay film is a bit of a headache for filmmakers who like to stick to the rules and do everything by the book. If you were a bad filmmaker and accidentally repeated sections, had fragmentation, digression and dispersion, you could get away with your documentary being classified as an essay film. If we  struggle to classify a film at the present time, it eventually gets lumped into the category of essay film; this is not a good thing, because it eventually means that works which are simply too hard to place in a genre will all just be classified as essay films and there will be no clear distinctions.

The essay film relieves the filmmaker of the responsibilities of sticking to the rules and parametres of traditional documentary practise (such as chronological sequencing). It allows the filmmaker to run free with their imagination and artistic potential.

Is that not the idea of korsakow films in a nutshell? K films are not always chronological, they don’t aways make sense, their material is fragmented and doesn’t have to link and it times, it can contradict itself.

I think that it is fascinating how the idea of emotion being introduced within a documentary can destroy its professional position. Yes, I’ll admit that before I came to university and learnt the many different avenues of what a documentary could be, I did simply just associate the word ‘documentary’ with David Attenborough’s voice. His films would be honest, all claims backed up by evidence. With the essay film, the filmmaker may introduce their own emotions and background, and so, how can we really say that everything we are watching is fact or an accurate representation of everything which is supposed to occur.

The pathway for the essay film has been nurtured by the developments in distribution. To view entertaining media, we no longer have to go to just a cinema, but we can now access media through our televisions, mobile phones and laptops. This means that material doesn’t need to strictly suit a mainstream audience.

The scriptwriter needs to merge with the filmmaker in order for essay films to work. The pen needs to meet the image. Phillip Lopate claims that “an essay film must have words, in the form of a text, either spoken, subtitled, or intertitled…[which must] represent a single voice… it must have a strong personal point of view.” This idea from Lopate comes from mimicking the essay itself.

Timmothy Corrigan’s list of dominant characteristics of an essay film:

• generally a short documentary subject
• the lack of a dominant narrative organisation
• the interaction of a personal voice or vision

Bordwell, David and Tompson are two extremely familiar names. As I am a student in majoring in cinema, they were the co-writers of the text for my first semester. Therefore, the content of this reading was extremely familiar.

Cause and effect – drives the narrative. Characters are persons. They have traits. They have needs and desires. Therefore they have cause to act a certain way and this creates an effect to the narrative. Sometimes, cause and effect may not even relate to character, but may be more due to the circumstances (natural occurrences, natural disasters).

Time – We construct time. When we read a book, and there is a lengthy description, we understand that time pauses within the novel. Things are not happening while the situation is explained to the reader.

• Temporal Order: events presented out of chronological order.
• Temporal Frequency: mostly, a story event is presented only once, however, it may be hashed up again. This may allow the audience to absorb more of what is happening or pick up more detail. This could include flash backs

Space – in film narrative, however, space is usually an important factor. Events occur in well defined and established areas.

Experimental Film – made to explore certain type of film making

With the development of 16mm film and the use of television, 1948 filmmaker Alexandre Astruc believed that these developments would lead to film to become more than just entertainment, but as more of a tool for ‘human communication’. In 1968, Astruc could predict that “the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector”. He believed that there would be films made based on nearly every avenue of life, but that during his time, the potential for film medium as a language was unfulfilled. His the main visions were: 1. that new technology would provide new means of expression and that they film medium would become less exclusive and more accessible; 2. because of this, there will be a more democratic use of the medium; and 3. there will be new possibilities for contemporary and different forms and usages.

After the introduction of sound film in 1927, people could only access recording equipment like a smaller 35mm camera if they had a lot of money to pay for it. The equipment was exclusive to those who could afford it, unlike the present time, when pretty much everyone in the population carries a camera in their pocket. I found it funny to read that up till 2007, we were still using technology in cinemas based around Edison’s kinetiscope from 1892, when technology has come so far from that point. My sister works at village cinemas, and she told me that it was only a couple years prior to when she commenced her job that the cinema had fully switched to digital playback – no more photographic film and hence the role of switching the films over was redundant at the cinemas. All you needed was one guy to hit play and the movie would start.

We eventually developed from recording things on the earlier video cameras to Portapak’s, to video cassettes then VCR formats and the list goes on. Whilst me and my family had access to the earlier versions of video recording software, things we recorded were only supposed to be for private use: birthday parties, weddings, special events, music recitals. When I was much younger, there was not many actual communities or domains in which these recordings could be posted. Websites like YouTube were completely foreign to my parents. Even now, whilst they may not know exactly how to work the website or upload videos, the name ‘YouTube’ is thrown around so frequently, they know of it and its potential. The concept of sharing media and amateur filming is not so foreign in the present day, for the shift from analogue to digital completely changed the face of film making. Suddenly, we could edit the films we made using technology such as Movie Maker or iMovie and redistribute them with the help of the World Wide Web. Films were no longer restricted to the cinema, but could be viewed online with access to a computer and internet.

With these and several other developments within the filming culture, the expansive gap between professional and amateur filming costs dramatically closed. The equipment used for filming and editing is no longer large, obtrusive and difficult to transport. And something which was once exclusive, has now boomed into a massive public sphere with endless possibilities.