mda20009-digitalcommunities

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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.

E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998 (via humanoidhistory)

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Russia Quietly Tightens Reins on Web With ‘Bloggers Law’

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Week 11: The Great Firewall

Social media in Asia is typically considered from a Western-centric perspective, and as a member of a democratic society, I found it hard to remove my cultural influence when considering this topic. Entitled to freedom of speech and venting frustration at our government (as illustrated in the vindication of Tony Abbott currently filling up everyone’s news feeds), we are also entitled to freedom of choice in government and freedom in identity, both virtual and corporeal. However, the Australian public is not immune to interference from government authority, such as its involvement in Wikileaks, framing it as threatening the safety of Western publics.

Censorship and surveillance operations by repressive governments are framed as monitoring social media and websites for civil unrest, preventing their citizens from being corrupted by ‘evil’ cultures. The Golden Shield Project in China inhibits freedom of speech by blocking user access to politically sensitive information and shutting down websites for violating constitution and attacking state leaders. Their disapproval is broad – not only are political activism websites affected, but religious websites, embarrassing news events, pornography, and aversive micro-blog posts are also restrained. While hindered by government interference, citizens are becoming empowered through the growing use of social media and finding freedom of expression in virtual identity, and are evolving at an incredible pace.

This social media revolution has been spurred by its post-1990 born audience, who are actively prepared to approach the government in an open manner and voice their criticism by evading censorship through the development of their very own language. These digital natives counteract the government’s stronghold by facilitating the audio, visual and locative abilities of a hybrid of alternative social media platforms to develop a rich communication based on emotion, exchange and connection. Between 30,000 upwards of 200,000 Chinese are estimated to be employed to monitor, remove and report illicit information, but that figure is meagre in comparison to the estimated 500-600 million Internet users, with over 90% using social media, and over 75% of those under thirty. This generation employs social media as much more than a user experience, using it as a tool to develop and explore pluralism in identity. By bypassing traditional forms of media, the youth is changing the very nature of socialising, communicating, and interacting.

Incredibly, this revolution is being led on a $40 mobile phone, a hybrid between a traditional and smartphone that has low functionality but is accessible and affordable, with over one billion of these phones sold each year out of Asia, staggering in comparison to the billion android users after four years in the global market. Indeed, Asia is a parallel universe in terms of Internet usage, with many of the most popular Western social networks not penetrating China. Instead, Asian equivalents have emerged, often based on the best aspects of platforms to provide a multitude of affordances, such as Twitter’s 140-character limit, with each Chinese character corresponding to one single Western word.

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DONT TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE

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Social Gaming: Playing the Crowd

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Week 10: Social Gaming

Social gaming provides a digital space for “competitive, social, cultural and commercial exchange” (De Zwart & Humphreys 2014, p. 77) from the intersection and overlapping of online and offline communities and rules created socially by players. These gaming communities encompass a broad social structure located both within and around the spaces of games and genres themselves, with the boundaries of these spaces becoming increasingly fluid as players extend the game both online and offline through the use of social media, fan forums, conventions, and other associated practises. 

Persistent and non-persistent environments see players interact at different stages and within different environments, with participation extending from the virtual to the real world. Both within and around games, certain genres (particularly sub-genres) form strong and specific communities, their almost fanatical participation demonstrated in sites such as fan forums. Physical co-locations, such as conventions, expos and meet-ups see video game communities associate both online and offline, with broader practises prevalent particularly in East Asia and South Korea.

Such spaces can be viewed as vastly dysfunctional and problematic, and are often sites for negotiation, conflict, and competition. However their social practises allow for the emergence of creativity and cultural production, expressing imaginative and co-operative shared experiences. Social gaming facilitates communities that do not necessarily have to be positive or idealised – the complex interplay of participants often have cultural differences and operate within online social spaces are not always legitimately governed. The dynamic nature of these spaces makes it hard to separate social connections from online and offline links.

The expectations and conventions of games are often set by rules, with law and architecture structurally written through the software’s code, and legally set within terms of use and end-user license agreements. As the EVE Online case study demonstrated, applying external rules to an online gaming context is difficult, as “cultural norms emerge from within the game space and from the contexts of play” (De Zwart & Humphreys 2014, p. 77). These norms are reflective of certain aspects of the culture within which the game is located, as evident within gender associations from a problematic subset of the gaming community. The creation of the ‘Tropes vs Women’ game, the overrepresentation of scantily clad, secondary female virtual characters, and the sexist ideal of “no girls allowed’ reinforces and reproduces the construction of gender hierarchies internalised within culture and manifested within its social structures.

