IA Summit 2009 – Michael Wesch – Mediated Cultures

Audio available here!

Starting in New Guinea – 1999 – Professor Wesch’s research has been influenced by the culture there.

Shows an image of his sleeping bag, what he called “my little america.” He recounts a story of how there were holes in the floor, holes in the wall of the place where he slept – entry points for snakes? one night, in fear, he pinned down his own right arm thinking it was a snake!

In their culture your entire identity is defined by face-to-face interactions.  In our cultures, here,  our relationships/culture are mediated by so many things (clothes, nametags, affiliations with particular institutions, etc.). For the folks in New Guinea, “What’s your name?” is a confusing question. If you think about it you probably go by at least 10 different names (depending upon environment and/or relationship), however we have picked one to be our “nane” – they haven’t done this. the word they use for him was “white man.” When the government implemented a census (Namba Tok – what they called the census – it’s numbers that talk to the state), they developed new term for the name that they gave to the official collecting informaiton,  their “census name”

Tales from the New Mediascape, or “the million dollar story”

A million dollars is what it costs for a 30 second ad spot during the superbowl. Doritos held a contest. The winning commercial cost $12.79 to make.  It cost 2.6 million to air it.  total cost:  $2,600,012.79,

Why spend this much just to air something that cost 12 bucks to make?? “water cooler talk” – they want to be what people talk about. Only this time, what people were talking about the day after the superbowl wasn’t a 2 million dollar commerscial,  instead they were talking about free things (The Machine is Us/ing Us).

He uploaded  his video on wednesday, by friday 253 people had viewed it. On saturday it had 1,154 views.  The reason why it was growing was because it had been dugg. it was getting tagged on del.icio.us, Technorati got wind of it, etc. Day after superbowl it was number 1. 2 – 20 were all superbowl adds. This was about something that was made in a basement in kansas. 

At the center of the user-generated landscape is us, not the technology.

The “bias” of media (nystrom 1973)

• intellectual – communicating with words/books vs. communicating with smoke signals
• emotional – depending upon the message, you choose the medium
• spatial and temporal – print vs verbal. how portable, repeatable is the media?
• sensory
• political -
• social
• metaphysical – the sum of all the other biases.
• epistemological biases – where metaphysical bias leads.

The effects of new media: The role of experts changes, etc.  Of course, he was actually talking about the printing press…

Questions to students

1. how many of you don’t like school? (lots of hands)

2. how many of you don’t like learning? (no hands)

This is interesting… the institution we have created for learning is unpopular.  Learning itself is not.

The problem of significance

Contrast an image of the same people in a college classroom and then at the american idol auditions.

“what we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical…” – henry seidel canby 1926 (he was actually talking about city life, assembly lines, etc.) [I can't find this whole quote right now, but when i do, i'll update this]

We’re so disconnected, we’re only connected by roads.  Our conversations of significance happen via TV (broadcast, one-way) – What is the secret behind American Idol? Why does it make people so insane?  An intense desire to be on tv; “to remind me that I’m real”

The MTV generation

Characteristics: short attention spans, materialistic, narcissistic – it’s costs a million dollars for a 30 second spot and it’s just for ME? This is flattering, but we are bombarded into passivity

Read this book :  Mediated – thomas de Zen

The Epistimology of Whatever

• pre-1960s – “whatever, that’s what i meant”
• Late 60s – “I don’t care, whatever.”
• 1990s – indifferent -  simpsons – “meh” 1996 – 2001
• Late 90s to present – “whatever.  i’ll do what i want” — you don’t matter, i matter” self-righteousness. 

———————————-

What do you plan to do about the crisis in the Middle East? “i’ll answer for you: You plan to do nothing”

we’re rendered impotent.

but there is something in the air.

12,000 of info per person is produced per year.  .01% is paper.

 ”we look at the present thorough a rear-view mirror. we march backwards into the future.” - Marshal McLuhan 

We live in metaphor.  It’s the only way we can deal with all of this information all of this change, all of this new technology.

• web “pages”- metaphor to print.
• DHTML – metaphor moves from print media to tv. This made Tim Berner’s Lee angry

 ”It’s not supposed to be a glorified television station” – Tim Berners-Lee

The web is about communicating. It’s supposed to be about making things easier and simpler, not more complicated (requiring different stylesheets per browser? this is not simple). This leads to a new dedication to standards – netscape leads to firefox.This is where things will really get interesting… Media better facilitating communication.

YouTube

the most common videos on youtube are home videos (33%). 15% are remixes of other videos.  (ex. Crank That, Soulja Boy). About 10,000 videos per day are posted to the youtube community. but WHY?

Rebecca Roth  - this is what i’m talking to [holds up the web cam].

What does that mean? for identity,  for self-awareness? We live in the world of instant replay. things are not only being recorded. they are being replayed. re-cognition. recognition is even deeper.

The anonymity of watching: what does this mean for community?

“Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.” – Time magazine

anonymity + physical distance + rare and ephemeral = ??? (the slide said something, but i didn’t get it down!)

YouTube allows you to watch other people without staring at them;  a state of “aesthetic arrest.”

Social media presents a cultural tension:

individualism, independence,  vs. community, relationships,authenticity

People want connections, but without constraint. YouTube offers this possibility. Media do not just distance us, they connect us in different ways that can sometimes feel distant (ambient intimacy).

becoming a mico-celebrity – Twitter

you can have followers, these are non-reciprocal relationships. 

4chan  - image-based bulleting board. imageboard. they are hackers on steroids (if you’re going to visit their site, do it on someone else’s computer!)

4chan’s mission: we are anonymous… we are everyone and we are no one. united as one, divided by zero. we are legion. we do not forgive. we do not forget.

“They are only a group in the sense that a flock of birds is a group…” (chris landers, baltimore sun)

Principle of 4chan: When you are at your most creative is when you let go of your identity.

“We will stop at nothing until we’ve achieved our goal… permanent destruction of the identification role”

What 4chan is most famous for: duckrolling people for taking themselves too seriously (which has transitioned into rickrolling or barackrolling).

All of this information and ability of anyone to publish means that there is a constant commentary on our society.

On media production and media sharing 

we can’t kill it, we can only criminalize it.   “we can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them pirates… ordinary people are living against the law…   in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better” – Lawrence Lessig

The Message: If you could write a message to the world on the palm of your hand

People are not just saying “this is the way things are” they are saying “this is the way things should be”

Information architecture is blending with the  architecture of relationships.

mediatedcultures.net