New media art, also called multimedia, cyberculture and digital media, shows a revealing and creative engagement with rapidly developing technologies.

Widely used words such as “technology” and “culture” carry the traces of social changes, which have operated around and through those words.

 

What is Technology

• The word “technology” components are ancient; the greek tekhne meant art or craft; logos had a range of meanings from ‘word’ to ‘system’ or ‘study’
• The word “technocrat” remains today to describe people who value highly the potential of technology
• the meaning of technology has shifted from referring of arts to mean the system of mechanical and industrial arts with the rise of science
• a technology is not a natural object but one made by humans

What is Technique

• it is defined as the use of skill to accomplish something
• Marcel Mauss (1992) notes that techniques are as crucial to culture and to the transmission of culture as technologies
• a technique is that which is effective (it works) and traditional (it can be passed on through culture)

What is Culture

• self- contained cultures or, ‘culture’ which embraces all human activity around the world
• it is multiple because it contains the activities of different classes, of different races, of different age groups; is conditioned by political and economic forces
• subculture means that culture accommodates various forms of dissent

 

Culture incorporates human activities such as art, music and building, also relating to the everydayness of culture – what people do, beyond the basic necessities of survival and bodily function. Advertising, merchandising, marketing and other aspects of the consumer society take their place as shaping forces of contemporary culture. Technology changes our living environment; civilizations and cultural activities are based on technologies.

• Anderson mentioned that “unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service”. It is true that we are in a world of abundance instead of scarcity because of the rise of online distribution and retail.

• Anderson brings out the point that we actually have no sense of what we want. We usually find out more in the catalogues which we like more than the mainstream one.”The more we explore alternatives, the more we’re drawn to them”.

 

• According to the 80-20 rule (Pareto’s principle), people assumed that only 20 percent of major studio films, TV shows, games and mass-market books will be hits. We think that “only hits deserve to exist”. However, Anderson argues that the 21st century is not only about hits but equally about misses. Since digital services have “no shelf space to pay for”, a hit and a miss become equally economic footing. “Popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability”.

 

• The Long Tail is about the idea that the media “will find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month. somewhere in the country”.

 

• “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.” There is a market bigger than the hits in the Long Tail by getting over the economics of scarcity.

 

In this week’s unlecture, Brian pointed out that hypertext is not a new idea but simply making used of pre-existing technologies.

Related to another reading “The Double Logic of Remediation” I have done in Comm. Histories & Technologies from Bolter, J. David, we are challenged to appreciate the integration of different forms of media. New media presents themselves “as refashioned and improved versions of other media”. Hypertext provides readers the linear-perspective reading to a whole new level. New media refashion older media and in the another way older media refashion themselves to reaffirm their status and face the challenge of existing with new media.

“No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces.”

“If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology, hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology”

Douglas describes that hypertext uses the printed word as the basis for technology that extends the boundaries of writing. Hypertext opens Pandora’s box with endless links that actually may not lead the readers back to the original story. There is no closure. Yet Douglas suggests that hypertext is at its early stage of becoming an advanced piece of technology.

I find it fascinating about the idea that stories change their shape every time I read it. Creating open ended novel and page-less books with hypertext changes the formal literary reading. To me, stories become more interactive, and lively as there is continuous connection to unlimited possibilities.

Is this a kind of design fiction before the digitalisation of literary texts?

Yet, readers are totally in control of the development of the story; will they get lost in how the story is assumed to flow? Readers are able to make own decisions from the beginning of the story and choose their own conclusion to finish it. without endings, so even the authors don’t know what the final part of their stories is. Novels may lose its original meaning. The author no longer can express their signature touches or their styles.

 

Here is an article about “Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story”.

This week’s reading about design fiction is totally a new concept to me. Bruce Sterling defines design fiction as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend belief’s about change.” It is to speculate about new ideas and think about the future. In another word from Matthew Ward in Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice, “We always design for a world that sits, sometimes just slightly, out of sight. We engage in a complex set of actors in order to move our fictions into the realm of the real”. Design fiction is useful in a way that asking the ‘what if ‘ question actually provokes so many possibilities. Hollywood movies always explore what our future can be like. How about The Daily Prophet in the Harry Potter movies – the interactive newspaper?  What if people are able to touch different parts of the paper to watch advertising clips or listen to audio reporters? This idea is innovative. Could it become the reality? That would be cool if it existed.