De Zwart, M & Humphreys, S 2014, ‘The Lawless Frontier of Deep Space: Code as Law in EVE Online’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 77 – 99.

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On the Internet, we organise information by its popularity in an attempt to determine its validity. If a website has been referenced by many other websites, then it is generally determined to be more valuable or accurate. Feelings expressed on social media are quantified, validated, and distributed in a similar fashion. Popular expression becomes the most valuable expression.

Every time we express ourselves, we do so with the understanding that things we say might become permanently and publicly known. We are encouraged to express ourselves in ways that are accepted by the largest possible audience. We lose our individuality in favour of popular acceptance.

My concern is that we have developed a generation of people who believe that successful leaders are those with followers. I believe that the best leaders are those that stand for something, who have a point of view. And that point of view must be developed, not alone, but in private, or risk becoming normalised in search of popular support.

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Perhaps the reason most of our dominate social media have been fixated on content, on media objects, is because content can be stored. Sociality is treated like information that can be indexed as search engines do to the Web. Photos and the rest are recorded, kept, organised into profiles to be measured and tracked and ranked. It made sense, that’s largely what people used desktop computers to do. Perhaps it was the rise of the mobile phone, where people do less information searching and more communicating that revealed this as a flawed model for organising anything social. I’m concluding on a highly speculative note here, but it is certainly time to rethink sociality based so fundamentally on media objects.

The Frame Makes The Photograph, by Nathan Jurgenson

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Week 9: Visual Communities

The increased use of camera phones, accompanied by the growth in editing applications and distribution through social media has seen a shift from networked visuality to emplaced visuality and sociality. The qualities, affordances and practices of digital photography emphasise place, movement and perception, with locative media, tagging and searchability allowing visual content to become highly emplaced through presence. Digital photography and its augmented reality do not exist for pure visual contemplation, rather it is part of the way human subjects, images and socialites become emplaced in relation to these structures and contribute to the expression of shared experiences. Meaning is not simply created in content, but in its context and consumption, with users as reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors engaging in shared culture.

The assumed default permanency of data through social media encourages an understanding of the present as documentable, with social media orientated to time, through timelines, news feeds and photo streams; an assumed inevitability of recording almost everything forever. The emergence of temporary photography through platforms such as Vine and Snapchat challenges social media triviality and responds to photographic abundance. Immediacy has taken precedence over archiving, with ephemerality rejecting the fundamental unit and organisation of visual content. Typically, documentation declared worthiness of attention, but the amass of visual media has devalued its importance and encouraged banality. Despite the manufactured nostalgia of faux-vintage filters and frames on Instagram, images are now briefly consumed and quickly forgotten, scrolled through with nothing more than a flick of the finger, or an occasional pause to hit ‘Like’ or ‘Heart’. Instead of merely evoking an aesthetic rarity, ephemerality enforces it through urgency, such as the countdown timer on Snapchat.

While dominant social media platforms such as Facebook and Tumblr focus on the media object as the fundamental unit of experience, ephemeral social media sees photos and videos acting as linguistic modes of communication – an aesthetic language. Instead of photographic evidence as a visual aid, ephemerality diminishes the importance of content, emphasising communication and everyday sociality. With tension arising between experience-for-itself and experience-for-documentation, there is an appreciation of impermanence, with an intimacy in temporary photography facilitating experience rather than documentation. Ephemerality also alters our relationships to online visibility, data privacy and content ownership, not just in content, but in its affordance to restrict its consumption.

Temporary visual media platforms are present-focused, creating shared human experience through intimacy and immediacy, whereas traditional, profile-based social media demands that content be stored, treating sociality like information that can be categorised and indexed. The ‘self’ is becoming increasingly connected and represented through social media documentation, whether that be a profile picture, a blurb, your friends/connections – we are expected to perceive our identity as a form of self-representation and self-expression. Alarmingly, it is not just their eyes upon us, but our own too, consistently forcing us to present versions of ourselves that all too often see people examine not only who they are, but who they are not.