Week 10.
The lecture this week felt the same. I feel like we’re getting too repetitive. I picked up some points about Korsakow and online content-producing platforms.
- Online media is different and better because you start with a shell and keep building. You can show and edit before the ‘final product’ is released. Online media is about building.
- Gaps in Korsakow are good. Increase the gaps. Gaps mean that your work is more open to interpretation.
- Try not to be explicit in these Korsakow clips. Infer something rather than portray it. Be subtler. Open up the gaps for interpretation.
- We like to connect things and find patterns. We’re always seeking out pattern in things. The themes in our Korsakow film allow formal association of clips and provide a strong premise for user interpretation. It gives the gaps context for interpretation. It makes the gaps make sense.
The reading is long. There are, however, some points that I like in it. It is essentially about investigating the change to documentary that the database-driven world will bring.
We’re Happy and We Know It: Documentary, Data, Montage. By Dovey and Rose.
O’Reilly titling the change to this contemporary database-driven world the “industrial revolution of data”. I really like that. It’s completely accurate, too. “The power of data will change us as surely as the power of steam did a century ago.”
The purpose–or the”mission”–of the documentary:
- “… to mediate society to itself, to let one part of a society see another, to create a very particular kind of dialogue.”
- “A privileged relationship to social reality…”
- “… was as much about changing the world as it was observing it.”
A lot of talk about Popcorn Maker.
My favourite part, though, was discussion of a website, We Feel Fine. This website collects and organises human feelings from weblogs. The technology behind this is a system that searches the web (newly posted blog entries) every few minutes for the phrases, “I feel” and “I am feeling”.
“The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.”
This data is organised and accessed through some crazy interfaces that can sort across a number of “demographic slices”. Specific questions can be asked.
Like: “do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.”
A creator’s (Jonothan Harris) thoughts on the site: “the partial glimpse into somebody’s life that he saw in personal fragments, the scraps of presence left by our online behaviours”.
I find that absolutely incredible. That something as complex as human emotion and can be found and quantified and organised and plausibly infer larger pattern. It’s absolutely incredible, in my eyes.